GEORGE ADIE: a task on hurry from 1981

A Task on Hurry, from 1981

On 24 February 1981, Mr Adie gave this task to one of the Newport groups. His statement of the task comprises Part I. Over the next week, the groups attempted to use the task to help their line of work. Then, the next week they brought their observations. Some extracts from one of those meetings, that of 3 March 1981, taken by Mrs Adie, is Part II.

Part I

Mr and Mrs Adie were in front of the group. Mr Adie introduced the task:

“How are we going to approach work more practically?

“The tasks that are given are only there as a help to work. The actual work, the actual choice is my own responsibility to do what I think is best for me. I may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter. I shall find that out. If I try, and then bring my experience to the group, I shall find it out. If I don’t try, I shall find nothing out.

“And the exercise is given, and has to be done as near as possible as said. I don’t have to think about that. Or at least I don’t have to think it out, it’s already presented. I do have to try and fulfil it and relate it to my own line of work. I must have a near aim, I must be going against something. I must be trying to achieve some change in my being state. Now how?

“Again, want to see how I am. Again, I may already know that certain habits, certain tendencies are unquestionably against my aim. Whatever my own individual aim, it takes me away. So that’s a thing I have to try and work against. Maybe I need to see more in regard to that. Alright then, in that case my aim is to see more in regard to that. And I have to relate that aim to this exercise given, and see how the connection is, and how it can be supported. I know that if I do make a resolve, and do my preparation, I shall get more reminders.

“Now this week, there’s a particular exercise given, which will be gradually expanded. But this week, I have to choose when. I have to do my preparation. It’s my own responsibility how I prepare myself, to sense myself, to relax, to become centrally placed, I know that. And I have to try and remind myself of the kind of work I’m going to do: where I’m going to be impatient, where I’m going to be irritable, where I’m going to be afraid, what habit I’m going to try to get over, laziness or gluttony or irritation, or I don’t know what.

“And in relation to that, what is going to remind me? I choose in the morning. I must do my preparation early, first thing, first thing on awakening. Then, I choose in the morning for one half hour during which I will not hurry. That doesn’t mean to say I do things slowly. I may find I do them much quicker, but I will not hurry. I will try and do everything without hurry.

“Hurry is terribly costly, it produces tension, fear and consternation and flurrying, throwing things, and catastrophes. Nothing can be done with hurry. How can any artist work in a hurry? Impossible. That’s an artist, and our work is on another plane. We cannot work if we’re in a hurry.

“The central idea of this half an hour is that I wish to observe myself. I am going to be in life: if I have an interview, a job, cooking, accounting, carrying, whatever it is. I know that this is the kind of work I shall be doing. I choose that half hour, but in that half hour I am not going to hurry. As said, it doesn’t mean to say that I have to slow down.

“Is it clear to everybody?

“Do you smell the possible result that might come from that? That one is always in a hurry, either in a hurry to escape doing something, or to get a result with less effort, or to get onto something more pleasant. Try and see. See what is required. You have some data now. See how it goes. Make a note of what you find.

“Of course you have to try and be present. And I shall need my feeling of myself. See how the requirements expand? Does it seem possible? For the whole week I try not to be in a hurry, but to do twice as much. Mm?

Mrs Adie prompted Mr Adie: “You also suggested that if they succeeded, they could …”

“Yes, thank you, I forgot that. If I make the appointment and I remember, then I am entitled to choose another half an hour in the second half of the day. But if for some reason I don’t remember, and I don’t have that half an hour, then I must leave it until the next day. It’s not like an ordinary appointment; this is something for half an hour where you’ll be working in a special way. If you fulfil, it doesn’t matter how successful you were, but as long as you fulfil it, you can then try again in the second half of the day. But if you don’t, then you miss the second half of the day. Try and see what use you can make of this to help your own line of work, your own aim.

“In the preparation, it’s a question of ten or 15 minutes, as early as you can in the morning, if you wish on one or two occasions to have a considerably longer one, you can, but at the same time, don’t just sit in a dream and think it’s work.

“If this is productive, the exercise will be built upon, so see what we can find. Don’t forget to make a note.”

Part II

When Mrs Adie came down to the meeting, perhaps 25 minutes after it had started, Ivan, who had been taking the meeting, said: “One of the things people brought, Mrs Adie, was that they couldn’t maintain the exercise for half an hour.”

“What do you mean by ‘not maintaining it’? Of course you couldn’t maintain it without any lapses.”

Pauline spoke: “I had sort of a moment … I can’t remember times.”

“But you mustn’t be too identified with the time. Can you say what happened? What your experience was?”

Pauline had a good deal of trouble even stating what had happened. After several questions and Pauline’s responses, it appeared that she had had a few moments of presence, but felt discouraged because they were so few. She had noted a tension in the stomach, and saw what she called a “boorishness” manifesting. It reminded her of something Mr Adie had reminded her of, but all she could feel “was a wall”. Her question was: “When I found it so difficult, do I keep trying to continue for half an hour?”

“If at that moment of difficulty, you realise how unstable your attention is, you have a chance. Don’t let that just slip away. You have less than half an hour before you. Can you somehow or another approach to the wish to do it?

“At first, you find there’s no wish there, because really, what can wish? However, even if you’re not fully present, but you have a feeling that there’s something lacking in your presence, then there is something there that can lead you on. Take advantage of that moment. Don’t let it go too quickly. You can’t hold it indefinitely, but if you want to, if you feel it enough, your weakness, that inability, you are working. What else could one ask for?

“You may not be able to maintain it unbroken, but it will come back, and much more often. And that is what we hope for. Everything depends on having more moments of this presence. Yet it’s no good working directly for the wish. You can’t produce a wish like that, by just saying “I want to wish. I wish.” It’s not there. It comes as a result of something. It comes as a result, sometimes, of making an effort in spite of the fact that you haven’t a wish.

“It can come when your head understands that it’s necessary. Although in many ways the head is a great obstacle, or at least the lower part of it is, we also rely on it. The head understands. The body doesn’t understand, and the feeling doesn’t understand: they have to be disciplined.

Pauline asked: “Can you say more about the different parts of the head?” You can hear, even over the tape, that the person asking this was a lot simpler and clearer than the one who had been speaking earlier.

“Well, you’ve read it of course, but until one has a real question, people forget. One wants to be careful not to become formatory in your understanding, but it’s important to know that your head is divided into three. There’s lowest part, which is completely mechanical, where really you could say there is no attention. Your attention is dragged out of you, so to speak. Then there’s the middle part, which has some feeling, and is not completely mechanical; there’s an interest, you’re attracted to something, and you find it easy apply your mind to it. And then the highest part requires a big effort, because you’re not attracted to it, it’s something you’re obliged to put your attention on. Some people find that with Beelzebub, for example [reading Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson]. There has to be an effort, you read in spite of the fact that your inclination is not to read it. Many people in their accounts spoke about the lack of wish, and it’s perfectly true, but the practical question is how do I produce it? What is going to help me feel it more?

“I’m nearly all the time in my personality, and my personality does not wish, because personality is in my head, very largely. And the feeling is in my essence, and my essence is what is real. Yet, sometimes something in personality can realise that. We couldn’t live without personality. Without the help of the more real part of personality, we should not be here: it’s largely personality that takes the initial interest in the ideas. So we to be careful not to confuse that.

“But very often personality is completely imaginary, and apart from not wishing, it’s very much against it. There’s nothing in it for that part of me, and some have seen how much that operates – that’s a very big discovery. It takes a long time sometimes. You don’t get upset about it, you can’t help it, this imaginary part is going to try to come in and spoil everything. But if you just don’t believe it, it loses some power, you’ve seen that now.

“So what else? Have there been many questions?

Gerry spoke: “Mrs Adie, there’ve been moments where I’ve known that I need to be watchful to observe myself and really try to see what’s happening, but when those moments come, and they are such that I know when they’re likely to come, but when they come, I don’t seem to be able to observe, I seem to be caught. I know in my head, anyway, that I need to plan for these.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs Adie, “you’ve spoken about that before. It certainly is a thing which seems to bother you. Of course with your present exercise something is very much more possible. In a way it doesn’t matter which time you choose, if I have an intention. You can choose a particular time when you know you’re going to have that tendency to hurry, but it’s much easier to see, I think, don’t you? It’s more restricted, in a way. It’s more specific, and a lot can be seen from it apart from the fact that whether you do or do not hurry in that time. But any other line of work should go on at the same time. It can help it.

“Yes, I feel there’s a necessity for me to care more about these moments, but when I do try and look, it seems a futility.” Gerry continued: “I feel a futility, in that when I try to observe, when there’s a negative process happening in me.”

