/lit/ - Literature

>>20390194
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/143356.Madame_Blavatsky_s_Baboon
Here's a section about him. It seems to me that Gurdjieff is just such a cunning businessman who sold Eastern wisdom and spiritual BDSM to Western rich idiots. His system definitely helped him: a mansion in France and racing cars, a beautiful life.

Wilson's book on him is pretty readable and short

Ultimately though look into Ouspensky's major books condensing his thought

>>20390194
Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous” is like the touchstone for this, ironically a better introduction for most than Gurdjieff’s own BTTHG, which is also an awesome work but only for the very devoted. Next after ISoTM, can come Ouspensky’s “The Fourth Way” as a further development of the presented there, or Beelzebub’s Tales itself.

>>20390194
>Gurdijeff
Who?

>>20390194
Snake oil salesman

>>20391517
A man who tried to teach people how to create souls. Because this is a controversial proposition in the modern West, where skeptical technological scientific atheism vs. self-limiting prideful adherence to some church like Judaism or Christianity reigns, he is strongly misinterpreted — the atheists/agnostics/those without a sense of spirituality, simply deducing “he’s nothing more than a conman and cult-leader,” and the religionists also, “He’s a dangerous cult-leader drawing people away from the Truth, which is only to be found in our tradition. The only authentic spiritual development and rebirth of the soul is to be found in our sect. If some random guy claims he’s doing it — he doesn’t have our fame and backing and massive support of billions behind him, so he’s just a ‘cult,’ as opposed to US, who are a genuine church.”

As the reference to existentialist philosopher and writer Colin Wilson makes clear, Gurdjieff can even be read and enjoyed/profited from, as an esoteric, existentialist, and religious philosopher >>20390409.

>>20391917
Are you the guy who posted that huge multi post thing in an Advaita thread recently and then the thread instantly 404ed? Are your writings available anywhere?

>>20392033
Yep. I’m flattered, but no. I view myself now as still more in a phase of great learning and study, and amn’t in the mood to create something like an anonymous blog where any limited insights of mine are crystallized, when I still have such a massive backlog of mystical and religious literature I want to get through. “Do not try to set yourself up as a teacher if you are not complete,” is a Sufic precept I like and see as entirely valid, I only break it anonymously on /lit/ occasionally, since with the element of anonymity there’s hopefully no false pride in it, no benefit or reward for me, hence not an ego-game.

>>20390194

In order: Colin Wilson's book, Gurdjieff's Meetings With Remarkable Men, In Search of the Miraculous.

Bump

>>20391917
I don't follow.

>>20391917
>A man who tried to teach people how to create souls.
What would that entail?

>>20392131
I really liked those posts. It was a shame when the thread died. I respect that, I feel the same way honestly.

Still, I enjoyed your insights and I hope you do share them systematically (or anti-systematically or whatever) some day. It doesn't have to be a finished system or program. I think it's important that the people who really care, and are really doing "the work," stay in some sort of dialogue with with the world, and don't hide it all away until they've fixed and perfected everything themselves.
>The best lack all conviction, while the worst
>Are full of passionate intensity.
Gurdjieff himself has his flaws but the world is better off for knowing about him.

Also having a community and being in dialogue helps you not to go crazy, which is always a risk with these things.

Start with Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous.

I went down the G rabbit hole in recent times. Lots of very astute observations about human nature. Lots of intriguing esoteric concepts. Lots of completely incomprehensible, bordering on schizo tier theories about the nature of the universe.

His adherents say that its all a ruse to shake you out of your conditioned way of thinking, that a lot of it is deliberate bullshit meant to fuck with your ingrained worldview and sense of self which does not really exist. There is a reason why the likes of Robert Anton Wilson and Osho were such fans of his. His detractors simply claim he was a scammer preying on gullible rich Westerners. He certainly had his disciples wrapped around his finger (and he fucked plenty of them too) but then most of them were typical bourgeois, spiritual dilettantes with too much time and money on their hands.

It can't hurt to read Ouspensky. I guarantee you will be intrigued at first then lose your shit when you see the diagrams. Gurdjieff himself repeatedly said that "the work" is extremely challenging and must be carried under supervision as part of a "school". This is not self-help stuff. If you are open minded, it could make you question yourself and reality in a way you never have before.

>>20394863

Through what he called a kind of inner friction. Basically, through lifelong inner struggle, such as that experienced by monks and ascetics, a soul or astral body can be created which survives physical death. Intentional suffering with a purpose or aim. He did not say this soul was eternal though, only that it could live on for a time.

He also claimed that at the last supper, the disciples literally ate Jesus' flesh and drank his blood in order to communicate with his astral body after his death, which is what supposedly happened when Jesus appeared to them after the 'resurrection'.

>>20394622
When people think about “spiritual development” they have 2 or maybe 3 main possible views on it:

1.) the clever atheistic one, that it doesn’t exist — there’s no soul and hence no need to develop it, religion is merely a sociological artifact
2.) it exists but the only true way to develop it is to be found through adherence to some popularized sect or religion, anyone claiming spirituality can exist outside these forms is simply a “cult-leader”
3.) it exists, its development has been a perennial tradition which took on the form of religions to propagate its techniques and insights, however, these have themselves become degraded — the esoteric insights, the inner core about soul-making, has left them, and therefore we need a recourse to mystical or hidden sources of knowledge.

The Gurdjieff-school, as it applies to something like Christianity, for instance, is not anti-Christian or non-Christian as typically conceived — the viewpoint there is rather, “Yes, Christianity is great, if people were indeed able to be Christians. Christ was a great awakener but who today is truly Christ-like, even if billions of people call themselves ‘Christian’?” This an offensive view both to self-described “Christians” (and traditional adherents of other religions), as well as to skeptical clever cynics who view all “occultism” or “mysticism” as cult-making, derangement, and obfuscation.

>>20394863
What Gurdjieff calls “conscious labor” and “intentional suffering” in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, and what more prosaically is called self-observation and self-remembering as in his disciple Ouspensky’s account of Gurdjieff’s teachings, “In Search of the Miraculous,” as well as the elimination of the outward expression of negative emotions meant to be paralleled by an inward abolishing of the expression of negative emotions. This is also conceptualized as “working on oneself” or “the Work.” >>20395125 somewhat describes it, even using examples given in ISoTM, but with some of the more sensational mystical ideas G. was transmitting.

The idea is a sort of reverse of how people typically view religious traditions. In the typical view, a certain faith is taken as the end-all be-all of one’s possible spiritual development, dogmas and rites and symbolism crystallized into a church. For Gurdjieff (and others like him), it is the reverse — the religion started with an awakening, a truly awakened person or group of people trying to awaken others. But the core of awakening became degenerated, because humanity at large is “asleep” — so sleeping people took what awakened people did and said, and made cults around it to keep themselves asleep but simply in a somewhat higher-seeming way — now with emotional and intellectual titillation bound up in it which they took to be “religion.” For Gurdjieff, he would not deny that Christian monastics, Buddhist monks, Hindu yogis, and Sufis could and have all been “awake” and used their religious faith and practices as a means of becoming so. But he would have a rather cynical view on how many of these people truly are awake, ensouled. For G., anyone who becomes awake is because they necessarily did “the Work,” worked on themselves, no matter who or where they learned it from — whether from Christ, the Buddha, or the Upanishads. It is not the reverse, that one system or figure is the origin of the Work (which comes from the divine or a higher level of reality and therefore involves opening oneself up to it, as well), rather, it is that any authentically spiritual figure simply did the Work and tried to teach others how to do the Work on themselves.

>>20396593
In his terminology, it is also that they were able to find within themselves, bring their consciousness into the “higher thinking center” and “higher emotional center”, which are typically latent and unused in humanity, as opposed to the lower/normal emotions and thoughts/thinking we all indulge in. Indications of experiences of the higher emotional and higher thinking centers, can be found in outwardly unrelated yet apposite works, like Aldous Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy” and “The Doors of Perception,” and William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Ideas like these are not necessarily unfamiliar to the modern New Age dabbler or the mystical seekers of Gurdjieff’s and Ouspensky’s day, often steeped in New Age universalist lore like that of Theosophy (as Ouspensky started out as an explorer of, as well as of Eastern traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism).

