Behind Closed Doors

N said it had been a very challenging time; not being able to get up and do his usual process, being effectively under house arrest for a considerable period of time. Not being able to go to work, being able to go out only for very limited things such as shopping and a little bit of exercise had been an interruption to normal habitual patterns. The last two or three weeks of the lock-down had been particularly fraught and extremely worrying with this disease; one client had had it very badly, and a cousin had been in and out of hospital with it. On the other hand he thought it was a good thing for the world to be interrupted in this way; to be forced back now to go deeper into ourselves and think about the implications and the world we lived in. He was thinking to himself that this could be the most creative phase if it was utilised in the right way for everyone. For himself, he was thinking whether he needed to lead the lifestyle that he lead to find the things that he valued in life, and maybe he could rearrange his life very differently. He thought there were enormous pluses out of this scenario when he started to look at it.

If you experience in the day something that you react to as a bad thing, switch your thinking to it being a good thing, and feel your feet on the ground.

T had had to remotely connect with her work which was very strange because it was all based on the time, place, person of the therapy room, and being with people and present with people who came in for this particular therapy, so the rug had been taken out from under her feet and the therapy. What was left felt disembodied and disconnected on the telephone, but the good thing was that despite all the problems of connecting, they did connect. The connecting was to a different kind of schedule but the schedule felt like a friend at the moment in an otherwise unscheduled time. For her it was holding on to the container of the schedule rather than the container of her workplace. When she had remembered the challenge and felt the feet on the ground, it felt less potent than the previous challenge of making a fist.

L said it had been very bad that we had been forced to stop using the Community Centre for the time being, but it was good because it had enabled us to use this alternative, which could potentially bring in people from further afield.

During the period allocated to responses, there was much discussion, but nothing was said about specific experiences of doing the CHALLENGE during the previous month.

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

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

The circumstances were these: in descending to the planet Earth for the sixth and last time, I proposed to attain, at any cost, the final elucidation to myself of all the genuine causes why the psyche of those three-brained beings, which should be like the psyche of the rest of the three-brained beings of our Great Universe, had on that planet become so exceptionally strange.

LR said she thought the reference to coming to this planet for the sixth and last time was curious - she did not know what it meant but it seemed to hold some significance. She wondered if this final visit was to remedy the issue within the psyche of the three-brained beings. L thought the number six might be of significance in terms of musical metaphor, as the sixth note is almost the end of the octave - in fact the next two notes are virtually off the scale, because the seventh is a leading note which goes straight to the octave which is where you start again.

... the Nature of the planet Earth was beginning to adapt Herself to the deteriorating quality of the vibrations She demanded that had to be formed from their radiations, by substituting those vibrations which are now obtained only from the process of their sacred Rascooarno, or as they say ‘from-their-death.

L was curious abut the nature of the vibrations which were "now obtained only from the process of their sacred Rascooarno", which meant death.

Heaven Descent

L had found the tensing of the fist symbolic of strength. One thing he had been doing was clearing and throwing old stuff away, some of which he could be very attached to, and he would say You're going, and tense his fist. Also there were things he was attached to doing, like reading or watching a film, and he did the same action and refrained.

If you realise you are about to do something because of attachment to a desire, let the attachment go and deliberately tense your fist.

N had been involved in a relationship with someone, and his desire had been to contact them back. He had realised also that that was because it was his attachment which was pushing him forward to want to immediately contact them back, so he then stopped that and clenched his fist, which was a good reminding and waking up factor. Sometimes he had found that these things were largely ego-driven, and the CHALLENGE had made him stop and look at the process again, and then he could see his ego in operation.

For T the Challenge had been usually to do with attachment to things, being full of historic, emotional content, but the thing itself was just a thing, and not what she associated with it. After deciding to let it go she felt all sorts of anguish, but the action of doing the fist afterwards, felt victorious.

