“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.
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.
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 youto 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.
“To notice each day if and when you experience something or do something or behave in a way that is authentic and to observe if there is any association with isolation or fear of isolation.”
T's understanding of authentic was to be the author of what she was doing, to be the motivator of her action. She observed during the month that this was a rare occurrence. Most of the time she was doing things because that was the task set her by her employer or because she was reacting to what she thought other people required or needed from her. She observed being the author of her actions and experience only a few times and this happened during the time she regularly scheduled for her own painting and nobody else was requiring her to do it. This was the time and place where the potential for authentic behaviour, being the author of her own action, could happen. This was also the time when she observed the most resistance to making the task happen, resistance kicked in with a vengeance. She generally experienced insidious self-generated resistance to organising herself to actually stand at the easel and paint. She associated this difficulty with the anxieties and fears that arose from turning her back on other people and being on her own with her task which was necessarily isolating.
The only way to be an author was to be alone with the task. Even with the circumstances in place, the studio, the materials, the time, the conviction, there was still the battle with distractions from the task, distractions that arose from nowhere and suddenly became all important to give attention and time to, I'll just do this before getting to the studio, and when in the studio, I'll just do this before standing at the easel. But then after the resistances to painting were overcome and the painting commenced, that's when she experienced a sense of authorship of having arrived somewhere where she was challenged at a deeper level than usual to be true to her own experience and level of understanding and to construct something from that position. This place was another form of battleground but on a different level. The challenge was to being true to what she perceived at the present time and not to respond or react on assumption of what she perceived of the same subject before. The challenge was to construct something from the coal face of the current encounter. This work could only be achieved alone and the challenge of the difficulty of doing it made her sweat. There was a personal battle going on or a relationship or a responding to the experience of being a human being in the phenomenon of the world.
The film directed by Jake Auerbach, "The Last Art Film" interviewed Michael Craig-Martin, Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, who passionately described his message to art students. "Once you don't have an art school behind you, nobody cares whether you get up in the morning, nobody cares whether you do a painting, even your best friend, even your parents, can only care a limited amount. Nobody really is that interested in this until you've done it." He emphasised that the Art student should be under no illusion that what they do matters to the world of others. The artist before they have made anything is never acknowledged and it's only after the event of creating something, after they've done the work, and not before, that there is any possibility of acknowledgement. An artist has to be self-motivated and has to face aloneness with the task. T remembered at art college, one of the students, who was doing a lot of work painting from life, saying, "The artist's life is a lonely Om". She didn't like it much at the time, and she didn't like it now.
L said that for him the exercise had been very similar to the previous one, which had been to notice ourselves lying. And when we were lying, we were not being authentic. Very often, also, it was to do with isolation. The fear of isolation made us pretend to be what we were not, or to fit in to whatever social expectations happen to be. We could see lies in advertised commodities, for example decaffeinated coffee, which he was not sure made sense, although he sometimes had it, but obviously coffee should be caffeinated. He would see people walking, sometimes very swiftly, or with a peculiar gait, and it seemed to him that this might reflect ego, something in the mind, it was not a natural state. He had noticed that he sometimes had his tongue between his teeth when he was not thinking straight, or when his mind was getting diverted. In art, he had been trying to compose music more authentically, and he had been doing this by singing in to a multi-track recorder from inspiration, and then trying to represent that as authentically as possible by copying, transcribing it. That was like painting from life, bringing to this world, as authentically as possible, mysterious inspiration, which came from we knew not where.
N had found this a very difficult exercise. As L had said, it related to the previous one to a certain extent about lying. Because we spend so much of our time lying, and it becomes a habitual thing, it was hard to actually experience authenticity. He was not sure though that all authentic experiences were necessarily ones in which you felt a sense of isolation. He thought sometimes you could feel a sense of liberation, a joy in being authentic. He thought part of what this work was about was actually to step outside all of that conditioning. Whatever religion you were, whatever social class you were born into, to be able to see the world differently and detached from that, this for him was part of what this work was all about, and to realise it was purely an accident of birth where or how you had ended up in this world. His experiences during the month had been ones of trying to step outside his social conditioning, and see the world differently from that perspective. Sometimes there might been feelings of isolation, or fear which came along with that, but other times there had been a lot of liberation.
T started the responses to the contributions, saying that she had been touched by N's comments that it was sometimes a liberation. T experienced this for just one second, while sitting on a bench in the park in the sun. She wasn't doing anything, and it took her by surprise. N asked T if she could describe that state a little more, and T said she could not, it was an impossible thing to chase, no matter how many meditations you did a day. She wondered if N had any examples of his description of either of those states. He said that there was a feeling of great meaningfulness and significance. Quite often there had been a lot of work prior to one of those experiences, a state impossible to chase. It comes as a gift, you can't expect it, it just descends. Maslow called these peak experiences.
JE said that if you were thinking or moving in a different direction from everybody else, you could feel very isolated. L agreed, saying that if that feeling became very strong, then it might impel to go back into the herd. In animals which moved in herds, there would be one or two which did not, but most joined the herd, and there were reasons for that, it was easier to get food if you were part of the hunting pack. That happened in human life, it was easier to get food if you joined one of the standard professions or jobs. N spoke of a book published in the 1950's called The Lonely Crowd, by the sociologist David Riesman, who discussed why people felt very lonely and would give up their freedom to join authoritarian groups or cults. T thought that we all fantasised that there was a tribe to which we were supposed to conform, but maybe it was a survival instinct from millennia ago to be together so that at least one person survived the trials and tribulations of being in the stone age.
J quoted the ancient Greek saying Know Thyself. While isolation as a word had pejorative undertones, but if it was a case of separateness because you wanted a detached, more correct perspective, that was something different. If we had considered our position in relation to the customs that surround us, then the departure from the norm should not be something that either frightens us or gives us a feeling of isolation, but was rather a comment on our conditioning and our personality rather than the actual problem. T said that the alternative word was solitude, which was less pejorative. It had a ring about it which suggested you ought to enjoy it. C said that the three letter root sol appeared in each word, associated with solo. To her isolation was active, something chosen, whereas solitude was something felt.
J asked how sophisticated did Gurdjieff say you had to be before doing this exercise. How could it help a terrorist who has only become one because he was bored. L suggested imagining that when people came through the door of the Meeting, they left their personality behind. Religious belief would likely drift away, and there would be no question of any belief in violence in pursuit of a religious conviction. Some essential qualities might be left. G asked L if he could define essence. L was not sure how much he could demystify the mysterious. If you took off all the wrapping, what was left inside? Perhaps it could be built on.
P said, on the subject of what is the essential person, at lot had been written over many millennia, and he was sure that Gurdjieff had incorporated some of this into his writings. In the tradition he came from, which was very ancient, there was a difference between essence and the secondary personality. Essence was seen as something changeless, which required uncovering. Nothing was required to be added to it. In Sanskrit, essence was called jiva or pramana, it was the soul. Personality consisted of acquired characteristics. Our anxieties, our nervousness, our neurosis, our joys, our pleasures - a sense of identity - and they would change from body to body. "R" said that P had been the first person to mention "body", and in fact Gurdjieff gave the body great importance in the sense of physical presence and experience related to the body. The Know Thyself in terms of ideas was only because we had a body which could do the thinking, and we did not respect enough what the body was for. Gurdjieff offered an idea of how to experience things which was to do with being present, and in those moments it was possible to have that solitary understanding.
