I was scheduled to attend an on-the-ground wisdom group gathering in Claymont in January of this year.  The gathering was designed around the annual commemoration of G.I. Gurdjieff’s birthday, and included teachings by Cynthia, group work, practices, movements, and a continuation of the wisdom civics thread that has been ongoing for over a year now.   However, just prior to my flight, I tested positive for the Omicron variant of Covid-19< and was thus unable to attend the gathering and participate….or so I thought.

I was initially, of course, disappointed that I would not be able to physically  attend the wisdom gathering, but I put on my ‘big boy’ wisdom pants and sat with the sense that I am where I need to be, and with a slight ego-scolding, attempted to let it be.  After all, disappointment can function as a negative emotion, ready to be worked, so…

In the time that passed after the January 2022 gathering, I was very anticipatory of the recordings from the gathering, to see what I “missed.”  Without trying to be overly obsessed with waiting to hear the recordings, my daily practice continued of reading, sitting, and engaging in Gurdjieff practices.  Without any spectacular revelation, one thing that arose during this time was a felt need to spend more time with the atmosphere exercise.  In following this prompting, I did and continue to do so.

There was a deepening that began in the embodiment of the atmosphere exercise.  The most specific note that I can make about it is that the exercise grew out into a personal and communal…I want to say ‘experience,’ but the word that comes to me is ‘task’ or ‘responsibility.

When the recordings became available, I did not immediately avail myself of them.  It’s not that I was not interested in what ‘occurred’ during the January gathering, there was just a sense of centeredness that was kind of taking steps in a rhythm that was not owned by me.  I have recently started listening to the recordings, and I have found that what was ‘taught’ during the Claymont gathering in January was all right there all the time, and it was all right HERE.  It was almost like listening to a confirmation of what is being lived out and engaged within right now in my life and really everywhere!

Without a named teaching, the collective teaching that was present in the Claymont gathering was not confined either spatially or temporally.  The download occurred anonymously and compassionately, subtly and viscerally, so to speak.  The atmosphere of the gathering was and is already present in the minds, hearts, and bodies of those who work to posture for the invitation.  But also, I believe, even for those who do not.  There is a force in an atmosphere that gathers the specific atmospheres of those doing the work that can WARM any location that so needs it.

Atmospheres do coincide and not just across time and space.  As Cynthia says, the atmosphere is an intertidal zone, a liminal interphase and zone of expression.  In this vein, I also can concede that there is not many atmospheres but only one that relies upon specifically personal adherents to compassionately expand.  Is this that WEB, that expands ever more efficiently and effectively to the extent that we, each of us, contribute our beautiful strand to be woven into the fabric of what can be exponentially transmitted, given and received, mixed and blended, across the realms and the worlds? Physicality notwithstanding…

This experience of receiving the anonymous benefit of a gathered group and also fully participating in the flow, I can verify for myself the reality of the effectiveness or causality of the transmissions that we send and receive, not always physically proximate, but never separate.  This is a verification of the power and strength and ever-growing expansiveness of the web and its atmospheric impressure – that ability to have an effect even without direct identification that the effect is being transmitted, if that makes any sense.  It is, I believe, that intensity that is a subtlety that just does what it needs to do through invitation and openings created within the collective and vibrant roundedness!

As I do my practice, it is never in isolation, but is a conjoined work that we are all doing.  I am humble in my window, and yet know its uniqueness is unrepeatable.  I am soberly thankful for this responsibility that draws me and receives me in that spherical realm.  That impressive atmosphere that surrounds and invites and engages and protects and nourishes all the realms – the collective personal magnum that will Honor the tincture and intensify through subtlety the growing edge of what it is that we are HERE for!