“Did your effort not to hurry commence before that process began, or did you awake in the middle of it?”

“I wake up in the middle, or even after it.”

“If it awakens you, then that’s a moment of possibility. If you weren’t there at all, you’d have forgotten it, but if you’ve remembered it, that’s a great gift. At that moment you actually have some choice.”

“A moment of choice is a terrific thing, which has to be worked for. But what is aware of your state isn’t caught up in it. So, how can it serve you? You need to hang onto that awareness, even if the process apparently goes on. The force goes out of it. Some force is available for myself. And at the same time, it’s very difficult but you can actually observe what is taking place.

“It can’t last very long without a break. Maybe the impulse is too weak, but any kind of recollection is a moment of choice nevertheless. You have a certain choice at that moment. Your head will understand that something is possible at that moment. But it hasn’t enough power, the head hasn’t enough force. Those moments have to be cherished and fostered, and I agree, as it were, that the fact of my experience makes an impression on me at a moment when I’m a little bit more impartial, less lost. If you have that valuation, something may grow up in you.”

After a pause, Mrs Adie advised: “Don’t concentrate so much of your attention on whether I can do the exercise it or not. It’s what can come out of it. If I try, quite unexpected things can follow. I shall see many things I had not known. Does anybody have any interesting observations about it at all?”

John spoke: “I think just from being given the exercise to do, I’ve seen a lot clearer the running around, and the sort of madness going on inside. It’s even the time of the day outside of the half hour appointments. It began as soon as Mr Adie gave it, before I’d even made the first appointment. I felt: “ I need this”.

“It’s quite true”, said Mrs Adie. “ An intention has an effect. I make a plan, and if I have any presence, it has an effect, it isn’t restricted to the time planned for. Especially with something like hurry, because even if I’m not doing anything. I’m never at peace, never quiet inside.”

Jethro brought his problem: “Mrs Adie, I find that I just go at two speeds, flat out or not at all. and really there’s no half way. Maybe I misunderstood the point of the exercise, and gave way, but I found that to interfere with the speed at which I operate, my machine operates, results in real failure of coordination.”

“But you’re not asked to interfere with the speed at which your machine operates. You’re asked to not to hurry, which means not to force it to go faster. What would you say hurry is?”

“It’s putting a kind of nervous energy into normal movements …”

“Yes, and it doesn’t make you any faster, just more hectic. It can even make you do things more slowly, because everything’s chaotic, you drop something, or … all the centres are completely in chaos. Hurry is a state, a sort of agitation. The mind isn’t working, the mind is in confusion. But Mr Adie did not suggest that you interfere with the speed at which your machine operates.”

“I’m in a situation where I’m under pressure from my boss to do quite complicated repair jobs, to help get musicians and artists out of trouble. I work with a firm of specialists, so I’ve achieved a kind of concentration which enables me to do sometimes quite complex work, at a high speed, while the customer is waiting, while they should really be sort of …”

“And you find you do it quicker if you do it in a hurry?” Mrs Adie asked.

“Much quicker, yes.”

“No, that’s not right.”

Jethro was not to be moved. “Well, the job gets done somehow, and the customer is delighted.”

“Yes, but if you were not in a hurry you could probably do it quicker. If you’re in a hurry, your attention is either dispersed or completely identified with one thing, getting it finished.

“Oh, well, yes, that always happens, that always happens. I curse the phone and I curse the intercom.”

Mrs Adie laughed. “Alright. You say it’s the only way you can do it, yet you haven’t tried any other way. To do something without hurry doesn’t mean to slow down. It doesn’t mean that at all. On the contrary, it means not to hurry inside. It’s inside that all this hurry is going on, in your so-called feelings.

“This hectic, agitated feeling that you’ve got to get on with it, get it done quickly, is the resistance. You can try times when it hasn’t got to be done in half an hour, or whatever it is. But try to do it with your head operating in the right way, and your emotions quite quiet. Your emotions have got nothing to do with it. They’re not needed at that time. You need your head and your moving centre. Maybe a certain amount of instinctive centre, too, to do with tuning the instruments and that sort of thing, but it’s the emotions that interfere and make you hurry, that get in the way. If my feeling can then appear, that will even ground me.

Ivan made an appropriate remark: “May I give an example? I think if you consider a concert pianist who plays something very very fast. He’s never in a hurry: he’s extremely relaxed. I went to the Opera House the other evening, and the pianist was playing some tremendously fast passages, but his hands just went … there was absolutely no hurry about it. I think that’s what we’re trying to convey.”

“Yes, it’s quite true,” said Mrs Adie, who was herself a concert pianist as well as a composer. “I remember that was a very vital thing, always, it was even impressed on me, by my professor, to take my time beginning, for example, never to be in a hurry.” She addressed Jethro directly: “You’re a pianist yourself, if you hurry, you’ll play a lot of wrong notes.”

After a pause, Mrs Adie added: “I think you’re rather settled, you’ve taken rather a stand about this. Try and be a little more flexible in your understanding. Make an experiment at a time when you can afford to make an experiment.

“You know this about your nature that you are a very tense person, and it’s not only physically tense, you’re tense in your feelings. You agree that you’re rather tense?”

“Mm!”

“It’s not a sin. Many of us are. I think it is very largely in your feelings. It means that you should sometimes, when you have a moment’s peace, just watch your breathing without changing it. Your breathing indicates your emotional state, very much. If you’re calm, breathing is calm. Directly you get excited, the breathing gets quicker and more shallow. Remember that when you’re doing something. It can be anything, just for a moment put your attention on that area, it’s the area of your feeling. Where you breathe is the area of your feeling. Try and quieten it a little bit, and when you do that your body will also relax more.

“You need to put a little more attention on that, I think. It’s one of your big difficulties. But you’re not as tense as you were, in any case. It is already better than it was: much better. But it would help you with everything that you’ve been mentioning, especially with the particular job that you have, which is very demanding in a certain way, and needs a sort of sensitiveness, doesn’t it? If you’re dealing with musical instruments and that sort of thing, you need to be free from this sort of turmoil that goes on. I think you agree that it does go on? That you’re in a turmoil a lot of the time, and it doesn’t serve any useful purpose?”

“Oh yes!”Jethro was emphatic.

“It really is your enemy. Well, I think you need to choose your half hour very carefully, to being with, to start with, anyway. Choose an occasion when you’re doing some quite simple thing, and see if you can do it when your feeling’s absolutely quiet, and your movements very measured, and intentional, with the assistance of your head.”

Silvio brought an interesting cameo: “One day this week I did my preparation, and I made the appointment for 11.00 o’clock. As I was typing, I kept saying to myself, “I’ve got an appointment at 11.00 o’clock.” And I did that until 1.00 o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Then learn from that. Something in me gets very frustrated. But I accept that that is how I am. And then I need to be patient. I accept the fact that that is how I am, but I am not satisfied with that. I accept it, but not passively. From that there can come a wish. The realisation of that. It’s necessary to see how completely powerless I am.”

“What I wonder is, what in me was saying to myself: “I’ve got an appointment at 11.00 o’clock”?

“No one can say, only you can know. It is suspect, but maybe it is the best I have for the moment. Something in me always wants to do: to succeed in doing what I set out to do, which is nothing to do with my real wish at all. I’ve decided to do something and I’m going to do it. But it isn’t like that, a real wish. It’s a very subtle thing, and very difficult to put into words exactly.”

I have omitted a few questions. At the end of the meeting, a woman brought this last question of general application: “Should we keep the same time each day?”

“It depends on what you find,” answered Mrs Adie. “If you find it’s a practical time, no need to change it. If not, then you change it. Sometimes it’s good to change it, it depends on what you find. But if you know there’s something that you tend to spoil by hurrying, make more mistakes, choose that time, certainly.

“If the quality of the effort seems to fall off, better to make a change. It will always run down unless I apply some sort of a shock to it. And also, one becomes rather lazy about it: taking the same time saves a lot of thought, so choosing another time can be good, giving plenty of opportunity. You judge by the result. Try something, then you try it again, if it seems to yield less, change it.

“Good night.”

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
11 January 2010

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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John Lennon: Essence & Reality Part 14: “Tennessee” and “Real Love”

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

John Lennon

Tennessee Williams

Lennon took a rather high view of the artist’s role and mission in society. He not only preached it, he indulged himself (and his second wife) in living the life of the socially-conscious avant-garde artist, and living it rather expansively. There was a rationale, if not an ideology behind it. One could conceive Lennon producing a manifesto to the effect that the role of the artist is to animate people by mediating a cultural influence, and, in rare cases, at the tip of the flower of culture, a spiritual influence. This influence comes through in the artist’s work, but as the Lennons saw “art” as a river without banks, it also flowed through their lives. If artists have the privilege of being opinion makers, leaders and teachers, there are also responsibilities and prices. Artists are responsible to use their public profile to spread a positive message. But this profile exacts a price, the notorious down-side of living in the public eye, and being vulnerable to misunderstanding and abuse, especially from the jackals of the media.

