Bring4th

_____

Is he a GI like Military?

_____

I guess I am now.

_____

I'm away from my PC, so I can't make this too long as I'm posting from my phone, but Gurdjieff was one of my "first stops" when I started on my quest for truth. I felt extremely uneasy reading his books back then, and now that I'm much wiser, I cannot caution you strongly enough against him. He was definitely advanced left hand path, but a brilliant mind nonetheless. Off the top of my head you might want to check out 2 books: Lords of the Left Hand Path and The Three Dangerous Magi. I'll elaborate further when I'm back at my PC, but Gurdjieff is a complex subject. There is a good reason why Rene Guenon said "flee from Gurdjieff".

_____

Hi GentleWanderer, aplogies, I'm still not at my PC While  my initial post might have come across as a tad alarmist, it's only because one of my interests is cult psychology, and I have just read waaaay too many stories of people who have had their lives ruined by either Gurdjieff himself or one of the many 4th way schools that have sprung up after his death, which have all been destructive cults. Let's just say his "philosophy" isn't compatible with love and an open heart.

When I'm back at my PC I'll elaborate a little, sorry for the delay! Happy to hear that you are not following his teaching. I will admit though that he was an invaluable little bread crumb on the bread crumb trail that led me to the Law of One!

When I joined a left hand path organization a few years back, Ouspensky was one of the first things I was required to read. Both Ouspensky and Gurdijeff were very left in their thinking, though that's not to say you shouldn't read it. Both had very interesting and intelligent philosophies worth studying with an open mind. I certainly found it informative.

_____

Michael Aquino, who took over Anton LaVey's satanic church in San Francisco and founded the Temple of Set, made Gurdjieff and Ouspensky required reading as well. GentleWanderer, which books have you read by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky? And which books have you read 'about' Gurdjieff?

It has been a long time ago that I read Gurdjieff, and I closed that chapter completely, because him and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum, so I really had to dig deep to remember what it was that upset me so much about things he said. Where to start.... for the most part, he dehuminises people, calling them machines and automatons. He spent his life "laughing at the idiots". This actually came out of his mouth "But what is a woman, just nothing but a man's handkerchief. I need a new one every day. Let others for the washing pay."

He also denied the existence of a soul, if I remember correctly.

It is not an overt expression of negativity, no. In fact, I don't think Ouspensky or Gurdijeff would have considered themselves to be following such a path, and there is definitely a mixed quality to the material I've encountered. The "left" expression may be found in the encouragement to finely control one's emotions, destroying the "useless" parts of the self in order to "escape" what is seen as a lesser state of being. There are also undertones of elitism, in the posit that man cannot exceed himself without a special school or teacher, and the idea that you've got two types of people- the slaves, and those who through certain techniques have become ideal. There are plenty of positive points made as well, but in my opinion the overall package leans subtly but distinctly toward the left.

In my experience it is rare to find a text that is polarized 100% in one direction. The overtly negative stuff is often found in grimoiries or distinctly magical texts, as purely negative philosophy is somewhat hard to take seriously when it is presented out of the context of an overt seeking of power. It is far more common to find elements of that philosophy mixed in with more positive ideas.

Oh yes, it's all coming back to me now, because I'm going off memory here. I actually burned his books, because I didn't want to run the risk of some innocent truth seeker happening upon them on the trash heap, so I'm not sure how I'm going to quote from them now... I will just share my other findings first, and then make a plan.

To quote Carla: "wisdom without love is a wicked thing."

GentleWanderer Wrote:What is left hand in their thinking ? It's true love isn't the main focus but for example in Ouspensky "In search of the miraculous" and others books by Gurdjieff i didn't grasped the intent to control, dominate or hate others.

Okay, I'm back on my PC. I never imagined that I would revisit Gurdjieff, but here we are. I remember for the most part what put me at odds with Gurdjieff, I would just like mention firstly that this is my personal opinion, I am well aware that there are many Gurdjieff loyalists and sympathisers out there. With that said, let me try and cast some light on this subject.

My meanderings into the mind of Gurdjieff was invaluable to me personally because it gave me some insight into the mind of a negative adept, and how extremely cunning they can be. The fourth way has also been described as the "way of the sly man". To quote Venger Satanis, High Priest of the Cult of Cthulhu:

Quote:Gurdjieff has said that the Fourth Way teaches that when it rains the pavement gets wet. Ouspensky might describe The Work as a systematic process of reaching higher states of consciousness and conscience. Girard Haven would describe it as creating a soul. In my own words, I view the Fourth Way as the best chance for mankind to evolve into Godlike beings, which is his birthright. Their role requires me to observe myself. To be patient, disciplined, creative, active, and sly. A student (or Master) of the 4th Way must be cunning!