However, Gurdjieff, as someone who had traveled much in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East, including Tibet, learned under many religious schools there and steeped himself in much religious lore, tried to take this one step further, beyond merely talking or thinking about such things and to actually realizing it within oneself. His system is thus an encapsulation of what he thought to be objective knowledge derived from these higher emotional center and higher thinking centers and the ways to get into them (which includes stilling, minimizing, properly putting in their place, the automatic reactions of the normal emotional and thinking centers — what the Buddhists conceptualize as “the monkey mind”, always hopping from one thing to another, uncontrolled, scattered, and disparate). As James and Huxley noted, those who had these mystical experiences seemed to be talking about very similar things and insights in very similar ways. This is also of course an insight Gurdjieff obviously had. For him, it was because the higher emotional and higher thinking center give one insight into reality as it really is, objective reality, as well as offering a pathway to communion with God. Hence, it is unsurprising that they indeed sound similar, even when coming from different traditions, places, and ages.

Gurdjieff’s system is no mere loose, wishywashy “just meditate” New Ageism, no, but rather an attempted genuine disciplining and perfection of the human being. In a way, its best insights are self-validating — because you can actually see, it IS better not to be addicted to negative emotions than it is to indulge in them; and you DO feel more awake, more human, more alive, when you are more conscious. For most people, they only truly become actually self-conscious at real moments of their life — near death experiences, being close to death, the death of someone else, or some sudden shock.

>>20396633
Gurdjieff’s system is about giving these “shocks” to oneself, DELIBERATELY seeking how one can be more conscious and awake, even in day-to-day ordinary life. Hence it is just as much like Zen as it is like “esoteric Christianity.” And so that is why it could also be said, that it is about how to create a soul in oneself (whether you take this to be literal, or simply a useful metaphor he gave his disciples so as to encourage them to work on themselves and to awaken).

>>20396648
One common and valid criticism of the “New Age” and interest in various religions besides the accepted one of one’s culture, is it that it mistakes “horizontality”, a knowledge of and acceptance of similarities between a great number of religions, with “verticality,” vertical depth, genuine deepening of spiritual insight and aspiration and discipline within oneself. Gurdjieff’s system accounts for this (he had many negative things to say about Theosophy and the like, the occult movements of Europe and America in his day), saying that such people are simply moving around in the mental center, the brain, creating a vast artificial composite system which doesn’t necessarily awaken within themselves higher emotion and higher thinking. So by his analysis, a dedicated Zen master and a pious faithful Christian monk are both more ensouled or awakened people (even if they used different methodologies for this), remaining within their own religious system, than, for instance, some great brain-student of various religions, creating a clever composite like Blavatsky did or even his own disciple Ouspensky once did in his younger days in books like “Tertium Organum: the Third Canon of Thought, a Key to the Enigmas of the World”, necessarily might be. One goes straight up to the higher emotional and higher thinking centers — the other is fascinated by others’ account of it and the lore and symbolism and religious tracts based around it and tries to get at it with their brain-intellect, without necessarily being an “insider” to it.

Students of Heidegger — an apparently random comparison but really not so — might find that Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity, being-toward-death, and the They-self are all rather similar to Gurdjieff’s conception of “essence” (the more unconditioned, truer self of a human being) vs. “personality” (the outer societally-conditioned ego), as well as of his thoughts on the importance of the remembrance of one’s and everyone’s inevitable death, as one of the best and most important things to grab onto if one truly wants to be a self-unified and awakening person. And of course the focus on remembrance of mortality is also similar to the Buddhist notion of impermanence and techniques they gave of meditating on impermanence, the idea in Plato’s Phaedo that proper philosophy is about preparing oneself for death, and Renaissance era art and literature using the motif of the memento mori. This is not just a matter of comparison or influence or seeing the similarity — it’s to be seen for oneself. Nor is it a matter of one person, sect, or tradition exclusively “owning” this common knowledge. They were talking about similar things and central core concepts because they were all more awakened people.

Heraclitus: “I searched myself.”

Will I profit from Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous” if I am deep into Western philosophy (all the way up until recent times) and wanting to branch out?

>Remember yourself, always and everywhere
Gurdjieff

For G., this is the basic way to true consciousness and conscience within oneself, true higher awareness, achieved by a special internal discipline. The state eventually achieved through the solidification of this practice — and it cannot be achieved WITHOUT it — conscious self-evolution cannot happen mechanically, as by thoughtlessly carrying out rites or listening to others — is the state he describes as “objective consciousness.” When a Buddhist talks about nirvana, a Hindu about moksha, Christ about the kingdom of Heaven being within, and Sufis about fana (extinction, as into Allah), this is the state of “objective consciousness” a precious few people have reached and continue to reach throughout history. But it cannot be done except by the practice of “self-remembering”, whatever name, shape, or form it takes. As G. notes, references to this can be found in the Gospels with all of Christ’s talk about waking and sleeping, dying and being reborn — “Watch [keep watch, be awake], for you know not the day and the hour.” The issue is that not everyone in every religious tradition understands and carries this out. So G. was trying to reintroduce this precious heritage of humanity, which he felt was clearly to be found in many ancient religious traditions and schools but which unfortunately were misunderstood, forgotten, not truly carried out. An obvious parallel to it can be found in the Orthodox religious text, the Philokalia, written by Eastern Orthodox monks of the hesychast tradition over the centuries, with a special tradition of contemplative prayer and remembrance of God which they even referred to as “watchfulness.” Again, it is not something one exclusive sect (or even composite sect, like Guenon-style Traditionalism) “owns”, it is a same truth different people throughout different cultures saw.

>The Philokalia of the Neptic Saints gathered from our Holy Theophoric Father, through which, by means of the philosophy of ascetic practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined, and made perfect

Gurdjieff in fact noted that he saw the Orthodox Christian tradition as having more of this in them, having it less degenerate from its primordial origins.

A somewhat looser idea or formulation of all this is to be found in modern phrases like “mindfulness.”

>>20396731
You will probably profit out of it in accordance with what within you is already sincerely striving enough to be awakened by it, to put it tautologically enough. It may catch you off-guard, it may not be fully what you expect, when you get into the outright cosmological parts which seem to be transmitting some primordial lore he claims to have learned from some obscure Central-Asian-ur-tradition (it seems). In other words, to the skeptic, it may have an aura of Blavatskianism around it. But there is much in it which applies to everyone and is awesome reading, feeling like you’re being reminded about something you always secretly knew but forgot about or covered up in yourself, something you once knew but forgot about as you grew older.

>>20396731
And also, you will probably find it most interesting in terms of how it relates to the modern philosophical schools of existentialism and phenomenology, as well as, on the other hand, and apparently paradoxically enough, to the schools of Ancient Greek philosophy. Both primordial and ancient, and fully modern and new! If “philosophy” literally and etymologically means, “love of wisdom” (an idea we today as moderners might find somewhat “corny” and “old-fashioned”), then Gurdjieff and the like are truly philosophers in the classic sense of the word. It’s a sort of intellectual arrogance, a pride of book-learning, maybe even a Western-centrism, that artificially cuts off Nisargadatta Maharaj and Gurdjieff, as somehow being “less of” philosophers than Socrates or Sartre. OP mentions the fusion of the East and the West in Gurdjieff’s thought, that is indeed a notable characteristic of his. The critic Martin-Seymour Smith in fact used this exact and perfectly insightful phrase when he included Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson” in his list of the 100 most influential books ever written — “the most convincing fusion of Eastern and Western thought that has yet been seen.”

>>20396807
>>20396911
Neat, thanks for your attention and words. I'm also rightly turned off by something like the arrogant analytic tradition as well, which seems to take pride somehow in not having any wit or much of anything of import to say at all. I'm open to seeing what Gurdjieff has to say, even though I'm totally expecting he may go off the rails at times, but this usually happens with almost everyone I read. If there's even a kernel of anything that catches my attention, I'll give Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson a try. I have a soft spot for the Greeks and "love of wisdom," so I'll take what I read like I'm joining a discussion with him. I find the fusion of East and West especially interesting.