As one would expect, Lennon’s relationship with his public and journalists was highly charged and strongly polarised in both directions – attraction and repulsion. He wanted people to love not just his work but also himself. Sometimes this was manifested in absurd extremes of self-importance, as, for example, when returning his MBE in protest to the Palace, he cited as one of his reasons that “Cold Turkey” had slipped down the charts. Even if this was meant to be humorous, it was a significant humour, because it is spun out of nothing but vanity. I doubt that it would occur to the average person to suppose that Her Majesty, or even the government of the UK, could have done anything about chart performance of 45 rpm records, let alone be rebuked for not having taken measures to ensure that “Cold Turkey” peaked at the metaphorical Everest. Much as I admire Lennon, he himself was the only butt of that joke, if indeed it was a joke. It was egoism to a delusional degree; and part of the reason I do admire him is because eventually took himself in hand and become humbler.

This conception of the artist’s noble social calling is a contributing explanation of many if not most of Lennon’s more bizarre actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the bed-ins. They said that they knew that they were going to get publicity whatever they did, and decided to use it in a manner which they saw as positive. We all see the point they were trying to make: the desire for peace should be a major value in everyone’s real life, and not just a camouflage for a profound apathy, or a tonic to placate the last remaining vestiges of conscience while engaging in war. At the time, important nations in the Western world were fighting the war in Vietnam, which, for everything I can see, was not a just war. Those who resisted the war must have felt frustrated to a point of madness. However, the self-importance and extremity of John and Yoko’s actions were of doubtful value, they were perhaps even counter-productive. A more measured protest, I suspect, would have been more effective. I think that, at that point and until his 1975 reunion with her, John and Yoko were so addicted to publicity and preaching that they did not consider that the wrong type of publicity could do damage to their causes.

After the tour de force of raw revelation which was the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album, Lennon cut the Imagine album. He once described the title track, his hymn for a believing atheism, as “sugar-coated”. After its critically acclaimed predecessor, yes “Imagine” does sound rather tailored for radio. And its sales far surpassed the previous one’s, which will not have displeased Lennon. It is
possible to entertain and spread a positive message at the same time. In itself that is not a serious problem: from what I can hear the very best music is played over radio together with everything else. Having fame and solo success, Lennon wanted to use it, and he and Yoko reverted to their favoured style: aggressive and preachy. And so they came to produce the disastrous Some Time in New York City album. Its chart and sales failure deeply upset Lennon, who was always competing with other musicians, especially, of course, Paul McCartney. I never heard, however, that he had acknowledged the record’s patent artistic failure.

But Lennon, being Lennon, could not sit still for long. Three years later, if you can credit it, these are lyrics Lennon was working on in the mid-70s, for a song in honour of Tennessee Williams, which showed how far he had come from the strident days of Some Time in New York City:

Tennessee, O Tennessee, what you’ve shown to me:1
Your words like water, pure and clear.
The sadness of your soul reveals the music of this sphere,
Conceal it behind your spirit mind, your poet’s love and feel.2

If I hadn’t heard Lennon singing these words, I wouldn’t have believed that he had written them, because nothing I’ve read about Lennon (and I’ve read whatever I can get my hands on) discloses the least reason to think that Lennon entertained such an exalted opinion of Williams. Lennon never finished this song, although he spent a lot of time working on it. When Lennon writes about “your words like water, pure and clear”, it is hard not to think of this of a case as one soul calling to another like soul, because Lennon too, aimed at clarity and directness.

On one take of “Tennessee”, the one I’ve most often heard, the opening verse is:

America, America, your heroes are alive.
Your faded men and glory will survive.
The madness of your soul supplies the all-consuming fire,
Beneath your spreaded chestnut lies A Streetcar Named Desire.

As with “Instant Karma!”, the writing is so intense, it is difficult to digest it. The final verse is no less compressed:

Tennessee, O Tennessee, your southern bell will ring.
Music travelled far from New Orleans.
Sling an arrowed mirror in the magic of your dreams
Reflect echoed harmony of the naked human being.
Reflect echoed harmony of the cold and lonely naked human being.

I am indebted to Peter Van Schie’s “Between the Lines” page for the lyrics. I must admit I could not make them all out from the recording. I have also heard another version of the song, where Lennon sings “Memory, O memory, release me from your spell”, and says that “today is really all I need to know”. I wonder whether Lennon wasn’t concerned that a song of homage to Tennessee Williams (who was then still alive and being covered in glory) would sound a little strange, and tried to find other lyrics. But these words, in homage to Williams and to the USA, are the only ones which work for me.

And they do work. The sentiments are so strange and almost forced as to be unsettling: what does it mean to sling an arrowed mirror, let alone to do the slinging in the magic of someone’s dreams? Yet, the anthemic quality of the music, the solemn almost gospel piano, and the patent unforced sincerity in his voice produce, in my opinion, one of Lennon’s greatest achievements. If Yoko Ono is reading this blog, it is the ideal moment for her to release every available version of this jewel, and in return I shall see to it that masses are offered for her and her intentions in every cathedral where I can have incense burned.

One of the important points here is that he seems to have learned something from Tennessee Williams: remember, Lennon’s opening sentiment is “Tennessee, O Tennessee, what you’ve shown to me” (my emphasis). What I think he learnt is that it is possible for the artist to be a poet, and to have a “spirit mind”, and to show people what their lives are like, without hopelessly antagonizing them and ridiculing himself as a fool.

Of course, in the past, Tennessee Williams had suffered more than his fair share of muck-throwing, and Lennon doubtless knew this. But by the mid 70s, Williams had come through, and his star had risen, fixed to if not in the constellation of the revered Marlon Brando (who had starred in the famous film version of A Streetcar Named Desire) and many other major stars with real credibility (e.g. Orson Welles) who had appeared in film versions of his plays. In his ability, in his mastery of his craft, his public penetration, in his history as a subject of abuse, and in his hoped for rehabilitation as an American icon, Lennon partly identified with Williams. Why else would he twice speak of Williams as producing “music”? One can wonder, too, whether Williams’ homosexuality and consequent outsider status may not also have appealed to Lennon.

But I think that the almost startling intensity of this song, and perhaps the fact that it was never completed and released, is eloquent of Lennon’s personal life in the last six years of his life. The significant elements are that Lennon sings of William’s words being “like water, pure and clear”, of the sadness of his soul, that this sadness reveals the “music of this sphere” (which I take to mean that as an artist he had access to higher level of insight), and that Williams could “conceal” the raw perception by virtue of his spirit mind of the love and feeling of a poet. All of these points are important. Lennon stated in one of his last interviews that many people were discomfited when he sang about himself, but if he made it a third person saga, such as Tommy, Ziggy Stardust or Sadie Schmuck (so it sounded to me), that could be accepted.

Could it be that at this point of his life, Lennon was starting to realise that sugar coating could be quite a useful commodity for a pill-maker? Sometimes I think that the vital fact is that both Williams and Lennon were appealing to America. Williams seems to me to have cherished an almost idolatrous love of the USA, after all, he changed his first name to “Tennessee”. But, it is also reasonable to suggest that Lennon’s reference to the country cannot be lightly dismissed. Lennon calls America by name, twice, almost like Elijah summoning the dead to rise. He boldly declares, prophet-like, that “your faded men and glory will survive.” By now the Vietnam war had been lost, and I think that this is Lennon’s theme. But he is not hooting in triumph: did he not mean that although he had opposed the war, he had never opposed the country and its people? He adored America, and he worshipped it partly because “the madness of (its) soul supplies (an) all-consuming fire,” and Lennon wanted fire (as perhaps we all do at some deep level). Be that as it may, the song abounds with soul, love and the value of honesty.

In these lyrics, Lennon see humanity on the slab, as it were, and declares that what Williams “reflects” and “echoes” is accurate. Lennon endorses Williams’ vision that on the marble is “the cold and lonely naked human being”. Can there be any doubt that Lennon saw himself and everyone he knew in Williams’ lines?

Incidentally, two images from this song were also found on the Walls and Bridges album. First, the liquid image (“all we need is water … cool … clear … water!) also recurs in “Old Dirt Road”, which he co-wrote with Nilsson not long before he began working on this song. Second, the “mirror in the magic of your dreams” reminds me of “# 9 Dream”, and the line “through the mirror go round”. Indeed, that song with its references to magic and spirits is close to “Tennessee”, in that both are visionary recitals.

