Post by johnbc on Sept 14, 2020 3:31:55 GMT
The devil also has his contemplatives, as God has his
In Islamic esoterism, it is said that one who presents himself to a certain ‘door’ without having reached it by a normal and legitimate way, see that door to close in front of him and is obliged to go back, not, however, as a simple profane, which is henceforth impossible, but as a sãher (sorcerer or magician operating in the field of subtle possibilities of a lower order). The last degree of ‘counter-initiatic’ hierarchy is occupied by the so-called ‘saints of Satan’ (awlTya esh-Shaytán), which are in a way the reverse of true saints (awlTya er-Rahmin), and who also express the expression complete as possible of spirituality the other way
.
- René Guénon
Rarely does anyone mention Gurdjieff without adding, raising its eyebrows, which is a figure “mysterious”, “controversial”, and the like.
For me he is nothing like that. Whoever has had the opportunity to access spiritual teachings revealed by traditions does not find any difficulty in identifying him as what he truly is. The atmosphere of mystery around his name is just fruit of ignorance, although it is not always about natural and innate ignorance, but artificial ignorance and purposefully fostered by those interested in maintaining the mystery.
The “doctrine”
Gurdjieff went through many esoteric schools, some authentic, others degenerate, without remaining in none of them long enough to reach any appreciable spiritual result (as Bayazfd al-Bistãmi says, who starts to open a well here, then another one there, does not find nothing, whereas the one who continually digs in the same direction ends up finding abundant water).
However, he wasn’t really in interested spiritual results (of which someone like him is — and he knows he is — a priori and irremediably excluded), and was limited to harvesting, from each, a certain number of techniques and keywords, referring to the most peripheral aspects and showy of the doctrine, to compose with them an dense, opaque and obsolete amalgam, which came to be known as the “Gurdjieff doctrine”. It is made up, on the outside, of some baits to attract the curious and disaffected, and on the inside, of a series of concentric layers of riddles progressively indelible, until total darkness comes. Such enigmas are constructed with elements — symbolic, doctrinal and rituals — extracted from authentic spiritual traditions, but offered in a purposely false order and with a succession of small but increasing deviations, mistakes and detours, so that the use of the techniques derived from them can never lead the beneficial results it should normally produce on a traditional spiritual path. The fascination exerted on the minds of western intellectuals for the challenge of deciphering the Gurdjieff puzzle is practically irresistible, but it wasn’t made to be deciphered, but to devour anyone that believe in the possibility of deciphering it.
The study of these “doctrines” and the practice of these “methods” leads to a state of growing doubt and increasing oppression; and as the darkness thickens in his mind, the student often falls under the illusion of being “deepening” in knowledge, when in truth he is sinking into ignorance and oblivion. Encouraged by the dominant belief in “cartesian” prejudice that
gives doubt the primacy over certainty, he assesses his advance in knowledge by the subjective criterion and individualistic of his own difficulty in understanding the questions, rather than being guided by the traditional criterion of the evidence and universality of responses; and taken also by a background of inferiority complex that the Gurdjieff instructors skillfully know how to explore, he falls in the trap of evaluating, paradoxically, the doctrine’s luminosity due to the density of the shadow it projects over his mind; what is it to say that the wisdom of the “master” is judged by confusion and imbecility that produces in the disciples; and there is even one certain masochistic pleasure in the tone of apathetic consternation with which they confess constantly to have been dribbled by the “master” and then frustrated in their attempt to understand what is going on: “But he’s a wizard!” they say. The illusion of being able to ever get out of this tangle and becoming a wizard in turn leads the student to remain indefinitely under the fascination of such “teachings”.
Without realize that the “master” is in turn a sucker in the hands of another more evil one, and so on to the summit of a curious “reverse spiritual hierarchy”; without giving up account of being misled by the contradictions and false leads purposely sown along the way, and also partially pressured by the ambition to discover something that no one ever knew (without noticing that it always drives him away of the universality of the quod omnibus, quod semper, quod ubique credits est, and imprisons him hopelessly in subjective narrowness), he develops a sense of increasing and exaggerated complexity and difficulty of issues, until the most common truths and patents appear to be subject to a security deposit. In the beginning, this can even seem like a protection against boredom, a weapon against the oppression of “everyday life”, against the tyranny of beliefs established in the bourgeois world; but, far from freeing man, ends up leading him to an impassioned sense of helplessness and the impossibility of knowing anything, even his individual identity and the bonds of feeling that the he call the closest people. Although this strangeness in the face of almost everything is in the antipodes of universality that makes man understand all beings and things like letters or words in the “speech evident “ that God continually directs all creatures, and although this subjective isolation resembles schizophrenic depersonalization than any spiritual state known in traditional mystics, the man who arrives at such a state clings with a certain pride to his feeling, and starts to see them as incomprehensible and profane to all who do not feel like him, to all who continue to see things with a normal dose of evidence and clarity. There comes a time when he feels like dogmatism tyrannical and intolerable the belief that his eyes see, the water wet and the chickens lay eggs. And when this rebellion against the obvious goes so far as to become an radical incompatibility against the fact that two plus two being four, then he is prepared to abandon the stage of disciple and in turn become a Gurdjieff instructor.
