Eternal Masquerade

Reflections on the Challenge

If the sun or the moon catches your attention, consider how it makes you feel, and how that may differ from a scientific understanding. Shade your eyes with your palm.

• Experience

  L had observed a half-moon at twilight, finding it austere, striking and seemingly close. It had appeared larger than its scientifically understood angular size, illustrating the difference between visual and emotional experience and scientific knowledge. He had shaded his eyes with his palm, as instructed by the Challenge.

• Experience

  T had noticed the morning sun shining through a window and, having felt cold, welcomed its warmth. Shading her eyes with her palm blocked the sunlight but not its warmth, giving her a sense of triumph that the sun could still reach her senses.

  On another occasion, she had seen a rising half-moon glowing yellow against a deep blue evening sky. Although she had covered her eyes with her palm, she could see the entire moon through a tiny gap between her fingers, bringing an unexpected moment of joy.

  Finally, shading her eyes from bright sunlight, she had noticed tiny shafts of light penetrating gaps between her fingers, while the surrounding skin appeared translucent and pinkish-red. She had felt surprise and delight at this unexpected perception of her hand and body.

• Responses

  N suggested that T's experience of sunlight penetrating the apparent barrier of her hand illustrated how human beings were not separate from the sun but existed within its influence.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 34

• Passage

  And further, thanks on the one hand to this clamor and, on the other hand, thanks to the action of always the same cosmic law Solioonensius, which action is always combined abnormally in the presences of all of them, others also begin to clamor. When these ‘clamorers’ among the ordinary beings begin already, excessively cacophonically, to act upon what are called ‘the-effeminate-nerves-of-the-left-half’ of several of the power-possessing beings of the given community,

• Discussion

  N suggested that political and ideological conflicts could be understood, within Gurdjieff's cosmology, as outward manifestations of underlying cosmic tensions. He emphasised the danger of identifying with these conflicts, allowing feelings of anger and dissatisfaction to develop into political hostility.

  T observed that such identification reflected automatic behaviour, which the Work sought to overcome. She added that once conflict developed into war, it acquired a reality of its own, becoming self-perpetuating.

• Passage

  ... then there begin these excesses of theirs which, progressively increasing, reach their zenith, yet to their misfortune ultimately always lead to nothing.

  ... This latter deteriorates in my opinion chiefly because, after these processes, the leading beings of the former ruling class are usually replaced by beings who proceed from other different castes, and who before this last process did not have in the persons of their representatives, either of the present or past generations, anything in common either consciously or unconsciously with that being-manifestation in which is included the ability to lead the outer and now and then even the inner process of the being-existence of surrounding beings, who although ‘similar to them,’ yet in the sense of Reason had not yet attained to their degree.

• Discussion

  N observed how revolutionary movements could become increasingly radical, eventually turning against their own supporters. He cited the French and Russian Revolutions as examples of this self-perpetuating process.

  T suggested that those who gained power might become fearful of losing it. N added that revolutionary leaders often lacked the experience and preparation necessary to govern, leaving them ill-equipped for their new responsibilities.

  L suggested that the passage also concerned the difficulty of maintaining a society's established principles when successive generations of leaders lacked the experience and understanding of their predecessors.

• Passage

  In the presences of the beings who had newly attained to power not only is real being-conscience absent, as it was also absent in the beings of the former ruling class, but further, in them in addition, those ‘charms’ begin particularly stormily to manifest and give extraordinary and terrifying results ...

• Discussion

  T suggested that those possessing real being-conscience would be unlikely to seek positions of power in the first place.