Responding to T, N said that when you clench your fist it changes your body dynamic powerfully, mainly because it can be aggressive, but there was a positivity in it which gave her more strength to stay with her resolve about not going with her attachment. T said that as well as aggression, it was a sign of solidarity. Black Power has used it - strength in numbers. Somehow the hand clenched like that has a direct link with the brain and the heart. The importance for her was to allow experiencing the physical, like touch, to inform perception, conception, understanding, and then the understanding to go back to and inform feeling.

The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... from among all the ‘highest being-bodies’ which have been coated and perfected in every kind of exterior form of three-brained being there have, so far, reached the planet ‘Retribution’ from the whole Universe, only three hundred and thirteen, two of whom had their arising on your planet and one of these is the ‘highest being-body’ of this Lentrohamsanin

LR wondered about the three hundred and thirteen. T said it was very specific, and moreover only two came from the whole planet. L said that there must be a significance to that number, because everything he wrote was carefully measured. T said it was like the unpronounceable names, which stop us in our tracks and force us to acknowledge that we don't understand something, and to perhaps ask, "do those two in the planet include me?" Maybe it speaks to the ego when he says something very specific like three hundred and thirteen. L asked, if you were one of those two righteous people, and had been very good all your life, would you want to go to a planet called Retribution? You might prefer to go to one called Reward.


... Among the number of those independent communities, there were during those periods, owing to those cosmic laws which I have once mentioned to you, those two large and, as they say there, ‘most-powerful’ communities, that is to say, well organised and possessing more means for the processes of reciprocal destruction, the Greeks and Romans.

And about these, from the point of view of your contemporary favourites, ‘very-ancient’ communities, I must furthermore not fail to explain to you and possibly in detail, because not only did they then, as I have already said, make a clean sweep from the face of that unfortunate planet of the last results beneficial for all the three-brained beings of all subsequent epochs, and even of all traces of the memory of the Very Saintly Labours of the Essence-loving Ashiata Shiemash, but they were also the cause that real ‘nonsense’ already proceeds in the Reasons of the contemporary favourites of yours, and that there is completely atrophied in them that ‘fundamental-being-impulse’ which is the main lever of objective morality, and which is called ‘organic shame'.

L said that we normally think of the ancient Romans and Greeks as the ones who created civilisation, and we as the heirs to it - we even talk about the Dark Ages after the Romans left Britain - but what Gurdjieff is implying here is that there had been progress in psychology, in self development, before that time.

J found it strange that Gurdjieff seemed to be saying up until then that everything was on the slide downhill, and everything was going wrong, and from the great Ashiata Shiemash beginnings, there had been a constant descent - and now he was saying that when the Greeks and the Romans came in, all that had been gained from before was lost.

LN said she believed Greece and Rome touched something very high in terms of knowledge and wisdom, but as with most humans it degenerated.

Something in the Way

RM often found himself wanting to assert his own opinion about something, hoping people would follow his opinion because he thought it was a good one. He had questioned himself on whether or not he was leading people astray. He got the impression that every time he tried to persuade anybody of anything, it was probably leading them astray, because he did not know if he was following in the right direction or not.

Observe if there are occasions where you have a feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray. Consider the degree of satisfaction, and what part of you is being satisfied. Press your tongue against your teeth.

It was all very vague for him. So he was conscious of the CHALLENGE but was unable to answer that question, except to keep quiet, because maybe every time he tried to assert himself he might be leading people astray, at least trying to.

T had remembered it during the month, but the thought of leading people astray was so counter to what her life was about, that she had found it a struggle to do the whole challenge, which was including the bodily part. There was one realisation to do with the Insight Timer app. She used it every day, but she used it to remind herself to meditate, and then she carried on doing what she had to do. So she turned it on, heard the lovely bells through the minutes of meditation, and if she noticed one of her "friends" had been meditating at the same time, she sent a message saying "Thanks for meditating with me." She was projecting into them her own misleading of herself, her leading herself astray that she was meditating. One of her rationalisations was that so long as she was present when doing things it was a meditation, but that was rubbish.

