Much Ado About Muffin

HW said there was an implicit assumption in the exercise that you were awake, and he was pretty sure he was not. While it was easy to distinguish being awake in contrast to night-time sleep, the waking sleep state pertained to not being present, to being absorbed in everything, which was the normal so-called waking state. One up from that was being present relative to certain sensations, particularly the physical ones, like the feet being on the floor, which gave a type of separation. So he did not know what the exercise meant. He had tried it, but that was all he could get out of it. He recalled Ouspensky's account of a Gurdjieff lecture describing the waking sleep state in In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 8.

EXERCISE “ Every day to note one thing that you do to go to waking sleep.”

C said that Ouspensky said the way you could possibly tell if you were awake was, for example, if you were looking at the street, to actually say "I am looking at the street", or to say "I am" repeatedly, and allow that to come into your mentation, into your mind, and then allow the reverberation of that to continue down into your solar plexus. But the fact was that when we woke up, we were still fast asleep. Perhaps the only way to get out of it was to join a school, which was why he had come to the Meeting, to see what was being offered. And hopefully being constantly aware of yourself, walking down the street, eating, constantly bringing a presence to it, rather than just doing. He had read various writers on this subject, including Jean Vayss, who had written Toward Awakening: An Approach to the Teaching Left by Gurdjieff.

Tiflis (Tbilisi)

L said that when we thought we were awake we were in the greatest danger, because we were probably still fast asleep. He thought that the Meetings had no answers, but we could nudge each other awake if we noticed another sleeping. That was the help of being in a group, though we did not consider ourselves to be a group - that would be elevating it too high, because we did not do Gurdjieff Movements, thus we called it a Meeting. Gurdjieff talked about the idea of alarm clocks. There was the story of Karapet of Tiflis, who annoyed the inhabitants of the whole town by sounding a bell early every morning to awaken the railway workers.

As for his personal experience with this exercise, one of the things he liked doing was playing internet chess, which was much easier than doing something actively engaged with life, and that put him to sleep very well, even if he played some good chess moves.

A live Internet chess game

In society on a wider level, he thought it was the obsession with property, and then buying a second and third property, that kept people asleep very effectively, because as prices were always going up, they had to work longer and longer hours, so putting off independent, creative thought until later in life, should they be lucky enough to get there. So he did think that on the macro level, that was an example of something people did to be asleep.

N came to this exercise very late because he had been away and could not get internet access. Normally he wrote down the exercise of the month and put it into his wallet, and this month he hadn't done it. This was a measure of his level of sleepness. He thought it sometimes indicated a resistance to the Work. He told himself, he had been away, he looked at the website, he wasn't sure which exercise it was, then eventually found it. Sometimes it was very easy just going along in our habitual mode, without finding the time to sit and think what puts you to sleep. Sometimes you were so asleep that you were not at that level of consciousness whereby you could be aware of the exercise to do it.

RM had joined Insight Timer some time ago, and would set the timer for 15 minutes with 5 minute intervals, and occasionally used it while he was walking around, and it was quite a shock to realise that most of the time his mind had drifted somewhere else. So when he meditated he focused especially on his physical feelings, because they were definitely there.

"R" had been away for a while, most recently on holiday with family in a place which had a pool. Her body was not in terrific shape, and to swim was an ideal opportunity to sense presence. She had not had the exercise with her, but what interested her was experience which was to do with the senses, sensing the body. In a way having a back which ached all the time was a reminder, but it did not always remind, and in order to go on the walks that they went on, she had to make herself wish to be where they were going in order not to sense the discomfort. But the only factor for her that was real about being awake was when she had sensation in her body - her framework, not just on her skin - and it was hard because it was possible to go through days without ever returning to that question in oneself. It was an energy, not an idea. Swimming with five children all under nine was quite an experience as well. They jolly well woke you up. Small children were full of sensation and life, even if they spoke different languages.

"creative ideas can come
... even eating one's croissant"

J said that one's feelings were certainly here and now, but if one's thoughts were elsewhere, there was the presumption surely that one's feelings were following one's thoughts. The distinction between brain and feeling was slightly problematic here. He said that the creative part and the sleeping part were probably more coextensive than we were suspecting. One's creative ideas can come when one is not absolutely in the present, but when one is facing practical questions, even when eating one's croissant, one was in the present there rather more than when one was elsewhere in one's creative mind. He would rather be present in a creative world that was erecting something interesting for him, and which took his feelings along with it, than the mindful present and watching and being aware that he was sitting on a hard bench.

As C, "R" and J had said about feeling sensations, D said this intellectual stuff was all very well and exciting, but as C had said about feeling the vibrations going down into the body, and "R" about it being the energy that was important, and J about sitting on a hard bench - these were the things we had to concentrate on. It was the life force, not the intellectual so much. The most powerful way he had found to stop these thoughts was to feel the energy between the hands. He said this stopped 80% of the thoughts. However he had spoken to someone about this who couldn't feel this energy, which D had found interesting. He said also that chaos and boredom were important to him. They were both not negative as they seemed to be, but were important aspects of emotional consciousness.

T had been aware of the exercise for the first week, and she was aware of it a few days before the Meeting. She did not know what happened in the middle. In terms of connecting with the exercise, what she had noticed during those periods, the thing she did to go to waking sleep was to turn the radio on. If she had had a fraught day at work, which was with a lot of interaction with other people, she did not want to be awake, as she was stimulated already. Putting on the radio was interesting because it was stopping her own thoughts and hearing other people's, to whom she didn't have to react. She could turn the radio off at any time. She realised that the radio was just as variable, as ad hoc as her thoughts; although there was a semblance of some sort of organisation in the programme, it was random ideas and subjects which had come up for no reason. It was like dampening her own scattered thoughts with other people's in order to enforce a waking sleep.

Following the contributions the Meeting moved to responses.

C said there was one sentence in Jean Vaysse's book, in the foreword by John Pentland, which says that one way to keep awake was to constantly tell yourself I am here now in this immediate space. In contact with a life-force which supports, enlightens and unifies my presence. He tried every morning when he woke up to tell himself I am here, and through the day when he woke up, and this could happen to you as a habit.