The Meeting then continued with the reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 21, page 231.
For the first days, the aforementioned terrestrial professionals of that time who had chanced to arrive there did nothing but gratify to the full their inclinations, which had already become inherent to their presences in respect of the destruction of these one-brained beings of their planet...
... when that second catastrophe occurred to your planet, then many of the beings who chanced to be saved from the continent Atlantis, chiefly those who already had relatives and kinsmen in that Pearl-land, also gradually collected there.
P asked if this was supposed to be true. N replied that it was fiction, but there were a lot of symbolic references. L said that the present section described how humans killed oysters for their pearls. It followed earlier sections in which reforms were made to reduce the killing of animals for sacrifice and later for food. L said that Gurdjieff had written with great compassion about the plight of animals. GC said it was wrong to deduce from this that Gurdjieff had advocated vegetarianism, and in fact the man had been a big meat eater. L asked how he could be sure the accounts he had read were true. "R" said she had personally met people who had enjoyed meat meals cooked by Gurdjieff. L said the passages in the book were attributed to a character, Beelzebub, and were thus not necessarily Gurdjieff's own views. However it was easier to be a vegetarian now in North London than in the Caucasus a hundred years ago. T wondered if the talk of the planetary body was a metaphor for the human body and that the something "catastrophic" was something that had happened to the individual human being, or humanity. We were born into the world and then something cataclysmic happens which affects us for the rest of our lives.
...But it turned out that amongst the beings of this third group of the continent Ashhark, there were at that time several peculiar 'Havatvernonis' or 'Religions' all based on different, quite independent what are called 'religiousteachings,' having nothing in common with each other.
...Before continuing to tell you about the three-brained beings breeding just on that part of the surface of the planet Earth, it is, I think, necessary to remark, even if briefly, that there existed and still exist, ever since the time when the practice of having peculiar being-Havatvernonis or Religions began to arise and exist among your favorites, two basic kinds of religious-teachings.
P thought this was outdated, as he thought that in 2016 it was known that they were all based on the same fundamental principles, and were contradictory only superficially. JE disagreed, thinking that Gurdjieff was deliberately referring to the external practices of different religions. J thought that Gurdjieff was very much anchored in his time with his preconceptions and had not escaped into his essence. He thought a lot of it was not 2016 thinking. P said that the Internet enables people, with just a click, to learn what Gurdjieff had to travel for two months on a camel to find out about.
...It was just then that the aforementioned Sacred Individual was sent to them who, having been coated with the planetary body of a terrestrial being, was called, as I have said, Saint Buddha. ...During my detailed studies of the mentioned religious teaching I also clarified that after this Sacred Individual had become finally coated with the presence of a threebrained being there and had seriously pondered how to fulfill the task that had been laid upon him from Above, he decided to attain this by means of the enlightenment of their Reason.
GC asked what the final sentence meant. "R" said it meant that rather than setting an example, he would explain things. P thought it was a reference to Buddha.
Following the reading, an exercise suggested by GC was adopted for the coming month, to notice each day a thought which seems to arise of its own accord and try to see where it comes from.
“To notice oneself lying, and make a note each time.”
This exercise had prompted L to recall a joke M used to tell.
Question: Why do tall people get up late? Answer: Because they lie longer in bed.
L had noticed that he was lying nearly all the time. Exceptions were while working on art, because that had an essential quality, and likewise while working on the blog. Whenever he planned to do something and did not, that was lying to himself. The to-do list system which had many to-do's listed was a stark reminder of numerous intentions and fewer follow- throughs. He was still doing the three things a day exercise, so that was a small area where that lying did not happen. When he made an appointment to be somewhere and was late, that was also a form of lying.
D said he wished M was there because he wanted to ask him about his experience of aging and age. He had been living in illusion most of his life and still was most of the time. His 75th birthday was coming up later in the month. He was thinking of the past a lot, of times in childhood. He had been in a lot of institutions, and rebelled. He was not in the future. He was either in the present or the past. He said this was typical of people as they got older.
N joked that his work as a lawyer meant that you could say he was a professional liar. He did what he could to reduce conflict. His clients had decided to be litigious in the belief that they had been wronged and had a case to be fought. He defended his clients in court to help them win their litigious battle. The judge heard both sides and then made a decision. When N considered there had been a miscarriage of justice he could take the case to a judicial appeal for the case to be heard again. N had one client who was undoubtedly an honest, hard working man who had been made bankrupt by several others who had ganged up against him to achieve this. He had taken this case to judicial appeal to try to reverse the judgement in favour of his client.
T had thought that she wouldn't have anything to talk about as she considered herself an honest person. However she experienced a shock at three weeks into the month when she experienced a case of herself lying at work. It had been agreed that she regularly worked late and she was careful to keep to the correct hours. There was a system of signing out because of fire regulations and one evening she hadn't felt well and left early but signed out at the usual time, so that the boss would not have to know. She realised that this was a lie. What she observed was that she immediately thought of having to say this at the next meeting and that she felt utterly ashamed of what she'd done and the shame triggered her to consider not describing this event in the meeting after all which she then realised was a second lie compounding further the first lie, and her identity as an honest person began to develop cracks. This realisation about herself was uncomfortable and shocking and distasteful. She experienced an emotional struggle going on inside, on the one hand wanting to deny this unsavoury aspect of herself and cover up, and on the other hand wanting to be honest about her dishonesty and accept the uncomfortable truth that she was not so honest after all. She was aware that it also brought back feelings from childhood of having to be honest and if you weren't honest then you were bad. If you were honest you were good. She wanted to be seen to be good and this triggered lying to keep up this illusion. For her the exercise had been an effective self observation tool.
"R" had been spending time with one of her grandchildren who was on the autistic spectrum. He was now 11, and was reading a lot, an enormous amount of which stayed in his mind. He would repeat back everything he read at great speed. This highlighted for her how much we acquired by reading, and then repeated this acquired information as our own experience of the subject and fact, whereas it was not fact and only acquired knowledge, not knowledge through experience. So she realised how much of what she said was, by virtue of this fact, a lie. This was difficult.
RM had not done the exercise because he continued with the one that works for him, to wake him up. He uses a one minute timer on waking and then 15 minutes with 4 minute chimes to wake him up to being present. He developed this further during the day using the timer chime in various daily situations, such as driving in the car, to wake him up to be aware of the present that he was in. This was transforming his experience of his day and it was extraordinary.
JE said her work consisted in helping people, but she felt she was helping others in areas that she was unable to help herself in. In this sense her work was a lie. It would be better if she didn't help others and they had to do it for themselves, and then they would learn something real. GC said that when he listened to the radio in his car, he normally did not listen to the news, because he considered it manipulation of the facts. He habitually turned it off and then turned it on again after several minutes in order to purposefully miss the news and then to continue listening to music. But he was aware that one time he didn't turn it off in time, and something in the news caught his attention. He continued to listen before realising that the newsreader had gone onto two or three other subjects and becoming aware that what he was listening to was not what he wanted to listen to and was no longer something of interest to him. He commented on how quick it could be to stop being awake.