L said it had been a difficult challenge because he did not like to think of himself as leading people astray, but then he realised that if he was playing chess with somebody, and set a trap, then he was leading them astray, and hoping they would take the bait. If he was doing it there, it was not a bad thing, clearly. On one recent occasion, he had been in a coffee shop, and had paid by cash, and was short-changed and it was the second time it had happened to him at that particular coffee shop. It was like Oscar Wilde's, once is "misfortune", twice is "carelessness". L had said "was it not meant to be £1:50?", and she had given him 20p back. They had both pretended that it hadn't been deliberate. So his pretending was, in a way, leading her astray, because he knew it was deliberate, and so did she, and then he realised that in all trading, there was this kind of leading people astray, because if you were doing a trade with somebody, or if you were buying shares on the stock market, or options, you thought you had got it right. There was always somebody on the other side of the trade who took the opposite view, and then there was the broker, who took their cut. So everybody involved was trying to lead the other parties astray, and hoped to make a profit from the encounter, just as happened in the coffee shop. He realised that he tried to deceive himself all the time, and also that direct communication between people was impossible anyway. So, leading people astray was inevitable, and happened all the time.

Responding to L, LR thought that in the example of trading we knew that was going to happen, and in the coffee shop, the cashier knew and L knew, but it was unspoken, because we do not speak the truth: I'm going to con you out of 20p and I'm going to tell you that you have. LR had the sense that the deception was to do with not being honest to self, and was about deceiving self.

As RM had described a fear or a caution to speak, LR wanted to ask him if he really wanted to persuade people, or was it just that he was so direct and honest he wondered if people would take it the wrong way. If it was a dialogue, the other person had to take responsibility for how they thought and felt. LR could not take responsibility for somebody else, and if there was an issue they could hopefully discuss it.

Responding to T, RM said that his view was that meditation was an exercise in being present. So every time you were present you were meditating, It was no more or less complicated. The minute he said Am I present?, he was. So meditation was being present, so he would say, yes, she was meditating.

Responding to L, RM said Gurdjieff's view was that it was conscious suffering that was important. The problem arises when it is unconscious suffering. On that principle, if you were playing a game and deliberately misled an opponent, it was not a problem because you knew exactly what you were doing, you were totally in tune with that for a good reason. It was when it was unconscious, when it was a reaction where you did not even know what was going on, that was a problem because you were asleep, and it was coming from sleep to awake. L said he thought it was worse to lead someone astray consciously, it was worse than doing it unconsciously. That was the difference in law between murder and manslaughter. If someone deliberately committed a crime it was worse, if they did it unconsciously it was still a crime, but not as severe. RM said he was not talking about deliberate, he was talking about consciously doing it. Just knowing what you were doing consciously, changes what you do. That was how you changed your behaviour, by being conscious.

The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

In the common presence of every kind of three-brained being, there can arise during the process of his planetary existence, four kinds of independent Hasnamuss-individuals.

The first kind of Hasnamuss-individual is a three-brained being who, while acquiring in his common presence that something, still consists only of his planetary body and who, during the process of his sacred Rascooarno, is subject to the corresponding consequences of the presence in him of the properties of this something and is thus destroyed forever such as he is.

The second kind of Hasnamuss-individual is that Kesdjan body of a three-brained being which is coated in his common presence with the participation of that same something and which, acquiring—as is proper to such a cosmic arising—the property of ‘Toorinoorino,’ that is, nondecomposition in any sphere of that planet on which he arose, has to exist, by being formed again and again in a certain way, such as he is, until this certain something will have been eliminated from him.

T said it was interesting that he had all these complex, multi-syllabled words and symbols, and then he kept on saying something, something, something, because something was just ordinary, but what did he mean by something? L asked if it was something that we needed to get rid of, or was it something positive. O thought it was something positive, the life force, that all your life you had tried to conceal and substitute through activities. RM said it was about getting rid of the attachment to things.


For the second kind of Hasnamuss-individual, ... he must inevitably be again coated in a planetary body and in most cases with the exterior form of a being of one- or two-brained system; and in view of the brevity in general of the duration of beings of these planetary forms and also not having time to adapt himself to a single exterior form, he must constantly begin all over again in the form of another being of the planet with the full uncertainty as to the result of this coating.