The supremacy of the self is of course prototypical of the left hand path. Becoming gods...and that you yourself are the source and origin of that power, whereas the right hand path sees themselves as co-creators along with everyone else, but that their power is ultimately coming from the Creator, they are channels. The left hand path relies solely on their conscious faculties, they have "cut themselves off" from the Creator, so to speak. Not that its possible, but you know what I mean.

Quote:Ra: Things come not to those positively oriented but through such beings.

Jesus was of course a prime example of a positive adept always stating that it was not he himself which effected the healing, but that he was merely a channel or catalyst for the Creator's energy, and that the person was healed by their own faith. Joel Goldsmith is also a good example, he said sometimes when he gave lectures, he was as amazed by the contents of the lecture as everyone else when he listened to the tape afterwards, because the information just flowed through him and came out of his mouth.

Gurdjieff had no qualms about expressing his disdain for humanity, very eloquently packaged and with such finesse, that it's not immediately apparent that you are exposing yourself to negative philosophy. These people don't walk around with horns and pitchforks (just a little joke), they pose as prophets, teachers, philosophers, mystics, saints, priests, saviours, politicians and healers. Gurdjieff even referred to his teaching as esoteric Christianity initially, even though he later said:

Quote:My way is to develop the hidden potentialities of man; a way that is against Nature and against God. This idea of the hidden potentialities of Man is fundamental. It often leads to the rejection of science and a disdain for ordinary human beings. On this level very few men really exist. To be, means to be something different. The ordinary man, "natural" man is nothing but a worm, and the Christians' God nothing but a guardian for worms.

Classic cult leader bait and switch... You have to realise how charismatic these people are, and how much power of personality they possess. If you for example tried to convince the Russian Tsar and his family (especially his wife) that Rasputin was bad juju, you would have met with great opposition.... yes, I consider Gurdjieff and Rasputin to be birds of a feather. They were master manipulators and deceivers. Evil always poses as good. In People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck, one of the prime characteristics of evil people is that they want to appear to be good, and Gurdjieff was no exception.

So let's take a snippet from In Search of The Miraculous - Fragments of an Unknown Teaching - these books have such beautiful titles, which is part of the deception, because I would not have picked this book up in a bookstore had it not been for the title...

Let's see how Gurdjieff ensured that none of his pupils would even dare to consider helping another person:

Quote:"Of the desires expressed the one which is most right is the desire to be master of oneself, because without this nothing else is possible. And in comparison with this desire all other desires are simply childish dreams, desires of which a man could make no use even if they were granted to him.

"It was said, for instance, that somebody wanted to help people. In order to be able to help people one must first learn to help oneself. A great number of people become absorbed in thoughts and feelings about helping others simply out of laziness. They are too lazy to work on themselves; and at the same time it is very pleasant for them to think that they are able to help others. This is being false and insincere with oneself. If a man looks at himself as he really is, he will not begin to think of helping other people: he will be ashamed to think about it. Love of mankind, altruism, are all very fine words, but they only have meaning when a man is able, of his own choice and of his own decision, to love or not to love, to be an altruist or an egoist. Then his choice has a value. But if there is no choice at all, if he cannot be different, if he is only such as chance has made or is making him, an altruist today, an egoist tomorrow, again an altruist the day after tomorrow, then there is no value in it whatever. In order to help others one must first learn to be an egoist, a conscious egoist. Only a conscious egoist can help people. Such as we are we can do nothing. A man decides to be an egoist but gives away his last shirt instead. He decides to give away his last shirt, but instead, he strips of his last shirt the man to whom he meant to give his own. Or he decides to give away his own shirt but gives away somebody else's and is offended if somebody refuses to give him his shirt so that he may give it to another. This is what happens most often. And so it goes on.

Of course this particular 'evolutionary level' you needed to reach to be able to help someone else, was never reached by anyone, so if we lived according to Gurdjieff's dictates, no-one would ever help another. I also remember another one of his analogies now, that we are all in prison, and the only way to escape from prison was to listen to someone who already escaped and can therefore show others how to escape. Of course only Gurdjieff figured out how to escape. Lol!

