Dreamtime

The Meeting began with a minute's silence, and those who wanted then gave an account of relevant thoughts and events since the previous month.

Z said that she had been absent for a couple of months, feeling a multitude of different challenges, which had been taking her away from being present and she hadn't even been aware of it. So she was glad to be back.

T said it had become more and more obvious to her through the month that everything was repetition. Not having the idea of repetition in the past had meant she had tended to start on new 'spontaneous' work frequently which always felt 'short lived'. More recently she has been returning to the same few paintings and deliberately setting up the same scenarios to bring a painting to completion by staying with it. Resistance is huge, but only thus does she get rid of distraction and let something grow. Also she has been using just one colour and the different shades of it to reduce distraction from the task of investigating subtle tone changes to create the picture.

RM had been away the previous time, on a cruise where he had been teaching a one minute meditation method from a system he has been developing for years. Each daily class was for one and a half hours. His experience of it had been very powerful. The one minute of fully focused meditation seems to be as crucial to the day as the keystone is to an arch. It has changed his life. He has been using triggers to do it at other times, and the intensity was growing each day.

L had observed repetition over the month in many areas and at many levels. For some reason events kept taking him to Wood Green. There were also repeated trips to the care home his father had recently moved to. String quartet music had entered his mind and kept repeating, gradually firming like a crystal. Could it be true that everything was repetition, and movement an illusion? He said he would stop before he repeated himself!

The message from BS was read out. He clarified that his request for his entries to be removed also applies to current and future web reports, but he said he would like time to be given in the Meetings to discussing them.

Following the contributions, time was given to responses from the attendees.

L thought that RM’s one minute meditation system was very congruent with the one minute silence which begins each Meeting. RM said it was a Taoist idea. The meditations are analogous to the roots of a tree, without which the tree would wither. D thought that five minutes would be better, saying that one minute is too short, and that the meditation would be over before it has started. RM repeated it would work and that it was important to do it at least once a day. Every morning when he gets up he sits in a chair with his eyes open and focuses on one thing in his surroundings while at the same time he is aware of his feet on the ground. He said that this is a meditation from the Tao Te Ching. L referred to David Blaine, and asked if he was meditating in some state during his performances, or was he retreating into himself, which was the impression he gave. RM said Blaine demonstrated one dimension of meditation, but in his own system the idea is to increase the intensity of it. D referred to the magician Dynamo whom he said was better than David Blaine. He described a scene in which drinks were swapped between a bottle and a tin can. He didn't know how it could be done. L asked if there were any theories about this from the attendees. He suggested the possibility that actors might have been used. D wanted to know why he couldn’t do it. T asked him to think about the phenomenon of his own writing, which itself, as a phenomenon arising in the world, was extra-ordinary and as inexplicable. RM said it was important to be open minded. GC asked if it was possible to be open minded, as personal experience colours how a person sees the world. He said that scientists were not allowed to be open minded. Z said that she didn't care if a thing was true our false.

In response to L, "R" asked if his composing was in the service of anything. L said that he follows the Muse.

GC suggested to D that he gets caught up in thinking. D said one can change one's thoughts. GC replied that it is the thoughts that are the problem; we are all victims of thinking." D said that he thinks and writes because he wants to attain “knowledge”. That's why he does his writing. He feels something has shifted inside himself through thinking, conversation and doing writing. It is a form of creativity, creating something which wasn't there before. "R" said that there is a level where things can be refined. Her mother used to talk about “the culture”, which didn't sit comfortably with her. She was a textile designer doing things with colour, she was not just doing the basic things of staying alive. D said that creativity is the most important thing we do in our lives. GC said that our opinions might change." "R" replied that the value is that we have different opinions.

There was a discussion of the message from BS. It was agreed that because of the open nature of the Meeting and the notes from it on the Internet, it was inappropriate to withhold significant sections of the Meeting from the monthly report, and that alternatively, if BS wished, he could publish his thoughts anonymously,or otherwise, as comments by clicking the link after each blog entry.

The Meeting then resumed the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales.

You must first be told that there exist in the Universe generally two 'kinds' or two 'principles' of the duration of being-existence.

The first kind or first 'principle' of being-existence which is called 'Foolasnitamnian' is proper to the existence of all three-brained beings arising on any planet of our Great Universe …

As regards the meaning of the principle 'Itoklanos' I shall also specially explain it to you sometime.

Clarification was asked for about the two principles. L said that his understanding was that the first was connected to the development of self-aware life, while the second applied to other life forms.

The reading finished at the close of Chapter 16, and there was a discussion about which exercise to adopt for the ensuing month. GC suggested the Solfeggio meditation based on the frequency mi = 528 Hz.



RM suggested the one-minute daily meditation as described earlier, and it was decided, on a vote, to go with the latter.