LR thought he was talking about the possibility of reincarnation. If somebody had not let go of the something, then they would have to come back again. LR believed that humans were here on this planet as a chance to refine, and develop and do good for the higher creation, and if we could not let go of the somethings, then we would have too come back again, or not at all.

The Borromean Knot

L tended to be a little thick-skinned and did not react too much, but he did find himself reacting on several occasions. On one occasion he had arranged to meet with somebody at a particular location, and it was a cold night, and the friend decided at the last minute to meet somewhere else, which was warmer for him, so L had ended up walking a long way in the cold.

Once a day, when you become aware that you have reacted to something automatically, observe yourself, consider how compulsively you reacted, and blink once consciously.

L felt that if you made an arrangement to meet somebody, at a time and place, you would go to that place, so he felt himself reacting in annoyance, and he realised and then he consciously blinked. So that was an example, and this happened several times during the month, he observed himself having reactions, and he blinked. He liked blinking as the physical action, which is symbolic of waking up, and one of the first things we do when we wake.

O spoke of someone who was a very kind and generous person, but she always spoke in a way that made you feel she was telling you off, and O's automatic reaction was to argue back. At a certain point O realised that this was just the person's style. The person was not really telling her off. She had had to accommodate the complexity of the situation and the person, and just let it be, and it was a lot better. She thought this was an interesting observation, which can be generalised to apply with any person. People come with different styles and we interpret all the time, and we react automatically. The point is, how do you catch yourself doing it?

J said that one of his guests at Christmas, when he was slightly under pressure for getting the lunch ready on time, said "Let's do without the Queen's Speech," and to J, this was such an outrage, that his reaction was not as it might have been to someone who had come along for a nice Christmas day. Your reaction in a case like that did not permit, unless you really trained yourself to have the space or the time, of being able to check your reaction; it was too spontaneous. J distinguished between the reaction in the outside world to other people, and the reaction you observe in yourself. There was this difficulty in terms of reactions in the outside world, to other people, of restraint. What was said to him, to incur that reaction, was so shocking, so contrary to what one would normally believe, that it was an infringement.

During the month T had been remembering the CHALLENGE, and wondering what the automatic behaviour was. It had happened quite a lot, particularly over the Christmas period, being with people who were related. But it was after the event, when she felt rising anger, the solar plexus in absolute torment and anguish, remembering what had happened. At the time she hadn't remembered the Challenge, but it was after the events that repercussions and re-triggering happened, and there she was, sitting, elbows on the kitchen table, feeling this rage, and only then remembering to blink. She had come to the conclusion that emotional triggering, usually anger - suppressed anger - happened when other people's actions were completely unthinkable to her.

D said that what T had said was very important, because you could not escape - full stop - because it was going to come up, whatever you did. So there was no problem with reacting at the time, when you thought about it logically and rationally, because you were going to be affected, maybe hours later, a day later. So all these so called esoteric teachings might not be suitable or appropriate. So react, maybe you won't feel this terrible feeling later on. There was no right or wrong, it was how you react or how you feel about yourself, and how you deal with things. You will take the consequences whatever happens.

Responding to J and O, T wanted to hear if they blinked or not, because it was the body part of the Challenge, connecting the body with the brain and the heart. J replied that the reaction preempted blinking, it was so quick. By the time the moment had passed he was in a position to check what he was saying, engage the brain before the mouth. When the emotion of the moment had passed, and it had been almost too late the moment he realised, myes, he had blinked when he thought of it.

O thought we were making a very artificial distinction with the mind and the body. T had been very angry, and had felt it all over her body. The body had reacted anyway, so what was the point of blinking? Maybe the blinking was raising your awareness for something, but automatically your body is involved in the reaction. T said that what the Challenge did was take it out of the sea of it happening all the time, and not being aware of it happening and riding the waves of daily life - it had made it into something which was less of the sea and more of a thing which you could get hold of. RM said that the blinking, for him, was acknowledging that he had noticed what had happened. If he did not blink (or did not have some physical thing to do), the whole event passed him, he did not even notice that anything had happened, so the blinking was really important because it was an acknowledgement, like Know Thyself. It was telling him that this was what he had done.

