1

March/Spring gathering 2017 ~ thurSday evening

Keith: In thinking about our gathering, these seem to be very good summary statements of why we are here; so, we will read those first and then we will talk about them.

Hospitality, Supporting Poor Old People, Fritz Peters

I noticed almost immediately that there were a number of daily visits at Mr. Gurdjieff’s apartment by older people, most of whom did not appear to have much, if anything, to do with his “work.” Not only were they old, but they all appeared to be poor. Mr. Gurdjieff’s attitude towards these people bore little resemblance to his treatment of those persons who were, quite obviously, his students. He treated them with courtesy, kindness and, I gathered, generos-ity. During the course of one of our own private sessions in the “coffee room” I spoke, somewhat hastily, about this “retinue” and the fact that he appeared to me to be helping, if not actually supporting, a great many people who did not seem to be in any way involved in his work. I do not remember my own exact words, but I remember that the implication was that he was helping in the perpetuation of persons who, unless I had misunderstood him in the past, were—to use his phrase—nothing more than “fertilizer” and without any par-ticular “possibilities”. Mr. Gurdjieff was not amused; on the other hand, he was not angry. Patiently, although I detected a note of irritation in his voice, he explained that I was confusing an issue and that I had not understood him completely in the past. In the first place, fertilizer per se was not a bad thing to be if there was—in this life—no other possibility, and, more to the point, if the given individual was not striving for some other destiny.

“Not only you not understand this about my work,” he said, “you also not understand about what kind of person I am.”

After more coffee had been poured, and he had looked at me reflectively, he said: “I play many roles in life . . . this part of my destiny. You think of me as teacher, but in reality, I also your father . . . father in many ways you not understand. I also ‘teacher of dancing, and have many businesses: you not know that I own company which make false eyelashes and also have very good business selling rugs. This way I make money for self and for family. Money I ‘shear’ from disciples is for work. But other money I make for my family. My family very big, as you see—because this kind old people who come every day to my house, are, also, family. They my family because have no other family.

“I give you good example why I must be family for such people. You not know, even though you hear about this, what life is like in Paris during war, while Germans here. For such people—people who come to see me every day now—was impossible even find any way to eat. But for me, not so. I not interested in who win war. Not have patriotism or big ideals about peace. Americans, with ideals, kill millions of Germans, Germans kill—with own ide-als—English, French, Russian, Belgian ... all have ideals, all have peaceful purpose, all kill. I have only one purpose: existence for self, for students, and for family, even this big family. So, I do what they cannot do, I make deal with

2

Germans, with policemen, with all kinds idealistic people who make ‘black market’. Result: I eat well and continue to have tobacco, liquor, and what is necessary for me and for many others. While I do this—very difficult thing for most people—I also can help many people.”

I persisted: “But why did you do it? Why for them?”He smiled: “You stupid still. If can do for self and students, can also do for

others who cannot do such thing.” He paused and then added, smiling enigmatically now: “Ask self why old

lady, with very little money, every day feed birds in park. These people—this family—my birds. But I honest: I say I do this for people, and also for self. This give me good feeling. Lady who feed birds in park not tell truth. She tell only do for birds, because love birds. She not tell what pleasure she get.”

From Beelzebub’s Tales, pp 665-69:

“When I went this time to that capital named ‘Paris’–which, by the way, had now in the logicnestarian-crystallization of the contemporary three-brained beings of your planet, breeding on all the continents, already completely become also such a center of their imagined culture as the cities Samlios, Koorkalai, Babylon and so on, were for the beings of former periods in their time–I went straight from the railway station to the hotel which had been rec-ommended to me while still in the city of Berlin by an acquaintance of mine.

“The first thing that I happened to notice was that all the servants of that hotel then consisted of foreigners who mostly spoke the English language, whereas, not so long ago, as it seems, all the servants of this same hotel spoke only the Russian language.

“The day after my arrival in that contemporary Samlios, I inquired for a certain being belonging to a community called Persia to whom I had an intro-duction from one of my good friends existing in the capital of that community.

“This new acquaintance of mine, the Persian being, suggested in the eve-ning of that day that I should go with him to what is called the ‘Boulevard des Capucines’ and sit for a while in the then famous ‘Grand Cafe.’

“When we arrived at this Grand Cafe we sat down at one of the many tables which took up, as is usual there in Paris, half the pavement.

“As I have already told you, a Cafe serves the same purpose for the beings on the continent Europe as their Tchaikanas do for the beings dwelling on the continent Asia. The only difference is this: on the continent ‘Asia’ in a Tchai-kana they give you a certain reddish liquid to drink, squeezed from a certain well-known flower there, while here on the continent Europe, although in these establishments they also give a liquid to drink, yet that liquid is not only firstly completely black, but secondly, from what it is squeezed–no one knows except the proprietor of that establishment.

“We began to drink the black liquid served to us, called ‘coffee.’ “I noticed here also that all the staff of this Grand Cafe, or, as they say here,

the ‘waiters,’ were beings from other groupings, mostly from the European community called ‘Italy.’

3

“You must know that in general in this part of the city Paris, or in this ‘for-eign Paris,’ each business is a specialty of the beings of one or other of the contemporary communities of the continent Europe or other continents.

“And thus, having sat down at a table in that famous Grand Cafe or rather in the street in front of the Grand Cafe, we began to watch the passing people just strolling by, passing and strolling on the other half of the pavement of this Grand Cafe.

“Among the strolling crowd were beings of almost all the separate group-ings both of this continent Europe as well as of the other continents, mostly of course from those communities whose turn it was at that period to be rich; there predominated, however, in that crowd, beings of the continent America.

“The beings of the continent America had already there in Paris finally tak-en the place in recent times of the beings of the great community Russia after the ‘death’ of this latter.

“There strolled by there, beings chiefly belonging to the caste of the ruling class, who often come there, as they say, to the ‘capital of the world’ to ‘have a good time.’

“There were many businessmen also among them, who had come there to Paris for what are called the ‘fashion-goods,’ chiefly for perfumery and women’s clothes.

“Among the varied crowd walking on the Boulevard des Capucines, many young people could also be noticed who had come there to learn how to dance ‘fashionable dances’ and make ‘fashionable hats.’

“As we, while talking, were examining that mixed crowd, whose faces ex-pressed their satisfaction at the fulfillment of a long-awaited dream, my new acquaintance, the young Persian, suddenly turned to me in surprise and pointing with his finger at a passing couple, exclaimed:

“’Look! Look! There go genuine French people!’ “I looked and saw that indeed this couple greatly resembled those beings

whom I had seen in the provincial towns of that community France. “After they had disappeared from sight in the crowd, we began to discuss in

order to understand the reason why that genuine French couple came to be in this part of their ‘capital.’

“After various surmises, we unanimously agreed that that couple probably lived in some outlying part of genuine French Paris and had gone, for some family feast or other at their relatives, to another part of this French Paris which lay just on the opposite side.

“Evidently at that family feast they had drunk rather excessively and return-ing home after the feast, they did not want to make a detour, and decided to take the direct route. And this direct route evidently passed just by the Grand Cafe.

“Probably for this reason alone, did these genuine French people appear in this part of Paris.

“Talking, we continued to look at the strolling crowd decked out in the lat-est fashions.

“Although the majority of them were decked out in these latest fashions, yet from everything, it was obvious that these clothes of theirs had only just been

4

bought–today or yesterday–and from close observation and comparison of their faces with their clothes, one could, without doubt, be convinced that in the ordinary process of their existence at home they rarely had the possibility of being so richly dressed and of feeling so free from care.

“When, among these ‘visiting foreign princes,’ as some of the ‘natives’ call them, all sorts of also foreign ‘professionals-of-both-sexes,’ already ‘well-ac-climatized’ to that part of Paris, were walking ‘in mass,’ my new acquaintance, the young Persian, suggested to me that he should become my ‘Paris cicerone’ and that we should go to what are called the ‘disreputable places of Paris’ and look at French ‘depravity.’

“I agreed, and we went from that Grand Cafe, first of all to what is called a ‘brothel’ situated nearby.

“There, in the first place, I learned that the owner of this ‘noble establish-ment’ was a certain Spaniard.

“In the rooms of this house was a crowd of women: ‘Poles,’ ‘Viennese,’ and ‘Italians,’ and even two ‘Negresses’ were there.

“I had wanted to see how genuine Frenchwomen appeared in this setting, but from my inquiries it became clear that there was not even one French-woman in this establishment.

Keith: When we raise the question of the nature of impartiality, we are raising a question that has a good deal to do with these two little stories that we just read through. And much of our conversations and what we will exchange and explore over the next couple of days will require that quality, that impartiality, because we will undoubtedly be touching on things that can be understood as quite controversial, not really the business of Work. But, in any case, as we explore them it will call our for our own impartiality.

During the time we are here, I wanted to call your attention to something that delights me and may be very boring to you but I will point to it anyhow since I pointed it out to the Sunday group.

My wife has picked up two candle demonstrations here. [The candles are in glass jars, each with three wicks.] They are alike in a number of respects that I would simply call to your attention, to look and wonder, simply wonder. Notice there are three wicks and the wicks are burning on this bed of wax. But the wax in its upper portion is all melted so it is not totally clear but clearer than what is below in the container, which is opaque. So, this is par-tially opaque, it is cloudy but liquid. It is a different state of matter. If the bottom of each of these vessels is solid wax, that is a state of matter as solid and then we have liquid above that and then we have gases in the burning of the flames. What is below the flames does not melt, does not become liquefied until the three flames are lit and have been burning for a while.

Think of the three flames in terms of our attention and the attention that we can po-tentially have in each of our brains. So, we can have a quality of attention of what Gurdjieff referred to as “sameness” in each and in all of our three brains. So simultaneously, we could say, in an event, all three brains are burning and, when they burn in this fashion, something in the arena of what is not gaseous is influenced by that, namely the wax which has melted into a liquid.

So, the liquid is not in the same state as the gas or the same state as the solid but it cer-tainly has a mobility and it has a quality of energy that the solid does not have but it doesn’t have as much energy as the flames.

5

So, when I saw this the first time and I was pondering in my own mind what interesting thing that could represent, I began to think of the liquid here as being: this is the place of what Bennett calls “the soul stuff,” where the soul stuff is put to the fire and where Kesdjan, as we have talked about in the past, has the possibility of taking form. The solid wax below is the wax of our physical being, the mechanical being that we take totally from the Earth/Moon.

Every time I look and see these burning here, I think of my three parts, my three brains. I think of the state of the middle where a soul takes form but only when the attention is suf-ficient and constant. So, it is a useful diversion.

We chose the first story tonight about Mr. Gurdjieff and his neighbors because we are now 70 years from the time of Gurdjieff’s death and Work groups and Work has been going on, and busily going on, through that extended period of time. I think in the last 10 years, in particular, we have become more and more aware of just how widespread the Work has actually become because now it is not at all a surprise to have in mind and reference made to literally thousands of Work groups all over the world, all over the planet Earth. 10, 12 years ago, I never would have thought of it that way because I was not aware of that much activity. Perhaps some of you were 10 years ago but I was not.

I began to become aware that there were singular efforts in the States and in Europe perhaps 20-25 years ago at the time the All and Everything Conference began and we began to develop connections and talk and share with people from other countries to some extent but it has been only in the most recent years that the profound growth of Work and Work groups has taken place and that we now can be so readily aware of and connected to if we so wish.

But along with that come these major questions, that here, as I said, 70 years after Gurd-jieff’s death, how do we speak for ourselves?

When Gurdjieff says, in this delightful story, “You stupid still” and when I read that the first time that really stuck out for me. You are still stupid. And what I didn’t see is that I didn’t see far enough into what his intent was in how he understood the circumstance of his being generous and doing what he could to help all of these poor people who were living in the neighborhood. They became his family. They were his family.

So, I kind of stuck on this expression, “You stupid still.” I asked myself. I am still not clearly understanding: where are we? We are here now in 2017. What are we doing and why? Why are we doing what we think we are doing?

It seemed to me there have obviously been changes over the last 70 years. Group work has gone through a number of evolutions. We all know of older people in this work who, in different circumstances, we related to the core group in Paris and in New York and very few other places but still and all, we have groups now and wherever they are and whoever is charged with being responsible to them, there is this question of what is it that we are re-sponsible for? And how do we that? How do we understand what it is to be responsible?

So, we looked around and gathered a number of readings, reference points from Gurd-jieff, The Tales, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am” but also from other authors that raise questions about our purpose and our present understand-ing and the possible futures. So that is what we will be exploring as far as you would like over the next couple of days.

How do you understand the impartiality that Gurdjieff is referring to when he spoke about how he looked on the Americans or the Germans or the other participating armies during the war? How do you understand his impartiality?

6

CC: I get the impression that he sees it as a situation that is not unique but really a condition of mankind. Elsewhere in All and Everything, he talks about “Solioonensius” and “Bolshevism” that these crises in humanity have happened at least 40 times before. So perhaps that feeds into his impartiality in that he understands that nothing has really changed for humanity and this really is how we are.

HG: He sees us as being essentially all the same and it is the outside forces that we react to mechanically in our sleeping state, through identification. But he sees everybody essentially the same and that is his impartiality.

Keith: Go into that a little further because you spoke about everything but the impartiality.

HG: For example, I’ve done a lot of things in life and sometimes I didn’t like it but essentially, I consider myself a late teenager. I am still developing. If I went to war, which I wouldn’t, but I would have to do what I was told. I would be more mechanical. But if I didn’t do anything, if I were just a poor son of a gun who didn’t have anything and who was hungry, I would know who to go to for generosity. That is impartiality.

DC: I got the impression that he has great compassion for us and that is where the impartiality comes from.

MG: I was struck by the mentioning of who all these different groups have ideals, ideals of this group or that group and that he was impartial to that fact. They are all killing each other in the war behind their ideals.

Keith: So, comment on the impartiality.

MG: When he sees that every group has their own ideals, he doesn’t take sides. He remains impartial to all these different ideals.

JA: I felt that he had great confidence in himself. He says, “I eat well.” He seems unconcerned about the chaos around him. He makes a point of talking about the recent chaos. He says to Fritz Peters, you wouldn’t know about this. But when I hear this passage, I think about what would I feel like if I were there? I would be very afraid. Why is he not afraid? I think he is not afraid because he has such great confidence and he’s been through many situations that are chaotic. So, from that unconcernedness, he stands in a different place with respect to the people around him. I don’t see how that is achievable. I guess some people have it other than him.

Keith: There would be then gradations of impartiality.

JA: Absolutely.Keith: There would be people who could be more impartial than other people so that impartiality as a capacity would be variable.

JA: Yes.

AG: It seemed like to himself, first of all, that he allowed himself to be what was necessary in a situation. From that is a freedom; it’s an openness–the freedom to be.MB: When I think of impartiality, I think of it as able to love and that what seems to be impartial–that he sees people with this quality of love, without any kind of reaction state, which would take away impartiality.

7

BP: Can we say that with impartiality, there is no judgment?

Keith: You mean judgment: up or down–good/bad–right/wrong? That seems a major qualification.

MB: The question that comes up for me is I got the impression that you were implying that impartiality might have to do with Degrees of Reason. The higher the degree of Reason, the greater the impartiality, that impartiality changes with degrees of Reason.

Keith: Why not?

HG: There was a time when two German soldiers came up and asked him for some help and he helped them. I am sure the impartiality applied to that because they were the enemy.

Keith: Not his enemy.

HG: That’s true. The soldiers were suffering too but they knew where to go and Gurdjieff maintained that impartiality.

Keith: The mention of impartiality and its resonance or connection to Objective Reason is worth exploring, as a major qualifier of impartiality. The higher your level of Objective Reason, the higher your level of impartiality. Would that be a fair statement?

TS: Yes, I think so. At the same time, what struck me in the reading was that he said, “I am your father.” This is my family. There is something about that degree of father that is part of it. When Mrs. Staveley’s group went over to Paris to see Gurdjieff the first time, they all bundled into his room. He was there and his back was to them. Before turning around, he said, “I am your new father.”

Keith: And he was facing away?

TS: Yes.

HG: In the Orthodox Church, the Priest has his back to the Parrish. He is facing the higher something. Gurdjieff may have used the same technique.

Keith: How to relate this to the other story when Beelzebub is in the Tchaikana with his friend and they go around here and there and meet up with these non-Parisians, non-Frenchmen, under various circumstances, which he describes in colorful detail. Relative to impartiality, talk about that. Why is that such a good example of impartiality? Why are Beelzebub’s activities and his way of expressing?

JA: It’s the French people who are impartial to the chaos of the city. He explains they are taking a shortcut and are unconcerned with all of the cicerone activities.

HB: It is just descriptive, un-judgmental. Just how it is. There are the people who are here. This is what they are doing. He seems to make the point that somehow it is being contrasted against the genuine French something or other is really not represented by this one couple that had too much to drink. They took the shortcut. But it has that sense of here I am and here are all these people and none of them are French and they are all parading around and this what they are doing and this is how it is.

8

CC: Also, the roles that people played in that society, that community, were completely interchangeable. They were Italians at one point, then Russians, then Americans and they all played the same roles, completely interchangeable.

MB: When I read that before and there is another part that was quoted before about Beelzebub’s comparing the characters with the people in Paris he saw a thousand years ago in the Tchaikanas and the whole thing and even the part we just read, it comes up as kind of sorrowful that he is looking at the unbecoming manifestations of three-brained beings with this kind of heavy sorrow that he realizes that this is how it is and these people living unbecoming lives and he is able to see it from a cosmic perspective. He is seeing these three-brained beings manifesting in this way and he is seeing it unfolding in the backdrop of a huge cosmic drama where this is not usual. He has this context of how three-brained beings live in other planets in the Universe where they live in a befitting way for three-brained beings. So, this is the context; he is painting this scene and creating this kind of sorrow.

Keith: It is also in the chapter “France” and we may be referring to this place in the chapter where he does speak of sitting in the Tchaikana, looking across and saw this man, etc., etc., and there was in that the seeing it is the same, it is the same…and he speaks of this with great sorrow. It kind of comes right off the page. This happened ten thousand years ago in Tikliamish and it happened in Babylon and here I am in Paris and here is this waiter over here and he is not exactly like the waiter four thousand years ago in Babylon? Yes, there is that sadness that is certainly there. But at the same time, because he paints the picture the way he paints them, there is an astonishing impartiality to what he is saying that this is the way it is.

He takes that a little bit further in that chapter; it’s not only sadness.

SA: He gets enraged.

Keith: He gets enraged. Why?

HB: It is because it is not their fault. But he still wants to blame it on that. I can relate.

Keith: He still wants to take the High Commission to task.

JA: There is a difference in the two stories. Wherein the one with Fritz Peters, he is describing these people that he helps as his family but I don’t get that the impression that the people that are being observed are his family. Beelzebub is detached and not related.

Keith: Yes, I agree. He is definitely related in the first story and it’s not family in the chapter “France.”

TS: There is a distinction, I agree. It is a description of a center of culture just like all the other centers of culture and it comes under Mullah Nasr Eddin’s quote “There is everything in it except the core or even the kernel.” (BT, P 322) There are the Italians, the Russians but only one tiny genuine French couple and that’s an oddity.

MB: I related that to myself in the multiplicity of “Is” and the inauthenticity. Here’s Paris which I could take as a center of being but there is nothing there and there’s everything but. There is nothing authentic and even the real Parisians; they are not there either.MG: Another part that struck me was that in the first story, the family members appear to me to be individuals. In Bennett’s ideal society, they would be dependents, those people

9

who are not able to put in what they need to take out from society, from the world. Being as impartial as he is, he doesn’t have a judgment about that. He sees the responsibility that they are lawfully in the group of dependents and he takes care of them. In the second story, no, these people are not really in that group of dependents and he doesn’t have that same responsibility.

I was thinking about how judgmental parts of our own society are about people who are dependent and how some of our fellow citizens look so unfriendly on them. It is a lack of im-partiality and feeling of distaste, hatred, anger that they are taking out more than what they are putting in and how different that is from his true impartiality. I think there is that kind of love and understanding that we are of the same kind. We are family. These people need to be taken care of and I can do it.

SA: Also, if I am your father and I am their father, and they are my family, they are also your family.

Keith: That’s why he can say, “You stupid, still.” Yes, that is the way we are. We don’t realize the other end of the stick, as you point out, means that we also are fathers and sons in that kind of circumstance. So, there is no way out.

To be impartial–if you were really put on the spot in front of 20 High School students, and you had to say, this is the nature of impartiality.

DK: I am glad you asked that question because I’ve been listening to what everyone has been formulating I find I am less and less clear in my mind exactly what impartiality is. We are using the word a lot in each formulation.

MB: If you break down the word, “partial” is to be a part so impartial is seeing the whole so just looking at the word; it has some quality of wholeness, a unitive quality. I can only be more impartial if there is some love that is not of my own that I can be connected to. I think that is the only taste I have had of a more impartial state in myself is when I am connected with some force of love that is whole. Love is the unitive energy or unitive force and therefore it allows me to be part of the whole or see the whole and not the parts.

HG: You have to put yourself in their position. I am poor. I am rich. I am Hindu, Jew, Muslim, Christian. I am all that I see out there. It is also part of the one of the Strivings to help other people up to the degree of Martfotai. But you have to put yourself in their shoes because you are they and they are you. Seeing that is impartiality.

BP: One of the qualities that arise for me, again and again, comes from Jane Heap’s four tenets. They are respect, responsibility, resourcefulness and fearlessness. Now when I find myself not being impartial, fear is a big part of it. I don’t want to look at this or that. Fearlessness takes my breath away–what is it to be fearless. To be as open as Mr. Gurdjieff was in Paris to all, there would have had to have been some element of fearlessness toward all of them.

Keith: That is a good qualification, the fearlessness. How do we see that?

NR: The fearfulness, the opposite of that is what creates the us-and-them and all of the passion that happens in war. What I am having in this conversation is I am Jewish and grew up with a very one-sided view of World War II. There were the right and the wrong. Now it is condition of man and the condition that this side was in and that side was in and it was

10

all according to what was playing out at that time. I think of the proximate causes and the surface of it and I get very partial to that. So, I am asking myself, what is it to be impartial, to see deeper than the surface of right/wrong, good/bad. But the fearfulness is what encourages the “they are right/they are wrong–they are good/they are bad.” It’s fear. Fearlessness, you don’t have that.

Keith: Good point.

BP: When Michael Smyth first told me these four tenets that Jane Heap’s group worked with; when he said “fearlessness” I gasped and I still feel that way. I still feel that. How could that possibly be! It takes my breath away.

SA: When we are partial we favor one thing over another. Since I have a horse in the race, I have something at stake; I don’t want my horse to lose, I want it to win so some quality of fear or tension rises immediately. How am I going to divorce that image or action with the two sides, especially the side that I do not favor? So, to not have a stake in the outcome leaves me free.

HB: So would you say Gurdjieff has a stake in the outcome of being an influence for an aim to somehow open pathways for people to work on their being, work for understanding and if that was the intent, does he have a horse in the race? How would you see that?

SA: It depends on whether my wish is personalized. I think to be impartial doesn’t mean that I don’t make discriminations; I don’t see differences or gradations or degrees but maybe combining it with the reading about him sitting in the Tchai-kana for three thousand years and nothing has changed suggests that we can certainly have the wish but maybe not an expectation. Then it is not personal. I don’t doubt that he wished deeply for everyone who worked with him but all he could do was share himself, ultimately not his responsibility whether someone else works or not or wakes up or not or how things turn out.

MB: I think that it is more than that, that when Gurdjieff had his aim to help us, when he undertook that, he also understood the hazard and that he was willing. The willingness to undertake this with the acceptance of the possibility that it wasn’t going to work and that there would be payment. We read that in Life is real only then, when “I am” and feel it very strongly.

Keith: The payment?

MB: Yes, the fact that things didn’t turn out the way he hoped that they would, that he accepted that they didn’t and what he had to do, and that he was willing to pay and undertake the enormous effort to write All and Everything so that his Legominism, his Work would be there for the future.

The most essential thing I see is that there was impartiality because he accepted the hazard–that it might not work.

TS: That corresponds with his actual definition of impartiality. When he speaks about the “individual collision” that arises between the “… concrete results flowing from the processes of all the cosmic laws and the results presupposed and even quite surely expected by their what is called ‘sane-logic’;” (BT, P 755)

That’s my question: when we speak about impartiality, I don’t automatically think, “oh yes, I have to have ‘an all-round understanding of the functioning of both these fundamen-

11

tal sacred laws” (BT P 755). But that is what he ties impartiality to. “… it is indispensable for every normal three-brained being to have … and exists under the name of … ‘impartiality’” (BT, P 756) He marries these two.

MB: And degrees of reason.

SA: I think Mandy (MB) put her finger on one of the key elements around hazard because when endlessness combined the laws, he set up a situation where he couldn’t predict what was going to happen. So, maybe impartiality becomes tainted when I fall into a belief that I could or should be able to control the outcome–that somebody is in charge–that if I approach this right way it will work out the way I wish it would. But if I recognize that that is not necessarily what may happen at all. I certainly have a wish but I can’t control anything. I suspect that has something to do with impartiality, that recognition.

Keith: You mean being impartial to one’s impotence? Is that what you mean?

SA: Yes. That is just the way it is.

MG: This touches on the basic insecurity that exists around hazard.

SA: And that’s where the fear comes in. I think I have control. If I know that I don’t have any control and I have accepted that then I think that changes the dynamic.

JA: I am curious about whether there is some other view. All of this is in a Christian context and many of us have been influenced by the Christian story, certainly Gurdjieff was, where Jesus was talking about the sower who goes out and sows the seed on the rocks. The seed is all over the place and only some of it is going to grow. That’s the same story that is told about endlessness who puts Creation into existence and lets it play out without further interaction. We are told that is the highest level of impartiality. I believe that is a quality of endlessness.

Keith: I don’t remember that about what you said about endlessness.

JA: Doesn’t he use the word “impartial” with respect to endlessness?

Keith: Not with respect to what you said about the Creation and I don’t remember any Biblical reference in that context relative to endlessness being impartial to that.

MB: For me there is a prerequisite, for example, if I am sitting here and I have the aim to be impartial the first thing I notice is my reactions. If I am reacting to anything I know I cannot be impartial. My body, feeling and thought–as soon as I see reactions in myself, I know I am not impartial. So my first effort would be an effort to not be reacting. If I cannot be caught in the reactions of my body, feelings or thoughts, I am in my own experience, I am more towards impartiality. It seems there is a stream of life; one stream of life which is my reactions, everything is in a descending octave–if I get caught in those, that is one flow, and then to remain without getting caught in those reactions, requires some effort, in another direction. There are these two things going on all the time so therefore it call me to make an effort to move into this other place.

TS: It’s a very good point. Isn’t it in the Ashiata chapters where he goes up the mountain and does all these things and only at the end to be able to be impartial?

12

“‘When I completed my seventeenth year, I began as commanded from Above, to prepare my planetary body in order, during my responsible exis-tence, “to be able to be” impartial. (BT, P 253)

Keith: How would you see impartiality and law? Do you see any relationship between laws and impartiality?

JA: Isn’t the highest impartiality the Law of World One?

Keith: There is a lot more than impartiality in World One, a lot more than just impartiality.

NR: It seems as if everything is proceeding according to law, then it is as it is. I am impartial to that outcome but very partial to things I care about. I want it this way or that way. In reference to World War II, if it proceeds according to law, I am impartial to that; I just see what is going on.

Keith: Ok, good. Does that bring us closer to an appreciation of impartiality? It is when we see that it is lawful, from top to bottom, whatever it is that we are looking at–that it is lawful at every level that we look at, then we can be impartial.

LF: If I want a certain outcome or preference, I am very much turning away from an understanding of law. I am denying more objective laws over personal preference–I wish they not be there because I want my thing to go through. They are kind of hand in hand.

Keith: You pointed to that very clearly that if what we are looking at and we test it against its consonance with law and we see as deeply as we can look that it is resonant with law–law at this level, law at this level…and all this lawfulness, now I am impartial to the result of all of that process. That’s what I understood you to say and I would say, yes, absolutely. Our consonance with law and increasing consonance with law is a very important qualifier of impartiality.

SA: It reminded me of Makary Kronbernkzion and how puzzling that was for a long time. Where was the justice in that? But in recognizing that people are asleep and hazard is part of everything and every stick has two ends and on and on, then I have to understand that what happens is really in no one’s control, we shouldn’t be surprised and we can certainly have a wish for how it might work out this time and if it did, well, we just got lucky because it probably won’t work out the next time. He has thousands of years of experience showing that. “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.” They are all asleep. I am asleep also and that’s why things happen the way they do. Learning to live with that is has taken a lot of the sting and the self-righteousness out of a lot of my reactions when things are ‘not the way they should be’ because I haven’t been around thousands of years but I’ve been around long enough to know that that’s the way they are.

Keith: Ok, but that’s the point I was trying to make but we have to look at it terms of lawfulness, that that being a test of impartiality–a test.DZ: It’s really an acceptance, almost a surrender in the fact that the law governs everything and if I could understand the laws to a full extent, then I could see all possible outcomes and the complexity of everything. It’s my judgment of wanting it to be a certain way.

Keith: So the measure of my impartiality then is the measure of the degree to which I see more deeply into the laws that have some specific action that qualifies what is happening, what I am looking at.

13

DZ: There’s that and then there’s the idea of the acceptance of when you set your ego aside, then you can just accept what is there. I understand there is something much bigger than what you want and it’s playing out in a way that it has to play out. You are in there in some level, you insert yourself in some level but you are not tied to the outcome.

Keith: I am wondering if I don’t walk away from that still feeling, inside of me, kind of partial because it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it.

MB: Here’s the thing with Looisos. Looisos and the High Commission decide to implant Kundabuffer and Gurdjieff talks about why that had to happen. It was necessary and im-portant thing to happen from their perspective. He gives us two things here. One is a top-down kind of looking at the law at something that was appropriate from the point of view of the High Commission. And then he says it was a nearly criminal act, which maybe we could look at as a bottom-up, which is also lawful. So he creates this paradox here that confuses the bejeebers out of me. So, in terms of law how are we to supposed to understand that? And how are we supposed to understand that in terms of degrees of Reason?

TS: You sound just like Beelzebub because he asks, “How could they have not seen this?” When, in the chapter “France,” he revolts and gets angry and sees everything is the same.

MB: So, talk about the law Keith.

CE: How that be? He is promoted. Something is amiss.

JA: He is fired upward. [laughter]

HG: During the Civil War, the Blue and the Grey got together several times at night–once at Christmas time with a river diving them they sang Christmas songs to each other back and forth, another time at night they would get together and play cards with a few people from each side. One night they got together and had a missions meeting in the barn. When they did that, they were all on the same level. Of course, the next day, they went back to shooting each other so they went from a higher law back to lower law. That is a sign of impartiality.

MB: When you raised the point about law and impartiality, it made me recall a few meetings ago when we were talking about self-observation and the law and that there must be some aspects to impartiality and observation because in the reading Paris, he is basically has this pure observation of what’s happening: all the different people, the different nationalities. If I am trying to observe myself, I try to be impartial; I am trying to see the whole; I am not trying to see parts of myself, I am trying to see the whole of myself–I am trying to observe myself. As soon as I am not impartial, I cannot observe myself. I get caught into a reaction of something I like, something I don’t like. So, this effort to observe and impartiality seems to relate to this observation that he is making and that we could try. An inner effort to observe myself would require this effort of impartiality.Keith: Which is why it is seems immensely valuable to explore into impartiality because, in the end, what makes it work, the real Work sense, is only when it is applied to oneself. In other words when it becomes a way of working on oneself.

