Vive la difference

N had encountered a huge, Arctic-looking dog that belonged to someone else in the office who would leave it off the leash, and it often wandered into N's room. He tried to understand it, but could not adjust to its experience of time. He had also met a tabby cat on one of his walks in Hampstead. He thought it might have smelt some sashimi that he had in his bag, as it jumped down from where it was, coming around to the bag. He tried to imitate it internally, but once again, could not get into its time consciousness at all.

Once a day, when you observe a creature, reflect on it, physically and emotionally imitating it in some way. Let your experience of time adjust to that of the creature. Consider the Bon Iver lyrics for Woods.

A quote by Jacques Derrida - To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend. - 

had come to T's mind in connection with this Challenge, and she had taken it literally, and enacted it in the privacy of her own home.  On one occasion she was watching a cat. In her attempt at being a cat, she looked around the room, and her experience was different from usual. She lowered her head to the floor, to sniff along the wall and the floor and in the corners, and she noticed the dust, which was quite displeasing. She sat up and looked around to check there were no threats to her safety, and then she relaxed and cuffed her ear with her hand to clean it. Another time, T was watching a large bird. Although she could not imitate the flight, she imagined it. Alighting on the tip of a large umbrella in the garden, she looked this way and that to see what what was there. It was a large bird. It was a jay. It was beautiful. But she looked to see what was there. Was it moving? Was it edible? Was it a threat? She took off to land on a metal branch growing out of steps to a square cave. She looked around again, listening, watching. Anything moving? Anything edible? She took off and landed grasping with her feet on the strange round metal construction that human giants bounced up and down on. She looked down and up and around. Anything moving? Anything edible?

First of all, L thought it was partly about empathy, if we were to try and appreciate how an animal was feeling. He thought he had always had that because of being a lifelong vegetarian. He had experienced or considered the terror that the animal might have felt as it was being taken away to be to be slaughtered. So every time he chose what to eat, or saw people eating meat, then that might come to mind, but in terms of creatures passing by it was hard. It was often very small creatures. He had seen snails crossing the road, after the rain. They walked away from the garden wall towards the opposite edge of the pavement, and they were probably going to get trodden on by somebody, but they were on this urgent and very slow errand, riding away against this cold, hard surface. Another time there was a tiny mite he had rescued and put out of the window. It was very hard to think what was going through its mind and what it was experiencing. When he was on the Heath, or near trees, he would say the Bon Iver words. The mind was the problem, and somehow being in nature helped and made it a little bit slower.

Responding to N, T wondered what dogs made of rooms. When she had been thinking about the bird, it was alighting on everything that was manmade, and it could not find anything. So it went off to the trees to get some insects, but what did they make of it? The noises the dog in N's room made - what was happening? N said the dog had found some water, and then the owner came in and said: No, you can't come in here, and pulled him out again. N thought the dog had been offended by this lack of acceptance.

B recommended a Kurosawa film - Dersu Uzala - about a man who lived in nature. It was about instincts and being in tune.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

From that moment, the learned being who had spoken would become a physician, because he had chanced to call his chief the head physician of the city, while the second learned being whom the former had called a policeman would assume the role of a policeman. Two other participating learned beings were then immediately called from the other room by the one who assumed the role of policeman, and they assumed the roles of cobbler and soldier respectively. 

And these two latter learned beings assumed and had to manifest themselves in just those roles, namely, one in the role of a soldier and the other in the role of a cobbler, only because the first learned being, having himself in accordance with his Darthelhlustnian state assumed the role of a physician, had called them soldier and cobbler respectively. 

Well then, these three learned beings who were thus cast impromptu by the fourth learned being for fulfilling every kind of perception and manifestation, which had to flow by law, of types foreign to them ...

L said that this description of the person calling the policeman, and telling him to deal with the cobbler and the soldier, and those people having to take on the roles, as part of the structure of the event, was what we would now call performance art, where the people involved do not know what they are going to be doing, and have to take on the assigned roles, immediately, without any rehearsing for it.

Here it is very important to emphasize that then in Babylon the three-brained learned beings who belonged to the group of the mysterists did indeed reproduce in action amazingly well and accurately the subjective particularities of the perceptions and manifestations of various types foreign to them.

