Gospel Truth?

J gave an example of what he tried. Do I or do I not put an extra sweetener in the drink? Do I or do I not go for exercise afterwards?

Once a day, after having a hot drink, do something kind to yourself, governed directly by conscience, and then stand on one leg for three seconds.

And then of course comes the question: Which is actually being kinder to myself?

T remembered the CHALLENGE after having a hot drink about half the time, and would then do something kind to herself, which was usually something to do with food, or a nice exercise that she liked doing, but she would often forget the third part, which was standing on one leg. She had managed to do the three together probably half a dozen times, which was an improvement on two the month before. In retrospect, she remembered that she had forgotten, and that felt like not getting the target.

N had succeeded in being prompted by the trigger of having a hot drink, but found it hard to think what he could do to himself which was in kindness and also directly governed by his conscience, other than sitting down and doing a meditation or something for a minute or so, so he did various things which were out of the ordinary, like reading some poetry. He sometimes he did not do the standing on one leg for three seconds, it somehow got lost along in the process.

For L, it had highlighted the question even more about What is kindness? If you were being kind to somebody else, you might possibly be doing them some harm, because you were taking away some empowerment. If you were being kind to yourself after a hot drink, you might think, Ah, I am going to have a slice of cake, and be kind to myself! - but that cake will contain the poisonous substance sugar, so are you being kind to yourself? This kindness concept was elusive, and he was not sure how meaningful it was. The final part of the Challenge was that it should be directed by conscience, so being kind to yourself, and then doing some physical exercise which you knew would be good for the body, and was pleasurable - he thought that qualified, and he had done that a few times, and if it was not physical, he generally remembered the standing on one leg, which brought back attention to the physical. In these Meetings, because we did not do things like the Gurdjieff Movements, we did tend to get lost in intellectual diversion. He had found it more interesting than useful, because it made him reconsider what kindness was, and what he was doing to help himself.

During the time allocated for responses, there was much discussion on Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, and Popeye, the extent to which hypnosis could control pain, and the influence of violent computer games on children nowadays. However nobody said anything which pertained to instances of doing the challenge.

The reading continued from Chapter 27 of Beelzebub's Tales.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch on YouTube

In consequence of this, every three-centered being of our Great Universe, and also we men existing on the Earth, must, owing to the presence in us also of the factors for engendering the Divine impulse of "Objective Conscience", always inevitably struggle with the arising and the proceeding within our common presences of two quite opposite functionings giving results always sensed by us either as "desires” or as "nondesires".

And so, only he, who consciously assists the process of this inner struggle and consciously assists the "nondesires" to predominate over the desires, behaves just in accordance with the essence of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR HIMSELF; whereas he who with his consciousness assists the contrary, only increases HIS sorrow.

Owing to all I have just said, my boy, at that period scarcely three years had passed when, on the one hand, all the ordinary beings of the town Djoolfapal and its environs and also of many other countries of the continent Asia, not only already knew that this Divine being-impulse of ‘genuine conscience’ was in them, ... but furthermore, nearly everybody even began to strive and to exert himself to become priests of the brotherhood Heechtvori ...

L said it all hinged on the concept of genuine conscience, and whether there is such a thing or not, and Gurdjieff, or Ashiata Shiemash, was saying there is. "R" asked if nondesire was the same as suffering. J said it was about mistrusting urges, it was not so much suffering. L said that if you saw a slice of chocolate cheese cake which looked really nice, that might engender a desire to eat it, but genuine conscience - if there is such a thing, or your knowledge of what was in it, might tell you not to. J said that you should have the nondesire to have it in the first place, that was the point. O asked if he was saying that the less pleasure you had, the better off you were. L thought that that might be what he was saying - the more you gave in to that desire, the more you would suffer.

N said that genuine conscience and objective knowledge were very related. One was just the counterpart of the other. L said it should be remembered that it was the character in the book, Ashiata Shiemash, who was saying all this, rather than Gurdjieff. We could take it as gospel, but it would be the gospel according to Ashiata Shiemash.

Pot Pourri Priest

L had started the CHALLENGE by responding to messages and emails, and communicating. Generally this had led to a very positive response from the people he had contacted, and after they replied, he was able to respond, thereby doing the same kindness another time.