After the contributions, L responded to D's comments about his experience of being more focused on the past as he got older. He recalled that there was a Chinese parable of two tigers which described maudlin perspectives and appropriate action, and T elaborated on it.
JE responded to L's comments about the connotation of essence with creating art. She had come across Gurdjieff's concept of objective art which had a visceral power which seemed independent of the artist. She had been invited to a Persian New Year event and had the opportunity to hear some old Persian music which seemed to communicate directly to her. L said that artistic ideas and inspiration were real, but in themselves unfashioned, like diamonds brought up from the mines. Later the artist will work on that gem to provide many different perspectives and structure. Perhaps the power of Gurdjieff's objective art lay in the unearthed gem, without which the finished product would be impossible, but it did require human work to make the art. L saw in this an interpretation of the concept of transforming coarse materials into finer ones., which "R" had quoted Gurdjieff as saying was one of the purposes of humans on the planet.
GC said that when he first visited Israel he had felt nothing, though he was supposed, as a Jew, to have felt something. On the other hand, he had visited the Arab countries and did feel something. But when he first stepped off the plane into India it felt to him as if he had come home! He asked about the nature of that experience. L described Israel as a politicisation of Jewish culture, and it was no longer real feeling that drove it. It had become nationalistic. T commented on how India had centuries of meditation practice as its traditional custom for all, which might have affected the subtle energies of the whole continent, which maybe was what GC was experiencing when he went there.
RM said he had listened to N and T talking when they were giving their contributions, and had noticed that N used the word "you" rather than "I" which gave him the experience of being told what he and others had experienced but not what N had. When he heard T speak she said "I" and this had communicated her experience more directly and felt more authentic.
GC said that he was a professional gambler. All his life his career had been in gambling, and the experiences of winning or losing were no different. He had earned a living from it, and he had won a lot and lost a lot. But he kept on doing it. This reminded T of visiting the Auerbach exhibition at the Tate Britain. At the end of each day, the painting had been worked on; adding layers, taking layers away, adding layers, trying to achieve, to a hair's breadth accuracy, a visual response to his experience of his surroundings. This approach often left him with a scraped off canvas at the end of the working day, with apparently nothing left to show for all his work, except the chance the next day to try again. Each painting was worked on for years, not months. This process seemed to be one of winning and losing, gaining ground and then losing it, to gain it again, echoing the gambling, winning and losing. The gambler, the painter, immersed in a process that was based on trying one's luck, taking chances, using all one's knowledge of the field to play the field. T described Auerbach's approach to painting as above all an honest approach. Auerbach tried to be as truthful and honest to his experience of the "fact" that was in front of him, the human figure, face, landscape, or mix of all.
The Meeting then continued with the reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 20.
Beelzebub continued to speak as follows: Sitting in a Chaihana in this small town of Arguenia, I once overheard a conversation among several beings seated not far from me. They were talking and deciding when and how they should go by caravan to Pearl-land.
Having listened to their conversation, I gathered that they intended to go there for the purpose of exchanging their 'turquoises' for what are called 'pearls.' I must here, by the way, draw your attention also to the fact that your favorites of former as well as of contemporary epochs liked and still like to wear pearls and also the said turquoise, as well as many other what are called 'precious-trinkets' for the purpose, as they say, of 'adorning' their exteriors. But if you would like to know my opinion, they do so, of course instinctively, in order to offset, so to say, the 'value-of-their-inner-insignificance.'
... As a result of it all, we also were then included in the company of their caravan, and two days later we set off together with them. ... After every kind of difficulty we at last, one rainy morning, on ascending a height, suddenly saw on the horizon the outline of a large water-space bordering the edges of the continent Ashhark, which was then called Pearl-land. ...It cannot be helped, my dear Hassein. Now that I have told you the history of the arising of the second group of the three-brained beings of the continent Ashhark, I must tell you also about the history of the arising of the third group. "You must indeed tell me, my dear and beloved Grandfather," eagerly exclaimed Hassein; and, this time with great reverence, extending his hands upwards, he sincerely said: "May my dear and kind Grandfather become worthy to be perfected to the degree of the sacred Anklad'!" Without saying anything to this, Beelzebub merely smiled and continued to relate as follows:
L queried what the term Anklad denoted. "R" said that this was revealed near the end of the book.
Following the reading, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the coming month. As there had been much talk of authenticity and isolation, a suggestion from L was adopted, to notice each day when one behaves, experiences or does something authentic in nature, and to observe if there is any association with isolation or fear of isolation.
“Todo something twice every day. The first time might be habitual, and the second time with more awareness, working to be awake.”
RM asked what the exercise had been. He intended to stick with things that worked for him. He did a one minute exercise every day and had been doing it for some years.
Domhnall Gleeson demonstrates a variant of the exercise, in the movie "About Time" (2013), directed by Richard Curtis.
N had found it a more complicated exercise to do than trying to remember himself by counting lamposts. He had been trying to diet, and had been using that as a Gurdjieff technique. He had also had quite a lot of dental pain in his jaw, and was trying to see if there was a way of becoming present to the pain and through this to see if it became less intense.
D had been suffering from bronchitis, and all the teachings had gone out of the window. He described how bronchitis had slowed him down. While walking to the Meeting he had had to stop half way and get a bus. He was starting to wonder if his lung was damaged. He had been thinking again about his earlier problems with his bipolar friend, and the television next door, two major things in his life (which were very sad) and seeing them from a different perspective after reading Barry Long, who said we put too much emotion into our likes and dislikes. He had realised the emotions he was feeling were depleting him of energy, and had had to step back from them.
L had done the exercise. The first time he did it, he locked the door twice. The next day, on his walk to work through a park, he walked round an area of it twice. The third day, it being a cold morning, he cleaned condensation from the car windows, and then did it again. This made it a better job and he was more conscious about doing it. Another day he repeated his timed meditation. He had come to realise that doing his meditation at the same time every day was getting to be a bit of a habit. So he had moved it to a to-do list and did it at whatever time felt appropriate or convenient. Meditating at different times of the day made it feel more meaningful, and made it more likely he would have those moments of mindfulness more often during the day. He thought it was very important for developing a magnetic centre to have a to do list, so that planning and tasks done aggregated around one external thing, even though they originated from different I's.
J said that an exercise he had been trying recently was making sure his wallet was in his pocket twice before going out, which made it less likely to forget it. Having a purpose justified it. To do it as a set exercise adulterated its value. Was the purpose of counting lamposts to become conscious through that walk, or was it to become conscious but allow that consciousness not to interfere with a train of thought? He suggested that the purpose might be slightly other than it seemed to be.
"R" had tried doing something much more slowly and what she noticed was the constant appearance of laziness and impatience. Since her wish to try the exercise was as part of studying and observing what was going on in her, which was also going on in all her companions, that was where its value was, not whether she succeeded or not. She did not do a lot of walking so did not encounter many lamposts.