This leads me, at last!, to the chief point of this blog, and that is this: while it is easy to criticise Lennon for not living his philosophy of love, he was, in my view, trying to transfer what he felt deeply as a reality in one state to his life when in another state. The higher, and truer state was, for Lennon, the one he experienced making and writing music. And yet he did not despise the world. Consider these words from the matchless “Real Love”, which he was working on about the same time as “Tennessee”:

All my little plans and schemes pass like some forgotten dream.
Seems that all I really was doing was waiting for you.
Just like little girls and boys playing with their little toys.
Seems like all we really were doing was waiting for love.
No need to be alone, no need to be alone.
It’s ree-yal love, it’s re-e-e-e-eal, yes it’s ree-yal love, it’s re-e-e-e-eal.
… No need to be afraid, no need to be afraid.
Thought I’d been in love before, but in my heart I wanted more …

Like “Tennessee”, the piano version has the simple dignified quality of the best of church music. The film “John Lennon: Imagine” opens with him playing it on acoustic guitar. Each has a disarming directness about it, and the Beatles’ edition from the third volume of the Anthology has an energy which adds an endearing vim, redolent to me of the early classics “I Want to Hold your Hand”, “She Loves You”, “I Feel Fine”, and so on. “Real Love” could, I think, well have fitted onto Rubber Soul or Revolver.

These lyrics, seemingly so naive, yet reveal so much: his plans and schemes have vanished like the merest of dreams. The occupations with which he kept himself so terribly busy were the pleasant bubbles of childhood. By stressing as he does that he has found real love, he is stating that there is an unreal love. He had always known it was possible, he says. It is as if he had been fooling himself. But no more. Beyond shadows to realities, as so many have said in different ways.

This, I think, is the key to both songs. Lennon was questing for the road to reality, and sometimes he found his feet on it. The way to the road lay, for him, through art and through love. So Lennon had had glimpses of this, but how to make it a part of his life? In a way, I feel that this was the theme of Lennon’s life and striving. What he wanted was reality.

Sometimes Lennon knew that reality lies not in personalities (as he sang in “God”), or in occupations or callings (such to the avant-garde), but in a change our internal states. As he sang in “Revolution” to all those agitating for political change, “you better free your mind instead”. But precocious as this understanding was, Lennon often forgot it. In fact, even when he wrote “Revolution” a part of him was not convinced of it.

One of Gurdjieff’s great insights was that we can know the truth, but the level of truth we can know depends upon our state. We cannot really speak of ourselves in an absolute way: to be more precise, and so freer of illusion, there is myself in this state, and myself in any one of the endless number of states we move from. Our state is always changing, but the range through which it changes can be higher or lower. The speed with which our state can fall is so bewildering that it can lead to despair. But with time, one can learn to raise one’s state just as quickly. And with time, too, our state will cease to fall so low as to sink into danger.

So that was John Lennon: he knew that there were certain states where love was real. That is what he wrote of in “Real Love”, and it supplied the fire that he then projected onto the USA and one of its greatest playwrights. The tragedy was that he was murdered while he was learning to bring something of this state to all the rest of his life, and to spread “The Word”, as he sang on Rubber Soul.

Note: Since I wrote the piece on “Imagine”, I have come to see one important matter: the song is actually addressed to believers. The famous opening words “Imagine there’s no heaven” can only make sense if spoken to those who believe in the existence of a heaven. “Heaven” is often a way of referring to “God”, just as “the White House” can often mean the President of the USA. Throughout the addresses those who also believe in hell and religion. Lennon does not outright invited us to imagine no God, but it comes to the same thing.

So what follows from this? To my mind it strengthens the impression that “the song aspires to ideals usually associated exclusively with religion.” Lennon was correct to say in 1980 that he was a religious person. It strengthens my sense that a spiritual or even mystic interpretation of Lennon’s life and work is fitting, and is potentially productive of good clear light.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
27 September 2009

Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

JOHN LENNON: Essence and Reality Part 10: “# 9 Dream”

Joseph Azize Page
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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John Lennon & May Pang

“# 9 DREAM”

I once had a dream where I was sweeping the cloistered walk of a temple courtyard. It strangely resembled one I had seen in Turkey: ostensibly a school of traditional music, I had suspected that this Turkish school was in fact connected with Sufism. In my dream, as in life, a strong sense of peace of security possessed the scene. Across one of the cloisters there were hung brightly woven curtains. I was quite light-hearted, and was almost finished sweeping, when someone asked me if I would like to have my fortune told. Across the courtyard garden, others were having their palms read by women who were barely more than teenagers. It all seemed a bit of a hoot, so, in a spirit of fun, I said yes, I would have my fortune told. Directly, someone said that the fortune-teller had arrived, and I felt a slight tremor. When I saw her, something inside me drew back. She was a tall and noble African, with high cheek-bones, a multi-coloured turban, and something of that impersonal, hierarchical presence which Nina Simone commanded. She seemed to displace the air rather than to walk, and she was accompanied by two men, one a bearded man in middle age, and the other an unshaven and demented youth. Somehow, I knew that they meant business. This was the real thing. I was in two minds about going ahead with the consultation, but I found my courage. I sat cross-legged, opposite her, while the two men looked on. She took my left hand with her right, and drew my arm forward. Then she laid the fingers of her left hand on the flesh of my left forearm, placing a slight pressure on the veins. Immediately, sensation filled my body and flowed over into an electric sensation, which took me into another state.

I know how far short these words fall of communicating the experience, and its present significance for me. Yet, the dream is a source of confidence. Perhaps the most I can do is suggest something which you can then relate to a similar dream you may have had. However, some poets and musicians have had more success in communicating these sendings. Samuel Taylor Coleridge managed to evoke an eerie power in “Kubla Khan”, his account of an opium dream. Interestingly, he was moved by the music he heard played and sang by “an Abyssinian maid” with a dulcimer. However, the music had passed from him, as it were, causing him to say that “If I could revive within me her symphony and song”, it would make him a man of altogether different capacities and powers.

I feel that in “#9 Dream”, John Lennon fulfilled something of Coleridge’s yen, and has fashioned a fantasy-ruby, an auditory vision of roughly four and a half minutes’ duration. The first time I heard this song, even though it was on a battered old radio with knobs and switches falling off it, I was entranced and physically affected, I could hardly stand. As is the way of things, no subsequent listening has ever had the same effect, but maybe now the experience goes deeper, to a place which is not so easily overcome by shock. Certainly, the song has benignly haunted me for 35 years. Frequently I sing to myself the opening words: “So long ago: was it in a dream? Was it just a dream?” Even now, it conjures in me a different focus, as it were. It reverberates with echoes of a far-away time, a far-away place, of people and spirits separated only by a veil dancing just beyond my finger tips. The tempo of the song is neither slow nor “dreamy”, and is all the truer to dreams for taking a pleasant walking pace. The nice tread of the music contributes to the sense of visionary reality – there is nothing hallucinatory about this song, unlike “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. Yet, the melody line takes its time; the words are not hurried. Some of the key words are subtly sustained, or given a light stress. It sounds as if Lennon is singing the following:

So-oh long ago: was it in a dream? Was it just a dream?
I-hi know-oh, yes, I know, seemed so very real
Seemed so (un)real to me –
Took a walk down the street,
Through the heat whispered trees.
I thought I could hear, hear, hear, hear
Somebody called my name – “John, John”,
As it started to rain – “John”,
Two spirits dancing so strange,
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Dream, dream away – magic in the air, was magic in the air?
I believe, yes I believe,
More I cannot say, what more can I say?
On a river of sound,
Through the mirror go round (round),
I thought I could feel, feel, feel, feel
Music touching my soul, (whispering)
Something warm sudden cold,
The spirit dance was un-fold-ing,
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say (continued)

May Pang, Lennon’s then girlfriend, whispers his name and some other words I cannot quite make out after the words “music touching my soul”. There is nothing dramatic about Lennon’s delivery or the music, they are almost understated, and yet they leave an impression. “So long ago: was it in a dream? Was it just a dream?” I cannot imagine these words being sung to any other tune, or the tune having more appropriate words. In fact, all the words come out as naturally as if he were speaking them with the unpractised emphasis of everyday conversation.