Once a day, after having a hot drink, do something kind, governed directly by conscience, and then stand on one leg for three seconds.

One could not send a message every single day as an act of kindness, that would be cheating, and would lead to the question, what was the motivation for doing a kindness. Was it an essential kindness, or was it for winning points in doing the challenge. One morning during the month, he had used a loo in Starbucks. and there was no loo-paper. There was a tap on the door, so someone wanted to come in. So L thought - OK! A kindness opportunity, and left some tissues there, and stood on one leg for three seconds. As he had already had a hot drink, this met all the criteria. It had been a struggle for him working out how to be kind, and that had made him reflect on whether he was a kind person, generally. It had also made him reflect on whether people were doing kindnesses for essential reasons, or because it was an expectation they felt upon them.  Part of the challenge was to do it direct from conscience - that was a dimension which was quite hard.

O described a recent incident where she did something kind. A friend had shown her her new mobile, and she replied, "Oh, I have a new mobile too". The friend said she would not talk about such things, as it was materialistic. For O it was just a bit of fun, but for her friend, she was struggling so much whether to be materialistic or not, that any mention of any materialism annoyed her. O considered whether to say something or not. It annoyed her. She decided not to say something, and thought that this had, in a way, been an act of kindness. It was a dilemma. If you did not say something, there was a poison going on not saying what you need to say, but there was the other side that you had to take into consideration that the person had a particular issue, and it was better not to say.

Very soon after T started doing the Challenge, she was tripped up by the question of whether her kind act was truly kind, as there was the ulterior motive of doing the challenge, and this acted as a resistance to doing the challenge during the month, because that question kept arising. On one occasion, she had a hot drink, and offered to make a colleague one. However the colleague declined, so T felt she could not stand on one leg as she had been unable to complete it. On another occasion, she had held open a heavy fire door to help a colleague leave the kitchen at work, but she had not had a hot drink, so it had not fulfilled the three criteria. She had felt it was extremely difficult to calibrate the three parts of the challenge.

There were no other contributions which mentioned a specific instance of doing the challenge during the month.

During the time allocated for responses, nobody said anything which pertained to instances of doing the challenge, although there was much talk about whether or not there was such a thing as altruism, and varying opinions were exchanged about Florence Nightingale.

The reading continued from Chapter 27 of Beelzebub's Tales.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch on YouTube

It was those who became worthy ... who were first called by the name of ‘priest.’

... when all the results of the Very Saintly Labours of the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash were destroyed, both this word priest there and also the word initiate about which I have already told you, were used and still continue to be used by your favourites down to the present time in two quite different senses. In one sense this word priest was since then and now still is commonly used, but only in certain places and for unimportant separate groups of those professionals existing there whom everybody now calls there ‘confessors’ or ‘clergymen.’

And in the other sense, those beings were called and are still called by this word priest who by their pious existence and by the merits of their acts performed for the good of those around them, stand out so much from the rank and file of the ordinary three-brained beings there, that whenever these ordinary beings there have occasion to remember them, there arises and proceeds in their presences the process called ‘gratitude.’


Already during that same period while the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash was enlightening the Reason of the brethren of the former brotherhood Tchaftantouri as well as of the newly collected thirty-five novices, there began to spread, among ordinary beings of the city Djoolfapal and its environs, the true idea that in the common presences of men-beings all the data exist for the manifestation of the Divine impulse conscience, but that this Divine impulse does not take part in their general consciousness; and that it takes no part because, although their manifestations bring them, certain what are called ‘quite-late-repaying-satisfactions’ and considerable material advantage, nevertheless they thereby gradually atrophy the data put into their presences by Nature for evoking in other beings around them, without distinction of brain system, the objective impulse of Divine-Love.

L thought one had to question whether he was introducing Ashiata Shiemash as a model human being, or as a potentially dangerous demagogue, because he was describing how the people who were doing acts of kindness (and this related to the challenge we had done), were appreciated by the people they were helping, and those doing the kindness gained status and were called priests, and then gained power. This might be a dynamic that over the passage of time was not very healthy, as it means there would be one group of people having power, status and material possessions, and another set of people who were dependent on their munificence for survival. "R" said he was talking about the Divine impulse conscience which he does not put in inverted commas, which means it is something real. J said this could atrophy through simple repetition. T said that at the beginning it was made clear that the saintly activities of Ashiata Shiemash were destroyed, and what was left were the words priest and initiate, at times in name only, at other times used to describe those doing good works who naturally stood out as priest and initiate. J said what mattered was not what the ritual contained, but the fact of the ritual itself - the priest, the initiate - that was what counted, rather than the specific teaching. T said she thought the opposite.