>>20396980
That’s great! I’m glad to have turned someone onto Gurdjieff, whom I view with tremendous respect. Gurdjieff is a fascinating figure because — megalomaniacal as it sounds — I think he is one of those rare figures who had the strange quality of “centrality,” of universality and timelessness, which is closer to figures like Christ, the Buddha, and Krishna than it is to just “some mere philosopher, mystic, psychologist, scientist or academic”. In other words, it is as if Gurdjieff’s thought “subsumes” everything and everyone else, they can all be given a “Gurdjieffian” analysis or interpreted through a Gurdjieffian lens, including through his cosmology and his spiritual psychological analysis and division of the human being. For instance, you can do Freudian, Jungian, and Marxist analyses of literature, religion, and history — but the mindblowing thing about Gurdjieff is that you can take this a level of abstraction higher, and do “Gurdjieffian” analyses of Freudian analyses, Jungian analyses, and Marxist analyses, for instance. You can read as apparently different things as Jungian thought, Christianity, the Hindu schools of Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya, schools of Buddhism such as Zen and Vajrayana, Sufism, Judaism and traditions in it such as Hasidism and the Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and schools of Ancient Greek philosophy — in a “Gurdjieffian” lens, which does not necessarily feel artificial and forced but like seeing a genuinely similar inner core in apparently diverse phenomena.

Some fragments of Heraclitus.

(50) Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that one is all/all is one.

> (116) All humans are able to know themselves and be prudent (phronein)

> (2) One must follow what is common; but although the logos is common most people live as if they had a private understanding of their own.

>(34) Not understanding after hearing they are like the deaf; the saying is evidence for them 'absent when present'.

> (79) A man is said to be a child compared with daimon, as is a child compared to a man.

> (17) Many who come across such things do not think about them, and even when they have learnt about them they do not understand, but to themselves they seem to.

>(72) Logos: though people associate with it most closely they are separated from it, and what they come across every day seems to them strange.

> (35) Men who love wisdom (philosophoi) must be enquirers (histores) of very many things.

>(19) They do not know how to listen or speak.

>(73) We must not speak and act like people asleep.

I always thought he was just some grifter didnt he take money from his followers

Nobody here understands Gurdjieff.

What he taught was that you do not necessarily 'have a soul', but you must 'grow a soul' to escape the material world

He said all the great ancient teachers taught this

Most human beings are in a sleeping state and must undertake conscious suffering / labour to grow a soul

>>20397714
>nobody here understands him!
>there multiple posts itt all saying the same thing you just posted
How embarrassing

>>20397629
There's all the difference in the world between the logos of Heraclitus and the logos of John. A simple point missed by people who prefer mystification over unveiling

>>20397770
one post, i'm more direct

>>20397817
When you say something like this, it is an evidence of identifying yourself strongly and exclusively with one tradition (what you take to be the Christian tradition) and “putting down” Heraclitus (as if such a wise man and the understanding he developed in himself can be “put down” in this crude sense, through a random comment tossed aside a couple thousand years later), as someone either belonging to another tradition or just not belonging to the tradition you view truth as exclusively residing in. Even in exoteric Christian theology, this is somewhat inane, as there you have the idea of the “virtuous pagan,” obviously inspired when they saw the great wisdom and morality of figures like Heraclitus, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and Parmenides, even though they did not belong to the Christian tradition as it had not been preached yet in the specific form Christ gave to it.

How is this paradox resolved?

They are “virtuous pagans.” Whatever was truly inspired and good in them, came from God, or a latent potential for the timeless development of the soul, in whatever form they conceived of it. This is not “My sect versus your sect.”

>>20396980
Yep. And interestingly, cognitive science and modern insights of psychology is another discipline he can be quite — eerily and anachronistically — related to. If his very learned disciple Ouspensky (who had studied much of Western AND Eastern philosophy) were writing it today, the word “qualia” would definitely come up.

The gist of the central idea of self-observing and self-remembering could have been put like this:

There is Qualia(1) of the non-self-remembering human being
There can be Qualia(2) of the self-remembering human being

To give a simple example — you can eat a bagel. You can be aware of yourself eating the bagel, aware that you are eating the bagel. And the crucial part is this isn’t a mere intellectual understanding or mechanically repeating, “I am eating a bagel,” it’s a genuine different subjective experience, an addition to it (of the presence of your own self-remembrance, self-collectedness). Hence, the mechanical and unaware eating of a bagel would be qualia(1) and the awareness of yourself while you eat the bagel would be qualia(2). Ouspensky noted that this very simple-sounding idea was indeed a revolutionary one when really made clear to them, and that most people almost never deliberately and consciously partake in qualia(2), the state of the self-remembering man.

Deliberately cultivating qualia(2) is a massive difference in one’s personal orientation, one’s personal being. It actually changes the philosopher, student, meditator, or what-have-you. This is what makes Gurdjieff’s works transcend being mere academic philosophy and turn into something that might be called experiential philosophy. The nature of the philosophical investigator, in most philosophy, is itself often deemed to already be “complete” and as “objective” as can be — if there is some flaw or incompleteness found in the nature of the philosopher and what their thinking capacity can grasp, this, then, is seen as an inescapable feature of reality and selfhood, not something which can be changed or improved up. Where Gurdjieff differs is that it is the nature or level of being of the thinker/student who has to be accounted for, and which has to be changed.

So you (hopefully) do not read Gurdjieff or Ouspensky and simply then go, “I have new and interesting ideas my thinking faculty has absorbed.” Rather, it is that you realize you can indeed deliberately try to cultivate qualia(2) and therefore be an entirely different person than before you came upon the idea (the philosophy changing YOU yourself).

An interesting note is that those who cultivate more of Qualia(2) would be able to understand each other more clearly and completely, then those who merely cultivate Qualia(1).

>>20399991
A person eating a bagel and a person eating cereal both find themselves to be in a very different state and this might be something they might even argue about or make fights and competitions and exclusive sects about. But a person eating bagel while partaking in Qualia(2) and a person eating cereal while partaking in Qualia(2), while cultivating awareness of themselves in the moment, have this common basis to build off of and see what is more similar in themselves than different.

Ouspensky emphasized the revolutionary nature of genuinely realizing that you and all people you know genuinely do not and cannot “remember themselves” most of the time, even if they certainly CLAIM to be doing so and that they are always doing so and are fully conscious people able to will and do things.

As Gurdjieff noted — and here he almost turns into Daniel Dennett, or any modern cognitive scientist and eliminative materialist philosopher who sees “consciousness” as simply an epiphenomenon of the entirely materialistic, deterministic workings of the body and organ of the brain — in most people, “I” does not do anything — most people are unconscious automata or mechanisms — IT does everything. IT eats, IT thinks, IT speaks, IT feels, and all this based off of conditioning, of one’s childhood and upbringing, society, from family and friends, politicians and the news, from religions one follows, from the literature and art and philosophy they have conditioned themselves with. All this happens just as mechanically as it rains, it thunders, as the weather and the turning of the planets and stars and galaxies happen.

>>20400029
As Gurdjieff also notes, the “being” of different things, of classes of beings, can be quite different. At first glance, this is a seemingly incoherent idea, and seems like he’s confusing the ontic and the ontological, as Heidegger would perhaps put it.

Clearly, a rock “is” and you “are,” and this “is”ness or existence is not something a rock or you has “more” or “less” of.

Gurdjieff is clearly not using “being” in an ontological sense here, but trying to refer to a concept quite difficult to put in just a few words, but easier if explained in more depth.

The “being” of a rock differs from your own “being” in ways you can commonsensically, instantly agree on and understand. You are (potentially) aware of yourself as being, you are here and now, an aware perceiver, in a way which the rock (presumably) is not. As Heidegger would put it, YOU are not just another being or an object but “Da-sein,” “Being-there”.

In Gurdjieff’s ontic and hierarchical division of reality, his cosmology, there is an evolving chain of being which goes from the inanimate to the more animate, being progressively further ensouled or enlivened. There is the physical, inorganic, and geological substratum; then you have the leap up to organic plant life and primitive crustacean life; then to animal life; and (apparently), finally, to human life.

A similar idea is referred to in Ancient Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism, and medieval Christian theology as the great chain of being.

Gurdjieff’s conception that this can broadly be split up into the physical level, emotional level, and intellectual level, also finds parallels and precedents in Ancient Greek philosophy, such as in Plato’s Republic, where the human being is conceived of as having a physical body and its desires and actions, the emotions, and the intellect. As per Gurdjieff’s conception of the perfected human being as having put in order and balanced their body, emotions, and intellect, the “just man,” in Plato’s Republic, is one who has done the same — put in their proper place and made to do their proper duties, their physical, emotional, and intellectual centers.

>>20400274
Gurdjieff notes that — strange and impossible as it at first sounds — the “being” of two human beings can be so different, that it is as if comparable to difference in “being” between a rock and a human, a plant and a human being, or an animal and a human being.

