The Sacred and the Profane

In the spirit of the previous month’s exercise, several attendees arrived wearing hats.

For L, hat wearing had made no difference, however he had been more aware of and enjoyed seeing other people in hats. In addition, during the month, he had done an exercise which required third force, the 30 day minimalist challenge. Each day of June he had cleared a number of things equal to the calendar date. By the end of the month 465 items had been thrown or given away. The flat still felt cluttered!

T normally did not wear hats as they made her head hot. She only possessed hats she had purchased on holiday. A straw hat had no strap, and tended to fall off. It amazed her how many people wore inconvenient hats. She had become aware that wearing a hat made her self-conscious, feeling she wasn’t blending in, that she was no longer comfortably invisible but was drawing attention to herself through clothing which was typical of the conventional sexist experience of the female being identified solely by her outer appearance in relation to men.

N said he liked hats, especially in winter. He thought Panama hats lent a sense of style. In his work, he could not wear a hat, though some at the work place were required to wear a form of headgear. In synagogue which he sometime attended, hats were not out of place. He thought that people in London were open to anything.

GC had started shaving his head long before it became fashionable, and had been wearing hats for many years. Therefore, for the exercise, he had decided not to wear a hat, to shave all facial hair off, and to grow his hair. He started getting headaches from the sun, so the hat went back on. He went to the barbers for a shave, and didn't like how his hair looked, so that also went. He was still without facial hair, but didn’t know what it proved.

D said he hadn't known about the hat exercise. He wanted to talk about mindfulness. His play had been successful but there was always a “drop” afterwards. He had been trying to be in the present all the time, which had helped him. The "downer", the anti-climax was not so keenly felt. He had been reading Will Young on how mindfulness helped him re his depression. He had heard on the radio that mindfulness was now being taught in the schools. Optimistic people were using it. CBT had also helped him this past two weeks.

RM had not done the hat exercise. He was intensely working on a book, of which he had already written forty chapters. He had reached the realisation that we did not have free well. He had tried to explain this to others, but this was sometimes difficult.

Lawrence Durrell
author of The Alexandria Quartet

J had bought his cork hat on Bondi Beach, after which he was the object of attention, being incorrectly identified as a caricature of an Aussie. Another hat in Margate, combined with an audacious T shirt, drew a different impression from people. Hats had a way of making him rethink the type of person he is, but through history people have realised that, like Napoleon. But the purpose here was to break out of habitual thoughts. He recalled Scobie in The Alexandria Quartet puffing at his pipe while deeply asleep. He thought it had been a good exercise.

After the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.

Following on comments by RM about mindfulness, D said that the continued use of the practice after his project had finished had led to boredom. There was a gap. RM said that when a project stopped there could be boredom, a space which the mind wanted to fill, in which you could find out who you really were. DM said people try to escape from themselves. RM said it was not about stepping back from who you are, but letting go from what you thought you were.

Responding to N, T said she could never wear a hat to work because she did not want to stand out there. GC asked if she was defined by other people's opinions, to which T replied, sadly, yes, the opinions of others had had a huge influence on her, and it was continuous work in order to counter this.

Charles Chaplin
Actor, Composer, Director.

Following on J’s experiences in Australia, N related that he had spent some time living in Germany, and went out of his way to walk around with a hat and walking stick and sometimes a cane. This likewise attracted a lot of attention because he represented the proverbial caricature of the Englishman. For him the most interesting people he met were those who stepped out from the norm. His experience of the exercise was that it was an enjoyable, playful and creative thing to do rather than one of feeling fearful of being noticed.


On RM’s comments about not having free will, L thought it was more complicated. We could strip away what we are not to find what we are, which might build up will power to achieve some things. We might then realise we had not been free in doing those things, and do more stripping away, getting to a truer identity, and then do more things. There were people who consistently did things against the norm, and very significant things. For example Elon Musk, who founded Paypal early in his career, went on to establish the Tesla Motors which was making excellent electric sports cars, and who was working on a long term project to establish a city and civilisation on Mars, where he intended to spend the last period of his life. In L's opinion, these were things that nobody would ever do unless they were using free will. L said he thought that part of the Gurdjieff Work was to build up will power and the oomph to do something and follow it through. The exercise of giving away things every day of the month till 465 things had gone was an exercise in will power. D asked if L was saying that mindfulness helped to achieve things by stepping back from them. L said no, giving an example of trying to start a car on a cold day. If the second attempt did not work, it was best to wait a few minutes to avoid flooding the engine. That was like mindfulness, but if you didn’t turn the key again you would not get anywhere. At a third try, revving the engine a little, the car might start and you could then drive somewhere. Mindfulness without action would go nowhere, but might help if action followed.

At 9:45 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales, continuing Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent to Earth.

During my visits to the Kaltaani there, I met a number of beings, among whom was one I happened to meet rather often.

This three-brained being there, whom I chanced to meet frequently, belonged to the profession of 'priest' and was called 'Abdil.'

… he was well versed in all the details of the teaching of the religion then dominant …

… the function called 'conscience' … had not yet been quite atrophied in him, so that after he had cognized with his Reason certain cosmic truths I had explained to him, … he became, as it is also said there, 'compassionate,' and 'sensitive' towards the beings surrounding him.

DM and L wondered if Abdil was a cypher for Ouspensky. T thought he found a glimmer of humanity still remaining in somebody who was completely in a conformist role and was teaching the doctrine. L thought that conscience was linked to compassion. GC asked what was meant here by conscience and compassion. L said that conscience is an appreciation of what was good and bad. Compassion is an empathy for people and creatures who are suffering. This passage spoke about the propensity of priests to do things like sacrificing animals. T asked where conscience came from. L thought that conscience might be born into human beings and drummed out of them by education or to the contrary strengthened by education. RM said it came from a sense of what you believed was good or bad. T asked where did beliefs come from. If it was from learned behaviour as a child, then it depended on how your parents’ consciences were. N said that this was the complicated thing about Gurdjieff work where we were trying to get to an objective truth. The text seemed to be suggesting that conscience overrides all cultural ideas of right and wrong. For example, in parts of the Islamic world they believe in honour killings. something which was horrendous to us, but they believe in it strongly and could not understand why we didn’t. L gave a quote from the scientist Stephen Weinberg: With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

The reading continued.

With the same aim, these favorites of yours of that period even divided the beings of all other forms into 'clean' and 'unclean.'

'Unclean' they called those forms of being, the destruction of whose existence was presumably not pleasing to their gods; and 'clean,' those beings, the destruction of whose existence was, presumably, extremely agreeable to those various imaginary idols whom they revered….

... the strong usually brought the less strong to be sacrificed; as for instance, a father brought his son, a husband his wife, an elder brother his younger brother, and so on. But, for the most part, 'sacrifices' were offered up of 'slaves,' who then as now were usually what are called 'captives,' ...

Yoko Ono
White Chess Set

L thought this was probably referring to the practice which developed into the kosher and halal classifications of food. N said there was a theme of duality here, a distinguishing between pure and defiled. He said that a number of anthropologists had written on societies which divide things into groups like that, for example Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked. Hinduism, Judaism and Islam all have these divisions, and it was interesting to consider whether this may reflect divisions within our own minds. T said that even now at ceremonial civic occasions, people were split into those who had to stand behind certain lines marked out on the floor and some ranks had remain behind the line, whilst higher ranks walked past. N thought it was interesting how we made this division - perhaps it was a manifestation of our split minds. L said that Yoko Ono had addressed this in her chess art, in which she made all the pieces the same colour. She was currently exhibiting at MOMA in New York. In this audio clip she described what it was like to play the game of chess thus adjusted - the differences between people could dissolve into laughter. J could not see the sense behind Yoko Ono's idea.