If we don’t understand or have a clear notion pretty much to bedrock what is the nature of impartiality, how do I understand that with respect to myself and to observing myself, then the mechanism of observation and the lawfulnesses of what is in motion that I am observing–those all begin to become very essential things to understand the best I can.

14

If I am looking at an event, let’s say in the biological world, when you get under the microscope and things very rapidly become enormously complex. It is simply not possible to predict what’s going to come next when you are looking under a microscope at, let’s say, a biochemical process taking place. It’s impossible. The possibilities are beyond what your computer would say is possible.

So, there is that kind of question of partiality relative to that kind of circumstance. I can see where it is possible where I can become impartial to result of this observation regardless of what it shows. Can I do that? Can I really be impartial regardless of what it shows? In terms of self-observation, it becomes enormously important. We run into certain places inside of ourselves that we don’t want to go. It’s too dark or it’s too angry or it’s too full of suffering or too full of whatever. And we don’t go there. We don’t have the impartiality to look on those things that in the end we have to look on. How we take this task of impartiality is a big deal, a very big deal.

ZB: Do you see that in reference to the brothel?

Keith: Oh, that’s another thing. He throws this in our face all through. You read through the chapter “France” but you read in the other chapters–Gurdjieff is always challenging us, putting in front of us associations that can throw us off track, that can pull us off track if we allow ourselves to be pulled. If we don’t retain that quality of impartiality then, all of a sudden, we are on an associative track. He has hypnotized us into following and then we get lost and miss the point.

ZB: In the second story, there is nothing real about it; it is imaginary. The first story is really in life and certainly what is being observed is embodying not only lawfulness but all of the Five Strivings and manifesting in life. In Beelzebub’s Tales, there is nothing real in the story. He’s articulating a lot but it is all in us. The lawfulness is the repetition. That’s our day. It repeats whether it’s three thousand years ago or three minutes ago–it’s always the same–constant repetition of 1-4-2, 1-4-2…endless. Going into and just getting caught in those emotions in a world where we don’t see anything. So, it seems the second story is a perfect reflection of the lawfulness of our day, it never changes.

HB: Sometimes there are moments though. Part of what I hear floating in the background is a sense in speaking about the lawfulness of it begins to take on an air of determinism, an air of inevitability, an air of “this is the law, the law … it’s just how it is; this is how it’s going to be; I just have to accept it, etc.”

There is part of the law that is evolutionary. There has to be some other quality because if there weren’t moments that weren’t inevitable in the line of our lives where, in the inter-vals, there is a different direction and something has to be there responding to that direction and making that. Unless you are going to create this entirely deterministic universe where everything going up and everything going down is predetermined from the very beginning then those moments are also lawful possibilities but not determinant. I felt partial at those times, “Goddammit I am not going to sit here and like this anymore.” If I have to get up and look at this another day and bear this another day, I can’t do this, I am going to move.

NR: Seems like we are talking about this other state of impartiality. Before we talked about people having opinions and the way we can be impartial to that

but can I be impartial to the partiality in myself? When I see, really like this or really hate

15

that, can I see as it’s going by–it likes this and hates that. Why do I care so much? It’s right there–to see that. When I really like something or really hate it, there is an opportunity to see what is it that’s liking it? What is it that’s hating it? How does that feel? Can I see that?

Keith: Then you see what makes you partial in that moment.

NR: Yes, in that moment. It is my partiality I want to see.

Keith: Time to bail out.

16

17

March/Spring gathering 2017 ~ Friday Morning

Keith: We move to a different way of raising this question of significance by reading from The Tales. Michael is going to read several pages that will present a number of questions. Listen with some care. (from the chapter “Art,” pp 454-59)

“Owing to their genuine and sincere striving to the corresponding manner of their existence and to their being-acts, these several terrestrial beings had already, even before their arrival in Babylon, been considered initiates of the first degree by those terrestrial three-brained beings worthy to become what are called ‘All-the-Rights-Possessing-Initiates-according-to-the-renewed-rules-of-the-Most-Saintly-Ashiata-Shiemash.’

“And thus, my boy, when I began going to the said club, it became quite clear to me, both from the conversations with them and from other data, that these several terrestrial learned beings who sincerely strove to perfect their Reason had from the beginning kept to themselves in the city of Babylon, and never mixed in any of those affairs with which the general mass of these Baby-lonian learned beings there of that time very soon became involved.

“These several learned beings kept themselves apart there, not only in the beginning when all the other learned beings who were then in the city of Babylon first opened a central place for their meetings in the very heart of the city, and when for their better mutual support both materially and mor-ally, they founded there a central club for all the learned beings of the Earth; but also later on, when the whole body of learned beings were divided into three separate ‘sections’ and each section had its independent club in one or another part of the city of Babylon, they identified themselves with none of the said three sections.

“They existed in the suburbs of the city of Babylon and scarcely met any of the learned beings from the general mass; and it was only several days be-fore my admittance among them as a member of this club, that they for the first time united for the purpose of organizing the club of the ‘Adherents-of-Legominism.’

“These learned beings about whom I am speaking had all without excep-tion been taken to the city of Babylon by coercion and they were for the most part those learned beings who had been taken there by the Persian king from Egypt.

“As I later learned, this uniting of theirs had been brought about by two learned beings who were initiates of the first degree.

“One of these two initiated learned beings of the Earth who had his arising among, as they are called, the Moors, was named Kanil-El-Norkel. The other learned initiated being was named Pythagoras, and he arose from among, as they are called, the Hellenes, those Hellenes who were afterwards called Greeks.

“As it later became clear to me, these two learned beings happened to meet in the city of Babylon and during what is called their ‘Ooissapagaoomnian-exchange-of-opinions,’ that is to say during those conversations the theme

18

of which was, which forms of being-existence of the beings can serve for the welfare of the beings of the future, they clearly constated that in the course of the change of generations of beings on the Earth a very undesirable and dis-tressing phenomenon occurs, namely, that, during the processes of reciprocal destruction, that is during what are called ‘wars’ and ‘popular risings,’ a great number of initiated beings of all degrees are for some reason or other invari-ably destroyed, and, together with them, there are also destroyed forever very many Legominisms through which alone various information about former real events on the Earth is transmitted and continues to be transmitted from generation to generation.

“When the two mentioned sincere and honest learned beings of the Earth constated what they then called such a ‘distressing phenomenon,’ they delib-erated a long time about it with the result that they decided to take advantage of the exceptional circumstance that so many learned beings were together in one city to confer collectively for the purpose of finding some means for averting at least this distressing phenomenon, which proceeded on the Earth owing to the abnormal conditions of the life of man.

“And it was just for this purpose that they organized that said club and called it the ‘Club-of-Adherents-of-Legominism.’

“So many like-thinking beings at once responded to their appeal, that two days after my own admission as a member of this club, the enrollment of new members already ceased.

“And on the day when new members ceased to be admitted, the number of those enrolled amounted to a hundred and thirty-nine learned beings; and it was with this number of members that the club existed until the said Persian king abandoned his former caprice connected with those terrestrial learned beings.

“As I learned after my enrollment as a member of that club, all the learned beings had arranged on the very first day of its opening a general meeting at which it was unanimously resolved to hold daily general meetings, when re-ports and discussions on the two following questions were to be made: name-ly, the measures to be taken by the members of the club on their return home for the collection of all the Legominisms existing in their native lands, and for placing them at the disposal of the learned members of this club which they had founded; and secondly, what was to be done in order that the Legomin-ism might be transmitted to remote generations by some other means that only through initiates.

“Before my enrollment as a member of the club, a great variety of reports and discussions concerning these two mentioned questions had already pro-ceeded at that general meeting of theirs; and on the day of my entry a great deal was said on the question how to obtain the participation in the main task of the club of initiated beings, of the followers of those so-called ‘Ways’ then called ‘Onandjiki,’ ‘Shamanists,’ ‘Buddhists,’ and so on.

“Well then, on the third day after my enrollment as a member of this club, there was uttered for the first time that word which has chanced to reach contemporary beings there and which has become on of the potent factors for

19

the total atrophy of all the still surviving data for more or less normal logical being-mentation, namely, the word ‘art’ which was then used in a different sense and whose definition referred to quite a different idea and had quite another meaning.

“This word was uttered in the following circumstances: “On the day when the word ‘art’ was used for the first time and its real idea and exact meaning were established among the other reporters, there stepped forward a Chal-dean learned being, very well known in those times, named Aksharpanziar, who was then also a member of the club for Legominists.

“As the report of that already very aged Chaldean learned being, the great Aksharpanziar, was then the origin for all the further events connected with this same contemporary art there, I will try to recall his speech and repeat it to you as nearly as possible word for word.

“He then said as follows: “ ‘The past and especially the last two centuries have shown us that during

those inevitable psychoses of the masses, from which wars between states and various popular revolts within states always arise, many of the innocent victims of the popular bestiality are invariably those who, owing to their piety and conscious sacrifices, are worthy to be initiates and through whom various Legominisms containing information about all kinds of real events which have taken place in the past are transmitted to the conscious beings of succeeding generations.

“ ‘Just such pious men as these always become such innocent victims of the popular bestiality only because, in my opinion, being already free within and never wholly identifying themselves as all the rest do, with all the ordinary interests of those around them, they cannot, for that reason, participate either in the attractions, pleasures, and sentiments, or in the similarly clearly sincere manifestations of those around them.

“ ‘And in spite of the fact that in ordinary times they exist normally and in their relations which those around them are always well-wishing in both their inner and outer manifestations and thus acquire in normal periods of everyday life the respect and esteem of those around them, yet when the mass of ordi-nary people fall into the said psychosis and split into their usual two opposing camps, then these latter, in their state of bestialized reason during their fight-ing, begin to entertain morbid suspicions of just those who in normal times have always been unassuming and serious; and then, if it should happen that the attention of those under this psychosis should rest a little longer on these exceptional men, they no longer have any doubt whatever that these serious and outwardly always quiet men have undoubtedly also in normal times been nothing more nor less than the “spies” of their present enemies and foes.

“ ‘With their diseased Reasons these bestialized men categorically conclude that the previous seriousness and quietness of such men were nothing else but simply what are called “secrecy” and “duplicity.”

“ ‘And the result of the psychopathic conclusions of these bestialized men of one or the other hostile party is that without any remorse of conscience whatever they put these serious and quiet men to death.

20

“‘In my opinion what I have just said has most frequently been the cause why the Legominisms about events which really took place on the Earth have, in the course of their passage from generation to generation, also totally dis-appeared from the face of the Earth.

“ ‘Well then, my highly esteemed colleagues, if you wish to know my per-sonal opinion, then I shall sincerely tell you with all my being that in spite of all I have told you about the transmission of true knowledge to distant genera-tions through corresponding initiates by means of Legominisms, there is now nothing whatever to be done through these means.

“ ‘Let this means be continued as before, as it has been on the Earth from the dawn of centuries and as this form of transmission by initiates through their “ableness-to-be” was renewed by the great prophet Ashiata Shiemash.

“ ‘If we contemporary men desire at the present time to do something be-neficent for men of future times, all we must do is just to add to this already existing means of transmission some new means or other, ensuing from the ways of our contemporary life on the Earth as well as from the many-centur-ied experience of former generations, in accordance with the information that has come down to us.

Keith: There is certainly a lot of material here. The singular notion that appears to be of primary importance in this, for me, is the role of Ashiata Shiemash. With all that we have read previously about the appearance of Ashiata Shiemash and the reasons for it, and his work and what happens for a period of time and then the coming of the destructive in-fluences on his work; here, without mentioning anything in between, Gurdjieff plunges us how long after, how many years are we talking about after the time of Ashiata and the time of Babylon? What are we talking about? A thousand, two thousand years?

That is one point we could talk about, historically, but more essentially, what do we understand is the fundamental mechanism, or the fundamental way or path for the Legomonism of Ashiata Shiemash?

It’s one thing for us to say, “Oh yes, this is Ashiata, this is the pursuit of Conscience.” But here we are some indeterminate period of time, centuries perhaps, later we have this reappearance, the “Adherents-of-Legominism.” They have pledged themselves under the banner, if you will, identified with the premier teaching in accordance with Ashiata Shiemash. How to understand that? What does that mean to you? Because he has this appearing in Babylon and this is a big deal; this is Pythagoras and the Moor setting the stage for something which is to move through time into the future and is to be an ena- bling influence into the life of man. It’s a big deal.

What is the core of this that ties it together with Ashiata? How do we understand that? What is he saying that the core of Ashiata Shiemash’s Legomonism is, and how is brought forth; how is it transmitted?

We can go back re-read all the material he has written about Ashiata and about how he undertook to teach a small group which moved to a somewhat larger group and then moved out to the countryside and, by their everyday life work, began to spread the “message.” So what was the message? What is the core? What is the most singular facet of this? Anybody have an idea?

JA: Isn’t it that Conscience had not been destroyed and could be used for development?

21

Keith: That is certainly the conclusion that Ashiata had come to and was the primary reason he chose to develop his approach around Conscience. He speaks of that very directly. But what does that mean? It is one thing to say that but what does that mean?

ES: It means that we have a teacher inside of us that knows what is right and that message was able to be transmitted to people so that they were convinced that is was true and we assume that must have had techniques that he showed to people to awaken Conscience which, in my view, is related to the teaching we get from Gurdjieff. In other words, all this work with self-observation; going to see how things are in us and seeing how we live un-correspondingly and we begin to listen to this voice that is our Conscience that tells us how live rightly. To me, that is the solution.

JJ: There is something very timely about this reading, isn’t there? Because this is kind of the time that the chaotic inner meaning of what the outer is being manifested in America right now. They use the word “bestialized” men. I use the word “Mammon” worshippers, [Matthew 6]. There is almost a split between of those who are trying, who are looking at another way of being in this short time we are on Earth and those that are looking at the egregiously gluttonous acquisition of the goods and everything is sacrificed to that. It is interesting that they say that the learned beings, those who are working on Conscience, those whose values are not the values of materiality–those are the ones who die, who are killed and it’s not the other way. They can talk about uprising but unless you are grabbed by something beyond Conscience, whether it’s an archetype as Jung talked about, that you go out and kill other people in order to change the world.

So what we are doing is I am sitting here saying, “what is my work here?” It really hasn’t changed. I still get up in the morning and do my sitting and have a cup of tea and go out in the day and try to do what I have to do to put bread on the table but also the extra to effort to resist this energy, whatever in World 48, that is supposed the rule of laws. I see many people falling into confusion and pain and “oh my God, look what’s happening” who are losing their center. If I can keep mine, there is this sense of walking on a slippery log over rushing water. There is something going on that’s really a huge devolvement. I have no view of what will happen but I know it is really necessary to love, to be just and to be merciful, and to walk humbly with God–whatever you perceive that to be–and to hold on to that because it feels like we are on the brink of a maelstrom.

Keith: We spent some time last evening exploring the various facets that concern impar-tiality and there seems to be a reference that’s necessary to bring up here because of the present situation. It is not easy as we all experience. We all experience this day after day. We are the objects of an assault out there in the world: from the headlines to real events, and it is very difficult not to become identified with it, not to glom onto it; to resist it, to try to deny its reality in some reality that we put out there. But that is also why I put in the reading last night about Gurdjieff and how he dealt with all of the old people who lived around him during the war. He said, “the Nazi’s kill English and French and the Belgium and Americans kill Nazis by the millions and I don’t care who wins the war.”

So that degree of impartiality, that standing aside from that process that is going on, that is taking place in the world for reasons we can think that we have some notion of why but, truth be told, we really don’t know. These changes that have been occurring and now we recognize, kind of backwards, over the last couple of years when we look around the world and we see other nations the same kind thinking, the same kind of reaction, whether it is

22

political or educational or whatever, these things were there. There were there two years ago and now we look on them as if, my gracious, we exported this–no, it was there all the time. And we have a very poor understanding, as Bennett points out so well, of what emerges and what drives changes that occur within society–we have very little understanding of the forces that move.

So here it’s important to come back to this notion of impartiality. We have to struggle and it is a struggle for all of us to remain impartial because, while we can establish a certain degree of impartiality, maybe in thought, but can we in feeling? When you put yourself in front of five hundred children dying in an air raid someplace in Syria, can you emotionally put yourself in an impartial place? That’s a different order of business all together. That is a very difficult thing.

So coming back to Ashiata, what then is the essentiality of Ashiata’s message? Because supposedly this is being put forward as the key into the future, it is Adherents of Legominism in accordance with Ashiata’s Shiemash. So the answer, from Gurdjieff’s point of view, into the future would appear to be inside of this, whatever it was that he is tempting us to look at.

BP: Wouldn’t that correspond to the Fifth Striving:

“And the fifth: the striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of oth-er beings, both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, up to the degree of the sacred ‘Martfotai’ that is up to the degree of self-individuality. (BT, p 386)

That would be a real introduction of our responsibility into the future.

Keith: Yes, in principle. It is not difficult with respect to any of these things. The problem comes down the road, as soon as you begin to do something.

Let’s take an endangered species. We’ve got lots of those around so you can kind of take your pick. In some parts of the world there are groups of people who have been making very genuine, very sincere efforts to assist that particular species to survive. The end result in several of these instances already is that, by creating conditions that favor the survival of this particular species because they are threatened, we have brought forces to bear on those for which these beings that are diminishing were previously food and they are, in effect, the hunters of, and we have put them at disadvantage so we are contributing to their demise and their future. But we were trying to help this species survive. In the process of help-ing them survive with the understanding we have, we create a circumstance that really puts other species in danger.

BP: That is sometimes the case, not always. There are many, many environmentalists that are working to understand not putting another species in danger.

Keith: Right, that is all I mean is that it gets to be an increasingly complex kind of circumstance. Like when you come into a human situation and you start thinking about the oppressed Kurds and you look back over the history of the last four thousand years in that part of the world and say, “Oh my goodness, how are you going to undo the entanglements that have occurred: the conquering and the enmities and terrible sacrifices of all the parts of all the different people and then you come down to the present day and say, “Here are these Kurds. All they want is to be left alone and have their own home.” Well, it ain’t that way. It is enormously complex and it is very difficult to be impartial in the face of that.

23

We all face that every day. We, all of us, have our DNA past that links us to so many races throughout the world and when we go into that to any degree, we find all kinds of entangle-ments that never got resolved. That is one of the reasons why we so many interracial things that don’t resolve–out there–every day. When you go shopping or get gas at a gas station and the people that you meet and the circumstances that you come up against–they inevita-bly, in one way or another, reflect the way in which we have entered this world.

So, me with my typically Canadian/American/conservative upbringing and perspective on the way that people should behave toward each other–that is there because it was there day after day, minute after minute through all of my early years of growth so it is there when I am 85 years old. It’s there whenever I meet somebody under circumstances. And so I have to look for it. I have to try to put myself in that position to being impartial to my DNA, my past and try to see the world through somebody else’s perspective.

The question of the impartial, more to get back to Ashiata, to the pursuit of Conscience, how do you understand that when Gurdjieff seems to try mightily in this chapter to re-estab-lish the primacy of the way of Ashiata Shiemash? That seems to be one of things he is up to here. He does this in a kind of off-hand sort of way. You read through this and if you don’t go back and say, “whoa, he just spoke about Ashiata Shiemash over here he spoke of Ashiata like this and that relative to future of man and the study of his nature and the role of Con-science.” And then we get this gap and then in Babylon, Ashiata reappears. What does that mean? How do we understand that? What does it have to do with, for instance, with today? Today, with us?

JA: I think he wants to emphasize by bringing up the destruction of Ashiata’s observation brought to him through a good deal of time on the mountain to get to the point of impar-tiality that there is something inherent in the distribution of the idea that causes destruction. Having thought about that instead of that method, the individual has to come to the same conclusion that Ashiata did for him or herself, otherwise, it devolves.

Usually in these conversations about Ashiata, that I have been involved in in the past, it rarely gets to the point where the entire perspective is brought in. I can’t remember the exact sequence that Gurdjieff presents but obviously there is this gap after the destruction and, for some reason, the idea bubbles up again. My conclusion, I don’t know if it is anybody else’s conclusion, is that the distribution itself is what made it fail. In other words, the breth-ren who passed along these ideas did not have the same conviction. Ashiata initiated a small number with his personal conviction and then it’s like the going down the octave and down the octave until it no longer has its potency.

Keith: But it did all the way to Babylon. The adherents of Legominism, they are real.

JA: Is there some other reason we need to look at the destruction?

Keith: Yes.

ES: Solioonensius. This is the thing. There was Lentrohamsanin. Talking about the present is this isn’t Solioonensius we are going through now then I would hate to be in the real thing. [laughter]

The thing you bring up which to me is really interesting because you are talking about thing that was set up by Ashiata Shiemash. The information was going to be transmitted to initiates and then, x-teen number of years later, this realization that it is not working because these very initiates are the first ones to die in the processes of reciprocal destruction when

24

Solioonensius walks in there and takes hold of people again. To find another way to transmit this information through art, lawful inexactitudes, etc..

The thing that is interesting is that we have Gurdjieff who said I am Ashiata Shiemash. Whether we take that literally or not, who knows but Gurdjieff obviously from our experi-ence since his appearance on the scene is that he was almost a unique phenomenon. There is nobody that has come up to that level.

I remember hearing from some place that Gurdjieff said that the Work can by transmit-ted through Beelzebub, in other words, Beelzebub can become the teacher. Isn’t that the same thing we are talking about here through the Society of the Adherents of Legominism? Right now in the present moment, we have this document which will be there whether we get destroyed or not. The document is there. It puts a whole different coloration on the ur-gency with which Gurdjieff was working when he found he was not going to be able to create the model society that he wanted to do through a community thing–that he had to have these writings.

So these writings are the same thing that he was talking about in the writing.

Keith: Absolutely, yes. But out of that, there is this pursuit of Conscience. In the whole of Beelzebub’s Tales, if you are to ask yourself: “What is it that I am faced with, most astonishing right here, you cannot avoid being confronted by Conscience. There are other ways we can put it in terms of our singular existence, our I or whatever, but Conscience is the state … of what?

BP: Self-other? That state of opening beyond oneself.

Keith: It certainly is that, yes, at least that. For each of us in our own way, we have to resolve this issue of where to place the heart or the center point or the triad of Conscience. Is Conscience an emotional state–a very high emotional state? Or is it a very high state of Reason?

ES: Or?

Keith: Or what?

ES: I’ll preface this first by saying I don’t know. But what I have seen for myself it comes across as a kind of seeing. I see this in simple situations–the way it was set up at Sherbourne, for example; we would have meal where there was not enough to eat and there was 12 half slices of bread on the plate and there were 10 people at the table. Each person gets a slice of bread and there is two left over and everybody is hungry. Then there is this scene that takes place. I want that piece of bread but if I take that piece some other hungry person is not going to get it. Immediately this awakens this part, from my subconscious, because I have been working on myself and in a place where work is taking place, I am awake enough to see this situation in myself. This seeing sees what’s right.

That’s what happens with Conscience. It sees. He says that Conscience is the representa-tive of the Creator. That makes sense because if you say that the Will is in the unconditioned world; this seeing connects the Will with what is right to do. There was some humor that took place at the dining table at lunchtime at Sherbourne because there were people, includ-ing myself by the way, “I am really hungry, I’ll only take half a slice. I’ll take the half slice and break it in half.” That’s only enough for four people so you are still in a situation. It goes along with creating conditions for Work for which one might be able to see. That’s what sees.

25

SM: There is one thing I have always thought was a strength of the teaching of Ashiata Shiemash, which is that it is an attempt to organize a society based on the maturity of individuals. It recognizes that there is a great gradation of maturity or being and so the attempt is to put those into leader positions that have more understanding and more experience in life. That is one of the cores of that teaching. I think it is also very much what Gurdjieff had in this teaching as well. So I am not surprised when he says, “I am Ashiata Shiemash” from that point of view.

It is reported as having failed and even after the Obligolnian meeting there it still hasn’t really worked otherwise we would have a different society today. So we have Democracy, in essence, that says everybody is equal in all parts. And here is this other philosophy that says that not everybody is equal in all parts–there are gradations of maturity and based on that we should organize our societies.

I think this is a new message that is being brought again through Gurdjieff into the pres-ent time that to some extent we understand what it is about. The question: Is there anything we can do about this situation?

You ask is Conscience higher emotional center or higher intellectual center? I would say primarily it is emotional. There is a sense of something. The question is what is higher emotional and higher intellectual? If it is beyond words, then I think it is higher intellectual center. If it is formulated in words, then I would say Conscience goes beyond formulation in words, in other words, to try to speak about it, you limit it in some way.

So I think it is primarily emotional. It is the inner voice that I think can be trained to be heart. It is there and through practice it can become a factor in our decisions in our lives.

Keith: How would you differentiate that from the stupid Saint?

SM: Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Keith: What I remember is that Gurdjieff, when he was speaking of the different Ways, that if one went the way of emotional man he may reach a certain level of development certainly but, because he hasn’t developed his intellect, he could find himself in life circumstances where he has great emotional connectedness and openness to whatever it is he is open to–but he doesn’t understand it. So he is, in that sense, a “stupid Saint.” If he had Conscience he would be beyond that.

SM: We must come beyond repeating what we have heard from others and come to our own understanding. At that point, we may have a chance to become a little bit more than a stupid Saint.

LF: You asked if Conscience was emotional or intellectual. I was recalling in my own experience no matter how poorly someone presents their case to me in an argument, whatever faults they had in their presentation to me, if there is something true about what they are saying against me, however contrary to my view, that is an intellectual clarification of that. But then there has to be the emotional to come along with that because I don’t want to hear; I just want to focus on how they presented it at first. So there has to be an emotional part that couples that. It is emotional and intellectual seeing but the support has to come from the emotional otherwise I won’t accept it.

Keith: Is it necessary for the resolution to a circumstance, when Conscience enters into it, to be clean and distinct and readily verifiable? It doesn’t seem to me that it is. Very often it is still a muddle, which is a very interesting circumstance.

26

Turning this whole thing upside down by several measures, we go all the way back to the first circumstance of Beelzebub being brought from Karatas to the Holy Sun Absolute, keeping in mind, that he is already a higher being. He would not be taken on as an aide to endlessness if he were not already highly developed; he is extremely intelligent but he is immature in terms of having dealt with a great many lawful kinds of things that happen in the world. So, he sees something that appears to him illogical in the way in which the Universe is being run. Following his primal drive of egoism to get to the bottom of something, he is does his own research into this and comes to the conclusion that indeed something is wrong and he should correct it. So, he then shares that notion with other beings of his kind and of simi- lar immaturity, perhaps. But he ends up in a big mess. He ends up in exile.

We could talk a lot about what’s involved in that kind of situation when we try to put a specific meaning on Beelzebub. There are endless Biblical and other religious connotations that pop out of that from a number of different points of view. However, less often comes the question from endlessness’ point of view, which I think recurs in our considerations of Ashiata. And that is that Beelzebub sees something that he things is illogical. What does endlessness think of that? Does he see this young immature being, who because of his immaturity has come to a wrong conclusion? Of course the lawfulnesses of the Universe worked with absolute precision and this young upstart is simply wrong so he is judged as being wrong and punished. But it sure doesn’t look that way.

He is exiled, true, but he remains “your Eminence” [“Right Reverence”]. He remains in charge of a large flock of people, other souls, other beings, his kinsmen, in addition, the chief teacher on Karatas is exiled with him. That should give us some pause. How is it that the chief Zirlikner from Karatas end up in exile with Beelzebub?

So, Beelzebub is a high being. Throughout his exile, he is a very high being. Looisos addresses him as “your Eminence” [“Right Reverence”]. This is Looisos who eventually becomes an Archangel. So Beelzebub is no small being in the Universe. When he is exiled, I think we have to ask the question, what is endlessness up to?

This is a question much like the question we are asking here about Ashiata, about the approach and method of Conscience because if something has happened in the Universe that really doesn’t make sense then, presumptively, endlessness would be aware of that also and would be very interested in finding out why. Why does it work out that way?

JA: When he asks the question at the end of book, what is to be done? Is it because he doesn’t know or is it the same deal all over again?

Keith: Is it the same deal all over again? Good question, yes. Is it another question?

JA: Is it a test of Beelzebub and Beelzebub, what does he do? He suggests implanting another organ which is intervention.

Keith: My major point in bringing it up this way is that I think there are in The Tales, so much incredible wisdom and insight but also an exposure of our reason and an exposure of the nature of Conscience. And I don’t think we have quite gotten there in what we have shared today about the nature of Conscience.

When I asked the question is it a fundamentally emotional thing or an intellectual thing, we have great difficulty as human beings of mixing those two–of really standing in both. That is an extraordinarily difficult thing; at least I find it that way in my own life; to take a very strong emotional state and then bring the intellect, a seeing in law that this is the way it is. This is tough.

27

ES: Have you thought about the answer to that question? That statement what was it, what kind of thing a young Beelzebub could have called into question about the construction of the Universe? What kind of thing is he talking about?

Keith: I think he is talking about in the interstices of World 48 to 96. He saw something that appears illogical. For instance, in modern biological studies, especially now when we are down into studying sequences of DNA and able to move widgets of DNA over this way we can then suddenly forecast the future. If it expressed, it will go in this direction; if it isn’t expressed, it goes in this direction. What I am saying is that we have opened the door through biological inquiry into a world that has many, many features of the unpredictable. You just can’t tell what is going to happen because the circumstances that will qualify this, the temperature, the range of other chemicals, of other physical qualities of the atmosphere and so forth may be different in the immediate future to what they are now which were the qualifying conditions for thing to appear in the first place. It is simply not possible to predict what those circumstances are going to be.

We have all kinds of evidence. For instance, life appeared on Earth under conditions of no oxygen or the minimal amount and yet we live today in a world where every living creature, every cell-bound creature is absolutely dependent upon oxygen and oxygen is a very plentiful element in our environment, thanks be to the world of plants. So, that’s four and half billion years that it has taken to change from whatever the environment was then to what it is today. Was that predictable? Would the Creator have seen four and half billion years ago with a sulphur atmosphere being the only thing that was there that the future was going to bring about what has occurred in terms of oxygen-dependent creatures?

Well from all biological evidence that is out there, no, it is too variable. It is too unpredictable what directions are going to be taken by life when it is put under varying circumstances. It will go here and then it will go there and then it will die out. The life forces on Earth have done away with more life forms than exist on Earth today. And we have thousands and thousands of species today but there have been millions of species that have died out in the past. Why did they die out? They ran out of food; they ran out of vital transformative elements that suddenly was lacking in their immediate environment and without that, they couldn’t go anywhere. Or, up to and including gigantic events as what did in the dinosaurs, apparently with a meteor collision that altered things very suddenly. But still and all, there is now increasing evidence that it may been local volcanic eruptions that did most of the damage even then.

ZB: This time of year often I go out into the woods and not that infrequently you come across signs of raw nature, people refer to the “survival dog-eat-dog” kind of scenario. So you could be out tracking and you come across a kill site and there is carnage, quite distressing perhaps, not too unlike what we would witness even with the human condition on Earth.

How do you reconcile yourself with something that by all appearances seems quite wasteful or destructive? There a certain emotional impact to that and there is also a cer-tain intellectual curiosity and there is an opportunity to explore that in many fronts in a mo-ment where you see much of the lawfulness, if you can penetrate into the lawfulness of what is in that moment, in that particular event.

