Motus Mentis

One thing connects to another in unexpected ways.

Last Friday I had lunch with a well-known conservative blogger. We didn’t meet to talk about politics, though: I had noticed, in some of this writer’s posts, references to the “Fourth Way” teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and his pupil, P.D. Ouspensky — and having both a personal interest in, and a personal connection to, Gurdjieff’s system of ideas (see here), I invited this writer, whom I had never met before, to chat about it over lunch, and we had a long and interesting talk.

I hadn’t reviewed any of the Gurdjieffian source material in years, and our conversation inspired me to do so. So this evening, having finished the day’s work, I took down Gurdjieff’s book Meetings with Remarkable Men, and sat in the living room skimming through it. I became engrossed in the chapter titled Prince Yuri Lobachevsky, which describes Gurdjieff’s stay in a remote Central Asian monastery where he was taught a series of “sacred dances”: dances that I myself had practiced as a younger man, at the Gurdjieff Foundation here in New York City.

My reading was interrupted by the sound of music coming through the open window. I live half a block from the 9th Street entrance to Prospect Park, and from there it’s just a hundred yards or so to the Bandshell, which hosts a summer concert series every year. I could hear that somebody was playing there tonight.

Curious, I went to Celebrate Brooklyn’s website to see who it was. It turned out to be an English techno band called Hot Chip. I didn’t know anything about them, so from there I went to YouTube.

The first video I saw was one called Night and Day. I’m not a big fan of this sort of music, but it was well enough done to hold my attention. About twenty seconds in, a group of dancers in monk’s garb took the screen.

Have a look here.

Now, look at this.

Like I said, one thing connects to another in unexpected ways.