HW had been impressed by what a lot of people had said, particularly what T had said, about running away from her normal state, which sounded like negative emotion, and instead of working the way that was suggested in dealing with a negative emotion, she was putting on a radio to get away from her normal negative emotional state. When "R" had said about sensing the body - he didn't hear anything about going further from a state of some kind of self-remembering to self-observation, to observing what was going on in the mind, which he thought would be a movement away from just sensing you were here. He thought there was a point in all this, that you could get away and become more awake, but it was more awake, not being awake in some absolute sense, and he thought Gurdjieff had implied this was possible, perhaps first by awakening the mental centre initially, and then the emotional centre, and being awake in the emotional centre would be being in a different state, and that could be semi-permanent.

L said that for him there was a degree of intentionality which develops during the Gurdjieff Work, pushing things through, having a concept in the imagination and making it real, and there was tremendous resistance to making things real. An example was having this Meeting. The usual venue was inaccessible during a protracted refurbishment. An arrangement was made with an alternative cafe, but they would not open the door, so yet another had to be found. Generally resistance tended to be balanced. People tried to do something until they met enough resistance, and then it stopped and there was a state of permanent balance, action and reaction being equal. That was Newton's Third Law, and he did not think Newton was talking purely about physics. In the Gurdjieff Work, if there is a strong centre, and intention, extra force can be applied to make a break through, and things can be achieved. He also wanted to respond to what J had said. It was great being in the present and handling complex things, and one can feel awake, but one can also create situations which require a lot of activities to manage and focus on, and which can take a long time to carry through. So in a way that is creating a distraction from other things, even if you have to be very awake to make that distraction fulfill itself successively. He did think the creative side of life was the most important - it may not be the most remunerative, quite the reverse. Gurdjieff talks about three types of transformation. Oxygen through the blood, food by the body, and impressions though the senses. L thought there might be a fourth category, inspiration being transformed by artists into artworks. Who knows, further along the spectrum there might be other categories.

"R" responded to Justin's use of the word feeling when she would have used sensing. In English it was not very clear. We use the verb to feel even when we mean physically feeling, sensing and experiencing, which is not the same as when we say I feel good, which was all going on "up here" (in the mind), all associations.

Annie Lou Staveley 1906-1996
Source: gurdjieff.org/staveley

Before the Reading, L drew attention to Mrs Staveley's Grace. which "R" had brought. This Grace was used by a student of Gurdjieff, and includes the line We bless the lives that have died to give us food. L said that during the next portion of Beelzebub's Tales, from about page 250, as in many other parts of the book, Gurdjieff or his characters were talking quite passionately about their views on animals, whether in reaction to customs of sacrificing them or of eating them. But also Gurdjieff, and many of his followers, ate meat, so there was an issue about reconciling this. L said that we all had different views, maybe most of us ate meat, some of us did not, but questioned whether Mrs Staveley had considered dying herself to be food for others. "R" said she was sure that Mrs Staveley had.  "R" then said that anybody who wanted direct experience could sample a muffin from her plate. D asked why she wasn't finishing the muffins. "R" said she was sharing them because she liked them.

The Reading then continued from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21.

Thus it was that a half of the word Kundabuffer survived and, being transmitted from generation to generation, finally reached your contemporary favorites also, accompanied, of course, by a thousand and one different explanations.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good Watch on YouTube

... And as regards the way in which the contemporary terrestrial learned beings of what are called the exact sciences define the significance of this part of the spinal marrow, that, my dear boy, is a profound secret.

And it became a secret because several centuries ago, this 'explanation' suddenly for no reason whatever entered the favorite mole of the famous 'Scheherazade,' which that incomparable Arabian fantasist chanced to have on the right side of her adorable navel.

...When I was quite convinced that I had succeeded so easily in the destruction, perhaps for a long time, of that terrible practice among the beings of that group there in Pearl-land, I decided to stay there no longer but to return to the Sea of Beneficence to our ship Occasion.

... I decided to return through the locality which was later called 'Tibet.'

Scheherazade
Sophie Anderson 1823-1903

Referring to the plate of muffins "R" had earlier offered, which still contained some, GC asked who had not liked them. "R" said she hadn't said she didn't like them. She wanted to share them, to share in the enjoyment, and asked GC if he wanted another bit. GC said he had thought they were very good, but somebody had not liked them as there were still some on the plate and this was analagous to the reading! D said he had been concerned "R" had not liked them, as he had initially selected which ones to buy. T said this was a new resistance to the Reading. GC said it was a prime example of how people can get the wrong impressions. RM said the passage includes a description of how some great mystical person misunderstands something and it becomes a belief for centuries, another form of sleep or illusion. N said that Gurdjieff had emphasised illusion and sleep by the association with Scheherezade and the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, which he thought was an entertaining way of describing it. L thought it very poetic of Gurdjieff to have an "explanation" vanishing into the favourite mole of Scheherazade. HW said this section described exactly what Gurdjieff in his own life had been doing - breaking up old ideas and putting new ideas against them. L agreed but also thought that Gurdjieff might have despaired that the same would happen with his own ideas, that they would be taken literally and turned into new dogmas. GC said that Sufis talk about shedding the accretions, but it was very hard to realise that we have our own accretions, and it was our own that we had to shed.


DM was still interested in the misunderstanding over the muffins. He had feared he had done the wrong thing. "R" had liked them and wanted to share them. "R" said it was to do with physical experience and with inner considering and outer considering. J said it might also be to do with intonation, which words are emphasised in a question, which might affect its interpretation. RM asked if this conversation was to do with this chapter? DM said its about how we relate to other people and GC replied that any conversation we had was to do with this chapter.


CHAPTER 22 Beelzebub for the First Time in Tibet

As the route proposed this time was most uncommon for the terrestrial three-brained beings of those days and accordingly we could not count on the possibility of joining any ‘caravan’ of theirs, I had, then, to organize my own caravan, and I began the same day preparing and procuring everything necessary for this purpose.

I then procured some score of the quadruped beings called ‘horses,’ ‘mules,’ ‘asses,’ and ‘Chami-anian’ goats and so on, and hired a number of your biped favorites to look after the said beings and to do the semiconscious work required on the way for this mode of travel.