Time and Relative Digression

The Meeting began with a minute's silence. Then those who wished spoke for up to two minutes on relevant issues from the previous month.

"R" said that one of her strongest experiences over the Christmas period was when she made and wrote Christmas cards. She experienced resistance because of the hassle, but there was also something satisfying about naming each of the friends she sent to, bringing into mind a sense of being connected, and also a sense of receiving something given in a non-selfish way.The work of looking up addresses - this was nothing to do with the commercial aspect of Christmas. She had been aware of her hands doing the writing, and been aware of her bad posture as she was sitting at her computer.

L had started reading the book RM had mentioned in the last meeting, Stranger in a Strange Land  by Robert Heinlein. It is about a human born on Mars, whose parents die. He is brought up by Martians. Later he is brought back to Earth and the book addresses communication difficulties between different paradigms. It was inspired by The Jungle Book. He had tried the hand exercise. He was still not convinced it came from Gurdjieff, as he had not found any clear attribution. However the exercise did appear to help the development of lucid dreaming.


D wanted to describe an experience he had where the Daemon tried to guide him. Before Christmas he had a bad attack of asthma. He was due to be going away for the New Year. He was using the inhaler too much, and was getting desperate. He remembered that there was a breathing technique created by a Russian about twenty years ago, who had written a book, but he couldn't remember the name of the book or the Russian doctor. He tried to remember the technique and started to feel better enough to go out. He went into a Charity Shop for something. He never get books from Charity Shops, he has got too many books already, but he felt drawn to the books, and did not know why but found himself scouring them from top to bottom. He didn't know what he was looking for. He came across one which he pulled out and, and considered whether to buy it, but then saw a yellow book behind the one he had pulled out. He tugged that one out too and it was the book he had been trying to remember. "Freedom from Asthma" by Dr Alexander Buteyko. He felt that something else was at work to help him. He bought the book, and although the virus came back and he got really ill again, he followed the breathing techniques and recovered well, and was able to go away.

GC had been absent the previous time, but described how for two days, for medicinal purposes, he had been eating a third of a nutmeg three times day. He realised he wasn’t in a bad mood, and eventually connected this observation with the mind-altering properties of nutmeg.

T said she had been aware of her hands while washing up, but also had had an experience in the studio while she was taking a half-hour break. She had started doing a timetable, which alternated a half-hour working with a half-hour resting. It was an experiment. It meant that the time wasn’t as chaotic as usual. Going back to the hands, she had about ten minutes where she paid them complete and utter attention. Her mind became very aware of the specific microcosm of the hands and her in the studio, and then the macrocosm of the universe, which sounded grand, but it was a very powerful experience of being connected to the whole. After emerging from that experience, she wrote down what she remembered of it, and had intended to read it to the Meeting.

Responding to D, L had been reminded of day when, as a student, he was looking at a stack of bookshelves in a bookshop, and asked his hands to pick out a significant book, without him looking. The book picked out was The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse, which became a very important book to him. D spoke further about the Buteyko method for treating asthma. GC asked D why he was so worried about not existing. D replied that he did not want to die in ignorance. G said that the most important thing is to be conscious of the moment of death, and that non-existence was infinite. L thought that scienctific research might greatly extend the human lifespans in the future. However there would be the same existential issues facing humans as individuals and as a species. G asked what our purpose was in being here. "R" mentioned the Five Strivings

The message from BS was read out, and it was noted that he wished his contributions from the previous two years to be removed from the blog. It was agreed that this be done, where it did not take away too much of the sense of the blog entry. It was unclear whether the request was meant to apply also to the current and future entries, and whether time should be given in the Meetings to messages and ensuing discussion of them which would not be recorded in the blog. As two minutes was often insufficient to read the messages, thus depriving the Meeting of part of the content, it was thought one solution would be for BS to place messages in their entirety as comments to the blog entry. These would be easier to remove at a future time if this was desired. It was also agreed that in future, requests for removal of comments should be made within four weeks of publication.

The Meeting then resumed the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales.

… the average proper normal duration of their existence began gradually to diminish and that it has now already become in the objective sense almost 'nothing.'


L thought that Gurdjieff’s frequent assertion that different groups experience time at different speeds suggested that he might have come across Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. GC thought this unlikely. L mentioned the title of the chapter, The Relative Understanding of Time, which he thought might be an indication.

To conclude the Meeting, there was some discussion of what exercise to adopt for the coming month. At this point GC commented that the book on lucid dreaming is clearly written and understandable, and wanted to know why Gurdjieff made his book so difficult to read and understand. "R" said that development only comes through making an effort. GC responded that lots of people don't read this book because it is difficult. Each person at the Meeting has a different view of it, and keeps repeating their own interpretation of it. "R" said that Gurdjieff worked closely with Orage on the English, and that Gurdjieff believed people were ruined by their conditioning. GC spoke of encounter groups moaning about the same thing every week. It was decided the exercise would be to observe and be aware of cases of repetition in what happens and what is experienced.