Lucy, from Finchley, admires the only lampost in Narnia. (From The Chronicles of Narnia, C S Lewis and Walt Disney)
T had found that she could not plan to do anything twice. What happened was that she would be going to get something and find that she was going to the wrong place. Usually she would have negative thoughts about that, but this month she consciously repeated the mistake. This happened several times during the month and she started using it as her gateway into the exercise.
JE had come to the Meeting looking to be more focused. She had been in the School of Economic Science when a teenager, and had done a bit of meditation. She was looking for something very practical to focus her. She had tried the lampost exercise. She noticed one in her street at nighttime, and at that moment realised how beautiful the street was, with the light shining on the bricks.
The contributions were followed by some time for responses.
"Back to life, back to the present time, back from a fantasy."
Back to Life, by Carol Wheeler with Soul II Soul (1989)
L thought the interesting thing from J's account was how far he went to in counting lamposts before he forgot he was counting. J said he had not actually conducted that exercise because he now had a dog, and lamposts could not be ignored, and wondered if there was a different question he could answer on that theme. L said the lamposts were a very good way of testing how quickly the transition from being aware to daydreaming happened.
J asked why there was the presumption that the alternative to being conscious of the immediate, and perhaps not very interesting aspects of the world you were moving around in, had to be day dreaming?
D found he did too much thinking. He had had to stop half way up the hill because he was breathless. He had been concentrating on his breath but then had become aware of the sun, and the whole idea of being on this planet, took him away from his pain and breathlessness, and he started to calm down and breathe better. If we were not present, we were absent, because we were not in touch with the rest of the universe. RM said there was another element to it - was what he was thinking now relevant to being present and to what he was doing now. That was a discipline. N related to what D was saying about emotions - there were so many in the wrong place. "R" said that Gurdjieff stated throughout Beelzebub's Tales and many of his talks that we were put here on Earth for the purpose of transforming course substances into finer ones, and not just to improve ourselves but also for something much greater. N said we were trying to become more efficient machines. As we did this we were also transforming the world, and other energies as well, so therefore we were playing a role, perhaps unconsciously. "R" agreed, saying that the influence percolates like osmosis whether we were intentionally doing it or not, but she was not sure that we got more refined. Rather, she thought that we were always at the beginning. N said he saw this in his work as a lawyer. Sometimes people could be very litigious about things, and he would try to get to the heart of the issue, and often it came down to emotion in the wrong place, and he would suggest an alternative approach. He thought you could either add to the worlds woes and conflicts, or you could try to reduce them. "R" said that one day we might reduce the amount of war.
What "R" had said, in her contribution about impatience, had reminded D of his experience with bronchitis. You really had to respect it and be patient. If you forgot about it and acted as if you were better, you might relapse. You had to allow time for the body to heal itself, which it did if you allowed it enough time. T said she could relate to this. She had a painful left shoulder which made it hard for her to put her jacket on the usual way, but she kept forgetting this and her habitual way of putting on the coat kept over-riding the pain-free way of putting the other arm in first.
Responding to J, L asked who was the person counting the lamposts and who was the person daydreaming or thinking things out, and were they the same person? J thought this was a statement rather than a question.
The Woman with Seven Personalities - Interview on the Jensen Show
For RM it was a question. One part of him would say he was going to get up at 6 in the morning, but another part of him would say no, he was going to get up at 10 past. Another part would feel guilty. Suddenly all these I's would start appearing in contrast with each other. A lot of the Gurdjieff work was about trying to bring all these I's into one centre.
L said that there was only one I in control at any given time, so there is the illusion that there is only one, though there is no reason to think that there is only one. It becomes a problem when it develops into a multiple personality disorder, and then they become very distinct.
The Meeting then continued with the reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 20.
That island on which Mister God Himself and the deserving souls exist is called 'Paradise,' and existence there is just 'Roses, Roses.'
All its rivers are of milk, their banks of honey; nobody needs to toil or work there ...
In other public squares of that beatific island are piled huge mountains of sweetmeats specially prepared with essence of 'poppy' and 'hemp'; and every 'soul' may take as much as he pleases at any time of the day or night.
...The other, smaller island, to which our Mister God sends for their further existence the 'souls' whose temporary physical parts have been idle here and have not existed according to His commandments, is called 'Hell.' All the rivers of this island are of burning pitch; the whole air stinks like a skunk at bay. ... It must be noticed that although the custom of Sacrificial-Offerings was also flourishing at that period in the country of Maralpleicie, it was not on the large scale on which it had flourished in the country Tikliamish.
RM said the religion was an attempt to make people wake up. So if they were not present it would be hell, and if they were present they would get their rewards. "R" said it was a system of rewards and fear. RM saw parallels with a Muslim view of paradise. T thought the passage was describing a system of social control. L said it specifically mentions the practice of animal sacrifice, and that it was not as prevalent as in the previous country Tikliamish. But it was still bad, so as before he seemed to be focused on the treatment of animals. J said that it says that the entire edifice of religion is nothing more or less than to take advantage of man's superficial aspects. L thought it was a very male oriented view of heaven. N thought it was to protect the king's tax income. People were led to believe they would get their hemp or opium in heaven but they were not to have it while alive. "R" said it was a substitute for conscience.
... Just then I invented that those spirits in 'cap of invisibility' who, as it was said in that great religion, watch our deeds and thoughts in order to report them later to our Mister God, are none other than just the beings of other forms, which exist among us. It is just they who watch us and report everything to our Mister God. But we people not only fail to pay them their due honor and respect, but we even destroy their existences for our food as well as for our Sacrificial-Offerings. ... It is very interesting to remark here that the information that serves on the planet Earth for the rise of a holy place is usually due to certain Earth beings called 'Liars.' This disease of 'lying' is also very widespread there. On the planet Earth people lie consciously and unconsciously. And they consciously lie there when they can obtain some personal material advantage by lying; and they unconsciously lie there when they fall ill with the disease called 'Hysteria.'
D said it was interesting that we lie to ourselves, and to others to keep the peace. RM said we lie generally to preserve a belief that we have and to indoctrinate everybody else into it. Sometimes we knew that it was a lie. "R" said that in any case words were pretty inaccurate. D was more interested in the issue of lying to ourselves. When he was ill he was impatient to get well.
RM found it particularly interesting how people of a religion of good and bad develop a righteous way of doing things. He thought vegetarianism was an example of such a practice. L said that in the text Gurdjieff had moved from criticising the practice of animal sacrifice to criticising killing of animals for food. This was a theme Gurdjieff kept returning to. There were those who said that Gurdjieff advocated eating meat, but after researching this it was something Osho said, which has been repeated on the Internet a thousand times, although it is without corroboration. "R" said that Gurdjieff cooked meat for his followers all the time. RM said that he ate it too. T said that just from the reading of the book of Beelzebub's Tales, within this book the author's main character talks very compassionately about other beings. He does not use the word animals, but refers to them deliberately as beings.
But the most peculiar of all was the custom of paying attention to the voices of beings of various forms.