It would be extremely funny if it wasn't so sad, because people coming out of fourth way schools have a really tough time recovering. If you internalise Gurdjieff's "philosophy", you're in a big mess. His parting words on his death bed were quite prophetic "I leave you all in a fine mess"...

Here's some rare footage of Gurdjieff which surfaced not too long ago:

(06-13-2016, 04:04 PM)GentleWanderer Wrote: [ -> ]Some years ago, i would say quite a long time ago (as time seems to be passing so fast now) i read books by and about
Gurdjieff and one of his disciple Ouspensky. Although not the purest man in the world there was something very powerful
in him i believe he was STO. I can't say i've really practiced his teaching because they were taught in his school and it's not
something you can really learn in a book but he marked me greatly. I'm curious to know if you've experienced his teachings.

what a weird coincidence, i was just reading this article talking about the same person


Gurdjieff

http://humansarefree.com/2016/06/kindlin...et-to.html

I found some more research by others online. As you will see, Gurdjieff is a hornet's nest best left alone...

Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

Amazon review Wrote:This is an extensive study of Left-Hand Path individuals and groups from ancient times to modern movements such as the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set - both of which have individual chapters in the book. Ancient paths include the Egyptian cult of Set, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, the Yezidis, Neoplatonists and the Greeks, the Germanics, the Slavs, the Assassins, Dualist sects, the Faustian path, the Hellfire Club, de Sade, Marx and the sinister aspects of Bolshevism.

A whole chapter is devoted to Hitler and Himmler and the occult practices of Nazism. Other modern individuals analyzed include Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Crowley, Spare, Gregorius and Gerald Gardner.

Amazon review Wrote:From black magic and Satanism to Gnostic sects and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way, the left-hand path has been linked to many practices, cults, and individuals across the ages. Stephen Flowers, Ph.D., examines the methods, teachings, and historical role of the left-hand path, from its origins in Indian tantric philosophy to its underlying influence in current world affairs, and reveals which philosophers, magicians, and occult figures throughout history can truly be called “Lords of the Left-Hand Path.”

Amazon review Wrote:This is the most comprehensive study of the Left-Hand Path and Satanism considered from its own perspectives. Dr. Flowers has traced divergent cultural streams of antinomian tradition of antiquity and the present. Flowers defines the Lordship of the Left-Hand Path from two key concepts: antinomianism, or going against the grain of society, and self-deification.

The book surveys cultural traditions, personalities and important groups that brought light onto aspects of the Prince of Darkness and the Left-Hand Path. There will be some surprises.

Chapters and sections include ancient Egypt, Sumerian, Chinese, Indian, Yezedis, and Northern European (the tradition Flowers is best known for). The development of Satan from its origins, through the Middle Ages is covered. A chapter on Nazi Occultism delves into the mysteries of Himmler and his black knights.

Modern occult schools and personalities surveyed include Crowley and his relation to the Left-Hand Path, Gurdjieff and his Work, Fraternitus Saturni, A. O. Spare.

Modern Satanism is explored through the Church of Satan and its founder Anton Szandor LaVey. The myth and magic of LaVey and his work are explored, and also the sources that LaVey utilized in his creation of a system that proclaimed Man as God. The Church of Satan is examined from its sources and the philosophies of the CoS are examined: from Satanic Ethics to Satanic Magic and Erotic Crystallization Inertia.

The survey of the Temple of Set is the most comprehensive of that shadowy institution in any public medium. Flowers charts the development of the Setian philosophy from out of its Satanic parent to the present. Major Temple concepts are covered, including the Black Flame, Life Beyond Death, Lesser and Greater Black Magic, and the Word Xeper. Several Orders within the Temple of Set are also examined, including the Order of the Vampyre and the Order of the Trapezoid.

This book is an important milestone in the history of the Left Hand Path. It is both a reliable history for researchers of magic and a valuable source book for practicing Black Magicians. This text is a torch on the dark corners of the blackest arts, and a valuable tool for the discriminating mind.

Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff - Knight of the Supremacy of the Will

Quote:Gurdjieff was a Left-Hand Path (LHP) Initiate. All who claim otherwise have never finished reading Beelzebub's Tales.