Time and the Gone Aways

After a minute's silence, those present spoke for up to two minutes on relevant experiences from the previous month.

D had been to visit M, who was in Casualty at the hospital, having had a fall at his residential home. He went to visit M at the Care Home a couple of days later. M was in a big room, sitting straight - he would suddenly slip away, wondering who he was. D was wondering again, how much the Work helps with old age.

L said he had found B's exercise, with the hands, good. He had remembered that a similar exercise had been tried before, suggested by GC, involving focusing on other parts of the body. He hadn't done it before going to sleep and hadn't experienced the hands coming to mind during the night. This exercise seemed to be testing the point that the dream and the day are both part of our existence. He was not sure the exercise from the extract is from Gurdjieff. There are no references to it anywhere else. The exercise reminded him of a to-do list - we can forget what we are planning to do and are reminded when we see the list. It is symbolic of the possibility of a single common identity within a person.

"R" said she had been teaching, watching her student, giving attention. The student was trying to do what her fingers are automatically able to do. "R" does not have the means of transmission of her skill. She is left handed, so most people do it differently, and so she has to do it differently. She has had to learn more about patience. There are two factors involved. A tendency to be lazy, and a tendency to be impatient.

B had found the exercise to be like the one with keys, but there are more opportunities to be aware of hands in the new exercise. His interest in his work, acting, seems to have changed. His coming here doesn't seem to have to be integrated into everything, and so it becomes more significant to him.

RM had been away for a couple of months, on a cruise to the Baltic Sea and the Northern Lights. It was a continuation of previous cruises.

He had been asked to do more meditation classes, of which he did about forty. His technique of meditation involved doing two things at a time. Like counting and being aware of a part of the body. This helped him and his pupils become more aware. He had been asked when he was coming back on his next cruise.

T realised she had been painting her hands as part of her work on a self-portrait, but there was in fact only a fleeting connection with the exercise, which had seemed at first as a gift but was in reality very difficult to do. Other times she remembered was at the sink, washing up.

The message from BS was read out. [Omitted at the request of BS.]

The Meeting then moved to responses to initial contributions.

Responding to D, RM said that it is irrelevant whether the Work helps with old age. The important thing is how he responds to the present.

D asked "R" about the link between her account of teaching and the hands exercise. "R" said her hands had perfected fine jewellery techniques with thread and beads. She can do it without thinking, but to explain it means putting attention on it, and being receptive to other people trying to learn. Eventually it becomes second nature, but initially there is a lot of fumbling. T said that when she is doing something with her hands, there is something else observing. Some other presence that we are trying to make more of. In order to be present, it seems we have to be aware of that as well.

D said he was wondering whether, for M, there would have been any difference if he hadn't done the Work? T asked D if he was asking what is the point of the Work or what is the point of someone's life? She said "Whether or not you do the Work isn't going to stop physical death. The Work isn't to prevent something in the future, it is about how we are living in our present. We are all going to die, whether we do the Work or we don't." RM asked D who he was responding to. "R" said that she values that D was responding with feeling.

Responding to B, L wondered, although he had found the exercise useful, whether it had a direct link with Gurdjieff. The author Carlos Castenada described exercises given to him by his teacher Don Juan, which have been associated by some writers with Gurdjieff, although L has been unable to find any corroboration for a link. Although Don Juan might not have existed, the books are no less wonderful. He was reminded of the earlier popular esoteric writer Lobsang Ramba (original name Cyril Hoskin), and Max Erhmann, whose great poem, Desiderata, written in 1927, is believed by many to have been written hundreds of years before. RM said that, similarly, the name Lao Tse may be made up. T commented that Gurdjieff made up Beelzebub, a fictional character in order to speak his ideas through the character and his stories. D said he had been reading The Daemon, by Anthony Peake, which describes everything as being a hologram. Time and space and man.

 

RM said that this ties in with C influence. If you meditate deeply, you can link with any part of the universe. There is a scientific theory that the universe is made up of holograms and so are our minds. Higher consciousness is called the right brain. Doing these exercises is trying to get inside the right hand side of brain. D said that if you can connect with this Daemon, it knows everything, and works in symbols. He mentioned how famous scientists who had slept on a problem and got the answer.

"R" said she had had a strong reaction to the contributions of BS, and talked of the importance of practice as opposed to thinking. The moments of presence are the important ones. L said that formulas as used by BS are useful, and formulas of this nature had been used by the psychoanalysts Wilfred Bion and Jacques Lacan. The accounts were an honest report of his experiences.

At 9:45 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub's Tales.

“...It must be noticed that the twelve ‘Krentonalnianrevolutions’ of the said Moon do not correspond exactly to a single ‘Krentonalnian-revolution’ of their planet round its sun and therefore they have made some compromise...