It seemed so very real, Lennon sings, and then he seems to say that it “seemed so unreal to me”. Perhaps he was only taking an audible breath before saying “real”. But it has always sounded to me as if he were saying “real” and then “unreal”. He both said and unsaid himself in an unreleased version of the Beatles’ song “Revolution”. which was faithfully shown in the movie Imagine, so it is not impossible. The song seems to imply that reality and unreality are two sides of one coin in this dream existence. Indeed, the difference between them is only a question of realisation. Once it has been dreamed, once it has been imagined, the concept or feeling can be realised, even if the realisation is itself an act of imaginative recreation.

I recall that Lennon was interviewed by a Sydney radio station when the album Walls and Bridges was released in 1974. He said that in the song he had described the dream exactly as it happened: so he will have seen himself walking down a familiar street, in hot weather, as trees whispered to him, and someone called his name. The DJ asked him about the spirit mantra “Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say”. Lennon answered with disarming simplicity that this was what it sounded to him the spirits were saying.

Was magic in the air? he asks. And he replies, yes, he believes it was. As I have indicated, dreams can comfort, they can console, teach and inspire belief. Thus it was for Lennon: as Lennon fans scholars well know, “nine” was for Lennon the number of destiny, it was his number. For many years he had taken drugs to break free from “the straitjacket of the self”, as he said. Now, through a dream, he was able to go through a mirror and around: through the image, coming back to reality having seen the other side of his perception.

Finally he asks, what more could he say? And what can he say about this mystery? What can be said by anyone about any mystery? Yet, he has described something almost beyond description. Could you imagine a song with the lyrics “I went through the image and came back to reality having seen the other side of my perception”? This is what he has done with the simple words “through the mirror go round”.
It seems to me that Lennon did receive an intimation of something high, I might say “sacred”, in this dream. First, however, we must say a few words about dreaming.

Dreams are the work, in Gurdjieff’s terms, of the “moving centre” (“moving brain”). This centre, which is in charge of our learned movements such as walking, talking, playing guitar, cleaning dishes and so on, continues with a certain consciousness while we are asleep. Generally, and especially during deep sleep, it is not connected with the intellectual or emotional brains, and so the next morning we do not recall the dreams. But if we are not fully asleep, then a faint connection between the centres may subsist, and the intellect can recall something of a dream the next morning. The moving centre, unlike the intellectual centre, is not logical, it does not have a sense of non-contradiction. Therefore, Gurdjieff said, it allows illogicalities and impossibilities, the dreamer can speak with people who are dead. To the extent that the moving and intellectual brains are disconnected during dreams, dreams can be illogical. Gurdjieff told this to Mme Lannes, and she passed the information on to Mr Adie, which is why I can confidently attribute it to Gurdjieff.

I extrapolate from this that to the extent that the moving and the feeling brains are unconnected, our dreams can have emotional aspects – even fearsomely emotional aspects – but the moving centre does not know this, so it blithely goes on creating dungeons and other tortures for us. Meanwhile, the emotional centre is being racked by torments, but is unable to convey this to the moving centre. It may, however, succeed in getting its message to the instinctive centre (which controls the work of the organism one does not have to consciously learn, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion and so on). And when the message gets through, we awaken. What Gurdjieff does not tell us is why the moving brain dreams, and whether all dreams necessarily come from moving brain.
George Adie’s view, with which I agree, is that the moving centre dreams as a form of digestion. Impressions are received during the waking day, and these impressions are not necessarily fully understood or grasped by the other centres (see the diary note of 4 February 1987 in George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia, 283). Some impressions are fairly unimportant, and leave little trace. So little trace do they leave that they appear in dreams only as background. But the concerns of our moving centre, and hence our dreams, tend to be things which are of substantial importance to us. Generally, I find, they relate to two fields: (a) matters where our ideas and feelings are as yet unresolved, and (b) the transfer of patterns from intellectual centre to moving centre. First, unresolved matters. If I have a bad conscience about something (using that phrase in its ordinary sense), if something has disturbed me, or, on the other hand, if something caused me pleasure or an intense hope, it may reappear in dreams. It is as though the moving centre has to file everything away into the tidiest possible place. We are made for order. Significant matters need extra filing, as it were. They demand extra attention, and if they are not given satisfactory attention during the day from the intellectual centre, then they demand it, so to speak, in sleep. So the connection between the moving and intellectual centres is re-established, albeit weakly, the prominent event is gone over with the help of the intellect, and it is given new associations in the psyche – it is acclimatized, as it were.

The filing carried out by the moving brain is not at all conducted in the way the intellectual or the emotional centre would carry it out. It seems to be performed according to a method of random associations or, if not entirely random, of associations possessing a similar intensity, and not necessarily of similar concepts. The result of this is that strong impressions often produce strong dreams where one cannot say what the dream message is, except that the impression was considered important.

The second major function of the moving centre in sleep seems to me to be to allow it to acquire skills learned by the intellectual centre during the day. As Gurdjieff correctly pointed out, I learn typing with the intellect, I have to. But eventually the moving brain takes it over, and does a better job: it does not have to think about every little thing. Well, I suspect that sleep is when the moving centre has a clear field, in which it can learn these things without being crowded out by the head. This would explain why the better we sleep the better we learn.

All this suggests two things to me: one is that we are made to understand. I can hardly insist on this enough, because at the moment there is, in some circles, a sort of exaggerated enthusiasm for non-understanding. It is true that some things cannot be understood, but that hardly means that we should not try to understand them. The very attempt may bring more understanding, or a grasp of other matters. Indeed, I suspect that the allure of the mysterious is a providential arrangement to arouse our curiosity, to evoke a pure love of knowledge and discovery. To anaesthetize that impulse, so readily observed in children is, it seems to me, criminal. I repeat, the fact that our organism knocks out our intellect in order to use dreaming to arrange and organize the day’s events seems to me to be evidence that we are designed to seek understanding and the harmonisation of our various impressions.

Also, and I add this to the blog because the idea may prove useful for some people, I have found that by carrying out the exercise of reviewing the day, I have fewer dreams, and those I do have tend to be less intense. I refer here to the Gurdjieff exercise whereby one casts one’s mind eye over the events of the day, and pauses when one comes to anything important or worrying. It is not necessary to think about these things, let alone to conduct an amateur psycho-analysis. In fact, that may cause new problems. All that is necessary is to put oneself before the memories, and then, I often find, a clearer understanding starts to appear.

To understand “#9 Dream”, and something of the process of art (higher art), I also think that some dreams come from other centres than the moving brain: they can be the products of higher emotional centre, and therefore speak in a natural symbolism – and this is emphatically not the symbolism of dream dictionaries. The higher emotional and higher intellectual centres are the two faculties, existing in every person, which are the means of receiving and transmitting influences from beyond this sensory world. When contact is made between the intellect, and the higher emotional centre, said Gurdjieff: “man experiences new emotions, new impressions hitherto entirely unknown to him, for the description of which he has neither words nor expressions.” However, because we are so rarely in such a state of connection, ” we fail to hear within us the voices which are speaking and calling to us from the higher emotional centre.” (P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 194-195).

My view is that Lennon heard these voices of the higher emotional centre calling him in a dream, and hence we have this marvellous song. As May Pang said, when Lennon woke up the morning after the dream, he had the words and the music together. If there has been a gift from the gods in modern music, this, I would say, is it. So the mystery of dreams is, or at least can be, related to the mystery of the life of the soul, the spiritual life. And Lennon made the connection.
As I said in the last blog, Lennon invites us into mystery. He does not make the mistake of trying to strip away the wonder by saying too much. He displays the magic, as it were, by presenting it, highlighted, in his own river of sound (and it should be added that Phil Spector was probably the perfect producer to work with Lennon on this piece). “#9 Dream” marks the high water mark of a tide which had begun with “There’s A Place”, on the Please Please Me album. Between these two points, there is a reasonably substantial body of work which forms a connecting trail. I cannot cover all of it, but in the next Lennon blog, I shall deal with one central concept: the use of creative imagination. I am referring, obviously, to what is Lennon’s signature tune, the classic “Imagine”.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE AND REALITY 9: “Here We Go Again

Joseph Azize Page
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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It is mesmeric: two notes hypnotically roll over each other for 30 seconds, sinuously moving higher, while in the increasingly textured background we faintly hear chimes in the sky, until all sounds are resolved into the audial clarity of one simple guitar chord. The chord fades, and then, unaccompanied, Lennon quietly announces “Here we go again”. The magician has appeared on stage. Almost speaking, he sings in a matter of fact way:

Here we go again and again.
Wonderin’ how it all began?
Wonderin’ will it ever end?

For the next 20 seconds or so, you can hear guitars jabbering like Chinese monkey spirits through your headphones, until the hypnosis theme is restated, the singer becomes more animated, and the volume builds:

Round and round we go,
Where it’s going, nobody knows.
Though I know we’ve been this place before,
Someone keeps on moving the door.