...And so, my boy, what our Ahoon so mischievously reminded me about concerned just that custom, which developed there in the city Gob, of attaching significance to the voices of beings of various forms and particularly to the voice of what are called 'donkeys,' of which there were then, for some reason or other, a great many in the city Gob. ... as soon as the sound of the voice of the donkey was heard, all who heard it had to flop down immediately and offer up prayers to their god and to their revered idols and, I must add, these donkeys usually have a very loud voice by nature and their voices carry a long way. ...Having thus become convinced that there also, among that second group of beings of the continent Ashhark, I had succeeded so easily in uprooting, for a long time, the custom of Sacrificial-Offerings, I decided to leave
Following the reading, there was a discussion on what exercise to adopt for the coming month.
"R" said that one of the things mentioned in the last few pages was lying, and that would be a really valuable thing to set oneself to be reminded by, if you noticed yourself lying. JE said Gurdjieff wrote of two types of lying - the conscious one and the one where people fall ill with hysteria, which made her think of what leads to wars like the the tension between North and South Korea. J said that the wise king was a liar of the first kind, whereas the people who somehow create the holy places, were not liars in the same way, they were hysterical. L agreed that the king was a liar for the first reason, because he was losing his input of taxes from the workers. RM said it was all for the best intentions because he felt he had to wake them up. N said he did not want to wake them up to stop the drug taking, he wanted to manipulate them for his own ends, to get them back into their normal jobs and thus money back into his coffers. So he created another lie. RM thought it more appropriate if each person chose their own exercise. "R" said it was useful to have a guideline to start with. It was decided that the exercise would be to notice oneself lying. N said it would also be interesting to observe other people lying to you, and to see what were the tell tale signs of a liar.
“Toaction and observe the experience of deliberate slowness, defined further as to do something every day at half the usual speed.”
Moving on from the counting lamposts exercise RM had spoken about before, he was very aware of the importance of not just counting lamposts, but being totally aware of being present so he could see how far he got before he lost himself, and added doing something more slowly, trying to get out of the habit of walking as fast as he normally does. If he found he was walking at a fast pace he would slow down to the next lampost.
N had found it a very interesting exercise. The slowing down of things enables you to see things better. He had used it in a number of areas. One was driving. He had a tendency to go fast and in his area they had made a 20 mph speed limit in quite a few places which was quite slow when he was used to going at 30 mph. He observed resistance, an internal struggle within himself to trying to keep within the 20 mph limit. There was a tendency with him to try and do things fast at work or wherever he is doing things, so working against that tendency is good. The other place he tried it was in learning to play his guitar and playing scales. He slowed down, which was good, but he had to use a metronome at times because of the tendency to speed up. He didn't know objectively how much he had slowed his action down, whether it was half the rate, but he found that the more he concentrated on it, the more he became aware of other things, and there was more time to be present in the experience.
L had found this exercise to be a lot harder than some of the others, partly because of the definition. It was to do something at half speed but it didn't specify what. But he did notice that, like others, he tended to rush things. He thought it was maybe a manifestation of tension. Generally, thinking about some of the Gurdjieff exercises, from other perspectives, they can be seen as disorders. For example, counting lamposts could be a symptom of OCD, and similarly always opening doors with a particular hand. But the exercises were being done for a purpose. He had also continued to do the alternating exercise of eating and not eating for a minute, and the will-power exercise of doing three things a day, which could get a little obsessive at times and had led to some late nights, but he was achieving it consistently, and was able to look back on about a thousand things done over the year, some of which were very trite, but others of which were significant and of benefit for ever after.
H had been unable to fit the exercise in to the things he did in practice, but did realise that mechanicalness would be interfering with it somehow. He had been reading around this subject from Ouspensky's point of view, and recalled a passage in the Gita which said that dwelling on the objects of sense creates an attachment for them. Dr Roles had been interested in it, among others, and they described this process of attachment which exists all the time. In the Indian teaching it's called attachment, and in the Gurdjieff teaching identification. It's very, very hard to get out of it, except by trying to be present, and the exercise can bring you into the present by slowing down.
T had tried the exercise with walking, and what surprised her, after she had been all set to walk slowly, was that she found herself speeding up again, and there was a process of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering. She would be walking in the rain, counting lamposts, and would realise she had missed three, and would then slow down. Working with these two exercises simultaneously reminded her of "pat your head and rub your tummy". It was really hard to do both and keep both in mind. She would increase her pace without realising and then forget to count lamposts. She found it disturbing that she did things fast mechanically, and in a way to forget because she found them boring. Activities like washing up were very helpful for slowing down.
The focus for "R" in the last month had been family and social occasions, and just working at really listening and taking in the presence of not her agenda, but somebody else's agenda which was really valuable material because at one stage she was in a room full of people of the social climbing variety, and the one person she found she could really listen to was somebody who was quite disturbed and who spoke in a genuine way about the things that were upsetting him, and how different that was from the people who wanted to tell everybody how important they were, and that brought her back to who is here listening, can they listen without judging, and can they even share something which might be supportive - she felt not in the library in her head, gesturing to her head as she spoke, but in here pointing to her torso.
Following the contributions, K requested an explanation of what was meant by being present, or self-remembering. RM said he knew what self-remembering meant now because he knows what it is like not to. GC asked K what he thought presence was. K said that he thought it was something which is aware of you, your physical existence, some part of your brain or being that is able to experience you existing and that can also include the surrounding reality. His experience is not coloured by associations, or if they exist they somehow go into the background temporarily, there is an expectation of himself that is more pure, so if he is having that experience of himself, then the logical thing is that something is taking it in. So in his experience that is what being present is, or that is an aspect of it.
Responding to the issue of identification raised by H, N asked if an experience of being present was an experience of non-identification. K said that all these associations are parts of feelings we are having all the time. They are directed to some object. There is an attached, identified relationship. If his attention is on himself in an impartial way, not attached with judgement of feeling or criticism, that is in the direction of being non-identified. GC asked K if he was talking about awareness without definition. K agreed, as a definition is something which uses words, and if words are a product of associations then it was so. L said he liked the way K put it, as it included the idea that you couldn't be totally present because there are always some things at the back of the mind which are in the process of undermining it, and it takes some kind of conscious effort to be as present as possible, but in our general experience the state cannot be sustained indefinitely. K said that in his experience it was for a brief moment, and then everything came back in again.
N thought the discussion was about moving from personality to impersonality. GC thought the term self-remembering gave the wrong impression because it seemed to indicate there was something remembering something. For him there was no me. It's the personality - you observe nothing through the personality, the mask. The problem comes when you try to understand the infinite with the finite.
K said that we were somehow trying to either develop something or find something to get beneath these layers of the personality. The idea is that there is something behind the personality that could be uncovered. GC asked what it was. Was it the the carrot on the stick that people are always grasping for? K said that the observer, the little I, was something that's not so attached to the personality, not so attached to this construct of who we are that gets built up. GC asked if K thought there was another construct behind that construct. K said it was possible, but you had to start somewhere. Maybe it was all a nonsense, but from his own experience, he has moments where there is something of greater depth that appears. In the fullest experience for him, there was an emotional element too, and an experience of greater depth of being alive. Maybe that was just another carrot or another construct, but it did seem that there was more value in that than all the superficiality that we were constantly engaged with, so from that point of view it seemed that there was a quality of difference. L said we do know that inspiration is a tangible and real force in the world, so we could surmise that that comes from or through the deeper self. That is something which is there, it is a phenomenon, people get inspired to do phenomenal things and sometimes do them.
