Under the Influence

Reflections on the Challenge

Notice when you are carried away with an activity beyond the point you meant to stop. Raise an open palm in a ‘halt’ gesture. Consider what is driving you, and any feelings that arise.

• Experience

  L had noticed several occasions when an activity had continued beyond its usefulness. Twice, prolonged morning planning had prompted him to raise his open palm; he recognised fear of missing out, guilt and duty as driving him, accompanied by frustration. Often, he had noticed himself reading the papers for too long. He made the gesture and stopped, recognising that habit had been driving him and feeling relief. These experiences had led him to connect the challenge with diminishing returns and with temperance: something initially worthwhile could become a hindrance when continued beyond its useful point.

• Responses

  T picked up on L’s repeated fear of missing out, suggesting that becoming absorbed in something could remove awareness of time and surrender agency over how it was being spent. In particular, when reading someone else’s writing, she questioned who was “calling the shots”: whether one continued to follow the writer’s concentrated focus or retained sovereignty over one’s own time and attention.

• Experience

  T had found stopping particularly difficult in relation to her art. She recognised a longstanding attachment to unfinished pictures and other works she had made, which she had been reluctant to let go of because they felt incomplete, because she loved them, or because she wanted to protect those that had reached a conclusion. She realised that letting go of these objects could feel like letting go of, and losing, part of herself.

  In particular, she considered a Painting for Life which she had worked on for several years but had not touched for about a year. Although she had never felt it was complete, she wondered whether the time had come to look at it afresh and decide whether to let it go.

• Responses

  L related T’s attachment to unfinished work to his own experience of having recently completed a piece of music. Although he could imagine continuing to revise and reshape it, he had decided to let it go into the world and move on. He suggested that there might be several satisfactory ways of completing a work, and that attachment and perfectionism could otherwise prevent an artist from recognising that a work had reached its end.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 34

• Passage

  As regards the causes which bring forth this same action of this cosmic law, they are for each planet different and always flow from and depend upon what is called the ‘common cosmic Harmonious-Movement’; moreover, frequently for your planet Earth, what is called the ‘center-of-gravity-of-causes’ is the ‘periodic tension’ of the sun of its system, which tension proceeds in its turn thanks to the influence upon this sun of a neighboring solar system, which exists under the name of ‘Baleaooto.’

• Discussion

  T connected the “common cosmic Harmonious-Movement” with the movement of the Solar System within the Milky Way, suggesting a recurring pattern of systems moving within larger systems. L similarly reflected on Gurdjieff’s image of cosmic bodies “falling”, relating this to orbital movement in which momentum prevents a body from falling into what it circles.

• Passage

  ... among the number of chief evils which flow from the conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves, specially when in the presences of every terrestrial three-brained being, there began to become predominant the ‘evil-inner-God’ of theirs I mentioned, named there self-calming, then it occurred that in them under the influence of the action of Solioonensius, instead of the desire and striving for a speedier self-perfection a something began to arise such as they themselves characterize by the words ‘need of freedom,’ which chiefly serves the cause of the arising there of these same grievous processes of theirs similar to this last ‘Bolshevism.’

• Discussion

  L understood the “need of freedom” as a displacement outwards of something that properly required inner work: instead of striving for self-development, people could seek freedom by trying to change others or external conditions. T similarly saw blame directed at systems and structures as a possible projection outwards, observing that turning inwards required work. L connected this with the discipline of creative work, while T emphasised retaining “sovereignty of the moment” by choosing what to do in each moment.