Abattoirs marked by red dots
Source: Google Maps

He also thought that Gurdjieff was showing up the idea of animal sacrifice, to placate a god, as totally idiotic. L said that Gurdjieff was describing the remote past as a way of describing the present. Although we think of animal sacrifice as something we grew out of, it was still widespread in some parts of the world. L also asked in what way did slaughtering an animal as an offering to a god differ from slaughtering it for dinner. Abattoirs are everywhere.

D had found that if he challenged somebody's belief, they would get defensive, but if they later realised they were wrong, they started to experience guilt. He wondered what guilt was. RM said it was self-judgment of what you thought you had done wrong. L said that in the Catholic religion, children were taught original sin, that human beings were born guilty. Little children were so malleable. T had read a report about FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) in Africa. A charity had started to give food, education and clothing to families who agreed not to do it. Children protected in this way by the charity would sometimes get harangued by the other village children as unclean. GC said that they did the practice because it was their culture, why should they not? T said this was an example of objective morality, a human being was being hurt and mutilated and this was wrong. L said he had a problem with it. He himself had been mutilated (in the Jewish religious ceremony of circumcision) as a defenceless baby of eight days old. He considered it was child abuse and he thought that it was wrong. Were a charity set up addressing this issue in the Jewish community in the UK, those families who opted out of the traditional practice would face pressure from their community. Just as in Beelzebub’s Tales, it was easier to see an issue remotely in Africa than closer to home. GC said that Gurdjieff talked about it being the strong who sacrificed the weak, and was keen on the metaphors of eating and being eaten. He asked what people took from that. J thought this was a valid point. If you abstracted all the surrounding ritual and explanation and justification, how wonderful were religions? You could not imagine the lamb taking the lion to the slaughter, or the captive taking his captor to be sacrificed. It was a a strength thing, a power game.

… I often talked on various subjects with this mentioned friend of mine, the priest Abdil …

… he also took me for a being of his own planet…

From our earliest meetings, whenever we chanced to speak about other beings similar to himself, his responsiveness and experiencings about them always touched me deeply. And when my Reason made it quite clear to me that the function of conscience, fundamental for threecentered beings, which had been transmitted to his presence by heredity, had not yet become quite atrophied in him, then there gradually began from that moment to arise in my presence and as a result to be crystallized, a 'really-functioning-needful-striving' towards him as towards a kinsman of my own nature.

T wondered if that was suggesting that if somebody has a conscience then there is a universality about it. N thought so - there were all these moralities in the world that were subjective, but when you get to a certain level of consciousness, conscience is there; it can be recognised in certain circumstances. It was very hard to determine what was conscience, rather than responses programmed from what was our own man-made civilisation.

Firstly, by destroying the existence of other beings, you reduce for yourself the number of factors of that totality of results which alone can form the requisite conditions for the power of self-perfecting of beings similar to yourself; and secondly, you thereby definitely diminish or completely destroy the hopes of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR in those possibilities which have been put into you as a three-brained being and upon whom He counts, as a help for Him later.

GC could see the futility of the external religion, but was not seeing the futility of the internal religion. L said that the anthropologist Mircea Eliade spoke of closed religions, whose adherents did not see their religion as such, but as part of reality. For animists in Africa, ancestral spirits occupying animals at night and revisiting the living was part of the fabric of their experiential reality.

Mircea Eliade

In contrast, open religion was the general experience in the West. RM thought that we did exactly the same. L agreed with RM. He thought we had the equivalent in our culture; it was very pervasive and we did not see it as religion. We saw life beginning with education, leading to 30 years of employment, which went with the buying of property which was then passed on to children. Anybody who did not conform to this was excluded from those considered to be successful. When the inner logic of that began to fail, as currently in Greece, there could be a lot of friction. N said that all points of view were partial, whether scientific or otherwise. There was no such thing as a completely  objective, impartial  view of the world. J thought that Gurdjieff was trying to say just that, implying that by looking down he somehow had a level of his own which was objective. How did Gurdjieff know what those common hopes of our “common father creator” were? T said it was the character in the book, Beelzebub, speaking. GC thought Beelzebub was a mouthpiece for Gurdjieff here. J didn’t know why the character was called Beelzebub in the first place. Did she think this was a reference to being devil’s advocate? T said yes, she did. GC said the book could be thought of as a koan. The more you thought about it the more you realised that you couldn’t think about it. He quoted Kierkegaard: Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.

As there had been much discussion of conscience during the Meeting, it was decided that the exercise for the ensuing month would be, as suggested by N, that if guilt be felt, or a conscience response experienced as opposed to a conventional morality response, to make a note of it for the meeting and then let the thought go.

The Unbearable Lightness of Accepting

RM had noticed that the more he was remembering himself in flashes during the day, though the problems in life did not change very much, the way he saw them did. He was seeing them as just there and an opportunity to learn. He was a lot calmer, so the world was calmer towards him as well.

N had found it a mixed experience with this process. He felt there were lots of radio stations going on in his head at times, and they didn't quite get to the frequency he wanted sometimes. He was trying to keep this thing going, and could do it for a little period of time but then it went  off or he lost it, but at least he was becoming aware of the problems of trying to maintain that level of serenity or calmness. But he agreed with RM that the more you did it, you realised that these things which stressed you were not that meaningful. It was his own problems rather than the world as it was. The world as it was was just a reflection of the world as he was, so you see that more and more as you do that exercise. It was good, but he had just become aware of how far he was from the process of having that very deep inner serenity which was ultimately, hopefully, what it leads to in all regards to life.

For L a couple of issues had arisen. He had tried out the meditation-like practice Gurdjieff had advocated daily at sunrise in Beelzebub's Tales, where he says to speak to the various parts of yourself, as if they are conscious, and to ask them to cooperate so that you yourself can fulfill what you are here for, and to let them know that if they don't, then at a later stage in life you will be unable to fulfill your composite purpose. He had found that quite interesting. It was like a meditation-plus. He thought it was worth taking it seriously and he might try to keep that going, in addition to the one minute practice.

... every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendor, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence. Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts - as if they were conscious - that if they hinder your general functioning, they, in the period of your responsible age, not only cannot fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence of which they are part, will not be able to be a good servant of our Common Endless Creator, and by that will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and existence.

The other interesting thing over the month was that he had read a supernatural novel by Luke Smitherd, who had a concept of a black room after which the novel was named, and in which the protagonist awakens in darkness, but for two screens through which he can see, which transpire to represent the eyes of a person inside whose head he has found himself. When this person opens her eyes, he can see what she is seeing, or if she blinks it goes dark for a moment, and he can pick up on her sensations and emotions by touching the walls. L thought this a was a good metaphor for self-observation and a helpful concretisation of the process of standing back which it entails.

"R" was able to report that she had noticed that the tendency is for her to prepare and appoint one or two moments that will come during the day when she fully intended to be reminded, but in the last few weeks she had tried something on a much smaller scale which happened more often, and found the forgetting was as much as ever, but there were also more opportunities to notice and return to oneself, and it was always on offer if it was frequent, whereas if it is at midday and goes unnoticed, then the opportunity for that day had gone. To have something on a smaller scale, like the exercises for going through doors, and using knives and forks, because they happen many times, a proportion of those times are moments of remembering, and remembering wasn't just, "Oh, I remember!"; it was returning, sensing the parts of her own body, which were constantly processing impressions, and constantly distracted by dreams, and yet it was all going on and she could notice it.

