Essence and Sensibility

RM realised through the challenge that this was a long jounrey for him. First he needed to discover what his essence was, which was an opening door for him. Was he on his craft? Had he found his craft? Had he found what he was? All these questions, and so it would take him more than a month to find out what that was, and then to see whether he was consistent with it.

Once a day, consider whether or not your mantle, your outer personality, is consistent with your essence. Sense your solar plexus, and observe any stress there. Try to be totally aware of your presence, say I am, and twirl round like a whirling dervish trying to focus on the solar plexus of that movement.

N said he was aware he had different personalities for different things that he did. Part of his essence was music and writing music, but it was not his profession, which pushed him in a direction to behave a particular way with clients, especially in regard to colleagues. Part of his essence was helping people who had got into difficulties, and supporting them and giving them help. He had one particular case where he could not possibly charge the person the kind of money that was involved in the work, but he was nevertheless going ahead, even though the result was not going to be good financially, simply because there was a case deserving of help. So part of his essence was present when there was a pro bono element to his work, although he wouldn't say that was always the case.

T had done the Challenge several times during the month. It had been a busy month trying to get back to the workplace with all its problems. She had not managed to twirl in public, outdoors but had tried it indoors, and then she had to be very careful not to knock into things. She had experiences of the solar plexus being energised and also in turmoil, and once or twice she became aware of these states, but it was the turmoil of the solar plexus that reminded her of the Challenge, rather than the other way round. She had taken it literally about the mantle and had become very conscious of what she was wearing. Where was the mantle? Was it the clothes? And then she became aware of the skin, of the body, as the mantle and how in the northern hemisphere we were all about the manufactured clothes we were wearing, and what that does to how we think about and feel about ourselves. She was not so aware of the body, especially in the public arena.  And where was the essence? Where did it reside? And what was the relationship between the two? For the last part of the Challenge, she realised she was turning rather than twirling, and she felt so clunky it was even hard to turn without falling over.

Some years ago L had received some emotional and unpleasant messages from a family member, which had been difficult for him. More recently, he had received less unpleasant, but still quite unpleasant, messages from another member. He had perhaps been unduly deferential to his family in the past, maybe taking the role of victim or being overly understanding to the way people act, but he had realised that this was a false mantle. It was not the way he really was. He was really a strong person but also a nice person, but maybe too nice sometimes. So he had adopted his real mantle of not giving way to this sort of thing, and responded in a firm way. He had done the twirling as well. It had made him go a little dizzy, but made him aware of his body. He also had an AGM of a professional association coming up, where everybody has roles and then personalities get involved. He had decided he would stick to the rules and responsibilities that officers have in such a situation, with no emotion about it. He thought that was a real mantle.

RM said N was obviously identifying something of his essence, where there was a deviation from strict regulation and the kindness was trying to get through. L thought that N's kindness was a virtuous aspect of his character, but mantles are more like roles, and his song writing was more of a mantle. Maybe he could write songs and be kind at the same time. RM saw mantle as the role in life you had got to, and the issue was whether your mantle was consistent with your essence.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... they have become expert in inventing and in distributing ... vast quantities of every kind of metalwares called there locks, razors, mousetraps, revolvers, scythes, machine guns, saucepans, hinges, guns, penknives, cartridges, pens, mines, needles, and many other things of the same kind.

“And ever since the beings of this contemporary community started inventing these practical objects, the ordinary existence of the three-brained beings of your planet has been ...‘not-life-but-free-jam.’

“The beings of that contemporary community have been the benefactors of the other contemporary beings of your planet, offering them, as they say there, ‘philanthropic aid,’ especially as regards their first being-duty, namely, the duty of carrying out from time to time the process of ‘reciprocal destruction.’

“Thanks to them, the discharge of that being-duty of theirs has gradually become for your contemporary favourites, the ‘merest trifle.’

T said that the mechanisation of making things had "made life easier" but almost robbed every human being of that experience of the craft that goes into making something, a process which they can learn so much from. When you make something you are interacting with the world and forming something which wasn't there before. L thought the emphasis was on the export from Britain of weapons. Guns (which were mentioned), and maybe tanks and warships, expediting the destructive manifestations of humanity.

