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The speaker, Jean Paul Gravel, provided us with a disquisition on the general topic of relationships, beliefs, happiness and how to manage life generally. He had been born into an unsettled existence of violence, threats and uncertainty, from which beginnings he had developed the view that everybody is a fake, a principle of uncertainty that drove him into an exploration of the three tenets of life: each of us is embroiled in the obligation to think, feel and act … whether you like it or not. His conceit was a story of the inexperienced youth who, charged with the task of clearing a copse, spent so much time sharpening his axe that his inquisitors despaired of his ever being able to discharge his task. However, he eventually so refined the sharpness of the instrument that when he got to work, almost too late, his tool was so sharp that everything fell before him with plenty of time to spare. Such is life: one has to have prepared the requisites that life can be managed on one’s own terms. The adze must be properly honed before commencing to use it.
The exercise that followed was more demonstrative. Asked to stand up and face one’s neighbour about a foot apart, your learned correspondent found himself confronted by the redoubtable Mary. Required to look into one’s companion’s eyes for 30 seconds, I found myself looking into a mind in constant motion and obviously deeply attentive to some profound metaphysical concept. The profound silence that accompanied this undertaking evidently encompassed everybody, as the silence of deep thought was manifestly profound. (When I asked my profound partner whether she had seen something similarly enervating in my aura, she indicated that all that she saw was a tabula rasa; I did not know whether to be happy or sad with this revelation.) However, this reactive feeling apparently did not much matter: that component of the presentation ceased at the point of regaining our seats.
We then moved onto ‘beliefs', these being demonstrated by the drawing of a little man in a boat approaching the edge of a saucer (apparently the rower believed that he was about to sail over the edge of the world, this represented by the saucer) and the segue into the fact that life is only an illusion and that we humans spend our lives pretending to be a confident reflection of who we actually are … or indeed, actually aren’t! Further, each of us has on average about 75,000 separate thoughts a day, none of which we remember (how then can we know how many we have? This, Jean Paul left unexplained). What we are seeking is the extension of our lives and perceptions into Emotional Freedom, of which there are 3 levels, which eventually will lead to happiness (for all, or individually: who would know unless we have sharpened our minds by limiting our beliefs?) And there we are, back to the beliefs with which the enigmatic question of fakery began 27 minutes before.
A very thought-provoking intellectual journey was had by all.