“But as in general, my boy, you do not yet know of the exceptional peculiarity of this cosmic phenomenon Time, you must first be told that genuine Objective Science formulates this cosmic phenomenon thus:

“Time in itself does not exist; there is only the totality of the results ensuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place..."

B said it was hard to understand time and space anyway, even without the long words. RM was reminded of Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land whose Martian protagonist, Valentine Smith, encounters difficulties in communication with people on Earth. T talked of languages being social constructs and meaning something when everyone speaks the same language but that when you don't know a language the sounds can be heard said but no meaning is communicated. When we speak in our own language we experience it as if it exists in a real sense and this experience is bolstered up by others, but language doesn't exist in any real concrete sense, language is symbolic existing in and between people.

D asked if the long words were there to wake us up. The words were very creative. B said that he always feels there is something of use, even if he doesn't understand it, in this book. T gave, as an example, the word trogoautoegocratic. "R" said that they may have been put together from languages he knew, like Armenian and Russian. T found that the mixture of foreign words and every day language makes her want to read them. B said that he got the same feeling as with BS's contributions; hard to understand, but a gut feeling that there is something there.

“Thus, my boy, uniquely Time alone, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘Heropass,’ has no source from which its arising should depend, but like ‘Divine-Love’ flows always, as I have already told you, independently by itself, and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in the given place and in the given arisings of our Great Universe."

D thought this described appositely the hologram of which he had been speaking earlier.

“ ... although according to our time-calculations you are still only like a boy of twelve ...  yet according to their subjective understanding ... you have already existed by their time-calculation, not twelve years but the whole of four thousand six hundred and sixty-eight years."

L thought this passage highlighted that time is subjective. For example, a mayfly lives only for a day. Yet he saw a slight flaw in Gurdjieff's writing. He has Beelzebub living on Mars for a long period, apparently experiencing time normally, but at his rate of experiencing time, sunrise and sunset would alternate immediately, the sun streaking across the sky every minute. "R" said that their experience of time would have adjusted to local conditions.

"R" had recently watched a programme in which Brian Cox discussed some of the concepts in Doctor Who. It had been hard to understand but was very good.

RM had been on a cruise. People were on average in their seventies. All remarked how fast time goes. He told them it's just that they have more ways of falling asleep. Concentrating on something for two minutes makes time slow down.

Before closing the Meeting, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the ensuing month. It was decided this would be to pay immense attention to the hands, once a day, for one minute.

Helping Hands

The Meeting began with a one minute silence to set the mood. Thereafter up to two minutes was available, for those who wanted, to give an account of their relevant experiences over the previous month.

D spoke first, explaining his resistance to coming to the Meeting. He had a cold and a cough and wasn't going to come. He dosed himself with garlic and ginger, lemon and honey drinks, and Carbolic soap! They all helped get him to the Meeting, and although he got out of bed only an hour before it started, he was pleased that he even arrived early.

L said he had had more success with the exercise set last month of doing two tasks per day, although this success came only during the final week. He has experienced a different kind of presence when doing planned self-willed activity. The activity felt more significant. As promised the previous time he had added a page about kundabuffer to the website, listing all Gurdjieff’s references to it encountered so far in the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales. He had achieved doing two tasks per day over several days in the previous week. This felt as if it worked directly counter to the influence of kundabuffer. He had also experienced a reciprocal action. A day ago, after doing one of these activities through will-power of his own volition, he discovered a musician had simultaneously sent a long technical email about performance issues, a similar act of will. He considered that out of the large number of people busily involved in activities and traveling and doing this and that, there might be very few doing acts of their own volition, uninfluenced by society or employers. In the art studios, some of the people are doing things of their own volition.

Z had started with good intentions, but they had faded away and she did not manage to do anything.

T had not remembered what the exercise was for the first two weeks, and then had difficulty remembering to write down the tasks and remembering what they were. She had only managed to do one task. She experienced trying to do the exercise and realised that although it sounded simple it had several stages to it, and each had to be jumped over, like several hurdles. First she had to remember to do the tasks. Second she had to be in the right place. Third, she had to be at the right time. Fourth, she actually had to do them.

Being late made B wonder how seriously he takes this work. He had set the alarm, but arrived late, and thought he was treating it like a hobby. Now he was not treating it very seriously. It didn’t seem too difficult but he was being lazy. He had succeeded in doing the exercise five or six times. He did not feel at ease about the things he was not doing.

"R" had been travelling, and had missed two months. She had resolved to listen to people. She has a bad back and needs to do exercises for it. The worthy excuses she comes up with for not doing them use as much energy as would making the effort. Listening to people is a vague task. She can always tell herself she is listening, but most of the time she is asleep.

All those who wanted to contribute had done so, and the Meeting then moved to responses.