Charles Chaplin - Modern Times

T said the mechanisation acts to amplify and magnify all that a human being can make, good and bad. MT asked if the three centres were involved in making something? Whereas in the use of a manufactured item, he did not know what was involved, certainly not the three centres. RM said certainly in the making of things the three centres are involved, because if you missed out one of these centres it would not produce very much. RM said that by having these labour-saving devices, at least one of the centres could go to sleep because of not being applied. So it was critical that we continue to be creative, and this is what art does for us, because we are not making something that is being used for something else, we are making it for its own sake. N said that his was almost a Marxist point, about the division of labour which took place under manufacturing. In the past if you were a craftsman or creator you created the whole item. With industrialisation there was a fracturing of that process such that you only saw a very little part of the process of production, which caused, in Marx's idea, the alienation of the individual involved in that manufacturing process. T said that when things are made and distributed, it is the consumer that has nothing to do with making it, so there is a disconnect between the making and the using. RM said the user can be fast asleep and just using it, but if they use it to be creative, that is another story, because they use it as part of the creation of something else, but society produces so much for the ease of use, it is tending to send society asleep. J said it struck him, when Gurdjieff was talking about "... machine guns, saucepans ... and things of the same kind", that of course those particular items were very different in kind. It seemed to J that Gurdjieff was saying that there were two different things that we do. We are giving people free jam, in other words pandering to their wish to have something for nothing, and also we have got a tendency to mutual destruction, or reciprocal destruction. It was like the earlier discussion about essence. There are two aspects of it. One is the benign and helpful, and that sometimes leads to sloth on behalf of those we are being kind to, and then there is the red in tooth and claw aspect of life which puts us all on our mettle, and he was making this distinction by somehow making a sort of mulch of all these different ingredients for two very different  purposes.

“The contemporary beings now scarcely need to make any effort whatsoever in order to destroy completely the existence of beings like themselves.

... sitting quietly in ... their ‘smoking rooms’ they can destroy, just as a pastime ...  tens and sometimes even hundreds of others like themselves.

The descendants of the beings of the once ‘great’ and ‘powerful’ community Greece there, still continue to exist ... but for the other independent communities there, they have at the present time scarcely any significance whatever.

They already no longer do as their ancestors did there, who were supreme specialists in cooking up all kinds of ‘fantastic sciences’; for if a contemporary Greek cooked up a new science, the beings of the other communities of the present time would not pay it the smallest attention.

And they would pay no attention to it, chiefly because that community has not at the present time enough of what are called ‘guns’ and ‘ships’ ...

... the descendants of the former great Greeks, ... have now perfectly adapted themselves there on almost all the continents and islands to keeping what are called ‘shops,’ where without any haste, slowly and gently, they trade in what are called ‘sponges,’ ‘halva,’ ‘Rahat-Lokoum,’ ‘Turkish delight,’ etc ...

N said that this was written not long after the first World War, and Greece was not on the political map at that stage. Gurdjieff was partly of Greek descent, so he most probably felt this particularly that his once great nation of philosophers and scientists was now no longer considered to have any authority in the world. J said that at first it seemed to be a dig at the British Empire again; sitting in our smoking rooms in the typical English club setting, chattering away, and by so doing not having much heed of the fact that we were destroying the lives of hundreds and thousands of people like ourselves elsewhere. It was a lack of understanding of what we were doing. That was on one side of it, and then he moves over to the great results of a different part of the globe, the nice foodstuffs from the Middle East. It seemed that Gurdjieff was taking sides here, but it was the first bit that interested J. T said that the people who get into the clubs J described are politicians, ruling class, and at the press of a button, or a decision in parliament, we go to war, and if  we have the military strength, the bully rules. Any natural authority can no longer exist if there is a military authority. MT asked what would natural authority be based on? T said that was a good question and suggested ethical principles.

The Mantle Piece

RM found he had been protecting his whole identity. He was seeing it with a degree of humour. It was a way of letting go. Being locked in at home more had given him an opportunity to be much more self aware, being present for his condition, and it was helping him focus on the things that were of real value in life.

Each day, after getting up, look around for one minute, and find one thing you have been protecting that has no lasting relevance or value. Thank it for its contribution and let it go. At the same time, consider the situation we are in because of the virus, and think of something you can be grateful for which has come as a consequence.

J was reluctant to discard things, but he did discard one or two things of people who had floated out of his life and he did not particularly want to have revisit it. As regards the Covid advantages, he could start with being able to come to the Meeting like this without having to come to Hampstead at nine in the morning, how marvellous! So it had been through so many engagements that frankly one can experience vicariously or virtually, and this had saved an enormous amout of time, and one had had the opportunity to revaluate one's past in a way that, given the normal frenetic pace of rushing hither and yon, he wouldn't have done. There were disdavantages, obviously, but in personal terms this had been a boon, for him.

T had managed two disposals. A gifted book from a strange family relationship that continued to cause emotional pain. and she had let that go so she was not reminded when she looked at it, which obviously you do subconsciously even if you are not aware of looking at it. And very expensive body butters and salt scrubs in beautiful jars, which had gathered three years of dust because she didn't particularly like them. There were two or three times as many things she wasn't able to get rid of. She had created a dilemma box years before with the thought that she would re-evaluate them (and never did). That was very, very dusty, and now they were washed and shined, and visible in the home. She had realised it was about attachment, and somehow if she let them go it would be letting part of her go, and the idea that something malign was out there that could destroy it. It was almost like the object was her, and she was the object. From the Covid lockdown, she was grateful for the shakeup of values, questioning habits, enforced reflection, but also reconnection with the Earth rather than the world, and buying a bike!