... The said ‘wild’ beings there, were at that period particularly ‘dangerous’ both for the three-brained beings there, and for those forms of quadruped beings which your favorites, with the ‘cunning’ proper to them, had already been able to make their slaves, compelling them to work exclusively for the satisfaction of their egoistic needs.

... So, my boy, because of this it was possible for your favorites of those times to pass through these places only by day. At night, great vigilance and the use of various artificial shelters was required as a defense against these wild beings, both for themselves and for their ‘goods.’

During the period of the aforesaid Krentonalnian position of the planet Earth, these wild beings there are wide awake and take their first being-food; and since, by that time, they had already become accustomed to use for this purpose almost exclusively the planetary bodies of weaker beings of other forms arising on their planet, they were always trying, during that period, to get hold of such a being in order to use his planetary body for the satisfaction of that need of theirs.




HW said that this was all mental. "R" said it comes into the rest of the chapter. HW asked why "R" had interrupted him. He said that we all interrupted each other.  There was such a thing as practice. It began with some impulse, some memory, and then there was a decision to do a certain, particular practice, but to carry it out to the end, for example not to express negative emotion in relation to circumstances. That was a decision you had to make very strongly, and that was practice and to carry it out to the end. T said that the practice at the end of the Meeting was to read this book. HW said he was pointing out that there was such a thing as mental and there was such a thing as practice. We don't take practice seriously and did not do the practice because we did not take a decision to do it, and we perhaps preferred to do the mental. The process of the Reading was all mental. "R" thanked HW for reminding her that she had butted in. HW asked "R" if she had been observing herself when she had butted in? "R" said that was the point of her not remembering. GC said that we butt in when someone's ideas are not the same as our own. T said she had the image of a lot of butting goats. N said while we tended to repeat our own mentations at these Meetings, we also learnt from each other. He personally had learnt from something GC had recently said.

... we, and especially our workmen for the semiconscious work, had to be extremely watchful and alert at night in order to guard ourselves, our quadruped beings, and our supplies.

A whole ‘gathering’ of these wild beings would form round our camp at night, having come there to provide themselves with something suitable for their first food, a meeting rather like an ‘assembly’ of your favorites during what is called the ‘quotation of stock prices’ or during their ‘election’ of representatives to some society or other, the nominal purpose of which is the joint pursuit of a means to the happy existence of all beings like themselves without distinction of their notorious castes.

The Nightmare
Henry Fuseli 1741-1825

T thought the mention of procurement of quadrupeds interesting, that they were carrying all the things. The wild things were also quadrupeds, and were a danger to human beings passing through that environment. T wondered if it was an analogy for mental states. RM thought it was an allusion to people who were asleep. T said they came out at night. J said that if two-brained beings could speak, they would refer to the three-brained beings as wild, as they ate the two-brained beings.

L said that to him this image of wild animals coming at night was like dreams, which might come at night and take over our thoughts. We even had the word nightmare. N thought the reference to stock prices might make us look for metaphors of other contexts, like the City of London. T said that as soon as you had a good idea there was someone out there to steal it. RM said all it took to send you back to sleep was for someone to come and talk to you about something interesting.

Following the Reading, a suggestion by T was adopted as the exercise for the coming month: When walking along, be aware of your stomach and pull it in. Be aware of what that does to other organs, particularly the lungs. Be aware of the change in the breathing.

Choice Noise

D had become ill during the previous month. After a week he went to the doctor, who prescribed medications which had affected his immune system adversely in the past. After weighing things up, he went on the internet, ordered some different remedies online and three weeks later was better.

EXERCISE “ When you are in the company of someone who is, in your judgement, talking a load of rubbish, observe your own thoughts and then annihilate the thoughts. Then respond naturally.”

T had found the annihilation of thoughts extremely difficult to stay in the present with, and even to be aware it was happening. She had a conscious shock when neighbours called in a gardener. The front garden had been a haven of wildlife, and she came back from work to find the gardeners had razed it to the ground and put wood chip down to prevent it growing again. There was nothing left. It was as if a tropical rain forest had disappeared, and she had hateful thoughts towards the neighbours, who had brought in the gardeners but not passed on her messages to save the blackberries and the thistles.

J said one was constantly in the company of people talking rubbish (present company excepted) but normally factored in somebody else's misappraisal of a situation, and it passed over. It struck him that this compartmentalizing idea of emotional intelligence was now a fashionable way of perceiving the world, as opposed to intelligence, and these were quite wrongly bifurcated, and emotional intelligence was factored into a lot of the thinking we do.  He once had to spend time filing letters from a person who had consistently lied, and though not in the person's physical company, he had been in their mental vicinity, and what he found was that the access to hatred almost overwhelmed the actual analysis of the illogic, such that it wasn't so much the illogic that caused the reaction, it was the emotional response. Though in the exercise it was the thoughts that were to be annihilated, and not the person.

H had missed some Meetings but had been reading the blog, and what had struck him was the word endure in the July exercise on intentional suffering, which was once a day to compel yourselves to be able to endure the "displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves". He hadn't thought about that at all, although he had read a lot of stuff, but he had been interested in dealing with the expression of negative emotion and he had tried to relate the two. You just needed to go into the Tube for two minutes and somebody would do something annoying, and it struck him that this was happening all the time, and this was why Gurdjieff had pressed this point about controlling negative emotion - it hinged on enduring, you had to take it. He had done this at a meeting where somebody had been going on and on, not to the point, and he had found it terribly difficult, but was handling it in relation to not expressing negative emotion, which came to the same thing as enduring, and somehow he reached a point where it clicked. By enduring so much he overcame the thing, not forever, but just on that one occasion, and it changed his being-nature.

Newton's Third Law
Action and Reaction are equal and opposite

L had found the incident T had described interesting - it was like a spiritual law that when people try to do something in an area where they are meant to be experts, they in particular fail. So in this case people who say they are gardeners go to a garden, and destroy it, wipe it out completely. In terms of this exercise, he had again been making phone calls to telephone help lines, which was always very good for Gurdjieff work, trying to get an internet service fixed with BT, and BT, a communications company, cannot return calls. Insight Timer was a very good app and organisation to help people do meditation. In meditation we try to still the mind and get away from the ten thousand thoughts which distract us all the time. Insight Timer had been changing their app to do so many things it did't work as easily as it used to, so it had actually been impeding his use of it for meditation.