D asked how M was, and it was explained that M was in hospital. He then observed that T was noting down all comments, and said that he had read the website and that it was accurate. He said she was good at doing it and that he was praising her. T responded that typing what people are saying is a function or role.

B said he was not sure that what he says communicates what he feels.

D asked L to elaborate on the connection between his action and the musician. L said that it might be fanciful to feel a connection, but these two self-willed acts happened at the same moment. Maybe his doing one triggered something else to happen, like a stone dropped in a pool of human activity making ripples. He cited the phenomenon of the hundredth monkey (which has not been scientifically confirmed), and mentioned the theory of “morphic resonance” of Rupert Sheldrake.

RM said it takes more energy not to do things than to do them. A state of apathy takes a lot of energy because it is negative. Energy to do something is about coming in and focusing. It is hard to switch from one to the other.

On the theme of alienation, D referred to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and The Outsider by Camus, which would be on Radio 3 that evening at 10pm.

There was some discussion of anger as a form of energy. “R” quoted Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

L cautioned against the popular belief that artists are and should be passionate in their work, also quoting Blake from Auguries of Innocence:

To be in a Passion you Good may Do 
But no Good if a Passion is in you

As an example he mentioned the ultimate romantic musical masterpiece, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which though passionate, was the result of years of trying out different presentations of the tunes and harmonies, as Leonard Bernstein explained in his first Omnibus TV Lecture.

GC said he gets wrapped up in that passion, acting angry when not angry. Charisma does not always lead to good results. The relationship with self is the problem. How seriously do you believe the propaganda put out? There is only a war within if you think there is. You are not your mind. You don't need to use the mind. A person who surrenders is no longer in the war. Surrender is the state of acceptance that you are not in the war. Changing your state is to participate in a battle.

At 10:30am it was time to resume the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales.

In his fable about the difficulty of making significant change, Gurdjieff has the king return to power in the city of Samlios after the revolutionary period.

And when the revolutionary psychosis had quite died down, King Appolis returned to the city of Samlios and … when the earlier policy of King Appolis towards his subjects had been re-established, then the citizens of this community resumed filling the treasury with money as usual and carrying out the directions of their King, and the affairs of the community settled again into the former already established tempo.

In a final irony, the young man who had so railed against tax collection is fated to participate in it.

Sketch by Albrecht Durer

As for our naive, unfortunate countryman who was the cause of it all, it was so painful to him that he would no longer remain upon that planet that had proved so disastrous for him, but he returned with us to the planet Mars.

And later on he became there an even excellent bailiff for all the beings of our tribe.

Following the reading, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the coming month. B suggested a technique in which people visualise their hands, based on an exercise to develop lucid dreaming, from the point of view that the Work is similarly an attempt to become awake and aware within a dream.

Possessions and Regressions

The meeting began at 9 am with a one minute silence. Each person who wanted then spoke for up to two minutes about relevant experiences over the previous month.

B had missed the previous meeting to go to a wedding. He had found the exercise from the Meeting two months before (of opening doors with the least familiar hand) the most useful since he started attending, but in fact he found it engendered more self-awareness when he failed to remember to do it and realised subsequently, compared to successfully using the alternative hand.

D had been reading Kierkegaard, whom he said wrote that it is impossible to be present but that one can get glimpses. He recalled a saying attributed to Plutarch: “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” This was why he keeps coming to the Meetings. D also observed that there was no longer a clock on the wall of the Meeting room, and that he was finding that disturbing.

RM had observed during the month that the way in which we acquire objects is comparable to the way ideas become crystallised, in the way described by Gurdjieff in Beelzebub’s Tales.

Z had found the exercise quite good personally; it gave her a sense of achievement. She had also been to Glastonbury, which had energised her as always, but the effect waned afterwards, which she had found interesting.

L had attempted the exercise, with limited success. This suggested that free will is an illusion. He had achieved the exercise before, then increasing the quota of tasks to a day, then three, and so on. This eventually had led to late nights finishing the tasks.

[Removed at the request of BS.]

The Meeting then turned to responses to these contributions.

Addressing D, GC asked him what do we mean by being present. To him it is being without thoughts, and as soon as he realises he is in the state, the state finishes. He has heard advice from others about being consciously aware of a part of the body but was not sure this had any benefit. D said he had found standing on one leg a useful exercise. Z agreed, saying it made her feel more whole, and alive. D wondered if being present was a different experience for everyone? B said that he felt he had more options to do things when he feels he is being present.

GC then asked what does the phrase eat or be eaten mean? L said that this could be interpreted on an emotional energy level, in the sense that people watching a TV show were having their energy sapped, literally eaten away, by it. Z said she would rather live her life than watch TV. L talked of the distinction between consumers and content creators in the media.

At 10:30 the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales continued.