Keith: Can you given an example?

28

ZB: When there are students out there the emotions that come up which I would characterize as the Bambie effect. You see a young deer that has been torn apart at the beginning of his life. Those emotions come up and all of a sudden, like what has been echoed throughout Christianity and been imbibed into the whole analogy of the wolf or the dark side of nature that has to be conquered, you see all sorts of reactions in terms of the question of Beelzebub; we are meddling. We can start to meddle in all sorts of things be-cause we see a certain injustice and we could go out and eradicate all wolves or eliminate the wilderness because the wilds are where those dark creatures exist and you can read those stories about what that kind of stupid Saint does.

But the penetration into the laws and understanding the laws, for instance, there is great documentary about how the wolves changed the course of a river and a nice exploration into the lawfulness of who the ebb and flow of nature. It is the Trogoautoegocratic process. We are eaten; there is nothing so much tragic about it, if you see it and take a particular perspective it is going to be quite emotional. But you can see it quite intellectually and have no feeling or compassion for the fact that creatures also have to live and somehow I have to get the question asked of me how am I responsible to all of this? It is an alchemical marriage in that at some point you see in a moment a greater will. If you hold these two together you see something more at work–Mullah Nassr Eddin’s saying,

“ ‘Never poke your stick into a hornets’ nest.” (BT, p 44)

Not to meddle in other people’s business because all sorts of things could come up. You have this momentary insight into these great lawfulnesses but you are also feeling

there is something much greater in the role of life. I can’t do anything about it other than I have to be reconciled to that and yet I can’t

change it. It reminds me of the story about Gurdjieff treating a pupil quite harshly and someone called him on it and he said, “I have to try.”

So, those are moments of impartiality and a bit of Conscience, not higher but perhaps the insight to see something of the order of will is the best we can do. There is no answer; it is just that we stand in a place of wishing that we could respond in the moment. In a mo-ment of being impartial, we try.

The story of Beelzebub sticking his nose into something–was it because something he tried as opposed to just standing there with a question?

Keith: This is some indication to us, as the reader of the status of Beelzebub at the very beginning. Even though endlessness says that he is young and inexperienced, he is a very formidable figure also, as he is portrayed there.

His seeing something illogical is a big deal. This raises a big question that is not a local situation. It is a very profound shaking of the tree in his own perceptual life as a higher being; looking into the way in which the world is working out and he bumps into this big bump in the road that seems to go against what he understood was the way in which it should unfold.

When he lands on Mars, and unexpectedly they are just standing around and one day and there is this horrible stink and smoke and they learn that something has crashed into Earth. Another unexpectedness, another unlawful something; but he gets an explanation.

How many of you, when you read the explanation for the collision of the comet Kon-door with Earth said, “wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense, something else is going on here.”

29

How many of you had an instant bulb go off? We look around here in this solar system things are going around and around all the time. The Moon is going round and round, the Earth is going round and round. We have all kinds of asteroids that go round and round and they bump into things and we know that so what is so special about something the size of the Earth or thereabouts seeming to be because it splits off a big chunk of Earth, how can we understand the lawfulness of that collision? Because the laws that govern, as he points out, the motions of comets and small planets, those are very high laws; they are governed from a very high level and here we have this image of things being set in motion in accordance with laws which are almost all Newtonian.

So, Gurdjieff is already being the poke. But in any event, we have comets moving in a certain pathway and planets that move in certain pathways and they are all circular; they are all orbital in one way or another. One orbit can be crossing another orbit but a day later or two days later or a year later or ten or a thousand years later and we can say they cross in the same space but they didn’t collide. There is no collision under all these circumstances except one, which was the collision he reports on in The Tales.

What is it that defines that collision? Timing.

SA: Beelzebub aside from his acting out, he assumed the Universe ran on logic, which is Newtonian, cause and effect. Someplace in The Tales, somebody says, thanks be to chance. Without the chance, without the hazard, the unpredictableness, nothing new would ever happen. So, his operating assumption from the beginning seems to be more formatory.

I always wondered about the illogic of everyone being exiled. But of course that makes sense because they went along with him, they were part of it. From the very beginning we have the example of the individual collision, which he talks about later. He acts out on it because he assumes if it is illogical, it can be fixed and everything will be run like clockwork, they won’t bump into each other.

That’s the problem we get into all the time with our emotional reactions, that’s not right, it’s not logical–it shouldn’t be this way. But how could it not be that way when you have three things constantly interacting with each other that don’t know what’s going to happen. It has to be that way. We have to live with that.

Keith: Exactly, we have to live with that! That raises the other end of the stick. When the unexpected does happen, what do we do then? Do we rail and weep?

SA: Yes [laughter]

Keith: … yes, we do, we do.

MB: This reminds me of the story of Makary Kronbernkzion and the example that Beelzebub gives in that story to Hassein when he explains to him what happened and what happened with the souls on Purgatory and how they came to the decision and understanding that they came to. When he begins to speak to Hassein and later on refers to him this time as “my direct substitute,” he goes into what happens inside of him and where he took that in trying to understand what had happened.

He gives him an incredible lesson of the importance of really going into things and trying to get to the bottom of it and not coming to some kind of understanding or conclusion too soon. It seems that he in his exile, that was one of the things that happened, that he came to this conclusion too soon and now, all these years later, he has learned a great deal and he goes to a great deal of trouble to understand what happened to Makary.

30

Keith: We should spend more time with Makary because there is great deal involved here in making choices and knowing how we make those choices in terms of what is to be done because poor Makary is a good example of how many things can go wrong along the way.

In any case, here we are in this situation of seeing Beelzebub coming to a certain conclusion about an illogicality and then the whole sequence of events that follows is dependent on that. So the very first event is the exile. The next event after he arrives on Mars is the collision of the comet Kondoor. Kondoor, I chose to think it is really important to take the collision of the comet Kondoor and follow it throughout The Tales, that every single step in The Tales has a direct relationship to the comet. Why? Because the comet splits the Earth into three. We have Earth, Moon–Moon is part of the Earth, and Anulios which is also part of the Earth. It is part of us.

The whole of our solar system, in Gurdjieff’s terms, is each of us in totality. In other words, the whole of our constitution our major centers and their relationship has an astro-nomical basis to it which is so simple and it seems to be so contradictory to astrological perspectives. He assigns to Mars an appellation, directly contrary to what in the Western world most understanding of Mars as the God of war and as typifying a certain attitude and he doesn’t do that.

Mars, from my perspective, is Higher Emotional Center, our real emotional center and Saturn is our Higher Intellectual Center. There is this lovely picture that is on the front of the book, The Fifth Striving that is picture of the Earth taken from Saturn. If you look at it, you can make out the orbit of Saturn, the rings, how many of you have looked for the Earth. It is there, a little tiny blue dot that is associated with my signature, for some reason.

ES: What that taken from the Voyager?

Keith: Yes.

ES: And all of human experience is in the little blue dot.

SA: All the egos.

Keith: That was Bonnie’s insight into what’s really going on there because that is the Earth seen from Higher Intellectual Center.

TS: Can I go back to the comet? You were saying it’s the organizing principle throughout The Tales. It is what causes the Earth to break into three. Is there also a reflection earlier with the Zilnotrago that disorganizes most of the functions? I think there is a reflection earlier as well with and might tell us something about the nature of the comet. He also calls it the “Madcap” and in “Arousing of Thought,” he describes his brain as “madcap.” There is a reflection back as well as forward.

SA: There is something else that caught my attention. As far as I am aware, the word “collision” occurs only twice: once in reference to the comet, but also in terms of the individual collision. The way he talks about that is every time something happens that we didn’t expect, if we are not present to absorb it, we experience it as a collision with our expectation and we fragment, we split, we come apart.

TS: And how interesting that it is that the angels thought something “might” happen. They had an expectation that their reason might cause trouble so, then, they implement this thing, they do something, they actually have an expectation and they actually make this action as

31

one of the second revolts of Beelzebub, which was referred to last night from the chapter “France.” Why didn’t they see that this would happen?

SA: They thought everything should be logical. The Commission committed the same sin that Beelzebub did. They intervened to make sure the Law of Three wasn’t operative.

JJ: This is going back a ways, but this hubris of the intellect that people or Beelzebub had and the sort of feeling center which is less precise. If one brings the emotional center to look upon the demands we make on the present moment creates something that was referred to of this experience of Conscience being very close to noticing. That’s how I experience it.

It can’t be argued away and it can’t be felt. In a certain way there is something that comes from outside because noticing always

comes from outside; it is a moment when something comes up in front of you and you can’t deny it is there. I know Bennett refers to Conscience as being outside, but the experiencing of this says something about the nature of Conscience.

This is a stupid, low-level thing. But you can get in your shower and notice there is a spider in there. Sometimes you don’t. There is something about when you open the shower door and there is a life that doesn’t have to end today. And you are not indifferent to it that makes you take that extra step, put your bathrobe back on and go to the kitchen and get a glass and get it outside, even though you are late and there are things to do in your ordinary existence relevant to you.

To me that doesn’t have anything to do with, “oh, your poor little spider” or, “my god I am allowing this animal to go on…,” or it’s important to the environment or something like that. But it is a matter of noticing, that you just do it because it ought be done and that has this taste of being external.

That’s how I experience it, that it is something outside you. Bringing together the intel-lect and emotions brings a receptive state for seeing something.

Keith: In our difficulty characterizing this kind of circumstance, perhaps one of the big contributors to the difficulty is the fact that when we bring higher emotion and higher reason together, we are really bringing them to an enfolded state, self-other.

The self is clearly the instrument of my need, my want, my wish–all of me, my, etc.. There is also a clearly seeing of the lawfulness of their having to mother, father, children;

there has to be a government that runs the local town or country. In other words, there have to be layers of responsibility that are to varying degrees independent of our emotional state, of our intellectual state. They simply are because they are necessary; they are required for the continuity of our living together.

At so many levels what we frequently get tied up in is the separating of the world of self from the world of other. If we get lost wholly in one, the self, then we can see the end of that road in our own egoism.

But if we got lost in the other, I think that is another way of characterizing the stupid Saint. Then we get totally lost in other.

The rightness, the way of Conscience (and this is why I chose to approach it this way) is when we blend those two in appropriate balance together–that self and other are not held separate but they are blended in a singular state of perception, a singular state of direct perception.

MB: Do you think this is applicable to what you are saying?

32

I persisted: “But why did you do it? Why for them? “He smiled: “You stupid still. If can do for self and students, can also do for

others who cannot do such thing.” He paused and then added, smiling enigmatically now: “Ask self why old

lady, with very little money, every day feed birds in park. These people–this family–my birds. But I honest: I say I do this for people, and also for self. This give me good feeling. Lady who feed birds in park not tell truth. She tell only do for birds, because love birds. She not tell what pleasure she get.”

ES: I have a stupid question. Which comes first? I like the way you put that, that it is a blending of both, the feeling side and the reason side but really what is the sequence that happens? It seems to me there is this seeing that happens first and then there is the response because there is an action that takes. Conscience is a response to some kind of an action. Is there is a seeing?

Keith: What is the seeing? Do you mean an image?

ES: Let’s take the example of example earlier of walking in the shower and seeing a spider on the shower. That spider doesn’t belong there. She sees that and she sees the possible action in front of her and then she has this response; then something is evoked. Am I going to help that or am I not? That question comes. Is the Conscience (I said it was a stupid question and I stand by it) the noticing? There is a triad there then. There is the noticing and then these two sides.

Keith: What if the telephone rang you had to answer it while you were pulling back the curtain and you saw the spider but then you picked up the telephone and you had to go urgently somewhere so you simply closed the curtain and went and when you came back hours later, the spider was gone?

ES: I look at this word “Conscience” and I see two words “with science.” It is a science; the right action is a science so when you presented with the spider there and the telephone is ringing then you have choose which is more important. That’s also connected with one’s Conscience. It’s not simple, necessarily.

Keith: I could make it pretty simple, in a moment. It doesn’t strike me that given that scenario that there is no inner conflict.

ES: Yes, so I answer the phone because it has more potential for something.

Keith: For the whole of me.

ES: Exactly.

Keith: Of my life, my responsibility

ES: Or other people’s.

Keith: That would take it outside of the arena of an event that had the potential to involve Conscience. It wouldn’t.

MB: Would you say consciousness has to precede Conscience?

Keith: Yes, I would think so, certainly.

33

FB: Do you see a concordance with the idea that Beelzebub is a higher element which is put into a lower world and blends in whatever happens to Beelzebub in the course of his studies and his banishment–that image with the fact the Conscience is presented as some-thing higher put into the lower world of the ground and has to somehow blend with our experience in order for it to have the effect we are talking about in our life, that you have something higher that is put into something lower then you have this middle ground where it either is or it isn’t going to flourish or manifest. Something about Conscience is that it doesn’t always turn out okay. It’s not always neat. It’s like a seed in the ground. Something can grow and come into that other world; it was like a perfect something in the ground and when it starts to interact with the world, lots of different things could happen; it could have a life for a limited period of time or a long life.

So there is something about the uniqueness of something coming up in its own manifes-tation which will have its own destiny. You can’t have Conscience forever. You feel it; you are in that state while you are in it or it becomes something else or you lose it. It is what it is during that moment of your experience of it and it’s never the same again. You can’t bring what you learned from Conscience in one moment to another moment and say, “Conscience told me to do this and that so I now I know what to do in this moment.” I have to come back into that moment again to know what to do in that moment.

I don’t know if I have gotten off track of this idea of something higher.

Keith: That I readily don’t see. I don’t see the higher/lower.

FB: Isn’t it presented that way? That Conscience is not corrupted because it is buried in our subconscious?

Keith: I wouldn’t see it as a question of corruption.

FB: I mean it that he says Faith, Hope and Love are corrupted and he sees Conscience as the fourth way is not in the same way corruptible as those ways because it is not accessible by the corrupting influence.

Keith: What if we put the clarity or the purity of the impression that has to be both intellectual and emotional? A real moment of Conscience it would seem would have a high emotional quality to it but simultaneous to it, it has to have a level of reason, of understanding. They are not separable. This is what makes it so confoundedly difficult to talk about because it is a dual state that with, our ordinary mind, we can’t take apart.

ES: What is the relationship of all this to choice? Is Conscience connected with a moment of choice?

Keith: For sure.

NR: I act because of my Conscience. But it seems the connection between Conscience and Reason is that Conscience feels totally emotional but informed by reason so that my reason has accepted this and I have an emotional reaction to that because I accept this. That is how it feels to me.

Keith: Right but we might be able to come up with other events, other circumstances where the intellectual part would present itself first and very strongly and only later, the emotional part. I am just saying that I think it can vary across a wide range because I insist Conscience is not tenuous but it is very difficult for us in our ordinary state to really be able

34

to comprehend it–to take it inside because it is simultaneously a high emotional and a high intellectual state and there is no way to un-glue that state. As soon as we start to try to talk about, we become glued to one end or the other. We make it more an intellectual affair or we make it more an emotional affair.

TS: The image he gives of Conscience is the statue of the Akhaldans; all of it is every function functioning at its highest level–at the same time. It’s not like Conscience tells me this or that; it is way bigger.

Keith: Because it involves the other parts.

TS: Yes, for example, the wings represent the aspiring reason; every part is involved in this moment.

Keith: That makes it simultaneously this impossible to separate out thing. We start putting it into words and we are in trouble instantly.

JJ: I want to give a better example. The question was asked about choice. When my mother was dying, she knew she was dying; she didn’t want my brother there, which was a good choice. She said all I want is you. There was no choice in that. My brother acted very badly and we had to engage a lawyer and the judge said to me “it was your choice to quit my job, take a leave of absence, go to my mother’s house which was 45 miles away from any town, deep in Eastern Washington.” That’s what he said to me and I said, “There was no choice. This is what one does because one is called to Conscience.” There is no take a hike. I don’t think there is choice here. You are presented with what needs doing and the call to Conscience is absolute and it is without, ‘may this pass cup me by’. You might feel that way; I don’t want to do this but there’s not a choice involved in a certain way.

HG: Is this a part of objective Conscience, like an objective choice? It’s something you had to do, obviously, but it was still a choice. It is still Conscience but maybe it was on a higher level.

JJ: I didn’t have an experience of any kind of choice. All I could do was say yes.

HG: There was still a choice but it was something you had to do.

ES: In Beelzebub He describes the way Conscience gets buried. It comes up, shows a possible choice and we don’t take it then it goes away because it is a small voice. If we don’t listen to it, we don’t take that choice it goes away but if we do listen to it, unfortunately for us, then it comes back quicker and gives us another choice until you end up living in a way that is obeying it and not me.

SA: The fact that one says yes I accept implies that there was a question, even if the question was like that and of course I had no choice, I can see the opposite but that’s not something I would choose.

JJ: But it is interesting that the judge said, “You have a choice.” And my thing was there was no there. But he thinks there was a choice and I wonder then what where he touched his Conscience.

HG: The judge was impartial between you and your brother.

35

JA: I’d like to suggest that when something becomes an ideal, Conscience is no longer involved.

SM: I also have a thought that might clarify this. If you want to go to Boston and you come to a fork in the road, one goes to Boston and one goes to New York. You may say I have no choice because I want to go to Boston but if you are on a straight road and there is no fork then you really have no choice, you can only go forward. But if there is a fork it may be that it is very clear which fork you are going to take there is still an act of choosing and that makes a big difference.

ES: It doesn’t always have to be difficult.

SM: No, all kinds of situations arise.

JJ: If you come to a fork in the road, take one.

BG: Also isn’t there remorse if you don’t take the choice that Conscience suggests?

AG: I wonder if experience of Conscience could be different dependent upon you, your level of personal evolution and being. At some point, Conscience is this struggle because you are somewhere and in this place of still struggling with choice. There may that factor and there may be the essence of the choice you are making. She is dealing with life and death with the mother. That is a higher-level sort of choice than a fork in the road or any other thing I can think of and perhaps something else is called, something else arises in you with that quality.

I am thinking of soldier in a war situation seeing a child, he is about to annihilate themselves; they sacrifice themselves; they don’t sit and think about choice; they act instantaneously; they go instantly to somewhere and the whole of them is there. There isn’t “Oh my gosh, I’ll probably hurt, my body will hurt, my wife will be sad. There is nothing there except the whole of them coming to that instant.

So I am thinking there are many different experiences of Conscience. I understand what you are saying about feeling you had no choice. All of your faculties are there as one whole. There is no division–one part saying yes and one part saying no. There is this feeling of unity that is unique and it definitely does not feel like a moment choice.

MB: It is a total absence of any conflict in that moment, as opposed to for example, I’ve observed sometimes when the telephone rings and I see that it is my sister. Momentarily I am conflicted, and I answer the phone and I believe I answer the phone from Conscience because she is my sister, and my personality doesn’t want to deal with this right at the moment. Those are moments of conflicted Conscience for me whereas what you are saying about your mother dying there is no conflict.

JJ: There is no conflict, no question, no choice.

ES: What AG said is really helpful because you brought up this other thing about struggle. You articulated it. To me struggle is on a different level than the moment of making a choice. We struggle but in that moment, there is no struggle in the choice itself because that becomes an act of will. We may or may not have to struggle with ourselves in order to get to the point where we accept and say yes to the choice.

36

MG: Relative to what Keith was saying about the difficulty when we talk about Conscience. I think we can talk about things it is not, that that can be helpful. We try to separate morality, taboos, the things that are not Conscience.

Keith: Can you give a couple examples?

MG: Nothing comes right away.

LF: You were talking about self and other and it’s that being lost in other or lost in self. I have a more mundane example.

In my everyday job with Band, thirteen year olds playing music and when I walk in there they are all warming up and playing. Mostly they are practicing their parts. I can let that go on for a certain time or I can stop it because it is inferring with my agenda. So it is always this thing, do I let it go, it’s me versus them in my mind. I can fall off either way and I often I do. Sometimes I am able to embrace both those and I can get a feeling of what is best for the whole group, all of them together. It’s a mundane thing; it’s more like the spider but it’s a moment of Conscience from where to draw that line. What’s enough.

NR: It’s funny that you say that because we have all had the experience of what we call “pangs of Conscience,” and we have a feeling of what we feel we ought to do but we don’t always make that choice, maybe I don’t, I don’t want to put it on you but it is kind of funny to see that you sometime have that feeling of what would be the right thing but then when you are faced with taking care of your Mom it doesn’t seem a choice. That’s why I thought of it as more emotional because I think of it as I did that and you took care of your Mom and it feels like the emotional part as opposed to some other part.

GP: I had an experience of other very different for me. Last Sunday, Cindy and I took the family to see the movie “Beauty and the Beast.” Cindy and I got there early and bought the tickets so we were sitting in the rear and then they got there and Cindy and I moved up to the next aisle. There was a row further down. We were there 35 minutes before the show began. People came in and I am being there with my family, relax and bring some attention.

This family came in and sat in the first row, the lady was very heavy with heavy breath-ing and her daughter was helping her. And then the children came in. The daughter had a big thing of popcorn and they all had food. Later on the husband came in. I could see there were judgmental thoughts about the obesity, my ordinary “me and them,” just the ordinary thoughts, they weren’t going anywhere but something would come up.

And then, no effort–just the space–(I had a privileged position of being able to take the space in from where I was) there was just a sense of reasoning came in of opportunity, the opportunity that I have had and I could see myself in them. I could see that I remember not having any control, eating. I was about nine years old in Maple Shade, New Jersey and going through the bakery and buying this whole box of cream doughnuts and going up on this roof and eating these cream doughnuts. As it went on, I really started to have a relationship with this space because something–again it wasn’t thought, it wasn’t trying to let go of the feel-ings–but just reason and, from the reason, I would call a moment of Conscience and from the moment of trying to be present. I was conscious of myself and I think I had a moment of consciousness of the human condition and again, for me, it was so much different than my constant struggle of ‘I am better then they are’.

Keith: Were you being reminded of Conscience? Was there a pull in there inside of you?

37

GP: I was transported to a space where I was able to be present in such a larger space and not be identified with myself. I was there with myself, myself didn’t disappear, but I was almost like drinking this in and it was much bigger than I have ever experienced. For once, I saw over the judgmental and comparison that I had a real brotherhood with this family. It went beyond the relational.

Keith: A good deal of impartiality wrapped up in that also.

What is time is it? What is the schedule?

HB: We have decided that the schedule is fluid. We have decided that the theme for this weekend is fluidity and that we would simply fill the time with what seemed the best in the moment.

38

39

March gathering 2017 ~ Friday evening

Keith: With the Angel Looisos as the agent Kundabuffer is implanted in man. This is seen as a decision undertaken by the High Commission. The coming to life on the planet Earth requires that the High Commission send a Messenger back to Holy Sun Absolute to ask permission of endlessness to institute this action which will be the causative impulse for life on the planet Earth. But when it comes to the implantation of Kundabuffer, they do not require permission from the Center to carry this out. So the implantation is carried out, as I said, under the direction of the High Commission with Looisos as the agent.

Later, we all remember those remarkably forceful words of Beelzebub when he speaks about their nearly criminal unforeseeingness in carrying out this implantation. And yet, before, that when the High Commission completes its job, it returns to the Center in “good consciences.” (BT, p 89)

So, question: how do we understand good conscience in this situation of the High Commission? Presumptively, this would include the whole High Commission, the Four Quarters Maintainer and the Archangels and the Angels and they are all put in this cate- gory of participating in this nearly criminal unforeseeingness and yet they return home in good conscience. How do you understand that relative to conscience?

CC: Sarcasm.

SA: What you don’t know doesn’t bother you. If they didn’t see it, they didn’t see it so they thought they had done a good job.

MG: And it reflects their degree of Reason.

Keith: Carry that further.

MG: Their reason is imperfect relative to endlessness so their ability is their ability and more or less along with what was just said, which is equivalent to saying to the degree of reason, they used their reason to the best of their ability and reasoned out what they thought was at the time the best thing to do and did so. So they would have no ill conscience.

Keith: So this was a good thing in that sense.

MG: Precisely.

Keith: Would you see any difference between above/down relative to conscience? From World 12, 24, down into World 48 or from World 48 up, looking up the Ray, is there a difference?

JA: They are obligated to maintain order and the order is down the Ray, the maintenance of the Ray down to Absolute zero and maintaining life to fill out the sol to mi interval. The other direction is not required for that to continue. Isn’t Looisos’ request of Beelzebub sort of related to this too where Looisos wants to have something fixed to maintain order but he probably realizes in his heart of hearts that Beelzebub has abilities that he doesn’t have and probably and agenda that he doesn’t have.

40

Keith: Certainly the abilities he doesn’t have because he addresses him in that way.

GB: Is the word “conscience” in the expression “in good conscience” the same word as in the expression “objective conscience”? He goes out of his way to explain objective conscience and this more like a throw-away almost. He didn’t say “in good objective conscience,” which is the point that was made about the best of their ability.

The other thing is that he gets promoted. I think that is really important because that to me underlines there is always going to be errors in the management of the expanding Uni-verse and that is just part of life or part of the way things are. There are going to be errors and these are not necessarily cause for damnation; it’s just a fact of life or fact of existence that there will be errors in it because he gets promoted. Why does Beelzebub [?] bother to promote him? He doesn’t have to.

Keith: Are these errors part of the concern that Beelzebub raises early on when he is on Holy Sun Absolute and he sees something illogical in the management of the Universe? Is he seeing into the inevitability of things going wrong but he is unable to accept it–to take it as it should be. It should not be this way so he objects to it. Is that a possibility?

JA: And when he objects on Sun Absolute is he objecting to the Ray down or the Ray up?

Keith: That’s why I raised the question of is there a difference between an involutional oc-tave and what can be expected of an involutional lawfulness and an evolutional lawfulness?

ZB: At that level there seems to be a lawful necessity for self-preservation. Self-preservation isn’t a necessity necessarily, maybe just the reverse in a downward octave. At one level in order to preserve one’s body one has to by necessity have that kind of center of being.

Keith: Would you see this of having anything possibly to do with the fact that at the level of World 12, we have 12 laws and at the level of World 24, we have 24 laws and then we have 48 laws in World 48 and then 96 in World 96? Is there anything here, any correspon-dence so far as conscience, would you see?

DC: My thinking on this is sort of vague right now but it seems like there is a mirror where unintended consequences comes from and how humanity of sleeping beings on the planet Earth continue to act in the same way again and again in good conscience–doing all kinds of things, all the wars and all of it–it is all in good conscience.

HG: Everything that involves from the beginning of Creation down to World 96 has to potential to go back up again because everything came from there. Within everything there is a memory or sense that we came from something higher. That memory or sense of something higher or feeling could be manifested as conscience.

HB: It seems as though the Creation the way he describes it in “Purgatory” sets about a set of laws that requires or results in life but that the life that comes about is not human life and it is not life that results in subjective self-awareness. That seems to be the level at which the High Commission is concerned about the laws and the functioning. Their perspective does not care about or does not include because it is not a part of their job description to have considered that three-brained beings might arise that would have the capacity to create to much havoc that that didn’t happen, come about until life reached a certain point.

Keith: He speaks of that coming to Objective Reason too soon. He uses that expression “coming too soon” so things had to be slowed down and that led eventually to the

41

implantation of Kundabuffer. But this is a recognition on the part of the High Commission that the development of reason would be an expected something, right? It did not come as a gigantic surprise to them only that if it happened too soon, it could create a big mess. They would object to the servitude that they were placed in as objects of physical life on the planet Earth and would object so mightily that they might destroy themselves as a consequence. Which is interesting; it makes you turn suddenly sideways looking at that.

I am interested in whether or not the above/down–looking from World 12 to 24 to 48 to 96 bears some resonance with the notion of conscience viewed from above moving down or from below moving up.

If there are no alternatives in the event that is unfolding–pick your event–whatever it is there is no alternative scenario, if it is going to work out this way, then Conscience has no role, it would seem to me. Conscience has nothing to do with that because it is going to happen in this way regardless.

When we look at our present day understanding of the action of a sun or in the life of the sun, what is the function of a sun? We see amongst other things, and perhaps knowable by us, is the creation of the atomic table. The whole atomic table is created by the action of suns. That is going to take place within the limitation of the size of the sun, the temperatures that are developed inside of the sun, the pressures that come about because of gravitational forces–those are the only limiting factors. If you knew those limiting factors and those are largely understood today, you can predict what the suns can create as elements in the atomic table and that has been worked out in remarkable, surprising detail.

So that is from above/down. It cannot happen any other way. If you know the laws at this level then this is what is going to happen mechanically in a lower world. There is no question of conscience there. One can be conscience free and carry out a creative action in a lower world without seeing the consequences from the point of view of the lower world because you are not there. The angels and archangels are not in the lower world. They are from Modiktheo; they are made perfect as Gurdjieff says. They have all their bodies completed; they have no need of going to Purgatory. They have no need to struggle; they have no need other than their duty and that is to carry forth whatever has been put into them, created into them. So they are in a totally difference circumstance, situation from us. We are below looking up. With us, the laws as they play out, coming from above down, they double and double again so the possibilities of what may happen double and double again for each law. That makes an enormous difference when it comes down to being able to predict what’s going to happen.

So the High Commission is not daffy when it says “…it might quite possibly happen” (BT p 88) that sometime in the future these beings would come to reason too soon and would not like the circumstances they were put in. They are perfectly right in saying that–that might just possibly happen.

TS: The thing that bothers me about that is I have a romantic notion about reason, that higher degrees of reason would be an indication of acceptance of being a part of a whole, whereas it seem more like Kundabuffer to say, “No, hell I don’t want to do that; I don’t want to serve anyone but myself.” It seems to those are attributes of Kundabuffer, not of a higher degree of reason. How do you understand that?

SM: And I have another question. Are you implying that higher beings don’t have the capacity to foresee what happens in lower worlds?

42

Keith: It would seem to me that they have the capacity to see many possibilities and that is the issue. As the High Commission when they life appear and then brained beings appear “it might just possibly happen”–that’s one possibility, there are many, many possibilities.

SM: I have always found that an extremely moot point of the whole story that there is this claim that the organ Kundabuffer had to be implanted so that these early humans or three-brained beings wouldn’t see what the purpose was for their existence. That has always seemed a rather strange explanation. I don’t know if you have anything to add to that because it just seems pretty contrived explanation or reason for implanting the organ Kundabuffer.

Keith: To compound that we have the unfortunate reference that Gurdjieff rather directly to the tail, his tail, Beelzebub’s tail. What is this tail that gets so hot that he has to go into his private quarters and cool it off if it is not Conscience? It must be Conscience. It gets a work out if you go back to the chapters before that, his Conscience has really been stressed to the point of glowing. So the tail then becomes where man is especially vulnerable and what is the tail figuratively an indicator of in man? I think it is his capacity to be creative.

HG: Didn’t the beings on Beelzebub’s planet evolve the same as we did but they didn’t need the organ Kundabuffer?

Keith: On Beelzebub’s planet? No. Beelzebub is taken from Karatas directly onto Holy Sun Absolute. Now you can’t get onto Holy Sun Absolute if you have a physical body. It doesn’t work; you have to have a Higher Being-body and it has to be complete. That is a condition for being able to go onto Holy Sun Absolute. So, no, he doesn’t have a physical body. This is one things I think we should early on recognize in the story line as he is telling the story. When Beelzebub comes to this solar system, he does not come in flesh and blood. It’s not like that. This is a much more interesting story because he has got it in an arena that we can, from the very beginning, participate in our mind.