T had been applying one minute meditations during her stressful day, walking to a cafe to have her lunch, and walking back, there was a little garden en route, so she was taking her phone with and setting a timer. There had been a couple of times when she was incredibly pressurised to attend meetings for which she was late, but she thought maybe she would be sixty seconds later than normally, and it was such an island of calm, and she was proud of herself in all that rush to actually stop, because that was an achievement compared to other times. But it was also something about it doesn't matter. She would be the one that was late. Her ego had always been crushed if she was late or doing things wrong. It did feel that inch by inch she was chipping away at the old ego, and how other people saw her forming how she was, instead of herself just being herself.

All those who wished to had contributed, and the Meeting moved on to the responses section.

Following on from RM's comment that his meditations had led him to be accepting of life's problems, L said that he had an art exhibition at the moment, and one of the things was a revolving piece of music. The music goes on forever. It is a cylinder which revolves, and the music is visible on the inner wall of the material. Someone had come up to him the previous day and asked him what did it mean, what was the message, did it have a philosophical meaning or did it give any hope for mankind? L had replied that it was about acceptance. Things were as they were and they just kept going on, and it was not a panacea and did not have any message. He thought RM's remarks expressed a similar outlook. RM thought it was a good metaphor to use reality to demonstrate.

T had some thoughts on L's description of his experience with the exercise with the sun coming up, which had been one of the previous month's exercises. What she took from this, with her romantic image of the sun rising, was thinking where was she going to be when the sun rose? But actually sitting down for one minute and having that in mind, it wasn't the sun rising and looking at the sun, it was the "reflection of its splendour" to meditate on, and so she started to look round to see any light reflected, and then she realised that everything was lit up, even when you were not in the sunlight. In the daytime everything was lit and visible. So that was an extraordinary moment, to think that she was visible because of this light, but if it wasn't there she wouldn't be, not visually anyway. RM said that there was a kind of light that shone universally. It was not like light that we see, but without the light that was there he wouldn't see himself internally or any of his senses or anything - he wouldn't be - his whole being was dependent, because being, in a way, needs some inner visual acceptance that there was something here - without that light he wouldn't see it. So a question to him was, what is this light that shines inside?

N said that, just walking to the Meeting, the sun was out and it was beautiful, and he thought what a lovely day, and remembered days as a child when he would wake up and just love being and playing in the sunlight, and he thought how so little of the time that we spend on the planet are we able to think we are actually living. We are somewhere else, a lot of the time, but to be present, and enjoy a moment, can be rare sometimes. We rush around doing our tasks, and forget to think we are alive enjoying the process. That awareness disappears, life goes on, years pass.

L had been in the City a few days ago, and was looking at people and trying to figure out who was in the present and who wasn't. Most people were walking very quickly and purposefully, and he could see they were in some kind of dream about the next meeting they had to go to. Of course you can't put yourself in people's heads, but he was pretty sure that is what it was about, everything was an obstacle in the way to getting to the meeting. They certainly weren't where they worked, except for the people who were trying to sell magazines, or the people without anything to do.

Remarks by GC in previous Meetings had reminded T of a TED talk by Jon Jandai that she had recently seen: Life Is Easy. Why Do We Make It So Hard?



The speaker had abandoned a lucrative city life in Bangkok to return to his village in a rural area. He found that he was able to build a house in the countryside in three months, whereas a mortgage in Bangkok would have taken thirty years to pay off, while working long hours. The questions it raised for her were: What are you doing with your day? and why are you doing it?, and what are you missing out in terms of relationships with plants and animals, and building your own shelter?. This reminded her of GC because he had spoken in the past of the mental gymnastics we go through. GC asked T if this had anything to do with a sense of individuality, that might be lost in the city? T thought that what was lost in the city was relationship with primary activities which inform people of themselves as a human being - the relationship with the live planet rather than the manufactured one. N thought that your relationship with nature changed in the city. He had gone to live in the country for two years, moved out of London, because at the time he felt very negative about being in cities, and he noticed it was a simpler lifestyle, and people seemed to be closer to their essence in the countryside, and there were some definite benefits of living closer to nature. He had moved back to the city but needed to get out of London from time to time or just spend some time on the Heath to be around trees and plants and other forms, that brought him to a better space, he worked in the City which is a mass of skyscrapers and concrete buildings and concrete streets, and he felt that was very alienating to his spirit. However there were some things that he liked about the City as well, he did quite like an urban lifestyle but also needed to balance it with getting back to nature. He thought the soul cried out for both.

Hampstead Heath, London.

"R" told the story of how someone had told Gurdjieff that he was thinking of going to live in the country and to grow his own vegetables, and asked if it would be a good life. Gurdjieff replied that it would be, for a dog.

At 9:45 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales, continuing Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent to Earth.

…in these peculiar religions of theirs there is very widely spread among the beings of all three groups the same custom called among them "Sacrificial-Offerings."

And this custom of theirs is based on the notion, which can be cognized only by their strange Reason alone, that if they destroy the existence of beings of other forms in honor of their gods and idols, then these imaginary gods and idols of theirs would find it very, very agreeable, and always and in everything unfailingly help and assist them in the actualization of all their fantastic and wild
fancies.

..."So, your Reverence, my request to you, as I have already told you, is … to undertake the task of specially descending on the planet Earth and of trying there on the spot to instill into the consciousness of these strange three-brained beings some idea of the senselessness of this notion of theirs."

"R" said that the original meaning of the word sacrifice was "to make sacred".

...After these Sacred Individuals had left the planet Mars, I decided to carry out the said task at all costs and to be worthy, if only by this explicit aid to our UNIQUEBURDEN- BEARING-ENDLESSNESS, of becoming a particle, though an independent one, of everything existing in the Great Universe.

GC thought there must be some significance in this paragraph. L noted that Gurdjieff used the word particle rather than the word part. T thought that the aspiration to be a particle was ego busting, as the particle is the smallest something can be. An internet search revealed that the quantum concepts of wave and particle were widely known at the time the book was being written, so Gurdjieff's choice of word might have had that connotation too.

… a third great catastrophe occurred to the illfated planet…

… Later when this second group also began to have a center point of their existence they called it the 'city Gob' and the whole country was for a long time called 'Goblandia'.

This locality also was afterwards covered by Kashmanoon and now the former principal part of this also once flourishing country is called simply 'The Gobi Desert.'

… there was present and already thoroughly crystallized in all these three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, belonging to the three enumerated independent groups, instead of that function called ‘the needful-striving-for-self-perfection,’ which should be in every three-brained being, also a ‘needful’ but very strange ‘striving’ that all the other beings of their planet should call and consider their country the ‘Center of Culture’ for the whole planet.

This strange 'needful-striving' was then present in all the three-centered beings of your planet and was for each of them, as it were, the principal sense and aim of his existence. And in consequence, among the beings of these three independent groups at that period, bitter struggles, both material and psychic, were constantly proceeding for the attainment of the mentioned aim.

… We sailed for fifteen terrestrial days and finally arrived at the capital of the beings of the first Asiatic group.

RM said that each of the three groups thinks they must be the masters of the world. T asked if it represented the three minds. RM said that good governance was about creating a balance between them; not one should dominate over the others.

Aurel Stein

It reminded T of the bible, which goes on and on and on about countries and peoples, which made her ask where was the spiritual message here, and it was actually more of a historical, geographical account. and similarly she thought that this part of Beelzebub's Tales might be a factual account as well as metaphoric. Referring to the mention of the Gobi desert, N said there was a lot of archaeological work going on in that part of the world at that stage, which was well reported, The famous archaeologist Aurel Stein had been there (Gurdjieff would have been aware of this), and some of the items he brought back were now in the British Museum. "R" said that the Himalayas were mentioned. "T" said that Gurdjieff was very well travelled, as was recounted in his book Meetings With Remarkable Men. N said Gurdjieff had gone through the Gobi desert, as was recounted in the chapter about the sandstorm. L said that as the reading went further, the numbers might make more sense too. There were three catastrophes, three groups of people, three centres, fifteen days voyaging … and in the preface ~Gurdjieff had said the book should be read three times, in three different ways.