L said that what came to his mind in these descriptions was enacting the Stanislavski technique, in which the idea was that the person actually became the role. B said that was interesting, because we were all in a role somehow. L said that this meant we were not our real selves. Perhaps being so was impossible, but we could build towards it. When in society, we were told to be in roles. N said that part of the education that Gurdjieff was trying to teach us was having this flexibility, this adaptability, this ability to change roles and not necessarily be stuck in the particular role that life seemed to have handed out to us. L said this was very profound, as if we succeeded in the Gurdjieff Work and created our real role, then we would have failed, because we would be stuck in a new one. So there was no end to it.

A Twist in the Tale

N had come back from hospital with a whole host of pills that he had to take. He tried to think and reflect on the pills and the benefits they were giving to him, being grateful for the fact that such technologies now existed, and such pills existed, which would help him get better. He took it in a more emotional way, as he swallowed the pills, and reflected on the goodness and the benefit it would do for him. So he was trying to be more present to those pills, making it a more intentional process, not just simply gobbling them down as one had a tendency to do hoping that the instinctive body would react to them. After having had the pills, he finished up the experience with standing on one leg. He thought it was a good way of doing it, warming it up at some level for the reception of the benefits that the pills might give him.

Once a day, when you are about to do a habitual action that you normally do instinctively, slow down, and imbue it with a lot of emotion and appreciation, presence and import. Observe the different way in which you experience it. When you have finished, stand on one leg for a few moments.

For L it had been very mundane actions, and he had found that doing things slowly often improved the way they got done. On one occasion he had been washing up a dish too quickly, and some water splashed over the lip of the sink. Then he proceeded to wash up much more slowly, giving it attention and meaning, and that made for a much better experience. Also, he had found sweeping slowly to be quite therapeutic, and more effective if done slowly, too, because the dust flies less. There was the old Latin saying: Festina Lente (hasten slowly). If you did things slowly, sometimes you got more done and did it better. He had done the standing on one leg too. The Challenge had made him feel more awake, and things felt more meaningful and true. He thought that our society was quite a mercenary one where, if people thought time was money, they gave incentives to do things quickly, but sometimes that could have a sub-optimal result.

When T had slowed down her actions, it reminded her of slow motion in films, and she noticed detail that surprised her. When she was at the kitchen sink and reaching over to turn on the tap, there was a clear and perfect reflection in the surface of the water of the bowl. She would not have noticed that if she had been on her usual, rapid automatic. She was surprised at her usual speed in comparison, and it highlighted that the mechanistic style usually prevents the range of senses from registering; the usual speed gets the action done at the expense of experiencing life on on many levels. The slow motion became balletic, and the standing on one leg part of the slow dance. The slowing down - taking a tea towel from the hook or the kettle from the stove - enabled her imagination to come into play. So she was able to imagine that if her arm wasn't visible, then the tea towel or the kettle would look as if they were magically moving through the air by their own volition. It made her realise that if an observer was unable to see her physical manifestation, then it would be as as though the material objects had the capacity to move themselves through the air like birds, and it would seem balletic, like a cartoon or animation of a children's fairy story. She could see that the movement she brought to the otherwise stationary object was in itself a magical skill, and how she took for granted not only how she moved things and objects about, but also how she moved her own body about, like standing on one leg. The other thing that had happened was when she was doing the invidious computer work, and she had slowed that down too, and it was much more pleasurable.

Responding to T, J said that the moment you put a schedule into something, you had a deadline that would abstract some of the pleasure from doing whatever it was. If he was playing chess, and then suddenly played by a chess clock, he found that some leisure enjoyment from the whole experience was slightly cut short. This was a problem in the purpose, the set of mind. The atmosphere of wherever you were was undermined by a purpose in being in that place. For example, if you were a municipal inspector, you would not look at Hyde Park from the standpoint of the beauties of Rotten Row, you would look at it from the standpoint of how many trees you needed to plant. These things sat slightly at odds, you could not really do both at the same time fully. T replied that when she slowed down, she became all herself, and then somehow whatever she was involved with, became a relationship with the outside rather than something that she was doing to something else. N said that T's description of balletic movements and the slowing down process reminded him of Tai Chi, where the movements look very poetic, but there was more of an inner connection with the movements. So you were moving from a different place within yourself and within your body. 