MB: One thing I found when earlier people were talking of their own experience of Conscience. When people were talking I was also thinking in myself of the experiences in my life. The one’s that came up most firmly was the relationship with my 4½ year old daughter and the students I teach at school.

You were talking earlier about functions ascending or descending, so it seems to me the examples that are real are the things I am responsible for. My connection with my functions is to do things I am responsible for in my life but they are not things that are above me. I am not responsible for things above me. My Conscience doesn’t play a part in things that are above me, my Conscience seems to orientate me towards things I am responsible for.

Keith: Good, good point.

HG: I find myself more and more because of the change in the family status, being more remorseful for things I have said and done in the past and wish I had done it differently. I know it is remorse but is there such a thing as a Conscience after the fact?

Keith: Why is not simply remorse of Conscience? [25] That’s the expression we use. As I understand it in The Tales, it is spoken of as a potential predecessor of real Conscience. One has pangs of Conscience. One may come to a real feeling of Conscience. Gurdjieff is very careful when he talks about Conscience because, as he points out, it is, in most instances, a

43

very painful thing inside–inside, emotionally but, if one persists in trying to get to the bottom of what is the circumstance involved in, say, a moment of real Conscience. Then, he says, one comes to a kind of joy when one stands in that place.

We could talk for quite a while and not get very far. What does that mean, the joy of Con-science when one finally comes that. Is it the joy of seeing that one is accepted, that’s one’s feeling of accepting guilt or something that one sees that in oneself and forgives it in other? That that is an elimination process relative to what we may carry around as the result of the action that we may participated in and this forgives that. Is that the joy of a real moment of Conscience? Is that moment of self-forgiveness; does that come from Above, it doesn’t come from us–it comes from Above.

In terms of the triad, this would be a moment of freedom. It is the triad 3-2-1, where one is outside of the law. In other words, the law at 3-1-2 immediately preceding it, the law holds us to this under Conscience. You are responsible for this and then you give up; you give up and accept. You accept that–that that’s absolutely true.

HG: For one of my patients, I inadvertently caused him to suffer and he was in pain. I expect in the after life to suffer the same pain. If not, I would insist upon it so I could somehow make it good. That is the worst kind of remorse that I can think of that I have done.

MB: I would like to come back to the question raised earlier about reason. Were you speak-ing about higher degrees of reason relative to Looisos and the High Commission?

TS: No, it was the developing reason of the three-brained beings. The question is about when he says their reason would develop too quickly, they would realize what their real purpose was and on principle destroy themselves. He is saying that is an attribute of reason, whereas it seems to me that if you realized that you were a particle of a whole–that their whole existence was to serve the Moon, that seems to be more a consequence of the property of the organ Kundabuffer. It seems an “egoistic” property. It just doesn’t quite fit. You would think reason would be able to handle that.

Keith: What degree of reason? That would be a very high degree of reason to understand that. A lower degree of reason might be exactly what he describes. They might just get really ticked off. They have that limited understanding of what is there. When we look at the his-tory of man, as far as we know it, over the millions of years of human evolution, it seems like that. We have been pretty brutal for a very, very long time.

TS: According to mythology of Beelzebub, that is the result of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer, it’s not the result of normal developing reason.

Keith: Yes, I think, even earlier, we can make a very good argument or pose a way of under-standing Kundabuffer that doesn’t fall into the trap. For biologists, this is an anathema to say that something came along and was inserted then removed. You talk to a biologist that has been around for awhile and he just looks at you with a funny look in his eye and dismisses your mind instantly because he says, that’s ridiculous when you consider that as a possibility.

TS: I agree, you can’t mix the two.

Keith: But how can we understand that?

GB: It’s a curious thing that they would think it should be so awful for mankind to realize what their role was. If someone said, “George, this is role, go and do that, I would be so

44

pleased, I think.” I am still trying to figure out what I am supposed to do and if someone gave me some instructions and said, “This is your job to maintain the Moon, I would go Yes!” You can turn this around to why is this considered to be such a potential disaster?

ZB: When you think of life and the development of the body, everything is a threat to it, anything outside of the body constituted a potential threat. Life had to evolve to the point where it could develop the intelligence to digest another body in order to make it part of itself because otherwise you get a splinter in your finger and the body will just reject it. It is something alien and it represents a threat unless you can transform it, to bring your own body. That early exploration to develop the senses to explore life and eventually take it in, allow us to digest that first being-food. It seems there is this inability to then, without the development of Conscience, to digest air and impressions. In many ways what we take in constitutes a threat. Somebody easily becomes a threat to me. In order to grow one has to be and digest the second and third being foods we have to develop the capacity to take other in to us and grow. Otherwise they represent a threat that we would destroy.

Sometimes I wonder if Conscience is similar to a hunger pain; one recognizes, on that emotional level, that one is starved and higher reason would be an understanding of laws intelligence to actually take other into oneself and be it. I am Thou. Thou art I. So it seems like Kundabuffer is, at a certain level, absolutely necessary as an organ to be at least asleep to other as having some greater significance because it is necessary for food. It’s eat or be eaten. But we are hungry.

Keith: If we go back into Purgatory where Gurdjieff takes up exactly your question you are mentioning because he speaks about when life came to the point where it was able to move independently on the surface of the given planet. Those qualifications are really important–on the surface of the given planet. But it is to move independently on the surface under conditions where the threat of life has been reduced. He speaks about that specifically as a reduction in the threat of being eaten, for instance or of coming into immediate conflict with some other life form. Under those circumstances, there is this possibility of automatic independent movement. These are enormously significant words. How can something be automatic and independent? These are absolutely contradictory terms–for something to automatic and independent at the same time. And yet, Gurdjieff puts in here and says, right at that point, this is when endlessness reenters the Creation.

We have spent time before and Gurdjieff has spent time before trying to point out that endlessness cannot reenter the Creation with his Will Power.

HB: Before that.

Keith: No, he did it before–that’s what brought the world about. he cannot enter with the Will Power. endlessness cannot be the expresser in a world that has already been created. All the laws have been laid out. So what is left? When he speaks of automatic independent movement, it is the independence that everything hinges on how we understand that, be-cause, to be independent means, non-mechanical. It means, to some degree, conscious.

So, this life form that has this early degree of conscious that can automatically decide that it can move over there or other here or I’ll stay here; in other words, automatic, inde-pendent–independent in its motion on the surface of the planet. This is the entry where Gurdjieff jumps in at this point and spend the next four pages, roughly two pages each, on the possibility on what may be created by these life forms over time is Kesdjan and Higher Being-body.

45

So, he takes the automatic independent movement–the emergence of this level of intelligence, the consciousness–and he builds on it and he says if this consciousness continues, develops further and further over time, then the building blocks for Kesdjan begin to enter the picture and he begins to talk about the world of self/other, the world of the inclusion of others rather than the exclusion according to the survival principles of staying alive in the moment and further when we finally get to the end stage of Higher Being-body. This is the completing process of the perfecting of the three brains. This is all there in four pages in the “Purgatory” chapter. It is a marvelously interesting thing to read and ponder much on.

JJ: There is something about the way High Commission comes in and decides because there is a possibility, not a probability, not even a likelihood but a possibility which could be incredibly remote–that there is this kind of ‘fix-it’ attitude. There is something really cold about this ‘fix-it’ attitude that comes in and says, “Gee, that can screw up, let’s fix it.” It is with perfection, so I can’t say it is with arrogance. So when you say “in good conscience” it’s like that’s fixed; there is something about valuing of the law over the possibility that this has to go like clockwork, we are not going to have 13 strikes at midnight; we are going to have 12–always. We spoke earlier about the Law of Hazard, things can go wrong–all right.

Another comment regarding what you said about the biologists saying that [implantation of Kundabuffer] that can’t happen. I love to eat dry pieces of seaweed. Being a Caucasian, I can’t digest that. The Japanese are the only people who can extract all the possible nutri-ents seaweed because sometime in the deep, dark past which has come down genetically their heredity is an enzyme which we don’t have and they are the ones who can digest sea-weed in the world. It’s amazing. So why couldn’t we have gotten some weird bacteria when we were grubbing around. The implantation of the organ Kundabuffer is just as logical as an enzyme digesting seaweed.

JA: On the first point that you raised, the way the story is set up isn’t the obligation for order to be maintained and don’t we see that if there is no order and no completion of the Ray as it is explained, there is no possibility for growth in the other direction. It is absolutely necessary that the digestion of the Octave to continue down for there to be, with hazard, any possibility of growth in the other direction.

So when they are promoted for maintaining order, and they leave in good conscience, obviously their conscience has something to do with maintaining order. That’s different than Beelzebub who is sent down to Ors and has to work his way up the ladder and understand.

What confuses me is that if these beings are perfect, they must have a completed third body and therefore they have these degrees of Reason but they are obviously are going to apply them in a very different way than beings that have to work their up and back. It seems like what endlessness has really done to Beelzebub is to invert him and say, “Well you are created perfect and you made it to the Sun Absolute but we made a mistake and now we are going to send you all the way to the bottom and you are going to have to work your way up in order to understand differently and have a different job in the maintenance of the Ray downward; we are going to make you understand what it is to go upward. The jury is still out on whether he does understand at the end.

MB: It is interesting what you said because I see this as the difference between the involu-tional octave and the evolutional octave. My question do degrees of reason really apply in the angelic world because I don’t think they do. I think that only applies to the octave going against God.

46

JA: I suppose you could figure out philosophically what it means for angels with perfected reason up to the top would do with their job but they don’t do a perfect job so their reason is not perfect.

MB: Is there any reference in Beelzebub’s Tales to perfected reason in the angelic world.

JJ: I think we were just talking about the combination of the Higher Emotional Center and the Higher Reason as being the doorway to Conscience and yet I find no Higher Emotional Center in this tale, I just don’t see it. I see the desire for order which is people who do things like alphabetize their soups in the shelf.

JA: But he has it stuck in saying that they left in good conscience.

JJ: They left in good conscience but not objective conscience, as what was said.

DC: But Beelzebub having to go all the way back to the beginning and down to the bottom is what leaves him with higher emotions and compassion and love, coming from the bottom up.

JA: Do the angels have love?

DC: I don’t know, if their concern is with order.

JA: If the symbol of the Akhaldan includes impartial love what is that?

Keith: That’s not angel; that’s people, three-brained beings.

GB: Are we in danger of becoming the “people of the book,” in thinking that our book is a perfect description? And therefore we are looking for perfection in this description where it isn’t. There are plenty of anomalies in Gurdjieff’s description, there ought to be anomalies because, ultimately, he is trying to describe the indescribable in the words of the material world. It is going to be inaccurate and full of anomalies or occasional anomalies. I am not saying we shouldn’t tease these things out but the fact is we should expect to come up with insoluble problems in this book because the book itself is imperfect. It has to be imperfect. It was written about ethereal things that are beyond description so it must be imperfect, just like the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, and everything else that is imperfect. But everybody stands by their book with the assumption that everybody else’s book may be imperfect but ours is on the spot. It is impossible that Beelzebub’s Tales is not perfect and there are anomalies in it which we will never get the bottom of, which makes it more interesting but we have to accept we are never going to get to the bottom of it. Should I leave now? [laughter]

NR: I wonder if their clear conscience had to do with their being under less orders of laws when they Looisos implanted Kundabuffer. Maybe it became more complicated under more laws and they didn’t see it so their conscience was clear.

Keith: That’s a good point. Before we go and we should go because we have a subject which I think is worthy of trying to digest, sexuality is the heart of Kundabuffer. If you go back to In Search and read the segment in there on the destructive influences of sex energy (si12), you will find a perfect description of egoism, of all of the negativities that Gurdjieff then speaks about as being the end result of Kundabuffer. Check it out and see what you think.

I think this is Gurdjieff’s way of smoking our considerations so we get kind of hooked into this sexual aspect of it more than is really appropriate because it is much bigger than

47

that. si12 in the octave is the highest energy created within a human body. It clearly is not sperm or egg. That’s ridiculous to even consider that. It is much higher, much more potent, much more involved in worlds of energies and forms and relationships way, way beyond the cellular world–just like thought is way beyond the cellular world.

So si12, which I understand is attention, it is what made use of, or misused, relative to the attention that is the heart of Kundabuffer. The misuse of sexual energy is the misuse of our attention. So let’s hear a paper, “The Work in Life or a Life in Work” written by Annie Lou Staveley after the publication of the 1992 version of Beelzebub’s Tales.

Keith: Sitting here I inevitably have noticed the candles on the table here. I wanted to call you attention back to set up in the two containers, one that is singular and one that has three wicks, especially the one where it is easier to see the middle layer of liquid wax and then the solid layer below that and then the burning candle above. What struck me when I was watching it this time was I look at the candle that is singular immediately beyond it and notice that the flame is very steady but when I look at the candle flame inside the 3-wick candle I notice that the flames are quite irregular and they flutter around a good deal. The question came: why is that happening? The flames are exchanging energy with each other; there are wafts of heat energy coming off of each of the candles and since they spread out they are not equivalent in all directions–they tend to interrupt of disturb or accelerate the flame in other one of the wicks. So in looking at this can you see that the three candles are, in a sense, stimulating each other. Our three brains are like that. Our three brains need the kind of collusion, not like the one burning singularly. In that burning together typical of the 3-wick candle is the formative ground for sol, for Kesdjan, for that body which is present within us but in an infant crystalized form and yet here we can see that it is a state of matter that is different from the solidity underneath it. It is like our body, our physical body. When Gurdjieff places such emphasis on our exercises, on sensing, I believe one equivalent to that can be seen in the liquid. When we sense our body, we extend some energy into it and we sense it; we bring it to life. It becomes real and vibrating when before it was not; it was simply inert, like the solid below. I have interesting illusions and imaginations that go on just watching something like that.

The paper we just heard was written 25 years ago. Certainly appropriate today.

JJ: in the last chapter of Bennett’s Making a New World, it says it is kind of short for us to accomplish this task there is already two and half billion people in the world. I sat there gob-smacked and now there’s 7 and half billion people in the world and we are still sitting here. It was shocking then and it is still shocking now.

SM: I have question regarding what was just said. We can easily intellectually understand what we ought to be doing but where do we get the actual drive to put that into action?

Obviously this is not easy because this is not happening very much. It is happening to a certain degree but what is it actually that is not happening? Why are still kind the way we were 25 years ago, in a sense? This is a question I have. I put it out to everyone, not just to you. But that’s a very obvious question. It seems so logical that we ought to be doing so much more. It is easy to understand from an argumentative, reasonable point of view but actually to turn it into a way of life hasn’t really happened. And I talk about myself here.

CE: What are the elements that are missing in us? For me it is the will, big push. The older I get the more resistance I have. Sometimes I have that will and sometime I don’t have it.

48

HG: How can we preserve the Work after whatever it is that is coming that is going to reset civilization if we all lucky enough to survive.

MG: I think there is something in the other letter written by Mrs. Staveley where she talks about critical mass. The numbers and intensity of the people who are in the psychokinetic stream has not reached a critical mass that is needed. We are in that process; we shouldn’t despair but continue our work to expand that group.

Keith: Appropriate to this also, I think we have to remember that it has been 70 years altogether. The A&E Conference is in its 22nd year. I remember the first year and the following years. What happened over that period of time? I remember standing in the bar next to Paul Taylor. Most of you have seen or met him? Paul is very tall and very articulate–a professor of medieval philosophy and history, a very able speaker. He has become over the last 20 years, he calls himself, the Gurdjieff historian and he has written a great deal about Gurdjieff and the family. His half sister is a daughter of Gurdjieff and many close family that go back a long way and still visits with them frequently and stays very much in touch.

(I didn’t know any of this then) I was standing there drinking a glass of wine in the bar of the hotel and Paul came over and he looked at me, a tall slender guy, and he started to cry. He said, “You know I have been 40 years away from people who have anything to do with Work. I’ve stayed in touch with my family friends but not in a Work context; it was always in a life context. My coming here to this A&E Conference, this is the first time I have suddenly found myself back in this arena that I grew up in.” He was 17-18 during the year he spent in Paris when Gurdjieff died. He spent two years at the Prieuré when he was just an infant, 2/3 years old. So he has his own collection of memories that go way back. What he said struck me so strongly then because he said, “You know, I value this now having re-appeared and found that there are all of these people who have such value for and such love for this Work. I’ve been out of touch all this time and now to be re-aligned to them and come into their presence, it is a big, big shock.

But this is what Mandy and I have found every year since then; we meet people who are new to A&E, new to this October Gathering. We started this gathering 2 or 3 years after A&E started. We started because Chris Thompson expressed a wish to get together so he came for several years for a week. We had marvelous interesting conversations–argued all the time and eventually we invited others to join with us, Sy Ginsberg and very slowly added on until finally we had to find some bigger place to meet for the last 8-9 years.

My point is that every year since then we have found more connection, more contacts, more countries in Europe, Asia, South America and the US and Canada. More and more people come and share ideas. This is happening. I think it is a very important happening. I am trying to answer your question in part because to do things, you need people and those people need to be in relationship and you have to be able to ask them, call on them, invite them into a discourse over a plan. What are we doing to do? What are we going to do together? I think we are getting closer to that point where yes it is going to take a lot of cooperative activity and a lot of giving to make whatever inroads in that direction that we think are worth putting effort into.

But I see from my perspective that’s on the way. There are many things that are happening that indicate that there is a larger arena of connectivities and more sharing and more wishing in the direction of the future. More is going to turn up in especially the next few years.

49

ES: I see a slight wiggle in this question because what you are describing is that the result of your commitment to this particular aspect of the Work. You have been engaged in this particular aspect of the Work for a long, long period of time and you’ve brought a very high level of quality to it. That action has brought in, gathered around you a core group of people that work with you and that core group has different strengths and different abilities. Because of what you have been doing with the Work, fathoming the gist, because you’ve done that, it has had an attractive force for people from all over the place. Really, you are doing the 100 people from Ashiata Shiemash.

The question is for all of us that that we need to find what it is how we can fathom the gist in something, in some department, somehow, and it probably will be unique to us that will then attract some kind of a core and then from that core will go an emanation into the world and that will bring something up.

So the real question is that is behind this (and someone was speaking about will) that’s really what the issue is. It is possible to do. We can see that it is happening here. It’s a fact. That’s the process. Gurdjieff talks about that in Meetings with Remarkable Men. These are people who went out and did things; they searched in their own way and they came back and shared and they were able to do that. Each of us has something unique to offer. We need to find out what it is and we need to do it.

Keith: You are finding out and doing it yourself.

ES: Yes, I can talk about that because it is absolutely miserable. [laughter] Speaking for myself. I couldn’t do this either but a catalyst came in and said, If you do this, I’ll help you.” But there was a lot of years of sort of plodding away at this particular skill which maybe elicited some catalyst to come. But the point is that that is what is holding us back. There is this group thing–I’ve seen it in different places; I’ve been in different groups and there is thing that ‘we are going to bring in new people, all this kind of stuff and we are going to do this together’ and what always turns out is that it doesn’t happen that way. ‘We are going to do it all together’ doesn’t happen. Somebody makes a commitment that they are going to be involved in this process and then people join around and then we all do it together. But it is not something that is initiated by a committee.

Keith: But, by the same token, when there are individuals like yourself moving in this direc-tion relative to bringing Gurdjieff’s and de Hartmann’s music onto a stage which is open and available and very much promotable, there are a whole bunch of other activities, events that other people in Work participate in and are accomplished in that can be put out there.

For instance, not by way of saying anything positive about it, but some years ago, in 1983 I had been reading and on the edge of becoming more acquainted with the literature on Hospice in the US. At that time, there was no such thing as Hospice in the US; it was all in England and one remarkable lady was the chairman of the Board when it came to initiating the Hospice activities that grew very rapidly and then spread to the US especially through Montreal and Canada.

I went up to Montreal to the second Hospice and palliative care Convention. At that point 2,500 people came from all over the world because they were interested. Cicely Saunders was there, the lady from England, who was the founder of the first Hospice in London.

I came back here and started the first Hospice in the state of Maine but because of the law it had to be a volunteer group. Eventually we had about 18-20 people who were

50

volunteers and the local nursing group was involved. That was a going concern for 5 or 6 years until the law changed and Medicare incorporated Hospice and since then, all of Hospice has to be under the eyes of a community health nursing organization so it has become much more strict and stylized. They don’t have as many volunteers as they had then unfortunately. But they are lovely people and I make use of them in my Nursing Home. Now we have 4 people on Hospice and they come in and do their thing with volunteers and it’s very helpful.

My point is that this has grown amazingly very rapidly in the last 30 years. Its rightness, its appropriateness is strongly re-affirmed. You won’t find too many people who won’t affirm it. I think we are on the cusp of something like that. If we find things that are worthy aims whether they are community, large scale entertainment, I have no idea what kinds of directions those actions might take, but I think it is possible that there can be movements, especially in educational and music arena, community activities and agriculture.

JJ: When we think about this moment of service or what’s calling you, you think it is going to start with one person and it’s going to grow and become large but in my former group, there is a Hospice nurse and we speak about being a conduit between the unseen world and world of values that don’t manifest except through us, that we bring into this world. Her take on this is that I can’t be part of some big movement because my work is to bring the value of presence and compassion into this moment with the families. Whether it brings people into the community or into the work it has an affect because she is a beacon people who are sore at heart.

Keith: Ok, that’s my point. Here is one person and she has an influence in a particular way but other people will have an influence in another way and they may work with a group of a half dozen people or a larger scale community that works with children. It can take a multitude of forms but at the core of it is simply one or other small group of people, see an opportunity, have an aim and accept a responsibility for putting their best effort into it. We all face that in our daily life. We all have those opportunities.

CE: Does one have be in the physical world in order to help? When I am in a better state, one can always project compassion. I become a conduit. I don’t have to be in big organiza-tion. I could bring them some grace; is that possible?

Keith: We have one lady who comes up the Nursing home two days a week because a year and half ago, her mother was a patient in the Nursing home. She had taken care of her Mom for two years at home and finally it became too much and she couldn’t take care of her. She would come in to be with her mother but she fell in love with many of the other residents. Her Mom died and she still comes; she helps and visits with these people. She is a force; she is an enabler of relationship and encouragement. We never know how far that kind of influence can go, how many lives it can touch.

MG: I think it worthwhile in that vein of the concept of risk. When we are touch by some-thing of value we see a motivation to explore something and we come up against the fact that we don’t know if this is going to work or expand or what and our willingness to take the risk and follow something that our heart tells us is good, knowing that it could fail; it could lead to nothing but let’s try.

51

JJ: Bennett talks about what he calls the Master Parable of the “Sower and the Seed.” The major attribute of sower is that the sower goes out there and is not looking for success. He is putting the seed out there because he must–because he is the sower. That’s what he does. Some of the seed falls on rocky ground, some is eaten by birds. I heard someone talking about this: they wanted their money that they gave to charity the most effect and go the right thing to get the biggest bang for their bucks. Maybe that is not what it is to be sower, maybe it’s just that you’ve got to do it because you are called to it. You have that impulse that is in front of you and it could be a bum on the street that you know is probably going to get up and go off and hurt himself, or have another drink, whatever, but it is in the awakening of accepting in yourself, who cares if it comes for naught? Because you be- come that energy, you are the conduit.

Keith: Or, as Gurdjieff said, she lie, she not tell you why she feeds the birds. It makes her feel good.

CE: I take the subway going home from the office. There are people sleeping in the cars and sometimes I feel their pain. If I am in a good state I project grace and prayers. That’s my of looking at doing things I don’t have to go out of my way; it’s in the subway, in the streets. I can do it in my very small way.

Keith: If you really want to test yourself, go and volunteer in a local hospital in the children’s ward, to just read to children or to play with them. There are all manner of ways we can be useful without putting a price tag–just saying, yes, I can do this one day a week. I go down to the clinic or some place and donate so much time. One never knows where it goes.

JA: What’s wrong with being hopeful that the Sower will have developing degrees of reason and, instead of being the stupid saint, to focus the energies more and be more successful in the face of the kind of odds that you point out. If two and half billion turns into seven and half billion, that’s pretty big numbers and requires a larger lever, perhaps one that is a little more focused and reasonable.

JJ: I think comparing the Sower in the parable to the stupid saint is absolutely a false comparison.

JA: Ok, why?

JJ: Because the Sower is sowing the seeds that return a hundred times over and you don’t really know and because there is a level of judgment that happens.

Keith: I don’t think you really believe that. I have the seeds in my hand and I know where they are going to fall so I am not going to throw it on the concrete; I wouldn’t do that– that would show no discrimination at all. I would throw them or where there was some possibility. I agree with John (JA), even the Sower. The Sower may spread it around but not indiscriminately. There is always a judgment of shall I put it here or there. And if here is so obviously against the growth of the seed then the Sower will not put them there.

HG: I can see an analogy of the Christian Church. To the jungles of South American to Africa to the Far East to China, India they had poor success in some areas and good success in others but they didn’t know what kind of success they would have. I would compare that with Sower and the seed–whatever would take, would take and what didn’t, didn’t.

52

JJ: I think this is material way to look at it. Because somebody is not respectful do you say I am not going to do for them because they don’t have a chance. It is more about the obligation. Some people in groups says there are no “shoulds” in the Work. Of course there are. We have ‘being-Partkdolg-duty’ and we have the Obligolnian Strivings. We have duty and we have obligation. One of those obligations is to bring into every moment that we can aware of it, some sort of lightening of the Sorrows of our Common Father. We can just put that way. My son says, “You know, Mom, I could re-write the Obligolnian Strivings. Here is the first Obligolnian Striving: don’t be an asshole. Don’t put your self interest above everything. Be decent in the world and bring a value that you see is a lightening.

Of course we don’t do that because we are not aware of every single moment but we have this obligation and that’s more what I mean about sowing. What are you going to sow? Whenever I get into a car, I usually sow impatience.

ES: Even if you are not behind a wheel. [laughter]

JJ: Mea Culpa. Wash away my sins; cleanse me of my iniquity. I struggle all the time with the stuff. We are responsible for our manifestation as we are for our children. I would hope that in my struggle in this life to not be whelping monsters. That’s my prayer for myself.

Keith: Zeke (ZB) is a professional tracker. He has been a teacher at a Waldorf school for 24 years and above all of the teaching of classroom, he is a tracker. He is an outdoors person who has great acuity and has developed a tremendous ability out of that observation in the wild to track creatures. He takes children out and they become entranced with the tracking.

53

March gathering 2017 ~ Saturday Morning

Talk on “The Ideal Human Society” from Volume III of J. G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe, by George Bennett.

PSYCHOTELEIOS GROUP

12 Messengers 11 Prophets 10 Saints 9 Guides

PSYCHOKINETIC GROUP

8 Initiates 7 Counsellors 6 Specialists 5 Candidates

PSYCHOSTATIC GROUP

4 Leaders 3 Craftsmen 2 Dependents 1 Dependents

Keith: George is going to talk about Bennett’s idea of an ideal human society. Keep in mind as George takes us through this, where we have been before this - the questions we have raised over the past 24 hours or so–and ask the same questions regarding the way in which the societies begin to take form in Bennett’s vision.

George: Before beginning his description of an ideal human society, Bennett makes three important statements which we should bear in mind when considering his twelve- term description. First, he says: ‘We start from the hypothesis that the task of an idea social order would be to promote and direct the course of human evolution towards its highest perfection.’ (The Dramatic Universe, volume III, p 233. All further quotations are from DU Vol. 3), which makes the idea human society one of purpose, and service to a higher aim. This is followed by a caveat, ‘… we shall find that the ideal structure of human society is very far from exemplification at the present time, or at any foreseeable time in the future.’ And, finally with Bennett’s customary optimism: ‘Nevertheless, the study of the ideal structure is by no means valueless, since it suggests both the goal towards which mankind is evolving and also some changes which are immediately practicable and could be effected if the situation were better understood.’ (p 235)

I would also like to add a brief comment about Bennett’s terminology. The words ‘psychostatic’ and ‘psychokinetic’ are fairly clear, but the word ‘psychotelios’ deserves

54

some further explanation. When Jesus says, “Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” the word in Greek he uses is ‘teleios’, which also means ‘complete’, or ‘finished’. So you could say that Bennett’s term ‘psychoteleios’ means the guys who have ‘made it’, who are the complete or finished article.

If we look at Bennett’s scheme, we can see that it is a structure of three related tetrads, or four-term systems, and elsewhere in The Dramatic Universe, Bennett describes a tetrad as ‘… the form of all activities that lead to a change of order … its very nature is to be an activity of transformation’.

So, that although people have different roles in Bennett’s scheme, these are capable of transformation. Bennett says explicitly that the role of producer, for example, should be a stage in the society, and such a progression is open to everybody. It is not a question of ‘you are a producer, stay producing’. Even if you are a ‘dependent’, you have the same possibilities, although they may be realized differently than possibilities for other people.

PSYCHOSTATIC: Dependents ~ Producers ~ Craftsmen ~ LeadersBennett begins with a description of the four levels of the Psychostatic group, beginning with (1) Dependents. These are people who, for various reasons, are not able to put into society as much as they need to take out. They are Dependents because they cannot help themselves, because, for example, of congenital defects, illness, accident or old age. Bennett doesn’t mention children here, though surely they are included in the category of Dependent. These are not hopeless people, Bennett says: ‘Every human soul without exception has a positive destiny, but some can fulfill their destiny only if their outward lives are cared for by others.’ (p 236)

Then come (2) Producers, people who are responsible for the production of the neces-sities of life; workers handling material objects and transforming energies, in the sense of traditional labor. Bennett says (in the early nineteen-sixties, remember) that self-regulating machines will take over automatic activity (involving automatic energy, E6 in his scheme of energies) but will not be able to do things involving sensitivity (E5) since this belongs only to living forms. ‘There must always be a need for a ‘productive’ function in human society, although as time goes on this will have less and less the character of “labor”.’

The Producer is inwardly passive, Bennett says, and directed more towards material aims than to enriching his psyche. However, membership of the productive group is not a permanent role; in an ideal society it should be only a phase in the life of all people, and not a fixed condition.

Craftsmen (3) are people who have a bigger picture than the Producers. They are able to meet new situations; they cover people in traditional crafts but also people in modern work; people with functional abilities in administration, business, science and technology are included in the category Craftsmen. They are concerned with quality, and not exclusive- ly with material gain.

And finally, in this group are Leaders (4). Leaders have initiative, they have organizing ability. They may enter the psychokinetic group or they may be dominated by one of their lower selves and be completely taken up with interest in power, domination and success.

Bennett says the ideal Leader is the one who fulfills all his duties and then concerns himself with the inner life when he has completed the leadership role he is there to play. This is a very traditional figure in Indian life. Many of you will have heard of the Buddhist monk Bhanté. Bhanté was a regional governor and a judge in Cambodia. He fulfilled his

55

leadership role in civil society and then put it aside and went off and pursued his spiritual life, and finally became an influential spiritual teacher.

