Here Comes The Sun

In May, there had been a lot of rain, but when the sun did come out N made the circle with his thumb and finger. During the month, he had joined two networking organisations, in which he had been trying to help people. There was definitely an element of self-interest, but he did not think that was the predominant motive. Sometimes in helping other people, you were also helping yourself. He thought that the things went hand in hand, there was very little that was purely altruistic. The thoughts he had, when he was doing things, was that if this helped people, this gave them information, he was very happy to assist.

Every day, if you notice the sun come out, form a circle with your thumb and forefinger. Think of a group or club you are in, and plan to do something for it which is not for your benefit. Observe whether you do it, and if so how you feel.

T had remembered to make the sign when looking at the sun. Acknowledging the sun in this way was bringing a different experience to her relationship with the sun. It seemed such a trivial action to make in relationship to the magnitude of the sun. It highlighted how many hours she took the sun for granted, and yet it was the key to life - without it she would die. It sustained her day after day, whether or not she noticed it. The second part was to think of a club she belonged to, and plan to do a selfless deed for it. She thought about what she was involved with apart from work, and the closest to being in a club was coordinating a group of her professional association, and in her involvement with a life drawing group from which she had been absent since the lockdowns. Anything she thought of to do for the professional association group did not meet the criteria for selflessness. Any action she took for the benefit of the group also benefited her as a member of the group. There were different levels of benefit. The deed itself would affect her too. There was even the emotional consequence for her, even if it was just fantasy, of other people's emotional or intellectual reactions to the deed. This made her question if altruism was an impossible state. The closest she could think of was donating anonymously to a charity, but even then there would be the emotional satisfaction, and even a sense of superiority, over those she was helping anonymously. By donating anonymously she would prevent the ability for others to be able to express gratitude towards the donor. The very act of doing something for someone else, ipso facto, generates a feeling of expansion and satisfaction. The old saying: It is in giving, we receive.

O said she had been doing the exercise every day, without the bodily part, and not consciously in the framework of the exercise. She was doing a lot of things for people, and all the time thinking about whether she was serving herself. So it was a conflict for her every day. So the question was whether, because it was not in the framework of the exercise, she had forgotten about the exercise itself, as if it had become like an everyday thing. It was not something that she had got an instruction here to do.

L had done this a few times during the month. As N had said, it had not been a very warm May, so he did this sign when the sun came out, and then he consciously tried to think of some way to benefit selflessly groups he was in, and he was in some professional associations, and other groups of similar interests, and there was this one too, but he was not in any group that was based about people helping each other as N had described. So no quid pro quo types of organisations. So what he came up with was contacting people and saying he liked this and he liked that. He like such and such a performance or event. It may have made people feel good, but it felt to him a kind of hollow altruism, because he did not necessarily fully believe in what he was saying, and he thought that if people do good things they don't need external praise. So it made him question altruism generally.

Responding to O, N said though she did this every day, he thought the whole part of these exercises was that there was another part of us, where we were asserting our will, and trying to be present and trying to wake up. He was sure there were a lot of things we did which were very beneficial to other people, and also very beneficial to ourselves, in the course of our everyday lives, but if we were doing them unconsciously, and were not actually "there" when we did these things, in terms of self-remembering, then he thought it was a very different process to the process that Gurdjieff was trying to teach us. Sometimes, when people joined his groups, he would try and get them to change their behaviour. For example, if they had a particular role in life, he would get them to act their role. He was trying to create a distinction between their higher self, that was doing the acting, as opposed to their lower self, which was just living life automatically. So N was trying to live his own role more consciously and accept it as being a role. He thought it was an important part of the Gurdjieff Work, that we look at our various roles, and then try and live those roles more consciously, and separate in the process of living those roles, rather than doing them at a subconscious level.

Responding to O and N, T said it was so complex, because whatever we were doing was originally our passion, but the more you do it, the more you go to sleep whilst you are doing it. It becomes entrenched. The whole life is surrounded by the consequence of doing, which means you can live where you live, and eat your food, because you get your living from it as well. T liked that distinction N was making between being in the role passionately, but maybe to step away from the passion, not losing the meaning for yourself of why you are doing it, but coming from a different place somehow, and the Challenges were trying to get you to be an observer of what you were doing, and that is the hardest part because we are so involved.

Source: hebrew4christians.com

L said that in the context of the Challenge, which was about altruism really, in Judaism there was the concept of mitzvah, or good deed - that was how it was thought of - but technically it means commandment, and so people may do it just because that is what the religion said they should do. So that would be purposeful, but it would be meaningful if they did it because they sincerely wanted to. So it seemed to him that what we were talking about was a form of authenticity. Were we doing things from a perspective of being awake, or were we doing them automatically?

O said that it was very difficult for people who pray every day not to be mechanical. L said that over the years and centuries prayers get longer and longer, so people say them faster and faster, and obviously mechanically. He thought that applied in every religion. J said that if you did not know the commandment, but you did it because it was a natural and meaningful thing to do, you were almost doing better, because you did not have the tenets of your religion in your mind - but the question really was, if you were bringing your considerations into your conscious, and being aware of what exactly you were thinking, because you were in the context of the real world, not your own mind, did that improve your decision making if you were more alert and alive to it, rather than because it had come from within you in a meaningful rather than a purposive way? L thought it was better to stand back and think, as well as do things naturally, because we can easily deceive ourselves and do things naturally and might think, at a later time, maybe that wasn't quite right. In the Gurdjieff Work, we can focus and develop values and understanding, and we can use the human quality of reason, which other creatures do not not have. and that makes something that was purposeful, become meaningful. O said this was where the Gurdjieff Work came into it, which was about the centres. There were things you should be doing automatically, like driving. If you stopped and thought about driving, you were not going to do it very well. O said there were thing that you had to do mechanically. When she played music, if she thought about all the chords, she slowed down. L said that before that point you learn what the chords are, and decide what you are going to practice, and when you have practiced for hours a day, you will play those sequences without thinking about it. O thought that this work about which centre you employ is very important, and that was something which was difficult. T said it was whether or not the three centres were all working together, plus the "will", which N had mentioned earlier on. You consciously willed something, and the plan was the proof, the plan brought it into manifestation, that was the hardest thing.