An obvious analogue to this, is that of an Alzheimer’s patient, or someone in a vegetative coma, as distinguished from a relatively much healthier and aware human being. You can intuitively see, that the higher soul or thinking capacity, the quality we view as central to being a human being, is no longer manifesting so much, as strongly present, throughout the physical, emotional, and intellectual vehicles of the mentally deteriorated dementia patient or person in a coma. Due to damage to the physical brain and body, it can no longer express as fully the “soul”, “mind,” or subtle animating principle we take as central to being a human being.

As Gurdjieff would note, for an awakened human being, others are in a similar state compared to them — like Alzheimer’s patients or people in a vegetative coma. Another analogy is to that of a vestigial or fetal state — the “soul” is so undeveloped in them and in yourself, it is as if it hardly exists at all. It is like a seed, with the potential to develop further, but which rarely does so, does not become the magnificent tree dormant within it as a potential.

Gurdjieff’s teachings and other authentic teachings, are about how one can go beyond merely vegetating, being a clever talking thinking animal with a brain which nevertheless doesn’t cultivate remembrance-of-being.

For an awakened person, they would be able to see how others (and themselves, throughout much of their life most of time, before they set out on the path to awakening) are merely deterministically mechanical, conditioned “people.”


Quite in line with insights of modern cognitive science and psychology (but conceived of almost a hundred years before today), the “being” of the unregenerate person does not have the unified, single “consciousness”, “free will,” and capacity to independently act and think it presumes itself to have.

>>20400286
In fact, this “self”, in the unregenerate human being, is not one static unchanging solid unified self, but rather (as he and Ouspensky put it) a conglomeration of many different individual “selves” or “I”s, changing from moment to moment. The “self” indulging in some blind physical pleasure like food, is not the same “self” listening with depth of attention to a symphony, which is not the same “self” of listening to a simple but pleasant-sounding pop song as background noise, nor is that the same “self” while reading with depth of attention some piece of literature, philosophy or theology.

The “I” which determines, “I will start eating healthier and exercising more from now on,” is a little fragment of the intellectual center, or thinking faculty — ineffectually so much as saying, “I am speaking for all the other ‘I’s of the physical center, and trying to give an order to them that they will eat healthier and exercise more.”

When push comes to shove, it is in fact a different ‘I’ or many different ‘I’s which have to actually carry out a change in diet and exercise. And they have never heard of or simply do not care about this intellectual ‘I’ having made the decision to stop eating this and that, start eating this and that, and work out in such and such ways at such times.

Man is legion.

>For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
Romans 7:14-20

As noted in Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous,” the average human being’s state is compared to a house which the master has fled and in which the servants (many disparate conflicting ‘I’s) are not in union, are arguing and fighting with each other endlessly. Authentic self-development, hence, is getting the servants of the house in order so that the “master” can come and regain the position he should have and be able to truly function and live in the household.

>>20400303
Here is where Gurdjieff’s philosophy is quite similar to the Indian Samkhya school, in which Purusha and Prakriti are the two major divisions of reality. Prakriti is mechanism, matter, the material substrate or primordial matrix of the universe, the Purusha is the higher soul or awareness, the ensouling force. The yogic system of Samkhya, is much the same thing Gurdjieff was saying and prescribing — one has to become aware of and extricate one’s Purusha, from the blind mechanical forces of Prakriti it is become caught up in, has, so to speak, gone to sleep in.

Hence, Gurdjieff’s way becomes here a way of negation. When eating, getting angry or upset, sleeping, thinking, enjoying artwork — you see that it is not “you” really doing that, but the mechanisms of Prakriti. And it is this very seeing (self-observation, self-remembering) which awakens and develops the Purusha, or soul. What Samkhya says about the Prakriti, and Gurdjieff about the unregenerate human being, is much the same as what some modern eliminative materialist philosopher or cognitive scientist like Daniel Dennett would say about all of humanity — it is not “conscious,” it has no “free-will,” it is simply a mechanism. In Sanskrit, it is simply an interplay of gunas (qualities) like tamas (passivity, lethargy, blind inertia, negativity), rajas (activity, energy, striving, action, movement, positivity) and sattwa (harmonious, balanced, reconciling or neutralizing), and Tattwas, different levels and aspects of the universe which it can be divided into — quite analogous to the conception of the great chain of being in Western philosophy — where there are 25 Tattwas, conceived of as:

1. Purusha (Transcendental Self)
2. The uncreated (unmanifest) Prakriti (primordial nature)
3. Mahat/Buddhi (intellect)
4. Ahamkara (ego, consciousness of self)
5. Manas (mind)
6-10. The five sense-organs
11-15. The five motor-organs
16-20. The five subtle elements
21-25. The five gross elements

>>20400338
(

In Gurdjieff’s system, interestingly enough, the three gunas are also referred to — being the affirming, denying, and reconciling forces in Beelzebub’s Tales, and, in Ouspensky’s more technical formulation, positive, negative, and neutral (or neutralizing). This also has an obvious parallel with the idea of yin-yang.)

And this is where the practical and experiential aspect of Gurdjieff’s philosophy enters. It is not merely a matter of an intellectual comprehension of all this — the actual experience and process in oneself, of observing and detaching oneself from the actions of one’s Prakriti, is a qualitative, personal, experiential different from merely reading or hearing about it. It is something one DOES and LIVES, but, paradoxically enough, not in a crude physical sense apparent to outside observers. It is most apparent and obvious only to yourself (and, in a hypothetical scenario, to others who are “self-remembering” and hence can sense that you have developed this in yourself, are developing it, or have not/are not developing it at the moment). It is a type of “doing” which, paradoxically, manifests as a realization that “you” are not “doing anything”; a subtle bringing to bear of awareness upon your lower faculties, your bodily movements, emotions, and thoughts — not an analysis, either, but simply a “watching.”

A non-traditional formulation of ideas like these, is to be found in J. Krishnamurti’s lectures and life and thought. Because this is a trans-cultural and deeply intimate personal experience and practice, Krishnamurti HATED comparing any of it to and/or bringing up terminology from other traditions and practitioners, such as insights from Zen, Vedanta, the Tibetan idea of mahamudra (the Great Position, Great Seal, Great Imprint, which manifests as not grasping, not seeking anything, being detached from the mechanisms of one’s perception, moving, feeling, and thinking), or the Taoist conception of “wei wu wei” (doing-without-doing). An interesting comparison to make, is that Krishnamurti was simply talking about and trying to develop on this wordless experience of “self-remembering” which he had somehow picked up — maybe he was a Buddhist meditator in a past life, bringing it forward into his life as an Indian Theosophical-breakaway iconoclastic anti-guru in the 20th century.

>>20400392
are you in a gurdjieff group anon

>>20400392
As >>20395100 points out Osho, on the other hand, was a huge fan of Gurdjieff’s and studied him very deeply, and simply seemed to have been transmitting wisdom he picked up on from Gurdjieff and his sources, in a very popularized, emotionalized, mystical enticing form, throwing in all the references to interesting Eastern philosophies and traditions he could. Hence, Krishnamurti and Osho seem like diametrically opposite poles of the same approach to a wordless something, a practice (what Osho, picking up from Gurdjieff and Eastern traditions, might call “watching the watcher”) — Krishnamurti in a very abstract, non-religious, anti-traditional way, endlessly pointing out that higher awareness (the state of what he calls “choiceless awareness”) is not to be gained by adherence to any sect, repetitive mindless practice or prayer or system of meditation, but a truly internal revolution and change, and Osho, as a universalist, also quite iconoclastic “guru”, that it is the same higher state of awareness many different traditions have talked about.

As per Gurdjieff, they are both talking about this state of “self-observation” and “self-remembering”. Where these figures (and others like them) actually had genuine spiritual insight, it simply came from them doing “self-observation” and “self-remembering” and hence gradually being able to enter into and have experiences of the higher emotional and higher thinking centers (which, as G. notes, are characterized by a lack of negative emotions, and which the negativity and mechanicality of the lower emotional and thinking centers are gateways to, cover up or obscure).

From G.’s point of view, it would not be improbable to say, that certain of Krishnamurti’s lectures and described experiences, were simply of him getting into the higher emotional and higher thinking centers, which he did by stilling the lower emotional and thinking centers and a practice of self-observation and self-remembering he had somehow come to.