There is a wonderful short story by Rudyard Kipling called The Miracle of Puram Bhagat, which illustrates the idea of the leader who fulfills his obligations as a psychostatic leader, and then enters the psychokinetic group. Go read it; it’s in The Second Jungle Book, and is really beautiful. It concerns just this idea, and is the story of a man who be-comes prime minister of ‘a not inconsiderable Indian state’ in the late 19th century, and who is knighted and showered with honors but then, when he turns 60, just throws off the whole thing and becomes a wandering sannyasin, carrying nothing but a begging bowl and a staff. It is a terrific story and exemplifies this picture of somebody who fulfills, to a high degree, the requirements of the Psychostatic level, but knows when to move on. We need Leaders, but ideally, they should not be like the Leaders we seem to end up with. If they have acquired a strong disposition towards Reality, Leaders may enter the psychokinetic group. However, if they are dominated by one of the lower selves they may become ob-sessed with a lust for domination themselves, and lured by success, power and fame. If you think this is all theoretical, consider the current relevance of this paragraph:

‘Generally, men and women of the producer subgroup are dominated by the “material” or “reactional” selves. This means they have less capacity for independent judgment than those of the other sub-groups and are more easily influences by suggestion and by crude considerations of reward and punishment. This category is, consequently, always in danger of exploitation by the more assertive categories of the Psychostatic group...’.

Does anyone recognize this? But here’s the kicker. Bennett completes the paragraph with the admonishment that “… and so (the Producer group) requires special protection of the Psychokinetic group, which, in principle at least does not seek for domination.” (p 238)

Keith: Speaking of the simultaneity of roles played, Bhanté came to the Pinnacle for a week or so. One afternoon late in the week when we had been sitting all day for these very prolonged meditation sessions, there was a group of us in the living room and we saw Bhanté came out of wherever he was and he was walking down the corridor towards us. When the front door of the Pinnacle opened a little group came in, including a young lady about nine-years old who shrieked at the top of her lungs, “Grandpa!” It was one of Bhanté’s grandchildren who had come to visit him. It just shows the simultaneity in this instance, the Grandfather also being the Leader of our spiritual pursuits.

George: One of Bhante’s grandsons attended the third course at Sherborne in 1973. The ideal Leader is one who exercises his functions as part of his soul transformation, and relinquishes his power as soon as his task is done. He can then become part of the Psychokinetic group, but may get ensnared by all the other trappings of leadership and not progress at all.

The Psychokinetic group which should be self-explanatory; it is the group that is, in principle, in motion. Its members share one central characteristic: the realization that the secret of human destiny lies in transformation. The Psychokinetic group, says Bennett, is the region in which people strive to possess a soul and discover their destiny; a psycho- kinetic person is a pilgrim of the soul.

If you take the Candidates as the starting place for this tetrad and the Initiates as the finish, this what Bennett called the ‘whence and whither’ of the tetrad. The Candidates (5)

56

in this tetrad become candidates for the Psychokinetic life–and for a spiritual transformation–by disposition. They have a kind of inclination towards it.

But for the Initiates (8), it is a question of decision; they have to make a decision before they can move from stage 8 to stage 9, that of Guides (9), the first level of the Psychotelios group. It is by decision that they make a step from stage 8 to stage 9 because it is by decision that they make the step which is death to egoism, says Bennett. To move beyond egoism is a question of will. When we get to Guides we can talk about the difference between them and Initiates.

ES: It’s interesting because when you look at that first tetrad of the Psychostatic group you have Dependent at the bottom and then at the bottom of the Psychokinetic group you have the Candidates and they are also dependent.

NR: Is it also true that the Leaders also face a decision?

George: Yes. If you take that Kipling story of the Prime Minister who gives up his worldly life, and pursue the spiritual path, he is shown as making a decision. He already has a high degree of development; he is the right kind of Leader. There are people who get into a position where they have enormously wide view, a very wide present moment for example. If someone is the right kind of Leader, there is a lot going on in that person that can easily translate into the psychokinetic.

MB: Would you say that Marcus Aurelius would be this category?

George: You mean did he go from Leader to Counsellor? Yes, probably … not that I knew him well … The categories of these groups are separate but are also … ‘fuzzy’. If we go through it, you will see what I mean.

The Candidates (5) are people who have this realization that transformation is possible and even necessary; they have a disposition towards a spiritual life. Bennett says that it is very helpful, and ‘almost necessary’ that the Candidates will have some kind of spiritual component to their upbringing, even if it is not where they end up. You may be brought up in a traditional religious way and end up pursuing a Gurdjieffian kind of Work because something has been sown in you early on.

Bennett says that the decision or the realization that there is a spiritual possibility in a person becomes a social problem. I had never thought of it like this, but you can see what he means in saying that this is a social thing. Very, very few people are able to progress from this Candidate stage to a higher level without help. If you think about the whole Gurdjieff tradition of groups and people working together, in that sense, spiritual transformation is social problem or challenge. It is a social situation in which everybody is working together, and helping each other.

In The Dramatic Universe Bennett spends three times as long talking about Candidates than he does with any of the other three categories in the Psychokinetic group. He talks about the three different ways, the ways of the fakir, the monk and the yogi that we are fa-miliar with from Ouspensky. And there is a lot about the way that he calls ‘subjective moral-ity’, which is the way of religion, and the way of accelerated transformation. There is a nice quote:

“The assumption that person in search of a soul can do it alone is as unwarranted as the assumption that he can feed and clothe himself in isolation.” (p 245)

57

The hermit is the exception that proves the rule. So Candidates need guidance, but this guidance doesn’t have to come from the highest.

Specialists (6) are people who developed a particular ordinary skill to a high level but they also have an inner disposition towards reality and transformation, and are able to ex-press this through their external skill. This distinguishes them from the Craftsmen in the Psychostatic group, whose motives are centered in themselves, and directed towards the external world. One of the important things about the Specialists is their visibility; they can be an example to people, but they have to be free of their material self. That is what separates them from the lower level because they have a different inner attitude and they are able to use their external skill as an instrument, not just for their own transformation, but also as a way of helping Candidates.

LF: I am associating this with the Craftsmen, but they don’t really correspond.

George: Bennett says that the Specialists don’t correspond to Craftsmen exactly but they differ from them because their motivation is towards their own transformation. This is unlike the Craftsmen, whose concerns are directed to the outward world. So it is a ques- tion of having a different orientation.

At almost every level, there are caveats. This is the trap these guys can fall into. We were speaking of the Archangel Looisos yesterday. He is high up there but he still makes mistakes. Hazard continues through all of this and that is why Bennett called his book The Dramatic Universe. One of the hazards for Specialists is they can appear as teachers, and risk being seen as being from the Psychoteleios group. They can even fool themselves into thinking that they are. A specialist’s powers that he or she has developed may even become an obstacle to progress in their own students because the Specialist thinks that what he has learned is the only way: “You’ve got to learn my stuff.” They may get caught in that, and it may be that the special techniques he or she has developed are not relevant to everybody else.

HG: We are seeing this right now in our country with a particular individual.

George: I wouldn’t have thought of him as a specialist, if I am thinking of the same one as you are. Which one are you thinking of? Trump? I would have said he is a Leader gone wrong.

JJ: Having a visceral dislike of hierarchies, I wonder if you took the Psychostatic group– and I am thinking specifically about schools now - if you put the number 4 (Leaders) as the independent, the reason for the hierarchy is that the Craftsmen and the teachers are under me and put the Leader down below, you can almost see that in all of them because what you do it seems that you miss a lot of the pitfalls that you say happen when people mistake themselves for something they are not. If you put the lower as the object of service who may mistake themselves in the hierarchy as ‘above’.

George: And?

JJ: It would be an interesting experiment to re-arrange it.

George: Bennett writes it like this, with Dependents as ‘1’, so that is how I have presented it.

58

MG: There are lots of problems with that idea; that the higher is determined by the fact that you can only learn from those who know, so you have to learn from someone on a higher level.

JJ: You can’t learn by doing yourself?

MG: That’s what he says.

George: I don’t think Bennett says that; what he says is that all levels need help. This is why the Psychokinetic group is a social one because everybody needs to support each other and help each other. I am thinking of my friends’ aunt who recently died; she had Down’s Syndrome, and was clearly a Dependent. But there is no question that my friends learned an enormous amount from her, not only from the service of looking after her, but from the woman herself. Help is not only top-down; it’s in all directions.

SM: May I make a suggestion? Even though you invited people to interject, I want to get the whole picture first before I take it apart, so I suggest you go through your presentation and then we do the discussion.

ES: I was going to interject that very same thing!

George: All right. Counsellors (7) are people who can see a bigger picture. They can see what is needed; they are not trying to accomplish something for themselves anymore; A Counsellor is able to be in contact when he needs it (and these are Mr. B’s italics) with his own individuality. In other words, he is not permanently in contact with it but he is able to be in contact with it. And I am sorry to use “he.” He, she or it is just implied.

CE: In contact with what?

George: With his own I. He can enter into the situation of others, and make objective judgments. Counsellors have broader understanding than the practical skills of the specia-list. They are turned from an interest in society in general to their orientation to a spiritual world. Counsellors are not so much concerned with achieving their own aims, as with accomplishing tasks not of their choosing that are given to them to do. The problem for Counsellors is that they are still not free of egoism, so they can easily find themselves taking the role of Initiates. This role may be given to them wrongly by some over-enthusiastic Candidates and, believing it themselves, Counsellors risk being caught. There is always this problem that the Counsellor level and others can be caught by temptation like this; it is a source of misinformation, if you like, and they start to believe it. Ideally the Counsellor is transmitting information and impulses from an Initiate, but can sometimes get miscast as an Initiate himself or herself, and thus get into trouble.

The Initiate (8) is someone who is free of his or her own egoism, and who lives under the direction of their own I; who is free of the limitations of existence but hasn’t made the step into the realm of essence. Bennett talks about why he used the word ‘Initiate’. ‘Initia-tion’ isn’t the same as union. Level 9, the level of Guide, is the state of union, when a person is in union with the Cosmic Individuality or the higher powers. At the level of Initiate, you are connected but you are not united. That is the difference. You can make this connection but you still are not connected.

Nor is the initiate created by “an initiation.” It is not conferred by one person on another; it is not even conferred on to them by themselves, except in the sense that it comes from their own individuality, so you could say it comes from ‘within’ them.

59

HG: Is it our own interpretation of self-initiation?

George: Sort of. But even that’s misleading because the self you are referring to is an ordinary self. You could say it’s an ‘I initiation’ if you like. It comes from our own will rather than from one of our ordinary selves which, by this time, the Initiate has moved beyond. It comes from individuality, and only in that sense does it come from within the person.

Initiates are the source of creative power; in fact, Mr. B goes through this (p 259) and connects the members of the Psychokinetic group to his scheme of energies, with which you may be familiar. He relates Candidates to the automatic energy (E6); Specialists to sensitive energy (E5); Counsellors to conscious energy (E4) and Initiates to creative energy (E3). So Initiates are a source of creativity coming into the Psychokinetic world, but also indirectly to the Psychostatic world.

The true Initiate realizes that his or her message is not unique. It only appears unique because of the limitations of his or her role. The Initiates’ messages only become unified at the level of the Psychotelios order, and on a lower level they appear different. This really causes a lot of trouble, since because these messages are expressed through the individuality of the Initiates, people don’t see that these messages are all the same. I wouldn’t even say ‘personality’ but the persons themselves, and therefore each Initiate acquires something different. So people tend to get hooked on ‘his’ message as opposed to ‘their’ messages, and not realize that at this level, they are the same message expressed differently. And this causes a lot of trouble.

And then Bennett says the whole life of the Psychokinetic group should be an inte- grated activity. To paraphrase what he says: the Initiates depend on Counsellors; the Initiates stand poised between existence and essence–and here is a curious thing that Bennett writes–and therefore cannot wield the powers that belong to either. That’s a strange position to be in. Therefore, they need the help of Counsellors to keep them on the straight and narrow. The Initiate who is surrounded by undeveloped Candidates may lose his or her way. The Specialist who relies on his own skills, without seeking help from Counsellors, won’t get beyond his own limitations. The Counsellor who usurps the role of Initiates will be in great danger of becoming a fraud. The true Counsellor attaches him or herself to an Initiate and their duty is to protect the Initiate from errors. So the psycho-kinetic group is in a very hazardous situation, in which all four levels need each other.

To quote:

“The true Counsellor attaches himself to the Initiate. His duty is to protect him from possible errors of judgment and from the mistaken enthusiasm of the Candidates.” (p 261)

So now we come to the Psychoteleios group, and I said at the outset that the word ‘Psychoteleios’ describes the completed soul. It means, “Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Members of the Psychotelios don’t act as ordinary people do, but they act through the Psychokinetic group. They are concerned not with action but with the sources of action.

Bennett says the first six categories, from Dependent to Specialist, are visible to ordi- nary people. In fact, they are ordinary people. The six levels from Counsellor to Messenger are not visible. There are thus two hexads - the ‘visibles’ and the ‘invisibles’. The Specialist is the highest level that can be perceived by anybody, and the rest are not immediately apparent. To put it simply, if Jesus or Moses walked down the road, you might see their physical body but probably would not recognize who they were.

60

Guides (9) differ from Initiates because they know what they are doing; they can always find the right path at the right time. They have a different vision compared with Initiates. They are completed people; they have all the powers latent in the human being and they can exercise them.

Keith: Are they free of egoism?

George: Yes, they are free of egoism. This is a question of decision. When I said earlier about disposition and decision, the abandonment of egoism is a question of decision; I am not able to tell you this from my own experience, you’ll be sorry to hear (laughter), but it is a question of decision, and the Guide is free of egoism. That is why these people are in a totally different situation; they are not attached to the material world in the way that the rest of us are.

Keith: And they are not recognizable.

George: Right, they are not recognizable. From this point, Bennett says, progress is not by activity directed by the self, but by Grace. As far as I can tell, looking at the rest of the scheme, it depends on what role the Higher Powers, whoever they are, want to be played. Where you end up in the Psychotelios group seems to depend upon what’s needed. All Guides understand and recognize one another, whether they come through the path of objectively morality, that is, broadly speaking, by a religious path, or by the path of accelerated transformation. Guides recognize each other and know each other, even when they belong to different races, cultures and religions. They can transmit more than they themselves can understand. And they can initiate new activities because they are not limited by space or time.

The level of Saint (10) is more or less the same picture as the word ‘Saint’ in Christi-anity, or the word ‘Wali’ in Islam. I don’t think Bennett is talking about the kind of image we get of saints pictured in church. Saints seem to me to be more robust. Of course I am not an expert on Saints, and I shouldn’t judge anything, but that ‘holy’ image always seems to me to be misleading. A Saint is free from the limitations of existing worlds; his or her place is in World 12. The actual and the potential are not divided. They are both present. Events for them are not even limited by successiveness. That is why Saints can continue to intervene even after the death of their physical bodies, and it is why miracles happen.

The second characteristic of Saints is that they have unity of will. They are beyond the distinction of unity and diversity. This is one of Bennett’s big themes, particularly at the end of his life, that we people see each other as separate. The exercise I suggest we do in tomorrow morning’s sitting is connected with getting beyond this feeling of separateness. The distinction between unity and diversity is a false distinction that the Saint is no longer governed by.

Bennett says that the ‘Community of Saints’ is far more than a band of brothers. It is a substantial unity that is imperishable because it is not subject to time or space. This is not just a bunch of mates; it is actual unity. The Saint himself is a unique individual but also an expression of the cosmic individuality, so the Saint has singularity but also universality.

Then–and we are really getting up there now–we get to the Prophets (11), who are infused by the Universal Individuality [God]. Their presence is in the human soul. There are visible Prophets who declare certain rules; there are also invisible Prophets whose inter-vention is through the Guides and Initiates who can recognize them, though they may not

61

be recognized by us down here in any form. They are not standing up in the marketplace saying, “Now hear this!” They are doing something quite different.

The wisdom of Prophets is not their own wisdom; their wisdom is an expression of the Holy Wisdom. It does not come from them; it comes through them from Above. Prophets are people who have accepted the limitations of earthly existence in order to help humanity, and they have been chosen for their role, and been given the qualities needed for it. This is not something you progress up to, in the sense that ‘I’m a really good leader and I’ll end up a Prophet’. It doesn’t seem to work like that; Prophets are chosen. In the Old Testament depictions of Prophets, they are always some ordinary guy that gets plucked out of nowhere and told, “Okay, you are it.” I don’t know who is doing the choosing but the picture in the Bible is of God doing the choosing directly. This is above my pay grade but I am just giving you the image.

Evidence of the existence of Prophets isn’t obvious. The only evidence is that mankind is making progress, all appearances to the contrary. There are positive changes, and these hidden influences also account for the fact that some people have inspirations at the same time independently. I am thinking about the Calculus, where Leibniz and Newton thought about it at the same moment. Sometimes these progressive ideas occur to different people independently, and apparently coincidentally, but Bennett says such developments are not a coincidence, but occur because these Prophets are acting invisibly.

DS: You aren’t saying that Newton was a Prophet?

George: No, but something came to him and came to Leibniz at the same time.

HB: The axial age, such as the simultaneity of Buddha and others.

George: Yes, though these are presented–not least by Gurdjieff–as Messengers (12). These are perfected beings who were sent to the Earth to fulfill a particular role, already equipped with the necessary qualities and the powers they need so they can act as representatives of the Cosmic Individuality. Their task is to set before Mankind an expression of sense and purpose, so they come from time to time, but their message has to be in accordance with the time and place. That is why it appears that some messages contradict each other, because the form of the message depends on the historical and geographical context. The contradiction is in the transmission downwards not in the actual reality of the message.

To paraphrase a quote from Bennett, it may seem to us that the message is transmitted in its pure form but the message is only a reflection of the truth, and therefore ordinary people cannot see the truth in its purity, we see it only in fragmentary form. And then Bennett has his famous quote, “When the smallest fragment of the truth enters a man he can do nothing but obey.” (p 273)

Finally, Messengers may be misunderstood and maybe even persecuted, but they can’t be resisted. When you think about it, it is kind of interesting. When you think about people that we recognize as Messengers they have a quality. Whatever happens to them, the mes-sage goes through. Jesus did not too well in this physical world but the message seemed to stick. Of course, we have screwed it up, but we still know what the message is even if we don’t live by it. Also with Mohammed, the message gets adulterated but the message is still there of Hope and so on. Every such person changes the course of history.

I think we need to go back to what I said at the beginning, and look at this as a picture of an ideal human society; Bennett says as much. But occasionally, some of the descriptions

62

fit very closely from what we can see in front of us. We probably can find people in our own experience in some of these roles. And I would like to end with another quote from Bennett, at the end of his presentation of the twelve categories: “We do not expect to find this ideal structure exemplified in the humanity of the present day. It is more likely that we have the elements that eventually will develop into a true Society of all Mankind. We may suppose that these elements are fulfilling as best they can the task allotted to them. But we must also admit that the evolution of mankind towards an Integrated World Soul is in its early stages and is surrounded by every kind of hazard so its outcome is unpredictable.” (p 273)

JA: Can you think of Gurdjieff’s degrees of reason as corresponding to these, which ones do have them and which don’t? Is it that kind of a hierarchy?

George: I don’t know, frankly. Here it doesn’t seem to be a hierarchy, particularly the last two – the Prophets and Messengers. These are people that seem to be appointed with those degrees of reason already present. Messengers appear to be sent into this world ready to go; they do not have to start from below and work their way up. They arrive and at some early stage see their role, for example, you can look at the description of Ashiata Shiemash, or of Jesus when he is presented at the Temple at the age of twelve. They come into this world ready to go.

JA: With Jesus, you can possibly think that he was made into whom he was by the people who wrote about him?

George: I don’t know; maybe. I am just giving him is an example of a Messenger. If you look at the Messengers that Gurdjieff talks about, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Jesus and Ashiata Shiemash, they are presented as being actualized on this planet already fit for purpose

JA: So up to Saints, they are working their way up the ladder.

George: That is the way I see it; the Prophets are slightly different. They are not sent ready-made.

HG: Many of us see Gurdjieff as a Messenger.

George: I would be surprised if that were true, because I think it is very clear if you look at his life that he did a lot of work in the lower levels, rather than arriving fully formed. He clearly had to work on himself. One thing is for sure though, who is to judge? Don’t forget, we may be in the area where we do not recognize these people at all.

LF: If we can see them, how do we know about Jesus?

George: I mean that we don’t recognize them for who they are.

LF: In their lifetime?

George: In the ordinary sense. Consider how few people were called to witness the Transfiguration of Jesus.

DK: This may not be relevant but I am curious. Can you say anything about how Mr. Bennett came to this? It seems so remarkable, especially in detail.

George: Thirty-five years of work? I am not quite sure. His starting point for a lot of the material in The Dramatic Universe is Gurdjieff. As he said, modestly, the DU was an effort

63

to make something of it for himself. Certainly, his energy systems come from Gurdjieff; they are largely a re-work from the Purgatory chapter. I think this scheme of an ideal human society really came from his own study, and from his own exposure to some of these people. He had actual experience with these people at many of these levels, I don’t know how far up but a good way, and certainly Gurdjieff is part of this. I feel more than a little impertinent to say where these people were in this scheme. By the way, if you look at Gurdjieff’s life, it looks to me that this is a life of a Psychokinetic man for most of his life. There is a struggle he went through. Bennett said that Gurdjieff was an exceptional man with an exceptionally difficult nature, which he had to overcome. In overcoming his exceptionally difficult nature, he became an exceptional man. There is no question in my mind that Gurdjieff had to go through a process. As far as I can see, he did not arrive as a fully formed Messenger, but I feel impertinent to talk about this because he was certainly at a level that I cannot see or judge.

DC: This comes from another tradition, but my understanding is that we can’t know each other and we really don’t know ourselves much until we die. It is called the seal of sanctity. You just can’t make judgments. We like to think well of our teacher but there are so many hidden people.

MB: Can you speak to the relationship in the tetrad of the Guides and Messengers?

George: Not without reference, but simply I think the Guides take guidance from the Messengers and the Messengers are much rarer than the Guides. Guides get their inspiration from the Messengers and it is not by email; this is coming from beyond time.

HG: Do you see Man #6, #7 or #8 in this?

George: Where do you see them?

HG: It would have to be from #9 to #12 or #8 to #12.

George: Probably or it would be #8 to #10. They may not fit exactly. I still have this problem with the Prophets and the Messengers because they both just seem to be coming off the shelf, as it were, according to Bennett’s description. But there is this distinction, as I have said, in the image we are given of Prophets compared with Messengers, in that they are often plucked from obscurity and given their role. In the Bible this is explicitly given to them by God.

CE: I am curious I haven’t met any Messenger.

George: What, sitting in this room? They are hard to recognize. When Bennett talked about the Prophets, he said some of them are not visible but their influence is apparent because we people are still here - the human race and the planet has survived despite our stupidity. This book [The Dramatic Universe] was completed in the early 1960s, so one of the things he talks about is the extreme tension of the 1950s, which to any normal eye should have ended up in disaster, but didn’t. He attributes this to the influence of invisible Prophets. We avoided going to war over Cuba not because Khrushchev and Kennedy were such geniuses, but because Prophets were pedaling like crazy behind the scenes.

JJ: I’d like to address this practicality - this idea of Saints. That word gets used a lot. I have a friend, now long dead, who I knew for 40 years and she started out looking for the truth,

64

whatever she could say as a parent, an intellectual and as an artist, and moved on the world of excesses, using multiple drugs and eventually into religion and was then became extreme-ly ill with cancer. Her ambition (and I am using that word specifically) was to find the good whatever, however she could find it. She was probably one of the few people I would define as a Saint. She died in a religious commune called ‘Metanoia’, a radical Methodist thing. Her death brought the entire community to one of the most profound states of grief I have seen between people–like something you see in a tekke when the sheik dies–not from a role of leadership but because she had realized something in herself whether it was through the road to excess, the road to study, of suffering and the crucible of dying and as much as she could stand to not take the drugs. This is a receptive state and most of these things seem to be in an active relationship to others.

George: That’s not necessarily true.

JA: You take Saints like Mother Teresa.

JJ: I want to use examples in my own life.

George: Whether they are apparently active or not active is almost beside the point.

JJ: Candidates go out and look; they are not just sitting there. The Guides certainly do guiding. Saints don’t do ‘sainting’.

George: This word ‘do’ is a pitfall here, because in Bennett’s picture, they are not concerned with action but the source of action so they are the source of inspiration for these people [Guides?] but not the actors. The Psychokinetic group are the actors and the Psychotelios group are the inspirers. They are free of the limitations of the material world. When Bennett says Initiates are straddling both worlds and are able to work in either, it is kind of an odd position; they may think, “Initiates, yeah, I made it, now I can’t do anything,” but it isn’t so.Progress in ‘Guideness’ and then maybe becoming a Saint is not from efforts from oneself; it’s by Grace. My own view is that at any level, all Work begins with Grace.

MB: Did Mr. Bennett mention Moses?

George: Yes, he did¬ – in the picture of Moses seeing the Promised Land but not being able to enter it. Bennett says of the Initiate: ‘His state is like that of Moses, for the Power of the Spirit is upon him and he can see what cannot be seen by the Self of Man: yet the Promised Land of Individuality cannot be entered.’ (p 259. It is a desperate picture, isn’t it? Tough job.

JA: There is an interval between Saints and Prophets, isn’t there?

George: There seems to be.

SM: The question comes up about the usefulness of maps. We have to treat this like a map, a scheme to qualify our own experience and see if it fits. There might places where it is inconsistent and it doesn’t match the picture here.

To try to line this up with another map, say, the Man #4 – #7 can produce the illusion that one can understand something if one matches it up. It’s not really like that. If there is an experience and then you see how this corresponds to a map, then this map is useful because

65

it confirms that somebody else has already seen this too, and has already been in this place also and that’s how I think we should look at this. The completeness of going 1 through 12 is great. I personally like theoretical schemes like that, but what happens between 9 and 12, is, like you say, of relatively little consequence for my personal life, but what happens between 1 and 6 is. So that is the area where I have some interest. I am not trying to stall the discussion here, but we need to remember we are talking about maps and when we talk theoretically about these things, we can get lost.

JJ: Thank you. We try to put everything into one big story and what happens is that we become self-referential and we are unable to hear from our own experience–it’s all about the story.

MB: One thing that came to mind, and it is kind of true from your comment earlier about the order to 1 to 4 and you said it would be nice to reverse that so the ones at the top are serving the Dependents and I agree with that in terms of service, but the very reason we are saying that is because we are looking at it from a psychokinetic point of view.

When we have people who are purely concerned with the material, existential world, we’ve got to realize that most people are living that life where they recognize material real-ity as the fundamental driving point of their life. If we were all business leaders here, with yachts and fancy cars in that group, we would be deciding thing based purely on the mater- ial world, on the existing world, so this whole thing, 1 to 6, we have got to think about the point where you go from 4 to 5 and our relationship, if we wish to be in the psychokinetic life, or we are called to it, this whole relationship between the 4, 5 and 6, and the 1 to 4, because point 1 to 4 are people who are not called into that community. They have no less worth, as George said; every member of that psychokinetic community has equal value. So we have got to see how these ideas, or our role, is related to them because we can’t convince people that there is this spiritual world, or that there is an invisible world, or that there is an essential world, because they are operating on that level.

So we have to put ourselves into that position as well. Keith was talking about the Hos-pice movement, and educational things where these ideas come down from the Psycho-kinetic group to the Psychostatic world somehow, and the way that there is interaction. So that’s the most practical way I can see that ideas get brought from the essential world–the values from the higher worlds get brought into the material world and manifest. Bennett talks about the spiritualization of existence, and the realization of essence that these values that can be brought down into the world of existence

Keith: With all the risks inherent in that. I was reminded of the story of the ants eating the map. Can anyone tell the story?

HB: It comes from Jan Cox. The story is of ants that send out scouts who discover a picnic table full of their essential garden of paradise of foods. They come back to the anthill and they try to describe the path to get to the picnic table. It gets very complicated but the short of it is that they decide they will make a map that they can share with everybody so they can find their way there. With much elaboration, what happens is that all of the other ants become so fascinated with the map that they never leave to go find the picnic table and eventually, they start eating the map, and starve for something they were not willing to get.

George: One of the reasons I erased the numbers is that in Mr. B’s scheme you don’t have to go sequentially ‘1-2-3-4-5 ’, and that fits with my own experience and observation. The

66

Specialists don’t have to be Leaders before they can become Candidates. The Craftsmen may become Specialists and they change because their inner orientation changes, when they realize there is more to life than meets the eye. Here they are, they have a craft that is able now to be an expression of their inner life. It is not sequential. Everybody in the Psychostatic category has the potential to be in the Psychokinetic group. In principle, everybody in the Psychokinetic group has the potential to be in the Psychoteleios cate- gory. They are not all going to be Messengers in the sense Bennett–or Gurdjieff–describes them, but certainly they all have the potential - we all have the potential. If we don’t get reach the Psychotelios group as individuals that is also not externally significant, because all the roles have to be played.

JA: Initiates could be initiated from above or from self-initiation, you could say. Guides are something beyond Counsellors, aren’t they?

George: They are. But these are just names. There is a talk that Bennett gave at Sherborne gave less than six years after he published The Dramatic Universe, in which he said, “I think I called them ‘Initiates’ but I can’t remember which.” [laughter] He knew what the roles where but he couldn’t remember what he called them. He has called the Guides those people who are united with the world of essence. They are no longer on the threshold. These guys have gone beyond egoism. We think of Initiates as someone who has been initiated, but it is not like that. Bennett chose a word that don’t fit our ordinary preconception of what an initiate is, so I don’t know why he used it. It is a word used in Beelzebub’s Tales so I think that is where he got it from, but it has this problem that we think of it as being initiated in the way a student is initiated in a fraternity, or into a monastery.

HG: How would this actually look in a community?

George: You can see that an ideal human society - which Bennett thought he might be able to set up but wasn’t given the time - would have these elements in it. It might be in contact with the higher levels, and probably would be, because if a community of people set themselves to it, they would be getting help.

HG: I am thinking of buildings, shops where people work, the leaders, the officers. Would the Guides would be the church or something like that?

George: I don’t know. In my experience Counsellors are very helpful when you need some help and you go ask their advice and they tell you something useful. When I look at Specialists I see that they have a specialist skill, but they also have this spiritual life in it. You can see that; they are there, these people exist.

HG: Would it be something like Two Rivers Farm or Camp Caravan? Is that what you are developing?

George: You could see that these places have potential, and I don’t want to speak about specific organizations or groups, but the people I’ve been involved have this one real problem, that none of us has made the step to renunciation of egoism. This is something unbecoming in all of us that Gurdjieff emphasizes. This egoism of ours is a serious problem for humanity. I’ve been talking with people about living in communities for forty years and none of these people, including myself, have been able to put aside ourselves enough to

67

actually do it. Or people put themselves under the guidance of a person which is a good model, up to a point.

So, yes, in an ideal society all these categories would be there and they would be influ-enced by the Psychoteleios group, though these latter would probably not be on the same campus.

HG: Is it something that is self-sustaining?

George: I don’t know. Bennett said there are not enough of the Psychoteleios people about.

ES: He also said the Psychokinetic group draws from the Psychostatic group. Another thing that came to me while you were speaking is that the Initiates have to sacrifice their egoism to make the next step, and the Psychostatic have to sacrifice their dependence upon the material world. Gurdjieff dealt with Candidates by making them pay money, or at least he said he did. There was always this obstacle. One had to pay money, give up something material, to make this step to be a Candidate. The onus on us who wanted to go to Sher-borne was that we had to earn our own money. So it seems like there is this sacrifice of being attached to the material world, at least a different kind of degree. You have to make that jump from the Psychostatic in order to enter the Psychokinetic.