The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... they clearly constated that in the course of the change of generations of beings on the Earth a very undesirable and distressing phenomenon occurs, namely, that, during the processes of reciprocal destruction, that is during what are called ‘wars’ and ‘popular risings,’ a great number of initiated beings of all degrees are for some reason or other invariably destroyed, and, together with them, there are also destroyed forever very many Legominisms through which alone various information about former real events on the Earth is transmitted and continues to be transmitted from generation to generation.

... they decided to take advantage of the exceptional circumstance that so many learned beings were together in one city to confer collectively for the purpose of finding some means for averting at least this distressing phenomenon ...

This reminded La that in the present time there were concerted efforts by some organisations to stop us using certain words, or to suppress books. So we can see difficulty in the preservation of knowledge and ideas at work at the moment. Gurdjieff was describing a long-term phenomenon that recurs in history, and suggesting that a great deal has been lost in the past, T said she had always thought of reciprocal destruction as about literal wars, but it could also mean generations destroying previous generations' wisdom deliberately, for whatever reasons. O said it was happening a lot in this century. The psychological knowledge that existed so far is being lost. There were only a few mental health professionals who fight against this trend, and even take it to court sometimes. T said it seemed to be an attack on relationship, and one of the things she was coming across was that everything was time limited, but you can't predict how long something is going to take between two humans, one trying to help the other. L said that in terms of theories of psychology being lost, and the system of legominism - symbols to preserve knowledge - you could see that very clearly with the complex system of astrological signs, representing different aspects of personality, and how they may mesh, and that has continued despite, no doubt, many attempts to suppress it. N said that astrology had been all round the world, it was obviously been a universal system of knowledge at one stage. It got trivialised, if you thought about astrology as it appeared in the Evening Standard every day, at a very simplistic level. There was knowledge about characterology, but a lot of that knowledge was not known to most people. L said there was also the ingenuity of connecting that to a comprehensive knowledge of astronomy, and the orbits of the moon, sun and planets. There was the Antikythera Mechanism which had been found in a shipwreck. It was over two thousand years old, but it showed a clear and precise knowledge of the orbits. T said it also showed knowledge of engineering.

...And on the day when new members ceased to be admitted, the number of those enrolled amounted to a hundred and thirty-nine learned beings; and it was with this number of members that the club existed until the said Persian king abandoned his former caprice connected with those terrestrial learned beings.

As I learned after my enrollment as a member of that club, all the learned beings had arranged on the very first day of its opening a general meeting at which it was unanimously resolved to hold daily general meetings, when reports and discussions on the two following questions were to be made: namely, the measures to be taken by the members of the club on their return home for the collection of all the Legominisms existing in their native lands, and for placing them at the disposal of the learned members of this club which they had founded; and secondly, what was to be done in order that the Legominisms might be transmitted to remote generations by some other means than only through initiates.

Source: Crop Circle Connector

N wondered what the significance of the number 139 was. He thought it might be significant in terms of the enneagram, which has a triangle within a larger pattern of 9 points. That reminded T of Gurdjieff's long made-up words. T spoke of the part about the Persian king abandoning his former caprice. As if, when there was hardship exerted by a dictator, somehow there were some good things happening, bubbling away, and then when the dictatorship fails or eases up, that disperses. it was almost as though hardship wakes people up to what they need to do. N said that the collection of legomonisms might include things like chess, astrology, playing cards and tarot. There was this knowledge, this wisdom that had been collated and embedded within systems, some of it was put in the form of games in the hope that some of that knowledge will infiltrate into society and be accepted, and there may be other things within our society which we don't realise, which were originally legominisms, which may exist still at some level within the framework of society. T said she had been thinking of crop circles [image] when N had been talking, because we did not know where they came from, they were mysterious, but they were designs, and people were researching them in esoteric ways. N said that buildings were also part of this, certainly architecture, for example gothic cathedrals. Certain dances were legominisms, they were like whole books in themselves. So there was this coding that had been going on. The hidden knowledge that was contained within those systems are forms in which matters had been scripted and possibly encrypted, so that people will have to read those things to discover the ancient knowledge. L said that also the concept of people waking up through adversity to renewal had been encoded into religious festivals like Passover and Easter, and part of the encrypting in terms of Jewish Hebrew rituals had been encoded in the gematria, and because it was hidden, it could not be destroyed. T said there had been the catastrophe of ISIS blowing up part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra.

A Song of Degrees

N found doing the Vitruvian Man pose itself, was very interesting, because it kind of balanced up the body and the mind, and emotions. He thought there was something significant about this Vitruvian Man. It wasn't just for the architecture of the human body, which is how it is usually portrayed. There was something esoteric that N got out of it. As he did that, he found much more connection between the various parts of his selves  It was good going into that pose. It was quite a magical pose. It was the pose of the balanced man, in a sense. He found making up the sentence harder. The word he chose was Tikliamishian - it was quite hard to put a sentence together, and actually say the word, because he always found Gurdjieff's words very hard to pronounce. He tried to say In the time of the Tikliamishian civilisation, people cut off their beards and acted more like actors, and changed the whole nature of human civilisation.

If you notice you are feeling drowsy, stretch like the Vetruvian Man, and consider what you were doing or thinking just beforehand. Make up a sentence involving one of Gurdjieff's made up words from the next part of Beelzebub's Tales. See to what extent this is frustrating and affects reason and emotion.

The first time, on 7 April, L noticed he was feeling drowsy, and noted he had been eating something with carbohydrates, so that was probably why. He thought of a sentence - How do I explain what legominism means?  - and that was just a silly sentence, because it was self-referential, because legomonism was about preserving and communicating meaning over a long period of time. The Challenge made him frustrated as he had to pause. The experience was about whimsy rather than reason. Another time, he had had an afternoon coffee. He was in company, and felt a bit tired. So he did his stretching sitting down, and the sentence he thought of was - Can you direct me to the ookazemotra? - He thought in the book ookazemotra meant something like a signpost, so again it was a self-referential thing. Again he felt frustrated because of having to pause, but there was no reason in it, it was fun and ironic. Becoming more aware of getting drowsy, he started taking a short rest after lunch, and he stopped feeling drowsy.

During the period allocated to responses, there was much discussion, but nothing was said about specific instances of doing the challenge.