Extract from a help screen of the Android app Awoken

L had also been looking into an app for lucid dreaming called Awoken, which he thought fitted very well with the Gurdjieff work, which was about waking up. Were we awake now? How do we know we're awake now? Also when we're asleep, can we become aware that we're asleep?

RM said that conscious suffering had been to him a big theme. He had read a lot of a book by Ramana Harshi who uses the phrase conscious awareness, which RM tries to practice by taking on conscious suffering. Ramana Harshi advocated making no choice, good or bad, about anything - this was the state of absolute calmness. Accepting the suffering for what it was and then seeing the root of why he was suffering. RM found by doing this that he was seeing that it was his own judgements. This had helped him to be absolutely calm under whatever conditions - somebody was talking nonsense, somebody talking lies, it was irrelevant, they were telling a story. He was getting a sense that everything we did was just a story. It was not a lie, it was not true, it was just a story. If he saw it like that, he felt completely calm, he made no choices, he was just seeing as if he was reading a good novel or seeing a good movie. Whether the person was lying didn't matter - it gave it substance, interesting substance.

Following the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.

H said that in addition to the contributions about enduring and waking up, he said that not expressing negative emotion was something Gurdjieff kept on pressing people about, by using self-observation. which H thought went well with enduring. You needed both. He thought this might help in the process of waking up. T agreed that it was to do with the switch to observing. Her initial reaction was very visceral. She had been shocked and stunned. She couldn't speak for a long time, was thinking hatefully of the neighbours, and then was in floods of tears, because it wasn't just blackberries, but was also roses and a quince bush. It wasn't until she heard her thoughts about the neighbours that it clicked in about the exercise, so that did help her stay with the suffering of her reaction. Her neighbours saw some of the plants as weeds, but T had been really enjoying them and taking loads of photographs. She thought it was key to notice in the first place. She found it very difficult to be observing at the same time as somebody was talking to her.

Following on from H, L said that it was all very well if we can wake up, or think we have woken up, and become aware of our automatic behaviour, but the next question was can we change that automatic behaviour? Or were we still following the narrative of the dream.

Responding to T's account of what had happened to the garden, GC thought there was nothing she could have done afterwards, but when this situation arose again, and it would, she would have to impose her will on it to define what she wanted. It was no good sitting back and letting other people decide for you, and then saying you didn't like it, because you then become part of the problem. You had to curtail it beforehand.

H had a different perspective, that the whole point was to endure something you didn't like. This concept was symbolised by the suffering of Christ. Theory was all very well, but practice led somewhere.

D saw it as not reacting, rather than enduring. J recalled how Shakespeare famously phrased this dilemma in Hamlet:

To be or not to be - that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them.

RM advocated not having opinions about things. The problem was that if you had ten people in a room you might get ten different opinions about the garden. One might not want any flowers because they had work to do and it would look very nice if there was gravel and stones there. Another might want a tree, and another one love the weeds. If we could just see it as a multiple of stories but have none oneself. We tend to get attached to what we think is the real story.

GC said there was a simple point here but it was very difficult to understand. Thoughts are real, but the thinker is not. We think the thinker is real and the thoughts are just nonsense, but the thoughts are real, it's us that is nonsense, it's us that is not real.

Following the responses, the Meeting continued reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21.

... And there in Pearl-land, owing simply to my invention, your favorites so greatly changed their essence-relations towards the beings of other forms, that they not only ceased to destroy the existence of these beings for their famous Sacrificial-Offerings, but even began very sincerely with the whole of their being to regard these beings of other forms as beings like themselves.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good Watch on YouTube

... you could see when strolling down the street of the city Kaimon, almost at every step, beings there walking on what are called 'stilts.'

And they walked on stilts in order not to risk crushing some insect or other, a 'little being,' as they thought, just like themselves.

Jains

RM said that this just described the absurdity of going as far as being vegan. Extreme vegans might worry about treading on insects and would wear stilts, and the end of the stilts would have to be so small in case they landed on an insect. T said they would be very sensitive people to do that and maybe we all should be. L thought a more practical way was what the Jains do in India. They sweep the ground in front of them as they walk, to move insects out of the way.

Many of them took the precaution to wear what are called Veils,' lest poor-little-beings-like-themselves in the air might chance to enter mouths or noses, and so on and so forth.

... It is needless to say that from the truths indicated by Saint Buddha Himself absolutely nothing has survived and reached the beings of the present time.

RM, H and J said the examples given by Gurdjieff in the text were to show extreme beliefs lead to absurd action. L said the mayor of Turin, Chiara Appendino, had pledged the previous month to promote vegetarian and vegan diets in the city, and the city of Palitana in India had recently banned animal slaughter. L said he thought Gurdjieff repeatedly brought up the issue of animal welfare because it provoked a reaction in people and is part of the contemporary world. D said that Gurdjieff was not a vegetarian, and GC said far from it. L said he had seen a Paul McCartney quote the previous day: If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. RM said he had worked in one and had never become a vegetarian. GC said he did not think Paul McCartney should be quoted at a Gurdjieff Meeting.

Slaughterhouse 1,100: The Emotional Impact of Killing Animals

RM said he was writing a book at the moment, and one of the chapters was on whether we had free will, and his conclusion at the end of the chapter was that we did not. He had spoken to a neuroscientist who said this was the case, and said that N, who had read all the books on the subject, said we did not have free will. L asked if this was not too easy, for if there was no free will there was no obligation to use it. He asked RM what made him decide to write the book. RM said it was because he needed to find the truth. L asked RM if he had chosen to do it. RM said he hadn't. GC said that the science RM was quoting may or may not be true. J said that one of the things about Gurdjieff was that you do not accept these totems that are made for us by outside authorities. L said that what contemporary science tells us through quantum mechanics is that life is unpredictable, and that there is room for free choice.

Following the Reading, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the coming month. A suggestion by L based on an idea from H was adopted: Every day to note one thing that you do to go to waking sleep.

