Any Gurdjieff/Ouspensky Fourth Way Disciples Here?

[Solomon]

Gurdjieff has been continually popping up for me over the last thirty years. I first encountered a Gurdjieff book about thirty years ago in my first year of law school at Berkeley. At the time, he seemed so complicated that I would put the book back on the shelf and say to myself, I'm not ready for that yet. I did wind up buying his "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson", but could never read it over the years. Every so often, over the course of thirty years, I would make an attempt at reading it, then put it back.

This past year, for some reason, the little man kept popping up in a series of what I call little synchronicities. I started trying to read him again, and, much to my surprise, it didn't seem so complicated anymore. It was actually making a lot of sense.

Daunting stuff. Just wondering if anyone else has looked at Gurdjieff.

[Thtwudbeme]

1. No, I have not, but again...

am bookmarking your thread.

A couple of years ago I bought a copy of selected essays by Lionel Trilling named, "The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent." I still don't feel intellectually mature enough to read it-but, think that I will at some point in the next twenty four months.

btw---I have more of your threads and comments bookmarked than any other DUer. I just thought you might like to know that.

Stephanie

[Solomon]

4. Wow Thtwudbeme! What a nice thing to say.

That's a really nice thing you said.

[CindyDale]

2. Don't know anything about Gurdjieff, but I think the Enneagram

is interesting. Gurdjieff had something to do with the Enneagram, I think.

[Solomon]

6. I think he invented the Enneagram. Gurdjieff referred to his "work" as

esoteric christianity. Or in other words, christianity before christ.

Basically, we have to create a soul. We don't get one by merely believing that somebody died and rose from the dead. The thought intrigues me tremendously because it makes more sense than the watered down version of christianity we have inherited.

[H2O Man]

8. Christianity before Christ .....

Wonderful, because that is the key to understanding Jesus. I would suggest that we are better off taking the word "Christ" out of any and all discussions of Jesus, because it is foreign to his time, his people, or his cultural belief system. Using the word "Christ" in regard to Jesus is as incorrect as having his followers wearing a Greatful Dead t-shirt.

Jesus refers to himself as "the Son of Man." This has a literal meaning: he viewed himself as mankind's representative to God. He recognized his internal journey as being that which must be undertaken to come to know "God" as best we can within the context of being human.

In order to understand Jesus in a historical context, it is necessary to study the movements within the Jewish peoples at the time .... and that means being familiar with at the very least the 200 years before the time of Jesus. It's also understanding what occured in the 400 years after his death .... before his teachings "went west" and became disfigured as "Christianity" as part of Rome.

To understand Jesus in an internal context, I think one needs to grasp what Gandhi meant when he said, "Living Christ is a living cross; life without Christ is a living death."

[H2O Man]

3. I was introduced

to the works of both by Rubin Carter in the late 1970s. In the years between his second conviction, and his winning in federal court, Rubin had withdrawn into a near-total isolation. The letters I have from that period are filled with discussions of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and remain some of the most powerful things I have ever read. I was in college at the time, and Carter's applying the lessons from these fellows to today's society had a huge impact on my life.

[Solomon]

5. H20 Man. You are blowing my mind now. Hurricane Carter?!!

I got chills down my spine. My mouth is hanging open.

Over the years I've asked many people and no one had even ever heard of Gurdjieff. I didn't think I'd get any responses from asking here.

I'm on the right track I guess. Got a lot of reading to do. This gives me even more incentive to plow through everything I have on these guys.

Thanks.

[H2O Man]

7. Yeah, the Rube!

The book "Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter," by James Hirsch ( Houghton Mifflan; 2000) has a few pages on Rubin's interest in the works of these two fellows. As some DUers know, the Water Man was the first of the two kids who corresponded with Carter while he was in Rahway & Trenton. I was friends with Rubin before he was popular with Dylan etc, before the retrial, etc.

By 1979, he was in a very difficult period. He cut off communications with all family and friends, with only two exceptions.(Of course, he was in contact with attorneys, though not frequently.) I'm not sure if you have seen the movie, but it really only hints at the terrible things done to this man.

I have beautiful letters, some 40 pages and longer, that he wrote from the dungeons, from the insane asylum called the "Vroom Unit", where tortures being conducted now on Muslims were perfected. And we would have detailed discussions on how the books you are speaking of apply to today .... to now.

It's a strange story, what happened to Rubin in solitary confinement. I published one essay about him being sent to Vroom in 1974, in a local newspaper. I'm tempted to write a few more. But, be that as it may ..... it's not surprising that only a small group of people here have read these works. (smile)

[Solomon]

9. Bowing solemnly in great respect. I hope you realize how very blessed

you are. What a tremendous treasure you have! I'm envious.

The fact that Gurdjieff applies to today is exactly what he was talking about. If the energy of the west is not combined with the wisdom of the east, the world will be destroyed. He was pointing the way to a new and higher consciousness.

Jeeeez I'd like to see some of them letters. What a treasure trove!

Carter must be an intensely spiritual man to have survived his ordeal.

What is he doing now? Is he teaching?