The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

Without thinking long about it, I entered the building and passing myself off as a foreign learned being, I requested, as an adherent of Legominism, to be enrolled as a member of the club; I managed to do this very easily, owing to that old acquaintance whom I had met by chance and who, like the others, took me for a learned being like himself.

... It must be remarked that among the learned beings of the planet Earth who were then in Babylon and who were gathered there partly by coercion from almost the whole of the planet by the mentioned Persian king, and partly voluntarily on account of the already mentioned famous question of the ‘soul,’ there were several among the beings brought there by coercion who were not, like the majority, learned beings of ‘new formation,’ but who, with a sincerity proceeding from their separate spiritualized parts, strove for High Knowledge only with the aim of self-perfection.

RM remembered that when he joined the Freemasons, which was like a club, the majority there treated it as a club, people were just socialising, and so on, but a very few saw it for their own personal growth and development. It seemed that Gurdjieff was alluding to that, the difference between the different kinds of people. One was mechanical - the club, and the other he said very little about, but they were growing in themselves, they were learning from it.

...These several learned beings kept themselves apart there, not only in the beginning when all the other learned beings who were then in the city of Babylon first opened a central place for their meetings in the very heart of the city, and when for their better mutual support both materially and morally, they founded there a central club for all the learned beings of the Earth; but also later on, when the whole body of learned beings was divided into three separate ‘sections’ and each section had its independent club in one or another part of the city of Babylon, they identified themselves with none of the said three sections.

They existed in the suburbs of the city of Babylon and scarcely met any of the learned beings from the general mass; and it was only several days before my admittance among them as a member of this club, that they for the first time united for the purpose of organizing the club of the ‘Adherents-of-Legominism.’

These learned beings about whom I am speaking had all without exception been taken to the city of Babylon by coercion and they were for the most part those learned beings who had been taken there by the Persian king from Egypt.

As I later learned, this uniting of theirs had been brought about by two learned beings who were initiates of the first degree.

RM said this section was exposing human nature for what we do. Even the leaders are exposed for the greed and the particular views they want everyone to follow. O said it was maybe to reinforce their own power. Knowledge was power, anyway. RM asked what kind of knowledge? - the knowledge that drives us for more wealth - that's one kind of a power, and another drive is towards more wisdom. O said that was what he was describing. It was a bit of a mix. These kings did not do it all for the power, they also were interested to develop science.

Virtuoso-Caperings

T listened to the radio for news, and on some channels, not all, sports news came at the end. She habitually turned it off at this point. This time the switching off offered an opportunity for the Challenge. She was usually doing something intentional in the kitchen, to do with preparation, cooking or clearing, and cleaning eating implements. She had not thought before that these activities were intentional. She continued with the task with the idea that the otherwise ordinary task was intentional, literally for sustenance, and then essential for sustaining survival of the body, without which nothing else can survive, let alone thrive. So she thought that what had happened to her was experiencing something which you did automatically or took for granted. It was something that you did but did not think very much about, and it opened that area up to be more reflectful at the time of a habitual task. That was the main thing.

When you are checking the news media, and the subject of sport arises, become aware of what you are doing, and ask yourself if it is intentional or out of habit. Click your fingers. Do something different intentionally, and consider to what extent it is purposeful or meaningful.

When L listened to the news, it was usually while he was doing something else, because he generally did not think it was important enough for him to stop and give it full attention. At the beginning of the month he did remember this Challenge. On one occasion he was making toast and the news turned to sport so he clicked his fingers and did something else. He asked the questions stipulated in the Challenge. Was he doing something purposeful? Yes. Making toast is purposeful, because he wanted to prepare something and eat it. Was it meaningful? No. Because it wasn't going to change his life, or follow a goal or personal project. On another occasion he was doing a list of things, and the news switched to sport, so he clicked his fingers and started doing something else - some cooking. Again it was purposeful but not meaningful, he wasn't doing anything life-changing. He noticed during the month how prevalent the subject of sport was. So in one of the regular press briefings from Downing Street about the coronavirus situation, the prime minister started by talking about sport, and how we were all looking forward to the resumption of sport events as soon as possible.

A had not done the Challenge as described, because she did not have a television, she did not watch TV, She did not watch news She read some, and she was not interested in sport. She had understood the Challenge to be focused on stop, pause, and look at what you are doing. Was it doing something purposeful or meaningful? (And not so much about sport.) So she was watching herself a lot of times, without this particular trigger, and what she did was only purposeful, but none of it was what she would describe as meaningful. She had been looking forward to the Meeting to listening, and she wondered what people would consider was meaningful. She realised that she hadn't been doing anything, since she got the Challenge, which she would really consider to be meaningful to her life. She thought that was what would make us thrive and be happy.

Using Todoist to review meaningful vs purposeful
 vs routine activity

Responding to A, T said that if we did not do the household activities, the eating and the cleaning, then our lives would deteriorate, so it was maintenance. She was very questioning of purposeful and meaningful, because cooking and eating sustained the body. Without the body, nothing happened. If you didn't sustain the body, there was deterioration and death. So the body was the vessel of everything. For her there was enormous meaning in doing the purposeful tasks. L had been using the app Todoist which presents a colour-coded chart at the end of the day or week. He had set it up to separate the the routine things he had been doing from the others.  Routine tasks can be meaningful - if you don't eat, you die. But they are not meaningful in the sense of changing your life. There are other things which are purposeful, but it is not our purpose. So we may be doing something for a job - preparing a spreadsheet or a presentation - it is for the boss's purpose, not ours, but we do it in a purposeful way because we want to fulfill a responsibility. Meaningful action follows our own goals, our own purposes, which may reflect our values or dreams, or wanting to change a habit. These he would colour code differently, So his charts did show, in colour, the proportions, and it was mostly routine tasks, with a number of purposeful ones and a smaller number of meaningful ones. This reminded J a bit of Bronowsky who said "... there are people who have led

happy and complete lives, who feel that they can speak out of a full heart and a full mind all in the same breath". J wondered if this also applied to a person whose purposefulness, and whose meaningfulness, in there lives, were correctly aligned. So if you could do both what was purposeful and meaningful at the same time, you were being to some extent happier and being fulfilled. The meaningful and the purposeful were definitely distinct, but you could marry them together and do what was meaningful because it was purposeful. He tried to do that. L said it seemed to him that there was a kind of pyramid here. There was a level of routines, things we had to do just to keep going every day. The second level of the pyramid might be purposeful actions, and out of those a few would be meaningful. And maybe the name of the game was to make the meaningful level bigger, or coinciding with the purposeful. This reminded RM of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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At this place of his tales, Beelzebub became silent and turning suddenly to his old servant Ahoon, who was also sitting there listening to him with the same attention as his grandson Hassein, he said:

And you, old man, are you also listening to me with the same interest as our Hassein? Weren’t you yourself personally with me everywhere on that planet Earth and didn’t you see with your own eyes and sense for yourself everything about what I am relating to Hassein?