Like everyone, N had had more time to reflect, more time to study, more time to work on himself, more time to get more perspective on his life. He had enjoyed going out in nature, having more walks than he would normally have done. He had enjoyed the experience of just having a different lifestyle for a period of time.

L had given away, or thrown away, quite a lot of things, and had made a note of how long he had kept them. One thing he had kept for 35 years. He had not been allowed to get rid of that. Some books on music, he had kept for 20 years. An old floppy disk, 27 years. An old CD, 30 years. He also made a note each time of what he had been valuing, what he was grateful for. These were the clean air on Hampstead Heath, less traffic noise, opportunity to spend more time at home, not having to commute, more time and easier to think and plan, learning more about friends, getting out of a rut, and experiencing a holiday at home. He thought there was a lot to be grateful for. It could be very hard to let these old things go, they were very sticky, but he thought it was worth it.

Responding to what N said about walking more in nature, T said we had such an extreme at the moment of being more connected with the natural world, and likewise with the technological world, being connected with it, and we were missing the middle ground, the community centre. What was it about being present in a room with another person that was so meaningful?

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... productions from ancient times have almost ceased to exist on that ill-fated planet.

This latter occurred because for various Hasnamussian purposes and for their famous, as they call them, ‘scientific aims,’ they collected the surviving ancient productions from all countries and, not knowing how to preserve ancient objects, they only hastened their speedy destruction.

But they used and still use those ‘antiques’ they collected as ‘models’ for ‘cheap goods’ which are everywhere known on that ill-fated planet by the name of ‘Ersatz.’

N thought Gurdjieff was advising scepticism about science. Books by people like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Hawking were very interesting, but had a very limited viewpoint. N thought this kind of cynicism about science was healthy and a good thing.

... And when this chemical substance, called atropine, is in a certain way introduced into the eyes of beings the pupils become dilated and darker; and, because of this, most of them introduce this atropine into their eyes, in order that their faces may appear good and pleasing to others.

And truly, my dear boy, those terrestrial beings who introduce this ‘German blessing’ into their eyes do have very ‘dark eyes’ until they are forty-five.

J asked what was he saying that people think, other than that you make yourself as attractive as you can, by means of hypnotising yourself into thinking that you are. What was he getting at here? RM said it was about creating a mantle that was not actually ours. As a young man he had wanted to appear wealthy, so every Sunday, he went out on the balcony of a five star hotel in his best suit, picked a cigar and smoked that, and found the cheapest thing on the menu, it was all he could afford. So he created a mantle of wealth that made him feel good. The text was saying that what we tend to do is create this false image by colouring ourselves, or making our eyes darker, to give an impression which is not truly ourselves. If we deviate from the fundamental essence of ourselves by creating a false mantle, it is a false personality. T said it works until 45, but then it is downhill all the way! It was self-destructive action, although it appears to be constructive. L said it also suggests that these people can no longer see clearly. It was talking about the primary organ of perception, which is the basis for what we think. It was about self-delusion, a deliberate self-delusion. RM said when you start believing your own mantle, that's a problem, because it's self-delusion. He had found people rented houses way above their means, and they got more and more into debt, just to create an image, keeping up with the Joneses. So they had this false mantle, false personality, and at some point they ended up with a crash, past 45, ran out of money, gone into debt, and they didn't even look the part because of their age.

Wooly Thinking

N's creative project had been to prepare a talk about Gurdjieff for the I Ching Society, and where possible bring out any similarities or contrasts with the wisdom in the I Ching. This was a daunting project as he had to go back over the Gurdjieff Work and read up on the I Ching. He had sometimes finished work late in the evening, and then thought he must do something towards his I Ching project, and did find a lot of resistance, for example there were other books around the house which he found more interesting, in some ways, than the I Ching. He then tried to do the Challenge which helped to do something towards the project.

Decide on a creative project for the month, for example an artwork, story, or song. Once a day, when you observe that you are in a decomposing state, stand up, pause, and do something towards that creative project. Observe points of resistance in doing the project during the month, and how they are overcome.

RM's creative project had been learning the piano, on which he had spent at least two minutes a day. He had an app on his phone which helped him align the keys with the letters and the sound. He noticed in retrospect that a lot of the time he was decomposing and did not even know he was, 'I've been busy but what have I produced?' It was shocking for him to realise his human nature. He was finding it very helpful, during that time when he did realise that he was decomposing, to pick up his phone, look at the app, and pick out a few notes. This exercise had been extremely helpful in order to get him to realise he was decomposing and apply the knowledge of that to some project that he had set himself to do.

