/lit/ - Literature

>>20645549
This very phraseology (“left-hand path”) is more of a modern occultist innovation from Western esotericism (although there is the Sanskrit phrase of “Vamamarga,” which does literally mean left-handed way and refers to Tantric rites of worship often breaking traditional Vedic injunctions, such as through the eating of meat, sexual intercourse with Tantric consorts, and the ingestion of forbidden substances such as alcohol, the seeing of the bliss of Brahman in the grossest experiences), but was not quite or just what Gurdjieff was doing at all, in the crude sense of some occultist like Aleister Crowley. Service to others, to the world at large, and to God is there co-extensively with service to self (to speak in this relatively crude fashion), in a teaching such as of Gurdjieff’s. Gurdjieff’s teachings could more accurately could be conceived as containing aspects of both “the left-hand path” and “the right-hand path” — the former not in any sinister sense, but, like in traditions such as of the Navnath Sampradaya lineage of Hindu yogic teachings, and Kashmir Shaivism, where the path can be tread as a “householder” — “the way of the householder” — marrying, building up a career and the like — instead of strictly ascetically, the retreating to a monastery.

If you read BTTHG, though, for instance, you’ll see Gurdjieff rather old-fashionedly speaking about how modern innovations — of politics, of fashion, trends like feminism, scientism, atheism, occultism (such as schools like Anthroposophy and Theosophy, which he mentions by name) — are all a farrago destroying in civilization what he views as the natural, basically good impulses humanity should have of patriarchality and religiousness.

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