Food for Thought

Reflections on the Challenge

When you notice someone charismatic, consider how you are affected, and what may be their motivation. Move your big toes up and down.

• Experiences

  N had had a long conversation over the phone with an old friend. He noted the friend’s precise, well-spoken English, and his manner of emphasising words. They had known each other since childhood. N believed his friend’s charisma was innate, like a force of nature, which he remembered from school. After the call he reminisced about thsoe days, and also completed the physical exercise with the toes.

  L had encountered charismatic figures in real life and media and had gained the impression that charisma was often linked to ego, which could wear thin after a while. He felt art was served better without charisma, citing exaggerated gestures by conductors, chess players, and pianists as unhelpful. He believed charisma was neutral. It could influence positively, as with gurus fostering discipline, or negatively, as with agitators inciting mob violence. He had remembered to flex his toes afterward.

• Responses

  Responding to L, N said that some people with charisma could misuse it and it could take them to dangerous places. They sometimes developed an appetite for risk, and N described a friend of that nature.

  Responding to N, L said he also had had a similar charismatic friend, likewise with a distinctive manner of diction and a penchant for risk-taking.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 32

• Passage

  those definite crystallizations foreseen by Great Nature—which crystallizations are the most important part of the composition of the second-being-food, and which when assimilated by beings are transformed into substances for the coating and for the further perfecting of their higher-body-Kesdjan—ceased, owing to their abnormal being-existence, to be assimilated either consciously or automatically for the purpose indicated, then in consequence of this and also because the afflux of these substances, transformed in other concentrations and getting into the atmospheres of the planets, continued all the time to flow into the atmosphere of your planet, the result was that on this ill-fated planet, among your unfortunate favorites, there arose still another definite ‘disease’ which has already become quite definite in its harmful action upon them.

• Discussion

  T said that there was now a complete disconnect between those who work the land and the politicians in government. Farmland was being repurposed for solar power collection, and much of it was therefore being covered with black panels New inheritance tax was forcing smaller farmers to sell their land, which might no longer be used for producing food.

• Passage

  ... since they lost the possibility of existing according to the Fulasnitamnian principle, certain of the ingredients of the substances of the second-being-food continue to serve only for assisting the transformation of the first-being-food and for removing from the planetary body certain elements already used by them.

• Discussion

  L said that Gurdjieff’s controversial thesis was that because people were not thinking correctly, they developed an emotional imbalance, which then led to physical illness.

  N added that this imbalance was clearly affecting us, as we were failing to transform energies that come into this planet properly. He noted that we should be able to ingest these influences and become stronger, but instead, they negatively impacted us.