Trials and Tribulations

N had returned from abroad to the Brexit situation. While he had tried not to react emotionally, there were times when he felt upset, frustrated, amazed and shocked as to what had taken place in this country, and the racist attitudes he had seen existing. There were also personal experiences, with people talking very loudly. We were always coming into contact with other people and to try to stay present and not react to those things was important - he thought that was where a large part of the Work exists. At the collective level the Brexit vote had taught him not to expect the best of people in this country. He had always thought Britain was a very decent country which he thought it fundamentally was, but he had not been impressed with how we had ended up.

EXERCISE “ Intentional suffering - once a day to compel yourselves to be able to endure the "displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves".”

D had boarded a bus to get to the Meeting in good time, but it was diverted as the Hampstead Summer Festival had closed one of the village roads. He had to get off the bus a long walk away, and tried not to react. At first he was fuming but started to calm down. The sun was shining and the little back streets were nice. He found it extremely frustrating. Also, the other day he had been on a bus and two women got on and sat right behind him, although the bus was quite empty. One put her feet up on the back of the seat in front, and the other sat across the aisle, and they were talking so loud, shouting across, and he was trying not to react, although he really wanted to say something. When they got off the bus he smiled to himself, as he thought he had achieved something. So twice he had been in a situation where it was very hard not to react.

RM had been continuing with his meditation techniques and was getting more and more sense of presence all the time. It was no longer just moments. It all started that moment when he woke up, sat on the side of the bed, and did that one-minute meditation. He noticed that as he was more present, there seemed more synergy, harmony with nature. If he was late for the train, the train would be late for him.

T didn't manage to plan intentional suffering but had experienced suffering and had a few moments in the suffering when she became aware that this could be the exercise and to consciously remain in it rather than try and end the situation. One example happened when she had lost her Oyster card, and received a phone message from TFL the day after but the voice was indistinct and then had cut off. She deduced the card had been found, and phoned the number back, only to hear an announcement that it was a TFL number at which no message could be left. There ensued several lengthy phone calls to the main number waiting to be connected during which she began to realise that she was suffering. This change in thinking from suffering to intentional suffering gave her energy a surge. She continued over several days, without giving up, to no material avail, except it had served as intentional suffering for her.

L had discovered that there was no need to go in search of opportunities for intentional suffering. He had bought a kettle some time ago online which was faulty. He had had emails with the firm he had bought it from. They stalled but eventually sent a replacement, but it wasn't left where it should have been and got taken away with recycling. So there was endless opportunity to stay in touch with them and they would keep stalling forever. There was also a problem with broadband at home, and BT was likewise stalling about fixing it, so he could keep phone calls going on with them. They were very annoying phone calls, because he was passed from one person to another, and each time he had to identify who he was, and go through the whole story. So he could keep that going on forever, until he switched to Virgin, which was going to happen sometime soon. So there was endless opportunity for intentional suffering, and it was good to take it with good humour, but of course the natural response was to be very cross.

On a different matter, the referendum reminded him of the discussion last time about gravity, the difficulty of going into orbit and getting away from the pressure against independent thought,  and one way of looking at the referendum was different thinking from a wider authority, and removing institutions from a wider legal system, and it was very hard, there was a lot of resistance, and even after the result, a lot of pressure not to act on it.

Following the contributions, the Meeting moved to responses.

D's trials with the buses recalled to GC's mind an incident years ago when he had the opportunity to negotiate on the price of a house with an elderly man who was very unwell in hospital, with amputated legs. The asking price was higher then GC had been advised it was worth. He decided, under the circumstances, to step back. On reflection, it seemed to him that in certain situations you have to go forward, and not step back and allow life to do what it will with you, because there are certain times when you want to do some thing, or people are annoying you, and you can't just take a back seat. If you opt out and don't have to get involved in these sort of things, sure, live that life, but once you are involved, sometimes you have to step over the line to let be done what you want, because unfortunately if you don't somebody else will. These memories were reinforced by D's account - if someone is annoying you, you either move away from the situation or say something. T said that D had become the puppeteer, he had walked up the string into the puppeteer - he had been watching it rather than being involved in it which was partly an exercise, as most of the time we are tussling with the character in the play.

RM was not sure this was a proper assessment of the right thing to do. He said his understanding was that if you were going to be in the play, play the part. If you were going to be angry, be angry. The main point is to be there while you're doing it, see your body being angry. You live the act of the body doing what it wants to do, but observe what happens. As the body sees the observer, it modifies itself and becomes more subtle in its actions. He thought that to stop and not get involved was missing the point. D thought this was a matter of choice, and you had the power to make that choice. He thought that to react angrily, if you took it to its logical conclusion, was very dangerous, though he understood what RM meant in a higher sense. N said that sometimes we are reacting to absurd situations which we can't affect at all, like the weather. Sometimes there is an impersonality about these situations. Perhaps that was the right attitude to take to Brexit, to accept the fact it had happened. Other situations, such as those D had mentioned, can be changed - you could complain about people talking noisily, but maybe they would react quite aggressively.

Following the responses, the Meeting continued reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21.

... endurance towards others' manifestations displeasing to oneself could alone crystallize in their common presences that 'Partkdolg-duty' which in general is necessary for all three-centered beings.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good Watch on YouTube

T thought  that this was what D had been doing in the episode with the noisy passengers on the bus. RM said that, though D had not been directly involved, his feelings had been involved so he had been suffering. D cited Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which a person might insist on having an amputation. Doctors tell them it is not rational, but in certain circumstances have performed amputation of a healthy limb for their well-being, and it had produced relief in patients. D did not know why that had come to mind. T said that earlier GC had mentioned a man whose legs had been amputated.

And so, for the purpose of this famous 'suffering' of theirs, many of the three-centered beings of that planet of yours, either singly or in groups, that is to say, with others who thought as they did, began from then on to go away from amongst beings similar to themselves.

They even organized special colonies for this purpose, where, although existing together, they nevertheless arranged everything so as to produce this 'endurance' of theirs in solitude.

It was just then that their famous what are called 'monasteries' came into existence, which exist down to the present time and in which, as it were, certain of your contemporary favorites as they say, 'save their souls.'

RM said this explained exactly how people misinterpret what Buddha had said. They believe they have to do intentional suffering, find others who will share in such a practice, and then they form a club, or monastery, and they feel very good.