HB: When I look at this, I am processing this simultaneously with Beelzebub’s Tales, be-cause that is my other favorite map. Not sure about map versus myth, so I am thinking about where one would put Hadji-Asvatz-Troov in that? Where would one put Beelzebub in that? I see all of those terms in Beelzebub’s Tales and in Gurdjieff’s writings and it is the use of those terms and a painting of pictures of those but then I sort of have that question: where in that I would see Beelzebub and where would I see Hadji-Asvatz-Troov? That is a question that came up for me in looking at it.

Also, when I think of terms of Remarkable Men I just get this sense that when he is finished with that that he’s giving of picture of reaching a certain point and then he went into life and that’s the material question. That’s like his ‘this is my process and this is my activity after that’. I haven’t really got a sense of the modeling that comes from Gurdjieff in any way, a modeling of that is anything other than negative.

George: I am going back to the quote we began with: “We start from the hypothesis that the task of an ideal society would be to promote and direct the course of human evolution towards its higher perfection.” This whole set-up has a task; it’s not just a random bunch of people hanging out. They have a task towards the perfection of the entire human race or the spiritualization of the planet if you want to use a Gurdjieffian expression. The task is to change the order; not just of these people but the whole planet and, by extension, the Solar System, because we and our planet are also a part of that. You can imagine the Earth as a spiritualized generator in the middle of the Solar System might change the whole system. This ideal society is not a random bunch of people; it has a task. Ideally everybody would be aware of the task and would play his or her role in it. Or, if they weren’t aware of it, they would at least be responsive to the impulses of the people who were.

SM: To the question, ‘which drawer does a particular person fit in?’ Early on when you started out and you talked about Dependents, I was thinking of somebody who is a depend-ent because of an incurable disease. But what happens to that person (this happens often as I understand it) through that disease there is an inner growth maturity. So that over time,

68

they could become Counsellors in this scheme by virtue of giving advice to someone else, because they have seen and understood something because of this disease. They continue to be a Dependent - that doesn’t go away - so in that sense they are now fitting into two drawers. For myself, I go up and down the ladder all the time. At times I am somewhat more present and aware, and I can be more sensitive and more able to fulfill of role, and at other times, I’ve lost it and I just babble around in the lower realms. So I don’t think we should take it as a particular person belongs to one drawer or another. There is a fluidity and transparency between them all.

MG: Not to take away with what you just said, there are some simplistic ways to look at it that are helpful. I agree with George that my own personal concern when I read that section of The Dramatic Universe, I don’t really spend a lot of time trying to understand and analyze the Psychoteleios because it is really not my world, but the Psychokinetic and the Psychostatic are. Bennett makes a simple statement where he says,

‘The Psychostatic man is concerned with what hehas not and the Psychoki-netic man is concerned with what he is not.’

HG: I know Bennett tried to explain a lot of things in terms of energies. Does this repre- sent certain energies coming into the world affecting certain people that are receptive to the energies?

George: As I said earlier, he connected the four stages of the psychokinetic group with the four energies from automatic to creative. I don’t think he connects it with other energies but you can see some correspondence. Energy 1, Transcendent Energy, would be connected with the Psychoteleios, wouldn’t it? You could superimpose the energies onto the levels of the ideal human society, except for what Stefan said about the energies in general. None of us live at a single energy level. If we are sensitive, the automatic energy is still there; all the lower energies are always present in us simply because we are in a physical body, right down to heat on Bennett’s energy scheme. I think we have this misleading tendency to look at a kind of ladder of promotion, even when it comes to energies.

JA: He starts by saying that man is a transforming apparatus for all these energies.

JJ: What he is talking about is a hierarchy of being, but you don’t stay there. I agree with Stefan. Half the time when I am out in the garden and weeding, I am producing vegetables. I am not even there; I am thinking what I am going to cook for dinner. This not like the Toast to the Idiots, where you get to choose your idiot.

George: Bennett said at the end of his life, “I can’t really say whether I am better at remembering myself when I was forty or fifty years ago. All I can say is that more of my impulses come from the Work.” So you can see that for those in the Psychostatic world, none of their impulses come from Work; it is all from the material world. For those in the Psychokinetic group we can hope that impulses come increasingly from the Work, while for the Psychotelios group this may be the case all the time. But the Psychotelios group still needs help. The Guides and Initiates need people from the Psychokinetic group in order to transmit or enact their influences in the ordinary world. By the way, they also need a physical body if they are going to stand up and do a little ‘Prophetizing’. That’s why I wanted to erase the numbers. It must be clear to us in all our experiences that sometimes we are completely automatic and sometimes we are not.

69

ES: In the Psychostatic realm by definition they would also have moments of influences not just from the material world, or they would not be able to make a transition to the Psycho-kinetic level. So there is fluidity in our consciousness as we have verified for ourselves, but there are also stations; there are basic stations. You can be a specialist but you can also be a sleeping specialist, or you can be a very awake specialist or you can actually give somebody some impartial advice and be a little above a specialist but that is still the station.

George: Yes, it’s probably true. That’s why I like this picture of Initiates bumping around a bit and needing the help of Counsellors to keep them on track. That seems to be a picture of a human being, even if he is an Initiate.

SM: It is a little bit like the Probability Curve.

Keith: How can we bring some of the notions we have been talking about the last day or so, the most important one being Conscience? How do we bring Conscience into these considerations of the various groupings of people? What role does Conscience play?

HG: Maybe being aware of this overall diagram representing the ideal society would be a beginning. Maybe that is not the same thing as Conscience.

JA: We have the impression that the first group is more interested in self than other, would you say?

George: Yes, it is motivated primarily by the outer world and not the inner world, and that is the defining difference.

ZB: I wouldn’t quite agree with that.

ES: There are people in the restaurant that I work with that care about other people. They have caring but they don’t have psychokinetic caring.

George: If you are person being cared for, does it matter?

ES: It is an interesting question you bring up, Keith, because the thing about Candidates, especially if you are talking about Mr. B’s model (Mr. B had his connection with Gurdjieff so you assume Conscience must be in there someplace) that the tools one gets as a Candi-date are the tools that open us to the possibility of living by Conscience. And I would say also that when we are in that process of being a Candidate, and we are learning to live by Conscience, we observe that we very often don’t live by Conscience, and so there is this process by which we learn to do so. I wonder if that has something to do with this change that happens when we go from being a Candidate, or from being a Specialist, and certainly from being a Counsellor, that one would have to have a different relationship between one’s connection with Conscience. Not that the Conscience is going to be any different, but the connection would probably be much more solid for a Counsellor than for a Candidate.

JA: I want to take my comment back. Zeke, I think you are right that Conscience figures into all of this.

ZB/ES: It has to.

Keith: Is there any differentiation here that would be consistent with the notions of self and other as psychological states? In other words, when we are in the Psychostatic, is there

70

psychologically a focus on self? Or, does it broaden out and become also consideration and concern about other in the community and so forth, or does that require a movement up into the Psychokinetic?

DS: We have been talking about self in the Psychostatic, which is the world of the here and now, and having, and then it would the self of the body. This self-other would have to do within this practical world - that maybe the gradation could be in that sense. When we talk about selves with gradations, the Self (with a capital S) it seems that would move into the Psychokinetic and would be in a different relation to other instead of this very ordinary practical in this world.

ES: A leader, a good president is concerned with other. A good president is looking to have health care for the country, all these things. There is a concern for other in the Psychostatic level. The difference between that and the Psychokinetic, the concern for other in the Psychokinetic level is the concern with the possibility of evolution and in the Psychostatic group, the Leaders are not concerned with the transformation of the inner life of their subjects. But for the Psychokinetic, they are.

MG: They are not concerned with the development of the soul.

ES: But they are concerned with the health of the physical body; they are concerned with all the aspects of the structure of society, which is not just self, it is also other but in a different way.

MG: A good Leader.

NR: A good Leader is concerned with self–other but in his own self-interest.

JA: [to Elan] You are a Craftsman and you make some well-formed music. Are you concerned about the music only or how it is taken in the usual way or are you also concerned with having quality there that is capable of lifting people? And doesn’t that work for all of these, simultaneously? So I am looking at this as another axis, another dimension, that the Conscience dimension is alive in all of these situations. How much balance is up for grabs?

MB: This bottom four (Psychostatic group) regarding size, we are talking about 99 percent of the world at least. This is the reality that we have. To allow that to function harmoniously is a fundamental aim. If we start judging that these people in this group don’t care for each other, I think that’s terrible. We have to recognize this self–other connection; we have to strive for ourselves. This is a fundamental part of people’s life. There has to be help to come to allow that but people like Gandhi, they want to create a fair and equitable society and when that’s in place, people recognize that. When the model is set up, there is an internal recognition of the beneficial situation. I don’t think the bottom four are always exploiting; trying to get one up on everyone else.

ZB: If we look at the evolutionary; we have often talked of the Family Triad, we distinguish the second brain. Everybody in that lower group, without exception I would assume, when a new child comes into the world there is more than just seeing them as fact. There is still value even though one is purely just going off to work at the Garden Center, sweeping the floors or doing whatever needs to be done because they have a recognition of duty and obligation to tend for his dependents. So that Family Triad comes in even with the animals;

71

there is that nurture and play and recognition of other. So I would have to assume that the seed for that starts way back when; that ability to recognize or feel for others is there.

TS: In a way that kind of makes it like a circle because that is given, like the Messenger is given and that kind of ties the Messenger down to the Dependent.

ZB: You can easily look at your child as a Messenger of God.

TS: And the feeling that you have is a reflection of something.

DK: We need to look at this more of a dynamic system than being two-dimensional on the board. The process, for instance, of becoming related to the Psychokinetic group is not necessarily a chicken or the egg sort of situation as it seems to be, but the process of becoming that opens one up to different perceptions of Conscience. It is not necessarily a requiring; it could be a cause or an effect of the change. You become more aware of Conscience as one’s relationship with the world changes.

ZB: As was said earlier, what is the difference between a map and a myth? A map is two-dimensional kind of projection but it is an invaluable tool. A myth is fluid; it is not static and things start to move. I see this as a good map, but static. As soon as things start to move there is more a mythic dimension.

JA: Are the three groups dependent on each other?

George: Absolutely. I just want to say that talk has been a grotesque simplification of the sixty-page chapter, but one of the things Bennett says is, “There is not an absolutely rigid separation of this group [the Psychokinetic] from the others but there is an unambiguous distinction between the selfhood, soul and individuality.” So it is not to say that selfhood is left behind, but the process is to go beyond selfhood towards individuality, that’s why it is kinetic. At one point, he does say something to the effect that psychokinetic people belong to the domain of ‘harmony’, where fact and value are brought into what Bennett calls ‘fruitful contact’, so that the new reality may be everlastingly brought to birth.

72

March gathering 2017 ~ Saturday aFternoon

The chapter “The Individual–The Group” from Gurdjieff’s Whim pp 179-81 was read.

Gurdjieff worked with individuals. Everyone that came to him was received as an individual and work was created and formed to be a defining influence in their struggle toward individuality. Emphasizing this is his oft-told story about automobiles. A paraphrase of this circumstance is this: “You are each of you like an automobile. When you come, your automobile is very rusty, the brakes do not work as they should, the steering wheel is loose, the gears grind and your motor does not run smoothly. Your tires are unevenly worn and not properly inflated. Your lights do not work and the seats are loose, with their leather worn and cracked. Altogether your vehicle is in sad shape and in much need of repair. I can help you repair your automobile. I can help you repair and recondition your vehicle so that you can travel wherever you choose. But I cannot tell you where to go. That choice can only be yours.”

Gurdjieff’s aim, with respect to his pupils, was to assist them in establishing their own individuality; not to follow a path that was predetermined for all to follow. When they had manifested their individuality, they could choose their path into life manifestation. Until they reached that point, they were still in the processes of ‘repairing their automobile’ and still in need of guidance.

At the same time, Gurdjieff placed great emphasis on the need for group work; on the fact that, by working alone, an individual can come to nothing.

His own history with the “Seekers of Truth”11 firmly established this principle. Throughout his life of teaching, in Movements, workdays, meetings, meals, trips in the car and reading The Tales, the group was a fundamental factor, one which emphasized the shared inner character of Work.

One sees oneself reflected in others in ways that are impossible to see by oneself. At the same time, one comes to accept the automatic manifestations of others as being no different in law from one’s own automatic manifestations. A genuine acceptance of oneself and of other is the hopeful result.

We have concluded that Gurdjieff’s emphasis on group work is a clear indicator that group work is, in its essence, a functional expression of the world of Kesdjan. Work with others is not only a necessity for one’s personal work but, more essentially, it is the heart of self-other relationships which are focused on working with and for the benefit of others.

When the automobile is ‘repaired’ (when individuality begins unmistakably to show itself as real and with potential for its own experiential expression), it is time for decision about the manifestation of individual aim. For some, this is a singularly individual path, seemingly unat-tached to an identified group and yet, lawfully bringing the individual into productive relation-ships with a variety of people. Others maintain a continuing and close relationship with groups, being both a source of continuing help to others in their individual work and an avenue for the expression of their individuality. Throughout the great variety of life manifestations, the principles of Work on oneself and Work with others are guiding precepts, allowing an ‘open-ing’ into ordinary life through example (of Being, of Conscience and of purpose), one result being the creation of B influences (manifestations into ordinary life which are enlivened by C influences).

1 Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men (New York: Dutton, 1974), p 164.

73

This triadic form summarizes these primordial aspects of Work.The lives of Sternval, the de Salzmanns, de Hartmanns, Tchekhovitch, Ouspensky, Nyland,

Bennett, Vaysse, Howarth, Pentland, Orage, Daumal, de Dampierre, Conge, Claustres, Nicoll, Tracol, Nott, Staveley and Popoff, each demonstrates the diverse manifestations of Work filtered through the individuality. The persons listed above are a small sample of the totality of three-brained beings who have been deeply influenced by the Gurdjieff teaching. It is not within our capacity to comment on the degree of true individuality attained by these persons but our intention is to point to Work as the defining influence of their lives. Their individual manifestations varied widely but appear to meet Gurdjieff’s criteria for the unique individuality which is the matured essence, manifesting from its own will. In doing so, with the great variety of forms taken, they are manifestations of Work for the Work, that impartial struggle toward consciousness and being for the welfare of other. [Bonnie, shall the chapter be included with this talk?}

~ ~ ~

Keith: How does the search for individuality, with all its manifestations, fits into the ideal society?

MB: I had a question for Zeke. You mentioned this morning that you found a difference between Volume 3 and Volume 4 of the Dramatic Universe. In Volume 4, you found it was more of a myth. Is that what you said?

ZB: Somewhat. I think the whole Dramatic Universe is speaking to George’s talk of the ideal society, to Bennett’s wish to formulate for himself the myth. The diagram of the ideal society that George presented from Volume 3 he likened to a map. I thought that was a good anal ogy because I thought it was static. The difference between a map and a myth would be a myth is more dynamic and fluid so there is moving, living story so, in reflecting on Volume 4, it is more history, so different from the foundational piece of Volumes 1 and 2, but Volume 4 seemed to be more of a reflection on a story. So I was just reflecting on the difference between myth and maps.

MB: One thing that came to mind, when we were speaking about the Work in life and we had this reading and then what George presented earlier. On that structural diagram as you

1

Triad of True Individuality – Matured Essence

HigherBeing-body

PhysicalBody

KesdjanBody

Work for the Work

Work on OneselfWork with Others

74

go up there is more concern for the welfare of people below as it were. Each level has more responsibility and they have to be more concerned with the welfare.

Keith: So the Work is how to get from down there to up here?

CC: When there is a moment of having consciousness, it is aware of sensation and sensation is a higher level of energy; it has more potential than the ordinary energies of life and so on–the energies of life have more potential than the mechanical energies in the body which has a higher organizing ability over ordinary thermal energy. The higher you go, the more, the word “authority” comes to mind–more possibility of seeing the lower of organizing the lower and organizing influence on lower energy.

Keith: Anybody have sufficient courage to put that in their own personal terms as to reflect on your position and journey and struggle and how you see what is required of you into the future? There are not too many of us that are under 35 years of age.

HB: When SM was speaking last night, looking at the conversation we were having in terms of speaking of the time Mrs. Staveley’s letter was written and looking over that 25-year span of time and speaking for himself that there was a static feeling of not having moved; that we were somehow in the same place. What I reflected on for myself was I asked am I in the same place now as I was that many years ago. I feel that the answer is yes and no. I am the same in many aspects in my personality and my weaknesses but at the same time I am quite different in terms of choices I’ve made, more emotional presence relative to relationship with others, moving into a profession is more involved with human beings, more commitment to continue in my connection to the Work and the people in that Work. That’s not the same; it has deepened.

So there is this aspect which is this question of individuality and what independent individuality has been more present for me over the last couple years and I keep returning to it–ask questions. THERE is a sort of fumbling around towards the future with questions of what the state of those relationships will be in another year, what my longer-term con-nection will be relative to how I live my daily life in the field of education versus some other possibility.

So I can’t say that there is a clear aim or intent that I’ve come to but I don’t feel dis-heartened as I look back over the last 20 years. Certainly not disheartened with my growth into relationship with other people, however much disheartened by the thoughts of judg-ments I want to make about what’s happening in the world but then I notice that that’s always been there, the circumstance just seem to be different. I can see that in myself– still a teenager, something about me has never been right with the world ‘out there’.

Keith: I think it was George who mentioned that someone asked your father once how he had changed.

GB: He said that all he knew was that more of his impulses came from the Work.

Keith: That is being very painfully honest. Wow.

GB: He once said he couldn’t be awake all the time but he could be awake whenever he needed to be.

ES: That was at a Staff meeting in Sherbourne in ’73, and he was talking about Self-remem-bering. He said the purpose of Self-remembering is to see that you cannot remember

75

yourself which shocked us a little bit and then he said, “I don’t remember myself all the time but I do when I need to.”

Keith: How do you understand for yourself?

ES: My understanding of Self-remembering has come around to the work that George and I did over a seven-year period with this group in Massachusetts. We came to the conclusion that Self-remembering is actually that we don’t do anyway. It is something that is done to us; it is something that comes…for example, noticing is a form of Self-remembering and we can’t make ourself notice but we notice. It is something like we get woken up.

And so what he is saying is that he is not in that place where that energy that brings about Self-remembering–he is not in that state all the time but when it is necessary, it happens.

Keith: Did he talk at all about what determines the necessity?

ES: No, we were so stunned because at that point–this was in the 70s and there was this whole association that you work at Self-remembering so that you can remember yourself. That seems pretty obvious so for him to turn it around and say the purpose of it is to see that it is not possible and then to turn it around and say that something else is possible. It is possible to be remembered by our higher part. That is how I would put it.

Keith: How do you understand that regarding your own future relative to the questions we have been exploring to some degree through the line of one’s life in Work? What role we assume or adopt or wish for relative to Work, relative to the future? How do you see that? I think we have to have some sense of that, some feeling about it. Some wish with regard to it. And the cleaner that is, the better.

GB: It gives me confidence that Work is possible. We came to the conclusion that it really was not possible to wake myself up–this me. But the fact that I am woken up made me confident that there is a higher part of me. This higher is not a myth. What is sure that I am not connected to it most of the time but that it taps me on the shoulder from time to time and says, “Come on, pal, time to wake up,” is immensely reassuring that Work is ac-tually possible. Otherwise my experience is that I am totally asleep and unable to do any-thing about it. I am convinced the notion that I am going to get my “I” is not the question at all; it is simply opening oneself to this which is already real. There is confidence that help is available. Then what happens when I am tapped on the shoulder, “Come on, pal, now it is time to do something?” Then I am up against it, but the fact that I will be woken up, because my experience is that I am woken up, gives me confidence that this Work is actu- ally possible. It’s not nothing as my Mum used to say.

Keith: But we all have the experience. We’ve had different impressions. There was a time when a great many jokes and somewhat black remarks would be made about people who were playing at working; who were walking around stony faced and not reacting. What about that? How do we understand that? How do we understand people who fall into that state when they playing at working.

ES: Are they playing or are they working to get to the point where they go beyond? Is it pretense or is it that that is the only kind of way that is available to them at that point in their path? I’ve seen that and I’ve seen people sitting in a room working on themselves and being

76

what seems to be completely asleep. It’s just trying to do something; it is not relaxed. But I am not sure it is pretending–to me it seems like it’s a stage in the path that one has to go through before the ice breaks. [general agreement]

JJ: I also agree absolutely because to not be there in your ordinary state which is just chatting mindlessly. If you come here with some sort of intention to be present and to be present when you are young in the Work the answer is to shut off the station because that’s what it looks like. You are heavy handed, sensations in the feet and you struggling for something, for not just being mindless. And hopefully that passes but that’s one part of the way.

And then you hear people talking about “I:” “I am here for real I, for Kesdjan Body; I am here for this or that. I do the movements because they give me something; it centers me, it gives me something; it does this for me or that for me.” And you are going ‘me-me-me-me-me.’

I think we all enter the Work because it is going to make us super people or that we are going to become fearless and un-driven by the things that drive us or that we are helpless in front of and hope that we some sort of center that we can hold on to in turmoil and everyday chaos and uncertainty. We want certainty which, to me, is foolishness. There has to be a time where that is all let go. I still have the same personality but I am absolutely certain this Work in not about me but the Work matters. That is really important to me.

DC: When I found In Search in 1976 in the Taos library, I had little capacity to none and I was a householder; I could raise my children but other than that, I really had no capacity. It is the Work that has led me to serve. It turned me into a Hospice Chaplain so I could sit with the dying. When I started this path had had the capacity to bear with the stuff that happens around death and dying and all the messes and the upsets and the trauma. But I could bear it because the Work funded me in a way that allowed me to serve.

Now I am retired and I can lay it down and do something else but when I looked at the chart I went, oh yes, I went to school and I got a degree and I did these things and I had this amazing vocation and it was funded by the Work.

Keith: That is a great story, that’s good.

HB: I am going to be honest about what comes up in me when I hear you (JJ?) talk. There is an aspect of egoism that I have to admit that I am ok. I want to live forever. A real man wishes to live forever. I wish to be myself. There’s an aspect of self-worth that is what has been given here not ‘I’ in the sense that we speak of cosmic individuality I but whatever that something is that is filtering through my personality that has brought me to this place. For me to say that that because I am so small and everything is so large is of no consequence; it never sits well with me.

JJ: I have picture on my mirror in my living room of two men taken by my grandfather in World War I. It’s a little picture, and it says Sargent Somebody and Lieutenant Coronel Somebody and they are in their uniforms. I inherited it from my grandmother. And you know what? There is nobody left alive in the world who can tell me who those people were and why it was important for him to take their picture on a sunny day in France. I am sure they wanted to live forever too but, I don’t know–I think about death a lot because we don’t want to think about death; it is an uncomfortable thing and nobody wants to die but are we willing to allow that it will happen to us. I am not talking about legacy–I’ve got to write my novel!

77

But it’s not legacy, of course you don’t want to die but there are some traces that we can leave behind that have to do with Work and we have to be open to the moment when that is the most effective.

Keith: This opens an interesting arena of questions. In The Tales, Gurdjieff seems to put a great deal on emphasis on the fact that there is a difference between the physical body dying–which is by natural law that all physical bodies come apart, at some point. There is nothing special about it; it’s just that that’s the way the world is put together. Whether or not the other bodies, the potential bodies and here we have to get over thinking about our physical body in the same way up until this point in time. This physical body, this body that we are corporally occupying space within is going to be no more. That’s a fact.

In our thinking; in our associative efforts to gain reason, we should never forget that. In all of our associative meanderings through purpose and through doing whatever it is we plan on doing, we should never forget that they physical body is not what we are talking about– throughout The Tales, that is not what Gurdjieff is talking about. He accepts right off that they physical body is going to die so what is left? What is left is the beginning, as we see in the Descents, we can go through the first three Descents and be totally wandering in the world of physical body things that end up being dead. And the best that can happen under those circumstances is that Abdil has his body taken to Mars. That’s fine. We talked a little bit about what Mars may represent. If Mars is an indicator that has something to do with Higher Emotional Center then taking Abdil’s remains to Higher Emotional Center when he dies means something, so think on that. What does that mean to have the remains of the physical body taken by a higher power to another place that is of a higher order of being? There is something about that that is really interesting to wonder about.

But once you get by the third descent, then you get into the guts of what Gurdjieff is really talking about and it isn’t the physical body. When we hit Belcultassi, from there on through the rest of all he talks about in the remainder of The Tales, I believe he is talking about this inner world, the inner world of our lack of consciousness, our lack of Conscience and he lays out this very sad and very honest and very terrifying series of pictures of what it means to be in that world.

In one sense, right when it can’t get any worse, that is when his full pardon comes through. And he can get out of there and he does. We should give some thought to that too. Beelzebub doesn’t stick around. He has been here all these thousands of years and yet when his full pardon arrives, he is out of there––off to Mars––order up the spaceship so I can get back to Karatas. We should think about that also.

What does that mean, inside of me, to think in those terms–that whatever it is that may live beyond the Earth, that has other venues in mind…if that is the real aim of my life… if the aim of my life is to work towards this state of self-other, the state of being conscious of my neighbor, of making the effort to be helpful or to be thoughtful of my neighbor, if that is the ultimate purpose of having a physical body, and I believe it is, because the physical body only takes you so far in that direction.

Remember that when you enter the Air Octave, it is only do-re-mi that remains in the body of atoms and molecules and the energies between atoms and molecules. Then it enters into the upper octave which is totally electromagnetic. Essentially, it has nothing in the lower world of atoms and molecules. It leaves the world of Earth-like things altogether, after the do-re-mi of Air. The do of Impressions begins with this octave of electromagnetic phenom-ena–begins! So it never descends. We cannot ever say that it is of the nature of this physical

78

world or my physical body. Now that is a thought that should stop us very quickly, that my thinking–when I think–this has nothing to do with my physical body. This is dealing with a world that is other, other–different laws.

SM: The story of the automobile here is pretty clear. He says, “I help you to fix it and then you use it to go where you want to go.” And I think a common mistake we probably recog- nize more easily in others than ourselves is that there is a tendency in all Work groups I have seen is to stay with repairing the automobile and not going beyond that, and to improve on movements and sensation and all of these things. There are good reasons for doing that of course but it becomes an end in itself. What you are pointing at is that those are just the tools that you need to adopt to do what you need to do.

I have seen this for myself in my own life in the last few years and I have come to under-stand it intellectually. I have also come to understand Stefan a lot better. I have come to see my limitations quite clearly; how I have good intentions and great plans and nothing much happens. That has happened so many times that I have almost lost confidence that I can do anything at all.

So this is what I was saying yesterday; when you understand something intellectually, where do you get the fire to actually carry it through? Where do you get the fuel to make this an action?

That’s kind of the point where I am at. George, Nanji and I have started the “Skills for Life” Program which I am behind with my mouth so far. I think it is a great idea and corre-sponds to a need in the world. I think somebody should do it and even that I should be the one. But, when I go home today and I need to write a budget, whatever, I would rather do it tomorrow than today. I am looking for the fire. Maybe this is what was talked about ear- lier about decision. This is not something that comes free. You have to make the decision, like Elan did when he plunged himself into the de Hartmann project. Since I’ve been close to what’s been going on there, that is an example of that sort of decision.

I am speaking out loud here because I feel by doing that, by admitting to it and bringing it out to the public and telling friends about it, you can get some help.

GB: I’ll hold your feet to the fire if you hold mine.

Keith: This is so true; it’s how we help each other keep honest.

MB: I had an experience just a few months ago. I was down on myself and I felt I can’t work any more–this kind of thing that happens from time to time but it hit me a different way. What changed was the realization of my connection with others. If I turn my back on working with other people that was like leaving the ability to work but as soon as I realized that if I have any responsibility with the working with other people, that is what would allow help to come, to allow me to even be in a relationship with the Work and myself.

So it really verified something which I have tasted before but this help for us if we have some connections with others and even coming to an event like this. If I commit to come to this event and do some preparatory reading or I step towards it, it seems law-conformable that we receive something from that. While we have those connections with others there is this invisible help that comes.

HB: I’ve felt that over the years it’s a seeing. As you said before, it’s the wrong language, that I wake up. There is a moment where suddenly, it is seen that this is the path and I am going to die in this path and you see it and then you move. Whether or not there is a hundred times

79

of partially waking up and noticing the pattern that preceded that, whether it came from outside, as I have reflected on that moment I can say where I was, when I was, why I was there–be there. Did it feel like it came from outside? No. But there was a seeing and then there was fire. There was emotion. There was commitment.

ES: I agree 100% with what you say because that kind of thing will only come in a moment. There will be a moment that that occurs. And all the rest of it is necessary preparation. There is a moment when one can say and one will say yes but to get to that moment … that’s a slice right through time.

Speaking about my personal situation, I have to say that it wasn’t that I did at all. What happened to me was that I was perfectly okay teaching piano and I was perfectly more than okay to be working with these six-week and ten-month courses we put on at Camp Caravan. I wasn’t even thinking of doing any kind of project at all but I was playing for a Movements class and it just so happened that Robert Fripp had been invited as a guest for 2 or 3 days on to that Practicum, 2006, three-month course. He came into the Movements class and then he left. I had no impulse to do anything about the fact that he walking into the Movements class at that time. When I went out of the Movements Hall, I noticed on his door was a list for anybody who wanted to talk to him. I thought to myself, maybe I should go talk to Robert. It had nothing to do with anything. I walked in the door and we started talking and he said, “I’ll help you. There is a project out there to get Thomas de Hartmann on the map. You are the only one who can do it at the moment probably and I’ll help you if you say yes. It is your choice.

It came in a moment. I couldn’t say I was dying to do this and I was frustrated because I wasn’t able to do it. It came from somebody else’s seeing. The reason I am saying this is because I do wonder whether, for example, I have heard it said that if a person wants to be a spiritual teacher, he shouldn’t be. It’s the wrong way to go about. If you want that kind of thing, you should not do it. The only way that somebody becomes a teacher is because they get pushed into that position by other people who see it.

So I am wondering if this kind of thing that you are doing could have that necessity–the necessity that something else would impel them to do it, rather than, “we’re going to do it.”

Keith: Or that there are unlimited possibilities in a host of events that happen tomorrow or the day after or the day after and if we are totally asleep, we just walk through them like they never happened. But if something is awake to some degree then maybe it sparks an interest or we pay more attention. We stop and we look. Something like that?

LF: I want to ask Harry (HB) a couple questions. We all have times when we see patterns. Typically you either look away or there is a depression about it. You are talking about seeing a pattern and then maybe enough times, you make a decision. That is what I am curious about. What happens when you see it enough times that something aligns and some kind of decision is made. I am curious if anybody has any real experiences they can touch on and help me understand that better.

HB: It probably has to be subjective. I put a great deal of emotional commitment in pursuit of a teacher and becoming involved in the Work and then left and then was just living my life again and saw again in a moment, this is just the pattern of my personality in my life repeating itself again. All the same questions, the same meanderings, the same aimlessness. Then the Work re-presented itself. I was completely not even thinking in those terms. I

80

walked into somebody’s office and there was a book about the enneagram on the table and it was like, okay, I could ask or I could not ask. But after the fact of asking, then it just a moment of living my life, doing carpentry, getting up, going to work. I was faced with that inner choice. That moment of seeing, I wake up and I am in that space and this is how it is going to be–life–I am going to keep this path going unless–in a sense that is stuff in my mind that I am articulating so it’s not like you can transfer those moments.

MG: It seems to me, in your description, that one of the keys is a certain openness that seeing this book you were open enough to allow that to happen, receptivity. And there is an element too of what strikes me as a spontaneity.