Explanation of the effect
This effect is the product of the purposeful rupture of harmony between the rhythms of the different cognitive faculties, harmony that traditional practices, particularly sufism, are strive to maintain and strengthen. Sufism describes seven basic intellectual faculties, each corresponding symbolically to a planet in the solar system, therefore to a particular cycle or cosmic rhythm. And just like planetariums cycles are of different duration (28 years for Saturn, 12 for Jupiter, 28 days for the Moon, etc), also the different cognitive faculties work according to different “speeds”, which nevertheless form together the harmonious pattern of the ensemble. This harmony, in the macrocosm, is possible because among the various cycles there are certain structural analogies, due to the fact that, roughly, they are divided into an equal number of phases. We can illustrate this analogy by saying that the moon travels in 28 days the same directions of space that Saturn travels in 28 years, that is, that at different times they pass through the same signs of the Zodiac, so that they represent the “measure” of differences between the two cycles, and therefore also the parameter of their similarities or their “junction point”.
Such analogies also exist between the various cognitive faculties in the human psyche. In traditional symbolism, the Sun corresponds to the main faculty, which is pure intelligence (while Mercury, for example, corresponds to discursive thinking, Venus to imagination and memory, etc). And, like the directions of space, from the point of view of the Earth, are not demarcated by anything else if not by the apparent movement of the Sun, so also, according to sufism, pure and supraformal intelligence establishes and demarcates the formal patterns, the logical and symbolic molds within of which the other faculties will operate.
In this way, the continuous concentration of attention into a single, transcendent and supraformal object in itself (God), accompanied by ritual and moral practices aimed at eliminating dispersion and other psychic obstacles, raises all faculties towards pure intelligence, making that all modalities of formal representation compete obediently to reflect the supraformal; in this way imagination, memory, reasoning, etc, instead of rise as obstacles before the truth, they transform on translucent surfaces through which the pure supraformal truth apprehended by intelligence passes like a light through a crystal; and so all the powers of the soul compete harmoniously for God’s intellectual vision, just as in the macrocosm the harmony of the solar system comes the laminae of planetary orbits with the solar axis.
If, however, instead of concentrating intelligence into a single and transcendent object and to discipline the faculties to obey intelligence, to bombard any of the faculties with an excess of stimuli and requests, the result will be that the internal rhythms disconnect from each other, and faculties will no longer be able to collaborate with each other. The victim of this process has difficulty, for example, of symbolizing with the imagination what he understood with discursive thinking, or of formulate rationally what he have grasped by imagination, or even to condense in decisions, in acts of will, that he understood or imagined.
Small arrhythmias between the various faculties are a normal event in daily life, and can be overcome either by voluntary effort, either by supplementary aid given to any of the faculties (for example, a visual symbol can help the imagination and integrate abstract knowledge; the ingestion of a homeopathic remedy can help imagination to find the symbols it needs, a rhythmic movement can help to condense thinking in an act of will, etc). The acquisition of any new knowledge also requires a momentary lag, which is then offset by greater harmonization at a higher level of integration. The ability to learning can be greatly expanded by increasing the tolerance to lag states. This depends on the doctrinal knowledge, as well as faith and hope, which sustain the effort in times of obscurity and fleeting confusion. The greatest and most prolonged effort is then rewarded by deeper knowledge or safer. Crede ut intelligas; intellige ut credas: “believe, to understand; understand, to believe”.
But — and here comes gurdjieffianism — it is possible to completely pervert this process, creating, on one hand, a state of chronic and increasing lag, and, on the other hand, stimulating the victim by attracting a pseudo compensation that substitutes for knowledge and induces it to always look for a new lag, a new dissonance, a new challenge, without ever winning the previous one.
The lag can be produced, as we have seen, by exaggerated stimulation of the lower faculties (ie, of those that, by themselves, have low integration capacity, as sensations and feelings), or even by the deliberately incoherent stimulation of two or more faculties.