Instead of just sitting there openmouthed at my tales, you also tell our favorite something…. There is no getting out of it. We have got to tell him all we can about those strange three-brained beings, seeing that they have so intensely interested him.

Surely you must have been interested in one aspect or another of these queer ducks; well, tell us something just about that aspect.”

When Beelzebub had finished speaking, Ahoon, having thought a while, replied:

“After your subtly psychological tales about all these ‘unintelligibles,’ how can I intrude with my tales?”

And then, with an unusual seriousness and preserving the style and even entire expressions of Beelzebub himself, he continued:

“It is, of course…. How shall I put it? My essence even was often thrown out of balance by those strange three-brained beings, who with their ‘virtuoso-caperings’ nearly always used to supply an impetus for evoking the being-impulse of amazement in one or in another of my spiritualized parts.”

T was curious about the symbolic role of Ahoon, whose name was an anagram of a biblical character. L said that Beelzebub, like Noah, was on a ship. Ahoon might be like an aspect of Beelzebub that was observing. Beelzebub might have been caught up in events emotionally, and was asking what the observer observed, for a more abstracted version of what had been going on. T said that the Ahoon character was also someone who did not speak most of the time, and he had been given this chance to speak.

... “I intend to speak about that factor which has already become definitely maleficent for the contemporary beings and at the arising of the cause of which, you yourself were present, as I very well remember during our stay then in Babylon; I mean the factor they themselves call ‘art.’

“If you should consent in your wisdom to take up that question in detail, then, according to my understanding, our dear Hassein will have perhaps the choicest material for his better elucidation of all the abnormal strangenesses of the psyche of the three-brained beings, who in most recent times arise on that planet Earth which has interested him.”

Having said this and having with the tip of his tail wiped off the drops of sweat which had formed on his forehead, Ahoon became silent and adopted his usual attentive posture.

L asked if this meant that Gurdjieff was not that keen on art? Or maybe he was not that keen on organised art, or subsidised art. N said we knew that he was quite interested in objective art. Gurdjieff made a distinction between objective art and other art. He was not condemning all art. L said that artists were very present in his groups, in the Prieurié. T said that the text described bringing the base of the body to the top - Ahoon wiped the sweat off his forehead with his tail. RM said this meant a lot to him. He had been studying the evolution of consciousness. Consciousness and the possibility of evolving arises in creatures when they become self-conscious.

A Question of Sport

L found this challenge harder to do and to log, because there was no external trigger. On one occasion, he observed he was focused working at his desk, and he was too identified with the thinking centre. He did feel a bit of guilt, and he did consider it as a regulator. He did clap. He then had the thought, that although in the Challenge the idea was to balance the activity with the other two centres,  but also pushing on was also a regulator action. It was an alternative. You did not always have to have the balance. Some things do require that extra push, and he thought that was a Gurdjieff third force idea. On how to balance it, he thought to go for a walk, and did so later. Five days later, there was a computer problem, synchronising phone and laptop, and he realised he was spending too long trying to fix it, and he was over-using the thinking centre again. He did feel guilt, and considered it as a regulator, and clapped, and he identified the guilt may be coming from childhood,  that he wasn't doing enough to help people.

Every day, if I "lose it" and find myself identified with the activity of a particular centre - thinking, feeling or moving - I will observe any regret, guilt, conscience and consider the feeling as a mechanical regulator in action and clap hands as if applauding the feeling, and think about other feelings that are possible. I will make an intentional effort, a regulating adjustment, to bring the other centres into my experience. I will make a note when and how it happened and over time, look for a pattern in my notes and if one centre usually predominates come up with a strategy for changing behaviour to reduce the predominance.

T read out two notes following doing the Challenge:

• The first time I found myself raising my voice in an argument, and getting very stressed trying to say my point, and when I realised in the heat of the moment, I suddenly remembered the Challenge, and started clapping. The clapping was as furious as the fury, I couldn't stop. Then the noise and experience of the hands slapping each other got my attention, which then altered the direction of energy and brought me back into myself away from the angry feelings. I became more self-centred and had withdrawn from this verbal fencing.

• I remembered I hadn't done the Challenge, and I felt guilty at not having done it, so then I started clapping. So it was self-referential. The sudden slapping of my hands together put a different backdrop to the scene and brought it centre-stage, where I was more able to locate it in my body around the solar plexus, and the heart area. With the clapping it began to disperse, but not really into another state, more like a reducing of the guilt state, and it was only then that I became aware of the self-referential  nature of it, that not doing the Challenge had set off the practical part of the Challenge.

During the early part of February, N had been very much involved with completing a transaction, and he only had three days to get it done. He was the one who had to originate all the documents, which put a lot of pressure on him. He found at times that he was getting worked up with the anxiety about getting all this done, or letting the client down, so sometimes he would notice this anxiety rising in him as part of that, and then he would clap. He would get up and do some exercises in the same room, to bring himself back into his body, because he realised that his intellectual centre was predominating, and then he would come back to his work, hopefully more calm about the situation. He noticed in that a pattern and took it on board as a way to balance himself out, in terms of the centres which usually predominate in one's life. So before sitting down to do work, he did some physical exercise, and tried to make a conscious effort to get up every hour, from his seat, and wander round the room, or do some exercise, or do something physical to get him out of the predominance of his intellectual centre.

During the period allocated to responses to specific experiences of doing the Challenge, there were no such responses during the discussion that ensued.