In my own life I had an event where I spent a lot of time in the woods and some of it with Zeke (ZB) and his brother who is now gone. The two of them became very interested in Waldorf education; I knew close to zero about Waldorf education. But being with them out there, I could feel there enthusiasm and at some point in time without even consulting them, I just said, I am going to put an ad in the paper and see if anybody is interested in this. How much risk is this? And the result is a school that has been functioning for over 20 years. It has educated hundreds of students and has had a real positive value to the com-munity. I didn’t feel it was a great doing on my part; it just sort of happened but there was that openness, just listening to them and I could sense that there was value in this. This was something good.

MB: And two of the women who became teachers were in our work group. They went to school and became Waldorf teachers.

MG: The whole Board was work-related. There was only one person who was not and he was spiritually inclined; he spent time in Findhorn. All of us together knew very little about Waldorf.

Keith: Have any of you had the experience that there are these kinds of events that at the time may seem serendipitous but something in us sees a little way down the road, that this may be possible, and then you avoid it. But then, as was pointed out, maybe the next time that that appears, you see a little further down the road–that is has other possibilities. In the major decisions that you have made in your life, do any of them have that quality, that you became aware of something and didn’t follow up on it and then it showed itself again and maybe you took it a little further and then finally you committed yourself to some degree to it and then, maybe there comes a point when everything changes and you that’s right where you belong. Any of you have that kind of experience? [a murmur of agreement]

CC: When I moved to Maine I was away from the Work and had been for a number of years and I thought meeting with a group would be important. I knew some osteopaths who would be connected with Jim [?] and I heard they were connected with Gurdjieff and there was an opportunity to follow up on this connection in this area in Maine and I missed those opportunities. It wasn’t until 3 or 4 moments when I knew where this connection was that I actually decided for myself that I just couldn’t live my life as I had been living it without the Work. I started looking. At that point, the Portland Group had put up a website right then and there it was, that was the opening for me.

JJ: But you didn’t see down the road. My experience is that you see down the road what you see is the door open and something comes in and says, here it is, whatever the opportunity it.

81

My sensation is that if I feel something arise in me, like “Oh God, this is going to be a pain in the butt,” then there is something that also arises in me that says, “I already know I am going to pay so I better say yes because it needs doing.” You need to find a group; you didn’t see what it was going to turn into down the road, there is no plan. The first thing that happens is that you say “yes.” You say, “I will this to be done.” It is presented itself a way that I can recognize it and it needs doing and it’s presented itself to me. There is that line of Jesus in the garden saying, “May this cup pass me by.” There is this tendency to say, “Oh God, not again.”

When we talked at A&E and you said I should stop in this group, being the person who says, “Come on kids, let’s put on a show”–being the one that says “DO” all the time. I really heard that and I took it up with Joseph Azize because I had a whole lot of trepidation about the dynamic. He looked at me and said, “Get out.” That’s what I ended up doing and the minute I did that, this other thing came into my life, and because of that I had no idea, look at all this stuff, I have no idea what I am doing, I found somebody who does projects on line who is an old devotee of Bhante; I’ve got tons of Bhante’s stuff. And all this stuff opened up. I had no idea other than there was one step and when I create that void–something else came in. And I had enough space where the Work worked that I had to say yes.

I think it is more like that. You open yourself up to the opportunity; you don’t have to see down the road. All you know it has been presented to you in a way that–it’s not magical thinking–but it’s there and it’s physical and it’s read and it’s going to be a pain. It has that flavor.

Keith: Good. But that is your experience of it.

JJ: Yes, it’s my personal experience.

ES: It’s funny you should say that because I think it may work differently in different people because when I remember when I had that first conversation with Robert, before I walked out the door, he said, “This is a 21-year project.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I want you to get to the point very quickly where you can do a concert every six weeks. I hadn’t done a concert in 10 years. That was immediately an aim that I had set before me that I had to figure out how to do. I had no idea how to do it. But I started getting touch with Gurdjieff groups, using the friends of my friends to keep this going. I didn’t see that 4 years later I would be part of a huge recording project but we did have this aim that this was a 21-year project. It will be ten and half years on May 3 and I still don’t have any idea what is going to fill that time up.

Keith: Why is that?

ES: Because he thinks in terms of three sevens. Robert works with the octave process. He says there are three seven-year periods and this second phase is supposed to be hell and it’s coming true. The question is that the third period, which is supposed to be heaven….[laughter]

JJ: Your experience, whether it is my experience or not, it is all real life stuff. It’s how things are presented that really have to do with your assent. You just have to give your assent to it and that has consequences and what those consequences are it’s not given for us to know. I have found planning over the years is pretty useless. It’s like a bird walk, you spot something over there and, well, that was cool and then there is another bird. It’s the expanded present moment, that you can actually see into the archeology of the experiences, that something real happens.

82

JA: So what function can a group like this have to assist people in the group to come to these points?

JJ: Are you asking me?

JA: No, I am interrupting. [laughter]

DZ: I would like to comment on that. When Annie and I were looking to moving to Maine, the big question we had was we weren’t aware of any Work groups. We were down in Virginia in the Foundation; we didn’t know of any groups in Maine. And yet when we made the decision to move to Maine, here we are. There is lots of work being done in Maine.

I’ve been pondering, since Thursday night something. It is around looking at the cover of the Third Striving, that picture of Saturn and that little dot of the Earth, so small.

One thing I’ve thought about very often in the Work is the scale; the scale of the Work and my relationship within that scale of the Work within the Ray of Creation. Billions and billions and billions of suns, tens of billions and hundreds of trillions of planets and here I am right now in this little speck at the far end of the Universe where Beelzebub got sent.

In the scale of that creation, what am I? Where do I fit in? I see what I am and I am a non-entity; I am a particle of nothingness. But there is a group. To me that work is like a hive of bees. There is a queen and the rest of us or at least I am, just a worker bee. I have a place and because I don’t have a sense of scale, I think the queen has died, Gurdjieff is gone but the hive is creating a new queen. This is just a moment; something new is coming. I hear these stories that we have all received something or we walked into a door and we came back with a project that changed our lives and changes other’s lives. That’s the energy that the group gives to us. We each work; we each strive. We have good days and bad days but we are sharing this; we help one another and come away with something deeper. And it sustains us. From that, there are all these amazing things that happen that carry the Work on to a new phase. So let David be a worker bee; there is a lot there and that’s a good thing.

CE: I am so grateful when you said there is always in one’s life something new. I’ve seen something different from ordinary life. When something is a little awake I realize that is where it comes from; it’s very precious. I have to stop this going down. It works; there is a lot of work from above.

MG: It was asked what can we do to help each other. The simple answer is to help others and have the courage to try things; to take risks, in a word, encouragement. It is sort of an antidote to fear.

HG: On the diagram of Food, Air and Impressions, we know that this is all within us. But I see you’ve got the Psychostatic, the Psychokinetic and the Psychoteleios and its subgroups also part of it, which seems to imply that they are all within us. If we go from the first conscious shock and all the way to the second conscious shock, we are now in the Psychoteleios world which is the real I. So the Psychoteleios group, the subgroup, it seems to imply they are all part of the real I. If we see this as potentiality, they must exist somewhere and they could be sending us messages or in a sense it would be we– we ourselves sending messages to take the next step ‘to do’ in a certain direction.

This is the way I am beginning to see this.

83

7

Cre

ati

ng

Hig

he

r B

od

ies

Oct

ave

of

Hig

he

r B

ein

g-b

od

y

FA6FA6Sacred

Degindad

SacredIschmetch Real I

SacredPodkoolad

SacredAnklad

FirstConscious

Shock

MI12

RE24

SI6 LA6

SacredPodkoolad

A66

SacredTernoonald

SecondConscious

Shock

SOL6

O r d i n

ar y

Re

as

on

Co

at

ing

of

K e s d j a n

FA96

RE384

LA24

SI12

SOL48

MI48

DO768

MI192

DO48

DO48

LA 6

FA6

DO192

RE96

H i g h e r B e i n g - b o d y

FirstConscious

Shock

Conscience

MI12

SOL12

RE24 FA24

Perfection /Maturationof Higher

Being-body

Higher Degrees of

Reason

A resonant balancing of

Kesdjan and Higher Being-bodies

A returning to Higher Orders

of Law

SecondConscious

Shock

84

Keith: Good. The positioning of the higher reasoned people on the outer curve where it goes from Degindad to Anklad, that placement is very tentative because from what Gurdjieff says, Anklad is the highest so, on that illustration, should we place it closer to the end of that octave? We can discuss those kinds of things, those stages in the higher reasoned individuals. Gurdjieff never seems to give us a great deal of data in The Tales that tells us where these individuals lie. We are left to our devices to figure what to do with it. But there are certainly indications that the major outlines of those triads of the way we put it together on that is useful. It may be wrong, that is certainly possible.

HG: That’s part of the map.

Keith: Right.

GB: Actually he says Anklad is the highest in general, doesn’t he? What I am saying is that there is no end.

DC: The horizon is always moving in front of us.

GB: Or something, I am not particularly bothered by the sacred Anklad–there isn’t a kind of ‘made it’, even for those guys.

Keith: There is certain rigidity or sterility in the way in which Gurdjieff seems to apply these appellations to these higher figures. They are never, seemingly, warm and cuddly. They are pretty brittle, cold and definitive but I certainly don’t get a human quality like you do from Beelzebub or Hassein. What do you think of that, these higher powers? How should we understand angels and archangels?

SM: One thing that dawned on me the first time yesterday was that Beelzebub was thrust out into the Universe in order to get experience because he was lacking experience and understanding. And even at that level, which is very high as far as the story goes, if you don’t have experience, if you are not immersed in the Creation, and maybe it’s the pur- pose for the Creation, if you are not in it, there are certain things that you can never get. That’s how I read that.

It kind of confirms for me a trap that we fall into very easily which is this thing about World 96 or different worlds–that there is the better ones and the worse ones and we want to get into the better ones. I don’t think the Universe is constructed like that; I think they are equally important. I have this emotional response which is very subconscious which is stay away from World 96, head for World 12. It is a naïve reaction but it is always there when people talk about this stuff. I have become aware of these subtleties and tend to start to doubt their validity. I am becoming aware of their risk for distortion. I wanted to say that about World 96; it is so easily understood as the worst place you could possibly be but if this world is sort of inferior, why is it here in the first place?

TS: It is interesting in The Tales, in his own writing, the way he speaks about the “Moon” beings in a very unique way, that he [Beelzebub] took great pleasure in observing them; that they had weak bodies but strong spirit and he defines that as being that they had a great endurance and capacity to work. Not only that, at the end of the description, he speak of their tunneling as this underground kingdom and the only other underground kingdom in The Tales is in Hadji Asvatz Troov. I agree this notion that the Moon is bad, bad World 96, I think he kind of repaired that with this image. It is not useful have that

85

kind of repulsion about World 96 and we don’t want to go there when he gives us this image of these beings with great spirit.

SA: This question about World 96 reminds me of the version of the Gospels where Christ descends from the Crucifixion and is three days down the tube, in “World 96” and brings back the souls from there. We talked about the necessity of being present to our reactions and non-identify with our negativity but to be present and not identified with other’s nega-tivity so what is this other than the practice of presence in the presence of factors from World 96? How else do we redeem that world but to have courage and capacity, not to run away, not to fall into identification but to consciously suffer it and understand it and then come back up with parts of it.

And this question of how do we help each other. In the hallway, there is a beautifully framed saying, “From every human being, there arises a light that reaches straight to heaven and when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, their streams of light flow together and a single brighter light was formed from their untied being.”

What are we, companions of the Work, other than light souls that find each other and by sharing and supporting our impressions, our souls intertwine and a brighter beam of light comes forth. From Gurdjieff’s perspective as I understand it, in Purgatory, this light that rises straight to heaven is actually the light that comes straight down from Sun Absolute, the Divine Attention and the Divine Love, the Theomertmalogos that gives us the capacity for consciousness. So while it’s slowing down, we are responding and allowing something of our response to move back up but together that light grows brighter.

And I think this question of what is our responsibility, this whole discussion about impartiality is critical because the understanding of dangers of how to avoid identification and to practice non-identification perhaps the unique thing that the Gurdjieff has to offer the contemporary world because we have a practice which allows us to get there, whereas, as far as I can tell, and I am quite ignorant on the subject but it seems to me that the other way philosophize about it and talk about it but don’t actually provide a method for how to do that. So in our interactions, we can bring the reality of that practice so people can see it is actually is a real possibility so we are not adding to the suffering. If we can be impartial witnesses with World 96 currently enveloping us, that’s not nothing. The danger is that we get so wrapped up in our reactions to it and our righteousness of our perspective that we become part of the whole mob and become the same thing. Can we be present to that and be compassionate to all the sufferings of the people who are absolutely sure they are right and up against others who are absolutely sure they are right? Can we be witness to that without becoming part of it or running away from it?

Keith: Gurdjieff doesn’t go into it in any detail in The Tales or In Search but he does allude to it and it raises a gigantic paradoxical question. What I am talking about is in the Creation story like in The Tales, out of Theomertmalogos, out of that initial thrust from within Holy Sun Absolute, he alludes to certain processes that take place that result in particles and those particles eventually become the building blocks for suns.

It is interesting to back to that part in “Purgatory” and read it again because how he has gotten there, he has bypassed a gigantic step. And that step is where did the mass come from? All of sudden we have not just energy as we know in E=MC2, we must have mass. Where did the mass come from? Where did the solidity of the Universe come from, solids that eventually end in protons and neutrons and electrons? In our world, there isn’t much

86

except those three; there are a few things that for a very short period of time are other forms of matter. But they are sometimes just partial forms of what becomes a neutron, proton or electron, or transformed directly into them.

When we look around our world, what we experience on a day-to-day basis is made of protons, electrons and neutrons. That’s the solidness of the world around us, in tress, in you and I, in everything that has solidity to it. Where did it come from? That’s the question.

At the moment of Creation, modern science has really begun to give us a much clearer picture of how that emerged and it’s just as perplexing in the picture they have come up with but it’s a picture. What I am trying to look at is: when Gurdjieff first introduces the Ray of Creation, he talks about the Ray going down and the Ray going up–the involutional octave which starts at World One and then goes to World Three, Six, etc..

But he also speaks about the World going up which is the fundamental evolutional motion within the Universe and that if anything is going to evolve, it has to start from lower and become higher. So World 96 is lowest, most dense; it is in greatest need of help, totally dependent on energies and forms of greater energy than itself. That is an absolute requirement. But that is the world we find inside the Moon. Inside the Moon we have forms of atoms, protons, neutrons and electrons that are, as far we know, absolutely fixed. They can do nothing to change their state, except radioactivity. Radioactivity is the one exception where a substance can move one notch higher in the atomic table and release a certain amount of energy in that process. So it is an evolutional motion.

ES: You are saying they do have radioactivity?

Keith: Yes, there are radioactive elements on and in the Moon sure, like there is in the Earth and all planets have it. My point here is only to emphasize that the octave in the Ray of Creation has a beginning beyond World 96. In In Search, he takes it down to World 96 and what is below that? The negative Absolute.

If so, World 96 derives from the negative Absolute. So our world of mass, that we come to understand it, that becomes protons, neutrons and electrons and it has at least some 90 component parts that pre-exist. The collision experiments that they are carrying on now in France and Switzerland are demonstrating that at enormously high levels of energy that what we consider to be a proton is really a combination of many, many things called quarks and gluons and other such things that have a lifetime of separate existence of perhaps four billionth of a second. So we don’t see them in our world; they are obviously non-existent in our world. However they are existent and they do move into other forms that are evolutional; they are moving up the Ray.

So the eventual product of that initial explosion of many sub-particles, as the Universe expands, and temperatures drop, the energy levels drop, it reaches a point where life, pho-tonically, can now move a distance and not bump into something else instantly. The Universe is so crowded early on that a beam of light starting from a source doesn’t go any distance before it gets absorbed or runs into something else or bounces off something else.

In physics, that is called the stage of the dark Universe. It’s dark because no photons can run free. We reach a point in the expansion, from that early stage where suddenly enough space appears between the component parts that are going to be all the protons, the neu-trons and electrons, going to be but are not completely that yet. They have moved far enough apart so that photons can move free. You see a picture of that when you see as they had in newspapers all around the world, the background radiation that is in effect, a photograph. It

87

is a true photograph of the early microwave background of those early photons that escape, that first move when the mass of the Universe permitted these photons to move freely.

When we come further from that state of the Absolute mass, as I said, as the temperature drops, these eventuate in protons, neutrons and electrons. And then the dance begins rela-tive to collision between those particles and by gravitation, a coalescence of those particles into which eventuates into the first sun.

So there is a lovely correspondence. When you read through that portion of “Purgatory,” there is no conflict at all between reading the Creation story that Gurdjieff spells out and the modern story that is emerging from all these high collision experiments that are being done in Switzerland and France. It is a very interesting story but one that is exciting be- cause it says that World 96 is a world of coalesced particles that are essentially powerless to assist in their own upward movement–their own evolution. They require either photonic energy or collision–like a moon. Our Moon cannot change unless it is through radiation from the Sun or another star or through collision from meteors and such bumping into it. As far as we know, that is the only way the Moon can change–that’s how they evolve.

The substance of the Moon is all of the pure, minerals, atoms, protons, electrons out there just in those forms that are elemental–that can be manufactured or created by a sun and they are coalesced in that form. That’s World 96.

World 48 is moving up the Ray of Creation; Earth is mi in the Great Ray and this is really soil. What we call soil is not powerless; it is the source of food because it derives its energizing from life forces that have come down from above, the Ray. So that entering into the substance or the materiality of pure minerals and elementals, that mixture that we refer to as soil, that is Earth, World 48. It has immense potential if it is approached and made use of but by itself it is under too many lawful biochemical restrictions that we can see that looking out there at the ground of itself, it can’t do very much. If it has seeds in it, because of the nature of the soil, the seeds can grow so you see the life can grow making use of the energies and forms that are available to it in the soil itself. This is World 48.

In us, it is World 48, literally. Those substances that make up our bones and muscles and organs and so forth they have lawful processes that are open to them, things that can hap-pen inside of each of those organ systems. They can’t go further. They are like soil, in other words, things can grow in them. They are made up of very complex elementals. They are not exactly the same as the sodiums and potassiums but they are now mixed together in such a way that their energies and forms can be made use of, to participate in the process which is higher than it–life itself.

By this way of looking at it, 48 becomes life but not quite life. It is life but it is life that is very dependent on the circumstances that make it up. There is nothing in life of itself that can change itself. It can grow itself from its pattern it can reproduce itself from its pattern but when it dies, as it must, it goes down to RE, it goes down to the Moon–less than the soil. It will go deeper because that’s its elementalness and eventually when it breaks down to its absolute components, then it is as low as it can be.

We can look on the enneagram in the Food, Air and Impressions Octaves and see that transition take place.

LF: It struck me that you said life in itself cannot change life itself. It reminds me of what we were talking about earlier about our lives. They don’t change by themselves; they just run down. We were talking about making a connection with our Work.

88

Keith: Yes, it is built into your liver to reproduce certain substances guided by our DNA. The liver is this great factory that produces protein-like substances that are used all over the body but then when you go to another organ, the pancreas does different kinds of things and the intestines do other kinds of things.

LF: I was thinking of the connections psychologically with our lives.

Keith: Well, it is the same there, just dealing with a different order of matter.

JA: Can we talk about the matter, the substance of Kesdjan and Higher Being-body in this context of evolution?

Keith: We can have a look at it, for instance looking at the three octave enneagram, when we come to do48, all 48s are the equivalent of neural images or impulses, those impulses that run up and down between brain cells, billions and billions of them. They are not technically matter, mass, but they use charge on matter that moves with respect to itself. If you have a nerve fiber, the outside of the nerve fiber has a higher concentration of sodium patterns. The inside of the nerve fiber has a higher concentration of potassium ions. Sodium and potassium are very closely related but they are different when you compare the energy of charge in their electron shells. We are dealing with tiny little bits of energy difference in the charge of the cell. But what Nature has done over billions of years is make it possible for there to be that if a sodium atom moves from the outer shell of the nerve fiber to the inner shell and simultaneously a potassium moves on the inner shell to the outer shell, there is a slight movement of charge from outside to inside. If you line up all the sodiums on the outside such that like Dominos and you start one tilting so this sodium goes and it tilts the next sodium so the sodiums begin to all flow down to the other side where the potassiums are floating upside.

So there is a tiny movement of charge from outside to inside. That charge is the neural impulse. When they test in the hospital, they put a machine on you and they can test the charge that’s moving and test whether it is moving as fast as it ordinarily should or if it has been impeded by injury. That’s the beginning. That’s the DO of this entire octave. It is all the ways in which nerve impulses which are non-mass but are immediately dependent on mass, tiny masses but masses nonetheless. They are dependent so these two worlds are very close together. But nonetheless they are impulses; they are non-mass.

From those, in our brain, begins the process that eventuates because of way in which each of our senses develop, all six of our senses, while it is dependent upon different phe-nomena in the outside world, for instance, photic stuff out there is the basis for vision, the eye but it is sound waves that is the basis for our hearing so we are not talking about the same phenomena but we are talking about a way in which the body, again through billions of years of evolution, has been able to take the energies of those exterior systems and work them into the same kind of system, the system of impulses. The photonic things that enter into the eye through the retina undergo a change that what comes out the other side of the retina and heads further into the brain are impulses. There is a transformation of the energy of the photon into impulses.

The same thing is true of sound. The sound vibrates the eardrum itself which through a series of transformations in the inner ear produces vibrations in a liquid medium which are picked up and registered by nerve cells and neural impulses are the product of that which go into the brain.

89

All of our senses have that underpinning of transformation which starts on the edge of the world of mass and then into neural impulse. From do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do–all those which are 48, 24 and 12 so far as ‘hydrogen’ category of energies–those all have to do with our intellectual activity of the physical body. Then our emotional activity or images of our emotional life–when you get beyond mi–fa of Air, mi48 are neural impulses that derive from hormones and other biochemical but the plethora of all those biochemical and DNA-determined parts of our life that condition what we call our feeling life–all mechanical, all determined by our DNA and by the function of these endocrine glands. But nonetheless, through do–re–mi that’s how they function. When they move beyond that, through the mi–fa, which doesn’t happen when we are asleep, supposedly. When we are able to bridge the mi–fa of Air, one way of marking that is that this is the transition from self to self-other–from self, which is do–re–mi of Air, it is all self feeling, self emotion. When I hit the mi–fa I am into self-other, my relationship with other people, with my family, with my children, with my friends, perhaps with everybody, with animals, with the trees with the world–this is all in this arena of self-other.

do–re–mi of Impressions has to do essentially with our intellectual life. The do of it is all of what runs our mind as we all think of it, with all of its amazing capacity. But every human being who walks the planet has that machinery and it functions for the most part very well. When it is highly trained and given experience then we see progress in the do–re–mi of Impressions Octave. That has to do with a growth in reason which would take us a bit sideways to talk very far into it. The important point to emphasize though is that here we are talking electromagnetic forms of energy. All of the do–re–mi of Impressions, the fa–sol–la of Air and the sol–la–si of the physical body––those are all neural, all electromagnetic impulses, all of them. They are not part of the physical body. That is what we really should be able to settle for ourselves rather quickly. My thoughts are not my physical body; my feelings are not my physical body.

CC: In some of the Gurdjieff exercises we are doing, we are working with the breath. We understand we are taking in oxygen and nutrients for the physical body. At a certain point in the food diagram, air enters and completes that combustion process. When we place our attention on the air now we are elevating this air to a different function. In so many of the exercises with directing this attention mingled with the air in some sort of way and now we are directing this to neural centers in the body. Does this actually have an effect? In my experience something is going on but are we actually transforming something? Are we feeding the neural world in this way?

Keith: Good question. Does anybody have an impression?

CC: Do these exercises work? [laughter]

Keith: Briefly, absolutely, yes. We mentioned all the 12s (mi12 of Impressions Octave, sol12 Emotional Octave,si12 of physical body) have to do with attention, with the quality of energy that we can kind of glom together and call “attention.” In Life is real, only then, when ‘I am’” Gurdjieff refers to as those which are the same in all three parts. The attention is the same in each of our brains or in each of those parts of the body that those brains are the directors of.

If you bring 12 into a triad, if you bring 48 up against a triad of 12, what is the result? You get a 24. So, if we take a 48, a do–re–mi of Air, this is an elemental, chemical feeling, a mechanical feeling state and we expose that to a 12, how do we do that? By bringing atten-tion through the air to our feelings.

90

The result, again, quantity varying with the intensity and the surety of our own practice, how well we are able to do this, how much attention we are able to focus and concentrate on, but, in any event, the result will be the creation of a certain quantity of fa24. mi48 is in the Air Octave. Continuing its octave, mi48 will move to fa24. It is fa24 that will be the result of attention brought up against mi48. As 24, it is the enzyme that makes it possible to produce 24. Does that help?

CC: That’s the mechanics, the symbology that I understand, I see.

Keith: The other side of that is practice, repetition. In reading Early Talks, in almost every talk Gurdjieff talks about repetition. You must do this again and again and again. It takes a long time. I didn’t realize how important this was until here, several weeks ago, I tried to explain to an adult, a person who has a college education, and I thought, for what he was talking about, that it would be helpful if I could get across to him a notion that had to do with sensing his body. Five minutes into this, I became clearly aware that it was being foolish on my part to even make the effort because I was trying in those few minutes to get across what took me years to reach a point where I could say that I am now sensing my right big toe and my left ear and my right shoulder. It took a long time before that became crystal clear. For people in ordinary life, there is no need for that. Why would you want to do a foolish thing like that?

So until we have some notion of how we can make use of the physical world and the physical body in terms of building more acute sensation, more acute awareness of that part of the body, that we wouldn’t put the effort into it.

JJ: I was interested in this idea of practice can have an effect. For 15 years, I taught the Alexander technique. These are people who are seeking some sort of relief and here is an opportunity where you teach people sensation for a mechanical reason. You were talking about the person you trying to teach sensation to but I taught sensation because body awareness allows them to use the body mechanically, in an advantageous way, such as, you don’t ride the clutch in a car because it wears out the clutch and if you are wearing tension in some place, it wears out the shoulder.

So there are ways you can transfer that and who knows where that goes. It’s not going to go into using sensation because one wants to be anything other than one’s self benefit. I really like the idea of being able to change–that came up when we were talking about “I can’t be present all the time but I am present when I need to be.” That is a training that not only changes the physicality but also makes it a practice to be present. That has enormous conse-quences.

CE: How long does it take for the exercises to have an effect? [laughter] Does waking up early have any effect on the practice?

Keith: I don’t see how anybody could comment; it is so individual. I could see something with great skill or great being like Gurdjieff who could create an experience for someone in that moment but we certainly would not be in that category. So how soon, it depends.

CE: To do it rightly or consciously, how many times a day? Once, or 3 or 4 times or early in the morning?

JA: How many times did you breathe today?

91

CE: Is that the answer?

JA: It would be hard to exceed that number, wouldn’t it.

GB: Are you talking about the Morning preparation exercises?

CE: What is the best time of the day and for how long?

GB: All I can say is my own experience. I find it is very useful to do those exercises first thing. If I get up at 5 then I do it at 10 past 5, whatever it is, immediately, before any other distractions. That is the first thing. The second thing is I can’t say this number of repetitions does something. What I can say I will work on this exercise for awhile then I come back to it maybe a year later, maybe two years later and work on it again, I very often find that something has shifted, sometimes I do, sometimes, I don’t. I keep going at these exercises. I’ve been doing it for a long time.

CE: Every day?

GB: Not every day, sometimes I blow it but my aim is most days, nearly every day. I am not saying occasionally, I say to heck with it and I wish I hadn’t. If I don’t do it my day is different; it is an inferior day. But I don’t think there is a rule. All I can say is for myself is I can see a clear benefit of having worked on those things regularly, regularly, regularly. But first thing is a really good thing. Would you say that? [general agreement]

So if you ask, when should I do this? Do it as quickly as you can when you wake up. And once a day is fine. Better to do it for 20 minutes with a lot of attention then sit there for an hour mostly asleep.

DK: We were always told much of what is being said but also after you bath but before you eat.

GB: In my experience if I am sitting with somebody else, not even doing the same exercise but sitting at the same time, then I can go for longer because we help each other. One other thing is don’t worry if you don’t see any results.

SM: How did you find all this out?

GB: By just having a go at it.

SM: You asked a question only you can know the answer for.

GB: But you can have encouragement.

CE: I ask to find out if I am on the right track, maybe I am doing something not correct. I just wanted some help from those who have worked for a long time.

GB: There is a Turkish proverb, “To him who makes one step toward me, I will take ten towards him.” If we take one step in that direction, we get ten steps taken towards us. I really believe that. We make a small effort and we get a disproportionally large amount of help.

CE: You mean help from above.

GB: Yes. If we just lie around doing nothing, we are not going to get help but we get a disproportionate amount of help with the efforts we make. I am absolutely sure of that from my experience. In other words, the Work is actually on our side.

92

March/Spring gathering 2017 ~ Sunday Morning

[In the process of adding Steffan Soule via Skype, we remembered the recent death of Barbara’s father and her grief. The recent death of another close relative of one of us was brought to our attention.]

Keith: We sit and we talk about Kesdjan and the inevitability of death but that’s not the event and you experienced a big piece of the event and then we realize this is different; this touches me in a place that in my ordinary state, I don’t. I talk about it but I don’t really touch it. That is important to recognize and for Steffan.

We start this session with a very short reading from Beelzebub’s Tales, pp 130-31:

“You must first be told that there exist in the Universe generally two ‘kinds’ or two ‘principles’ of the duration of being-existence.

“The first kind or first ‘principle’ of being-existence which is called ‘Foolasnitamnian’ is proper to the existence of all three-brained beings arising on any planet of our Great Universe, and the fundamental aim and sense of the existence of these beings is that there must proceed through them the transmutation of cosmic substances necessary for what is called the ‘common-cosmic Trogoautoegocratic-process.’

“And it is according to the second principle of being-existence that all one-brained and two-brained beings in general exist wherever they may arise. . .

“And the sense and aim of the existence of these beings, also, consist in this, that there are transmuted through them the cosmic substances required not for purposes of a common-cosmic character, but only for that solar system or even only for that planet alone, in which and upon which these one-brained and two-brained beings arise.

“In any case for the further elucidation of the strangeness of the psyche of those three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, you must know this also, that in the beginning, after the organ Kundabuffer with all its properties had been removed from their presences, the duration of their existence was according to the ‘Foolasnitamnian’ principle, that is to say, they were obliged to exist until there was coated in them and completely perfected by reason what is called the ‘body-Kesdjan,’ or, as they themselves later began to name this being-part of theirs – of which, by the way, contemporary beings known only by hearsay – the ‘Astral-body.’

“And so, my boy, when later, for reasons of which you will learn in the course of my further tales, they began to exist already excessively abnormally, that is to say, quite unbecomingly for three-brained beings, and when in consequence of this they had on the one hand ceased to emanate the vibrations required by Nature for the maintenance of the separated fragments of their planet, and, on the other hand, had begun, owing to the chief peculiarity of their strange psyche, to destroy beings of other forms of their planet, thereby gradually diminishing the number of sources required for this purpose, then Nature Herself was compelled gradually to actualize the presences of these three-brained beings according to the second principle, namely, the principle

93

‘Itoklanoz,’ that is, to actualize them in the same way in which She actualize one-brained and two-brained beings in order that the equilibrium of the vibrations required according to quality and quantity should be attained.