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

So, my boy, from the time when these favorites of yours completely ceased consciously to actualize in their common presences the ‘being-Partkdolg-duty,’ thanks only to the results of which what is called sane ‘comparative mentation’ as well as the possibility of conscious active manifestation can arise in beings from various associations, and from the time when their separate ‘brains,’ associating now quite independently, begin engendering in one and the same common presence three differently sourced being-impulses, they then, thanks to this, gradually, as it were, acquire in themselves three personalities, having nothing in common with each other, in respect of needs and interests.

J thought it was a large claim to say the manifestations had got nothing in common with each other. Was it not like, in a long winded way, Dr Johnson's refutation of the idea that a table was not solid by kicking it. On the level of kicking the table, he was perfectly right, it was solid, but at the level of quantum physics, there was fluid and nanomatter inside, so it was both things at the same time. He understood Gurdjieff him to be saying that there was this tripartite splitting up of everything you were doing for its purpose, and its inspiration and its manifestation. Everything was this. So these arguments that people had - is the table solid or not - were quite irrelevant. In one sense, it was solid, and in another sense, it was not. N thought Gurdjieff was also trying to represent the confusion that arises from us being three-brained beings, and the different manifestations that come from our nature, which trigger off different manifestations or associations, making it extremely difficult to see things as they are.

Gut Feeling

To help her be more specific, T had had to define awake as self-aware, and asleep as unaware of self. Then she had to define self, and all the terms were nebulous and vague. The instances when she recorded the challenge were when she was involved in routines in the home or at work, usually when she was in a rush. One of the instances was when she was clearing a room, and she was on automatic  - and that needed defining - and she put the air purifier in the wrong cupboard. On another occasion she put a tub of margarine in the cupboard and not the fridge. Each time, finding herself at the wrong location brought her to her senses, and she backtracked and corrected herself. Each time she had had her hands full, and her head was full of other thoughts. It was when she remembered the shock of the mistake that she remembered the challenge, and that was when she touched her head and said Got it! It felt disconnected, so being awake started to mean being aware of all and everything in the process of deliberate intended action.

Catch those moments during the month when you realise you have transitioned from being asleep to being awake. Observe how you feel about it, and try to recall what you were doing at the time of transition to sleep, and what it was that brought you back. When you remember, tap your head, as if to say, I've got it!

L had not noticed any particular pattern to becoming awake and going back to sleep. It had happened a few times naturally. He even wondered if it was a phenomenon in the brain, a chemical process that made us sometimes more aware, or sometimes less aware. It could also happen because of external events, too. A week before he had been waiting at a roundabout and someone drove into the back of his car. When something like that happens, you wake up psychologically, but even that might be because the body then produces adrenaline.

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

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... yet those mysteries in the contents of which the learned members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism then intentionally placed varied knowledge, calculating that it would reach beings of very remote generations, have during recent times almost totally ceased to exist. 

These mysteries there incorporated in the process of their ordinary existence centuries earlier already began gradually to disappear soon after the Babylonian period. At first their place was taken by what are called their ‘Kesbaadji,’ or, as they are now called there on the continent Europe, ‘puppet shows’ (Petrushka); but, afterwards they were finally ousted by their still existing ‘theatrical-shows’ or ‘spectacles’ which are there now one of the forms of that said contemporary art of theirs which acts particularly perniciously in the process of the progressive ‘shrinking’ of their psyche. 

These ‘theatrical spectacles’ replaced the mysteries after the beings at the beginning of the contemporary civilization—to whom only ‘a-fifth-to-a-tenth’ was passed down of the information about how and what these said Babylonian learned mysterists had done—began to think of imitating them in this also and set about doing, as it were, the same. 

From that time on, the other beings there called these imitators of the mysterists, ‘players,’ ‘comedians,’ ‘actors,’ and, at the present time, they already call them ‘artists,’ of whom I may say very many have sprung up during recent times.

It seemed to J that what interested Gurdjieff here was the way that information and learning becomes, over time, more and more attenuated as it is passed down from generation to generation. T said Gurdjieff takes what we consider to be the high arts, and says that they are very, very diminished from what they originally were.

... As this said ‘currents-of-associative-movements’ does not proceed in the presences of the three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, as it generally proceeds in the presences of other three-brained beings, and as there were quite special reasons there for this, proper to them alone, I must therefore first of all explain it to you in rather more detail.

The process is the same as that which also proceeds in us, but it proceeds in us when we are intentionally resting to allow the whole functioning of our common presence freely to transform, without hindrance by our will, all the varieties of being-energy required for our all-round active existence, whereas in them  these said various being-energies can now arise only during their total inactivity, that is during what they call their ‘sleep,’ and then of course only ‘after-a-fashion.’ 