The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... "hordes" with the arch-vainglorious Greek called "Alexander-of-Macedonia" at their head, were dispatched thence and passed almost everywhere over the continent of Asia, they made, as it is said, a "clean sweep" from the surface of that ill-fated planet of everything that had been established and had still been preserved and carried out; so clean a sweep, that it left not even the trace of the memory that there could once have existed on the surface of their planet such a "bliss" ...

Jacques Lacan, psychoanalyst
 Source: Wikipedia

O said this sense about the generation of knowledge was interesting. There had been a few people who wrote in a way that people could not easily understand. One of them was Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst. There had been other people in the past who wrote esoterically in such a way, that people would not use it in a simplistic, twisted way, so that it would only be accessible to people who wanted to know something like that and investigate properly. RM said that one thing he had noticed through all the great teachings was that the most effective teachings were done by telling a story, not instruction.

Borromean Knot as used by Lacan
Source: NO SUBJECT

L said that people like Gurdjieff and Lacan incorporated what they were saying into geometrical structures. You could not explain a shape, but by associating psychological concepts and feelings around different parts of the topology, there could be a basis for discussion between people and self-considering of emotional relevance.

If these separate aspects of the entire ‘spectrum’ of Naloo-osnian-impulses are described according to the notions of your favourites and expressed in their language, they might then be defined as follows:

(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious
(2)The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray
(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures
(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature
(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one's physical defects
(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved
(7) The striving to be not what one is.

RM said he was one of those people, to one degree or another, he could see them all in himself. He thought this was where compassion comes from. It was only because he saw it in himself, that he could understand it in other people. N said it was the evil inclination. T asked about the fourth in the list: The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature. O said that people have short-cuts to achieve - if you like me you will give me this - but they might give it to you and you would not value it, unless you made the effort to get it. L said he had come across people who embody the sixth one - a calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved. J said it was interesting that each person seemed to have alighted on one particular defect.

Following Up

T had realised that for most of the time during her life she had been a follower. There was massive resistance to acknowledging that, so that was why the CHALLENGE was so difficult to get started on. Then she realised who she might be following at the moment. She managed to give attention to the hands twice. They were trembling, vibrating. She could feel the blood vessels moving.

Once a day, when you become aware that you are being a follower, sense your allegiance and consider what emotion is attached. Do I know it to be so, or is it just because it sounds good? Give attention to your hands and wait till you feel them tingle.

L had attended a meeting of followers, and although he was not a follower himself, it was interesting being in the presence of followers. He did the exercise with his hands and felt very strong tingling.

During the period allocated to responses, there was much discussion about following, and whether it mattered or applied to appreciation of art, but nothing was said about particular experiences of doing the challenge.

The reading then continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales. This led to much discussion on civil wars and revolutions in France, Spain and Russia, and the meanings of ego and waking up, but  not on anything related to the specific parts of the text.

"Reflected Glory"

L had done the CHALLENGE a number of times. In addition, he thought he had sometimes been pompous, and while that might be too short-lived to count as wiseacring, he sometimes stood on one leg anyway. A few times, he also responded in the same way after becoming aware of his thoughts wandering.

Once a day, when you become aware that you have been wiseacring, stand on one leg, and purposefully manufacture a feeling of elation.

N said he found himself speaking in a context, like work, and then realised that perhaps he was overextending himself.

T said she had experienced through the month many instances of wiseacring and needing to stand on one leg. This was shocking for her, because it was her usual pattern to forget the challenge, then try to remember it during the last two weeks and have to go back to find out what it was, but this time it was there very frequently. The thing that got her was manufacturing a sense of elation. It was so far removed from anything she had done before, or tried to do for herself - to make up a feeling - so that was really difficult. She realised there were great swathes of time when she was at work when she had been unaware of the challenge, but she retrospectively knew that she wiseacred there a lot. This was getting involved in long, drawn out conversations about things she knew nothing about, particularly the politics of the workplace which were toxic. She was not privy to why people in management made decisions, but she had all sorts of speculations.