This true information began to spread, thanks chiefly to the superlatively wise provision of the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash which obliged everyone striving to become an All-the-rights-possessing brother of the brotherhood Heechtvori to ... know how to convince all the three separate spiritualized and associating parts of a further hundred three-brained beings there, concerning the Divine impulse conscience.

... those who had sensed and become aware of this Divine conscience, and who were called ‘first-degree-initiates,’ he set apart, and he began to enlighten their Reason separately ...

L said that as those who accepted the promoted philosophy were promoted above those who did not, it seemed to him a recipe for conflict a few years later.

Celestial Conscience

After the Meeting, L had been on the lookout for use of the ideas of subjective and objective. There had been a programme about Brexit which referred to objective and subjective interpretations, and he thought this was a good example because it was an objective fact that there was a vote, and a result, but then there were so many interpretations. 

Observe through the month when something arises in your life about which can be asked - is it an objective truth or is it a subjective truth?

 He had come to the conclusion that nearly everything is subjective. If you looked at a particle at the quantum level, then its reality changed. That was subjectivity - reality might be different for everybody. He had a musical idea that morning which he had made a note of. It was subjective, and would remain so until somebody else heard it. The 'celeste', a musical instrument, which came to the mind of Victor Mustel, was subjective until he made it real, naming it after its celestial sound. It became particularly objective after Tchaikovsky brought one to Russia and, most famously, used it in The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

                

Lauren Cuthbertson performs the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
at the Royal Opera House in 2017 - Source YouTube

There were no other contributions which mentioned a specific instance of doing the challenge during the month. A message from BS of India, who has been following these Meetings for many years, was read out. Following that was the time allocated for the 'responses to contributions', however none pertained to doing the challenge. The reading continued from Chapter 27 of Beelzebub's Tales.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch on YouTube

... And so, after arriving in the town Djoolfapal, the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash established corresponding relations with these brethren of the mentioned brotherhood who were working upon that abnormally proceeding functioning of their psyche which they themselves had constated, and he began enlightening their Reason by means of objectively true information, and guiding their being-impulses in such a way that they could sense these truths without the participation either of the abnormally crystallized factors already within their presences, or of the factors which might newly arise from the results of the external perceptions they obtained from the abnormally established form of ordinary being-existence.

J said that the critical phrase here was "the abnormally crystallized factors". What he seemed to be saying was that there was a tendency, even a likelihood, both in the organisation of society, and in our own thinking, for stupid, or silly, or somehow suspect, or odd, abnormally crystallised ideas, to take root, unless we were vigilant. That was just a human problem that we ought to recognise, and we had within ourselves, or the society had within itself, the data by means of which we could combat this tendency. L said that the crystallisation means inflexibility - they get in a fixed form, where they stay. T said that then they get followers, who were gullible because they could not think for themselves. "R" asked if we - at the Meeting - could think for ourselves. N asked where the place itself,  Djoolfapal, might be. L said it was in Asia, as was recounted a little earlier in the chapter:  "Ashiata Shiemash ... did not again return to the city of Babylon but went straight to the capital city Djoolfapal of the country then called Kurlandtech, which was situated in the middle of the continent Asia."

... the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash sent these same brethren to various places and commissioned them under his general guidance to spread the information that in the subconsciousness of people there are crystallized and are always present the data manifested from Above for engendering in them the Divine impulse of genuine conscience, and that only he who acquires the ‘ableness’ that the actions of these data participate in the functioning of that consciousness of theirs in which they pass their everyday existence, has in the objective sense the honest right to be called and really to be a genuine son of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR of all that exists.