Three Dangerous Magi, The: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley

Chapter 2 Wrote:"Till Gurdjieff raised up his head, one could think he is only a great scientist, or something like that. But when he looks at you, you can no more see his face, neither know if he has great or little eyes; you see only two immense wells of black light." - Rene Daumal

"Gurdjieff exercises on those who go to him a kind of grip of a psychic order which is quite astonishing and from which few have the strength to escape." - Rene Guenon

Wikipedia Wrote:George Gurdjieff

Pauwels claims Karl Haushofer, the father of geopolitics whose protegee was Deputy Reich Führer Rudolf Hess, as one of the real "seekers after truth" described by Gurdjieff.

The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers

Book review Wrote:This book avoids the devoutly worshipful attitude of Moore, Patterson, Bennett and their moon-mad ilk, and likewise doesn't fall into the pit occupied by the kinds of outright misrepresentations of fact found in so many other books, like those fairly recent things written by some well-known Brits (a psychologist, a lit professor and a famous occult writer). This is a complete presentation of the lives of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, drawing the only conclusion possible: Gurdjieff's ideas are a brilliant but derivative hash made out of a random assortment of old occult documents and a little bit of hearsay. But the book says all this with a remarkable grace, depth and style; this man knows what he is talking about and knows how to say it. Rare in this genre.

Page 384 Wrote:Orage’s explanation of the split is therefore of great interest. He always maintained that it was Gurdjieff’s near rape of Mrs. Y in 1923-24 that finally decided Ouspensky. The date tallies and the scandal was of such proportions that the explanation is very plausible. If Orage were right this would explain Ouspensky’s obsession with Gurdjieff’s ‘integrity’ in his conversation with Boris Mouravieff after Gurdjieff’s crash, and why - out of loyalty to his teacher as a ‘member of the same family’ he refused to tell Mouravieff why he had decided to work alone.

The Dark Halls of Fourth Way Encounters...
Gurdjieff, Hess, Hitler, Haushofer, Crowley, Rasputin

Quote:G. I. Gurdjieff, (architect of the Fourth Way), was fast becoming famous at a time when there was a focus on leaders around the world. He escaped the revolution in Russia when Rasputin was the Machiavellian dark figure on the scene of Russian mysticism and political intrigue. Gurdjieff later was accused of being a tsarist agent named Lamas Dordjieff as well as other rumors which had his personage as a close confidante of Karl Haushofer, the mentor of Rudolf Hess, and linking him to the creation of the Nazi party.

Gurdjieff & Stalin

Quote:“There are rumours that Hitler was acquainted with this doctrine of Gurdjieff. Essentially this idea of a man as a machine is the foundation of any totalitarian regime. Gurdjieff is the inspiration of totalitarianism. He is a guru of totalitarianism, despite the fact that he himself was not interested in politics.”

Mikushevich talks about Karl Haushofer and his geopolitical views because “he was acquainted with the experiences of Gurdjieff in Tibet. They tried to discover the true Aryan race in Tibet, and in the faces of Tibetans to find features of Nordic people.” Mikushevich refers to Haushofer, who was a member of the Thule Society, as “a student of Gurdjieff.”

Aliens of the Golden Dawn

Quote:Hitler used to say: "We are often abused for being the enemies of the mind and spirit. Well, that is what we are, but in a far deeper sense than bourgeois science, in its idiotic pride, could ever imagine."

This is very like what Gurdjieff said to his disciple Ouspensky after having condemned science: "My way is to develop the hidden potentialities of man; a way that is against Nature and against God." This idea of the hidden potentialities of Man is fundamental. It often leads to the rejection of science and a disdain for ordinary human beings. On this level very few men really exist. To be, means to be something different. The ordinary man, "natural" man is nothing but a worm, and the Christians' God nothing but a guardian for worms.

_____

You know, Gurdjieff is surrounded by controversy to this day, so many people saying so many things. All that we can do is try and piece things together as best we can. If I go only on his own words, he's incompatible with the positive polarity, along with that he was not isolated, he was surrounded by people, many of whom wrote autobiographies of their own, and the picture that emerges is not good.

My first comment to your initial post would have been "run a mile", but then I erased that after realising it won't be of any benefit to you. We are veiled, so we only have a tiny little candle in the dark to work with, and we will never truly know Gurdjieff's polarity or his intentions.

Quote:The decisions then are made to set up the possibility/probabilities of correcting these imbalances in what you call future space/time experiences. The advantage of time/space is that of the fluidity of the grand overview. The advantage of space/time is that, working in darkness with a tiny candle, one may correct imbalances.

I have settled the Gurdjieff matter for myself, but I don't want to influence you in any way, you should make up your own mind. You are the authority of your spiritual life, no-one else. It would just be remiss of me if I didn't share what I have learned.