We are not going to describe the lag processes here artificial generated by the Gurdjieff school, because they are quite known — of course, under the label of exercises for the integration of the higher faculties of the man. Recent studies have proven that many aberrant sects — pure popular extension of gurdjieffism — employ deliberately the game of information and counter-information to create states of confusion and dependence in their disciples. Gurdjieff was, in our century, the father of all these techniques. By calling himself “the herald of the coming good”, he showed that he was aware of the brief invasion of the world by the plague of the Moon, Rajneesh, etc.
Just to give you an example of how it works, you can imagine how much lag it is possible to generate when orders someone to trace a geometric figure with their feet based on succession 2x1 = 6, 2x2 = 12, 2x3 = 22, while reciting the sequence 2 x 2 = 1, 4 x 4 = 13, 5 x 5 = 28 aloud; or when someone is told to knock down a thick pine tree with a spoonful of coffee while decorating a poem and reciting endlessly a mantra. They are really Gurdjieff exercises, and the appeal they arouse in many people reside only in the expectation that it would only be accomplished if such exercises had not been specially designed to never reach a happy outcome and if they were not continually replaced with a new and more intriguing “challenges”.
The ability of the instructor Gurdjieff resides in exchanging these exercises (which can be given even in the form of situations without anyone telling you that it is about exercises), exactly when the victim is about to give up and to confess his defeat. This creates a permanent state of longing without satisfaction: the expansion of hunger ends up constitute an ersatz of food. Gurdjieff himself said that it was necessary to keep the disciples “on the verge of nervous collapse“. Once Gurdjieff, playing irritated, asked his disciples, “Do you think I’m here to teach you how to masturbate?“ None of those present was wise enough to realize that the only true answer was: “Yes”. The masturbatory excess of challenges to no avail leads to a state that the greeks called hybris, which means the sterility to which it is taken who, by exaggeration, exhausted his chances of birth harmonic and normal. At each step, the student is invited to advance another one on the sterility scale. The passing to an increasing degree of complexity and difficulty is then explained as a rise in the esoteric hierarchy, and the satisfaction thus given to the disciple’s pride works as compensation for the defeat suffered by intelligence and by will. The hardening of intelligence and the proud ego inflation are the criteria of “spiritual ascension” in this singular “mystical school”.
It is understood then the feeling of “deepening” that the disciples experience, and also the fact that they claim holders of huge “secrets” at the same time in which they are showing more and more evident samples of intellectual degeneration, that even arrive, in extremes cases, at the level of stupidity. In a curious inversion of traditional processes, where the unveiling of mysteries leads to a state of evidence, fullness of intelligence, transparency of the real, what happens with the victims Gurdjieff is that it develops in them, for the growing opacity, a sense of love of secrecy as such. And that, instead of having unraveled some secret, by contrary: which was evident in the eyes of all became secret to them. As a symbol of spiritual vision, the eagle is for the mystics as well as the ostrich is for gurdjieffians.
The process is accompanied by a sense — equally “secret” — of impotence and revolt (especially of revolt against normal intelligence capable of expressing itself in transparent forms), and it is from this dark, resentful and gloomy feeling, which gives the impression of emotional intensity that these people transmit, and that often scares the spectators, who in turn fall into the tragic mistake to take it as a sign of “intense inner life” and of believe that anyone who can frighten them must also have something to teach them. And so it is perpetuated the lure, until the ideal of perfect stupidity is reached crowned by the maximum degree of pride, pretension and arrogance.
Symbol inversion
This inverted alchemy does not surprise us, by the way, because it’s not just that he takes things at inside out. It does the same with a large number of traditional symbols. For example, in written works that comprised the Gurdjieffian’s “doctrine”, Hussein — name of the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad, founder of Islam and, a fortiori, from sufism) — becomes the name of the grandson of Beelzebub; Judas is presented as “the greatest saint in Christianity“; and the human being becomes ”a body that is born without a soul“ (only being able to acquire one through Gurdjieff’s exercises and by means of — of course — a certain amount of money), whereas in traditional doctrines the soul logically and ontologically precedes the body, that it is nothing more than its provisional crystallization; and so on.
Taking things inside out is the job of excellence of the “Adversary” (ad versus = “by the verse”), or, in Arabic, Shaitan, which usually translates as Satan — which does not mean that Gurdjieff is Satan, and yes just a Satanist. Proof that he is not the devil in person is that his coldness of greatness took him only labeling himself Beelzebub, whereas Beelzebub proclaims himself as a second God.