Responding to RM, T said it was very refreshing to hear about his two minutes, because two minutes is better than no minutes. Psychologically there was such resistance, but you did not have to do anything more than that, to touch base, and then that two minutes might expand.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

For your clear representation and better understanding how these contemporary direct heirs have surpassed their ‘legators’, I must now explain to you also about certain widely used means existing there at the present time, which owe their existence exclusively to these ‘Nature-helping’ direct heirs of ancient Greece.

I will explain to you certain of these means there, now existing and in use everywhere, which have been invented by the beings of that contemporary community Germany.

I should like first to emphasize, by the way, one very odd phenomenon, namely, that these contemporary ‘substitutes’ for the ancient Greeks give names to their said maleficent inventions, names which for some reason or other all end in ‘ine.’

As examples of the very many particularly maleficent inventions of those German beings, let us take just those five what are called ‘chemical substances,’ now existing there under the names of (1) satkaine, (2) aniline, (3) cocaine, (4) atropine and (5) alisarine, which chemical substances are used there at the present time by the beings of all the continents and islands as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin says: ‘Even-without-any-economising.’

Wernher von Braun 1912-1977
Chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle

N said that last time he was criticising the Greeks and the Romans, and now he was criticising the Germans as the creators of these strange sciences, and it seemed to be quite serious, negative criticism of these cultures and what they did. T thought he had moved on in history. Germany and all the European countries were the high culture of the Western world at that time, and suddenly there was this catastrophe happening, because it was also saying that all the continents and islands were doing it, even without economising, so it took hold. RM said that when people follow on later in life, like the Germans following the Greeks, they tend to take on their own interpretation and add their own meaning to things. He got this sense that Gurdjieff was talking about human nature from one group to another, who had been given great, wise words. What happens biblically is that Jesus Christ may say wonderful things, and then people that follow that add their own interpretation, and eventually the original meaning gets completely lost, and people use it as a power tool. T was wondering if the legators were the previous civilisation. L said that during the course of his book, not only does he invent gurus, like Ashiata Shiemash, and then destroy them afterwards, there was also no civilisation and no part of the world which escapes his wit and criticism. So at the moment it was Germany, and no doubt it was every other country in Europe which will shortly follow. T asked if Beelzebub was not the objective eye? He was not the devil's advocate, he was the devil, Beelzebub, and he was talking as someone from Mars. He had that outer viewpoint, looking down. A asked if it was also the disconnection between individuals inventing things and not taking responsibility for their inventions and what they do. Wernher von Braun was enjoying developing rockets; flying to the moon did not seem to matter too much.

... owing to the fact that there was then proceeding in the presences of the beings of their community, consequently in them themselves, what is called ‘the-most-intense-experiencing’ of the chief particularity of the psyche of the three-brained beings of your planet, namely, ‘the-urgent-need-to-destroy-the-existence-of-others-like-themselves’—and indeed, the beings of that community were then fully absorbed in their process of reciprocal destruction with the beings of neighboring communities—these others thereupon at once ‘enthusiastically’ decided to devote themselves entirely to finding means to employ the special property of that gas for the speedy mass destruction of the existence of the beings of other communities.

L said he assumed this was about the use of mustard gas in World War 1. The way Gurdjieff described war was just like a scientist describing the way something growing in a Petri dish might change colour or shape, or some phenomenon in nature or the cosmos. He was describing behaviour in a very abstract sense, even though to us personally it is incredibly destructive and cruel behaviour. T said he may be commenting on it in that way because it is automatic behaviour and inevitable if there is no conscious awareness of what they are actually doing. L said that people behaving automatically tend to be in conflict with others who are behaving automatically, as for instance there is a desire for growth when resources are limited.

The second of the chemical substances I enumerated, namely, ‘aniline,’ is that chemical coloring substance, by means of which most of those surplanetary formations can be dyed from which the three-brained beings there make all kinds of objects they need in the process of their ordinary being-existence.

Although thanks to that invention your favorites can now dye any object any color, yet, what the lastingness of the existence of these objects becomes—ah, just there lies their famous Bismarck’s ‘pet cat.’

Before that maleficent aniline existed, the objects produced by your favorites for their ordinary existence, such, for instance, as what are called ‘carpets,’ ‘pictures,’ and various articles of wool, wood, and skin, were dyed with simple vegetable dyes, which they had learned during centuries how to obtain, and these just-enumerated objects would formerly last from five to ten or even fifteen of their centuries.

T thought it was talking about how the new chemical dyes did not last, whereas the dying which was done naturally in harmony with nature lasts for centuries. N said that Gurdjieff was a carpet dealer, and would understand about vegetable dyes and the newer chemical ones. L assumed that here Gurdjieff was talking about long-term change to people. 