Here we go again, here we go again,
Here we go again, here we go again.

There is a sense of wonder here, but it is not the pure and affirmative child’s wonder exemplified by someone like Thomas Traherne, or the tender, washed-by-rain clarity of “Oh, My Love!”, which we discussed in the first Lennon blog. There is something in the music which is almost sinister, or at least, one senses, liable to turn dark. Once more, the music ceases, and the narrator reintroduces himself:

So I say hello again,
And nobody gives a damn,
And nobody wants to hold your hand.
Everyone’s an also-ran.

Round and round we go,
Where it’s going, nobody knows.
Though I know we’ve seen this place before,
Someone keeps on moving the door.

And now, at the refrain “here we go again”, there is more intensity, accented by a dramatic brass and drum arrangement. The song was, I believe, prepared for Walls and Bridges in 1974, and was produced by Phil Spector. Why the colourless “Going Down on Love” should have opened that album, I don’t know, unless this gem was cut too late for inclusion. This song sounds to me like the perfect curtain raiser for an artist of Lennon’s calibre. To her credit, Yoko Ono released it in 1986 on the posthumous, under-appreciated Menlove Avenue with its striking Andy Warhol artwork. Listening to it in the context of other songs of loneliness and sorrow from Lennon’s “lost weekend” in Los Angeles adds context and resonance, one might say, to the experience.

On first listening, I thought that when Lennon says “here we go again”, he was, as a matter of course, referring pretty much exclusively to the process of song writing, recording, presenting an album to the public, and the give and take which occurs after release. But I soon came to think that although this may well have been the point of departure, it does not do justice to this piece. Lennon, I think, fashioned something more open-ended, more inclusive: the first lines refer to “wonder”, and wonder is something which involves and invites an expansive response. How did it all begin? Not only his song writing, his stardom, his performance, but our being here to listen to him? And where will it all end?

To many, these questions will not matter, but I think that there are some questions which can be made to matter if they are put in the right way, yet if posed in a different fashion, they will sound like inanities. And Lennon, I believe, raises the question into a mystery: “Round and round we go,” he says, and it is true. We do become fans of various performers, and many things work together, contriving to produce habits; things like our expectations and theirs, their personal commitments, the recording industry, and the surrounding culture. It was Lennon’s habit to record, and it was ours to buy and listen. Such habits make up much of our lives. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with them: some habits such as eating and cleaning regularly are perfectly good, provided we are able to modify them in accordance with reason.

When should we apply reason to habit? Jane Heap used to say that the only difference between a groove and a grave is the depth (as the late John Lester told me). When we shrug our shoulders and say “that is the way I am”, are we losing an opportunity to liquidify our bony rigidities? The only answer which seems satisfactory to me is that to the extent that we are present to ourselves, we are present to our habits; and to the extent that our reason partakes in our presence (not something which it obviously does), our reason is active, it stands alert before our habitual manifestations. If we are not present, then it is, I would have thought, only by good luck that the groove is worn no deeper.

Lennon adds: “Where it’s going, nobody knows.” This phrase, reminiscent of a spruiker on a chocolate wheel, adds to the sense of theatrical magic and stage-mystery evoked by the opening. But the point is valid, and it was more than just an appropriate filling line: shortly after recording this, Lennon retired from show business for about five years in order to have and raise his second son. He really felt that he was on a circus circuit, and that even if he was one of the star attractions, he was trapped by success. He did not know where he was going, and he decided to make a plan.

Whatever the man’s weaknesses and faults, he was strong enough to run away from the circus, and make what was effectively a more conscious life with Yoko Ono in New York. However, there is more to harvest from this song.

Though I know we’ve been this place before,
Someone keeps on moving the door.

Later, he will repeat these lines but instead of “been” we will have “seen” this place before. What can it mean but that when he is songwriting and performing (let us say, “being creative”), there is a familiarity: he had written hundreds of songs by now, and was one of the most accomplished writers of his generation. He had been one of the Beatles, easily the most culturally important musicians of their time. And yet, an imaginative beginning is always an entry through a door which had not previously been there.

Beyond even that, I doubt that I am alone in having had the sort of feeling Lennon refers to here, of being in a situation which does not seem new, and yet, the key of comprehension seems strangely misplaced. It is as if I should know something, but that this precious something has been occulted. I use that word in preference to any other, because Lennon’s music suggests that the misplaced secret is in the realm of the occult.

However, it does not end there. Lennon turns away from this mystery, as the next verse brings to sight the darker current I found subsisting beforehand: it is the verse about how “nobody gives a damn” or even wants to “hold your hand”, and we remember that this song was written about the same time as “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out”. I must confess, I find these lines self-pitying and self-parodying, after all, with Paul McCartney he had written one of the most positive, energy-charged songs I have ever heard: “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, a song which has rarely been covered, because, I suggest, the original recording was unmatchable.

There is serious disillusionment here: the statement that everyone is an “also-ran”, is profoundly cynical. After those lines, it is fatalistic to sing “round and round we go, here we go again”. It is a sort of cursing of destiny. Anything positive in the sense of original sense of wonder is effaced. “Round and round again” – it has completely assumed the fearful spectre of tedious, frustrating repetition, of endless courses of existence. It is enough to make one long for Nirvana. When one considers the self-pity of this second verse, the line that “someone keeps on moving the door”, takes on a sharper shape: Lennon was indulging in sorry victimhood.

The hypnotic melody which opened the song, and which occasionally reappears is the same melody Paul McCartney used in the word “you”, in the phrase “I’d love to turn you on”, which appeared in “A Day In The Life”, one of the last joint Lennon-McCartney compositions. If it had a dark side there, and I think it did, it has a blackness, here, too. There is a touch of the snake-charmer about it.

And yet, for all that, we are indebted to Lennon for something which is truly rare, a rock musician’s insight into the psychic drama and the occult dimension of his craft. A few years after this, Kate Bush would write “Symphony in Blue” from the Lionheart album, a precocious effort, spiritual and sexual, which may deserve to rank along with this grimmer song.

This song tells me something about how we can approach Lennon’s songs. He was the instrument of something which he did not fully understand. While he was clearly central to the process, he also saw it as collective: it is here we go again, and we’ve seen this place before. It is legitimate to emphasize the first person plural: Lennon accepted Yoko’s ideas of art as something created in the interaction between both artist and audience. Many of her avant-garde pieces needed the audience to progress them: for example, by hammering in a nail as in the famous Indica Gallery piece.

Lennon invites us into a sad mystery. He is saying here that there is a mystery in his work – an irreducible mystery which belongs to us as much as it does to him. And the exploration of it is now our privilege. As stated, I do not think he was exclusively speaking about music: the mystery is a mystery also of life and existence. To take this further, we shall next consider another song from this period, the numinous “#9 Dream”, which did appear on Walls and Bridges.

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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THE FOUR IDEALS

Joseph Azize Page

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I have referred elsewhere to “The Four Ideals” exercise which the Adies worked on, at Gurdjieff’s direction, for a period of five months from October 1948 to March 1949. They had other exercises at the same time, particularly the “I AM” exercise. But this one is of some significance, for several reasons. The four ideals of this exercise are Muhammad, Buddha, Lama and Christ (although the diagram made by Adie shows, if I read it correctly, that there are also many other ideals). Other of Gurdjieff’s exercises mention these four ideals, and sometimes also Moses. The exercise is given to facilitate in the person who attempts it the conscious absorption of higher hydrogens. It is effectively, I would say, a prayer of a very unusual type.

There is something literally ‘wonder-full’ about these exercises. According to the transcript of a meeting in Paris of 7 December 1941, someone asked Gurdjieff how he should pray. Gurdjieff replied that this is for later, but there are substances which emanate from the sun and planets (in this respect, see “Purgatory” at pp. 760-1). These emanations, he said, make contact at certain points in our solar system, and can reflect in materialized images which are themselves images of the All Highest, albeit they are what he calls “inverted” images. There are always, he averred, materialized images in the atmosphere, and if only we could sufficiently concentrate, we could enter into contact with the image and receive the substances.

Another aspect of the Four Ideals’ prayer-like nature is that religiosity is not usually associated with Gurdjieff. He is occasionally quoted expressing something like religiosity, but not often. However, in Beelzebub (especially the 1931 edition), in his music, and in the movements, there is rather more. Much of his piano music bears titles such as “”, “The Story of the Resurrection of Christ”, or “Reading from a Sacred Book”. There are even pieces with titles such as “Vespers Hymn” and “Tibi Cantamus”. There is the entire series of “Hymns from a Truly Great Temple” and “Sacred Hymns”. The solemnity and gravity of these pieces is almost overwhelming. In fact, it takes most of us some time before we can bear to open to the music, so powerful is it. Such sublimity requires courage to stand before it. It is easier to subliminally shut down. Then there are movements with titles such as “The Big Prayer”, and “Sense of the Sacred”, which invokes the names of the four ideals. One cannot say much about this teaching without words. But it exists and is an important part of Gurdjieff’s heritage.