If he takes forgetting as knowledge, it is to be expected that he also takes weakness as a strength, and his famous handblezoin — subtle current of “energy” with which he fascinated and deeply disturbed his disciples — it is really nothing but the effect, physically sensitive, on the skin, of a certain type of cellular degeneration caused by the continuous breakdown of organic harmony. This degeneration affects all the organs of the body — in Gurdjieff’s autopsy, not a single organ was found that was not rotten, in a curious inversion of the incorruptibility of the bodies of saints — and its effect is so devastating that the presence of the sick person causes tremors, chills and feeling of weakness in the people present, without them understanding what is happening. If such people, instead of attending the meeting predisposed to facing a “master”, were warned that it was just someone exceptionally sick, these sensations would not be fancifusly explained as samples of “spiritual power”; as a matter of fact, if there is any power in it, it is the same gender as the lepers and tuberculosis also have.
This state is not only a disease, but the result of certain operations aimed precisely at create a capacity to generate malaise, a capacity that forms the basis for countless prestidigitations later. The “technique”, known here and thousands of often denounced by all traditions, consists of summarily in committing methodical and increasing transgressions to all moral, natural and divine laws (including those laws of logic and grammar), until the individual becomes a kind of focus and compendium of imbalances and deficiencies, able to drag in the maelstrom those who approach, without warning, the edge of the well. And of course the character of such operations only remains standing, after from a certain point, thanks to those around him, who are going serving as a counterweight to his imbalances (as opposed to of the great mystics, who by definition appreciate life lonely, Gurdjieff was never alone for more than minutes), until they themselves need of counterweights in turn, which explains the voracity with which Gurdjieff organizations entice and consume disciples, generating with astonishing speed multitudes of unbalanced people, to the point that in certain cases raises serious threats to the social order (as in the case of Rajneesh). Hence the obsessive fear that gurdjieffians always has that others “steal their energy”. The ‘’techniques‘’ provided to prevent this alleged theft put them then in an attitude of permanent suspicion and lurking, and the mental trickery they devise to get rid of their supposed enemies gives them the vaguely wolfish air — between frightened and fierce — of those who cannot sleep in peace. And this permanent and neurotic startle, taken, for the sake of naivety, as self-control and spiritual vigil, is in turn a generator of new and endless imbalances.
The process works more or less like the “perpetual motorcycle” described in chapter II of the Beelzebub’s Reports: based on the principle that “everything falls” (that he determined “fall’s law”), it is enough, in each cosmic level, to “remove the resistors from below” so that everything falls indefinitely to a qualitatively inferior plane. Whether it is a moral resistance or a weak point in the structure of logical thinking of a individual, gurdjieffianism operates on the “lowest line resistance“, which can make the hard the easy, the obscure the evident, heavy the light, and do in a short time a normal man a sick, an intellectual an idiot and a decent man a thief. And “an complete inversion in the spiritual climb. As Whitall N. Perry says, “evil does not have a reality of its own, but it sticks together as a shadow on the dark side of the manifestation, with ‘gravity’ or suction of its own emptiness“.
Who is Gurdjieff
From what we’ve said so far, it’s already possible to understand that Gurdjieff — far from what the ones who would like to imagine and prefer to explain everything for simple and materialistic reasons, and that, in fact, in its apparent unbelief, are the most credulous victims of gurdjieffianism — it is not a simple “charlatan” in the current and human sense of the term. On the other hand, obviously not being spiritual master, he can only fall into the category of that what some traditions call “evil ascetics”; are figures that throughout history, in normal times, remain relatively obscure and unknown, but comes to the full light of the public scenario in times of extreme spiritual decay as in the end of the Egyptian Empire, the last days of Rome or our tormented end of the Christian Era.
With all its abnormality, rudeness, malice and stupidity, they do however have their role in the whole of the cosmic economy. Its role, within the doctrine of cosmic cycles, is to promote and accelerate the end. Withdrawal of traditional resistances (legal rituals) that during normal times of civilization kept them at a healthy distance from ordinary humanity, they advance through the portals, and are satisfied in a bloody feast with the souls of the unwary. Few are those who, in the face of this invasion, remember to seek shelter along with the old and infallible defenses of religion defenses that, while the rites and precepts, remain effective until the last day, and “the gates of hell will not prevail against them”. On the contrary: the majority, if they do not give themselves to slaughterhouse, seeks fragile havens in the shade of explanations of ideological and pseudo-scientific evasions of fashion, which they do nothing but make the attacker’s job even easier.