Quote:Ra: Thus, to learn is the same as to teach unless you are not teaching what you are learning; in which case you have done you/they little or no good. This understanding should be pondered by your mind/body/spirit complex as it is a distortion which plays a part in your experiences at this nexus.

(06-15-2016, 01:12 PM)GentleWanderer Wrote: [ -> ]About Anton LaVey and Crowley, Scott Mandelker said in a video they were STO at their core while thinking to be of the negative side. There is a story about Anton saying that an angel visited him before his death and showed him how he was deluded. Anton was shocked and frightened by this revelation.

Ra also said outright that Crowley was Positive (18.10-11), but had such a difficult incarnation that it led him to act in very bizarre ways. (Including thinking himself fundamentally wicked.) This is one of the big reasons I try to avoid making judgments about someone's polarity unless there is a massive pile of evidence on one side and few mitigating factors on the other, especially when it comes to thinking someone to be negative.

I haven't read much of/about Gurjieff, but I think it's important to keep in mind that despite what was clearly some very poor behavior, IF at his core he was still honestly focused on trying to spread a message he believed would be beneficial to people at large, he would probably still be STO at heart. And that's the big problem with trying to judge these things from our heavily-distorted 3D perspectives. It's nearly impossible to tell, in retrospect, what his true focus was.

And so it tends to be with most people.

Some final links:

Sufism and the Way of Blame

Quote:J. G. Bennett was convinced that Gurdjieff's greatest influence came from a group of proto-Naqshbandis in Central Asia, a brotherhood later verified by HasanŞuşud as the Khwajagan, or Masters.

Quote:HasanŞuşud, a rather enigmatic Sufi in Istanbul, had disguised his former affiliation with the Naqshbandiyya and with another group that referred to itself as the Nuriyya-Malamatiyya (in Turkish, Nuriyye-Melamiyye). He had revealed that he had a rather low opinion of Gurdjieff as a "thief of the tradition." It is hard to tell which tradition Şuşud was referring to, although he probably meant the Khwajagan or the malamatiyya, or both of them comingled together.

A common element that tied together Gurdjieff, the Shah family, Bennett, and Şuşud was that all of them referred to the Masters of Central Asia. All of them also posited that the Khwajagan had functioned as a rather elite group within greater Sufism; yet all of them, with the exception of Şuşud, seem to have deviated from the central teachings of Sufism, which emphasized the nothingness of human beings next to God. Instead, the followers of Gurdjieff, Bennett, and Idries Shah would all continue to promote a form of occult elitism that emphasized a hidden hierarchy in Sufism composed of superhumans who operated beyond, behind, or outside of normative Sufism and Islam. And this idea was inimical to the original teachings of the Khwajagan.

Quote:The late Annemarie Schimmel spoke for a lot of people in the academy, amongst the Orders and the solitaries of the Sufi universe when she asserted in her MYSTICAL DIMENSIONS OF ISLAM that students of Sufism would do well to take Idries Shah (and by extension Gurdjieff and Bennett) with modest grains of salt - as neither one of these names are authentic representatives of the Tradition. JG Bennett is especially problematic since he was an agent of British intelligence (a spy for MI6) whose involvement with Idries Shah and Sufism really had more to do with Anglo-European colonialist/imperialist adventurism and geostrategic designs on Eurasia than the Tradition itself.

Sufism and the Way of Blame: Hidden Sources of a Sacred Psychology

Quote:The first section discusses the impact of several men who introduced Sufi (or quasi-Sufi) ideas into the West: Hazrat Inayat Khan, Idries Shah, Gurdjieff, and John G. Bennett.

On a Spaceship with Beelzebub: By a Grandson of Gurdjieff

Editorial review Wrote:Spiritual "schools" of most any kind are nonsense; all development is self-development, and the kinds of methods used in what is left of the Gurdjieff organizations are merely self-deception and self-projection, often nearly on the scale of psychoanalysis and organized religion. If one reads between the lines in this very well-written and honest book, this becomes more than apparent in the behavior of pseudo-gurus like Stavely and Pentland - and contrary to some reports the descriptions in this book ring true, not just of those individuals but all those who set themselves up as "mystical authorities", including Gurdjieff himself. The only flaw the book has is that Kheridan never seems to realize that it isn't just his teachers that are limited, but the whole enterprise of spiritual search through dedication to such imaginary "masters".