T talked of the concept of the VIP inside you. It is very hard to feel you can relate to a 'very important person'. As a way of describing what is inside you it is difficult to know how to relate to the VIP. As in external life how unfamiliar and anxiety making to address a Queen or Prime Minister.
Following the responses, the Meeting continued with the reading from Beelzebub's Tales, Chapter 20.
... both the climate of this country and everything else so delighted the hunters and their families that none of them, as I have already said, had any desire to return to the continent Atlantis, and from that time on they remained there ...
Just before the second great catastrophe those genuine learned beings then existing on the continent Atlantis ... began to observe very carefully all the natural phenomena of their continent; but however hard they tried, they could in no way find out what precisely had to happen.
A little later on and with the same aim, they sent some of their members to other continents and islands, in order, by means of these common observations, perhaps to be able to find out what was impending.
... One of these members, namely, the mentioned important being, had chosen the continent Iranan for his observations and, having migrated there with his servants, had settled on the shores of the said water-space later called the Sea of Beneficence.
It was just this same learned member of the society Akhaldan who once chanced to meet certain of the mentioned hunters on the shores of the said Sea of Beneficence, and having learned that they had also come from the continent Atlantis, was naturally very glad, and began to establish relations with them.
And when, shortly afterwards, the continent Atlantis entered within the planet and this learned Akhaldan member had no longer any place to return to, he remained to exist with these hunters in that future Maralpleicie.
N said it was interesting that Gurdjieff gave the example of Atlantis, because it was a continent which was destroyed. And sometimes one thinks about this world being destroyed. N wondered if by giving the example of Atlantis and saying that some inhabitants survived may be suggesting a link with schools that Gurdjieff searched for and wrote of discovering. "R" said it was also a description of the fact that our real consciousness is now submerged. L said that maybe Atlantis has a symbolic meaning.
Plato's description was of a city based on a design of concentric circles, which may have had a symbolic design. L was struggling to find meaning in it but it might be to do with what Atlantis means to us, and maybe to do with the geometry of the city according to Plato's description, which Gurdjieff would have known of. RM saw this chapter as an allegory. T heard Maralpleicie as "moral place". GC queried where the places actually were, and whether they were in Asia. L said that after the last time there were queries about the locations, he searched online for a map and could not find one, and suggested it might be worth making one if there was not one available.
...Multiplying, these beings gradually spread over this country more and more widely, although always preferring the shores of the Sea of Beneficence and the valleys of those two large rivers which flowed into it.
GC said that Gurdjieff seemed to be very fond of the word beneficence, what did it mean? Did it mean doing well, or making good things? N said that we were talking about an area which was blessed by nature, the Sea of Beneficence. People in those early days of society moved by the sea for the supply of food, much better life and security than up in the remote mountains.
After long observations he finally cleared up for himself that the cause of the phenomenon was a new habit of the beings of his community, namely, their habit of chewing the seed of a plant then called 'Gulgulian.' This surplanetary formation also arises on the planet Earth at the present time, and those of your favorites who consider themselves 'educated' call it 'Papaveroon,' but the ordinary beings simply call it the 'poppy.'
...In the course of his further close observations and impartial investigations King Konuzion clearly understood that these seeds contained a 'something' that could completely change, for the time being, all the established habits of the psyche of those beings who introduced this something into themselves, with the result that they saw, understood, felt, sensed, and acted quite otherwise than they were previously accustomed to see, sense, act, and so on.
...When King Konuzion became clearly convinced of all this, he immediately dispatched everywhere trusted and faithful subjects of his strictly to command in his name all beings of his community to cease chewing the seeds of the mentioned plant; he also arranged for the punishment and fine of those beings who should disobey this order.
Thanks to these measures of his, the chewing of the said seeds seemed to diminish in the country of Maralpleicie; but after a very short time it was discovered that the number of those who chewed had only seemingly diminished; in reality, they were even more than before.
GC said that Beelzebub is talking about people out of their heads, tripping. RM said that the experience was absolute nonsense, but GC asked how he knew that? "R" said the distinction was that people under narcotic influence stopped making an effort. H said that if both experiences were equally valid, did the concept of waking sleep mean anything? K said that the perception itself was the waking sleep. H said he thought that there were people, like Ouspensky, who had woken, and you could tell that was the case from the way they wrote. L said he did not get that impression. He got the impression of a writer who had got sidetracked and was producing more acceptable fodder for people to read. Eventually enneagram study was turned into a form of astrology and there was the huge appeal of the enneagram personality types which is very much more interesting to talk about at parties, and is also a much easier read.
The proposed Mars One settlement
L was not sure Gurdjieff said you could wake up but he provided a means of trying. He thought it was interesting that the human race was acting out this whole drama in trying to escape from the pull of gravity - we were at the stage now where there were half a dozen people in orbit doing self-observation of the planet. But that was not enough for people, they had not yet escaped from gravity, and they wanted to go to Mars.
...Finally the wise king decided to deal with this evil indirectly, namely, by playing on the weaknesses in the psyche of the beings of his community. With this aim he invented a very original 'religious doctrine' corresponding to the psyche of the beings of that time; and this invention of his he spread broadcast among all his subjects by every means at his disposal.
GC said this paragraph summed up Gurdjieff perfectly.
Following the reading, an exercise was decided upon. A suggestion from L was adopted, to do something twice every day. The first time might be habitual, and the second time with more awareness, working to be awake.
Adam Sandler demonstrates an example of this exercise (opening a door twice) in Punch-Drunk Love (2002).
As the minute's silence which opens the Meetings was about to start, there was a distinct knocking at the door, but there was no one there. More knocks and sounds from the door ensued throughout the silence, after which D locked it shut, to prevent it being rattled by the wind. The date happened to coincide with the anniversary of the Meeting's late Founder Member, M, who passed away the previous December. Moments later there was a further knocking at the door, which D unlocked, and RM entered.
The cause of the initial knocking was ascribed, as is usual in such circumstances, to the wind, and the initial contributions from the attendees began.
EXERCISE
“To daily count lampposts while walking, and note the maximum count attained.”
L had read the account by Ouspensky of his exercise counting lampposts, and hadn't taken it too seriously at the time as he assumed it would be quite easy to count lampposts, but in practice he found it very hard. On one auspicious occasion he got to 35 but rarely made it to double figures. Again, it was a demonstration that our perception of being free-willed, conscious and awake can be an illusion. He had also carried on with some previous exercises - doing three things every day which were planned at the beginning of the day, and the alternation of minutes eating or not eating.