Owing to the fact that they, like every other three-brained being of the whole of our Great Universe, have three separate independent spiritualized parts, each of which has, as a central place for the concentration of all its functioning, a localization of its own which they themselves call a ‘brain,’ all the impressions in their common presences whether coming from without or arising from within are also perceived independently by each of these ‘brains’ of theirs, in accordance with the nature of these impressions; and afterwards, as it is also proper to proceed in the presences of every kind of being without distinction of brain-system, these impressions together with previous impressions compose the total and thanks to occasional shocks evoke in each of these separate ‘brains’ an independent association.

Regarding the mention of three separate independent spiritualized parts, which each have their own brain, L could see that the thinking part had its physical brain in the head. There was also a kind of brain in the gut - the stomach worked a bit like a brain. T said that science now recognised this and used the term "second brain" for the gut. B asked if this corresponded to the feeling centre. T said it did, and that the moving brain was the proprioceptor system. L said that this "brain" did not have a specific location in the body, and was linked to the nervous system. B distinguished two types of behaviour associated with the moving centre. The first purely instinctive, like responding to danger, and the second skilled learnt motion, like dancing. J said there was a different wakefulness state way back in time from our progenitors or ancestors. It gradually became part of our psychic hinterland, and we were not so conscious of it, and were on to a new wakefulness state; but the old knowledge, which at that time we acquired during wakefulness was now only really available to us in sleep.

Sincere Laughter

N said this kind of discipline about active listening was a very good one, because it made him not interrupt, but rather to let people finish exactly what they had to say before he came in. He also refrained from jumping in, leaving a few seconds after someone had finished speaking, in order to respond. He noticed also when he talked with them, if he looked into their eyes, he got a very strong connection at that stage, and people could sense it. It was an interesting result and it added to the quality of the communication, to the feeling about two people meeting on a human level rather than just talking in a utilitarian or practical way with each other. There was much more of a connection,  rather than just an ordinary communication. He had also opened his palms as suggested in the Challenge. He thought it was an interesting experiment in terms of how to be a better listener, and how to get more from his experiences of talking to other people, and being present in talking to other people. People felt they had been heard.

Every day, when you notice that you are talking at somebody, or being spoken at, engage with the person by talking with them or empathically listening. At the moment of engagement, open your palms. Consider whether you are taking on board the emotional quality of what is being said. Are you just wanting to jump in there and express your own opinion? Afterwards consider modifying your views and observe if you do so.

RM had been spending time with a new friend, and had talked a lot about listening. As soon as something he said triggered a thought in her mind, she would jump in quickly before he finished what he was saying, and he would close his hand tight. Over time, they got better and better at listening to each other. He had noticed that he himself would also jump in before she had finished speaking. He intended to continue working on this in the coming month, and hoped to become a much better listener.

L had usually forgotten about opening his palms, but he did often monitor his communication and try to listen with empathy, speak with empathy more, and that made the conversations much more meaningful - and more real. So that had enhanced his life, and he would keep doing it too. He had also observed, looking at interviews on television and online, that some hosts had the skill of empathising with the other person, whereas the others were talking at the interviewee. The ones who were purely listening produced a much better interview and product.

T had had one experience at work. There had been terrible noise from drilling, which she was not in a position to stop, and she became angry. Afterwards she spent a long time writing an email about it, trying to be restrained. While doing this, somebody burst into the room and was very apologetic. That was when she had remembered the challenge. She wanted to say how much she appreciated the apology, but could not get a word in, and at that point stopped trying. Then she remembered the rest of the Challenge, and wanted to open the palms. She tried three times, and just could not do it.

N asked T if she felt the apology she had received was genuine, and what her feelings were about receiving an apology in that way. T said that authenticity can sometimes be very hard to hear - it was full of emotion, and got mixed up with her emotions as well, because she was battling with feeling angry but appreciative at the same time.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

... each large or small part of the whole totality of the planetary body of a being has exactly proportionately increasing or diminishing dimensions in relation to his other parts.

For a clear understanding of what I have just said, the face of any three-brained being can serve as a good example.

The facial dimensions of every three-centered being in general, and also the facial dimensions of the three-centered beings of the planet Earth who have taken your fancy, are the result of the dimensions of seven different fundamental parts of the whole of his body, and the dimension of each separate part of the face is the result of seven different dimensions of the whole face.