The Gurdjieff Work

Review Wrote:Writers of spiritual philosophy could learn a lot about communicating their ideas by reading this slender, marvellously clear document. The author distils an enormous amount of complex material in a brief, accurate, and wholly understandable format. Don't let anyone tell you that complex ideas necessitate complex language. When someone really understands a subject, he is generally able to speak about it simply. And this author provides a beautiful case in point.

Review Wrote:This book is unrivalled as the clearest presentation of Gurdjieffian mythos, ethos & logos. For anyone seeking transparent elucidation of the "work", this is the best starting point. Instead of meandering through the ponderous & subjective musings of Nicoll, Bennet, Orage and Ouspensky, here you got in a nutshell:

1.Gurdjieff's cosmology: a highly original ( this is an understatement ) variant of Neoplatonist emanationism combined with Blavatskyan planes/worlds; all set in a pseudoscientific lingo using ordinary chemical symbols (Carbon, Oxygen, etc.) in a bizarre quasi-alchemical setting.

2.Gurdjieff's psychology: a modern-day gnosticism without "divine spark". His famous "centres" (physical/vital, emotional, intellectual) are old Platonic & Thomist archaic psychology recast in a deceptively "oriental" mode- in fact, Gurdjieffian esoteric physiology is Western (his centres having little in common with chakras), while the entire raison for the "work" is Eastern: in essence, this is activation & empowering of the already existent, but numb & deluded jiva (Tantric tradition), spiritual seed (Valentinian gnosticism) or vijnana (Vajrayana Buddhism). Gurdjieff's's emphasis on non-existence of "I" is just a pedagogic trick.

3. And, last: it was Gurdjieff who has brought the enneagram to the West. This ancient Hermetic symbol, serving primarily as a glyph delineating stages of alchemical transmutation of a psyche, has become, due to hilarious unpredictable New Age ravings, a sort of universal bestseller on the pop-psychological supermarket.

What to say at the end ? Read it- it's a truly delightful mystery story on the search of the miraculous.

The Gurdjieff Con - Debriefing the Gurdjieff work

_____

(06-15-2016, 03:48 PM)GentleWanderer Wrote: [ -> ]Yinyang thank you for your input it's appreciated and it is helping me to better discern what is negative in this philosophy. This makes me realises that we can often be naive about the true polarity of some way of thinking. I still tend to think that G was a positive despite the bad things he did but you know, i can't read his mind and heart so who knows, i could be wrong. Too me an advanced STS is like a demon in human form with no humanity as i've seen in a psychopath. G had clearly very bad sides but i think he has some humanity, am i right or is it projection on my part ? Swami Prajnanpad said G was on the path of siddhi as opposed to the path of peace Buddha was on. Ultimately these paths lead to the same place but the path of the siddhi is more dangerous as it first focused on power to the detriment of love and can lead to delusion.

You are very welcome, if it has been of any benefit to you, then I'm happy. Accept it or discard it, and I wouldn't know if it's just projection on your part, I'll leave that knot your you to untangle!

GentleWanderer Wrote:A few years ago when wanting to understand his teachings i started to search on internet groups and contemporary teachers. I find looking at internet that many people who were in these groups looked like zombies and that the teachers seemed to lack integrity, love and i sensed something perverse in some of them. I agree that some things in this teachings are easy to interpret in a sts way. So i abandoned trying to understand this philosophy and since i have found a very good one with Ra and others.

For me, finding Ra was like hitting the jackpot, and heaven knows my search was long and arduous enough. Gurdjieff was not the only "rascal" I stumbled over, I have a great talent for sniffing them out!  I also totally get what you're saying about the zombie factor, and fourth way students are also not a very merry bunch. They seem to exhibit the same contempt for their fellow humans as Gurdjieff has done. Of course lack of humour alone should be an indication to you to proceed with great caution, because if a practice is humourless, something is very, very off. It's quite ironic that Gurdjieff's war on automatons has produced the biggest automatons! What is it with these Russians? Because Ayn Rand was also Russian now that I think of it, and if there was ever a stern bunch it was her objectivist students!

Perhaps one of the most significant differences between the two paths is faith:

Ra Wrote:Ra: I am Ra. The vibratory distortion of sound, faith, is perhaps one of the stumbling blocks between those of what we may call the infinite path and those of the finite proving/understanding.
You are precisely correct in your understanding of the congruency of faith and intelligent infinity; however, one is a spiritual term, the other more acceptable perhaps to the conceptual framework distortions of those who seek with measure and pen.

vs.