The irony, however, is that someone like Krishnamurti would say following or believing in someone like a Gurdjieff, or taking insights from other traditions like Zen, Vedanta, Samkhya, or Vajrayana Buddhism, would be “fragmentation,” a simple limiting of the psyche and trying to force it to fit the box of some “tradition,” when awareness itself is fundamentally unconditioned and does not belong to a tradition. Ironically enough, this is also what some authentic people of those traditions have pointed out — that they are using their terminology and practices to point to something within you yourself, not to be found “outside” of yourself somewhere. The old cliche is that they are fingers pointing to the moon, another possible formulation is that it is like trying to turn the mirror of your ego away from the world it is reflecting and paradoxically somehow turn it upon yourself, pointing out to you your own self-nature.

>>20400431
No. The Gurdjieff groups are, I believe, inauthentic and degraded, having devolved into a sort of attachment to the personality, character, and life of Gurdjieff and presuming themselves to have the ultimate body of knowledge and teaching, the supreme teacher. Cynical as it sounds, I view it as entirely probable that they are semi-developed or pseudo-developed, through having developed a “cult of Gurdjieff.” It is unlikely any of them really have the being of a Gurdjieff. An analogy to this might be found, as being as different between setting up and worshiping a statue of the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng, and having the understanding and being Hui Neng did.

When Gurdjieff talked about schools and the importance of a school, he was almost certainly referring to the true insight and rigorous practice and discipline one can find, in places like a Tibetan lamasery, under a genuine guru of the Hindu tradition, under a Zen master, under an authentic sheikh in a Sufi tariqa. Gurdjieff, having apparently genuinely experienced situations like these, such as under Islamic Sufi teachers (see “The Teachers of Gurdjieff” by Rafael Lefort), in Tibet during his travels there, and meeting developed fakirs and dervishes in Central Asia and the Middle East, saw this principle of how the “school” and the presence of people wiser and more advanced than oneself, is a vast boon and practically a necessity for authentic development, and how, today, this understanding is more developed in certain places in the East than it is in the West. Where the higher soul and development is really there, it certainly also can be found, perhaps, in other faiths, like in Orthodox Christian monasteries.

The issue, however, is that there can be a difference between the genuine spiritual development behind it, even if it seems to be “the real deal.” One interesting thing I’ve heard from Sufis and read in modern Sufi literature, for instance, is, “If you find something in the West like, ‘Just swing on by to our authentic Sufi meditation retreat, as a side-thing you can tack onto your life in the weekends and learn authentic Sufi meditation!’, it will not be Sufism, it will be pseudo-Sufism, a cult based on Sufism.” This is the dilemma I find probably happening to Gurdjieff groups. Gurdjieff developed the insight and level of being he did through massive extensive travels throughout Asia as a young man — actually having done it and steeped himself in it, unlike, say, perhaps Blavatsky really did. The Gurdjieff-group people, took a fraction of this development and insight from Gurdjieff himself, without necessarily the same wisdom and growth of soul Gurdjieff had.

This is the same principle of mechanicality and the descending octave G. would point out, that what starts out in great consciousness and power descends, due to the mechanical nature of humanity, to progressively lower and lower, more degraded formulations of it.

>>20400431
>>20400512
An even more eccentric but entirely valid way to put it, is also that I doubt any of them had siddhis like Gurdjieff had, such as of telepathy. Ouspensky recounts eventually coming to have telepathic discussions with Gurdjieff. I doubt any of the Gurdjieff-group people are authentically telepathic, can teach telepathically like Gurdjieff did.

This is the sad fact, which Gurdjieff pointed out, that the “being” of the student is crucial, a highly-developed teacher cannot simply take people with much less developed “beings” and instantly raise them to his (or her) own level. The “being” of the student, meditator, disciple, reader is in question. It probably comes about from many reincarnations and whatever one has really learned and practiced and developed in oneself that is able to be carried on from life to life, until it finally ripens so much that in one life one decides to fully devote oneself to awakening, the path of yoga, and through one’s good karmas maybe even finds an authentic Godman, Sadguru, someone through whom God is working to teach and guide other people. You can see that figures like Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi were most likely enlightened, but not all of their disciples and followers were.

Hence, I view modern “Gurdjieff”-groups as something analogous to a “Nisargadatta-Maharaj”-group where the followers promulgating it very likely do not have the understanding of a Nisargadatta; or promulgating and carrying out a “Ramana-Maharshi”-group where they do not have the understanding and being of Ramana Maharshi (both these figures urging self-inquiry, entirely in line with G.’s practices of self-observation and self-remembering).

An offensive insight from Gurdjieff is that much of modern religions — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — have turned into this. “Jesus”-groups, “Buddha”-groups, “Krishna”-groups, but they do not become enlightened miracle-workers like Shirdi Sai Baba.

Gurdjieff is dead, long live Gurdjieff.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner

>>20400609
Gurdjieff composed a hymn with de Hartmann (a pupil of his who was a composer and a pianist) with this name.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UjoYABn56I0

>Lord have mercy

Note, he is not “anti-Christian” in the sense you may take him to be. Rather, he was trying to take what he felt to be objective wisdom, knowledge, wise precepts and practices and techniques, which he overall found were more developed in some scattered places in the East today, as well as in certain historical situations, than they overall are today in the West. Hence, he was trying to bridge the wisdom of the East with the wisdom of the West, instead of a competitive-ego-game of, “The East is the superior source of wisdom” or “No, the West or this tradition today most developed in the West is.” The central insight is that wisdom is wisdom no matter its source — so long as it really is wisdom, and not just spurious or pseudo-wisdom.

There is an apposite saying from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition:

>There is a saying in the Tibetan scriptures: “Knowledge must be burned, hammered, and beaten like pure gold. Then one can wear it as an ornament.”
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Even though it is a Tibetan saying, it can obviously be applied to the Christian scriptures, regardless of who said it and where. The Scriptures also have to be burned, hammered, beaten like gold in your own alchemical furnace (allegorically speaking) and “made your own,” truly lived out and experienced by you.

The idea is that the wisdom, the religion, must be transformed and made one’s own instead of being “out-there,” outside oneself, some exotic piece of curiosity or Orientalism to be indulged in as escapism. Gurdjieff’s system is essentially about this embodiment, this living-of, a deepening of religious practice and experience. Hence why he did not prescribe his student’s religions, and Jews, Christians, and non-traditional occultists and mystics of the day (like Ouspensky) are all recounted as being his disciples. In “In Search of the Miraculous,” Gurdjieff notes that his teachings can easily be applied and taken, as a way to be able to be a better Christian.

>Here there are neither Russians nor English, Jews nor Christians, but only those who pursue one aim—to be able to be.
Aphorism written on the wall of his Study House at the Chateau de Prieure at Fontainebleau-Avon.

In many ways, as I’ve noticed, his insights align a lot with the existentialist and phenomenological schools of philosophy. One does not “become converted to a Gurdjieff-cult” but takes Gurdjieff’s authenticity as an inspiration for one’s own authenticity (if one truly has any and is developing on it). Gurdjieff saw this timeless wisdom as so well-worth sharing, regardless of one’s cultural and religious orientation, that it was worth it, as an act of service to humanity, to try to awaken as many people as he could to it, regardless of their religion.

>>20400684

I don't have time to read all your posts now but I will return to them. I instinctively feel Gurdjieff to be right about many things. The indecipherable ray of creation stuff etc I will leave alone. He shook my worldview into a depression recently, along with UG Krishnamurti. I am broken down, "nigredo". If I don't emerge a stronger man, so be it. I know we are fucking machines, I know the world is not what we think it is. I'm in hell. Probably the best place to be if you want to leave this life with a soul.

An analogy may be, Heidegger was not a Christian but theologians and Christians interested in Western philosophy can learn much from him and from existentialist philosophy and phenomenology in general. It’s about the transformation and deepening of you, the reader and student, instead of a mere “agreement” or “disagreement” with. Gurdjieff’s works and thought sincerely gave me a deeper understanding and appreciation of the Gospels and New Testament, for instance.

Another related example more recently is the Roman Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton and his Centering Prayer, who studied and learned much from wisdom of Eastern traditions and engaged in dialogue with many from their traditions while still being a devoted Trappist. This is not the mindset of argument or mere eclectic brainy-comparison, but inclusive respect for other traditions and seeing what in them is genuinely there of wisdom which can be applied to yourself and your own living situation right there, regardless of time and place.