Referring to the assertion above of who would have "the honest right to be called and really to be a genuine son of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR of all that exists", GC asked why should we believe that, why should we give that any credence at all, whatsoever. J said that as he understood the passage, the critical facet of any over-arching universal being, was conscience - the way you allocated the natural law, the justified law, the good feeling - that was paramount. "R" said it was a metaphor for something which is common to all of us, which is almost all the time suppressed, negated and asleep. L said it was also indicating that it was an objective truth, that within us, is conscience. RM said that it was neither social conditioning, nor spiritual, religious conditioning. The conscience Gurdjieff was talking about was, he thought, a much higher level, higher order of conscience. It was not a social conscience. J quoted Shakespeare: Conscience does make cowards of us all.

According to the statutes drawn up by the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash, any brother could become an All-the-rights-possessing brother of the brotherhood Heechtvori, only when in addition to the other also foreseen definite objective attainments, he could bring himself—in the sense of ‘ableness-of-conscious-direction-of-the-functioning-of-his-own-psyche’—to be able to know how to convince to perfection a hundred other beings and to prove to them that the impulse of being-objective-conscience exists in man, and secondly how it must be manifested in order that a man may respond to the real sense and aim of his existence, and moreover so to convince them that each of these others, in their turn, should acquire in themselves what is called the ‘Required-intensity-of-ableness,’ to be able to convince and persuade not less than a hundred others also.

L said that it seemed to him that what was being described here was a dangerous pyramid scheme, where each person proselytises to a hundred others, and tries to get them to do the same, and before you knew where you were, you had a big religion. GC asked what was meant by the Required-intensity-of-ableness? L said they were being trained up to be salesmen. J said that Gurdjieff was not necessarily being cynical about this, because there may be, in his way of looking at it, a genuine conscience that could be informing the whole process. It seemed to him that Gurdjieff was looking at the process whereby  all religions and cults come in to being, and he was holding up that process for us to look at. RM said that what he found interesting here was the phrase: to prove to them that the impulse of being-objective-conscience exists in man. RM took that to mean that there is a common understanding that does actually exist in man fundamentally.

If Tomorrow Comes

This CHALLENGE had made L assess everything that came up to be done, and to classify it - whether to do it now, or today, or leave it till further along in the future.

At least once a day, when you feel the temptation to put off doing something till the next day, do it right away instead, and with the wrong hand.

He had switched his to-do list system to "1MTD". That had been quite helpful, and he had done a large number of urgent things, rather than put them off and do less urgent things. As this issue had affected him systemically, the challenge made him approach everything differently, and doing it with a different hand did not come up for him.

Sometimes at the end of a long day, N could not be bothered doing something, and would add it to the following day's to-do list. If he had a complicated document to draft, he had found it a better strategy to spend only a little time on it during that afternoon, and to sleep on it, allowing the subconscious to pull itself together, so that coming to it fresh the following day it would flow with greater precision. He could not do things with the other hand, because all of his work was typing. He had found that there were certain things that he was avoiding doing, which kept on appearing on his to-do list and then not getting done, and therefore the Challenge was constructive from that perspective.

Humpty Dumpty before a Fragmentation Experience
Art by John Tenniel 1872

Doing things now instead of tomorrow had not been uppermost for T. She had done it a few times, but it was for deadlines, rushing things late at night - just a token exercise really. She had been in an anxious state to try and do the challenge, but because of that she had not been thinking holistically and therefore doing things with the wrong hand had got missed at those times, although she had tried writing and drawing with the left hand during the month. So it was a fragmentation experience.

Responses to these contributions were made, but did not pertain  to doing the challenge. They included a lengthy discussion about sleep, musicians and athletes, including thoughts on a recent boxing match. The reading continued from Chapter 26 of Beelzebub's Tales.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
this Watch on YouTube

... He then, after His year of special observation and studies of their psyche, again ascended to that same mountain Veziniama, and during several terrestrial months contemplatively pondered in which way He could actualize His decision, that is, to save the beings of this planet from those hereditary predispositions to the crystallizations of the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer, by means of those data which survived in their subconsciousness for the fundamental sacred being-impulse, Conscience.

GC asked what this meant. J said it meant there was a residue of unconscious drivers that was distinct from your individual volition, your individual wish, and you could survive if you allowed the better conscience elements within that to be the driver of your thinking. T said that the driving force was unique for each person. GC asked if choosing those elements was a guessing game. L said that the text indicated that conscience is the key.

The Daily Express

N was often travelling into work on the very crowded Northern Line, where he would sometimes be pushed around.