D said that he had his phone switched on and if it rang he would have to answer it and would go out of the room. His friend was due to travel overseas that morning, and he didn't know for sure if she was going or not, so he would have to take the call and go if it came. It was really a challenge to be a friend of hers, and he was a very good friend. Over the last 18 months he had really had to be present. Even that morning walking up the street he had really had to be present because he had so wanted to come - but if the phone rang he would have to go.
N had likewise found it a difficult exercise. He had started off with great enthusiasm and lost it fairly quickly. On one occasion he got up to the thirties. He got a bit bored with it. He had to use quite a lot of resources of his will-power to count like that. It was not the sort of thing he could do without being consciously there and because it was not the most exciting exercise in the world he got bored with it and resisted it. One of the things that did happen in the month was an increase in consciousness at some level; he went to a jazz concert in a church, and had to wait beforehand, sitting in the garden of the church, and the church bell was ringing. Every time it rang it was as if the gong was sounding within him and he felt his whole body resonating. He wondered if it was because he had done the exercise earlier that day, and whether there might be some pay-off in that he might have experienced something internally more strongly as a result of having done the exercise.
T had tried the exercise throughout the month. The first couple of weeks she remembered it, but in the following weeks it faded away. The most difficult part was between the lampposts, because that was when she got distracted. It reminded her of the alternate one-minute eating and not eating exercise. Each time there was a lamppost it was as if she could eat something, there was something she could relate to. She experienced the time between the lampposts as her mind trying to find something to eat. She had often gone some way down the street before she remembered the exercise in the first place. She often looked back, and saw that she had passed 2 or 3 without registering them so the score was always something like 5 out of 8, or 6 out of 8. It was difficult to be aware of what did trigger the memory to do what seemed a mundane, banal exercise.
It was one of RM's favourite exercises which he had been doing for years. He found that the most important part was in between the lampposts. It made him so much more aware of the presence of the self as opposed to the monkey-mind of attachments and things and where he was going and what was happening. If he didn't hang on to these things they flowed through him, just as a watermill did not hang on to the water. Occasionally as he reached the next lamppost he forgot he was doing it, and the lamppost reminded him. and it was the in-between bit that was the real meditation and had given him a real sense of the difference between being mindful and being stuck with past ideas and expectations, two very clear separations, and he had found that extremely helpful for years and had used the lampposts often when walking from home to the station, maybe thirty lampposts, and it was rewarding when he had got to the station and he had managed to hold a sense of being present in between the lampposts.
J said it was not a unique experiment, it was an example of a type of experiment, and recounted a related experience from his schooldays when he was preparing for A-level in Ancient History. He had gone through Suetonius looking for the word crown as a way of remembering all the other stories. If the word crown appeared, he remembered the story. It paid off, especially when one of the questions in the A-level exam when he actually came to be doing it was: Explain the significance of crowns in Suetonious. There were really two levels of consciousness. The exercise was also a way of being able to concentrate on two things at the same time, two equally important totems or goals, and may be a good mind training anyway. Looking for the word crown was rather boring, like looking for lampposts, but if you had another purpose in mind, if you were concentrating on something else as well, it was a mental training.
"R" said that she did not do a lot of walking because she had a bad back, and she did not need to in her daily life. When preparing in the mornings, she chose moments in the day (though she did not always remember those moments) to be aware of the flow of life energy. It was easy to immediately forget, but sometimes she could catch the flow of life energy through the body and through the feelings, and not try to grasp it but to let it continue to flow. Another thing she had noticed and made a point of looking at, was that with each breath we tended to think that the work lay in breathing in, but in fact the muscles relaxed when she breathed in to make more space. When she breathed out the diaphragm was working, and that was a sort of contradiction, in a way being caught in the middle of two different directions of energies, and to notice it as a kind of signpost. Not to interfere, with this natural process, was even more difficult.
Baruch Spinoza
1632 - 1677
Following the contributions, the Meeting moved on to responses.
J wondered if a lot of what had been discussed goes along with Spinoza's analysis of happiness, being not just about happiness but also awareness of being happy. What we seemed to be doing with the lampposts was being conscious of what was going on around us, highlighting that thinking as well as reacting in the flow.
D followed up RM's comments about attachments, and asked him how they applied to emotional attachments. RM said that these can be tested - if you were dependent on a person for your happiness, then that was attachment. If you emotionally warmed towards somebody regardless of whether they were with you or not, that was not attachment. Q said if you were interested in self-study, a relationship could be an opportunity, as best as you could, to accept yourself, and everything that went on within you, simply to see if you could have an attitude of interest and self-acceptance of yourself.
L was wondering how N had remembered to start the lamppost counting exercise. In other exercises there had been a trigger, for example opening a door with a different hand would be triggered on getting home. RM said that the idea of the lamppost itself was the trigger, because your mind was subconsciously thinking about it, even though you were not aware of it. This would often happen to him while walking, and the minute he realised he would start the exercise. T had the experience of it linking with the Meeting as well - it reinforced the Work, and was a support for it. N said it was a very good exercise as we were never without lampposts somewhere; in a sense it was a permanent exercise so as to see your level of awakeness or awareness at any particular time. T had been trying to wring some meaning from it, and the metaphor of it being a light in the darkness helped, though that was harder during the day when the lamps were not on. RM said we must not lose sight of the point that it was the level of awareness we were looking for, not the counting of lampposts which help to trigger it and remind us - it was about what you did in between the lampposts, and as people have mentioned, it's boring.
N talked of one thing that came out of this for him He had gone to a lot of concerts in November, and had written down what people were playing. Remembering the songs that were being played helped him concentrate on the music and gave him a record of what he had listened to, so he actually enjoyed the concert again afterwards by looking over his notes. So sometimes bringing things into the intellectual centre and not just experiencing them as events could help. Memory could help, appreciation could help, a lot of other things as well, so having some direction and some extra intention when you do certain things makes a massive difference to your appreciation of them. J wondered if there was a difference between lampposts and appreciation of jazz. Was there a danger of diminishing returns because the more you did it, the more it became a habit and therefore the less impact it had, whereas with jazz, when taking notes, you were constantly being brought into the present, which was what the lamppost exercise was supposed to be about. L said that it would appear that the exercises had to keep changing lest they became new habits.
Following the responses, the Meeting continued with reading from Chapter 19, Beelzebub’s Second Descent To Earth.
But during the day I feared that the same or other unconscionable beings might commit further outrages on my friend's planetary body, so I decided at least to prevent the possible actualization of what I feared. I therefore immediately hired several suitable beings for a great sum of money and, unbeknown to anybody else, had his planetary body removed and temporarily placed in my Selchan, that is, on my raft which was moored not far away on the river Oksoseria, and which I had not disposed of because I had intended to sail on it from there to the sea Kolhidious to our ship Occasion. This sad end of my friend's existence did not prevent his preachings and persuasions about the cessation of Sacrificial-Offerings having a strong effect on many, even on a great many. And indeed, the quantity of slaughterings for Sacrificial-Offerings began very perceptibly to diminish and one could see that even if the custom were not abolished completely with time, it would at least be considerably mitigated. ...I learned afterwards that this story reached His All- Quarters-Maintainer, the Most Great Archangel 'Setrenotzinarco,' the All-Quarters-Maintainer of that part of the Universe to which that system Ors belongs, and that He manifested his pleasure by giving to whom it was proper, a command concerning the soul of this terrestrial friend of mine. On the planet Mars I was indeed expected by several beings of our tribe who had newly arrived from the planet Karatas. Among them, by the way, was also your grandmother who, according to the indications of the chief Zirlikners of the planet Karatas, had been assigned to me as the passive half for the continuance of my line.