The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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But in your favorites, specially in your contemporary favorites, who exist constantly passively under the direction of only one of the separate spiritualized parts of their common presence and thereby constantly manifest themselves entirely by their factors for negative properties also lawfully arisen in them, and hence, by negative manifestations, there proceeds in them that same disproportionate expenditure of the contents of their various Bobbin-kandelnosts, that is to say, the possibilities, placed in them by Nature according to law, of action by only one or only two of their brains, are always experienced, in consequence of which the contents of one or two of their Bobbin-kandelnosts are prematurely exhausted; whereupon, just like those mechanical watches in which the winding is run down or the force of their regulators is weakened, they cease to act.

Sometime later, I shall explain to you in detail not only why, when beings, existing only according to the principle Itoklanoz, exist by the direction of only one or two of their spiritualized sources, and not harmoniously, that is to say, with all three combined, and in agreement, that particular brain of theirs in which there were superfluous associations is prematurely used up in them and consequently dies during the period of its existence, but also why, owing to this, the other Bobbin-kandelnosts also are used up, even without their own action.

But here you must also know that even on your planet, one still occasionally finds one of your favorites whose duration of planetary existence extends to five of their centuries.

N said Gurdjieff seemed to be expressing the idea that there were limitations for the centres, that get used up, because if we don't use them harmoniously with the other centres, we are running some of these centres down, and if one didn't do this there was the possibility of extending one's life considerably, such that one's planetary existence could extend to five centuries, which was quite extraordinary because we were not aware particularly of any cases in history of people living for five centuries, though there are theories about the Count de St Germain. The Gershwins wrote a song about Methuselah. O thought Gurdjieff might not have meant duration of physical existence, but rather how long they existed in people's minds. Who would want to live 500 years? Life wouldn't have any meaning. You could postpone everthing. Simone de Beauvoir had written about this in her 1946 novel, All Men Are Mortal. L said that the very first paragraph, in terms of its structure, was extremely complex. It was a single sentence. He had tried to take it apart, and work out the structure. T said the same was true of the second paragraph.

. . . though there are more than two and a half millions of what are called ‘unemployed-beings’ in that community England, yet the power-possessing beings there take no measures concerning this, but endeavor to spread still more widely among them that same famous sport of theirs.

Just as in the large community Russia the contents of all what are called ‘newspapers’ and ‘magazines’ used to be always devoted to the question of Russian vodka, so now in that community England, more than half of the text of all their ‘evil-sowers’ is devoted to that famous sport.

N thought England had promoted sport more than any other country. We did not see it not see it so much now because the rest of the world had come on board and was equally mad on sports, and in some areas more than the UK was. There were great supporters of Manchester United that he used to meet in India. You would have thought that sport was quite good - it allowed people to become physically fit and healthier, but Gurdjieff was denigrating all of that, and saying that this was just part of the mass hypnosis that governments and others were trying to induce on us at some level.

The Regulator

N had realised how much he was in his intellectual centre as he was sitting at his desk doing his work. So doing the Challenge got him to move around a bit, trying to get back into his physical centre, trying to get back into his emotional centre, just for a few minutes, like going off to read a poem, or listening to a piece of music, or doing something which would get him out of his intellectual centre which he was just very focused in, and to move himself towards a different centre and bring himself back.

Set an alarm to go off at the same time every day. When it goes off, stop what you are doing. Consider what is happening with the moving, feeling and thinking centres. Is there crystalization, or over/under use of a centre? Consider if the centres can be re-balanced. If one of the centres is running down, try to think of something that might wind it up. Note down your experience each day.

L had kept track of the Challenge this time, and he had done it twenty times in all. It was tailing off at the end because towards the end of the month he was observing more balance. He had set up a reliable alarm system to go off at 2:30 every afternoon. He stopped what he was doing 90% of the time, and half of those times he held his physical pose for a minute. He was doing a variety of things when the alarm went off. Sometimes it was housework, sometimes walking, but quite often he was sitting at the computer, and when this happened he often noticed there was a tension in his body. He noticed crystallisation in the moving centre much more than in the other centres. His thinking centre was overused and his moving centre underused, and he tried to develop the moving and the feeling centres more. He thought slightly that he was moving around and feeling a little bit more now, and sitting hunched up at the computer, maybe a little bit less.

T had set an alarm at the time of her choosing, and the first time was really inconvenient, so she changed it to another time. She wrote an entry into an email, and kept replying it to herself each time she remembered. Out of the month she wrote nine emails, and had chosen one to read out.

The alarm went off at three. I was sitting at the table reading about safeguarding which was heavy duty and disturbing reading. I had got to a very lengthy statutory act. I stopped and assessed my physical state. My eyes felt swollen and my stomach felt in turmoil. I didn't like what I was experiencing. I decided to stop reading the legislation and go back to the main training, and I had gone down an unnecessary rabbit hole that was not required for my pay grade, but maybe it was easier reading than the gruesome examples given in the training. The thinking centre is this stopping, but also the reflection which is the writing. The feeling, or sense-centred, brain was yelling at me to stop what I was doing before the alarm went off, but my head was ploughing on through the flood of words, driving deeper and deeper into a dead end, so I just wasn't listening to myself. The alarm just went off at 3:19 to stop the Challenge, and I couldn't recall what the third brain was, and that was of course  the moving centre, and the only action that I could think was taking place was me typing the reflection, and the action of typing my own thoughts felt more life-enhancing than reading what others had written.

When the alarm went off during the week to remind him of the Challenge, when he might be in a meeting, RM realised so much he was in the state of common knowledge, stuff that people had told him rather than what he actually knew, which was the moving centre. So he was really wiseacring a lot of the time, and not working with what he actually knew from a sensory point of view.