Instead of viewing “enlightenment” as just something exotic that happens on Himalayan mountain-tops, you view it as representing a latent potential for experiencing or a potential state of mind within yourself which can brought to your day-to-day life. Regardless of from whom or where or what you learned it from, you are authentically grateful for and appreciative of it once you experience the core insights. “I can remember myself,” “I can permeate my life and thoughts with remembrance of and devotion to God,” “I can struggle against negative emotions and bad habits.” Etc.

Gurdjieff seems like just another guru industrialist, it’s fitting that anon above mentions the likes of krishnamurti and ranjeesh and maharaj that’s exactly the sort I lump him in with. Next he’ll be posting about eckhart tolle

>>20400769
A person who thinks they are already fully developed conscious people, as Gurdjieff would note, will view with skepticism anyone pointing out or claiming that they can in fact become more conscious, more spiritually developed.

Even if they themselves and we overall, are unhappy, undeveloping, unfulfilled, mechanical and empty people with lots of bad habits and an endless sense of “There must be something more to life,” they and we will endlessly degrade those who claim to be offering a way beyond it.

They (and we in general) do not have mumuksha, desire for moksha, the burning desire for enlightenment which draws one out of ordinary life and into or around the edges of a school or pathway which offers awakening, which Gurdjieff and Ouspensky call in their own phraseology “the magnetic center.”

Enlightenment is not a cheap trick, nor did Gurdjieff offer or advertise it as one.

If you look at Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson” (1950), it is about a 1,238 page-long (depending on what edition you have) doorstopper he spent years and years refining and laboriously working in and making it the best expression of his thought he could. It is not something he did easily, nor that was meant to be advertised as “easy.” In fact, he noted how important it was to make it difficult for the student or seeker so that it a real authentic desire for knowledge that comes to the fore in them. Would-be students of his were kicked out or turned away if massive character-flaws or failures happened, or some trait became evident like that they weren’t really interested in “the Work” but simply seeking occult New-Age socializing or some way to spend the time and temporarily be free from what they saw as “real life.”

>>20400769
Also, the references to Krishnamurti and Rajneesh were not meant as blind adherence to or worship of them; just bringing up more well-known “New Age” figures people might be familiar with, and noting how they intersect with Gurdjieff. What is authentic in Rajneesh — and note, I think there is some wisdom in him, even if he had obvious great character flaws and failings, and tended to simplify and value eclecticism for the sake of eclecticism — Gurdjieff would note, came from Rajneesh studying and learning from the literature of many authentic “schools” in the East which had insights about, methodologies and techniques for the development of the human consciousness — Sufism, Zen, Tantra, Advaita Vedanta, and the like. Also, Rajneesh studied and learned much from the works of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky themselves.

The great failing came in that he tried to simplify and popularize teachings which required a depth of devotion, dedication, and approach to them and, BY NATURE, cannot be advertised and touted at large, as if masses, millions of people, can mechanically evolve through shallow reading and repeating of certain mystical ideas. He encouraged unworthy people to adulate him and set up a cult around him, he used spiritual wisdom he had picked up and which could impress others and even sometimes be partially transmitted to them, to gain sex, money, fame, and this, it seems, was his own downfall, unfortunately. Gurdjieff went the opposite approach, focusing on creating a smaller but more devoted sect of people who could promulgate his ideas, and making his ideas hard to come by.

>>20397702
This was an entirely practical consideration since lodgings and much free time and space were needed for him to be able to lecture to and teach dozens of people at a time. The time and space for this doesn’t just come from nowhere. Think of a professor or a doctor — “How can they be practicing genuine medicine on me or teaching me real knowledge in this class if I have to PAY them for it?” Answer: because, paradoxical as it seems, they are human beings too and the money is required for them to be able to support this situation of teaching or practicing on others.

Ouspensky notes that what seemed like mere fleecing actually didn’t turn out to be so, when he saw how much money it cost to actually have/rent all the lodgings to be able to lecture to and guide students over an extended period of time. He noted that, unbeknownst to people publicly, money even went from wealthier students to be able to be donated to/help support much poorer ones who nevertheless wanted to partake in the Work — and he noted that, even though this wasn’t publicly advertised, if a prospective student really wanted to learn under him and G. saw them as authentic in their desire, but was too poor to make the donation asked of them, they would not be turned away.

>>20390194
I hate Gurdijeff. And I hate the Hermitix Podcast. But I feel compelled by a kind of lit solidarity to recommend to you the Hermitix episodes on Gurdijeff.

>>20400709
I would recommend never giving up faith in your higher development, as well as a massive and respectful devotion to the vast corpus of the mystical and religious literature of the world. As Gurdjieff himself would put it, “If you are going to go on a spree, then go the whole hog, including postage.” You may as well fully devote yourself to esoteric knowledge, whether or not traditional religious folk think you are heretics going on a demonic path, and the non-religious that you are a kook wasting your time.

Gurdjieff’s ray of creation, as I pointed out, has a parallel to and precedent of the conception of the “great chain of being” in medieval Christian theology, Ancient Greek philosophy, and Neoplatonism, as well as to certain ideas in Hermeticism — Hermeticism also being referenced in Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous,” with the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus being an artifact G. mentioned.

Central to it is the idea of microcosmic and macrocosmic recursion — in Hermeticism, alluded to with the phrase, “As above, so below,” as well as of panpsychism. The idea appears to be as such: there are gradations of “being,” from the more inanimate to the progressively more and more animate and ensouled. All these are in a process of evolution. The crucial turning-point of humanity, is that it can continue to mechanically evolve, which is a very slow, aeonic process, taking millions of years to turn it into a higher more enlightened life-form — but, for a few of humanity, the chance is held out for the conscious evolution of the possibilities latent within them.

Furthermore, the panpsychist part holds that the qualities of emotion and thinking humanity has, has to come, so to speak, from somewhere. As Gurdjieff strangely puts it, they can be compared to forms of higher matter, subtle matter, or energies, which definitely exist just as crude matter as we perceive it exists. The planets, stars, and galaxies themselves are also living beings complete unto themselves, and have, on a profoundly vaster scale, these energies of emotion and thought enlivening them, which organic life on the Earth is like an extrusion and microcosmic development of. You can then further see, that the human body is made up of many cells, which are also animate and living entities, but on a much smaller scale than we are, obviously.

Gurdjieff’s insight is this: to the cells of our body, we are “God,” relative to them. We stand in a similar relation to the planets, stars, galaxy, galactic systems, and universe we live in. There is a planetary consciousness or soul of the Earth, a solar consciousness, stellar consciousnesses, a galactic consciousness and a universal consciousness or mind. We comprise cells in them. We are the microcosm relative to the universe we live in, which is the macrocosm for us, and, relative to the cells and atoms of our own body, we are the macrocosm and they are the microcosm.

>>20402062
Ouspensky noted the parallel to Hindu teachings, too, about things like manvantaras, a Day of Brahma being billions of years for us, as well as conceptions of the creation of the physical manifest universe as the outbreathing of Brahma and its dissolution/destruction as the inbreathing of Brahma.

Rumi, seeing quite a similar thing, wrote:

>I died as mineral and became a plant,
>I died as plant and rose to animal,
>I died as animal and I was human,
>Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
>Yet once more I shall die human,
>To soar with angels blessed above.
>And when I sacrifice my angel soul
>I shall become what no mind ever conceived.
>As a human, I will die once more,
>Reborn, I will with the angels soar.
>And when I let my angel body go,
>I shall be more than mortal mind can know.

This panentheistic cosmic view, seems the most sensible to me, even if it would smack to traditional religionists of “deranged occultism and cosmology-making.” The vastness of the universe, the planets, stars, and galaxies, the oceans, trees, mineral deposits, plant-life, crustacean life, fish, four-legged creatures, and humanity, are all included in God’s scheme of creation. The sense of humility and insignificance, of one’s tiny place in a vast scheme of cosmic evolution, and of your own higher spiritual development being most important to and for YOURSELF, since it is YOU who are going to die one day and only have a limited lifespan to appreciate and learn from such teachings — this is rather beautiful.

>None will attain to the truth until a thousand sincere people have called him a heretic
Junaid of Baghdad

>>20400392
Where were you when I made a thread on Krishnamurti a few weeks ago? I stumbled across him reading Henry Miller, who was full of praise for him. That led me down the rabbit hole and I want to get into him but I’m unsure where to start. If there was a messiah, I think it would have been him. My thread was a failure as most anons are assholes and little help. Any tips for reading him?

>>20402036
Why the hatred for Hermitix?