Gurdjieff (In Search of the Miraculous) Wrote:No 'faith' is required on the fourth way; on the contrary, faith of any kind is opposed to the fourth way. On the fourth way a man must satisfy himself of the truth of what he is told.

Gurdjieff (In Search of the Miraculous) Wrote:In properly organized groups no faith is required; what is required is simply a little trust and even that only for a little while, for the sooner a man begins to verify all he hears the better it is for him.

_____

In Search of the Miraculous is one of the great classics for those pursuing a conscious awakening, and one of my favorite books.  Those of you who have not yet read it, should pounce on it.

Quote:Ra: The negative polarity is clever.

I'm not necessarily painting Ouspensky and Gurdjieff with the same brush, in fact I lean strongly towards Ouspensky being positive, and just very unfortunate to have crossed paths with Gurdjieff. They met because Gurdjieff read an article in the newspaper by Ouspensky, and the article referred to Ouspensky as an esotericist, and Gurdjieff lured him in after that...

From A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

Quote:P. D. Ouspensky

Although to most readers Peter Demian Ouspensky is known, if at all, as the most articulate disciple of the enigmatic G.I. Gurdjieff, he was in his own right a thinker of considerable merit, and it is possible that his meeting with that remarkable man was perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to him. After breaking with Gurdjieff in 1924, Ouspensky set himself up in London as a teacher of Gurdjieff’s ideas, disseminating them in a dry, professional manner to the likes of Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, T.S. Eliot and Algernon Blackwood. The situation may seem strange; but as Ouspensky himself points out in his posthumously published In Search of The Miraculous (1949), an account of his early years with Gurdjieff, by 1917 – two years after their initial meeting in a seedy Moscow café  - he had begun to separate the man Gurdjieff from his teaching, finding fault with the former, but maintaining the importance of the latter. Yet, in 1947, just months before his death, brought on by heavy drinking, Ouspensky held a series of talks that have gone down as legendary in the history of “the work”, the name given to Gurdjieff’s peculiar system  of “harmonious development”. Returning to a post-war London after sitting out the Blitz in the US, Ouspensky shocked his audience by repudiating the system he had devoted more than twenty-five years to propagating. All of the retinue of “work” ideas: “self-remembering”, “sleep”, our different “I’s”, the fact that we are all “machines”, were denied by the aged and ailing master. Ouspensky rejected the teaching he had given his life to, and advised his listeners to think for themselves. The effect was electrifying. After his death, around which hovered strange circumstances and paranormal events, many of his students, rudderless, eventually found their way to Gurdjieff, the very man that Ouspensky had warned them against and over whom, no doubt, he had lost much sleep. To this day the relationship between the two is the stuff of myth and psychodrama, with Ouspensky cast as a treacherous Judas, stealing his guru’s teaching, and Gurdjieff playing the black magician, power mad and insatiable, intent on dominating all around him.

That Ouspensky made such a profound volte face was not unusual for him. He is, if not, unique, certainly one of the most self-critical and painfully honest, as well as readable, writers on esotericism. Having once adopted Gurdjieff’s austere and unromantic ideas, Ouspensky looked back on his earlier self with some disparagement, calling his Tertium Organum, the book that made his reputation, a weakness. Yet it is this book, more than any other, that communicates the best in Ouspensky: his vital, questing mind and fiery enthusiasm. All of his other works share a certain pessimism, perhaps most obvious in the theme of his single novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1915-1949), which is a working of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, the idea that we live our lives over and over again. As a child in Moscow, where he was born in 1878, Ouspensky early on had powerful experiences of déjà vu, that strange feeling that “I have been here before”. Today, most clinical psychologists root this in crossed wires in the brain, but Ouspensky would reject such an explanation. To him there was clearly something wrong with our ideas about time.

Like Nietzsche, Ouspensky’s thought swung between the grim vision of an infinite series of himself, eternally making the same mistakes, and the profoundly optimistic counter-weight of the superman which, in Ouspensky’s case, meant a being endowed with a large helping of Bucke’s cosmic consciousness. That Ouspensky had at least a taste of this is clear from his remarkable essay “Experimental Mysticism”. Following William James, Ouspensky engaged in a series of experiments with nitrous oxide. In his little room in St. Petersburg, he inhaled the gas, and more than likely experimented with hashish as well, finding himself thrown into a strange world of living hieroglyphs and weird, inexplicable phenomena. It was his inability to bring back anything concrete from these experiences that led Ouspensky on his quest to find a teaching that could somehow show him the way.