Keith: The implications contained in these quotes are pretty impressive, scary even. How do you understand that? How do you understand this principle Foolasnitamnian? There is a great deal of emphasis placed on how difficult is the creation of a perfected Kesdjan Body. Gurdjieff makes mention of this frequently throughout. And yet, here he is putting down to a principle that applies to every three-brained being. This is a very high order of lawfulness, this principle. What do you make of that in the line of your life? How do you understand that? Is it something that you say, “well I’ll think about that later,” or do we try to confront that now? What does that bring up for you associatively, what kinds of issues, questions?

ES: It is interesting that he chooses these two words that they have in their sound (I don’t know the etymology of them) an onomatopoeic description of some kind of indication of what these are like. For the Foolasnitamnian principle that is this smoothness, a flow.

The other thing that is interesting in the reading I just heard was that he mentioned this word “astral.” We have astrological science of astrology which gives an indication of what a right life can be, what is our path through life. If we follow that path through life, it is not going to be without difficulties of course but it is going to be progressive; it is going to have a flow. If we don’t live like that; if we don’t live, among other things, according to our Conscience, then we have this “Itoklanoz” [pronounced stiffly]. Itoklanoz was put there because artificial shocks then get created to wake us up to produce these energies which otherwise we wouldn’t be doing. So we have accidents. We live according to the law of accident.

Keith: Certainly, the most impressive first thing about that seems to be what you pointed out to begin with and that is the flow that you get, a consonance of sounds from “Foolasnitamnian” [spoken slowly] and from Itoklanoz [sharply]; it is chop-chop. It has that effect on you when you are saying it, that there is something broken up about this as you properly point out. Something comes in to change the direction so there isn’t smoothness, a flow as there is in Foolasnitamnian which tells us a good deal about the principle.

But I think we should, in a sense, with appropriate concern for the welfare of one- and two-brained beings, also try to see the other side of the lawfulness here. It is lawful that they cannot form a Kesdjan Body because they don’t have the machinery; they don’t have the brained-ness that makes that possible. So it puts them in a position of us, properly, with regard to one- and two-brained beings where we must feel compassion that they do not have that possibility, through no fault but simply because they lack the brain-ness.

JJ: It always strikes me when us three-brained beings look at the rest of the world. There is a line in Genesis that mankind is given dominion over the animals, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. People have taken that as the right to do whatever they want. Dominating, from which “dominion” comes is lordship and what do we think of lords that kill their subjects and take their land. We think of them as monsters and Hitlers and Pol Pots. Mandy sent me this fabulous TED Talk about the relationship of trees in the northern forests. They are not without intelligence. The other life forms are not without intelligence. Gurdjieff said we have to love animals and we owe them something which is a stewardship.

94

We become bestial without that relationship, less than three-brained, monsters in our own way. I think this is a process that is happening.

GB: What you are saying is right about our attitude toward two-brained beings but what this passage always says to me that I am living like a two-brained being. That is the problem; it’s not that the two-brained beings are doing a bad job; they are doing a great job. I am living like a two-brained being and doing a lousy job. I call myself a three-brained being but I don’t live like one. That’s what strikes me as being the important part of this thing. My mother once asked why was their dog so uncritically loving? It’s because she is not subject to temptation. It’s easy. My problem is that I am living like a two-brained being and it is not proper for me to live like a two-brained being. We have to do the two-brained part because we have killed too many two-brained beings ourselves for no reason at all maybe and so we are obliged to pay for that by being two-brained beings ourselves. That’s the warning I get out of this. I am not actually a three-brained being; in my ordinary life.

TS: What I heard today and find hopeful, is that he says the Foolasnitamnian is based upon a three-brained being whose “… fundamental aim and sense of the existence of these beings is that there must proceed through them the transmutation of cosmic substances necessary for what is called the ‘common-cosmic Trogoautoegocratic-process.’” That is, (and he goes into great detail in the next chapter, “Arch-absurd”) taking in the three foods consciously, relatively speaking. So this certainly takes it out of ‘are we this or that’? When we are striving to take in the three foods consciously, we are living in the Foolasnitamnian principle. It is interesting that he says the principle Itoklanoz, the sense and aim of existence is for “that planet alone” which I think is a beautiful resonance with Autoegocrat, “that planet alone,” for me alone. The principles seem more fluid than I had thought of previously.

What do you think, Keith? It seems like he is saying it depends upon the fundamental aim and sense of the existence of the individual being.

Keith: And still and all, the Foolasnitamnian principle puts all of us in that circumstance until we perfect a Kesdjan Body. Does this raise any other questions in your mind? How are you going to get there? On the one hand, I see the line of my life and I see that, in the not too distant future, it is very likely to end. But the principle is that I have to live until I have perfected a Kesdjan Body. That is the law. How do I do that? What questions does that raise?

TS: When he says the duration of being existence is he talking about literally a lifetime or is he talking about those moments of being existence. I get the feeling that this is out of our ordinary time, not necessarily dependent upon one lifetime of the planetary body.

Keith: Ok, give that some clarity, what do you mean by that?

TS: I guess it’s the question of what does he mean about the duration of being existence. Is he talking about “mere” existence, the lifetime of the planetary body? Or he is talking about an existence when we actually exist, when we actually are? I don’t know, it’s just a question.

HB: I am struck when reading the description of Itoklanoz because it has many what appear to me to be positive and what I associate more with my experience with people than with animals. When he lays it out in the manner he does as being for a description of the principle of one- and two-brained. I see so much a description of human life that for me that has you looking to eliminate what you might otherwise want to put in the category of Kesdjan as

95

something you would have thought was uniquely three-brained perhaps, where no, it’s not like that principle is embedded in the family structure of two-brained beings also so it is not that, it must be something more.

Keith: One must have an alternative presented in which circumstance we make a choice. In other words, if it is all coming from our DNA and we look and treasure the familialness that we see manifested in two-brained beings. And we see that and we have value for it. We say this is family life as it should be even among people.

But what we don’t realize when we say that is that the animal does that in a totally mechanical way. It does it that way because it has no basis for doing it on any other level. That’s the way it’s put together. When we do it that way, that’s acting like a two-brained being. When we do it with consciousness, only then, do we do it in accordance with the Foolasnitamnian principle or the requirements of a Foolasnitamnian existence. If it is not consciously then it doesn’t count because we are simply a two-brained being. No complement is necessary for us to be familial, for instance, and to be nurturing of our young. There is no plus in that. When you read the newspapers or watch the television or see what efforts are being made all over the world, the vast majority of that doesn’t involve choice, doesn’t involve consciousness–it is simply being a two-brained being in those circumstances. So we can strip away a great deal of what happens out there in the world if we think of it as what human beings should be like–no, no, not like that.

The contrariness of that was shown in the very first story that we read several days ago when Fritz Peters told the story about Gurdjieff and his feeding the people in the immediate neighborhood because he wasn’t acting like a two-brained being. He made a choice. He chose to go to the door and to invite these people. He chose make plans for having in his storehouse of goods foods and other kinds of things. He did not have to do that. That was not a familial two-brained kind of action on his part. This is Foolasnitamnian.

LF: In this reading it sounds like Foolasnitamnian gradually becoming Itoklanoz but where am I when I am hating somebody.? I am neither one nor the other. I am in a state that animals don’t go in. So I am in an extra category it seems; I am moving somewhere but I am in a negative state. I am not even reptilian, I don’t even have that much.

Keith: Okay, stay with it though. What does it point towards? It points towards the most gigantic issue that is out front for each of us and that is our egoism. The egoistic demonstration, making use of a power which is God’s to act from oneself. If one turns that around and I act only and exclusively for myself, I am neither one-brained, two-brained nor three-brained. I am egoistic I, which is a different ball of wax altogether. He doesn’t take it up here. It is not Foolasnitamnian nor Itoklanoz. It is on the road to Hasnamuss, which he, again, gives very careful descriptions of a little later in The Tales when he talks about first-, second-, third-degree Hasnamuss and finally full degree Hasnamuss. That is how I would understand the different there. We take ourselves out of consideration of either of these principles when we act from our egoism.

ES: It’s funny how this resonates with what is in the Sermon on the Mount because Jesus says “Love thine enemies” –it’s everybody loves their family; everybody has their family love but to love your enemies is another thing. If you look at it in terms of this lens, you have to be conscious to love your enemies.

Keith: It is a requirement, absolutely.

96

GB: Isn’t the problem with being a three-brained being precisely that we can go wrong? To be a bad three-brained being, a Hasnamuss for example, isn’t that still three-brained? Our two-brained dog wasn’t tempted, part of our conditioned of being three-brained is that we have these choices all the time which the dog doesn’t have. We are still three-brained in front of that choice and sometimes we choose rightly and sometimes we don’t. Does that stop us being three-brained at the point if we make the wrong choice?

Keith: That’s a good point, important point.

GB: Then we have to carry the consequences of that in our three-brained-ness.

Keith: Because there is an alternative and there is sufficient attention and intelligence to know that there is a choice. When you don’t know that there is a choice, there is no blame–whatever is, is. But if there is a choice and we make that choice, that is what I was trying to point out.

ES: Would you say we live in and out according to the Foolasnitamnian principle?

Keith: Moment by moment, yes, moment by moment.

MB: When I have a taste of the Foolasnitamnian principle, it is when I have had an experience in the daytime regarding setting one’s intentions as in the reading from The Tales to do something where there is an affirmation, a denial and a reconciling force. And probably a lot of us have had a taste of that in our lives. When I have a taste of that in my day, when I have set something to do there has been a denial and the reconciling and something has happened it feels like getting a taste of being more conscious and then I feel like there has been some energy transformation. My state is different; I’ve moved out of Itoklanoz principle which is just my regular day’s sleep. The balance of the three forces.

Keith: Is anybody tempted to see any correspondence here or does the issue come up about the contrast between the Foolasnitamnian and the Itoklanoz to Ouspensky’s apparent identification with recurrence? Do you make anything of that notion?

SM: That is the most straightforward conclusion. If you can’t complete it within your lifetime you have to have a second lifetime and if you can’t complete in a second, you have third one. That is a logical outcome of this thinking.

Keith: I just wanted you to expand it enough so that if anybody had something to share, they could share into it.

SM: The most logical result for not completing a Higher Being-body in one lifetime is to have a second lifetime so recurrence is the most logical to that kind of thinking.

LF: Not to me. It is just as possible to me that you die and it’s a dead end. I don’t know. I haven’t died yet but whether it is connected to something else I don’t know.

DC: Maybe both are true. Perhaps you have to have earned the right to try again.

JJ: When it’s gets into this I sort of go, “whoo, whoo, whoo” and I come to the principle that Gurdjieff says which is you have got to test it for yourself and why speak about something that’s completely speculative? Why even go there? There is certainly enough in the Work we can test and we can do and we make efforts towards and experience and see results–the “Resulzarion” results of efforts. My head feels like it is going to explode. I am sorry, I am just a practical.

97

FB: I think there is something that is very practical in the sense of this. When I think of what was said about seeing one has the same pattern of who one is and that it is played out over and over again in his life that makes sense relative to my life. I started out and my patterns sort of draw events toward me and those events play out and I end up in the same place I was ten years ago and I go, “oh, I have been here before.” Sometimes I get the sense that I am reincarnating this pattern over and over again because something in me hasn’t developed to an extent that it is has transcended the pattern and has some independence of it.

I don’t know if this is what Ouspensky was talking about but I get that sense of dejá vu, I’ve been here before in very big patterns in my life where I see things.

JJ: Haven’t you felt that in the training that is this Work there are different choices? The patterns are still there but that doesn’t change, that’s just personality but there is a way we come to see ourselves that I don’t have to choose that; I have an expanded moment of choice. I’ve trained myself and I can go, “I know where that road is going to lead me.” We can be present to ourselves in a new way.

FB: I can say that, sure. The pattern still plays out. There it is.

JJ: That’s the ingredients of your cookie and we all have our cookies.

DC: In my work and in my life I have had a number of personal experiences that suggest to me that there are many of these things that we are talking about simultaneously. The death of my mother showed me a lot. She was an orphan who had attached, instead of people, to the material world; she was very attached there. When she died, her caregiver opened the back door (she had just died a few moments ago) for the little dog to go out. A desert wren flew into the room and flew around the room three times and at the next moment, the hospice nurse opened the front door and the wren flew out. Then the wren was there. I was there for a month packing stuff up and the wren was always trying to get back into the house.

I have wondered about that. What’s come up for me is the Hindu idea of reincarnating but I wonder if the bird didn’t connect with my mother, in some way, who had done so little developmental work because the wren would sit on the window sill and peck at the window and want to get back.

LF: At the very least it is an excellent myth.

DC: At the very least! and then I have an early memory, my very first memory. I guess I was coming down, it’s a black and white memory, and I am gathering bundles to myself. For a long time I was at Claymont when I finally realized all those bundles were the bad things that were going to happen to me but then I realized, oh no, that is the Work. Thank you, the helping hand. It’s true we don’t know what we are talking about but we shouldn’t deny any of it because, to some extent, it all is.

JJ: It’s not a matter of denial. I practice very deliberately, non-belief and as much as I would like there to be ET and reincarnation and how comforting I would find that, I refuse to be comforted. I refuse to allow comfort into my life because I find that discomfort keeps me awake more.

MB: I wanted to share with you my experience. My Mum died last May. I had a similar experience with a robin. The robin came my mother’s window. Over the course of three days the robin came to every window in the house. The robin was very content; there didn’t

98

seem to be disturbance but it came the bedroom and for three mornings it would wake me, tapping on the window. It went to two other windows and our bedroom and kitchen and bathroom window; it circulated the whole house for three days. I wrote to my cousin in Ireland. She said it’s very strong belief in Ireland that souls will come as birds, particularly the robin. When she was dying, I opened the window I named all of her family who had passed on and said, “Mum, everyone is waiting for you and Jesus is waiting for you and everybody has their arms wide open. So fl y Mum, fl y.” We said the Rosary and she went. It was very beautiful. On the third day the robin was here I told the robin that I was fi ne and she could go.

DC: Perhaps there was concern. The truth is we don’t know but not to deny any possibility.

MB: I think it is a matter of being open. Like you say, to be open to it, trying to be impartial. Do I know that that is really true? Not really. But could it be? I don’t know.

SM: What I am hearing from both of your stories, I wouldn’t end that with I don’t know. You cannot have certainty but there is defi nitely something known here, intuitively. This is not the same thing as not knowing.

MB: That’s true. That was my experience.

Keith: I have to add an exclamation point to my wife’s because the same thing happened to me, so there is another witness. When you were not there, it came to the window of our bedroom and I was the only one there. There is that confi rmation of experience at least.

Some of you may be able to call to mind the unfolding of the Symbol form that we make considerable use of.

With the unfolding from do of the Lateral Octave, which is sol of the Great Octave, starting from that do we have the unfolding of the Lateral Octave. The si in that unfolding is World 24, from 12 to 24. After that comes la–sol–fa. The la–sol–fa makes ultimate sense in seeing that as Microcosmos, the first life that appears on Earth–that’s la. sol is Tetartocosmos, multi-celled life and we have all kinds of multi-celled life still with us,

14

Tetartocosmoses

Microcosmoses

LA

la

sido

do

SOLFA

Kesdjan

one-brained

si

sol

fa

three-brained

HigherBeing-body

two-brained

do

SOL

LA

MI

two-brained

one-brainedone-brained

sol

two-brained

sisisi

FA

sisi

FA

KesdjanKesdjan

si

Kesdjan

three-brainedthree-brained

Kesdjan

HigherBeing-body

Higher

sido

SOL

sisi

FA

Being-bodyHigher

Being-body

siHigher

three-brained

Kesdjan

si

laone-brained

faMI

one-brained

MIla

one-brained

fa

one-brained

la

LA dodododo

sol

la

— 6 Laws

— 12 Laws

— 24 Laws

— 48 Laws

Involutional Evolutional

do–si–la–sol–fa—fa–sol–la–si–do

Lateral Octave

invo

luti

onal

evol

utio

nal

will this illus work? thought you could look before I send to KB

Insert un-folding to W12

99

especially sea creatures. fa brings a very interesting circumstance because it is still Tetar-tocosmos, multi-celled life but now it is multi-celled life and, on the one hand, unfolds towards the world of plants. But the same unfolding of Tetartocosmos at that point in the Great Ray in the Lateral Octave, as that unfolds, it also unfolds to brained life. This is the point I wanted to emphasize because it is so interesting relative to the question we were exploring about Itoklanoz and Foolasnitamnian.

LF: And this is two fas, right?

Keith: Two fas, right. In the la–sol–fa, there is one fa that opens into the whole of plant life and the other is the opening into brained life. The underpinning in plant life is in photosynthesis. This is the quite remarkable–more than remarkable–capacity evolved within the lawfulnesses of the Lateral Octave that is able to use the energy of photosynthesis, the energy of the photon–the photon, the sun. It uses that energy to fix carbons together and how it does that is still one of the great mysteries. We can state that this is what happens and you can put it in the laboratory and show exactly the steps and the stages that are taking place and what you end up with is a change of atom carbons, which of course is the whole underpinning for all plant life. That photosynthesis is a remarkable, cosmic solution to using the sunlight to be an expansive influence on life because the whole of the plant kingdom emerges from all manner of plants.

However, we posed that other fa unfolding. The other fa unfolding also makes use of electromagnetic forces of the photon, ultimately, because it builds up on the fact that all atoms (and certainly all molecules but even down to atoms) have on this surface a degree of charge. It may be unmanifested if it is a completed circle of electrons in the outer shell or it may be open to interaction if it has less than a full complement of electrons in its outer shell. In any case, we have a situation where there is charge, which is electromagnetic in nature, on the exterior bounding membrane of the atom or molecule. Building on that principle alone, that there is a difference in charge we begin to see, for instance, the tendency of one atom to easily attach itself to another on the basis of the charge that is there on the exterior of that particular atom. Same thing applies to molecules. When you take them as a totality there are variable charges on the surface of that molecule and all of those carry the potential for entering into interaction with other molecules.

From that potential, which is just that– it is an immense, infinite perhaps, potential–comes the gradual, preferential utilization of charge in order to direct whether or the mo- lecule will hook up preferentially with one kind of molecule but not another kind. That de-gree of preferences is what leads eventually taking two, perhaps two and half billion years, but it leads eventually to what we understand now is an early form of a neural impulse where the charge, as we talked about last night, gets passed from one atom to another. And that impulse which is non-mass–it is not specially a massed based interaction; it is an impulse that is carried between mass-based objects. From that neural impulse, we get the first un-derpinnings of what leads to a brain. That is the very beginning of this unfolding from fa. The one fa through photosynthesis into the world of plants, carbon based. The other fa unfolding into what eventually becomes a neural impulse and the underpinning to a brain.

Those unfoldings, the first with plants because plants precede brained beings, that opens the door to a brained being. You’ll see on the illustration that the do on the Great Ray octave, I’ve outlined this wedge which is a continuation of the sides of World One that outlines a series of triads and includes those triads within this opening. The do – si – la – sol–fa follows life forms: Microcosmos, Tetartocosmos and plants. When the unfolding is in

100

the other direction, we understand that as one-brained beings. What happens when that triadic unfolding takes place is that the triad that results, that fa, is now included within the larger triad that is an extension from World One. I understand that extension as being an emanation from World One that has to do with consciousness, attention–so that enters into all of the triads that unfold from that but it begins with one-brained beings. We don’t see the possibilities in terms of intention and consciousness in non-brained beings.

Gurdjieff, in “Purgatory” chapter, takes this up very specifically as we talked about last night when he speaks about life forms when the requirements of staying alive reach a point where they are not so absolutely impressed in every moment; there is a momentary gap in the urgency of staying alive. When these ultimately self-protective things, when a little space begins to emerge, what Gurdjieff calls automatic independent movement begins to appear this is where endlessness re-enters the Creation, not with the Divine Will Power, that’s prohibited, but with the Divine Consciousness.

The inference is that endlessness becomes aware of one-brained beings and he sees (as he says in the chapter) the possibility that this could be built on. he could build on brained-ness in order to assist eventually in the administration of the enlarging world. A being could come with that capacity.

So, again, he undertakes that process but he undertakes it in the next four or five pages where he unfolds all of these steps and basic requirements for building a Kesdjan and then a Higher Being-body. But when he is talking about Kesdjan, he is talking about the same thing that we were talking about earlier so far as Foolasnitamnian, in other words, what are the requirements for this. He takes this up in some detail in these several pages.

JA: In having those passages read I wonder whether you might be interested in talking about that exact thing. What is the possibility for Kesdjan and for Higher Being-body in the maintenance of the enlarging world after the death of the physical body? In other words, what is there possible for them at that point? What is there possible for us presumably under those circumstances? To be simplistic about it, it seems if the physical body is the producer of attention and you don’t have a physical body, whatever substances that could come into nourish those other bodies after that would have to come from somewhere else and I am wondering if that was a direction you were interested in.

Keith: We may get there. If we go back to the opening steps in the Lateral Octave, especially to the la-sol-fa, when the la unfolds, it will then unfold to sol which will unfold in two directions, two fas.

The interesting part of this is that when this unfolds, when you go from la to sol to fa you have outlined three sides of a six-sided figure. You have unfolded the triad twice over its beginning. The next unfolding according to the established unfolding will be to two-brained beings because this first one over here is one-brained being then when it unfolds it will unfold back to two-brained beings and then further to three-brained beings.

So we will start from Microcosmos, Tetartocosmos then one-brained beings, two-brained beings, three-brained beings. As Gurdjieff describes, when Kesdjan is complete, the bearer of the Kesdjan has its own Law of Three. So it is not the Law of Three of the physical body. It is a different Law of Three deriving from a higher World, namely in this instance, from World 24. So there has to be a diminishment in lawfulness from 48 orders of law to 24 orders of law which means that, in each instance, half the laws of World 48 have to overlap and become a law of World 24. That’s how you get there by those laws unfolding into two

101

different laws, from 12 to 24 or 24 to 48. Now, in order to get back from World 48 to 24, we have to infold two laws into a simultaneity and we have gone into that in the recent past to some degree.

The point I am raising is that when you take the do–si–la–sol–fa in the unfolding of the Lateral Octave, what you have when you reach the point of three-brained beings, you have put six triads around a circle. It feeds back on itself. The fi nal unfolding to three-brained beings, if you were to fold it again just according to how the triads are set up, it would fold back into si of the Lateral Octave.

The unfolding from three-brained beings away from World 48 to 24 is the direction that would elaborate the laws governing a Kesdjan existence. That would be away from this complex of six laws that we have outlined to get to three-brained beings because then two of the laws of World 48 have to infold and become simultaneous in World 24. That happens three times so it happens that six lawfulnesses fold into three and we have its own Law of Three being characteristic of a Kesdjan Body.

What I fi nd interesting to explore, relative to what we were talking about before, is that, if you don’t form a Kesdjan Body–you’ve got this lawfulness in the Lateral Octave. You’ve got the do–si and from si–la–sol–fa and then it goes up. The octave turns and instead of going down (down would be to go to the Earth in the Great Ray) it turns upward from that fa at two-brained beings to sol and then to la. That completes the six triads that come back on themselves, because you are going to infold away from these six triads to form the two triads that coalesce in World 24.

If you don’t form a Kesdjan, and you have this circle of lawfulnesses, the do–si–la–sol–fa–sol–la and it falls back into the si of the Lateral Octave.

infolding ??

15

DOSI

SOL FA

LA MI

RE

6

48

48

24

12

3

3 31

6

6

6 6

6

12

12

12

1212 12 12

12

12

12

12

48 48

24 24 sol

sol

fa

la

si

sido

do la

fa

KBHBB

3BB

3BB

12do

la

KB

HBB

3BB

3BB

si

KB: Kesdjan Body3BB: Three-brained Being

: Higher-being BodyHBB

Enneagram ofThree-BrainedBeings

Enneagrammatic circleof the Kesdjan Body

102

MB: Which seems to correspond Mr. Bennett’s “soul stuff pool.”

Keith: That’s the point. Bennett’s “soul stuff pool” is about the forms and energies that are the building blocks of a Kesdjan Body. If you don’t form a Kesdjan, and each of us has come through this cycle, do–si–la–sol–fa–sol–la, at la let’s say, we die and we haven’t formed a completed Kesdjan; we haven’t infolded from inside that cycle outside. If we don’t, then we continue to fold and we fold back into the Lateral Octave but at the level of si.

What is si of the Lateral Octave? do is clearly the creative power of the sun. What is si?

LF: Something to do with possibility?

Keith: Yes and it must have a form implicit, right? It is the possibility that it may be this, it may be this…. But it must have a form, in other words, there has to be some kind of outline

3

la

Two-brained

Kesdjan Body

One-brained

Surplanetary

do

si

Higher Being-body

One-celled life

The Lateral Octave

fa

invo

luti

onal

evol

utio

nalThree-brained

Tetartocosmoses

dosi

sol

solla fa

Lateral Octave

do–si–la–sol–fa—fa–sol–la–si–do

Ray of Creation

DO–SI–LA–SOL–FA–MI–RE

DO

SILA LA

LA

LA LA

SOL

SOL SOL

FA

MI MIMI

MIRERE

FAFA

LA

SI SI

Laws of Brained Life

SILA

LA

SILA

SI

LA

SOL

LA

LA

LA

SOL

LA

LALA

LALA

SOLSOL SOL

SOLSOLSOL do

FAFAFAFA

FAFA

MIRE

MIMI

FA

si

MIMIMIMI

MIMI

la

sol

fa

fa

lasi

do

sol

103

or architectural description of the way in which the forces have to unfold, what we would call the “pattern,” that occurs immediately after fertilization in the act of germination of a human being, that when the sperm and the egg and fertilization takes place, in that moment, there is a beginning realization of a pattern. What I am saying is that the pattern comes from the si of the Lateral Octave.

LF: But not the substance itself.

Keith: Not the substance.

LF: Just the pattern.

Keith: In a way it is the substance it is in the world of atoms and molecules but not in the world of cells so we could say it is inside the world of cells, in the world of possibilities but the possibilities have to have a descriptive lawfulness to the law, a series of quantum equations, perhaps, that say “this will be a two-brained being –– this will be a one-brained being –– this will be a human being” and it will be of such-and-such structure and so on.

LF: So people who are interested in reincarnation would be interested in that too.

DC: Was that si the place where endlessness became aware? Where consciousness and awareness entered or different?

Keith: Different.

ES: I am wondering if that si has anything to do with creativity. If you look at the sun as given a task. The sun’s task is to spiritualize the planets. So that is the fertilization, the si is the point where that gets fertilized. It doesn’t have a body yet but that’s what happens at fertilization, the pattern enters in.

Keith: And the patterns have to cover all possibilities because we are going to unfold the whole octave.

JJ: But even in that pattern when you have some sort of insemination, there are anomalies. I was reading about cancer. Most cancers they say are caused by life style but over 60% of them are just random mutations. We are looking at a pattern which has all this possibility of random mutation and distortion and failure to express this gene or that trait. So, even if we are looking at human beings, obviously the pattern is not fixed.

ES: That goes right along with the si-do interval as being fraught with hazard, doesn’t it?

JJ: It does but when we talk about brained beings, when I look at a tree – no brain on the plant side but there is intelligence and community and cooperation; there are warnings they send each other through the mycelia and so you have a community that is able to communicate and be cooperative. It is the same about snails and work cooperatively; they have known to go over to a wounded friend and slime them with healing slime. There is all this intelligence and yet we refer to them as without brains in a way that I rebel against that. The distortions of three-brained beings make them less than animals. What I am looking for is a little equivalency in these terms.

Keith: The arena of potential that is there at the do–si of the Lateral Octave is nearly infinite, in other words, what will enter into the life forms as they emerge, all the way down to one-celled life (one-celled life, after all, is the most versatile of all life forms it has to be)

104

all the rest comes from it. So, certainly, there is vast intelligence. There is a tremendous difference between intelligence, which is what you are referring to, and attention.

JJ: Yes, I understand that.

Keith: So, my point is that if you do not develop a Kesdjan Body in this lifetime and you come to your point of death, then what happens to the “stuff” to the soul that has been perhaps worked on up to a certain point–or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it hasn’t been worked on at all. But there is some what Bennett refers to as “soul stuff,” soul stuff being some of the form, some of the patterns and some of the actual forms, the electrons and material forms that will participate in the world of Kesdjan.

What that specific form is, the symbolic representation doesn’t tell us but, for me, there is a strange echo here of much that Ouspensky says in terms of recurrence because, if you recur, do you recur as a three-brained being? This is a really interesting question. Am I going to recur as myself?

The first thing we have to realize about the Kesdjanian world is that all selves disappear. If you haven’t come upon this yet, come upon it. The world of self-other is not a world of selves that have stickers on them and say, “I am so-and-so.” It is not that way. We do not have a name in the world of Kesdjan. Self-other is different, totally different.

In the Kesdjanian world, you don’t have a name. You can’t say, “My soul in development.” You can’t say that. I know it is disconcerting; it is disconcerting for me too but it seems the laws don’t allow that. We are both many and one at the same time.

If we infold into the soul stuff pool then we are available to be born again, available to come back but in what form, what is preconditioned to happen?

ZB: There is something about the pattern.

Keith: That would have to be a major qualification for what could happen is in the pattern.

ZB: That’s lawful. If the pattern is there from the beginning so there is something repetitive about the pattern and not so much the person or the body. But there would be something inturned in the pattern that would remain an echo.

ES: That’s why we sometimes remember things.

Keith: Maybe, we don’t know. Gurdjieff said interesting things. You may remember when he was speaking about his wife, he said, “She is old soul and perhaps, if she is able to stay alive long enough and I help her,” which is why he was going to such great lengths to her stay alive and work. She was staying alive in order to work, not to stay alive–in order to reach a point where, as he says, she will not have to come back.

That’s a big deal. When we read that Gurdjieff said these things with respect to his wife, I think we have to kind of brighten up and look at it and wonder what does that mean? What does that mean so far as Foolasnitamnian and Itoklanoz? If he was speaking to his wife, to her: “You must work in order to pass out of this life and not have to come back. You must do this. You must make this sacrifice.” We should ponder those.

MG: One of the things that came up associatively during the reading was a connection to the presentation of the Ideal society. I was thinking about the Psychostatic community which is not in the process of making an astral body and so it would seem that, by definition, they must return to the soul stuff pool. There isn’t going to be an astral body in the members of that community.

105

Keith: Even in the middle category since individuality has not appeared. One could have a similar question at the end of their life. They don’t come back with a completely formed Kesdjan.

MG: I was thinking about numbers, how many human beings there are on the planet now. As the numbers of three-brained beings has gone up, the number of two-brained beings has gone down. Are there less two-brained beings on our planet?

Keith: It certainly raises all manner of interesting questions. We face them every day if we are reminded in our exercise or when we first wake up or whenever we first remember, oh I am a mortal being. I am going to die. Gurdjieff says this is an important thing to remember, that you are going to die. Where does that take me?

JJ: It is the only hope for mankind that if they remember that they and everybody upon whom their eyes fall will die is the organ we need in order to be proper three-brained beings. It is not just important it is essential.

Keith: That is conscious self. It is not an unconscious awareness. We are close to that now worldwide. There is so much death and so much suffering. It’s very hard not to be aware of it. But that awareness is as a sleeping person. I am not really conscious of it.

JJ: We are called upon to be conscious of it.

Keith: Of course, that’s the issue.