Referring to an appeal from Earth for help resolving a crisis there, Gurdjieff has Beelzebub tell his grandson:

At first I tried to help them while remaining on the planet Mars, but when I became certain that it would be impossible to do anything effective from the planet Mars, I decided to descend to the planet Earth and there, on the spot, to find some way out.

GC suggested there may be some symbolism to the plotline of going from Mars to Earth, which might represent going from a finer state of consciousness to one less fine.

Later the author brings in his concept of kundabuffer again:

It is necessary to premise just here that at the period of my first descent in person on to this planet, the organ Kundabuffer was no longer in the three-brained beings who interest you.

And it was only in some of the three-brained beings there that various consequences of the properties of that for them maleficent organ had already begun to be crystallized.

In the period to which this tale of mine refers, one of the consequences of the properties of this organ which had already become thoroughly crystallized in a number of beings there, was that consequence of the property which, while the organ Kundabuffer itself was still functioning in them had enabled them very easily and without any 'remorse-of-conscience' not to carry out voluntarily any duties taken upon themselves or given them by a superior. But every duty they fulfilled was fulfilled only from the fear and apprehension of 'threats' and 'menaces' from outside.

GC and D discussed what the term kundabuffer meant, and whether there is any link with kundalini. L said that as far as he recalled, it was mentioned in Beelzebub’s Tales in connection with the collision of a meteor with the Earth. As there was no consensus among the attendees on what it meant, L said that he would add a link at the top of the blog to a webpage listing in detail the chronology of Gurdjieff’s usage of the term kundabuffer within Beelzebub’s Tales.

At 10:30 the attendees discussed what exercise to adopt during the coming month, and it was agreed to repeat the exercise of the previous month, but to attempt two tasks daily instead of one.

Castles in the Air

There was an initial silence of one minute, and then each attendee who wished to gave an account of relevant experiences from the previous month.

Z said that she always seems to be a month behind with the exercises. She has started to squirt washing up liquid with her right hand instead of her left. She has been standing on one foot and observed that her whole body seemed to come alive! She felt quite conscious with this exercise, and had found it very useful. She has done it a few times and will continue.

RM had been involved in a long term project attempting to rewrite the Tao Te Ching in his own words, in order to try to get meaning from it. Its attitude to ideas is that they are mostly untrue things that we acquire, which crystallize into gospel. How true we believe things are! People like to hear ideas, and what they believe builds on that. What he is trying to do now is work on being present, on exercises like wherever he is standing to deliberately go slightly off-balance. He is realising how fragile we are as human beings.

T had been following events in Syria. In the current chapter of Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff describes warfare as what humans do to each other. She had seen a current photo from Egypt of a woman a holding up a white stick and confronting a boy soldier, his gasmask pushed to the top of his head and wearing body armour. It seemed as if she was talking or shouting in earnest to him and he appeared to be listening to her; she had his attention. It showed a human interaction amid fighting and at the same time showed each in role, playing  their part in the wider dispute, each identified with opposite sides. T had also been trying the exercise of putting the key in the lock of the front door with the other hand when she arrived home and had failed every time remembering only before or after the event.

D had been thinking that the environment is important. He is reading a book on creativity. As he had mentioned in previous Meetings, there were four major things disrupting his environment. He had to deal with a fire alarm that kept going off, and an intercom three times a day. He thought it was a form of creativity being aware of the outer and the inner, being aware of feeling irritated by things around him. How did people live in Afghanistan? It is difficult enough in King's Cross. He couldn't be born into that sort of stress. Last month had been creative for him because he had resolved three of the four outer irritations (leaving only the fire alarm to be dealt with), and grappled with them and felt calmer for doing so.

L had tried the exercise set last month, and had found it very hard to remember to use a different hand to open the front door. He had remembered to do so on entering the building for this Meeting. The difficulty with this exercise demonstrates to him that his belief in his free will is an illusion. The balance exercise was useful too.

BS, in his message from India, talked of [Removed at the request of BS.] ( According to Sikh scriptures, one moment is equal to 24 seconds).

M said he has had experiences of odd absences of memory. All he knows is that he is not conscious. He has had lapses in memory. There is an inner change on a certain level that he has noticed. He is resolving his own personal problems to do with will. Will is an aspect of consciousness.

There being no further contribution, the remaining time until 9:45 was devoted to responses.

D began with a question for M as an older person. We are doing this Work. How useful is it? How does it help? M responded that the Work had changed his consideration of things. He has been asking himself “What is your will?” A whole new panorama had opened up. “What is your will? What are you actually doing?” He was looking at it from a different point of view. Will is a proof, if your will is in action. The only thing that counts is what you've done. The will has to be active. The idea is an important part, you can have wonderful ideas but you have to have the power and the will to make the ideas happen. The will is the Go button. D said that what M was saying was a revelation. Losing memory is not always negative. M said that if you lose a part of memory, you are a spectator, and you are trying to get the memory to work. L said that if we are not in the present, we are experiencing long periods of forgetfulness. D said that he can't remember what he did the day before. Most of the time he is doing and thinking about something, but it is not important. He feels more aware now. He feels he is being productive.