When you find yourself in a crowded tube carriage, observe how you are feeling, and if your feelings are automatic, try first to be free of them, and then to replace them with better feelings.

This was a good opportunity to observe his feelings. There was a part of him which would have more liked to be somewhere else, but then if he calmed, and accepted the fact that it was just for a short duration, then he somehow came to terms with it, and it was not so unpleasant, and he was not trying to escape.

A busy time on the Sri Lanka railway.

Further contributions and responses to these contributions were made, but nothing more pertained to contributions relevant to the challenge. The reading continued from Chapter 26 of Beelzebub's Tales.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
this Watch on YouTube

... all these tablets were also destroyed by these strange beings themselves, and only one of them, namely, that one now with these brethren, somehow survived, as I have already told you, and is now the property of this Brotherhood.

“On this still surviving marble were inscriptions concerning the sacred being-impulses called Faith, Love, and Hope, ....


Faith of consciousness is freedom
Faith of feeling is weakness
Faith of body is stupidity.

Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Love of body depends only on type and polarity.

Hope of consciousness is strength
Hope of feeling is slavery
Hope of body is disease.

From the movie Serendipity, 2001, directed by Peter Chelsom

Source: YouTube 

T said that she always had a problem with the word faith. She also had a problem with the word belief, and the word she had come up with which felt more accurate was truth. Faith seemed such a blur, and such an amorphous entity. She felt similarly about the word hope, and could not connect with it. J said that these verses were like a song. L thought it would be useful to lay them out as a table.

	Consciousness	Feeling	Body
Faith	Freedom	Weakness	Stupidity
Love	Evokes the same in response	Evokes the opposite	Depends only on type and polarity
Hope	Strength	Slavery	Disease

D said that Consciousness was the key, and RM agreed.

... owing to this maleficent disease ‘tomorrow’ they never succeed in making these required efforts.

And this is just the maleficent part of all that great terrifying evil, which, owing to various causes great and small, is concentrated in the process of the ordinary being-existence of these pitiable three-brained beings; and by putting off from ‘tomorrow’ till ‘tomorrow,’ those unfortunate beings there who do by chance learn all about what I have mentioned are also deprived of the possibility of ever attaining anything real.

L said this could be discussed further next time.

A Hello to Love

L had done the CHALLENGE many times during the month, and it had changed his consciousness and empathy. Sometimes homeless people by the station had said hello to him, and he would do the challenge then as well. He thought it had been an aid to wakefulness.

Once a day, when you ask or receive the question "How are you?", consider how present you are emotionally to the reality of that question, and cross your fingers.

He had also thought more about the Reading from last time. and realised that we may have missed a point, because Gurdjieff had been talking about legominisms, and then had made a reference to Scheherazade. He had been talking earlier on in the Reading about how hard it was to preserve information and pass it on, and how often there was very little of that information left. L had realised that Scheherazade may have been mentioned as an example of legominism. It was first written down in the ninth century AD, and it had been passed orally before then, so its age was unknown. He thought the story of Scheherazade should be borne in mind moving on in the book because Gurdjieff probably put that reference in there for a purpose.

Scheherazade
by Sophie Anderson

N had been on holiday, and would bump into forty or fifty people every day. People were grouped together in small numbers of half a dozen or so and every morning would talk about their feelings. Lots of stuff came up for people and each person was listened to without any judgement or comment. There was an emphasis on genuine emotional honesty which was very refreshing. In contrast to this experience he was aware that a lot of the time he did not check in with his feelings and did things by rote.

T had experienced two periods in the month: holiday and work. Away from London, she had been caught by surprise going for walks along the coast when people had passed by and greeted her with great warmth. She had surprisingly experienced anxious feeling at these moments, and then of course made a hurried reply. Though superficial, it had given a different quality of experience to the walks. There was a contrast when she came back to London, when she realised that there was no way anyone was going to say Hello when walking along the street. On one occasion in the morning, she had been open to making eye contact with passers by in relation to the challenge. She noticed most people were in their own world of anxiety or worry, or were very purposefully walking along and out of half a dozen people she received one furtive, warm smile in response. Then being back at work, in retrospect she did remember saying Hello, how are you? to colleagues, but at the time she had not recalled the challenge.