It was decided that the exercise for the ensuing month would be to wear a hat at least once a day, especially if one did not normally do so.

Ex Pluribus Unum

L had tried the exercise, which was to find something done regularly, and to do it in a different way. He had chosen to turn on taps with a different hand than usual. This had not worked so well. It had taken him a while to remember the exercise, and then it turned out that he quite often turned on taps with the alternate hand anyway, when he was already holding something with the primary hand. But one interesting thing had occupied his mind quite a lot during the month. In the previous Meeting he had mentioned a quotation, Things don’t happen to you, they happen for you, and D had questioned him a few times about it, so he had researched its origin online. It was attributed to many people, but appeared to have originated with Byron Katie. He had done some research about her. She had a website called, coincidentally, thework.com. There was quite a lot in her writing he did not like: a kind of guru fixation, a glib use of karmic ideas - from her logic the holocaust happened for the victims, so there are limitations to her logic, but her concept that people’s thoughts are not really their thoughts, but rather that the thoughts happen to them, was interesting.

RM had been continuing the one minute or four minutes of remembering himself, and had noticed that he worked better under pressure, realised that the reason was that the pressure put him absolutely in the present, and when in the present he was in touch with his intuition and was more effective. This was also why he preferred to work late rather than in the morning, as at night he felt it was time to go to bed, which put him in the present and thereby more creative. Also the moment he would wake up in the morning he was absolutely in the present. It was such a joyful moment that he did not want to get up.

The habit that T had been aware of doing for a while but done nothing about, was of chewing her tongue. She noticed during the month that it had been associated with chores like washing up. She hadn’t realised but the whole psychology was to do with wanting to get something done before she had done it. She had discovered it too in walking, when she had in mind that she had to get there, and she tried to slow down to mindful walking, and it was quite an extraordinary change in pace - you still got to where you are going but a different psychology was happening. She did not try to stop the tongue chewing, but tried to be aware of it, and that was what helped her associate it with times when she was trying do something practical, with hand-eye coordination. It also happened when she was painting, trying to get somewhere in it - it was wanting to be there before she was there.

N had been changing the way he went to work, which created some interesting experiences. One was that you could appreciate the journey which became more of an adventure. You could observe and see things which you hadn’t seen on previous occasions when you were on automatic. He had been thinking about how that could apply to other things in his life, wondering if things would become more interesting, more of an adventure, if there would be more discovery resulting from that process, so from that perspective he was experiencing those things and seeing what I’s were involved in that process, and why he was doing quite a lot of things most probably on automatic, and that led to him thinking about maybe changing other things to see what effect that might have, things we could easily change and reprogram.

“R”’s ongoing complication was laziness and impatience, and there were physical exercises which she tried to do each morning which were physically necessary, and her understanding of her aim was not to improve things but to be in what was. So she was trying a different exercise in the mornings at the moment, and it was not more pleasant, but it was more reminding, and it was very hard to stay with not wishing to improve and have more fun. Trying to use this physical exercise which did not take very many minutes, but enabled her to have the opportunity and be reminded to sense and to feel, and not just look for a label. The very first time, when she was a child, that somebody mentioned to her the idea of consciousness, she remembered having a taste of what it might be as a hundred percent state, and in a way that has also returned from time to time to remind her what she is really hoping or working towards.

A message received from BS of India was read out, and then the Meeting turned to responses.

In response to N’s description of doing routines differently, L said he had been experimenting with an opposite approach, trying to do things in exactly the same sequence each time. There was a concept called habit stacks, which a few people had written about, and in contrast to our attempts to wake up and avoid automatic behaviour, this was a deliberate attempt to preserve energy by making some our behaviour automatic so that it required no energy whatsoever. He had found that interesting as some of the energy saved could be useful. RM said that one of the first principles of organisational development was to get people into a state of regularity as quickly as possible, because while they were unfamiliar with what was going on around them it was very inefficient.

RM also picked up on the saying L had quoted in his contribution, Things don’t happen to you, they happen for you. In one of the chapters of a book he had been working on for twenty years, he had considered the idea that things happen through you. We were not an individual being. Things happened for us and through us. Because we were not individuals, it was more like rivers, they all flowed, but along different paths. They don’t have choice, but everything that happens, happens for the river, and happens for its own learning and so on but is part of something much much bigger, and what L had been saying made a lot of sense, that things just happen. L said that as a composer, he had the experience where musical tunes had an external reality. They came in to the mind, and then the composer wrote them down and formed them into structures, so it was as if they had an external reality. And Byron Katie’s comments about thoughts reminded him of that. It was as if thoughts had an external existence, and were swimming around reality, and latched on to people, and stayed there, and then possibly influenced the people and took them over. He was not sure where this fitted into the Gurdjieff Work, but thought it did help in waking up, if one became aware that our thoughts might not be our own.


Coming back to the earlier subject, N said that when we do things continuously in the same way, there can be some merit in it because it saves energy. He remembered reading the book by Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, where the author automated so many things in his life that he had more time for his writing and creativity. When we learnt any new physical skill, like driving, it first of all started with mental centres, and then eventually went down to the mechanical centre and the body took it over, so that we drive, and we just continue to do these skills automatically. At times he had tried to improve his playing of some guitar pieces, and experienced issues because of habitual skills. The same thing once happened to Julian Bream; who became dissatisfied with his guitar playing and went back and painstakingly retaught himself so as to improve mastery of his technique. So there was sometimes some unlearning that had to take place. Some of the habits may be optimal to our situation, but what happens is that the machine takes over and we don’t even think about our behaviour once it gets to a certain standard of practical usefulness, but it was important that we actually observed what was happening, because it was often happening in unconscious parts of our being which we were not aware. Everything was interconnected, so sleep in one part of the machine was going to cause problems somewhere else in your life, if it wasn’t revealed, looked at, and considered at some level.



L said that paradoxically, if you were going through a sequence of things which form a habit stack, and if you were aware that you were doing that, you could just sit back and watch your body do those actions. So you could be on automatic and self-observing at the same time.

RM said that for Gurdjieff it was more the consciousness of what you were doing which was important, whether or not you were on automatic. He also thought Gurdjieff’s point was that changing the way you did things made you more aware of what you were doing. In RM’s experience, if he was aware of doing something and saw that there was a better way of doing it, he found it effective to slowly shift to the better way while visualising it.

Returning to L’s remarks about Byron Katie’s suggestion that the holocaust happened on some level for the victims, N thought that this was an extremely dangerous way of using the concept of karma. He did not deny that sometimes things happened to us which we are meant to have happen to us, and sometimes we were used, and in a very positive way, although we may not have seen it that way at the time. We were also used in writing music or poetry - when things came through us in that context, the work is considerably better. In a sense, being used at some level, could be very positive, but he did not think that could be talked about in a more generalised view of karma in history.

At 9:45 the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub’s Tales, continuing Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent to Earth.

Among these Most High Sacred Individuals there was again His Conformity, the Angel—now already an Archangel—Looisos, of whom, do you remember, I recently told you that during the first great catastrophe to the planet Earth he had been one of the chief regulators in the matter of averting the consequences of that general cosmic misfortune.

So, my boy! The day following this second appearance of the mentioned Sacred Individuals, His Conformity, escorted by one of the Seraphim, his second assistant, made His appearance at my house.