Responding to D’s comment that he could not have been born into the stress of Afghanistan, RM recalled asking a Buddhist monk in an ashram how he would have coped had he been born into a busy environment. The monk replied that he would not have been born into such an context.

RM questioned what it is we are producing. He found his perspectives changed as he became more conscious, he observed but did not judge. He felt an ongoing momentum, but was not sure about productivity. He’s failed at this, he’s failed at that. He recalled the allegory of the sandcastle. The sea comes in and washes it away. What does the builder have left? It is the builder who is built, not the sandcastle. He referred to a concept which he had encountered in the Freemasons, which he described as “building the temple of you”. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.

L gave a geometric description of two different world views. The Occidental is straight line thinking, a goal-directed, purposeful view of history. The Eastern is more circular, there is repetition, reincarnation, karma, what goes around comes around. He quoted the Zen Master, Hsin Hsin Ming, Before Enlightenment, Chop wood carry water. After Enlightenment, Chop wood carry water.

“R” said that Chapter 10 of The Fourth Way, by Ouspensky, was relevant here. It maintains that we cannot do, and don't do, anything. D referred to the book by Camus on this theme, A Happy Death.

At 9:45 the Meeting resumed its reading from Beelzebub’s Tales.

"It is necessary to premise just here that at the period of my first descent in person on to this planet, the organ Kundabuffer was no longer in the three-brained beings who interest you.

“And it was only in some of the three-brained beings there that … one of the consequences of the properties of this organ … had enabled them very easily and without any 'remorse-of-conscience' not to carry out voluntarily any duties taken upon themselves or given them by a superior. But every duty they fulfilled was fulfilled only from the fear and apprehension of 'threats' and 'menaces' from outside.

The Meeting again discussed what the term kundabuffer meant.

RM said that the kundabuffer organ was a protective measure, to safeguard the planet and the life on its surface.

At the close of the Meeting, it was decided that the exercise for the coming month would be to do one thing each day, having decided what it would be at the start of the day.  A point would be scored for each day that this was successfully accomplished.

Wakeful Balance

After an initial silence of one minute at 9am, the proceedings began with accounts from attendees of relevant experiences over the previous month.

L said he had found the exercise useful. He had also been following the list system. It may not be possible to have a single "I", but a list may be a catalyst for coalescence towards something closer to a single "I".

D had brought a copy of The Way of the Sufi, by Idries Shah, from which he quoted: "You must prepare yourself for the transition in which there will be none of the things to which you have accustomed yourself". He had also been reading Arianna Huffington in the Huffington Post, who had written about mindfulness in the context of business.

 
He thought that now may be a time that these practices are becoming more widely used in day to day life including in business and the work place. He wanted to ask M and "R" if they are helpful when getting older. He is using them more now, and is getting through the day.

T had been trying the exercise of standing on one leg. Her body had really enjoyed trying to balance; it had been interesting. She had also tried the exercise from GC. She remembered it as being the back of the head, that was to be the place of awareness. She had done it a few times. It had given her a sense of her own skeleton, which she usually gets from looking at a drawing of a skull. To actually experience it was different and terrifying, on the cusp.

M spoke on being older. He said that time goes faster, that "you haven't got as much time as you think you have". He gets stuck in a train off thought, and wonders where the thoughts come from. It is interesting to notice this.

RM recalled that when he was in a Gurdjieff Group he was given a question, "What is this self?" He has been rewriting the Tao Te Ching in his own words, which constantly refers to the true self and false self. The golden mean is the true self, which happens completely naturally. Even attaining wisdom is a false self activity.

B had done the exercise a few times. Maybe he had felt a tingling, a change in awareness. Sometimes his deeper feelings felt a fiction. Last time he was told to enjoy being in love, to smell the roses, but part of him didn't want to, while the better, higher part wants to commit. He had become angry a few times. His mother had asked what was the point of the writing he was working on, and he had felt that his writing was deserving of respect.

"R" had set for herself the practical task for the summer to look at the appetites, and in order to do that decided on alternate days to desist from eating either cheese, or anything containing sugar. This showing her how cunning "it" is. She is going to go on retreat for two weeks with her group, which will be very interesting as there will be nice things on offer to eat. At home she has moved tempting items out of sight in the fridge. Appetite, so-called, is a habit.

As there were no further contributions, the Meeting moved on to the section where responses are given and discussed.

D commented, in response to T, that standing on one foot is quite effective for getting back into the body. Habitual behaviour causes the mind to switch off - the question is, how to function without habitual behaviour.  Turning to RM, D said everyone disagrees what a Sufi is, and there might be a similar issue in his rewriting of the Tao Te Ching about what the true self is. RM said the everything D had thus far described is not it.