Masquerade

On occasions when N wore the mask, he did not see so many flowers, but there were trees, and he looked at them and tried to integrate this with the wearing of the mask. Putting on the mask, he had different experiences; sometimes he found it unpleasant, sometimes he found it pleasant, if he wore the same mask too often, there could be a horrible smell coming back from it, which made it a bit unpleasant, and so he then concentrated on either trying to forget the smell, or trying to integrate it with his own feeling, in other words trying to make it pleasurable towards himself. He found that quite hard at times, so then spent the next day or two washing the masks and putting a perfume on them to make them more acceptable and pleasant to wear. This helped a bit with the pleasant smell coming back at him, and made it more pleasant to wear.

When you put your protective mask on to go out, clear the mind and enjoy looking at a flower or something beautiful in nature. Accentuate the feeling of wearing the mask and make it pleasurable.

L said that putting on a mask was not generally that pleasant because you had to pinch a bit of metal over the top of the nose to secure it, but it did make him aware of his skin and his face, as he pressed it round the contours. Of course, looking at a flower on going out, was always nice, and it enhanced his sense of nature. Wearing a mask, or not wearing a mask, was symbolic of change, and he thought over the month he might have sensed a change creeping over him.

When RM first put on the mask, he found it uncomfortable; he had to pinch around the nose to make sure it sealed properly. Then he looked at things around him, which was pleasant. He then started enjoying wearing the mask because he associated looking at nice things. This was a change of attitude, which seemed a permanent change. He also realised that if he put the mask on first and then his glasses on top, it sealed the mask more, and he thought that was quite cool.

J said that if you try to look at a flower through a perspex screen, you can't actually see it properly, so part of the challenge was negated for him before he got going. He was able to be aware of the mask, but not necessarily make it more comfortable. It did not induce a different spread of reactions according to how he placed it. The only difference was that he would be thinking, "what pleasure do I get from wearing it?" The more he thought about it, and he did not think very much about it, the more the process of thinking about it in this way was taking him away from the purpose of the Challenge, which was to be mindful and to be conscious and to be aware. He realised he was setting himself a set of intellectual problems - What is the purpose of it? How can I feel better about it? - rather than actually feeling better.

T's challenge, every time, was, "Can I remember the challenge and all the parts of it, and the joining up of those parts when I am doing it?" Her experience of the mask when she was out on the street, was that it was warm and she could hear and feel her breath which she could not normally do. She was reminded of women in the Muslim burqa, though hers was white with a red ventilator. For her it was always easy to notice the beauty in flowers that she came across. Generally she is easily distracted by sights as she walks along but during the challenge of remembering the mask, she did not manage to connect up the two aspects, wearing the mask and looking round at nature. In the last two weeks she managed to remember the challenge with notes to herself - Remember the Gurdjieff Challenge! - and even made alarms. She had a sense of cheating, but also wanted help for  remembering, and used strategies for that but even then only had few occasions where the two aspects happened at the same time.

Responding to J, RM said said that knowing the difference between thinking about it and experiencing it, was a huge shift in perception. When he was just thinking about it, it took him away from doing it and being present to it. Most of the people he talked to were so much more in thinking about their life, rather than living and being in it. There was a huge difference between the two. L said he thought it was probably a good sign if J had found it quite awkward and uncomfortable. When that happens during a Gurdjieff Challenge, to L it means that it is working. It is when life is too comfortable and everything seems OK, that our growth stops, so the cat has to have something to sharpen its claws against. J clarified that the inconvenience, not quite amounting to discomfort, wasn't so much in the actual wearing of it; it was in perceiving, as you would wish, the sensory perception of the flower. By wearing a mask, one of the things you could normally get from enjoying a flower, was to be able to smell it, and of course you couldn't do that either. So maybe the inconvenience aspect of it, made you appreciate the flower, but not because you were smelling it, but because you couldn't smell it. Therefore it brought to mind more clearly the experience that you weren't able to have, and thereby, by thinking about it in that way, you became more appreciative of the flower. It was a sort of odd roundabout.

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

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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In the early period of that Greco-Roman civilization, the said maleficent impulses, which have now become being-impulses, namely, the ‘passion-for-inventing-fantastic-sciences’ and the ‘passion-for-depravity,’ were inherent in the Greek and Roman beings alone; and later, when, as I have already said, the beings of both these communities chanced to acquire the said strength and began coming into contact with and influencing the beings of other communities, the beings of many other communities of your unfortunate favorites gradually began to be infected by these peculiar and unnatural being-impulses.

J said Gurdjieff was really chancing his arm by disposing of Greco-Roman civilisation in one sweeping and rather derogatory way; that all maleficent impulses that arise are as a result of them. Each generation proceeds along certain lines of development, some good, some bad, for the future. You have got to take account of what there would have been without this. T said it was the character that Gurdjieff was writing about who was saying all this. Beelzebub is the devil, isn't he? So he was really getting J going. We always thought to admire those fantastic civilisations, but maybe he is trying to shake things up, to question what were they doing; but it is also what we are doing with the knowledge that has come from those civilisations. Do we sit on our laurels, because they have done all the thinking, or do we use our own experiences to have some discrimination.