After Te Deums with me, and after certain inquiries of mine concerning the Great Center, His Conformity then condescended to tell me, among other things, that after the collision of the comet Kondoor with the planet Earth, he, or other responsible cosmic Individuals, superintending the affairs of ‘Harmonious-World-Existence,’ had frequently descended to this solar system to observe the actualizing of those measures they had taken in order to avert the consequences of that general cosmic accident.

L found it interesting that this person was called "His Conformity". T noticed the reference to "the Great Centre".

‘And we descended,’ His Conformity continued, ‘because although we had then taken every possible measure and had assured everybody that everything would be quite all right, we ourselves were nevertheless not categorically convinced that no unexpectedness might occur there unforeseen.

...‘But now,’ added His Conformity with a shade of self-satisfaction, ‘the existence of this planet will be quite normal in respect of the common-cosmic harmony. This second catastrophe to the planet Earth has finally quite pacified and convinced us also that a catastrophe on a great scale cannot again occur on account of this planet.

‘Not only has this planet itself now again acquired a normal movement in the general cosmic equilibrium, but its two detached fragments’—which, as I have already told you, are now called Moon and Anoolios—’have also acquired a normal movement and have become, although small, yet independent “Kofensharnian,” that is, additional, planets of that solar system Ors.’

Annulus Platonis

T wondered if some of the words, like Looisos and Anoolios, might be significant. L said they were almost anagrams. "R" said that Anoolios could be seen as "Sol" and "Luna". T was reminded also of the pair of words from an earlier chapter, Cathodnatious and Anodnatious, which compare to this new pair, Looisos and Anoolios. L thought Anoolios was like "annulus", a ring formed from two concentric circles. T thought Anoolios might refer to "annual", or pertain to the Sun.

RM had gathered from his reading the catastrophe might have been to do with moving from unity to duality. A great shock splits everything up into separate parts. L said he was also talking about descending, which suggests giving up a level of consciousness.

...‘Although these Havatvernoni or Religions have nothing in common,’ continued His Conformity, ‘yet nevertheless in these peculiar religions of theirs there is very widely spread among the beings of all three groups the same custom called among them “Sacrificial-Offerings. And this custom of theirs is based on the notion, which can be cognized only by their strange Reason alone, that if they destroy the existence of beings of other forms in honor of their gods and idols, then these imaginary gods and idols of theirs would find it very, very agreeable, and always and in everything unfailingly help and assist them in the actualization of all their fantastic and wild fancies. This custom is at present so widespread there, and the destruction of the existence of beings of various forms for this maleficent purpose has reached such dimensions, that there is already a surplus of the “Sacred Askokin” required from the planet Earth for its former parts, that is to say, a surplus of those vibrations which arise during the sacred process of “Rascooarno” of beings of every exterior form arising and existing on that planet from which the said sacred cosmic arising is required.'

The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Pedro Orrente.

"R" said that the meaning of Rascooarno is death. L asked what was the Sacred Askokin. "R" said that was possibly the result of personal work of transformation of courser substances into finer ones. T wondered if it was to do with questioning, as it contains the word "ask". L said it was talking about vibrations which occur during the process of dying, and those who were being sacrificed would experience fear and distress, and he wondered if that was the surplus sacred askokin. "R" said that Gurdjieff was writing this before the holocaust, but he may have sensed the growing ferment in Europe. N noted that Gurdjieff was Armenian, and there had also been the Turkish massacre of his own people, so he was aware of what mankind could do to mankind, and that sort of destruction which could take place in the name of religion or other doctrines. T said that the text appears to describe sacrifice of animals, but originally there were human sacrifices. N said that changed to sacrifices of goats, and even today there is still much in the newspapers about how animals are killed, and people still want very much to hold on to those systems, even though they are not very humane. L said that the fact that animal sacrifice is still a religious practice in Islam, and referenced symbolically in Jewish practice at Passover, and practiced by some Christians in villages outside Jerusalem, in Palestine. RM said that all the mystical readings he had come across refer to sacrifice purely as sacrificing your attachment to things. N said that in Christianity there was very strongly the sacrifice of Christ - the whole essence of the religion is that God sacrificed His Son. T said they called him the Lamb. RM said the biblical quote "I and my Father are one" was symbolic of the sacrifice of attachment, of "two becomes one". "R" mentioned a 'grace before meals' which was sometimes said by people in the Gurdjieff Work, following its use by J G Bennett and Mrs Staveley, who were pupils of George Gurdjieff.

All life is one

And everything that lives is holy,

Plants, animals and man.

All must eat to live and nourish one another.

We bless the lives that have died to give us food.

Let us eat consciously,

resolving by our work to pay the debt of our existence.

Amen

N mentioned the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son. RM said that having proved he was willing to give up what he was attached to, he no longer needed to, he had passed a test. L said that the story could be looked at the other way, that by agreeing to do this terrible thing he had failed a test.

Following the Reading, there was a discussion on what to do for an exercise. A suggestion for a more extended meditation, from "R", was adopted. These words by Gurdjieff from Beelzebub's Tales may be helpful:

... every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendor, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence. Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts--not as if they were conscious--that if they hinder your general functioning, they, in the period of your responsible age, not only cannot fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence of which they are part, will not be able to be a good servant of our Common Endless Creator, and by that will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and existence.

An additional suggestion from N (linked to what had been discussed) was also adopted: before and while eating, to be thankful and aware of the work that has gone into its preparation, perhaps entailing the sacrifice of a creature or vegetable.

Flash Trance

Manna from Heaven
Maciejowski Bible (13th century)

L had tried the exercise on intentional suffering, choosing a household task he did not like doing. He had found an app "Rewire" which tracks whether you are able to do a task daily. He had succeeded in doing so most days, and had been able to take a back seat and observe body and automatic mind getting on with doing the task. He had also been assisted by a member of his family who was sending him unpleasant emails which he delayed reading, allowing time for intentional suffering and self-observation of his automatic reactions. A new insight had just occurred to him, it being Passover time, as to what manna may represent. As a composer he had to isolate himself from the works of the great masters to leave room for inspiration to come, otherwise all he would be thinking of was Beethoven or Mozart which would fill the mind, and as it happened some music had come to him on waking that very morning, and he had recorded it. In the biblical story the Israelites were in the desert, bereft of food, and sometimes in the morning manna would come. So it appeared to him that this was a more realistic symbolic meaning of that legend.

N had encountered an issue at work which required an enormous amount of looking through years of records. He was able to observe his inner resistance, and after a while was able to stand back and see it as a good discipline, as what the Work was all about, having to contend with things in life which go against our egos and perspective. It had led to him working very late at night and often at weekends, but within it he saw a kind of inner freedom of having to deal with things he did not particularly want to give such a large degree of attention to.

D was interested in the emotional responses invoked in a person when they are slurred by another. His example was an encounter with an evangelistic Christian. They had had an exchange about the election debates. D had wanted to stop the exchange after a while and the Christian continued and started expressing Christian dogma. D was amazed at his own angry response. He thought that emotions generally were very powerful and could override any teachings. He described being emotionally involved with a woman friend and how it had started to get too emotional for D and they decided to have a temporary break from each other. Since then he had experienced tremendous emotional freedom, total relief from not seeing her. D asked how is it possible for ordinary people to search for enlightenment when it is usual for monks to live without a relationship? His question was, is it too much for people to work towards enlightenment and be in an emotional relationship? He requested some time to explore this point later in the meeting.