The “ascetics of evil” are equivalent, technically speaking, what in greek mythology — and also in buddhism — receives the name of titans: they are beings that, aberrant efforts and sufferings — turned, in the Gurdjieff’s own words, “against Nature, against God” — manage to become the pole of vast imbalances around, dragging many to the maelstrom of total and irremediable dissolution(for which, of course, there is no spiritual reward of any kind).
Such figures are not only not difficult at all to identify — except for those who don’t know everything about traditional doctrines or is already numb by some Gurdjieff-like practice — as well as the ability to identify and avoid them is kind of like an indispensable and preliminary requirement for those who wish to follow a spiritual path within the framework of traditional religions. Many saints and mystics from great religions, before finding their way, they were victims of transvestite titans in spiritual masters. Saint Augustine was deceived by the manicheans, and the greatest spiritual man of islam in our century, the algerian sheikh Ahmed El-’Alawy, even said that “there has never been a spiritual master whom God would not test, sending someone to deceive him, ostensibly or by the back”.
Unanswered Question
Finally, an interesting aspect of gurdjieffianism — and of which gurdjieffians themselves, unable to draw any conclusions from even the most obvious evidence, never realize — is the following:
In his book Beelzebub’s Reports, Gurdjieff says that the central rite of Christianity, the Eucharist, was a “anthropophagic magic” rite in which Jesus would have given pieces of His body to eat and shots of His blood to drink. This “information” is followed by severe criticism of the Catholic Church for having “forgotten the original sense of the rite“.
It is clear that Gurdjieff’s interpretation contradicts the letter of the Gospels (which say that Christ broke bread and poured wine, and called bread “meat” and wine “blood”); it is also clear that it hurts the most elementary aesthetic sense and lowers the traditional symbol to a profanatory and grotesque literalism; and it is also clear that it is incompatible with not only Christian’s symbolism, but universal, according to which bread represents exoteric doctrine and wine spiritual knowledge.
But the most interesting thing is that Gurdjieff complements criticism offering an alternative to “Christianity decadent“: he claims that his own school is nothing but “Esoteric Christianity”, that is, the original Christianity in its purest and unchanged form.
Given these data, we have the duty to ask: gurdjieffians and the like, being, as they call themselves, “primordial christians”, practice or not practice the essential rite of “early Christianity”, in the form in which do they describe it themselves?
If they don’t practice, then their so-called esoteric Christianity is only theoretical, with no more interest than any academic curiosity, of which they criticize so much.
If they practice, then they are anthropophagous.
In Islamic esoterism, it is said that one who presents himself to a certain ‘door’ without having reached it by a normal and legitimate way, see that door to close in front of him and is obliged to go back, not, however, as a simple profane, which is henceforth impossible, but as a sãher (sorcerer or magician operating in the field of subtle possibilities of a lower order). The last degree of ‘counter-initiatic’ hierarchy is occupied by the so-called ‘saints of Satan’ (awlTya esh-Shaytán), which are in a way the reverse of true saints (awlTya er-Rahmin), and who also express the expression complete as possible of spirituality the other way
.
- René Guénon
Rarely does anyone mention Gurdjieff without adding, raising its eyebrows, which is a figure “mysterious”, “controversial”, and the like.
For me he is nothing like that. Whoever has had the opportunity to access spiritual teachings revealed by traditions does not find any difficulty in identifying him as what he truly is. The atmosphere of mystery around his name is just fruit of ignorance, although it is not always about natural and innate ignorance, but artificial ignorance and purposefully fostered by those interested in maintaining the mystery.
The “doctrine”
Gurdjieff went through many esoteric schools, some authentic, others degenerate, without remaining in none of them long enough to reach any appreciable spiritual result (as Bayazfd al-Bistãmi says, who starts to open a well here, then another one there, does not find nothing, whereas the one who continually digs in the same direction ends up finding abundant water).
However, he wasn’t really in interested spiritual results (of which someone like him is — and he knows he is — a priori and irremediably excluded), and was limited to harvesting, from each, a certain number of techniques and keywords, referring to the most peripheral aspects and showy of the doctrine, to compose with them an dense, opaque and obsolete amalgam, which came to be known as the “Gurdjieff doctrine”. It is made up, on the outside, of some baits to attract the curious and disaffected, and on the inside, of a series of concentric layers of riddles progressively indelible, until total darkness comes. Such enigmas are constructed with elements — symbolic, doctrinal and rituals — extracted from authentic spiritual traditions, but offered in a purposely false order and with a succession of small but increasing deviations, mistakes and detours, so that the use of the techniques derived from them can never lead the beneficial results it should normally produce on a traditional spiritual path. The fascination exerted on the minds of western intellectuals for the challenge of deciphering the Gurdjieff puzzle is practically irresistible, but it wasn’t made to be deciphered, but to devour anyone that believe in the possibility of deciphering it.