And thus, little by little, these ‘inventions’ of those two ancient communities have brought it about that already, at the present time, the psyche of your favorites—shaky enough already before then—has now become so unhinged in all of them, without exception, that both their ‘world outlook’ and the whole ordering of their daily existence rest and proceed exclusively on the basis of those two said inventions of the beings of that Greco-Roman civilization, namely, on the basis of fantasying, and of ‘striving-for-sexual-gratification.

Here it is very interesting to notice that although, as I have already told you, thanks to the inheritance from the ancient Romans, ‘organic-self-shame’—proper to the three-brained beings—has gradually and entirely disappeared from the presences of your favorites, nevertheless there has arisen in them in its place something rather like it. In the presences of your contemporary favorites there is as much as you like of this pseudo being-impulse which they also call ‘shame,’ but the data for engendering it, just as of all others, are quite singular.

This being-impulse arises in their presences only when they do something which under their abnormally established conditions of ordinary being-existence is not acceptable to be done before others.

N said that, on the one hand, the author is complaining about the Greeks, that they were responsible for having created this thing whereby we came up with all these fantastic sciences, which you would have thought would have been beneficial to civilisation. On the other, he was complaining about the Romans, that sexual gratification was the only thing that they were about, or that they gave to civilisation. That all this was somehow imbibed into our psyches, either we are fantastically turned on by technology or by sex. If we look around at our civilisation there is a fair bit of truth in that, thinking about how extensive technology and science is within our civilisation, how much it controls things, and at the same time how much there was in terms of pornography out there in the world, which Gurdjieff would say was presumably a corruption of the sexual centre, in his understanding of the way it works. He is also saying that shame is part of this, in other words, that is it is not very authentic, only when we have done something and we have been found out about it. Therefore we feel shame, not because we have any conscience about it from a more conscious place, but simply because of what other people think about us.

Thanks to the sciences invented by the ancient Greeks, only the being-mentation of other beings was spoiled and still continues to be spoiled.

... the said specific disease there of wiseacring has been very widely spread among other of your favorites;  their total effect has now already become, what is called, the ‘resultant-decomposing-force,’ in contradistinction to what is called the ‘resultant-creative-force’ of Nature.

L did not think he was talking about science, but more about wiseacring from social sciences and maybe politics. RM said the decomposing force is natural entropy, where things slide back if you let them. We have a natural tendency to undo things if we get lazy. The creative force is where we want to drive forward. Gurdjieff was talking about a balance here. We have to watch out for natural entropy entering into our lives, just being slovenly and slow, or when we are wiseacring.

Airy Nothing

N had found himself talking to a client, and realised it was in an area which was outside his knowledge of expertise, and he suddenly pulled back and did the action to himself regarding the jug.

Once a day, if you notice yourself speaking from a presumption of greater knowledge than you have, evaluate what you were saying and consider how you can make it more congruent with reality. Pause, grab an invisible jug by the handle, and turn it as if to pour out its contents.

RM had attended a meeting about Ficino. They had a long debate and discussion reading Ficino's words with people trying to interpret what Ficino actually said. RM's ego said, Oh, I know what he said, and while he was talking, he realised he was speaking way above his paygrade. He didn't want to stop, because he didn't want to show that he was an idiot. He carried on a bit, realised what he was doing, and then he stopped and just let it drop, and he emptied the imaginary jug. It had been an interesting experience but it also reminded him of the number of times he did speak above his paygrade, often wiseacring about what he thought he was clever at. It had been a great opportunity for him to realise something about himself. He kind of knew it, but it was more obvious to him after this.

J said he was very aware that this was a potential problem of people generally, and himself, speaking out of turn and with rather too much authority. The only instance he had seen during this period was when a friend of his from Afghanistan sent him cartoons of the current political situation, showing drug fuelled Afghanis obviously incapable of forming a government. He told his friend that when he had been in Kabul, he remembered getting almost transcendentally high simply walking down a street, because of the fumes of drugs billowing out of the front doors of houses on either side. Then he remembered the CHALLENGE, and asked himself if he sounded as if he knew all about Afghanistan and the drug situation there, which he did not. However, going through the instance in his mind, he realised that what he had been saying was nothing but the truth. In fact it was the whole truth as he saw it, and he was clear. So it might have been a temptation to wiseacre, but he thought that because of his long awareness of this potential danger in normal conversation, he thought he had avoided it. But the other attendees had heard him now, and could probably tell him that he was actually unaware that he was wiseacreing.