J was interested in the expression "inner freedom", because for him the exercise brought a feeling of detachment, not only from the daily domestic task, but also from the fact of doing something that he did not want to do. As someone who was brought up Catholic, he had great resistance to doing something that he did not want to do, for a kind of spiritual reason or a reason outside himself. He felt like not doing it because it was like giving something up for Lent. But he stuck with it, and he had found a detachment from it, and he had been able to look at himself not only doing the little job, but also being detached from the little job and being not doing it out of the same spirit of giving something up for Lent, but doing it out of, maybe, a more creative spirit.

"R" had missed the energy with which this exercise was suggested because she hadn't been there for a couple of Sundays, but she was able to relate something which was ongoing which was sufficient to be very disturbing, and that was having to take responsibility for forgetting, losing things, and not being able to summon names quickly enough to be able to say "Hello" addressing people by name. This was not going to improve particularly, and she was considering how she could use this to help her work. She could tell herself to accept it but it still kept her awake because it didn't fit her image. Sometimes she was able to understand that it was resistance that was one of the forces that we needed. She would much rather have chosen something grander and more beautiful, but this was a fact to be accepted.

Although T had thought about the task last Meeting, she had actually failed to do it on a daily basis, so there was a lot of forgetting going on. There had been something at work which she had had to do which was extremely unpleasant, and she had not had the presence of mind to use it as intentional suffering. What she was aware of was her continual habit of trying to paint, and setting aside time, despite everything going on during the week, to do this, and how for her that was the most challenging thing in her week, to sit down and paint from life, because she did not have to do it, and she would wonder why was she doing it, why was she bothering. But after she had actually climbed up a mountain to do it, it was always worth it, but she could never remember that when she was next planning to do it.

Something had happened to GC at the beginning of the month. He was getting involved in an argument with somebody, and suddenly, in a flash, saw the ridiculousness of his reaction to what was going on. An understanding had swept over his body, a warmth and a glow, maybe a rechanneling of the energy into something more positive, but he had nothing to do with it, it just happened. He had no idea why it happened or why it was strong enough to pull him out of the situation. His mind had not been involved anymore. He could not explain it, it just happened.

RM was thinking about successes. He was still doing four minutes a day of present-centred awareness, contact with his feet and so on, and he was also writing a book about the subject which was keeping him focused, and studying Taoism, which was a fascinating thing. All that was coming together. The more he was present, the more he sensed nature around him, as being part of the natural flow, and as he sensed letting go to that flow, being part of it just as a leaf in a river, things seemed to be coming to him. He would get to a platform for a train and the train would just be arriving, it had happened to him all the way to the Meeting. He did not know where there was a link - he was trying to see success as an ego trip and he was just using his ego to keep him going in a way. He realised now with Insight Timer, after 250 consecutive days of meditation, when he said to himself that he was doing well, he realised that he was just brushing his ego, but at least it was keeping him going. And there were synchronicities happening in life which were quite extraordinary. The only thing he could say was that he never got what he expected, but when he got it, it was what he needed at the time. It was quite weird. So in some ways he was trying to face in the right direction without a destination, and was beginning to accept whatever came as right for him at the time, which was very uplifting for him.

Responding to "R", L said that the words she had used were that it was still keeping her awake, so from that point of view, he thought that was the main thing. "R" said that she did not feel that it was an affliction of the physical brain. She thought it was to do with energies. The general pattern was just not accepting the passage of time. T spoke of the individual and the tribe. Giving out to other people (the tribe) includes remembering their names, but perhaps "R" was trying to remember herself, and that was getting more energy or precedence.

Byron Katie

RM's comment that things happening to him were unexpected but right for him at the time reminded L of Byron Katie's saying, "Things don't happen to you, they happen for you". "R" recalled that her teacher would very often finish what he had to say with the words "For myself, for those near to me, and for the Work".

N found GC's account interesting, regarding this other thing that came in, and it appears that something comes in at that stage and restrains us in some way from persisting in an argument or whatever it might be. What T had said was also interesting, about doing her art and having to climb that mountain, but once she was there she would actually to enjoy it. He had found that with his task, having to go to work at the weekend, but whilst doing it he actually got some pleasure along the way, clarity of perception about some things, certain lessons which were being learnt effectively. That is the thing with the other side of suffering - if you go through it in the right way, insights will be given to you. There are lots of things in life where you learn something from the process even though it is exceedingly unpleasant to go through it. Following on D's comments in terms of relationships, he thought that monks might be losing out if anything, there was much to be learnt from intentional suffering which might come from relationships, and as Gurdjieff suggested combining the ways of the monk, the fakir and the yogi might be the fastest way to reach a different level of consciousness rather than separating yourself from the world.

It being 9:45, the Meeting resumed the reading from Beelzebub's Tales.

Gold is no other than the metal we call 'Prtzathalavr,' the specific weight of which, reckoning from the element of the sacred Theomertmalogos, is 1439; that is to say, its element is three and a fraction times less vivifying than the element of the metal red copper.

Why I suddenly decided not to try to explain to you in detail in words all that then took place in the fragment of the said red copper, in view of my suggestion of the possibility of soon actually showing you in definite intraplanetary formations the processes of various combinations of the manifestations of the active parts of Okidanokh, was because I suddenly remembered the all-gracious promise given me by our All-Quarters- Maintainer, the Most Great Archcherub, Peshtvogner.

T thought this suggested how futile materialism is. We put all our energies into getting something that was gold. For N it was alluding to alchemy, with the pursuit for gold a metaphor for a spiritual quest.

... This I had to do on account of the same sins of my youth. And I was obliged to do so, because when I was pardoned by HIS UNI-BEING ENDLESSNESS and allowed to return to my native land, certain Sacred Individuals decided to demand of me, for any eventuality, to have performed over my essence this sacred process in order that I might not manifest myself as in the days of my youth ...

You probably do not know yet what the Sacred- Aliamizoornakalu over an essence means? I shall later explain it to you in detail but meanwhile I shall simply use the words of our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin who explains this process as 'giving-one's-word-of-honor-not-to-pokeone's- nose-into-the-affairs-of-the-authorities.'

L recalled that Beelzebub here is recalling the time in his past when he was sent into exile to our solar system after getting involved in politics on his home world. T said that he had "poked his nose in" at that time. But now he was a lot older, thousands of years old. L thought the inference was that a procedure carried out on us might similarly affect our future behaviour. There was some discussion of Gurdjieff's depiction of our planet as a place of exile. L said Gurdjieff appeared to be against insurrection. D thought the account of Beelzebub's exile evoked Gurdjieff's exile from Russia. L said that for an artist exile was an aim in itself, in terms of shutting her or himself away from the world. D agreed, saying that it can be lonely.

He at once promised to give orders that everything I should indicate should be taken at the first opportunity on the next trip of the space-ship Omnipresent.

T thought the name of the spaceship, Omnipresent, was very apposite. She also remarked on the name of an earlier spaceship mentioned, the Occasion. L thought that the Iain Banks might have taken a cue from Gurdjieff in the naming of spaceships in his Culture books. "R" agreed with GC that the Meeting was going round and round talking about ideas, but for Gurdjieff ideas were a starting point but the Work was not on what we know, memorise or understand, but by the energy or flow in being present. What was not happening in the Meetings was working on our being directly. It was so attractive to get involved with ideas, but the energy and the development that is possible requires physical sensation of the body and acknowledging its presence.

The Meeting had reached the end of Chapter 18:

... And meanwhile, during our traveling here on the space-ship Karnak, I shall, as I have already promised you, tell you in their order about my descents there to your planet and also about the causes of what is called my 'appearances-there-in-person.'

and continued with Chapter 19, Beelzebub's Second Descent to Earth.

... “It appears that a year before the said catastrophe, our, as she is called, ‘Party-Pythoness’ there, when prophesying, asked us all to leave the continent of Atlantis and migrate to another small continent not very far away, where we were to exist on that definite part of its surface she indicated. 

