How to read?
It seems helpful, and necessary, to come back again and again to the question, How to read? This is of course equally the case for when reading alone and when reading with others. But reading in a group has its own particular needs and possibilities. And as well as reading, there is often the wish to discuss the ideas.
In a meeting of one of A.R. Orage’s beginners’ group talks in 1931,1 in New York, the following is noted:
The ideas discussed at these meetings, for example, compare with foods of which a small quantity gives a strong effect. If taken too soon after talk on light, trivial subjects, or followed immediately by such talk, bad effects result. Compare the care taken in religious services to surround the consideration of divine subjects with relative quiet. The kneeling and praying on entering the church is to provide a moment of "fast" before the intake. Similarly on leaving the church, to provide another moment of fast during which ideas may be absorbed, — or the impressions settle to their level before being mixed with impressions of a different specific gravity. O remembers the custom in the village church that he knew as a boy, of keeping silence until one was out of the churchyard. If this "silence" is complete — i.e. not merely on the lips but in the mind — the impressions have a chance to be absorbed while still unmixed.
In these groups we come to the discussion fresh from the affairs of every-day life, and turn back to them immediately afterward. It can be seen that it is hard to maintain a state of intellectual health. Almost no one succeeds. One must know when to feed.
What Orage says here seems worth bearing in mind for our own reading of this special literature of Gurdjieff's, and also of his direct pupils, both alone and with others. This desired change of tempo during the time of reading, delineating it and protecting it from the automatic onslaught of the associations of ordinary life, seems worth paying attention to. I leave my ordinary concerns at the door, and attempt to enter a more receptive state - listening, sensing, waiting inwardly. The tempo of ordinary life is returned to in due course, but for now I move in a different world.
L.S. Morris – Orage’s beginners’ group talks, April 7, 1931, p.9.