RM said this meant to him that we had to look at the whole, not the part. Body language was so integrated with feelings. L was wondering if Gurdjieff was really serious about the seven-fold symmetry he specifically describes, or if it was just put it in the words of one of the characters of the book, because it was an appealing and seductive idea which might, however, be a Procrustean bed in which people tried to force everything to fit.

On Saturdays—the day-of-mysteries, or the day-of-the-theater—the demonstrations produced by learned members of this group were the most interesting, and, as it is said, the most ‘popular.’

I personally preferred these Saturdays to all the other days of the week and tried not to miss one of them; and I preferred them because the demonstrations arranged on those days by the learned beings of that group frequently provoked such spontaneous and sincere laughter among all the other terrestrial three-centered beings who were in the given section of the club, that I sometimes forgot among which three-centered beings I was, and that being-impulse manifested itself in me which is proper to arise only in one-natured beings like myself.

L said the text talked of being one-natured. That suggested some degree of attainment which most people did not get. So he might be three-brained but one-natured, particularly integrated, perhaps. T had picked up on the spontaneous and sincere laughter, which was about authenticity. Was it not being in the moment? L said that on Radio 4, you got the canned laughter which was not sincere, but in great comedy, you did get sincere laughter. Stand-up comedy was more likely to be sincere, because it was not entirely rehearsed, and was live. B asked what point Gurdjieff was trying to convey. L said Gurdjieff was describing experiences which come from somewhere very deep. So in terms of laughter, in English usage there was the phrase, belly laugh, indicating it came from the gut. So he was talking about experiences which came from somewhere deep inside our psyche, and which were not pre-planned or mediated through the superego. B cited the Ukrainian president, who used to be a comedian, and was in the middle of a tragedy - she was thinking about how to connect these things. L said we can think of comedy as waking people up. It makes us think again. An old friend from long ago had spoken of the image of God laughing, and that had always stayed with L. Laughter was also considered important in Hasidism. Maybe Gurdjieff was talking about sincere laughter as being a way of affecting personal change.

Lawful Inexactitudes

L had not noticed the connection of people with animals very much, especially at first. When he had his first vaccine, he had a reaction which led to a frozen shoulder, and he had been having physiotherapy for it. He thought the physiotherapist might be bear-like, and contemplated how to likewise become more physically attuned. More recently, L met someone whom he realised was sparrow-like, fast-speaking with brown hair and freckles, and thought that maybe he, L, could be a little faster-thinking. At a later time, he was looking at photos of people on a TV screen shown in succession, and he did find he was starting to recognise possible animal likenesses in them. He thought about the terms we used in English. We had bird-like, leonine, bovine, ursine. It was in the language. He had forgotten about stroking the chin.

Each day, If you see somebody with an apparently animal characteristic, become aware of how that emotionally affects you, and consider how you can apply that characteristic to develop yourself. Stroke your chin.

N had been looking a lot for animal characteristics in people, and there were occasional flashes, but there wasn't a lot to go on. He met someone whom he thought was fox-like in his demeanour and in the way he went about things. There was someone else who was dog-like, so he saw that in another individual. He found it hard - there were not so many obvious situations or people he came across, but he thought his significant contacts with people has been fairly limited because of COVID, so he had not met as many new people. He thought that once you knew someone, it was hard to see their animal characteristics as much.

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

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

So, whenever the Babylonian learned painters wove or embroidered with colored threads or colored their productions, they inserted the distinctions of the tonalities of the colors in the crosslines as well as in the horizontal lines and even in the intersecting lines of color, not in the lawful sequence in which this process really proceeds, in accordance with the Law of Sevenfoldness, but otherwise; and in these also lawful ‘otherwises,’ they placed the contents of some or other information or knowledge.

T said that the practical weaving of a carpet or a rug was very physical and manifested physically. It was very exact, because otherwise it would fall apart. Gurdjieff was speaking from experience in making carperts. She said there was a relationship between inexactitude and exactness. It was not one or the other, but both. RM took otherwise to mean they started adding their own overlay on it, their own opinions.

...Among these productions were also various what are called ‘allegorical beings’ which were represented with the head of one form of a being there, with the body of another, and with the limbs of a third, and so on.

