/lit/ - Literature

> >There are certain states in ordinary sleep in which a man wants to awaken but cannot. He tells himself that he is awake but, in reality, he continues to sleep – and this can happen several times before he finally awakes. But in ordinary sleep, once he is awake, he is in a different state; in hypnotic sleep the case is otherwise; there are no objective characteristics, at any rate not at the beginning of awakening; a man cannot pinch himself in order to make sure that he is not asleep. And if, which God forbid, a man has heard anything about objective characteristics, Kundalini at once transforms it all into imagination and dreams.

This sounds like Gurdjieff is bullshitting or talking out of his ass, right? Like he doesn’t know anything about Kundalini Yoga and Hindu and Tantric teachings about awakening the kundalini shakti from the root chakra at the base of the spine, and/or the genitals, up through the spine until it reaches the sahsrara, crown chakra, thereby reaching enlightenment?

In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, at some point late into it’s 1,100 pages — I actually read the book three or four times, many years ago — writing this whole thread makes me want to read it again — he has this extremely strange headache passage which sounds bizarre, of course, out of context, but is a nice sample for anyone who wants to see what all this fuss and confusion of the OP is about:

>Just these same substances in beings, according to the fifth deflection of the Sacred Heptaparaparshinokh, have the free possibility of giving, in the manifestations of the common presences of three-brained beings, results not similar but ‘opposite to each other.’ “That is why, in respect of these being-substances, the beings themselves must always be very, very much on their guard in order to avoid undesirable consequences for their entire whole. From the cerebrum of beings a part of these definite substances also goes to serve the planetary body itself, but the other part, passing in a particular way through the ’nerve nodes’ of the spine and the breast, is concentrated in the beings of the male sex, in what are called ‘testicles’ and in the beings of the female sex in what most of your favorites call ‘ovaries,’ which are the place of concentration in the common presences of beings of the ‘being- Exioehary,’ which is for the beings themselves their most sacred possession. You should know that this particular way mentioned is called ‘Trnlva.’"

This is the sex energy going up through the spine to the back then top of the head, leading to ecstatic experiences and enlightenment. Gurdjieff here also makes the warning about how one has to be particularly careful about derangement arising from these experiences and messing around with this stuff without knowing what you’re doing.