Sound of Number, Taste of...

Seminars The Awakening to One's Real Self

 

The Awakening to One's Real Self
The Gurdjieff Approach

 

Friday, December 18 to Monday, December 21, 2009
Delray Beach, Florida
30 minutes from the W. Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale airports

Through guided meditation, Conscious Body-Breath Impressions™, dialogue and private interviews, William Patrick Patterson explores the theme. Open to all levels of simplicity. No previous experience necessary.

Because space is limited and past seminars have filled quickly, please make your reservation early. The total cost of tuition, lodging (double occupancy) and meals is $475 with reservations received by December 1, 2009. Afterward, the cost is $575. Space is reserved with a deposit of $275.

To reserve a place, send your deposit by mail or reserve electronically below. There is a small surcharge when using the latter.

To reserve a place by mail, send a check made out to Arete Communications to the following address:

Arete Communications
773 Center Boulevard #58

Prayers & Music of G.I. Gurdjieff: Sacred Music of the Eternal Present

Prayers & Music of G.I. Gurdjieff: Sacred Music of the Eternal Present Nancy Caporaso, alto, and Michael Dale, piano This is the first time the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music has been accompanied by the singing of Gurdjieff's prayers. Recorded live at two recitals in Washington, D.C. and in Baltimore, the prayers from Gurdjieff's Legominism All and Everything are sung to original music composed by Ms. Caporaso. "Innovative and visionary. The prayer hymns are direct, unadorned and powerful, Nancy Caporaso's voice warm and resonant. Michael Dale's assured playing conveys a heartfelt affinity with the Gurdjieff music. Deeply vital music transmitted through the musicians with a special quality of attention that calls us to listen actively." —Mary Ellen Korman, A Woman's Work

Locked-In syndrome - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Based on Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir of life after a debiliting stroke, this film by Julian Schnabel shows how he awoke from a  coma finding that he was almost completely paralyzed except for his left eye.  Working with a speach therapist he begins communicating with people by blinking his left eye, indicating each letter. Bauby had been editor of the French fashion magazine Elle. He had a deal to write a book before his accident so he decides he will still write a book. The story of writing the book is mixed with recollections of his life up until his stroke. One of the most poignant moments in the film is when Bauby recollects shaving his father who is confined to his own apartment because he is too frail to use the stairs. In another scene, the father, played by Max Von Sydow, weeps when he realizes during a phone call to the hospital, that Bauby can't answer back. Bauby finished his book and died of pneumonia ten days after it was published. He is played in the movie by Mathieu Amalric and the movie was filmed, in part, at the hospital where Bauby stayed after his stroke.

interruption... Notes from the Body

                             The Co-Op always has a certain smell to it. What's this, the new issue of Delicious Living, probably a lot of advertisements and a few recipes, but lots of color.  Let's see...mmm...interesting article. Natural killer cells slay fatigue. Uh-oh, this Doctor in the picture has too much flash, that polyester sportcoat, uh, solving the puzzle of chronic tarigue syndrome. Let's see if they have this product in the store. Wow, it's over $50, i think i'll try it.  (One hour later.) i'll take one, no use reading the "suggested use." (45 minutes later)  Incredible, the grid of pain and fatigue has lifted off. i feel quite sure it's gone (forever). Let's check out the research on this. Of course the Doctor told me i had fibromyalgia, but as much as i know it's difficult to tell these two apart. (2 days later) Look, at this internet site i can buy 6 bottles, shipped free for....

amore... Amari

Amari (bitter) is a digestif popular in Italy; it's drunk after the long Italian meal (apertifs are drunk before the meal). They're little known outside of Italian communities in larger cities. Some bars in San Francisco and New York are beginning to offer large selections. Amari's are made from proprietary, secret and local recipes of herbs, flowers, roots and other ingrediants; they're macerated in alcohol and then distilled. The origin of the drink supposedly can be traced back to the  time when spices were being brought from the Near and Far East and then used by herbalists and monks in Europe. The drink was first commercialized in the 19th century. It should be had chilled but keeping it in the freezer can stiffen the liquid and deadan the herbal taste. Amari are sometimes used in cocktails and can also be used as a base in which to create a cocktail. Other countries that produce amari include Serbia, Germany, the Czech Repuclic and Russia. Gorki List (bitter leaf) from Russia may be available shortly in the United States. This drink contains wormwood which was an ingrediant in old-style amari.