RM said it made him feel good when he got a metaphorical hug from people, and he either gave a smile, or his heart felt warmth towards anybody who was willing to smile or say Hello, how are you?

Responding to N, L thought it was magical that where N had gone on holiday, there was the opportunity, every morning, to do this challenge, and it was focusing on the feelings. M asked if we were responsible for others' feelings, whether or not we were silent, or were saying hello. L supposed we were responsible in both senses. Our presence, whether we communicated or not, did have an effect on people, as a force has a reaction to it, so we might decide it was our responsibility to communicate. M thought there was a subtlety between feeling you had to do something, and letting things happen. From his experience, when you felt you had to do something, it took away the spontaneous intelligence of what needed to happen.

Following the responses to the contributions, the reading continued from Chapter 26 of Beelzebub's Tales.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
this Watch on YouTube

It is perfectly easy to convince beings of this planet of anything you like, provided only during their perceptions of these "fictions", there is evoked in them and there proceeds, either consciously from without, or automatically by itself, the functioning of one or another corresponding consequence of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer crystallized in them from among those that form what is called the "subjectivity" of the given being, as for instance: "self-love", "vanity", "pride", "swagger", "imagination", "bragging", "arrogance", and so on.

N found it interesting that it said it was easy to convince beings on this planet of anything you liked. It came back to the suggestibility of all of us, and how people can manipulate us in any way using vanity, self-conceit, or any of those things. In a sense we lived now in a narcissistic society, where people spent a large part of their days doing selfies, and goodness knows what else, so he thought people were particularly vulnerable.

...In an equally abnormal form were data moulded in them for evoking the sacred impulse of love.

In the presences of the beings of contemporary times, there also arises and is present in them as much as you please of that strange impulse which they call love; but this love of theirs is firstly also the result of certain crystallized consequences of the properties of the same Kundabuffer; and secondly this impulse of theirs arises and manifests itself in the process of every one of them entirely subjectively; so subjectively and so differently that if ten of them were asked to explain how they sensed this inner impulse of theirs, then ... all ten would reply differently and describe ten different sensations.

One would explain this sensation in the sexual sense; another in the sense of pity; a third in the sense of desire for submission; a fourth, in a common craze for outer things, and so on and so forth; but not one of the ten could describe even remotely, the sensation of genuine Love.

M said it seemed that there was something deeper than just what arises in him (most of the time he was navigated by sensations that were picking up on what was actually happening outside and inside, without the freedom for them to move without interference), that allowed some sort of rest which was not determined by the movement. T thought M was touching on something beyond the superficial, a deeper sense which was more objective than subjective, but which we were not in touch with. O said this was about genuine love, so what was it? Beyond self-love, beyond all the seduction, there was genuine love, a natural thing. T said the word love was over-used in so many different ways, so that the word love had lost its meaning. D asked about a woman's love for her child, and wasn't that because the child came from her? O said that could be a form of narcissism. L thought Beelzebub was talking about a concept of an elemental force, something like electricity, but which was the love that powered the universe. He glimpsed it in his own way, partly through personal relationships. J said although the ten might reply differently, there was a kernel that was shared in terms of our public and individual perception of love.

Weeping Tree, Sneezing Flea.

N said that when he shifted his attention, he found that he was still aware of what was going on in the street, but he was also aware of these other things happening as well.

Once a day, when you walk down the street, shift your consciousness to something different that you feel is unimportant, that hasn't grabbed your attention.

It increased the level of his consciousness, and the more he did it the more he found it added to a state of awareness in the course of the day. It was quite a pleasant CHALLENGE to do as well, just to remind himself, and bring himself back into separate reality and not be absorbed totally by things in front of him.

D said that on his way, he became very aware of a weeping willow, with a huge canopy, and he stood under it. He had walked up that road many times, and never noticed it. A bit further on, he saw a huge white mansion, that he had never really noticed. He thought this challenge had calmed him down, and he had not been lost in conditioned thoughts. The colours suddenly bounced into his consciousness. He had suggested this challenge but did not know where he had read it.

When T started it, she thought to herself that it was no different from what she was doing all the time, in a visual sense, being aware, through painting, so she thought that this was not going to impinge on her that much. She had been attempting to do it more consciously, and she found that on two occasions she fell over, because she was more absorbed in the peripheral visions, than she would otherwise be, which had really surprised her. She thought what happened was that she directed attention to the peripherals and then forgot where she was. She had not been looking consciously at the pavement in front of her. The challenge had tripped her up.