"R", in response to D, quoted advice Gurdjieff received from his father in Meetings With Remarkable Men:

...the fundamental striving of every man should be to create for himself an inner freedom towards life...

and to prepare for himself a happy old age. ... But a man could attain this aim only if, from childhood up to the age of eighteen, he had acquired data for the unwavering fulfilment of the following four commandments:

First	To love one's parents.
Second	To remain chaste.
Third	To be outwardly courteous to all without distinction, whether they be rich or poor, friends or enemies, powerpossessors or slaves, and to whatever religion they may belong, but inwardly to remain free and never to put much trust in anyone or anything.
Fourth	To love work for work's sake and not for its gain.

RM said that as we get older we find jt easier and easier to go to sleep. Time didn't go faster for him, but he finds more ways to go to sleep or do useless activities

Z said it seems that so much she did is habit, which is sleep- forming. RM said that some exercises like the Movements and tapping the head while rubbing the tummy are impossible to fall asleep to.

The Muppets demonstrate an exercise for staying awake

Responding to B, L stated that there will always be resistance from family members to another family member doing art. The main thing is what the artist thinks of what he or she is creating. As the artist does not create anything of material value, other members of the family may take a different view of the activity. L suggested that there is a link between practicing creative art and the Work, and that it may play a part in the development of a core identity. Historically, many of the people attending Gurdjieff’s meetings were artists. D asked if Gurdjieff chose them. “R” said no, but they came. D asked “R” if it was only artists who came. “R” said no, ordinary people came too.

Noel Coward’s “Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage”

T said it was interesting to know about self calming, that Gurdjieff referred to it as the evil inner-god. “R” said that self-calming can justify staying sleep. D said that being irritable can help him be more himself. “R” could see how this might sometimes be the case. D was unsure if the Meetings are so helpful nowadays as the world has changed completely; respect for elders is not as important as it once was.

At 9:45 the reading from Beelzebub’s Tales continued.

"And so, my boy:"The contemporary writer of whom I began to speak was just a 'writer' like all the rest there, and nothing particular in himself.

"Once when he had finished some book or other, he began to think what he should write about next, and with this in view, he decided to look for some new 'idea' in the books contained in his what is called 'library,' such as every writer there is bound to have.

B commented that rearranging the same stuff and not creating anything new is a concept he is not sure he understands. RM thought it is like the concept of habit. Z said it is a key issue how to separate self from habit. L mentioned Euterpe, the Muse of music and poetry, whom the ancient Greeks thought brought ideas to the artist. Maybe there is nothing new. He said that we are composed of atoms from interstellar space. When he writes music, the fragment comes from such and such a place. RM recalled L’s work in the field of fractal music, where the repeated application of the same rules produces more and more musical motifs, all related but but at the same time each one unique. L asked where does a tune come from, and in the larger context of the human story, where do the folk melodies come from? As other species produce songs and melody, it could be that some tunes are encoded in our DNA, and in that sense are part of physical reality. Citing an example of the tension between new and old, RM said that the DOS operating system remains essentially the same, at the heart of Microsoft Windows. Apple created their own base system. There is a struggle creating something completely new. This is why we have wars. It is related to Gurdjieff’s concept of the “conscious shock”. RM felt that he has to go to places he has never been before. He had been attending the School of Economic Science for many years, and it has a turnover of 300 attendees every year. Those who stay all have a sense of enquiry. From time to time he starts again at year one, in order to be with fresh minds, as otherwise it gets cultish. “Nothing fresh stays in one place,” he said. L commented that in painting, there is really no such thing as a still life. Everything changes.

The reading continued:

" … they therefore decided almost immediately to 'get rid of' both the writer himself and his 'Gospels' …"Some proposed that they should simply shut him up where many 'rats' and 'lice' breed; others proposed to send him to 'Timbuktu'; and so on and so forth; but in the end they decided to anathematize this writer together with his 'Gospel,' publicly and punctiliously according to all the rules...”

L asked is there were any theories as to who Gurdjieff is referring to. “R” though he was referring to himself. L said he had thought it might be Freud, Jung or Joseph Smith. B said he really wants to see Beelzebub’s Tales as a gospel, he wants to be led.

"…Anything he writes now, they all seize upon and regard as full of indisputable truth … But if you were then to ask what he wrote, it would turn out that most of them, if of course they confessed the truth, has never read a single one of his books.

Z remarked that groups take over the public imagination. “R” commented that people speak in this way of Machiavelli, but who has read his books? L recalled Gurdjieff’s advice from his grandmother, which “R” read out to the Meeting:

Eldest of my grandsons! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you: In life never do as others do … Either do nothing—just go to school—or do something nobody else does.

Following the Reading, it was decided that the exercise for the month would be to try to remember to open doors with the less usual hand.