>>20400996
>>20401456
Hmm ok anon maybe I’ve been too harsh on the guy

>>20399916
That's a long winded way of agreeing with me, kid.
Again, Logos of John > Logos of Heraclitus.
Stop with the semantics and let's be empirical here. If you don't know the difference just say so. I know humility isn't something you long winded, wannabe messianics are known for. It's ok, my man, some things don't require a secret gnosis to understand, just eyes to see and ears to hear

>>20396708
Extremely thought provoking posts. I appreciate your presence here.

I dont have anything to add but bump because I read most of the thread and "The Master Game" which mentions Gurdjeff a lot catalyzed the most transformational meditation of my life.

>>20390194
Anything I see on Gurjieff is just
>woah he's so difficult
>did you know that the Tales is really difficult to read?
>bro he made people wash pots in his groups
>he's so difficult
>you need to obsess over every word he wrote because he meant everything literally

It seems like make-work, I have yet to hear of anyone's life improving from his shit

>>20390194
>G.I Gurdijeff
I don't know anything except that I just want a woman to sit on my face with the excellence and satisfaction that G.I. Gurdijeff's mustache sits upon his face.

>>20402036
Hermitix is good though

Although I hate the dumb 3 people in a room question, just get to the content nigga

I do wish he'd interview more out-there thinkers like before with Chad Haag or Nick Land. These days its mainly
>Interview with Dr. Richard Penis from Spurdo Sparde University on 'Ethnomologified Aesthesis in the Anteriior Writings of Vasily Vasilyevich'
>James reads something from a book [paywalled]
>Gurdjieff said XYZ: An Interview with Some Guy
>Interview with Steiner academic who has fried his laughter circuits from LSD and doesn't seem to know a whole lot about anything

>>20402079

What do you think of mainstream religion, traditional Roman Catholocism etc?

>>20402106
The Awakening of Intelligence is the only collection you will need, watch lectures otherwise

>>20402625
Thank you.

>>20403297
Interestingly enough, well-known students of Gurdjieff’s like J. G. Bennett and Rodney Collin later converted to Roman Catholicism. They didn’t view their former time and work with Gurdjieff and his role in their life as something apart or antithetical to this, but rather as a deepening of it. G. seemed to have been trying to reintroduced a kinetic, evolutionary, and relativistic sense to religions which he felt was found in ancient forms and practices of it (including even in the early Church, amongst early monastics, the Desert Fathers, Orthodox hesychasts, and in sayings and parables of the Gospels and New Testaments themselves), and today in some people of some Eastern religions, but many times lacking in modern people’s understanding of religion.

What does this mean? Basically, that the level of being of the would-be religionist is important, too, instead of just grafting beliefs, “faith,” and practices upon an essentially unregenerate self. There is also the crucial insight that most of humanity, relative to the state of consciousness of self-remembering, self-recollectedness, which they could have, is not so — they are, so to speak, “asleep.”

As a further example of the principle of relativity G. made clear that the human being can split up into seven levels of evolution:

>1. physical human
>2. emotional human
>3. intellectual human
>4. balanced human (this is the state of a human being who, for whatever reason or in whatever way, has in some way started to work on and balance themselves — bodily, emotionally, and intellectually — and has what he notes is a permanent center of gravity in relation to their conception of whatever “work” or religious formulation they are following and the school they have gotten it from; their body, their emotions, and intellect — none are hypertrophied or imbalanced in their being and relation to their religion; also, this person does not come about naturally or societally from whatever forces are available to them in normal society — they became this way through deliberate work on themselves along the lines of a genuine “school,” the influences and forces of which come from a higher level than, outside of ordinary life)
>5. a person who has reached a certain type of unity unattainable and inconceivable for most of us
>6. a person much like number 7 except not all their qualities are permanent
>7. a fully developed human being, who has will, consciousness, a permanent and unchangeable I, individuality

>>20404453
As G. notes, all these people would have a different conception of Christianity. For the body-centered human being, we might see something like paganism or a primitive tribe appropriating some of the rites and symbolism of Christianity as a crude addition to their own religion, since it’s the addition of another God to protect them, more power; or someone just including its rites and symbolism in their life out of a blind faith inculcated in them by societal and familial conditioning.

Christianity number two would be emotion-based, sometimes very pure and loving but without much force, and sometimes, conversely, of the bloodshed and desire to torture, punish, and wage war against the enemy that see in the Inquisition — punish and exterminate the heathens, the heretics. Christianity number three would be intellectual Christianity, the Christianity of the theologian, the doctor of theology, intellectual, theoretical religion of proofs and arguments, dialectic, and the like, some salient examples of which are afforded by some schools of Protestantism.

Then there is Christianity number four and above, of which the average person does not really have a conception. It is not a destruction of the lower faculties we have — the body, the normal emotions, and the normal intellect we have in our day-to-day life. G. didn’t get into much explicit detail about these but you can theorize that the body, emotions, and mind would all be included in their service to the religion but without hypertrophy in any one faculty — the mechanically repeated movements of the body, the sometimes-stupid/ignorant/naive and sometimes-wise heart, and the braininess of the arguing and proving theologian. It’s the presence of self-remembering or self-consciousness, and a balanced consecration and devotion of one’s body, emotions, and intellect to the endeavor.

In Indian yogic philosophy, obviously, these three would also be referred to as hatha yoga (of physical postures and practices, asanas, physical discipline, maybe of mantras with the breath), bhakti yoga (of devotion, love, emotion-based), and jnana yoga (of the mind, intellectually-based study and practice of yoga).

>>20404577
An interesting note to make is someone emotionally conditioned to Christianity might view any suggestions that there’s some source of wisdom or potential spiritual development outside their way in two main ways:

1.) an instant negative reaction — “This smacks of occultism, or it’s a religion which was not revealed by and does not reverence Jesus Christ as their only Savior. It might even be Satanically inspired.”
2.) maybe a lukewarm accepted perennialism but not necessarily an interest in or deep regard for it — “It seems to me as if Christianity is the true religion as revealed by God and His son, our Savior Jesus Christ, but there are obviously good people of other faiths — pious Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists whom I’ve read of or known. Ultimately, it is God’s decision whom He will save and whom not. Perhaps the very good and devoted of other religions are saved, as well.”

And one with a more intellectually conditioned view of Christianity in 2 major ways:

1.) “The other religions, theologies, and mystical paths simply do not align with the orthodoxy of my church. They are preemptively wrong and even dangerous paths, with a much more shallow understanding of theology, spiritual development, psychology, ethics and the like than is to be found in my way.”
2.) “They might have some aspects of wisdom and deeper truth in them despite being from different cultures throughout different times, and even have something to teach us about ourselves and how we can deepen our faith if looked into seriously and studiously.” (As Reverend Thomas Merton did).

As G. and Ouspensky would note, shallow or deep as any of these reactions might seem — whether positive/affirming or negative/denying reactions of one’s emotional and intellectual conditioning — they might all be equally mechanical. They could simply be movements of the heart or the brain without necessarily having the deeper awareness there.

So Collin and Bennett did not see any of this as antithetical to their conversion to Roman Catholicism and remaining in that faith until they died. They viewed everything they did and studied as a prelude to their deepening of that faith.

>>20403297
So, to finish my characteristically long-winded answer, I would say that there are different types of human followers of Roman Catholicism. There are heart-centered followers of Roman Catholicism — but not all of them necessarily become like St. Teresa of Avila. There are more brain-centered followers of Roman Catholicism, professors and doctors in theology and the like, some of the clergy, perhaps, but few become like St. Thomas Aquinas — whose gargantuan feat of the intellect, the Summa Theologica, note, was left unfinished and he refused to return to it because, after miraculous experiences and states of unusually extended ecstasy, all that he had written seemed like “straw” to him. (Note: these categories aren’t fully black-or-white — G.’s insight is that usually one faculty predominates in the average human being, but a person might be predominantly emotional but with development of the intellect as a strong secondary feature, or predominantly intellectual but with development of the emotions as a strong secondary feature, etc.)

In the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky terminology, they had reached the higher emotional or higher intellectual centers, which are “divine” or “miraculous” relative to the lower centers.

