/lit/ - Literature

>>20364824
Furthermore, in “Beelzebub’s Tales,” Gurdjieff names “Saint Moses,” “Saint Jesus Christ,” and “Saint Muhammad” as common messengers of what he calls “Our Endlessness”. Clearly, a very Sufic idea.

Of the aforementioned note that Sufis historically have called themselves “masihi i battini,” esoteric Christians — in his disciple PD Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous,” Ouspensky recounts Gurdjieff answering curious students asking what the source of his teaching was or what they could call it, that one name that could be given to it was, “esoteric Christianity.”

Gurdjieff’s assertion that various originally true, great, and authentic religious teachings had been corrupted by humanity’s “wiseacring,” is in line with Sufism’s assertion that various religious traditions do indeed have foundations in great wisdom but have been historically and societally corrupted, as well as having apparent differences due to variations of “time, place, and people” — the idea that the same truth can take on different manifestations due to variations of time, place and people, is both a Sufic and a Gurdjieffian one.

Gurdjieff’s division of the human being into “essence” and “personality” — “personality” being the socially-conditioned artifice in oneself which is a barrier to seeing reality as it is, and commonly-inculcated traits, mannerisms, and typical beliefs of which (the personality) can differ from culture to culture and based on the education and upbringing one has received — the essence being the deeper, more universal part shared by all of humanity — is completely in line with the Sufi division of the human being into the nafs (self, disparagingly, in terms of “lower self”) (also, again, known as the nafs-i-ammara, commanding self, in that it “commands” one in one’s day-to-day life) and the deeper aspects of the self symbolized by the ruh (spirit) and qalb (heart).

Wiseacre (n.)
>A person regarded as being disagreeably egotistical and self-assured.
>A sayer of wise things; a learned or wise man.
>One who makes pretensions to great wisdom; hence, in contempt or irony, a would-be wise person; a serious simpleton or dunce.

>>19374671
An energetic/immaterial/super-material version of your body enters into a normally unseen and unexperienced realm, a realm that those who are awake and sober usually know nothing of. Sometimes, in dreaming, ecstatic mystical experiences, paranormal episodes, and hallucinogenic drugs trips, you can pierce the veil and sense this realm. Shamans, saints, sages, and sometimes lunatics and animals know more of it than we do. In Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism, this realm is subdivided into several levels known as the bardos, which actually has some surprisingly close parallels to Judeo-Christian eschatology (note: this usually refers to the theological study of a religion’s views on the end times, but in some rare cases, can also be applied to their views of the fate of the human soul after death). The six bardos of Tibetan eschatology are essentially parallel to the tripartite division of the afterlife in Christianity of hell, purgatory, and heaven, except the Tibetan version is just a bit more nuanced and detailed and has six different realms, and also applies to human spiritual and psychological states while living.

Which of course returns to the truism that as your state is while living, so will your state be in death. Christian theologians and writers, when trying to explain how a “loving God could create hell,” argue that it is not from God’s lack of love, but from the subject’s lack of love and lack of a close relationship with God, the universe, and the rest of mankind that Hell arises. Because they cultivated a loveless or even an evil psychological and spiritual state while alive, they experience the same thing after death.

>What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in “The Brothers Karamazov”

G.I. Gurdjieff, the unconventional 20th-century Armenian sage, himself said most people turn into dust after death (dust to dust, as the Old Testament puts it), since they are so soulless and mechanical that they didn’t really cultivate a soul to have much experience after death. They basically just act as spiritual worm-food for the universe after death, then have their primitive consciousness recycled into a new form shortly thereafter (as per Hindu and Buddhist theology). One interesting parable told in Gurdjieff’s study groups, called the story of the Sly Man and the Devil, went like this:

>>18976859
Some writers are called “writers’ writers.” In this book, Gurdjieff is the exact opposite of that. People used to and expecting normal literature will go, “What in the FUCK am I reading?” Gurdjieff did this on purpose to dissuade the normal reader, and reward the devoted one. If you read Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous”, Gurdjieff makes a point that, “It actually is precisely NOT good to make people too easily attracted to these ideas and to make it too easy for them to learn from us. Doing so is too tempting for the soft and easy part in people that wants everything to come without effort. Believe me, if someone with a real spiritual desire has felt something true in our work, he will stay up all night waiting for a call back from us, or even call back and inquire as much as possible.” This was in response to Ouspensky asking why Gurdjieff did strange things like suddenly cancel group meetings after he had scheduled them without warning anyone in advance, or suddenly moving group meetings from one town to a very far town in a manner of a few short days, making people have to change all their plans just so they could travel far to meet him. Of course, to the random outsider reading this, this sounds like Gurdjieff just being a theatrical charlatan and cult leader abusing his students because he thought it was funny. In the term given in Ouspensky’s book, he wanted disciples to make a “super-effort” to learn from him.

Gurdjieff was trained by and/or directly, personally learned from sources as diverse as the Naqshbandi Sufis, the esoteric Sarmouni sect, Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhists, Orthodox Christian monasteries, Nestorian Christians (obscure Christian sects in the Near East who don’t revere Christ as God but as a prophet/saint), the Yazidis, and definitely had to have learned from various Buddhists, Hindus, and even just wandering enlightened yogis, saints, holy men, and fakirs while traveling in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Far East looking for the truth behind all religions as a young man.

Of all these sources, it’s said the Naqshbandi Sufis and the Sarmounis were the ones he was most representative of and personally learned the most from — of whom, interestingly enough, esoteric teachings of theirs claim they are teaching the truth behind all religions and see valid sources of enlightenment behind all religions. Trans-cultural mysticism and enlightenment, in other words.

In his characteristically broken English (he was actually a polyglot who knew maybe over a dozen languages which he learned with at least some fluency in the course of his travels so he could talk to people and stay in the most different countries — fun fact — as a child living in Kars, a multi-ethnic region now being a city in northern Turkey, where people as diverse as Armenians, Russians, Caucasus Greeks, Georgians, Turks, Kurds and smaller numbers of Christian communities from eastern and central Europe