This small continent was then called ‘Grabontzi’ and the part the Pythoness indicated did indeed escape the terrifying perturbation which then occurred to all the other parts of the common presence of that ill-fated planet.

... So, my boy, the Party-Pythoness there was able to warn those beings of our tribe who had been obliged to exist on that planet, and thereby to save them, as I have already told you, from the inevitable ‘Apocalyptic-fate, owing only to one special being-property which, by the way, can be acquired by beings only intentionally, by means of what is called being-Partkdolg-duty, about which I shall tell you later.

D was reminded of Monty Python. N replied that John Cleese had talked about Gurdjieff being an influence on his life. T said that in the Dead Parrot Sketch, after the admission the parrot was dead, a slug was offered, a metaphor of Gurdjieff for human being. L said that this sketch was all about avoiding the acceptance of death, and the shopkeeper would do anything but accept the parrot was dead.



There was a discussion as to what to do as an exercise during the coming month. A suggestion from RM was adopted, to select a daily physical habit, and deliberately to do it in a different way.

Alchemy and Evolution

T said that she had been trying the exercise of making a note of any small achievements during the month. She had experienced a few but had not written them down even though this was the intention. The exercise had enabled her to see how plans are easier to make than making plans happen and how untrained her own will power was.

Young Flautist, by Manet.

RM had noticed that by paying attention with all senses: touch, taste, breathing, sight, sound and smell - bringing them all together - his ability to learn music had been enhanced and he was able to retain the ability to remember and play notes and tunes. He had been learning the Irish whistle.

GC had tried the exercise of congratulating himself and had kept it up for three days. However on one occasion, in the kitchen, he had knocked something off the shelf, and instinctively caught it before it reached the floor. He had immediately congratulated himself and experienced a warm glow of achievement.

DM had succeeded in improving his health from the state of dizziness he was experiencing the previous month. His doctor had not been able to resolve the condition, but DM himself had found approaches from researching the internet which reduced his symptoms by 90%.

What colour is the dress?

L found it was hard to write down the triumphs. It was true, as GC had observed, that there is a resistance to acknowledging our successes and achievements and that the mind likes to dwell and wrap itself round the negative. He had found an app online called CoachMe, which sets up peer groups in areas where they perceive a need for improvement - within the groups people record their achievements and congratulate each other. There had also been a news item about a photograph of a dress, which different people see, persistently, as either white and gold, or blue and black. This suggests that reality may not be as we perceive it.

J had read the previous web report and he was trying to be present to himself. He had noticed how often he thought the same thing - the same thought came into his head and it was not original and was not "now", was not present.

Following the contributions, it was time to feed back on them. Responding to RM's remarks about being in the present whilst practicing the Irish whistle, L was reminded of the piano technique he had studied which was originally developed by Theodor Leschetizky. This entailed playing each note not just with a finger or hand, but with the whole body. He had been astonished to find the relaxation exercises set by the piano teacher were identical to several exercises he had come across elsewhere in the martial art, ki aikido. In the "Leschetizky method" there was a focus on presence in body more than presence in mind.

At 9:45 it was time to continue the reading of Beelzebub's Tales. RM requested a brief period to read his interpretation of terms Gurdjieff used in the book. After his summary, it was suggested that his descriptions could be mentioned where the words came up during the reading. The Meeting then continued with the book.

When the said masses of different densities that have thus arisen in planets under normal surrounding conditions radiate from their common presences the vibrations required for the said World-law of Reciprocal-feeding-of- everything-existing, then, among these vibrations of various properties there is established, owing to the fundamental World-law "Troemedekhfe," a reciprocally acting contact.

And the result of this contact is the chief factor in the gradual change of the various densities in planets.

...Now see in what order its artificially accelerated transformations will proceed.

Melanie Klein

J thought Gurdjieff here was describing the creation of the world. L had that image too, but said he also thought the description might also be of psychological changes, of the development of awareness and consciousness. T said that Gurdjieff thought of the human being as a planetary body, and used the term in that sense several times. RM said that Gurdjieff's writing in this book, by design, works on multiple levels simultaneously, "as above, so below". T talked of Melanie Klein's analysis of the development of awareness in babies, which begins with the realisation that there is something other than themselves, and also mentioned Winnicott's work with children.

Having said this, he first fixed before my organ of sight the automatically moving Teskooano and then turned on and off various switches in a certain sequence; and as I looked through the Teskooano he explained to me as follows:

'At this moment I admit the "influx" of all three parts of Okidanokh into the sphere containing this metal; and as all three parts have the same "density" and, hence, the same "force-of-striving," they reblend into a whole in this sphere without changing anything in the presence of the metal; and the Omnipresent-Okidanokh thus obtained flows in its usual state through a special connection out of the Hrhaharhtzaha and is reconcentrated in the first container which you have already seen.

'Now look!

'I deliberately increase the force-of-striving of only one of the active parts of the Okidanokh; for example, I increase the force called Cathodnatious. In consequence of this, you see that the elements composing the presence of that red copper begin to involve towards the quality of the substances that compose the ordinary presences of planets.'

As he explained this, he at the same time turned on and off various switches in a certain sequence.

Although, my boy, I then looked very attentively at everything proceeding, and everything I saw was impressed in my essence 'Pestolnootiarly,' that is, forever, 

This reminded D of RM's technique in learning a musical note. T said the use of the new word Pestolnootiarly forced people to give this very sentence extra attention. GC thought this use of complex words to functionally affect awareness, like a Zen koan, to go beyond thinking rather than convey a specific meaning, was at odds with RM's project to compile a set of definitions of Gurdjieff's invented words. L remarked upon the term Cathodnatious and said he thought it meant negativity, or friction to deter action. By increasing the input of that force the operator of the apparatus can bring consciousness down to earth. D thought that the friction was described as crystallisation. RM talked of the concept of intentional suffering. This was being aware of the friction, and intentionally going with it.

... But I will tell you meanwhile that there proceeded in that fragment of red copper something rather like those terrifying pictures which I occasionally observed among your favorites on the planet Earth through my Teskooano from Mars.

... A rough parallel can be drawn between the occasional proceedings on your planet and the proceedings then in that small fragment of copper, if you imagine yourself high up and looking down upon a large public square, where thousands of your favorites, seized with the most intense form of their chief psychosis, are destroying each other's existence by all kinds of means invented by them themselves, and that in their places there immediately appear what are called their 'corpses,' which owing to the outrages done to them by the beings who are not yet destroyed, change color very perceptibly, as a result of which the general visibility of the surface of the said large square is gradually changed.


... I noticed very clearly that this metal was transformed once upon the said plate into just that same definite metal about which the sorry-savants of your planet have been wiseacring during nearly the whole of their arising and existing, in the hope of transforming other metals into this metal, and thus constantly leading astray their already sufficiently erring brethren.

This metal is called there—'gold.'


T thought that the description of violence in the public square where the colour of live human beings changed to the green of corpses was similar to the way copper changes colour from red to green during oxidation. L thought it was a dispassionate, scientific account of mad warfare between human beings - Gurdjieff did not go in to detail of what was happening in the war, but just said that some of the bodies changed colour (after they died, they would have gone from pink to white), and that from a distance this affected the colouration of the square. This stripped away all the emotion of warfare and depicted it, by metaphor, as a mechanical process. Whether applying negative inclination - Cathodnatious - to humans, or heat to copper carbonate, the result in either case would be a change of colour. For RM the fighting was a description of intolerance between religions leading to war. D said that the Quakers have no creed. RM said this was also true of the Vedic masters.