Gene Wilder, as Rabbi Avram Belinsky in The Frisco Kid (1979), undermines monastery tradition.
Watch on YouTube

... when these certain parts of the Great All-embracing, already spiritualized by Divine Reason, return and reblend with the great Prime Source of the All-embracing, they should compose that Whole which in the hopes of our COMMON ENDLESS UNIBEING may actualize the sense and the striving of all that exists in the whole of the Universe.

Further, it seems Saint Buddha also told them:

You, three-centered beings of the planet Earth, having the possibility of acquiring in yourselves both chief fundamental, universal, sacred laws, have the full possibility also of coating yourselves with this most sacred part of the Great All-embracing of everything existing and of perfecting it by the required Divine Reason.

T wondered if it was deliberate that the word unibeing can be read as Un-I-Being, a complete absence of "I". RM saw it as Uni-being, the unified one being we were all a part of. N said that Buddhism was a religion which did not require belief in a god, so it was an interesting juxtaposition that unibeing appears in this passage. T thought it amusing that Gurdjieff prefixes Buddha's name with the word Saint, bringing together two different belief systems.

... But when the second and third generations of the contemporaries of Saint Buddha began wiseacring with His explanations of cosmic truths, they just wiseacred with their peculiar Reason and fixed—for its transmission—a very definite notion to the effect that that same 'Mister Prana' already begins to be in them immediately upon their arising.

Thanks to this misunderstanding, the beings of that period and of all subsequent generations including the contemporary, have imagined and still imagine that without any being-Partkdolg-duty they are already parts of that Most Great Greatness, which Saint Buddha Himself had personally very definitely explained.

L found the reference to partkdolg duty interesting, and the idea that nobody can make progress unless they are doing it. He saw it as paying for his life, with the talents with which he was born. T said that partkdolg duty was something other than sitting down meditating for eight hours a day in a monastery. L said that the passage says that Buddhism was misinterpreted to indicate that everybody was born with the capacity that partkdolg duty is required to attain. GC said that if you want to lose weight, it's very simple - Eat less and move more. What we were aiming for was also very simple - Think less and do what needs to be done. It was as simple as that.

... they were warned by still another Saint-Individual, also a genuine Messenger from Above, namely, the Saint Kirmininasha.

And this Saint and genuine Messenger gave this warning to them in the following words:

' Blessed is he that hath a soul; blessed also is he that hath none; but grief and sorrow are to him that hath in himself its conception.'

T said it suggested that some people had souls and some did not and that conception meant something had been conceived in that person, and the grief and sorrow is the growing pains. GC disagreed and said it meant that you create your own reality - it was about the issue of mind. RM said it meant if you had your own conception about it, you were in trouble. L thought it meant we human beings were born without a soul, and then by exercising partkdolg duty the soul can be built.

Following the reading, there was a discussion about what exercise to adopt for the coming month, and a suggestion from GC was adopted: When you are in the company of someone who is, in your judgement, talking a load of rubbish, observe your own thoughts and then annihilate them. Then respond naturally.

The Great Escape

L's experience as the mind emptied was to see images of other places - buildings and people, as if looking through a window to another world. He had been considering D's comments the previous month about the Aymara tribe, and the notion of seeing the past as if it were in front of us, and associations which flow in to the mind are a bit like that because they are normally from the past, and to be able to think freely we might need to break away from that and think of new ideas.

EXERCISE “ Choose a moment each day to let associations recede into the background to receive impressions, and notice if what comes up is associations or thoughts, and if it takes a long time or is instant.”

J thought that the main difficulty of the exercise was to be able to distinguish between association and analytical thought. No matter how long or short the process, the idea came in a flash. The question we were all posing was: where did the ideas come from? There was a presumption that we could not find those ideas within ourselves, so they must come from somewhere else. He referred the attendees to the more recent theories about the kernel of the core of personality.

N noticed that it was very hard to look at things without ideas already being in his mind. He was prejudging things, and tried to look again and see things differently, that were not seen previously. He found we lived in a daydream world where we accepted things as being out there, and when he started questioning that - Is it quite like I think it is? - different perceptions came to him, and he started to look at things in a different kind of way, almost trying to intuit them, to sense the essence of what they were about rather than his preconceptions of what they were about. The exercise for him, was about getting back to the earliest impressions of things noticed as a child, or when he looked at objects or found some mystery in them.

When "R" was trying to write something for a deadline. It was an interesting exercise to focus on an aim and try to put it into good words and communicate. This process involved the brain, but there were no new thoughts, it was all about sorting out the associations and prioritising them and then being able to put everything in order on the computer. Struggling with the computer was a challenge as well, because when she had written books before she had done them in the old fashioned way on typewriters and sheets of paper, but to appreciate herself trying to be receptive and focused on what was necessary to phrase something properly and condense it into few words (because there was a word count limit) was quite a discipline and much more difficult than it had been twenty years ago. The activity - or non-activity - sitting on her chair at her desk at her computer for hours at a time, had made her realise how deeply asleep she was on every topic except the subject of the writing.

D had been looking on the internet about so-called enlightenment and so-called gurus, some of them probably pseudo-gurus, talking about it. What he got from most of them, which he had condensed to the most important, simple thing, was that we were an open vessel, a clear vessel, whereas all the rest - thoughts, feelings, perceptions - was noise which stopped us being in the moment. He was aware how much he would lose concentration whilst listening to people, and then go back to what he was thinking. The Aymara idea that the past is in front of us puts all experience in to the now, so that the past is here, present. The future is unknown, so, to them, it is behind us, out of sight. When people said the same things they were saying ten years before, it was the conditioning mind - the past in front of them.

Pinocchio marionette by Jim Shore

RM was working on a chapter on free will in the book he was writing. He asked himself: is everything I do here now, even to a thought, consequent on something that went before it? So far he had not found anything, even to the smallest degree, that wasn't. The more he considered this and read about it, the more he came to the conclusion that we were like marionettes and did not have free will. The positive side of this was that you could let go of all opinions and go with the flow of nature. It was like riding a bike, you could not decide to ride it a different way, because if you tried it would cause a crash. He found that every time he tried to go against the natural flow it caused him distress.