LR was aware that she had not had much wiseacring this month, and the reason was because in the last few months she had become more internally quiet, but she had spent many years wiseacring, and trying to come up with intellectual claptrap - things she knew nothing about. So now she was letting that go and being much more natural and not trying to look for the right answers either, and admitting if she did not know something, or if she did not like something, she would say it. She used to try and draw on anything to give an answer. So that was insightful for her to see that she did not have any this month - she had been aware of it.

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

The reading continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
this Watch on YouTube

But meanwhile, as this is not so, we ourselves must struggle and we ourselves must strive hard for our real happiness and for our real freedom and also to free ourselves from the need of having to sweat.

It is true that for eight months of the year we now have no trouble in obtaining our daily bread; but then, how we must labour those four summer months and exhaust ourselves getting the barley we need!

Only he who sows and mows that barley knows the hard labour required.

True, for eight months we are free, but only from physical labours, and for this, our consciousness, namely, our dearest and highest part, must remain day and night in slavery to these illusory ideas which are always being dinned into us by our chiefs and counsellors.

L said he thought the description of physical labours was a metaphor for the Gurdjieff Work. RM said he had a sense that what Gurdjieff was saying here, was that for so many months of the year when we were working, were grafting, that was real, but the time when we were sitting around talking about it was not real. The only time it was real was when we were actively doing stuff. But then we speculate and then you get all the bosses telling people how to be, and so on, and that was the problem. T said that getting the barley was hard work, but thinking there was going to be any free time or liberation from work was untrue.

...And we can only obtain real freedom and real happiness if we all act as one, that is to say, all for one and one for all. But for this, we must first destroy all that is old.

And we must do so to make room for the new life we shall ourselves create that will give us real freedom and real happiness.

Down with dependence on others!

 

Source: YouTube

O said we were all dependent on each other. She had to take public transport, she was dependent on someone running it. She thought dependency was everywhere. The only freedom we had was to make decisions in a given circumstance, so she did not know what he was talking about. D said this was exactly what the problem was. The only way to be really free was to become a sadhu, and they have to rely on external things. LR said it was taking responsibility for your own thoughts and actions and feelings, and that was a hard thing as we all knew. She gave the example of the film Playing for Time with Vanessa Redgrave. It was set in the war and she was a prisoner. While she was being raped, in her mind she was playing music. LR thought this was incredible, because she wasn't filled with fear and loathing, she was connected to something higher - she went beyond the body into the mind and higher feelings. J quoted Dale Carnegie: "Two men looked out from prison bars, one saw the mud, the other saw stars."

We ourselves will be masters of our own circumstances and no longer they, who rule our lives and do so without our knowledge and without our consent.

D said it was saying, give up your family script. Give up all the things that you know, and change your mind and do the work to be free. That's what we were here for. GC asked if this did not sound like a cult? J asked, why give up everything? Why not just give up what was wrong?

Our lives must be governed and guided by those whom we ourselves shall elect from our midst, that is by men only from amongst those who themselves struggle for our daily barley.

And we must elect these governors and counsellors on the basis of equal rights, without distinction of sex or age, by universal, direct, equal, and open ballot.’

O said he was saying that the people who ruled were people who had to be themselves awoken, and struggle, not just people who were elected by other people. RM said it was describing to him what true democracy could be. L said it sounded to him very similar to the genesis of the Russian revolution. J agreed, saying that he was describing a system which apparently made sense, but was inherently and internally contradictory, and then when you thought this was absolute nonsense - Down with dependence on others - we must all be one together! - then he says, somehow, this was actually the placard for a particular philosophy about which he was sceptical. So what seemed to be ridiculous turned out to be as ridiculous as the people he is describing. O said that the system in India started like that, with the governments being the wisest people to rule, and it became very oppressive.