Gurdjieff gave directions for prayer, even while warning that it was not prayer such as we ordinarily understand, and that to be significant it has be attempted with all three centres. In Ouspensky’s ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, Gurdjieff is reported saying that the action of conscious praying could itself do for the person what they sought from a higher power.

However, neither here nor in the transcripts of Paris meetings does Gurdjieff say that prayer is ineffectual let alone not to pray. On the contrary, he actually and explicitly gave instruction in how to pray and enjoined it. In other words, prayer is one of Gurdjieff’s methods.

A particular form of prayer which he insisted upon is what might be called “well-wishing”. In one of the Paris groups, someone related to Gurdjieff that he had seen some poor children, and was distraught because he could do nothing to help them. But you can, said Gurdjieff, even if you have no resources: you can wish well for them, and then, it is a law that someone who can help shall do so. The questioner continued in the same vein, he could not assist them. Gurdjieff stopped him: you have not heard what I say. You can, do as I suggest.

Mr Adie said little about this, he placed the emphasis upon changing oneself, but he did sometimes state that we are all related. He would often speak of being in relation. We are connected by subtle threads, and so to what are the others connected? An evolving part of humanity? Mrs Staveley said more about this, and about prayer, and she was correct to.

But whatever one has learned about this, I would suggest that once more, the key lies in Aiëssirittoorassnian-contemplation. At page 569 of ‘Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson’, Beelzebub goes so far as to state that the soul is made up of substances exclusively obtained from the art of Aiëssirittoorassnian-contemplation. Gurdjieff taught that only through the crystallization of the higher bodies do we acquire immortality; and immortality, Gurdjieff said, is the goal of all religious teachings, including his own.

To someone who practices the art as the three-centred basis for engagement in life, prayer and well-wishing come naturally. The circumstances of life suggest them. The practitioner knows that prayer is no fantasy, even if it works in ways we find mysterious. But there is a wisdom and even a wonder in that mystery. A high valuation of the art of Aiëssirittoorassnian-contemplation will bring a valuation of prayer, and a low valuation of the art a correspondingly low evaluation of prayer and well-wishing.

Gurdjieff advised his students to have an ideal: for example, in the meeting of 16 January 1944, with his disarming common sense, he counselled that one cannot recapture the faith of childhood, one is adult now and that faith is not necessary. Yet, he stated, if one does not have an ideal, if one does not believe in God, then one’s parent or teacher can serve as an ideal. As mentioned, on 9 December 1946, Gurdjieff advised that when finishing an exercise one could make a prayer to one’s ideal to help guard what one has received or attracted until the next exercise.

This concept of the ideal is referred to several times in the Paris groups, and it is worth studying. Many of us have found that what we thought of as ideals whether religious, political, social or otherwise were idols (ideals with which we became identified), and we came to see our idolatry as a foolishness. To an extent, Gurdjieff’s methods enabled us to see both idol and idolatry with more clarity. But it does not follow that there are no ideals or that there can be no service, no genuine being-faith. To take one’s teacher as “ ideal” does not mean to pretend that our teachers were perfect. In so far as they represent a teaching, they represent an ideal. The ideal himself, as Gurdjieff said in the Four Ideals, is high above the earth. We approach the ideals by stages. We ourselves are flawed, and are far from God, but we can take an ideal which corresponds to our situation and raise ourselves by steps.

Finally, in the Four Ideals exercise there is an order given to the movement of higher hydrogens through the body. Some of the Paris groups meeting transcripts refer to this passage of energies. Other traditions, especially from Asia, give very precise indications of how different forces move through the body. While there is no doubt that there is a sort of psychic circulation system which follows its own laws, these laws are not on our terrestrial level. The blood of the astral body (Hanbledzoin) does not behave like the blood in our veins and capillaries: it possesses a greater degree of consciousness. Hence, as Vaysse says, even if one has a skeletal deformity, one can use the preparation. If one brings consciousness to the body and the movement of the breath, that very consciousness will assist the passage and transformation of the energies.

I think that there is a danger in the reports of the Asian systems, such as those of Hinduism and Buddhism. They are so clear and precise that they almost suggest that the higher hydrogens flow like water through copper pipes. I cannot say that this is wrong, but neither is it the whole of the truth. They move with a passage which defies description even when it is experienced. What we experience of this movement we have to account to ourselves. Our account is necessarily influenced by what we already believe and have previously experienced. What seems to us to be an entry of forces may in fact be the manifestation of forces which are within: the feeling of entry may, on occasions, be a trick of the eye. What seems to us to take time may not: it may be instantaneous but presented to our experience as if sequential, and the sequence may even be the opposite of what we think. That is, the movement of these energies may be first noticed by the conscious mind when it is completing. Then the very last of a chain of unconscious or superconscious experiences is the first to impinge upon our awareness, and our awareness but sometimes, but not necessarily always, reconstruct the order and so present it to us in reverse order. Something like this happens with our visual impression of lightning.

This is all said so that one does not trust too much in second hand accounts whether oral or written, but rather in one’s own experience. Having said that, certain of the preparations which the Adies had taped do provide some very valuable information. They would warn us not to imagine what they referred to, but to watch for it. It is rather as if an experienced astronomer advised in which section of the heavens one should watch to see a very faint star.

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book “The Phoenician Solar Theology” treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.

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A REPLY FROM HENRI TRACOL IN 1951

Joseph Azize Page

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Henri Tracol

The notes I summarize here were written by Mr Adie under the heading “3 October 1951, Group II, Colet Gardens”, and placed in the same folder wherein I found the Gurdjieff group meeting of 16 October 1943. Their six pages relate to Henri Tracol’s exchanges with two persons, ‘Mr Andrews’ and ‘Mrs Brown’. I find the second exchange sound, but is not so novel now as it would have been in 1951. However, the first is unique, and deserves to be known. Mr Adie must have valued it, because he has written these notes very carefully. I suspect that he either worked from memory or had jotted down some rough notes during the meeting. Also, the meeting almost certainly had more than two exchanges. This also points to the probability of selection.

Part One
‘Mr Andrews’ had a question about the suffering he has occasioned himself by causing “a lot of trouble” to other people. Mr Tracol replied that there are different types of suffering: first, there is suffering in personality. He offered the example of the ordinary negative emotion we experience at having made ourselves look silly or bad in front of others. Secondly, he said, there is the suffering which comes when we have done something wrong “against ourselves”. With this suffering, the essential thing is not that other people have been touched by it or even know of it, but that “it has been against ourselves in the sense of the work”.

In this instance, replied Andrews, it was definitely the first type of suffering.

“Then”, said Tracol, “you have to fight very hard, probably all you can mobilize of effort of work against it.”

How?, asked Andrews, whart type of effort?

“So you can get some result when you fight”, replied Tracol.

I find it a little hard to follow what Andrews then said, but he spoke about his manifestations. Tracol may have too, yet he understood the man’s state. “But I mean the fight itself” – he used that word again – “That ought to be very very clear to you. You must know how to fight, really fight your negative emotions. Try to tell me more clearly.”

Andrews then mentioned his efforts to stop thought and to relax.

Tracol responded bluntly: “That is not sufficient now. You know that your help is ‘I’, but you must know how to do it. I will try to make you understand by a kind of pciture. You are in a house and a fire is in some part of it and you have to stop it. … We are in the presence of something quite catastrophic. You have to mobilize all your forces against it. It is quite a concrete thing that is happening, as concrete as fire … quite concrete and you have to oppose it with something quite concrete also.”

“It is a thing that demands energy against energy, or, if you will, energy to direct energy in another direction.You have to arrive ready at this feeling of yourself before a complete process after having tried and tried very much. This I want you all, when you have such an enemy inside you, to try.”

“You relax and you really try to get ‘I’. ‘I’ is an affirmation that you are there fighting. ‘I’ is like the soldier who arrives on the battlefield, who says ‘I am there’. That must be very concrete. ‘I AM HERE’. You must feel that ‘I’. It comes from your sensation. You must try to put all the force you can behind it.”

“Without that ‘I’ you can do absolutely nothing. For the moment when you say it, everything else has to disappear. Just the moment when you say ‘I AM’ you sense as much as you can. Then you begin again, ‘I AM’. Try really to understand that you can put an energy in there, and that now you must try at any cost. Then you will try and the beginning and perhaps not succeed, but try and try again. Then you will attract into your ‘I’ the energy that is in your feelings.”