T said she had been very taken with what N had been saying about getting completely absorbed by the requirement to pay attention to what he was doing, but to the consequent neglect of the body. But how did you reconcile those two when you had got a job to do? It was almost as though the requirement of other people, and a desire to do a job, was so strong. This was all very laudable, and what made the wheels go round in our culture. She wondered if it was a cultural pathology that we were in. That was just a question that she was asking herself. N said he thought a lot of occupations had a tendency to push you in one direction. Where he could, he tried to feel his feet, somewhere in his mind, to get some connection with the moving centre, but he agreed, it was very easy to lose it. Once an hour, he would get up and walk around for five minutes, just to get out of the thinking centre, and enable him not to be entirely an intellectual machine as he went through the process of doing what he had to do. J wondered whether the observer part of one, and the actual actor in the world, had to be dovetailed at the same time. Were there not legitimately two states of thinking? You could stand back at one point, and when you were involved in your occupation, you should be fully integrated in that. Was there any thinking about why they both had to happen at the same time? RM said there were two schools of training for being an actor. Method acting was where you were in the part, and you took it as you. Most actors will try and be both at the same time, both the actor and the act they were playing. The trouble was you might get locked into one and not find your way out to be who you really were. L said that for consistent work in art of high quality, it was best to have the passion in the art, but not in the artist.

The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

And a one-third death through the premature using up of the Bobbin-kandelnost of the feeling-center occurs for the most part among those terrestrial beings who become by profession what are called ‘representatives-of-Art.’

Most of these terrestrial professionals, especially the contemporary ones, first fall ill with one or another form of what is called ‘psychopathy,’ and thanks to this, they later in their psychopathy intentionally learn, as they say, to ‘feel’; and thereafter repeatedly feeling these abnormal being-impulses, they gradually use up the contents of the Bobbin-kandelnost of their feeling-center, and thus disharmonizing the tempo of their own common presences bring themselves to that peculiar end which is not often met with even among them there.

M asked how this sat against what was being said about passion in the responses to contributions, because it seems an invitation to pull back on passion, because passion is expensive in terms of the running down of that centre. L said it seemed to him like a warning to artists of the dangers of becoming too passionately involved. O said that Freud said about artists, that they were all neurotic. Art did not always come from the right place. Sometimes it was a form of identification, and no more than that. M asked O if she thought there can be passion without identification. O said that not all artists are alike. Some of them sit on a particular pathology and need for stability and orientation, and some of them are really passionate about what they are doing, and are really interested to discover something else.

... This kind of death through the thinking-center occurs there chiefly among those favorites of yours who try to become or have already become scientists of new formation, and also among those who during the period of their existence fall ill with the craze for reading what are called ‘books’ and ‘newspapers.’

“The result among those three-brained beings there of reading superfluously and associating only by thoughts, is that the contents of the Bobbin-kandelnost of their thinking-center are exhausted before the contents of the Bobbin-kandelnosts of their other being-centers.

L said he recognised himself there, because he loved reading sci-fi, so there was definitely an imbalance of the thinking centre bobbin-kandelnost for him. T said that Gurdjieff had chosen sport, art and reading. These were like the tenets of our civilisation. L said these were all things that we could lose ourselves in, literally. M said we could lose ourselves in anything. O said that maybe there was no connection between the psychological being of a person, and their activity. Some artists, for example, came to therapy thinking that if they improved psychologically, their work would improve. There were some very talented people in art that psychologically speaking were very infantile.

... I admit that somebody would be certain to understand this ‘secret’  because, in the first place it is simple and obvious, and secondly because they discovered it long ago and they even often employed it in what they call ‘practical use.’

They even use this simple secret, to which I referred, for those mechanical-watches which we took for comparison as an elucidating example concerning the duration of their existence.

In all the mechanical watches of various systems they use this said simple secret for regulating what is called the ‘tension’ of the said spring or the corresponding part of the general mechanism of the watch; and it is called, it seems, the ‘regulator.’

By means of this regulator it is possible to make the mechanism of a watch, wound for instance for twenty-four hours, go a whole month, and on the contrary, thanks to this regulator, it is possible to make the same winding for twenty-four hours finish in five minutes.

Source: angelhomebrew.co.uk

In the common presence of every being existing merely on the basis of Itoklanoz, ‘something’ similar to the regulator in a mechanical watch is present and is called ‘Iransamkeep’; this ‘something’ means: ‘not-to-give-oneself-up-to-those-of-one’s-associations-resulting-from-the-functioning-of-only-one-or-another-of-one’s-brains.’

RM asked if anyone could tell him what the secret was, which Gurdjieff was just trying to tell us. M asked if it was not to intentionally bring all our centres into every activity, and live harmoniously. L said he thought there were two related ideas that he was getting here. One was not to get too involved just in one of the three centres, and the other was to pace ourselves, just to do a bit at a time. That was the regulator idea. So it was going, on a ratchet, slowly round a circle, in a watch, tick tick tick, a bit of painting, then a bit more of painting, a bit of walking in nature. M said that the regulator is a metaphor, and the metaphor is the balancing of all the centres in any activity. RM said governance was not control. It was about regulating. So a good governor regulates all the centres of a business. In political governance, like governance of a nation, the concentration should be about regulating. not controlling. N said that laws were our way of regulating society, and keeping balances between interests, and making positions clear. It was meant to be objective, and objectively upheld by the courts. That was the basic idea of the legal system.

Tick Tock Crystal Clock

L had had trouble doing this challenge, and had made a brave effort on December 11th. He decided that for the physical thing he would go for a walk, for the emotional thing he would order a gift, and for the thinking centre he would play a chess move in a correspondence chess game, and he scheduled the times. He was going to play the chess move at 6pm, order the gift at 4pm, and go for the walk at 3pm, and he succeeded in going for the walk at 3pm. He had partially succeeded on that day, and didn't manage to keep it going through the month, in which there were a lot of things to remember and do. He had found that each centre had elements of the other two centres, but the main thing was whether one could have an intention to do something at a particular time, and then do it.

Every day think of something to do for the moving centre, another for the feeling centre, and a third for the thinking centre. Write them down and schedule them. See if you can stick to the plan - if need be, set alarms on your phone. On each of those three occasions during the day, observe how all your centres respond, and if they all respond in the same way.

To help her understand it a bit more, T had called the thinking centre brain work, and had planned to do the Challenge at half past three each day. She had considered it to be thinking about the Challenge and writing about the experience, and what she had done towards it or not. She had done it on the 31st December, and wrote this about the 'brain work':

The time slots pushed earlier and later like pieces of driftwood cornered by harbour walls. The time slots are not stone steps at all. When I'm at work, time slots are carved into my day by consensus planning, so that disparate humans meet, talk, reflect, plan and propose guidelines for future productive action, towards a common purpose. But the time on the holiday felt liquid and lost.