Sakura (cherry blossom)

Recalling the exercise for the meeting T was aware that during the month she remembered the exercise in the first and second weeks, but after that it was gone from her mind. She remembered vividly a tree moving in the wind, but after three or four seconds without thinking, she realised what was happening and the thoughts started coming. She was shocked by how minute the time was, and it was also frightening, because she experienced for a moment something in the raw that wasn't her.

The Meeting moved on to the responses.

D said that he was beginning to agree with RM, that people did not have free will. "R" asked, bearing in mind that everything might be the result of the influences we had been under and the things that had happened, whether there was any way that we could choose only to be influenced by cleaner influences. D thought we could, but that it would take time. "R" agreed, saying it was because everything is associations. J said that there might be a presumption that we could not have original thoughts, but he saw it more like a mason choosing which blocks to build with. The blocks, like those unoriginal thoughts, are all ready-made but the mason can choose which blocks to use when building, and likewise we could have very original thoughts by using different combinations of the blocks we had, but we could not operate in a pure mathematical vacuum without actual ideas or building blocks in place already. To say that we had no original thoughts or were asleep all the time was a bridge too far. It was the synthesis between the building blocks which was the original thought. L said that in the Gurdjieff Work, there was the idea that you could have free will, but it took a tremendous effort and you could not do it for long. He had been watching an interview from the Recode 2016 conference a couple of days before in which Elon Musk had clarified a common misconception about gravity. When we see images of people on the space station floating, we might assume there was no gravity there, that they had escaped the earth's pull, but in fact the force of gravity there was much the same as on earth, and the weightless effect was produced only by spinning the craft sufficiently fast around the planet to prevent it from falling. L said this was analogous to the enormous effort needed to exercise and maintain free will. "R" said that Beelzebub speaks about the Law of Falling in Beelzebub's Tales and about how the spacecraft that he is on is travelling. N found it an interesting analogy, and said that part of the Work was finding one's own centre of gravity. The daily exercises show how difficult it is to maintain free will, and our struggle with the exercises showed us how asleep we were and as a result the Work showed us very clearly that we do not have free will, and we kept falling back out of and away from a sense of our own centre of gravity. J was unsure about the idea that effort is needed in order to produce a new thought, because inspiration can come without effort. RM said that the great freedom was to be free of your own ambitions and intentions, your own attitudes and views - the minute you were free of that, you let go to nature to follow its own course. T thought that this sounded like going to sleep, because we were responsible for our own human nature.



Following up T's memory of vividly seeing the tree for a few seconds, D asked if the fear she had experienced was partly a consequence of how busy her life was. Someone who was not busy, who spent a lot of time in meditation, might find it easier to be in the awake state, because they had already built that block. "R" said it was also possible for a busy person to have the same experience, by bringing the three centres together. D thought that the experience might last longer for the less busy person.

The reading then continued from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21.

...a suitable Sacred Individual was immediately sent here, so that ... he might better explain and show you the way of eradicating from your presences the already crystallized consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer as well as your inherited predispositions to new crystallizations.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good

During the period when the said Sacred Individual, coated with a presence like your own ... directly guided the ordinary process of the being-existence of your ancestors, many of them did indeed completely free themselves from the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer ...

But ... the duration of your existence had ... already become abnormally short, and therefore the process of sacred Rascooarno had also very soon to occur to this Sacred Individual, ... then after his death, the former conditions were gradually re-established there owing on the one hand to the established abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence and, on the other hand, to that maleficent particularity in your psyche, called Wiseacring.

For T the talk of abnormally short periods was like the little periods of enlightenment she had experienced. D queried what Wiseacring was. RM read out the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: A person with an affectation of wisdom or knowledge, regarded with scorn or irritation by others - from Middle Dutch wijsseggher 'soothsayer', probably from the Germanic base of "wit". L said that when reviewing the Meeting to work out what goes into the blog, there were some parts which were very focused on what was being read, but there were a lot of sections where the talk was of things completely unrelated and would go off track, and then the word wiseacring would then come to his mind. Everyone present provided their own understanding of the word and there was a long discussion about what it meant. J added that the use of the adjective maleficent suggested it was a particularly bad trait. He thought Gurdjieff had put the idea very well a little earlier, when he spoke of our "inherited predispositions to new crystallizations". which also related to the earlier discussion about originality and synthesis,  T thought the use of the word coated was interesting, as if it described the superficial shell you can see of somebody else, like icing. "R" said it was personality, not essence. "N" compared it with crystallisation. An object might get a shell or a coating which did not belong to the original thing itself and therefore changes it. "R" said that after crystallisation a material was no longer fluid and movable, and was difficult to dissolve. N thought it might be analogous to the start of mechanical, less fluid thinking. These thoughts reminded L of the historical psychological symbolism applied to chemistry by alchemists.

... After having said all this, Saint Buddha ... explained to them how the process of their existence must be conducted and the order in which their positive part should consciously guide the manifestations of their unconscious parts ...

RM said we had to separate the ideas of knowing and thinking. Some things were beyond our thinking but not beyond our knowing, for example riding a bike. "R" said that the body had to learn the skill first.

...One of the best means of rendering ineffective the predisposition present in your nature of the crystallization of the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer is “intentional-suffering”; and the greatest intentionalsuffering can be obtained in your presences if you compel yourselves to be able to endure the “displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves.”’

This explanation of Saint Buddha together with other definite indications of His was spread by His nearest initiates among the ordinary beings there; and after the process of the sacred Rascooarno had occurred to Him, it also began to pass from generation to generation.

Following the reading, "R" observed that intentional suffering had just been mentioned, and this was adopted as the exercise for the coming month: once a day to compel yourself once a day to be able to endure the "displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves".

Looking backward

EXERCISE “ To notice each day a thought which seems to arise of its own accord and try to see where it comes from.”

D had been attending a class which described the Aymara tribe's concept of time - that the past was in front of us, while the future was behind us because it had yet to come. People projected their minds and their history on to the world, and the only way to stop that happening was to be in the present. He found this a very interesting perspective.

N had found that his thoughts came sometimes from body states (he had experienced some bronchitis during the past month from which some thoughts had emanated), or emotional states including from dreams. For example, on one occasion he awoke with feelings of anger which were hard to quell and which he assumed came from an experience while dreaming.