"R" said she had been doing a lot of travelling over the previous month, and she found how little attention she usually gave to the scenery that was going past. She tried to use this as a reminder to sense herself, because she had got an opportunity to sense where she was, otherwise it was just another distraction.

L had been prejudiced about this challenge because it was a Gurdjieff Meeting, and he thought everything we did should be about Gurdjieff, but he did try it a few times. He was a person who tried to develop a centre, and look where he was going, but to look for something else, a distraction, was taking him away from his focus and his direction. It was lovely to walk along the street, and then if he was looking too much at one thing, to look at something else, but it was also like one distracting thought succeeding another. It was the opposite of how he saw the Gurdjieff Work, which helps take us away from the state of mind where we are constantly distracted.

O had tried to divert her attention to something insignificant, and noticed that it drew her attention to the miraculous nature of the insignificant. In a way, it was a different kind of fascination, rather than divided attention, a higher awareness rather than just treating the insignificant as triviality.

When GC realised that he had been getting involved with thinking that was like a soap opera, he would say to himself. for example, Tree!, and his attention would be diverted outwards to the trees, and the thinking would stop. When you actually had to think about something, then obviously you did not need to divert your attention, but the amount of time during the day that we thought about things that needed thinking about was very small, and at other times we were just dreaming.

GC said he could not understand how L could say that that challenge had nothing to do with Gurdjieff. L said that normally we could do a direct link to something Gurdjieff had written in Beelzebub's Tales, or something we had been discussing during that Meeting about Gurdjieff, but in this case by the last minute of the 10 minutes allocated to deciding a challenge, we had still not come up with one. Then D remembered this thing he had read somewhere, but did not remember where. From that point of view, L was not sure there was a direct link with Gurdjieff. N said he thought it was very much to do with self-remembering and the Gurdjieff Work.

Responding to GC, L said that rather than being aware of having a set of thoughts, and then looking at something else and having a different set of thoughts, GC's idea was to put a stop to those thoughts, which was different from what D had suggested. GC said that everybody had personalised the challenge.

Following the responses to the contributions, the reading continued from Chapter 25 of Beelzebub's Tales.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
this Watch on YouTube

“As for the information which passed from generation to generation through the ordinary mass of beings of that planet, it has either completely disappeared, having been soon forgotten, or there remains of it, as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin expresses it, only the ‘tail-and-mane-and-food-for-Scheherazade.’ 

...How the contemporary learned beings of the planet Earth concoct their hotchpotch ... is very well defined in one of the wise sentences of our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin, which consists of the following words: "A flea exists in the World just for one thing— that when it sneezes, that deluge should occur with the description of which our learned beings love so much to busy themselves."

L said that if you had a body of knowledge which you wanted to transmit for, maybe, hundreds of thousands of years in the future, it was almost impossible, because as soon as you started talking about it, it started to diverge. L said that the bit about the flea sneezing was similar to the question of how many angels can dance on the end of a needle. T said that the flea was the tiniest thing, yet the sneeze was a deluge. L said that something inconsequential might lead to a whole science. O said that James Joyce was a case in point - he wrote his book, and he said that all the academics read his book over and over to interpret it.

'To me, a trifling particle of the whole of the GREAT WHOLE, it was commanded from Above to be coated with the planetary body of a three-centered being of this planet and to assist all other such beings arising and existing upon it to free themselves from the consequences of the properties of that organ which, for great and important reasons, was actualized in the presences of their ancestors.

'All the sacred Individuals here before me ... have always endeavored while striving for the same aim to accomplish the task laid upon them through one or other of those three sacred ways for self-perfecting, foreordained by OUR ENDLESS CREATOR HIMSELF , namely, through the sacred ways based on the being-impulses called “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Love.”'

O asked why it was so important to assist all other beings. "R" said it was because the world was in a perilous state. L said that this assertion was in quotation marks, so it was one of the characters saying it. O asked why Gurdjieff was implying that there was a Creator in the first place. L said he thought Gurdjieff was playing off those who set themselves up as teachers against those who follow teachers too blindly.