T had waxed very lyrical at home, and in that space she had been able to raise her hand far too often to pour water over herself. She had realised that this was talking about things she had heard or read about, and taken in the arguments, without any experiential knowledge, and everything had came flooding out, having an argument about something in real time with someone else. It felt very satisfying to beat that drum of intellectual knowledge gained from what other people had written or said. There were so many instances of going off on one that she could not think of one in particular, it had been shocking.

L said that nobody had yet talked about the part of the Challenge related to rephrasing statements in a form more congruent with reality. When he had tried to do that he found that what he actually tried to do was rephrase things in a more positive light, because when he talked about things he did not know about, it could lead to negative expression. The truth was, if he didn't know what he was talking about, the most positive slant was equally likely, perhaps, not to be correct, it might just make him feel better. He had done the pouring of water gesture, but because he was not talking to people very much, it happened equally or more often with his thoughts, thinking to himself. He was daydreaming from a vantage point of assumed knowledge which he did not have. It was really a waste of time and energy, and being aware of this he would then try to stop.

Responding to J, T said he had brought up an interesting point about historic experience and current experience. Things might have changed a lot, and we were left with the stereotype of what we remember, which was so tactile and so clear. It was like remembering somebody who was a juvenile delinquent - they might be reformed ten years later, but they were still tarred with the brush of their delinquincy. Even with these vivid experiences, it was possible to acknowledge that this was historic and might not be accurate now. N said it was more acceptable to preface such remarks by making it clear it was a personal opinion and not based on experiential knowledge.

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

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... the result of the frequent contact of the beings of those two communities was that the Greek beings, borrowing from the Roman beings all the finesses of sexual ‘turns,’ began arranging their what are called ‘Athenian nights,’ while the Roman beings, having learned from the Greek beings how to cook up ‘sciences,’ composed their later very famous what is called ‘Roman law.’

D said that the Greek and the Roman civilisation were both very knowledgeable and advanced, and it had progressed to when Gurdjieff was writing, to another civilisation. Even fifty or sixty years ago, it was a different civilisation from what we had now. It was progress possibly, to what eventually? Possibly enlightenment?

J said there were several ways in which things could change, but he thought the interesting point that D was making was of human nature changing. There had been an interesting study of cats not long ago, which had shown that from their original independence of mind, from when they were out in the wild, they gradually became domesticated, but were never as affectionate as dogs. But now the modern breeds of cat were on average just as affectionate as some dogs. He did not know if this meant that the actual character of the cat was changing, but if you could assume that it might, then maybe our character and our attitudes were fundamentally changing.

... This advance of theirs into the interior of the continent Asia proceeded very successfully, and their ranks were constantly being increased, chiefly because the learned beings who had been in Babylon then continued everywhere on the continent Asia to infect the Reasons of beings with their Hasnamussian political ideas.

This reminded L of colonial history and well-meaning expeditions, including missionaries, going to foreign lands in Africa and America, and imposing a world-view on sometimes very peaceful people, and certainly people who couldn't resist. He did not know if there was any metaphorical depth to that section. T wondered about the moving into the interior, whether it meant self-exploration. J said that one of the chief commandments of Ashiata Shiemash declared: "Do not kill another even when your own life is in danger", and then in the following paragraph there they are destroying on their way all those who decline to worship their own gods. Was that slightly contradictory? L said it meant that the cultures who practiced that benevolant philosophy got quickly overrun, so the invaders were helped by the fact that those earlier cultures practiced some form of non-violent polytheism. They did not want to resist if resisting did harm. J said we were obviously saying that the mere fact that you want to be peaceful puts you at a disadvantage. N said that the use of the word hasnamuss is refering to evil, a bad person misusing their power to a great extent, and this is what he was saying about Alexander the Great.

Greek Gift

N remembered particularly one day when it came to him about the beauty of nature. He had decided to go for a long walk, and it was raining. He could watch the trees with water running down, see the grass and how it moved with the water when the raindrops came down. At the same time he tried to do the pushing back and stretching, so that he was fully in his body at the time when he was appreciating nature, and he had felt this was adding to the experience dramatically.

When you step out for your daily exercise, feel more keenly the beauty of nature, and push back with the hands moving out, away from the body -  stretch and feel the greater peace and space.

Even though T had remembered the CHALLENGE  through the month, and had determined herself to do it after she had got out of the front door, she had been too anxious, with her glove on, and her mask on, and her heavy bag. Once she had got to the park, being in the wide open space, with the trees rustling in the wind, she remembered, and then she opened her arms and embraced it.