T said there seemed to be a resonance with Jesus being taken from the tomb, going up to "The Father". She found it amusing. The passage seemed to parody the Resurrection. "R" disagreed in that this character's message was only to tell people not to kill animals, and his was not a universal movement but a private one. L pointed out that the issue was of sacrificing animals. From the animals' point of view it didn't matter whether they were killed for sacrifice or slaughtered for food. The passage seemed to resonate with the present age and highlight the dichotomy still in our culture, that abuse of animals was wrong, but killing of animals for food was seen as right. The person was martyred for preaching that animals should not be killed. Even after death there was a question of safety of the planetary body depending on the beliefs of the society.
There followed a discussion about the lengthy words, names and nouns that are frequently used. GC commented on how some of the lengthy nouns sounded mocking or satirical. N considered they were like a play on words, and seemed to call for detective processes to search for their hidden meaning. The words seemed to be a code for something e.g., Kolhidious. "R" commented that in relation to the name of the river Oksoseria, that there is a real river the Oxus, and that Kolhidious is the fictional name for the actual Caspian Sea into which the Oxus used to flow.
D wondered what Setrenotzinarco meant? T speculated that the wordplay was a nudge to wake up and GC questioned, "Wake up to what?" J remarked that names in novels, for example in Dickens, were often designed to create an impression by the sound, not the reference. For instance Setrenotzinarco seemed to hint at the word narcotic. "R" said that the books were originally written in Russian and Gurdjieff was helped with the English version by Orage and that reams had been written about the names and words. T described how the words added an extra dynamic to the text, uncomfortably provoking the question in the reader, 'what does that mean?' Q reminded the meeting that the writer's advice to the reader was to read the book three times, once straight through to oneself, a second reading to read aloud to another and a third to study it carefully and she considered that it was definitely a process. G felt cynical about this and he was reminded that in the 50's and 60's the population was told not to use soap and to use hair shampoo, probably because the companies that made the hair shampoo wanted to sell a lot of the new product. Maybe Gurdjieff wanted people to read his book?
The Reading continued.
CHAPTER 20 The Third Flight of Beelzebub to the Planet Earth After a brief pause Beelzebub continued to speak further as follows: ...“On this third descent of mine to the planet Earth our ship Occasion did not alight on the sea Kolhidious, which is now called there Caspian Sea, but on the sea called at that period the 'Sea of Beneficence.' "We decided to alight on this sea because I wished this time to go to the capital of the beings of the second group of the continent Ashhark, then named the City Gob, which was situated on the southeastern shore of that sea. ..."The City Gob was situated on both banks of the mouth of a large river called the 'Keria-chi' which flowed into the Sea of Beneficence and which had its rise in the eastern heights of this country. "Into this Sea of Beneficence, on its western side, another large river flowed called the 'Naria-chi.' "And it was in the valleys of these two large rivers that the beings of the second group of the continent Ashhark chiefly existed.
N and L wondered about the reference to actual countries, and whether Gurdjieff was talking about China and Japan, or if anyone had tried to produce a map with all the book's place names in relation to real places. This was not known.
... while the continent Atlantis was still existing and at the height of its splendor, one of the ordinary three-centered beings of that continent 'invented' ,,, that the powdered horn of a being of that particular exterior form then called a 'Pirmaral' was very effective against what they call 'diseases' of every kind. His 'invention' was afterwards widely spread by various 'freaks' on your planet, and also there was gradually crystallized in the Reason of the ordinary beings there an illusory directing factor, from which, by the way, there is formed in the whole of the presence of each of your favorites, especially of the contemporary ones, the Reason of what is called their 'waking-existence,' which factor is the chief cause of the frequent change in convictions accumulated in them.
GC wondered about the passage referring to "frequent change ... accumulated in them." There was a discussion about the meaning of freaks as used in the book and as used conventionally through the ages. GC considered that the use of the term freak referred to mad people and criminals. RM described the natural world and unnatural world, and how a freak was someone who didn't follow convention or conform to the natural world. L experienced Beelzebub's use of the word freak as affectionate, when referring to people.
J considered that the book was a folie à deux of multitudes writ large, with the writer deliberately standing apart from the planet in order to look at it from a different perspective. L agreed and recalled similar in Gulliver's Travels. R was reminded of the novel, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. N said that by using philosophy and anthropology, Gurdjieff forced the reader to question everything; he took what we knew as familiar, and made it seem unfamiliar. The phrase crystallising in the reason and illusory directing factor seemed to be significant.
N pointed out that animals with horns are in myths and legends, the unicorn was a symbol of mythology. The nearest humans have to horns are our nails, we certainly don't have horns in our heads. L recalled reading an article by a journalist who came across a unicorn late one night in Pimlico. GC said that horned animals were the most dangerous animals to humans. T observed that in the book, Beelzebub has a horn.
For my further tales concerning these three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, it will be very useful for you, I think, if I emphasize here that on account of various disturbances during the second terrestrial catastrophe, several parts of the continent Iranan entered within the planet, and other terra firmas emerged in their place and attached themselves to this continent, which in consequence became considerably changed and became in size almost what the continent Atlantis had been for the planet Earth before the catastrophe. ...On that 'terra firma part of the surface of your planet, not only did there exist at that period multitudes of twobrained beings of the said exterior form, namely, Pirmarals, but around this water-space were also multitudes of various kinds of 'fruit trees,' whose fruit then still served for your favorites as the principal product for their 'first being-food.' There were then also so many of the one-brained and two-brained beings which your favorites call 'birds' that when they flew in droves it became, as your favorites say, 'quite dark.' ...
L clarified that one brained life-forms - like fruit trees - were rooted to the ground, two brained had mobility and three-brained higher mental faculties.
Sir John Collings Squire (1884 – 1958) worked for a while with Alfred Orage.
To Alexander Pope's couplet:
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” — and all was light.
Squire famously appended:
It did not last: the Devil, shouting "Ho.
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.
Acknowledgements and thanks to "R"
GC asked the Meeting "What is objective reality?". He had been a believer of objective reality but that had now changed. In response J asked if there might not be several objective realities. "R" attempted to define objective as actual and gave the examples of pure mathematics and pure physics, with fundamental laws. L recalled how scientists used to believe that there was an ether, a medium, a substance of space, that filled the universe and the space between the planets. Einstein then came along with the theory that the speed of light was constant and that people of different viewpoints had different experiences of reality. GC said that people were now challenging Einstein. D said that the choice for him was heaven or hell. Some days he was free of it, some days he was in it, but it was by choice. Protons and electrons were true.
Following the reading, there was a discussion on which exercise to adopt for the coming month. It was decided it would be to action and observe the experience of deliberate slowness, defined further as to do something every day at half the usual speed.
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.