For the physical, or the body, she had planned a walk on that day.

N had not written down the things as the Challenge indicated, but he tried to do something which related to all three centres. For the emotional centre he tended to read a poem. For the physical centre he would go for a walk, or occasionally a run. For the intellectual centre he would play chess or read from a book which he knew was beyond his comprehension. He had chosen a book on the philosophy of mathematics, and tried to read a chapter a day to get into the concepts that they were talking about which he had found interesting but hard to grasp entirely. He had not been very good, he found, at the timing - he had not put it down for specific times, he would just do it at different points in the day when he remembered to do so, so he didn't order it or structure it in the way in which the exercise required.

When J had been doing physical exercise his thoughts related to either the cerebral or the romantic or heart centre, from out of what he was doing. It was the same with all of the centres. When he was doing something emotional, he did not stop thinking about it. When he was involved in the emotional side of things his consciousness was toward his head. It seemed to him that the main thrust of his feeling was around the area of the heart.

Responding to J, A said that thinking and emotion affect each other. When she thought about something, she could get emotional, even if it was just her data crunching. For her, one triggered the other one. She thought these three things were very connected, thinking, physical exercise and emotion. N noticed that when he played chess, which should be a purely intellectual process, there was a part of him that was getting emotionally involved with playing the game, and wanting to win. It was not an isolating, purely thinking, process; he was strategising. There was a part of him which was identified with the outcome of the game and part of him was hoping the person would make a mistake somewhere along the way. All the responses were not exactly purist intellectual responses. The emotional centre came in as soon as he started thinking about any process. He did not think there was a purity in each of these centres. It was very hard to separate out intellectual, emotional and physical reactions in any circumstance and even to observe them. J was surprised to hear this, because when he played chess, which was a long time ago, he did everything he could to eradicate any emotion, like I want to win, because the moment he allowed that in, he was distracted from the strategising, and the only emotion which came in, was the pleasure when someone fell into a trap that he had carefully prepared. Apart from that, anything was a distraction from the goal to get the best move, to plan as best he could, and so it was a purely intellectual exercise.

The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

Just as the duration of the movement of mechanical watches depends upon the spring they contain, so the duration of the existence of beings depends exclusively on the Bobbin-kandelnosts formed in their brains during their arising and during the process of their further formation.

Just as the spring of a watch has a winding of a definite duration, so these beings also can associate and experience only as much as the possibilities for experiencing put into them by Nature during the crystallization of those same Bobbin-kandelnosts in their brains.

They can associate and consequently exist just so much, and not a whit more nor less.

N said that, at first reading, this seemed a mechanical and unscientific way of looking at human beings and our centres and that once we went through our allocated bits in one of the centres we exhausted the system and there was no more in that area. But it seemed nevertheless to have a sort of truth in it. L said Gurdjieff was expressing, on the much larger scale of a lifetime, the earlier idea of needing balance between the three centres on the short term level of a day. Gurdjieff uses the metaphor of a watch, and what L could not make out from what he'd read so far, was whether he was suggesting that we could rewind these springs that powered the bobbin-kandelnosts, or whether that was it, that when we had used up our thinking capacity, or emotional capacity we were just left with whatever we hadn't used up.

And so, owing to all I have just said, however your favorites may exist, whatever measures they may adopt and even if, as they say, they should ‘put-themselves-in-a-glass-case,’ as soon as the contents of the Bobbin-kandelnosts crystallized in their brains are used up, one or another of their brains immediately ceases to function.

The difference between mechanical watches and your contemporary favorites is only that in mechanical watches there is one spring, while your favorites have three of these independent Bobbin-kandelnosts.

And these independent Bobbin-kandelnosts in all the three independent ‘localizations’ in three-brained beings have the following names:

• The first: the Bobbin-kandelnost of the ‘thinking-center.’
  
  
• The second: the Bobbin-kandelnost of the ‘feeling-center.’
  
  
• The third: the Bobbin-kandelnost of the ‘moving-center.’

RM said that when things are crystallised, they have a limited life, but if they are not crystallised, then they are more open. When we have crystallised ideas about things, we take a position, and that is the crystallised position we have which has limited life. So we need to be watching out whether we have become crystallised in a particular view or not. If it is crystallised, the idea of the watch holds true, but if it is not crystallised, then it is much more open, free, to continue running. T was interested in the use of the word watch which has the additional connotation of observation, and wondered about the etymology. She said that winding the watch up was effort and we had to realise it was run down in order to wind it up again.

Source: etymonline.com

Sewing the Seeds

T had got really enthusiastic. It was like the flush of the Meeting, and it lasted for about 2 weeks, and then life took over, distractions took over, and she didn't engage. It had been fascinating to read the quotes, which she hadn't done very often. She had written down her reactions and responses. It had been about remembering, and the remembering came with the breathing and the kettle, and the responses to that, and the experience of it. After reading Blaise Pascal's quote, Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary, she wrote:

Gurdjieff Work is humbling and ego busting. Gurdjieff Work sounded simple and doable, and then I expected to move on to other self-development work. The Work sounds deceptively simple, but it reaches to the core of the fragility of my life in nature and within the human world of human relationships, on the individual and world scale. Remembering is something I used to take for granted. It was something that I did, like eating or speaking or sleeping. Remembering was an undisputed natural and efficient way of being. My assessment now of then, and also of now, is I forgot in my past more than I remembered. In the past I forgot that I forgot, whereas now, through the Gurdjieff Work, I have at least started to accept that I forget, and with work I remember that I forget. Now I see that after a lifetime's habit of believing that I remember, I still forget that I remember less and forget more. This realisation is humbling as to the precariousness of my subjective understanding.

Each morning, when you are about to switch on the kettle, take five deep breaths. Read the Quote of the Hour at gurdjieffmeetings.com (website top right), and consider how it relates to the Gurdjieff Work. When you eat, empathise, from the point of view of the food, its origin and route from nature to mouth. Be grateful.

J said that an additional ingredient of the Buddha's teaching on eating, was that you should remember the effort of the people who prepared the food, and it was a way of being grateful for that which one was being given.