Rainbow over London
Thursday, 2 May 2020

L said that it would have been very nice to have left the house, under these circumstances, once a day, and to enjoy nature, but the first thought was how could he avoid that jogger or cyclist who was charging down the road, and which side of the road to walk on for social distancing to avoid getting too close to people. So that worked against the immediate pleasure in nature and embracing of it. He had enjoyed it, and his awareness of it was accentuated. He had noticed the birdsong more, perhaps because there was more, and the beautiful light, especially the evening light, of the previous few days. He had also been aware of the embracing, arms out gesture, and had noticed this shape in nature as well. There was a beautiful tree on the Heath with its boughs curving up on either side, as if the tree were embracing nature, and the previous Thursday evening, just before eight, when there was the now traditional clapping for the health service, there was a rainbow in the same shape, upside down, and the rainbow was symbolic of the health service. He had also sometimes done the embracing as he was leaving. It had been hard to remember all three aspects at the same time.

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

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

     

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

The Greeks were the cause why the Reasons of the three-brained beings there began gradually to degenerate and ultimately became so degenerate that among contemporary beings it is already as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin says, ‘a-real-mill-for-nonsense.’

And the Romans were the cause why ... those factors are never crystallized in the presences of the contemporary three-brained beings there, which in other three-brained beings engender the impulse called ‘instinctive shame’; that is to say, the being impulse that maintains what are called ‘morals’ and ‘objective morality.’

... According to the investigations of our mentioned countryman, it seems that the earliest ancestors of the beings of the community, which was later called ‘Greece,’ were often obliged, on account of the frequent storms at sea which hindered them in their marine occupations, to seek refuge during the rains and winds, in sheltered places, where out of boredom, they played various ‘games’ which they invented for their distraction.

... As it later became clear, these ancient fishermen amused themselves at first with such games as children now play there—but children, it must be remarked, who have not yet started contemporary schooling—because the children there who do go to school have so much homework to do, consisting chiefly of learning by rote the ‘poetry’ which various candidate Hasnamusses have composed there, that the poor children never have time to play any games.

T was thinking about us in our caves, inventing games now. It was a stark reality that we were bored and inventing games just like the shepherds and the fishermen. When the work was done, or they could not do their work, this dynamic started to happen between people.

J asked if Gurdjieff's explanation of the Greeks and the Romans was a bit simplistic. T thought he was getting at the intellectual life rather than the more comprehensive life, because the shepherds and the fishermen were no longer doing their work, which would have involved every part of them. L said Gurdjieff was also suggesting part of the human being's organism included an automatic spur to morality, and this mechanism got weakened and stopped working, and that was the descent of the human race, which he was attributing here, in his book, to the time of the Greeks and the Romans.

T was thinking that it was to do with the fact that things were written down, and children were being educated out of their own experience and into historic experiences and creations that had gone before them. That there was some sort of degeneration of the children's experience of life which otherwise would lead them to have a natural sense of right and wrong.

N thought that children would always play games. He found Gurdjieff's statement strange, it did not appear to be entirely accurate. The Greeks had an emphasis on healthy mind, healthy body, not just the philosophical ramblings of Aristotle and Plato. All civilisations aspired to something, going through to the peak of their period, to decline later on. So when there's a statement about Romans and Greeks, at what point in time is the statement about? He did not think you could generalise about the Romans and Greeks in this way, because for each there was a period where they were ascending and brought great things to civilisation, and then there was a period when they degenerated.

RM said that we get drawn away into different things rather than focusing on what is important. Particularly if you were meant to be a fisherman - for some reason fishing was not possible because it was stormy, then they learned to play games, and those games were more enjoyable than doing the job they were supposed to be doing. So when the sun's clear and everything is ready for fishing, they would much rather play the games than do that. So for RM the text was saying something about human nature and how we are, and how we have got to watch very carefully what we are doing.

Briefly, these poor bored fishermen played at first the ordinary children’s games already established there long before; but afterwards when one of them invented a new game called ‘pouring-from-the-empty-into-the-void,’ they were all so pleased with it that thereafter they amused themselves with that alone.

This game consisted in formulating some question always about some ‘fiddle-faddle’ or other, that is to say, a question about some deliberate piece of absurdity, and the one to whom the question was addressed had to give as plausible an answer as possible.

... Still a little later, when these bored fishermen had already given place to their descendants, both these inscribed fishskins and the craze for the said peculiar ‘game’ passed on to the latter by inheritance; and these various new inventions, both their own and their ancestors’, they called first by the very high-sounding name ‘science.’

And from then on, as the craze for ‘cooking up’ these sciences passed from generation to generation, the beings of that group, whose ancestors had been simple Asiatic fishermen, became ‘specialists’ in inventing all kinds of sciences such as these.

These sciences, moreover, also passed from generation to generation and a number of them have reached the contemporary beings of that planet almost unchanged.


T asked if it was questioning, or toppling, the authorities and the experts, and that sort of dynamic still went on now. We were faced with hanging on to the science to save us from extinction. RM said he was not sure what Gurdjieff meant with the last paragraph, whether the sciences were a good thing or a bad thing. T said she did not know either, but it stops us in our tracks to question, things that we wouldn't usually question, to tease out what it is, that is valid.

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.