The study of these “doctrines” and the practice of these “methods” leads to a state of growing doubt and increasing oppression; and as the darkness thickens in his mind, the student often falls under the illusion of being “deepening” in knowledge, when in truth he is sinking into ignorance and oblivion. Encouraged by the dominant belief in “cartesian” prejudice that
gives doubt the primacy over certainty, he assesses his advance in knowledge by the subjective criterion and individualistic of his own difficulty in understanding the questions, rather than being guided by the traditional criterion of the evidence and universality of responses; and taken also by a background of inferiority complex that the Gurdjieff instructors skillfully know how to explore, he falls in the trap of evaluating, paradoxically, the doctrine’s luminosity due to the density of the shadow it projects over his mind; what is it to say that the wisdom of the “master” is judged by confusion and imbecility that produces in the disciples; and there is even one certain masochistic pleasure in the tone of apathetic consternation with which they confess constantly to have been dribbled by the “master” and then frustrated in their attempt to understand what is going on: “But he’s a wizard!” they say. The illusion of being able to ever get out of this tangle and becoming a wizard in turn leads the student to remain indefinitely under the fascination of such “teachings”.
Without realize that the “master” is in turn a sucker in the hands of another more evil one, and so on to the summit of a curious “reverse spiritual hierarchy”; without giving up account of being misled by the contradictions and false leads purposely sown along the way, and also partially pressured by the ambition to discover something that no one ever knew (without noticing that it always drives him away of the universality of the quod omnibus, quod semper, quod ubique credits est, and imprisons him hopelessly in subjective narrowness), he develops a sense of increasing and exaggerated complexity and difficulty of issues, until the most common truths and patents appear to be subject to a security deposit. In the beginning, this can even seem like a protection against boredom, a weapon against the oppression of “everyday life”, against the tyranny of beliefs established in the bourgeois world; but, far from freeing man, ends up leading him to an impassioned sense of helplessness and the impossibility of knowing anything, even his individual identity and the bonds of feeling that the he call the closest people. Although this strangeness in the face of almost everything is in the antipodes of universality that makes man understand all beings and things like letters or words in the “speech evident “ that God continually directs all creatures, and although this subjective isolation resembles schizophrenic depersonalization than any spiritual state known in traditional mystics, the man who arrives at such a state clings with a certain pride to his feeling, and starts to see them as incomprehensible and profane to all who do not feel like him, to all who continue to see things with a normal dose of evidence and clarity. There comes a time when he feels like dogmatism tyrannical and intolerable the belief that his eyes see, the water wet and the chickens lay eggs. And when this rebellion against the obvious goes so far as to become an radical incompatibility against the fact that two plus two being four, then he is prepared to abandon the stage of disciple and in turn become a Gurdjieff instructor.
Explanation of the effect
This effect is the product of the purposeful rupture of harmony between the rhythms of the different cognitive faculties, harmony that traditional practices, particularly sufism, are strive to maintain and strengthen. Sufism describes seven basic intellectual faculties, each corresponding symbolically to a planet in the solar system, therefore to a particular cycle or cosmic rhythm. And just like planetariums cycles are of different duration (28 years for Saturn, 12 for Jupiter, 28 days for the Moon, etc), also the different cognitive faculties work according to different “speeds”, which nevertheless form together the harmonious pattern of the ensemble. This harmony, in the macrocosm, is possible because among the various cycles there are certain structural analogies, due to the fact that, roughly, they are divided into an equal number of phases. We can illustrate this analogy by saying that the moon travels in 28 days the same directions of space that Saturn travels in 28 years, that is, that at different times they pass through the same signs of the Zodiac, so that they represent the “measure” of differences between the two cycles, and therefore also the parameter of their similarities or their “junction point”.
Such analogies also exist between the various cognitive faculties in the human psyche. In traditional symbolism, the Sun corresponds to the main faculty, which is pure intelligence (while Mercury, for example, corresponds to discursive thinking, Venus to imagination and memory, etc). And, like the directions of space, from the point of view of the Earth, are not demarcated by anything else if not by the apparent movement of the Sun, so also, according to sufism, pure and supraformal intelligence establishes and demarcates the formal patterns, the logical and symbolic molds within of which the other faculties will operate.