Taking the deep breaths had made L feel good. It made him stretch, and be aware of the qualities of the breath. His chest expanded and he stood erect. When it was sunny it was good to feel the sun. He felt energized and strong. It made him slow down, and got the metabolism going. Each successive breath was easier. He had realised how good the quotations were. For example, Blaise Pascal: Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. So we had to be aware of our own ignorance, we were deeply submerged in Gurdjieff's merde. Gurdjieff was quoted talking about this in Women of the Rope, in English it is deep shit. We were struggling to get out of that mire. Thinking of the food, he was initially aghast when he looked at the ingredients of things he was eating, so it made him change and reconsider what he was going to eat. As regards gratitude, there was lots to be grateful for; farmers, and the habit of self-observing.

N said that taking the five deep breaths elevated the spirit, especially first thing in the morning. The quotes were very interesting. He looked particularly at the quote of Apollinaire about creativity:

There is a poet to whom the Muse dictates its chants, there is an artist whose hand is guided by an unknown being using him as an instrument. Their reason cannot impede them, they never struggle, and their work shows no signs of strain. They are not divine and can do without their selves. They are like prolongations of nature, and their works do not pass through the intellect.

He also liked Art is frozen Zen (Reginald Blyth), and The truth you believe and cling to, makes you unavailable to hear anything new (Pema Chödrön). For example there is an identification with the "truth". All these things got him thinking quite early in the morning about their relevance to the Work, and whether he thought they were accurate, and also whether he thought they were meaningful quotes and whether they taught him something. In terms of eating, going back to the source of what he had bought and eaten, made him much more discriminating in the course of the month. He would particularly go to shops where he thought food was much fresher or more organic. On some occasions he even went to a food market to get stuff straight off the farms rather than supermarkets, so it made him much more grateful. It made him think of the process, of what had been involved in the production, and of the people who were involved. There was one particular place in Hampstead which served coffee but also had all the machinery to make bread in a bakery in the place itself. One day he spoke to someone about it and had a very interesting conversation. He realised that this person had spent a fortune making sure he had got all the right equipment to make the right bread, and the bread seemed to taste much better as a result and was of quite a different quality.

Responding to N and L about food and how it got to the plate, T said that, being vegetarian, she had stopped eating animals, because she could not kill them herself, so she did not want to give someone else that responsibility for her. She was also struck by the fact that even as a vegetarian, she was eating what had already died. (This was more obvious in the case of people who ate meat.) So she was taking in deadness. Although it was revitalising her, it was paradoxical; it was life giving, but had died in order to be transformed, in the Gurdjieff sense of the human as a 'cosmic apparatus for the transformation of food'. However much she wanted to get good food in her, the process of deterioration of the thing that had been alive, had started in anything that she ate. This had made her question what she was eating.

Responding to T, J said it was interesting the way we considered the animal world and what we did eat and what we didn't eat. We downgraded hyenas and vultures as animals not to eat. These animals in fact didn't kill for food, like we did, they actually fed on cadavers. So he wondered if that was not a problem in the way we were conceiving of what we ate and the way we ate.

The reading then continued from Chapter 29 of Beelzebub's Tales.

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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... when the organ Kundabuffer with all its properties was removed from their presences, ... they also should then have existed without fail until their ‘second-being-body-Kesdjan’ had been completely coated in them and finally perfected by Reason up to the sacred ‘Ischmetch.’

But later, when they began existing in a manner more and more unbecoming for three-brained beings and entirely ceased actualizing in their presences their being-Partkdolg-duty, foreseen by Great Nature, by means of which alone it is possible for three-brained beings to acquire in their presences the data for coating their said higher-parts—and when, in consequence of all this, the quality of their radiations failed to respond to the demands of the Most Great common-cosmic Trogoautoegocratic process—then Great Nature was compelled, for the purpose of ‘equalizing-vibrations,’ gradually to actualize the duration of their existence according to the principle called Itoklanoz, that is the principle upon which in general is actualized the duration of existence of one-brained and two-brained beings who have not the same possibilities as the three-brained beings, and who are therefore unable to actualize in their presences, the said—foreseen by Nature—‘Partkdolg-duty.’

RM asked what people understood by Partkdolg-duty. N said it was development of our being on this planet; part of it was living in accordance with our essence. L had a recollection of it meaning what we do to earn our presence here. T thought it sounded as if unless we did this Partkdolg-duty, we became like any other creature on the planet, one or two brained and it was the third brain which needed to be worked for and did not come without work. L asked if Gurdjieff was also suggesting that under normal circumstances human beings could live longer, but because we hadn't developed in the right way, we lived according to the rules of other animals, which meant short lifetimes. N added, because we were not living according to our true natures, i.e. our essence natures, we were shortening our own lives by that very process.

And so, my boy, because these contemporary favorites of yours, these three-brained beings of the planet Earth, already arise only according to the principle Itoklanoz, therefore from the moment of conception up to the age of responsible being there are crystallized in their brains these Bobbin-kandelnosts with very definite possibilities of actualizing the processes of association.

... I intend to take as an elucidating example just those ‘Djamtesternokhi’ such as your favorites also have and which they call ‘mechanical watches.’

As you already well know, although such Djamtesternokhi or mechanical watches are of different what are called ‘systems,’ yet they are all constructed on the same principle of ‘tension-or-pressure-of-the-unwinding-spring.’

One system of Djamtesternokhi or mechanical watch contains a spring exactly calculated and arranged so that the length of the duration of its tension from unwinding may be sufficient for twenty-four hours; another system has a spring for a week, a third for a month, and so on.

Source: theatlantic.com

RM thought watches were being used as a metaphor for the way the body works. N said the bobbin would unwind. L said that went along with the watch spring. N said Gurdjieff was very knowledgeable about carpet weaving. He was talking about something which was finite, which was weaving away, and he goes on to talk about watch springs, saying that our centres are like this. L said that when we run out of steam, we have to apply more energy and wind up the watch.

Source: reddit

T asked what was going to be made - thread had potential for many things. RM asked what were we going to make of ourselves. The bit about the durations of the watch springs reminded L of planning, which could be done on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, all of which had to be included in planning. In fact, if planning didn't happen, stuff didn't happen. RM said he found that if he didn't plan, it happened better, because you were observing exactly what needed to be done. N said he did to-do lists, and found his days were much more productive as a result. If he did not plan, he did not get all the things done and time got used up.