You know what would be fascinating? To find out what lessons he taught to his persecutors from working with the Fourth Way. Wow! The thought chills me.

[H2O Man]

10. Rubin worked for years

with a group that assisted the "wrongly convicted." He has also been an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, having come quite close to being executed in 1967 for a crime he did not commit. We talk from time to time, though usually about flower gardening.

I have some fantastic things, from the letters, to cassette tapes, (including those where he was writing his book, "The 16h Round") to all types of legal documents, prison communications, and other things that I occassionally take out and let my teen-aged sons read (the older one is actually 21 now; time flies). But when Rubin spoke with only two people, during his transformation years, I was one of two people he did communicate with.

One of he ideas that I'm sure you will find familiar is that people are machines, something that holds true for all of us. So he recognized that those responsible for his being in prison were not consciously "evil." They were unconscious machines. And all of us, be it those from the East or West, have to wake up to our humanity. There are no saints, just human beings, but even as sad and weakly human - beings, we have the capacity to wake up and then to change. At the same time, we must recognize that without that effort to wake up, we can not change .... either ourselves or any situation .... because conscious change can not occure unconsciously.

I may put an article on Carter on my blog this weekend, if I have time. Ha! Now you have me thinking about the Hurricane, which is funny, because three days ago, I had thought about sending a short note to him, with news on one of our common friends. "spose I'll get to that before the mailman gets here.

[Solomon]

12. Yep Yep. Most people are machines who react to the things that

happen to them in predictable fashion. I like his idea that the things that happen to us creates a substance, a type of food, that we can use to better ourselves if we don't dissipate the "food" by reacting as machines. Our egos are buffers we have built up to deal with things that happen to us, but then this ego which is not our true self takes control as a machine. We think that our egos are actually us.

I have learned a lot already and I like what he tries to teach. I am learning to let all the slights go, to suffer then intentionally without letting my ego automatically react like a jackass.

That's why I say Carter must have really taught his persecutors a lot. (Or I should say, he really must have pissed them off by not reacting to them as a machine would.) Fascinating stuff.

One thing is clear. As Gurdjieff says, one cannot come to the work unless one is dissappointed with one's life or the world.

Yep yep Waterman. You got a real gold mine there. Glad to be a part of a little synchronicity for you as well.

[H2O Man]

14. I just put

an "updated" article I published in 2000 on Rubin, onto my blog .... which you can access below. It is primarily about Rubin before his "transformation" ..... some of his lawyers called it his "Buddha phase" .... and while it doesn't directly address the subject matter at hand, you may find it interesting.

[Solomon]

15. Thanks. I already checked out your site and now I look forward to

anything whatsoever you have to say on the current subject.

Be back after I get a chance to check it out.

[H2O Man]

16. I've had a few messages

asking me to post the article on the Hurricane on "editorials and articles." I'm not sure (m)any people will be interested, but I'll put a post/link there, too.

[Stevepol]

11. Not a disciple but I've read a lot of Ouspensky.

I think he's the guy who provides the easiest access to Gurdjieff. The most interesting book is "In Search of the Miraculous" I think. Tells of the group that formed around G when he was in Moscow and St. Petersburg around the time of the beginnings of the revolution in Russia. If you get it, you may want to skip some of the denser chapters about the food chain, etc. Ouspensky wrote several books about The Fourth Way, as he and Gurdjieff called his approach. To my mind it's some of the most acute and powerful psychology and religion ever published anywhere. A lot of books have been written about these ideas. The key idea according to O ws the idea of "self-remembering." Really fascinating, thought-provoking reading.

[Solomon]

13. I've got all of Ouspensky's books and Gurdjieff's books and am working

my way through them. Fascinating stuff.

[H2O Man]

17. The inner circle of humanity.

"Humanity is regarded as two concentric circles. All humanity which we know and to which we belong forms the outer circle. All the history of humanity that we know is the history of the outer circle. But within this circle there is another, of which men of the outer circle know nothing, and the existence of which they only sometimes dimly suspect .... The inner ... circle forms, as it were, a life within a life, a mystery, a secret in the life of humanity ... the members of the inner circle are civilized men living in a country of barbarians among savages." -- Ouspensky


I think that we see this even in this section, or forum, on DU.

[H2O Man]

18. The threat of cultural consensus.

"All the truths belonging to the majority are like ancient rancid bacon or like rotten green ham; and from them comes all the moral scurvy which is eating itself into the life of the people around us."

As true today as 100 years ago. Perhaps more so.

[justsomegirl]

19. Gurdjieff - box set

My husband is a fan of both; he's encouraged me to check them out. There's a new box set of Gurdjieff's work (he also composed) called
Harmonic Development

"Subtitled: The Complete Harmonium Recordings 1948-1949. 2 regular CDs, an MP3-disc (with 19 hours of music & visuals), plus a 144 page illustrated paperback book on Gurdjieff and his harmonium recordings."

I ordered it, but it's on backorder and I haven't received it yet.

[Solomon]

20. Wow! Thanks for the link!!

[justsomegirl]

21. sure!

I love that cd shop; they're a little slow in shipping, but they have great/interesting music that's hard to find.