There is good reason to believe that when Ouspensky met Gurdjieff, that “sly man’s” dour doctrine – that man is a machine with only the slimmest possibility of gaining freedom – combined with Ouspensky’s own Romantic world-rejection to push him into an attitude of Stoic resignation. At any rate, he wrote little after working with Gurdjieff, and the last book published in his lifetime, A New Model of the Universe (1931) (which includes “Experimental Mysticism”), is a collection of essays originally written in his pre-Gurdjieff days, re-worked and brought up to date. Many of the chapters deal with themes similar to Tertium Organum: the fourth dimension, the superman, eternal recurrence, and Ouspensky’s own version of the new physics. But through it all runs the idea of esotericism, the notion that behind everyday world, we can find traces of a hidden hand, the influence of esoteric schools, whose teaching offer the only hope of escaping the wheel of life. Ouspensky believed in this idea fiercely, and in his last days, seeing in Gurdjieff a tainted source, he made plans for journeys to Central Asia, the area of the world most likely, he believed, to harbour traces of secret schools.

These would not be his first journeys to the East, before meeting Gurdjieff, Ouspensky had acquired a reputation pre-Revolutionary Moscow and St. Petersburg as a journalist, mostly for his accounts of his search for the miraculous in India, Egypt, Ceylon and Central Asia. Indeed, it is precisely because of his reputation that Gurdjieff had him ensnared. Returning to Moscow after his fruitless search for schools, Ouspensky was astounded to discover a source of the secret teaching right in his own backyard. Yet, while downing glasses of Montrachet in his last, lonely days, Ouspensky often thought nostalgically of his early years in Russia, before he met Gurdjieff, when his lectures on the superman or the fourth dimension would draw thousands of listeners. He would also remember his late night sessions at St. Petersburg’s Stray Dog Café, a meeting place for Symbolist poets and other members of the avant garde, and the place where Ouspensky rubbed shoulders with the likes of Anna Akmahtova. It was the same milieu as that of Briusov and, another writer we will meet shortly, Andrei Bely. Had Ouspensky not cast in his lot with Gurdjieff, there is good reason to believe that he would be spoken of today in the same breath as Berdyaev, Merzhkovsky and Soloviev. As it is, the influence of Tertium Organum on the Russian avant garde has, in recent years, received more attention. Among other painters, Kasimir Malevich was influenced by Ouspensky’s writing on higher space, and even Berdyaev, who was very critical of the occult influence of Rudolf Steiner on the Russian intelligentsia, spoke of Ouspensky as the only theosophical writer worth reading.

The youthful Ouspensky had a poetic soul, a romantic, vulnerable side that comes out in his early writings, like the collection of stories translated as Talks With The Devil (1916-1973). It also appears in one of his earliest books, The Symbolism of the Tarot originally published in Paris in 1911. Combining his ideas on time, consciousness and secret knowledge, this series of poetic prose sketches was later reworked and included as a chapter in A New Model of the Universe. Yet, as some commentators have remarked, it is in striking contrast to his more rigorous, stern dicta on recurrence, sex and the laws of Manu. Perhaps the strict taskmaster of “the work” could not let go of his earlier, more human self.

Like many drawn to the occult tradition, Ouspensky thought little of socialism and other egalitarian movements. Disagreeing with Buck’s democratic view of cosmic consciousness, he argued that the superman would be a product of high culture, not an inevitable advance of the race. Crossing Russia during the Revolution, Ouspensky had an opportunity to consider these ideas. Separated from Gurdjieff by the warring White and Red armies, stranded in the backwater of Ekaterinodar, Ouspensky wrote a series of Letters from Russia, published in A.R. Orage’s journal The New Age. His account of looting, murder and other atrocities perpetrated by the Bolsheviks was sobering reading for many sympathetic to the Soviet experiment. Reaching Constantinople in 1920, Ouspensky never set foot in Russia again. Throughout his years as an exile he maintained a fierce, implacable hatred of bolshevism, seeing in it the most vile example of the “history of crime”, a virulent barbarism intent on overthrowing what was left of western culture. Oustensky however had no love for the czarist regime; in 1905 his beloved sister was arrested as a dissident and locked up in the Boutirsky Prison in Moscow, where she died. It was grim realities like these that drove him to reading works on occultism while working as a journalist on a Moscow newspaper, and led him, eventually, on his long search for the miraculous.