In this way, the continuous concentration of attention into a single, transcendent and supraformal object in itself (God), accompanied by ritual and moral practices aimed at eliminating dispersion and other psychic obstacles, raises all faculties towards pure intelligence, making that all modalities of formal representation compete obediently to reflect the supraformal; in this way imagination, memory, reasoning, etc, instead of rise as obstacles before the truth, they transform on translucent surfaces through which the pure supraformal truth apprehended by intelligence passes like a light through a crystal; and so all the powers of the soul compete harmoniously for God’s intellectual vision, just as in the macrocosm the harmony of the solar system comes the laminae of planetary orbits with the solar axis.
If, however, instead of concentrating intelligence into a single and transcendent object and to discipline the faculties to obey intelligence, to bombard any of the faculties with an excess of stimuli and requests, the result will be that the internal rhythms disconnect from each other, and faculties will no longer be able to collaborate with each other. The victim of this process has difficulty, for example, of symbolizing with the imagination what he understood with discursive thinking, or of formulate rationally what he have grasped by imagination, or even to condense in decisions, in acts of will, that he understood or imagined.
Small arrhythmias between the various faculties are a normal event in daily life, and can be overcome either by voluntary effort, either by supplementary aid given to any of the faculties (for example, a visual symbol can help the imagination and integrate abstract knowledge; the ingestion of a homeopathic remedy can help imagination to find the symbols it needs, a rhythmic movement can help to condense thinking in an act of will, etc). The acquisition of any new knowledge also requires a momentary lag, which is then offset by greater harmonization at a higher level of integration. The ability to learning can be greatly expanded by increasing the tolerance to lag states. This depends on the doctrinal knowledge, as well as faith and hope, which sustain the effort in times of obscurity and fleeting confusion. The greatest and most prolonged effort is then rewarded by deeper knowledge or safer. Crede ut intelligas; intellige ut credas: “believe, to understand; understand, to believe”.
But — and here comes gurdjieffianism — it is possible to completely pervert this process, creating, on one hand, a state of chronic and increasing lag, and, on the other hand, stimulating the victim by attracting a pseudo compensation that substitutes for knowledge and induces it to always look for a new lag, a new dissonance, a new challenge, without ever winning the previous one.
The lag can be produced, as we have seen, by exaggerated stimulation of the lower faculties (ie, of those that, by themselves, have low integration capacity, as sensations and feelings), or even by the deliberately incoherent stimulation of two or more faculties.
We are not going to describe the lag processes here artificial generated by the Gurdjieff school, because they are quite known — of course, under the label of exercises for the integration of the higher faculties of the man. Recent studies have proven that many aberrant sects — pure popular extension of gurdjieffism — employ deliberately the game of information and counter-information to create states of confusion and dependence in their disciples. Gurdjieff was, in our century, the father of all these techniques. By calling himself “the herald of the coming good”, he showed that he was aware of the brief invasion of the world by the plague of the Moon, Rajneesh, etc.
Just to give you an example of how it works, you can imagine how much lag it is possible to generate when orders someone to trace a geometric figure with their feet based on succession 2x1 = 6, 2x2 = 12, 2x3 = 22, while reciting the sequence 2 x 2 = 1, 4 x 4 = 13, 5 x 5 = 28 aloud; or when someone is told to knock down a thick pine tree with a spoonful of coffee while decorating a poem and reciting endlessly a mantra. They are really Gurdjieff exercises, and the appeal they arouse in many people reside only in the expectation that it would only be accomplished if such exercises had not been specially designed to never reach a happy outcome and if they were not continually replaced with a new and more intriguing “challenges”.
The ability of the instructor Gurdjieff resides in exchanging these exercises (which can be given even in the form of situations without anyone telling you that it is about exercises), exactly when the victim is about to give up and to confess his defeat. This creates a permanent state of longing without satisfaction: the expansion of hunger ends up constitute an ersatz of food. Gurdjieff himself said that it was necessary to keep the disciples “on the verge of nervous collapse“. Once Gurdjieff, playing irritated, asked his disciples, “Do you think I’m here to teach you how to masturbate?“ None of those present was wise enough to realize that the only true answer was: “Yes”. The masturbatory excess of challenges to no avail leads to a state that the greeks called hybris, which means the sterility to which it is taken who, by exaggeration, exhausted his chances of birth harmonic and normal. At each step, the student is invited to advance another one on the sterility scale. The passing to an increasing degree of complexity and difficulty is then explained as a rise in the esoteric hierarchy, and the satisfaction thus given to the disciple’s pride works as compensation for the defeat suffered by intelligence and by will. The hardening of intelligence and the proud ego inflation are the criteria of “spiritual ascension” in this singular “mystical school”.