Listen, and all of you be aware that we, the representatives of terrestrial beings assembled here who have thanks to our great learning already attained independent individuality, have the happiness to be the first to behold with our own eyes the creation of a Messiah of Divine consciousness sent from Above to reveal World-truths to us.

 

Elliot Alderson expresses his views
Source: YouTube

RM said that the problem is that people change their allegiances to whichever has the greatest power.

Thereupon began that usual maleficent what is called ‘mutual inflation,’ which had already long been practised among the learned beings of new formation and chiefly on account of which no true knowledge which has chanced to reach them ever evolves there as it does everywhere else in the Universe, even merely from the passage of time itself; but, on the contrary, even the knowledge once already attained there is destroyed, and its possessors always become shallower and shallower.

D said that was the dilemma we had.

And the rest of the learned beings then began shouting and pushing each other in order to get near Lentrohamsanin; and addressing him as their ‘long-awaited-Messiah’ they conveyed to him by their admiring glances what is called their ‘high-titillation.’ 

 ... if anybody becomes a follower of an already well-known and important being, he thereby seems to be to all other beings almost as well known and important himself.

J said this described basking in reflected glory. If you followed someone, and other people believed in the teachings of the person you were following, then they looked to you as an exponent. Is it so wrong? is the question, but it happens as a normal way of the order of life. It reminded O of Eichmann. When he was brought to trial in Israel, what he really said in his defence was, I followed, I followed. People gave their authority to other people that got a halo around them. That is something that Hannah Arendt talked a lot about in her book on the Holocaust, These were ordinary people that gave their authority to other people in order for the sun to reflect on them.

Labour and Sweat

With people at work, the arguments in T's mind were connected with energy whirling round in the solar plexus. She had not been able to remember the pause. With people that she knew well, she had been aware of it at the time; her thinking processes became more scattered, her voice became raised, and it was a more biological response. She had been able to pause afterwards, which was an interesting experience, because it was as if everything was whirling round in her body, so there wasn't equilibrium and poise.

Once a day, when something you say is disagreed with, observe how you are feeling emotionally, and then where you feel it in your body. Pause for a moment.

On one occasion, a lady who cares for J disagreed with something he wanted to do, and his reaction to that was entirely cerebral, he knew where she was coming from, and the location in the body was decidedly up top. On another occasion, a friend disagreed with him in an acerbic tone of voice, and the locus of the reaction was in the solar plexus.

Having been quite reactive most of her life, LR had been mindful this last month of her response to disagreement, aware that she needed and wanted to become responsible, looking in to herself and seeing how she wanted to be in terms of being calm and neutral, and not arguing back or even accusing. At the point when someone disagreed with her, she was aware of what was going on, and considered how she wanted to be. She realised she had a choice. Did she want to get involved, or did she want to try and stay in something she was constantly trying to form up in herself, which was an inner calm and stability, out of which she could come in a positive way when she dealt with another. LR's reaction was in the solar plexus, which is a seat of will, and another brain. She was also aware of her blood getting heated up, and her nerves could jangle. On one occasion she observed she had used an accusatory tone of voice.

N had met with a client during the month, who became very defensive when asked for more information. N explained further that the information was needed to pursue the matter further, and the client became very difficult about the whole situation. N could sense the tension in the room.

People disagreed with L quite a lot, partly because he was quite focused, and he knew what he wanted to do and tried to do it. Or people disagreed with him because they might plain just not like him, but whether people agreed or disagreed, he thought OK, he did not tend to react emotionally any more, or feel it anywhere, but occasionally, if there was anger associated with the other person, then he did feel it. He supposed that was being empathetic. L was part of a group of artists, and one recently sent a letter of resignation by email, to other members of the committee. L could see, just from the subject line, anger leaking out, and so it proved to be when he read the email. On this occasion he felt it around the heart, and then he paused.