Sexual Division - Ted Hughes

                                        A Childish Prank          Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls, dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert on the flowers of Eden. God Pondered. The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.  Crow laughed. He bit the Worm, God's only son, into two writhing halves. He stuffed into man the tail half with the wounded end hanging out. He stuffed the head-half headfirst into woman and it crept in deeper and up to peer out through her eyes. Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly because O it was painful. Man awoke being dragged across the grass. Woman awoke to see him coming. Neither knew what had happened. God went on sleeping. Crow went on laughing.                                                                                                                                       

Army of Shadows/Gurdjieff in Paris

Jean-Pierre Melville's film about the French Resistance made in 1969 was finally released in the United States in 2006. The film is adapted from Joseph Kessel's book of the same name and is an account of the author's experience in the French resistance; it was published in London in 1943 as a fictionalized work of reportage. Melville himself was supposedly connected with the French resistance but there is no doubt he fought with the Free French in North Africa. When the film initialy came out it was ignored during the heyday of the French New Wave. Characters and storys in the film were based on real people and incidents that actually took place in the French resistance.

                                                                                                What was Gurdjieff doing during the German occupation of Paris? For a detailed description see William Patrick Patterson's book Voices in the Dark. It includes transcripts of meetings between Gurdjieff and his students, the influence of the pseudo-occult on the German order and the voices speaking of citizens, soldiers, political figures and intellectuals. Gurdjieff had stayed with his pupils in France instead of going to America during the occupation. What would it be like to live in the uncertainty of not knowing if your friends were informers, of not knowing if you would have food to eat and realizing that France, the country with the largest standing army at the time, had been easily overun by the Germans?

REGARDING CARLOS CASTENADA

William Patrick Patterson's new book provides the insght and order to understand Castaneda, his ideas, the underlying threads and their "unrecognized source."  Shows Castaneda's terms and how they correspond with Gurdjieff's teaching, Castaneda's influences for dreaming, his "witches." A must read for anyone who read Castaneda and felt the frenzy and emotion he introduced into the rationalist Western culture.

VOWELS

The self, (myself) laid bare to an open bed of flowers. Stalks drooping, depressed and sour. The roses bent and weighted within the wattle dead.

Space galore, the calendar suspends its days, echos (the vowels) float over her poems, the quiet stands around. Recurring, recurring, recurring (repeating) in the hours.

Let's go to town.

The Jaguar

Ted Hughes was  Poet Laureate of England from 1984 to 1998 when he died.  He was born in Yorkshire in 1930 and grew up in a household haunted by the presence of his father's experiences in WWI.  His father was one of a few British soldiers to survive the slaughter at Gallipoli. The book Ted Hughes - The Life of a Poet by Elaine Feinstein (WW Norton 2001) helps set the record straight about Hughe's life which was a tragic one. His first wife, Sylvia Plath, committed suicide after Hughes started an affair with another woman. (In so doing she gained the fame that had eluded her.) In America, embracing the onset of the feminist movement, Plath was sanctified, Hughes was vilified. Many critics bitterly attacked Hughes for Plaths death. He had two children with Plath.  He also had a daughter with Assia Wevill that ended in tragedy, Wevill killed herself and her daughter. He was married a second time to Carol Orchard. Here is one of Hughe's most famous poems, The Jaguar.

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun. The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut. Fatigued with indolence, the tiger and lion lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor's coil is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw. But who runs like the rest past these arrives at a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized, as a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes on a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom - the eye satisfied to be blind in fire, by the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear - he spins from the bars, but there's no cage to him more than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: the world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.