T had noticed a theme running through the thoughts that entered her head, which was a concern about how she might be viewed by others. She had traced this tendency back to childhood. For example, she had been prescribed exercises to ease a rotator cuff injury, and wanted to do them while walking or waiting at a bus stop, but had felt uneasy about how she would appear.

L said he had thoughts coming all the time and was not sure where they came from, but the exercise made him think of the relationship between our experience dreaming and our experience "awake". This reminded him of the animation Waking Life. These thoughts were like dreams - it was very hard to find out where they came from. They usually did have a source; it might be to do with puns or word-play, or similarities of colour or shape, or context of events in the past, like smells. It seemed to be an automatic process. For him as a composer it was especially interesting, as music was entering his mind all the time,  He had woken with some this morning, and had got up and recorded it. So he was obviously interested in where this music came from. Did it come from nowhere? Or was it actively brought by some agency? That was actually the theory he was working with. He followed the Ancient Greek belief in the Muse, and the Muse bringing inspiration to those who were going to transcribe it. But also, just as in dreams, the conscious mind was incredibly creative in creating scenarios and he thought that could also happen in waking life.

G said that a problem had come up abroad half way through the previous week. He started thinking about it, and realised that thinking about it would not do anything, but just create doubt within him, throwing each scenario backwards and forwards. He thought the process would stop if he didn't open the door for it. But over the next day and a half it crept in again like a naughty child. He thought that he had to think about it, as if he had a moral responsibility to do so, but thinking was not going to help, and if it was going to help it would be resolved in about twenty seconds, because you would resolve to do this, or that, or leave it. But the mind kept throwing it at him, just like a naughty child, and you had to put some form of discipline before it.

"R" had been writing a book, and had a deadline coming up. The book had to be full of information. It was not a novel. It had focused her attention on what is remembered and what isn't. She wouldn't call that thinking, she would call it associations. She has noticed the way that the "database" in the mind would just slow down. It seemed to be working at half speed a lot of the time, so trying to pinpoint a particular bit of information, she had to wait, do something else, and then it would pop up. Rather as GC was saying, it was not intentional access to what she wished to access. The other side of the same thing is how is it that anything is remembered?  Real thinking, it seemed to her, was to be solving problems and inventing solutions to the requirements of life that crop up. It was distressing and puzzling to consider that one was no longer in control, and never was.

Following the contributions, time was given to responding.

Tony Buzan

D thought that "R" must have some sense of control. Without that we wouldn't achieve anything. "R" replied that we don't achieve very much. Although she had written books before, the process, though it might appear to be the result of intentional thought, was primarily the consequence of assembling associations which apparently came at random to the mind. N added he used to teach courses in mind mapping and creative thinking, including the techniques of Tony Buzan, He advocated doing "mind-dumps", maps of associations to help in writing about a subject. N thought this was a good way of making use of the associations, having compiled them into a map, it was then possible to decide on a direction. "R" said that she did that, but the question was who is doing the deciding. N said that we were trying to become the master of that process. "R" said that there were moments of mastery, but to permanently put that hat on was a different matter. D asked "R" how did people meet deadlines. "R" said that some people drive themselves very hard to the detriment of their health. D said that some people consistently meet deadlines. L said that the Work looks into the possibility and development of a single "I", and where this is absent, following the instructions of an employer - or the requirements of a customer - works similarly. D said that what we were discussing and ultimately working to achieve was free will. GC thought the problem was the negative self-talk which can arise from thoughts, and that it was very important to recognise that process when it begins. This reminded T of a slide - as the descent picks up speed it gets harder to stop. GC agreed except for the connotation of pleasure. L said that if he was right about music coming from outside, he could infer that thoughts might also come from outside, as poetry might come to the mind of a poet.

The reading then continued from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21.

With acknowledgments to Harold Good

By certain all-enlightened and all-justly guiding most sacred final results of the actualization of everything existing in the Universe, my essence has been sent to you to serve as a helping factor in the striving of each of you to free yourselves ...

Pineapple flower D raised the issue of the wording used, that Buddha's essence had been sent. He said that Buddha had not been born with an essence. L quoted Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the architect and painter - "Art is the Flower - Life is the Green Leaf". He saw art as the flowering of the human being, and maybe that was essence asserting itself, but maybe it was also about a growth of essence, a development. It was natural for plants to flower though sometimes they did not. We had all probably enjoyed pineapples, but who knew what a pineapple flower looked like? D said that the caterpillar was not the butterfly. The notion of metamorphosis was helpful to him. GC asked how did we know that essence really existed? He said that each person at the Meeting was using different words and metaphors to approach this issue. He personally kept returning to mind and thinking - thoughts came from nowhere and the mind - the physical brain in action - seemed to be attracted by negativity. He said that others spoke instead in terms of art or associations.

Art is the Flower - Life is the Green Leaf. Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful living thing, something that will convince the world that there may be, there are, things more precious more beautiful - more lasting than life itself... you must offer real, living - beautifully coloured flowers - flowers that grow from, but above, the green leaf – flowers that are not dead – are not dying – not artificial – real flowers springing from your own soul – not even cut flowers - You must offer the flowers of the art that is in you – the symbols of all that is noble – and beautiful – and inspiring - flowers that will often change a colourless leaf - into an established and thoughtful thing. Charles Rennie Mackintosh

... namely, there was implanted into their presences a certain organ with special properties, owing to which everything external perceived by their whole presences and transformed for their own coating was afterwards manifested not in accordance with reality.

A little later, ... our MOST ALL-GRACIOUS COMMON FATHER did not fail to give the command immediately to annul certain artificial measures, among which was the removal from the common presences of your ancestors of the now already superfluous organ Kundabuffer with all its special artificial properties ...

GC asked what kundabuffer was. "R" gave the metaphor of a flock of sheep, who are not aware of their purpose being to be slaughtered and fed to other beings. Some people were quite happy with their views, but if you had a question you already had the energy to develop it.

Following the reading, an exercise suggested by "R" was adopted for the coming month: to choose a moment each day to let associations recede into the background to receive impressions, and notice whether what comes up is associations or thoughts, and whether it takes a long time or whether it is instant.