Responses then followed. Responding to N, T asked if there was a point when he was aware of the pause happening in the context of the CHALLENGE, and if there was a period when he had paused. N said he was aware, and wondered What was really going on here?, and there was confusion and anxiety within him. He had sensed all kinds of feelings running through his body at the time that it was going on. He sensed it as well in the body, in the solar plexus, which was where you felt these things. Also, if he got angry, he sometimes felt blood coursing through his head, and he had to then calm himself down and meditate, otherwise it could have a strong physical effect on him. He was aware of the fact that the disagreements could lead to anger, which could lead to all kinds of things. So it was an ongoing process which you could see in your machine. It was purely a mechanical process, and if you could stop it, which you sometimes could, you had gone to a higher stage. He had realised during the process that he was not going to change this person's attitude in the meeting, and so they did pause it and moved on to something else. T asked if the pausing had been for the meeting or had it been for himself. N said it had been for both. GC said that N was the only one who had felt the energy in his head.

 

Source: YouTube

LR had watched the film Meetings with Remarkable Men again, and on this occasion she caught something new from it, that she'd never seen before, and it was to do with the depiction of pauses. They did not waste language. In the film, the young Gurdjieff would ask a question to his father. There would be a long pause. Then his father would give a brief answer. They were coming from a place of respect and value and honesty, and being precise, rather than the waffle we all have, and there was a feeling of substance or content. For her there was something significant about the pause before she reacted with people.

The reading continued from Chapter 28 of Beelzebub's Tales.

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
this Watch on YouTube

... Already by the time this terrestrial what is called ‘Papa’s-and-Mama’s-darling’ was approaching the age of a responsible being, he was, as it is said there, very well ‘instructed’ and ‘educated,’ that is, he had in his presence a great deal of data for all kinds of being ‘egoplastikoori,’ consisting, as it is usual there according to the abnormally established conditions of their existence, of various fantastic and dubious information; and later, when he became a responsible being he manifested himself automatically through all kinds of corresponding accidental shocks.

LR said the significant word here was responsible. It was as if he had created himself. She had the feeling responses in him became automatic, having worked through, overcome or faced the accidental shocks, because we all had accidental shocks, and a shock was a move up.

RM said that a lot of education was instruction, and it became instinct. Education gets people to become automatic machines. How do you make money? How do you do this? How do you do that? RM had a sense that this was what Gurdjieff was talking about, and that the parents were channelling him into  that way of thinking, becoming a machine, as most of us did become.

When this later great learned being there reached the age of a responsible being, and although he had indeed a great deal of information or, as it is called there, ‘knowledge,’ nevertheless, he had absolutely no Being in regard to this information or knowledge which he had acquired.

T said he was not being allowed to have his own experience of anything, he was just being filled from books and other people's words. J said it was the difference between pure and applied mathematics, You could learn information that was not of emotional importance, and you could apply it, but to deliberately cut yourself off from one or the other was a mistake. N said this was very different to the education that Gurdjieff himself got, as described in Meetings With Remarkable Men, where his father would get him to do all kinds of trades, and when he was about to master one, his father would move him to the next thing for him to learn, so he acquired all this practical knowledge.

Well, when this unprecedented Kashireitleer was ready, the subsequently great Lentrohamsanin inscribed upon it his invention concerning a topic which, indeed, it had occurred to nobody to discuss before, and for which, in truth, there was no reason why it should have been.

Namely, in those wiseacrings of his, he then criticised in every way the existing order of collective existence.

This Kashireitleer began thus:

Man’s greatest happiness consists in not being dependent on any other personality whatsoever, and in being free from the influence of any other person, whoever he may be! 

...Undeniably, life under the present state-organisation is now far better for us than it used to be before; but where then is that real freedom of ours upon which our happiness must depend? 

Don’t we work and labour as much now as during all other former state-organisations? 

Haven’t we to labour and sweat to get the barley indispensable to us to live and not to starve to death like chained dogs?

J said there was one thing he could not see. What he was discussing was the state of society. We did all this. This was bad. What we have got now may be an improvement but is it good enough? How come nobody had thought to discuss that before, and why wasn't there any point in it? L said that somebody had to be the first. J said that the text was saying he was on an entirely false trail, but it seemed a reasonable thing that he was doing, even if he was wrong about what he suspected should be the case.