L said this was interesting, because the Meeting had been talking about animals being associated with people. The sculptures combined different animals, which was a different way of looking at people. It was about us having different aspects of personality or make-up and associating each of those with an animal. So we had the Sphinx, and centaurs, which he thought represented human beings changing from a natural form.

Umvelt

For L it would normally be a cat or a dog, maybe sometimes a bird. Sometimes he tuned into the animal. Cats were usually flustered, and thinking either to avoid the person or wanting to be stroked. The colour would normally have been brownish or greyish, and then he would see that colour around him, and then choose another colour, which would typically have been green, tree leaves, and then there would be a green car, and so on. That reminded him of when he studied the Shona language, which had fewer words for colours than English, though they had extra words for brown and green animals and plants in nature. He supposed that this was natural language corresponding to natural perception. All the colour-names we had in English - yellows and reds and different shades - might be more suited for a production economy where  things were sold in different colours of a specified shade.

Each day, when you observe an animal or a bird, try to tune into its feelings and emotions. Pick out a colour from that creature, and try to be aware of the extra shades of that colour. Blink twice, turn away from the creature and look at another colour. For as long as you remember, observe this second colour and its shades.

T recalled an occasion when she heard the patter of clawed paws on the path and then saw a small dog running along ahead of its owners. The Challenge came to mind. The dog was black and white. It veered onto the grass heading for a tree, circled round it twice with what she considered a happy wagging tail, cocked its leg and wee'ed in what she considered was satisfaction, before it scuffed the grass with its hind legs and hurried on, with what she considered to be a delighted nose to the wind. She blinked twice, then looked around for a different colour and noticed the sandy yellow of a running track. Then she noticed a train in the distance with a sandy glow of dimly lit windows. After that she noticed flats with sandy yellow-lit rooms in the dusk. Another time, she saw a black crow high up gripping a black branch. Its emotions or feelings were hard to imagine, except for alert attention and watchfulness. She blinked twice, looked around for a different colour, white, and noticed that in the overcast sky. Her weakest link in the challenge, was to be aware of the extra shades of the chosen colour. She had not recalled or consciously done this. She became aware during the Challenge that the colours of the animals she was noticing were black, grey or white.

Responding to L, N said he wondered sometimes what came first? Did we observe different shades of different colours, because we had different words for them? He remembered that when he was in the textile trade, he used to love looking at the different colours and fabrics that were there. They used to make up swatches of different shades of colour for people who wanted to buy fabrics, and he had become very much aware of the different colours of blue, the different colours of red, different colours of yellow. It was interesting that the West had developed colour and observation of colour to a phenomenal extent, whereas in some areas we had not, for example the Eskimos had many more words for snow than we did. So it was interesting how language develops in ordered to assist us in having experiences and being able to differentiate in our experiences.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
Watch this on YouTube

Certain beings who were then enthused by this founded, in imitation of the followers of the said branch of painters, a similar society and the motto of their new movement was: ‘To-search-the-truth-in-the-shades-of-smells-obtained-between-the-moment-of-the-action-of-cold-at-freezing-and-the-moment-of-the-action-of-warmth-at-decomposition.’

Like the painters, they also then found between these said two definite smells about seven hundred very definite shades, which they employed in their elucidating experiments.

I do not know to what these two peculiar ‘movements’ then in Babylon would have led and where they would have ceased, if a newly appointed chief of the city, during the time we were there, had not begun prosecuting the followers of that second new ‘movement’ because with their already sufficiently keen sense of smell they had begun to notice and unwittingly to expose certain of his what are called ‘shady dealings,’ with the result that he used every possible means to suppress everything connected not only with that second new movement, but with the first as well.

N said it was interesting that Gurdjieff used the word smell, and its connection with corruption - the smell of corruption - that there was something they noticed, in behaviour or essence, which came across, which was not very conducive to them. There was a kind of connoisseurship of the differences that are there out in the world. What was the point of all of this? Did it enhance our lives? Were the distinctions important, of these different shades of feeling that we experienced? What was Gurdjieff trying to talk to us about here? T wondered if it was do with increasing intelligence, perception and observation, to know what was really happening, including the shady dealings, and that this increase in knowledge would attract the attention of the established people in power.

Angle of Declination

The first thing for N was the trigger. It was not every day that he saw something beautiful, that arrested his attention, but he did notice in particular, when he walked down the road where he lived, there was a group of trees, and because of the extraordinary changing colours around this time of the year, they were a wonderful orangey, yellowy colour, and that stopped him. Gosh, Wow, isn't that beautiful? That created a sense of wonder in him, and registered at a deeper emotional level.