GC thought in general the passage, and mention of gold, was a reference to alchemy. L said it was reiterating the concept which had come up before that there was a mechanism with three inputs which the operator was calibrating, and by which he was able to make various degrees and levels of consciousness result.

Following the reading, there was a discussion on what to choose as an exercise in the ensuing month. T suggested intentional suffering, to select an activity that the person does not want to do, and to do it daily, making a note every day whether or not it was done.

The Hunt for Red Copper

T spoke of the exercise for the previous month, which was to think about achievements and to write them down as they were done. She had felt there were a few things she had achieved, but hadn't written anything down, so she had failed in that respect. She intended to try it again in the coming month and would try to be present enough to write them down. She had really liked the exercise.

L had also found it a good exercise. He said that people tend to think about the negative, but do achieve quite a lot too. He did not record very much - he did notice his little triumphs every day. He said that becoming aware of our achievements also makes us more positive in our attitude and more likely to try and accomplish them.

GC had tried the exercise and it lasted about three days. What became apparent to him was that his mind didn't want to be reminded of the successes. It identified with the negative too easily, and there was some kind of war going on in the mind, so anything which emphasised the positive was helpful and endorsed the exercise.

For D it was an achievement to come as he had been experiencing dizziness, which was induced whenever he used his iPad. He had been researching all the possible causes. He had changed his glasses and been walking slower. It was a huge contrast to how he had been feeling the previous month. He was pleased to be present and glad he had made it to the Meeting.

RM said that by now he had done over a hundred consecutive days with one-minute meditations, and the effect on him had been dramatic. He was present generally to what he was doing. If he put something down, he sensed the entire body, and remembered where he had put it. He had been thinking about the next steps for him, and had been considering Gurdjieff and the many I's, and his reading had suggested that each of the the I's was associated with different senses. Accordingly he had been trying a longer meditation to build more of an awareness of the different senses, so instead of just touch and sight, he was now using the order touch, taste, breathing, sight, sound and smell, and as he repeated each one he was sensing the depth of that sense. His sessions had increased to about fifteen minutes, and so far it seemed to give him a more rounded, whole sense; there were not as many things pulling him in different directions.

During the course of the month N had become aware that various things going on in the world were playing on his mind, and had also become aware of how he felt affected by that. The Charlie Hebdo massacre, and all the things around that, had created a lot of friction within him, which he had had to come to terms with, and consider his attitudes and the influence of the media on him. Observations could, in themselves, be achievements, he said, and it was part of the Work that we do things.
In terms of setting goals and actually achieving things, he had an app on his phone which counted his steps, with a daily target of ten thousand, and each day he reached it he felt a sense of achievement. On days when he was falling short, he would sometimes go out for a late walk to increase the total. He was considering using a lot more technology to set and achieve goals, major and minor. When there was a device to record as well as measure, it was very supportive, and luckily we lived in an age of technology where such things were possible.

Messages from BS in India were read out, and then the Meeting continued with responses to the initial contributions.

T followed on N's comments about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and how it now seemed a long time ago. The bombardment of news from the media had shifted to other stories, while at the time it had felt pervasive, in both the broadcast and social media. N said it was as if something in the brain shuts these things off and life continues. GC asked if people allow themselves to become puppets of the media. As an example of media influence, L pointed out that at about the same time two thousand people had been killed in Nigeria, but the media gave this much less attention. T remembered the dictum Eat or be eaten, and though she felt only compassion at the time, wondered now if she had been consuming something. She remembered the huge demonstration in Paris, attended by millions, yet it already seemed a remote event now.

D said that he had been considering the notion that the world might be heading for a nervous breakdown, unable to cope with the unstoppable flood of information. GC suggested that D was expressing negative thoughts because he was disappointed to be feeling less well. T thought it might be an example of GC's idea that people find it easier to recognise their failures than their achievements, and recalled that D was extremely positive the previous month.

Responding to RM, D asked RM what he hoped to achieve with his determination to be present on every issue. RM said that in the spiritual journey achievement and goals were not a feature at all. A goal was simply a pointer, like the North Pole, it pointed you in the right direction. This was more important than the speed you were going at. It was also helpful to ask the question in the mind whether what you were doing or reading was helping you to stay in that direction, or was it a distraction. Success was to do with peace of mind. This relieved a lot of the pressure of growing older or infirm, because it was the direction that matters, not the speed, in the evolution of conscious awareness. The problem with goals was that if we are so intensely involved in a goal, everything that was between where you were and the goal was literally in the way, like a necessary evil - it could be the staff in a company helping you achieve that goal - and that caused a huge amount of stress in organisations. This related to D's reference to stress in society.

T returned to the aftermath of the shootings in France, and asked whether the crowds coming out in support of free speech were awake or asleep? Were they mechanical or had they been awakened? GC asked what she thought and she replied she thought they were probably mechanical.

At 10:30, the Meeting resumed the reading of Beelzebub's Tales.

I wish to aid artificially the evolution and involution of its elements towards a greater density, or, on the contrary, towards their transformation back to a primal state.

N thought this suggested intervention in the process of change, with the terms evolution and involution referring to either raising or lowering consciousness.

Red copper

And from that moment, the given parts of the Omnipresent-Okidanokh begin, together with the said elements of the said medium, to represent the corresponding densities required in planets, that is to say, various kinds of metalloids or even metals, as for instance, the metal I have placed in this sphere, and in which there will proceed artificially at this moment, at my wish, the action of striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole of the parts of the Okidanokh, and which metal, as I have already said, exists under the name of red-copper.

The only thing that sang out for T was the reference to red copper, and everything else was a mush. The difficulty of extracting a unique metal from mined ore symbolised for her the difficulty of extracting meaning from Gurdjieff's writing in this part of the narrative.

And further, having arisen in the planets in this way, the said various metalloids and metals then begin according to the common-universal-law called "Reciprocal-feeding-of-everything-existing"—as it is generally proper to arisings of every kind in which Okidanokh or any of its active parts participates—to radiate from their presences the results of their inner "Interchange-of-substances." And as is proper to radiations of every kind issuing from sur- and intraplanetary formations that have acquired in their vibrations the property of Okidanokh or of its active parts, and which are in what is called the "center-of-gravity" of every such said formation, the radiations of these metalloids and metals possess properties almost similar to the properties of Okidanokh itself or of one or another of its active parts.

D thought there was some friction involved, and in his mind there was an image of the creation or crystallisation of a diamond at the centre of a cyclone. The text was about the creation of some element in the body. It was as if this process had occurred within Gurdjieff himself, who seemed not to be rocked by inner emotional turmoil or surrounding events.

L said that scientifically we think life evolved by chance on this planet. But in the text Gurdjieff suggests an external intervention, twice using the word "artificially". He is talking about the evolution of life and consciousness from raw materials. GC asked how consciousness could evolve. L thought that was a key question.

RM considered the distinction between consciousness and awareness. He described awareness as universal, and consciousness as sitting in a field of awareness. When consciousness blends with awareness, things start to change. His own understanding had come from the book I Am That by Nisargadatta, he makes the clear distinction throughout the book about the distinction between consiousness and awareness. For RM the sequence was ego, body, mind, consciousness, awareness, these can be stripped away in that order. GC asked for the definition of the word. L checked online the etymology of the word, and its origin was in Middle English and pertained to a sense a danger, as in wariness. N said that it was a semantic issue. T said that she was aware that the Meeting might be straying from the Reading. GC said that the Reading so far this time had not been understood by anyone. T said that the discussion had also been confusing.

Following the Reading, there was discussion on an exercise for the coming month. It was decided to continue with the exercise from the previous month, noting down achievements. GC remarked that it was very interesting that the mind did not like to do this, whereas it was content to dwell on failings.