Mr Andrews made a comment that it was more than a metaphor, it was a picture. Tracol continued: “You have a little sensation in you sometimes. That sensation is, right now, all that you have to lean on in your effort. When we begin to remember ourselves, we say ‘I AM’. We say it as we must, with whatever is available to us. But it cannot change anything until you have tried again and again. Then, little by little, through these unsuccessful efforts, we start to understand that the affirmation has contain a certain kind of something, and what can that something possibly be but an energy?”

“You remember how in ‘Fragments’ (i.e. In Search of the Miraculous) Mr Gurdjieff says it has to make a vibration? I have heard him say that many times with his own mouth. That vibration is a sign that the energy of vibrations is there and that energy is in that direction. You can not do it at once. You do it twice, thrice, four times, five times. I am suret aht your negative emotion is a little less after it and you will understand what the fight is.”

Part Two
A vigour leaps at me from the page. Gurdjieff had not then been dead two years. I suspect that the power of this exchange reflects Gurdjieff’s personal impact, at a close remove. Later, of course, that influence was obscured by time, but also by Mme de Salzmann’s “New Work”. The later material I have seen from Henri Tracol is not, in my view, of the order disclosed here.

Note that Tracol’s first advice was to try whatever gave results. As I have mentioned in the book George Adie and in earlier blogs, one can take the advice of not working for results too absolutely. Anyone who never seeks any result from their work is mad. The real problem, as I see it, it is identification with results, and dreaming about possible results. This will all undermine the very effort.

Further, I find the exchange fascinating as being consistent with the impression given by Mr Adie’s 1949 diary, which shows Gurdjieff speaking similarly about the importance of ceaseless struggle so that sweat pours even from one’s heels. But for me the important thing is that this robust approach is the one which for me works. The New Work only set me back.

But now, with the material I recently posted from Gurdjieff’s October 1943 group meeting, I feel that readers of this blog have access to some high quality and otherwise unpublished material which could lead to a new understanding of “effort” and how a clear intellectual understanding of true efforts can lead to encouragement.

To tie these strings together, Gurdjieff had said in 1943 that the secret is in the effort. And the effort demands an intensity only of attention or of concentration while the person remains relaxed. As Mr Adie would say, I focus or concentrate without self-tensing. There is no tension in any of the centres, just direction. This, of course, is what inner concentration is: all of the faculties are pointed towards the centre. One can look at an object while relaxing the eyes or one can fixedly stare at it. It removes some of the self-tension, perhaps, to reflect that as Gurdjieff said, the exercises should be allowed time to work. Tracol stressed the last aspect of this, especially. Do not expect to succeed the first time: be patient, and let the work operate.

In 1943, Gurdjieff stated his hope that the exercises would produce faith in our possibilities of becoming. Tracol stated as a fact that if one persisted one would feel the vibrations which lead up to “I AM”, and from this would understand what the fight is. His advice was to think of a soldier coming in to battle. Gurdjieff had prayed “May God help you with your intellect”. Perhaps these are three aspects of the same thing, for as Orage said: “Thought is the pure effort to attain the truth and takes place in the Intellectual centre.”

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book “The Phoenician Solar Theology” treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.

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THE EYES

Joseph Azize Page

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Part One
The eyes, like most organs, have several functions. That means, they possess a multiple importance. My own view is that if the eyes are damaged or lost, other organs can, to a certain extent, perform the more subtle work which they perform. To an extent, we have other organs or faculties which can even see: Jacques Lusseyran bore testimony to this, stating that even after he had become blind he could see. But it is sight of a different order, and not all blind people have Lusseyran’s experience. Further, no other organ can do the work of the eye nearly so well as the eye: their substitute work is rather like walking on one’s hands.

So what are these other functions of the eye? The eye is an accumulator. Gurdjieff mentioned that we have two accumulators attached to each centre. In fact, as Ouspensky remarked in A Record of Meetings, Gurdjieff’s fuller teaching is that we have many more accumulators: the teaching recorded in Miraculous is abbreviated in order to allow the essential details to come out more clearly.

Now Jane Heap also added that the eye performs the same function for each of the bodies, and is the only organ which does so. That is, the eye is an accumulator for each of the centres. This explains why the eyes are such excellent indicators of a person’s state: they tell us how much energy is in each centre, what the quality of the energy is, and which centre is predominant. Reading the eyes correctly is an art and a science.

I repeat, the eyes can tell a person who has learnt how to read them, which substances and energies are active in a person, and what is taking place within the other. The fact that the eyes are accumulators is useful for a person who knows how to relax the eyes, and to bring consciousness to them. It means that the person can use the accumulators more intelligently, and, with a little further knowledge, gain access to the large accumulator, because the eyes have an indirect connection to it.

Mr Adie always wanted to commence a study group to research the eye in art. However, limited time and ill health prevented this. He used to tell us that the posture of the eyes was important, and in the preparations, he would teach us to relax the eyes, to feel them soft in the sockets, not hard like marbles. And of course, one can relate the relaxation of the eyes to the relaxation of the entire skull, especially, the sensing of the Eustachian tubes and the skin around the eyes, nostrils and temples.

Part Two

Many habits are related to the eyes, and knowledge of these is of benefit in the preparation which Gurdjieff brought. Here is a quote from Mr Adie on 15 November 1978.

“The question arises, how in fact do we close our eyes when we start our preparation? Open them for a moment. The closing has to be an act. It has to be an act. Otherwise, what do you close your eyes for the in the ordinary way? You close them to sleep.

“The action of closing the eyes is extremely powerful – it has a very big influence upon one.

“Preparation is my big possibility, but so often one sits down without any clear idea. The whole of our work depends upon the power of acquiring intention, fulfilling it, having it and fulfilling it.

“Yet, perhaps I cannot have a clear idea, for I am coming from dreams. But I am aware of this. So at least, when I sit down, when I close my eyes, I close them with intention to awake. I close them with intention to work. I don’t close to go into a delightful trance.

“I cannot expect to step straight into a peaceful, ordered state. If I expect that, it shows that I don’t understand. I go to fight, I go to give combat to my dreams. But I don’t fight my dreams according to the ordinary concept of a fight. Direct opposition is the very worst weapon against dreams.

“No, I dissociate myself from them. But for that I have to have the intention, and I can make a connection between the intention to dissociate from dreams, and the act of closing the eyes.”

Let me reiterate this. I am adding emphasis to Mr Adie’s words: “I can make a connection between the intention to dissociate from dreams, and the act of closing the eyes.” Mr Adie continued:

“It must not be automatic. I must never have automatism entering into my possible conscious moments, my possible conscious act. We have to act – and we have to understand what an act really is, how it is tied to a finer time, how an act takes place in the merest flash.

“This is creation. This act precedes all. Automatic events are not acts, they proceed from real acts by a very long chain of law. An act of creation includes all time: it includes before, now and forever. You know how it is said in the Gospel of Saint John, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. What is the Word? In the beginning?

“It is a question – what is the Word? When I start my work, I am god – a doer. I have to be god or there’s no work. I start with “I”. I start with an act. And how can there be an act unless it is an intentional act? All of this comes into this moment, a moment which certainly cannot be expressed in any words.

“You see, there’s every kind of trap in conscious work, every kind of trap because my life consists of a labyrinth of paths already trodden, like grooves, and at any moment I can fall from one into the other. That is the level of my understanding, I understand grooves, I don’t understand this vital second which is new. I am not prepared for a new birth, a new life, yet that is what is there for us.

“There is idealism. We came, many of us, with ideals. Very high ideals, belief in something very high. It brought us our best. But then, in the ensuing period of months and years we find that we are brought down to earth. We find that our being must grow in order that any of these ideals be realised. The ideals gradually get misted over, and rather dim. They seem so impossible that they almost cease to lead us. But we are actually in a very much better position, because now we have some facts, and we need to go to facts.

“I mention this idealism because if we could realise what heights we glimpse, and the elevated level which is our way, then we would realise how much an act is necessary. We would understand too, how could not possibly stumble into an something sacred like an act with half closed eyes.”

Part Three

Personally, I find that if when I am sitting quietly, I open my eyes, delibrately draw them closed again, and then, gently lift them to accept the impressions, the impressions come in to me quite differently the second time. This is a technique which I learnt from Mrs Adie. It never ceases to work for me. The first time I open the eyes, it seems that I am receiving impresisons, but by comparison with the second occasion, I see that somehow something in me was going out to them.

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book “The Phoenician Solar Theology” treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.

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