Each day, if your attention is drawn in by something beautiful, consider how that makes you feel emotionally. Shake a leg, and allow yourself to be drawn in more. Write a one line poem, or a haiku, reflecting the experience.

What T had noticed was that she was very attracted by light. So she had a few one liners:

• Twinkles of light in water on the pavement

• Glints of light in grey mineral tough flooring

• Sparkling water on leaves in sunlight

and over the month, she managed one haiku:

under the green tree

five pointed yellow red leaves

in shafts of sunlight

She noticed the yellow and red leaves scattered like confetti on the pavement. She noticed bright yellow leaves catching the sun fluttering against the shadowy dark background. She noticed the low sun's rays through the car windscreen in the morning creating an ethereal atmosphere. Noticing something beautiful, she felt connected to the wonder of nature and felt joy. Each time it seemed easy to remember the challenge and shake a leg whilst walking, and surprisingly, when driving. When she shook her leg it amused her because it was the gesture of a clown, or a dog after it has peed. The amusement took her attention away from the next part of the challenge, which was to draw herself in more. Looking back, she was naturally, automatically, but not consciously, drawn in more to something she experienced as beautiful. She either pointed it out to herself, or when she was with someone else. When she was receiving something enjoyable her attention was directed and held a lot longer than usual. Regarding the part about the haiku, she was aware of starting to put into words the sight she had seen, and each time she was struck by the inadequacy of language to recreate the experience. Putting the experience in words was for her a translation for herself, and for communicating to others.

It did not happen to L that often, but when it did he paused and let it draw him in, and he wrote a haiku, which was usually to do with the sun or the leaves. On the first occasion, 15 November, he was on the platform for the Overground, and it was to do with red leaves that had fallen on a path leading to the platform. So he wrote:

the path descending

deep red leaves of autumn hue

soon the train arrives

A couple of days later, he was at the Studio, and there was a really nice sunset outside. He put

round and round he goes

pink and noble is the dawn

sunset is the crown

And then, another red leaved tree in the street.

trees - so red the leaves!

sunlight permeates, the wind

makes them sway and fall

And then, a few days before, there was a fallen leaf with dew or rain on it. He had written:

water droplets lie

upon the fallen leaf

below the rising sun

By doing this, he had just felt more of a connection with nature, and therefore reality. It had been a good experience.

Responding to L, N said he had liked L's haikus very much, he thought they were very well put together. He also thought T's were nice as well, with the light, seeing the the shafts of sunlight. He had not actually read out his haiku, which said:

beautiful trees, so

compelling in your orange

and yellow colours

He said what the haiku did was interesting, it tried to encapsulate the experience poetically, but we all knew that we were going to fall short of that experience, however gifted we might be in trying to write haikus or anything else poetic. There was something so compelling and mysterious about the beauty that we were seeing and which was affecting us emotionally, it was hard to fully express it in a way which would satisfy a similar emotional experience.

Responding to N, T said it resonated with her experience of the season's red and yellow and orange leaves. In a sense, they felt like a distraction. It was autumn - maybe other countries were not as blessed with these changes - but how sensitive we were to it! We were sensitive to it when we saw nature, and it elevated us, but the desire to communicate the experience to ourselves again, or to others, through language - why would we want to do that? There was a tension between our own experience and wanting to convey it to someone else or to another human being - perhaps it was for some tribal reason, a kind of glue for community. When N was speaking it resonated with her own experience; the desire to express the beauty, to hold on to it or to experience it again, but always the inadequacy of language to enable that.

J said he thought N's point about looking for beauty was where a difficulty arose; either we felt it without looking for it, or the moment we actually looked for it, there was a danger that we were going to be in self-illusion. When we looked for beauty we would experience it, not because of its innate quality, but because of our desire for it. N replied he had been talking about the involuntary experience of beauty, where his attention was taken away, and he was pulled out of himself and experiencing something in that moment which was powerful. He knew this from listening to music, because music was a flow, a continuum. If he got caught in the moments of a beautiful leitmotif, or whatever it was he was listening to, he would miss the next bit. T said that whilst N had been talking, she was thinking about natural sounds, like birds singing or the river flowing, and those could not be stopped and re-wound, not like artificial human creations. Although creations were from us and in that way they were natural, we could manipulate them more - we could listen to something six times over, because we loved it so much.