As G. put it in his greatest aphorism, “If you are going to go on a spree, then go the whole hog, including postage.” If you are going to become a Roman Catholic, really be a Roman Catholic. Then, through massive intellectual or emotional devotion, you might really see what’s behind it. The system Gurdjieff was teaching (which he called the Fourth Way), was for people truly interested in it, and who wanted to learn a system of self-development taking into account and harmoniously balancing the body, emotions, and intellect. As he noted, in the grand scheme of humanity, it appears as a “obscure little side-path,” a useless detour or distraction in obscure little pockets of history and certain places and figures. It’s not meant to and by nature cannot attract everyone.

As the references to Robert S. de Ropp’s “The Master Game” (who studied under Ouspensky) and Robert Anton Wilson make clear >>20395100, Gurdjieff’s thought can be seen as being as psychological than it is strictly theological and doctrinaire. He was not trying to indoctrinate people but give out certain techniques, practices, teachings and insights. Hence, to traditional religionists it may seem “unacceptably secularized, occultic, and self-glorifying”, and to skeptics, “New Age cult-making, nonsensically mystical.” Both are misinterpretations of it, I feel. As de Ropp and Robert Anton Wilson saw, they can legitimately be taken as the teaching of higher psychological principles which seem to be part of some latent potential in humanity not always fully developed by everyone.

>>20404793
As a further note to anyone who might see aspects of “pride,” “self-worship” in any of this — the interesting note is that the higher emotional and higher intellectual centers are not egoistic, of or limited to the ego, and reaching them is not a game of the ego or some type of super-discipline of the ego. “Higher emotional center” and “higher intellectual center” should not be taken as something crude like Nietzsche’s conception of the Ubermensch as a hyper-egoistic individualistic development of and transcendence beyond the human state, or some crude New Age conception of the evolution of humanity as just something that will easily happen through carrying out some occult exercises and practices and meditation techniques or setting up a New Age composite religion.

These are faculties latent within us, parts of the deeper soul, and reaching them is not some “ultimate attainment of the ego.” In fact, they are non-egoistic, transpersonal, beyond the games and machinations of the ego instead of just being another achievement or a glorified achievement of it.

Someone awake in the higher emotional center would not have negativity, depression, self-pity, existential angst, anger, and hatred of others, for instance. They would be all-loving. As G. and Ouspensky note, in the higher centers, there are no negativity.

Someone awake in the higher intellectual center would not have the doubts, arguments, arrogant beliefs and disbeliefs, and lack of true knowledge/certainly of the lower intellectual center. They would be all-knowing.

Obviously, becoming all-loving and all-knowing is not a hyper-attainment of the personal self or ego, it is a state beyond it. It is from God, they are gifts and manifestations of God. Gurdjieff’s teachings can sadly be appropriated as a brain-game or a sort of hyper-ego-game when, in fact, he was trying to teach people how to go beyond this, and did indeed very faithfully believe in God. In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, he notes that faith, hope, and love are the great divine impulses in humanity present as latent capacities in us, given to us by God, so to speak, but which unfortunately remain undeveloped or only semi-developed in most.

In Sufism, these might be referred to as the qalb (heart) and ruh (higher intellectual spirit). In Mahayana Buddhism, a similar teaching seems to have existed as the concept of the bodhicitta, mind or thought (citta) of enlightenment or awakening (bodhi), the enlightenment-mind, which has as attributes wisdom (higher intellect) and compassion for the sake of all living beings. This is not the ultimate attainment of or glorification of the ego, it is the deeper core of love and true spiritual wisdom which transcends ego.

So Christ, for instance, was someone in whom the higher emotional center and higher intellectual centers were awake. He was all-loving and even partook in all-knowingness, omniscience, as attributes of God.

>>20404957
So a core insight of Gurdjieff is that these latent potentials figures like Christ were trying to awaken in humanity, did not indeed become awakened in humanity at large. The heart-awakening (growth of conscience) and wisdom-awakening (growth of consciousness) did not fully happen to all of humanity, and original teachings of and transmissions of this became gradually diluted due to humanity’s mechanicality and lack of conscience and consciousness.

In “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,” he speaks of Christianity as based on "resplendent love," saying also that among all of the ancient religious teachings none had so "many good regulations for ordinary everyday life." He believed that Christianity is the best of all existing or future religions "if only the teaching of the Divine Jesus Christ were carried out in full conformity with its original." In the aforementioned book, “Views From the Real World,” when asked by someone if Christ was God, Gurdjieff answers, “Yes, but on His own level.” As a young man, he actually grew up steeped in the Greek Orthodox Church and was training for priesthood.

But, as he recounts in his autobiographical “Meetings With Remarkable Men” — in the fascinatingly syncretizing, intercultural locale of Armenia lived and grew up in, there were Yezidis, Muslims, and Christians intermingling, as well as many folk tales and anecdotes about miraculous and supernatural happenings and healings (some of which he even claimed to have witnessed or were known to have happened to people in the town), and he grew a conviction that there had to be some greater sources of miraculous knowledge and wisdom outside of ordinary life but sometimes seeping into it.

So this is where he started his travels — which he actually did and didn’t just bullshit about, as it would seem Blavatsky partially did. He appears to have learned from and studied under Sufi schools, wandering fakirs and dervishes, Buddhists, and in Tibet amongst Tibetan Buddhists. He essentially saw that these people of different cultures and religions had the development of higher heart-awakening and wisdom-awakening, conscience and consciousness, as part of their traditions and which some of them had even developed to an unusually high, miraculous degree. He recounts meeting a wandering fakir who blew his and his traveling companions’ brain circuits when they saw him casually stopping and walking with a bear without any fear whatsoever, then stopping to talk to them and give him his thoughts on religion.

So Gurdjieff’s life-mission, then, became, “How can I bring what I’ve learned and saw to the West, where the role for them is rather unconventional — where I cannot just become a priest, since any established church would view me as ‘heretical’ for what I am trying to teach?” Hence, this is why Gurdjieff became an infamous “cult-leader”, with all the connotations and sometimes imperfections and scandals that implies.

>>20404357
Thank you

>>20405038
I'm reading anon Gurdjieff effortposting but near as I can tell the idea is "we're going to back out of the room slowly now" with some kind of jnana yoga. Witness to my name. Names not me. Witness to my body. Body is not me. Witness to my thoughts and feels. They're not me. There's no witness. Where are you? Dadadadada! Am I getting this right so far?

>>20405181
In yogic terminology you could say Gurdjieff prescribed methods of hatha yoga, bhakti yoga, and jnana yoga to his students.

Why is this?

As he noted, any of these and various spiritual and religious ways offered to humankind CAN indeed give them a certain type of development. Figures like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Theresa of Avila, as I brought up, undoubtedly reached a great stage. But Gurdjieff’s insight is that it can be lopsided.

The bhakti yogi can attain but their control over and expansion of capacities of their physical body and mind will be undeveloped, not as developed. Since they attained their state through great emotional devotion, they will believe this is the ultimate and only way and this will be what they will prescribe and teach. The hatha yogi the same, with their control and discipline over their body having been the most developed, and the emotions and thinking centers simply disregarded, ignored, minimized, underdeveloped — not much depth of thought or feeling to them carrying out asanas and reciting mantras. The jnana yogi, finally, can attain, but, again, at the expense of the development and expansion of the capacities of their body and heart.

Ouspensky clearly was a very intellectual type — he came to it all very intellectually, without the great depth of feeling and devotion to divinity, but rather as a occultism-inclined brain who saw higher truth and wisdom in various forms of religion and spirituality.

Gurdjieff’s way was promulgated as a potential development of all three major centers of humanity through the so-called “Fourth Way.” It is not way one (body), way two (emotions), or way three (thought) only.

Gurdjieff doesn’t seem to have been of the anatta (no-self) persuasion but rather of the higher or truer self teaching — the “witnessing” capacity, the witnesser, is the vestigial undeveloped immortal soul (fourth state of primordial awareness) beyond the body, emotions, and mind. Because this “self” has the apparent paradoxical feature of featurelessness, not being strictly attached or confined to the mechanisms of one’s body, emotions, and mind, being pure primordial awareness, Buddhists tried to conceptualize the true nature of humanity and reality as “anatta,” no-self, since it appears as a featureless void, primordial awareness, without a center.

Gurdjieff’s teaching seems to have been about how to get the “master,” higher self, the vestigial soul which is a microcosmic reflection of God, down into and truly and fully inhabiting and perfecting the lower vehicles (body, emotions, mind) which it often only rarely or imperfectly manifests through.

So it could also paradoxically be put, it is not just about backing out of the room, but even more fully inhabiting in and living it.

Bump