The Sacred and the Profane

Reflections on the Challenge

When you notice a media statement that feels as if it distorts reality, purse your lips and formulate an alternative statement about the same issue - whether contrasting or subtly different - which feels better to you.

• Experiences

  After reading a promotional article by the company building smart motorways, T had pursed her lips, recognising the claim of improved safety contrasted with fatal accidents caused by the removal of hard shoulders. She had noted the reliance on 'refuges', which offered no help if breakdowns occurred between them. She had also reacted similarly to Rachel Reeves' spring statement, which had portrayed the financial state as sound. However, she had observed that it failed to acknowledge widespread business failures, and redundancies due to people being more expensive to hire.

  L had responded to a news report about a car ramming incident in Germany. The media had described the perpetrator as someone known to police with mental health issues. L had pursed his lips and reframed it. It had later emerged that the driver was a far-right German. No further details had been released since. L had also awoken one night from a dream with a law in mind, that all human actions must inevitably diverge from their intention. He had seen this as related to the challenge, suggesting distortion was not necessarily deliberate. Later, he had responded to a government statement about restoring democratic NHS oversight by reframing it as a move to centralise control under direct government authority.

• Responses

  Responding to T, L said that the original motorway design had a clear mission — including a hard shoulder and other safety features — which had been compromised. N highlighted the danger caused by the new design, while T added that the changes had likely been driven by the political need to show progress, even at the cost of safety.

  N reflected on the law L had mentioned, suggesting that such divergence is common in life. T noted how easy it is to lose momentum on the monthly challenge — strong intentions often fizzle within days. L agreed, saying that even if one begins awake, there is always a drift once attention weakens. N linked this to Gurdjieff himself, who had to abandon his original plans in Russia but found ways to realise them elsewhere through extraordinary effort.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapters 32 - 33

• Passage

  Most recently, by the way, when I was on this ill-fated planet a new maleficent means began to flourish there for doing the same with the psyche of the beings there, as there did and still does this branch of their science hypnotism.

  And this new maleficent means they call ‘psychoanalysis.’

  You must without fail also know that when beings of the period of the Tikliamishian civilization constated for the first time about this particular psychic property of theirs, ... then the process itself of bringing someone into this state began to be regarded by them as a sacred process and was performed only in their temples before the congregation.

  But in the presences of your contemporary favorites ... not only do they not consider its concentrated manifestation, intentionally yet unavoidably evoked by them, as ‘sacred’; but they have already adapted it, the process itself and the accidentally obtained results, for serving them as a means for ‘tickling’ certain consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer firmly fixed in them.

• Discussion

  T was struck by the use of the word tickle, both in the passage and in the name of the ancient Tikliamishian civilization. She wondered whether the similarity might be intentional — a kind of linguistic clue. L agreed it felt suggestive.

  N picked up on Beelzebub’s framing of psychoanalysis as a modern offshoot of hypnotism. He noted that early figures like Charcot and Freud had indeed used hypnosis before moving to the more familiar image of the analyst listening invisibly behind the couch — a structure which L linked to the Catholic tradition of confession.

• Passage

  For bringing them into this state, I had at first recourse to the same means by which the beings of the period of the Tikliamishian civilization brought each other into this state, namely, by acting upon them with my own Hanbledzoïn.

  But when later there often began to arise in my common presence the being-impulse called ‘love-of-kind’, and, apart from my personal aims, I had to produce this said state in very many three-brained beings there for their personal benefit, and as this means proved very harmful for my being-existence, I invented another means, thanks to which I obtained the same effect without the expenditure of my own Hanbledzoïn.

• Discussion

  N observed that the passage describes two forms of hypnosis: one that was energetically costly to Beelzebub, and a second that achieved the same effect without that cost. L suggested that Beelzebub may have been helping people with little motivation — those seeking change “cheaply” — and that this might have been ethically problematic, especially since it was draining to him.

  T pointed to the mention of the being-impulse of love-of-kind, and suggested that Beelzebub could not have continued the work without that impulse arising. N agreed, saying it seemed he was doing it for humanitarian reasons, and that this made the energetic cost more serious.

  T related this to the demands on therapists, especially in the NHS, where support and supervision are often lacking. She noted that without support, therapists can burn out. N added that the same applied more broadly: many people don’t recognise how much energy they use in everyday work and creative life, and don’t take steps to replenish it.