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

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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It is necessary to say, first of all, that according to the completed result of the fundamental cosmic law of the holy Heptaparaparshinokh, that is, that cosmic law which was called by the three-brained beings of the planet Earth of the mentioned Babylonian period the Law of Sevenfoldness, the ‘common-integral-vibration’ like all the already ‘definitized’ cosmic formations is formed and consists of seven what are called ‘complexes-of-results’ or, as it is also sometimes said, of ‘seven-classes-of-vibrations’ of those cosmic sources, the arising and further action of each of which also arise and depend on seven others, which in their turn arise and depend on seven further ones, and so on right up to the first most holy ‘unique-seven-propertied-vibration’ issuing from the Most Holy Prime Source; and all together they compose the common-integral-vibration of all the sources of the actualizing of everything existing in the whole of the Universe, and thanks to the transformations of these latter they afterwards actualize in the presences of the cosmic ‘Insapalnian-concentrations’ the said number of the various ‘tonalities-of-color.’

J said that, funnily enough, Gurdjieff was very modern. He was saying that everything was vibration and interdependent on everything else, but why was it necessary to interpose a very human concept - seven? If everything was together, all vibration and energy, splitting it up in the way described might help a flowchart diagram, but J felt it was not the source of universal energy that animated everything, including us. So there was a problem immediately with the framework, as opposed to the perception of what it was that was happening. N said that if you looked at Chinese culture, they did not have this concept of seven in the same way, but had much more the concept of eight, for example, in their culture 64 was the number of hexagrams in the I Ching. He was wondering how much was culturally determined in these criteria, these frameworks, and how much was actually inherent in reality. RM said he found it intriguing that the Chinese universities would still talk about the fundamental seven crystalline forms.

... During such transformations, this said ‘common-integral-vibration,’ that is the white ray, acts with its gravity-center-vibrations upon other ordinary processes proceeding nearby in intraplanetary and surplanetary arisings and decompositions, and, owing to ‘kindred-vibrations,’ its gravity-center-vibrations dependently upon and in accordance with the surrounding conditions blend and become a part of the whole common presence of these definite intraplanetary or surplanetary formations, in which the said processes proceed.

J thought Gurdjieff was giving an entire new vocabulary to a set of concepts that relate to the way we were going about the world, but we did not see it. For instance, he was talking about the white ray. Now we can imagine various sorts of spiritualists or healers, saying there is a white ray coming down, and that this somehow transforms the mosaic of our normal experience into an holistic way of seeing the world and the interpermeation of all vibrations, and Gurdjieff is trying to put a framework in, which is quite instructive, but there is an outside non-human framework intercession with all this. Even when we say two and two is four, right across the universe, it is still, in a way, a human tautology. It is something outside, that is beyond language. He is trying to give it a language, which is actually, J thought, probably a modern truth in a way. It is impressive, but difficult to grasp in the detail.

... Deteriorating century by century, the ‘sensibility-of-perception’ of that organ also—namely, the organ by means of which there chiefly proceeds for the presences of the three-brained beings what is called the ‘automatic-satiation-of-externals’ which is the basis for the possibility of natural self-perfecting—had reached such a point that at the time of our fifth stay there during the period called by the contemporary beings there the period of the ‘Greatness-of-Babylon,’ that organ of theirs could perceive and distinguish the blending of the gravity-center-vibrations of the white ray at most up to the third degree only of what are called its ‘sevenfold-strata,’ that is up to only 343 different ‘tonalities-of-color.’

Here it is interesting to note that quite a number of the three-brained beings of the Babylonian epoch themselves already suspected the gradual deterioration of the sensibility of that organ of theirs, and certain of them even founded a new society in Babylon that started a peculiar ‘movement’ among the painters of that time.

This peculiar movement of the painters of that time had the following program: ‘To-find-out-and-elucidate-the-Truth-only-through-the-tonalities-existing-between-white-and-black.’

L said that was interesting, because they became aware that their sensitivity and perception were in a process of decline, so they tried to reverse the process and accentuate their senses by focusing in on just a narrow band of spectrum, and to try and raise awareness of it. J asked if we could not hang on to a point or a peak of perception. L said it was definitely a motif in Beelzebub's Tales that the ability of human beings to perceive and be aware was gradually reducing and in decline over the ages.