It is understood then the feeling of “deepening” that the disciples experience, and also the fact that they claim holders of huge “secrets” at the same time in which they are showing more and more evident samples of intellectual degeneration, that even arrive, in extremes cases, at the level of stupidity. In a curious inversion of traditional processes, where the unveiling of mysteries leads to a state of evidence, fullness of intelligence, transparency of the real, what happens with the victims Gurdjieff is that it develops in them, for the growing opacity, a sense of love of secrecy as such. And that, instead of having unraveled some secret, by contrary: which was evident in the eyes of all became secret to them. As a symbol of spiritual vision, the eagle is for the mystics as well as the ostrich is for gurdjieffians.
The process is accompanied by a sense — equally “secret” — of impotence and revolt (especially of revolt against normal intelligence capable of expressing itself in transparent forms), and it is from this dark, resentful and gloomy feeling, which gives the impression of emotional intensity that these people transmit, and that often scares the spectators, who in turn fall into the tragic mistake to take it as a sign of “intense inner life” and of believe that anyone who can frighten them must also have something to teach them. And so it is perpetuated the lure, until the ideal of perfect stupidity is reached crowned by the maximum degree of pride, pretension and arrogance.
Symbol inversion
This inverted alchemy does not surprise us, by the way, because it’s not just that he takes things at inside out. It does the same with a large number of traditional symbols. For example, in written works that comprised the Gurdjieffian’s “doctrine”, Hussein — name of the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad, founder of Islam and, a fortiori, from sufism) — becomes the name of the grandson of Beelzebub; Judas is presented as “the greatest saint in Christianity“; and the human being becomes ”a body that is born without a soul“ (only being able to acquire one through Gurdjieff’s exercises and by means of — of course — a certain amount of money), whereas in traditional doctrines the soul logically and ontologically precedes the body, that it is nothing more than its provisional crystallization; and so on.
Taking things inside out is the job of excellence of the “Adversary” (ad versus = “by the verse”), or, in Arabic, Shaitan, which usually translates as Satan — which does not mean that Gurdjieff is Satan, and yes just a Satanist. Proof that he is not the devil in person is that his coldness of greatness took him only labeling himself Beelzebub, whereas Beelzebub proclaims himself as a second God.
If he takes forgetting as knowledge, it is to be expected that he also takes weakness as a strength, and his famous handblezoin — subtle current of “energy” with which he fascinated and deeply disturbed his disciples — it is really nothing but the effect, physically sensitive, on the skin, of a certain type of cellular degeneration caused by the continuous breakdown of organic harmony. This degeneration affects all the organs of the body — in Gurdjieff’s autopsy, not a single organ was found that was not rotten, in a curious inversion of the incorruptibility of the bodies of saints — and its effect is so devastating that the presence of the sick person causes tremors, chills and feeling of weakness in the people present, without them understanding what is happening. If such people, instead of attending the meeting predisposed to facing a “master”, were warned that it was just someone exceptionally sick, these sensations would not be fancifusly explained as samples of “spiritual power”; as a matter of fact, if there is any power in it, it is the same gender as the lepers and tuberculosis also have.
This state is not only a disease, but the result of certain operations aimed precisely at create a capacity to generate malaise, a capacity that forms the basis for countless prestidigitations later. The “technique”, known here and thousands of often denounced by all traditions, consists of summarily in committing methodical and increasing transgressions to all moral, natural and divine laws (including those laws of logic and grammar), until the individual becomes a kind of focus and compendium of imbalances and deficiencies, able to drag in the maelstrom those who approach, without warning, the edge of the well. And of course the character of such operations only remains standing, after from a certain point, thanks to those around him, who are going serving as a counterweight to his imbalances (as opposed to of the great mystics, who by definition appreciate life lonely, Gurdjieff was never alone for more than minutes), until they themselves need of counterweights in turn, which explains the voracity with which Gurdjieff organizations entice and consume disciples, generating with astonishing speed multitudes of unbalanced people, to the point that in certain cases raises serious threats to the social order (as in the case of Rajneesh). Hence the obsessive fear that gurdjieffians always has that others “steal their energy”. The ‘’techniques‘’ provided to prevent this alleged theft put them then in an attitude of permanent suspicion and lurking, and the mental trickery they devise to get rid of their supposed enemies gives them the vaguely wolfish air — between frightened and fierce — of those who cannot sleep in peace. And this permanent and neurotic startle, taken, for the sake of naivety, as self-control and spiritual vigil, is in turn a generator of new and endless imbalances.
The process works more or less like the “perpetual motorcycle” described in chapter II of the Beelzebub’s Reports: based on the principle that “everything falls” (that he determined “fall’s law”), it is enough, in each cosmic level, to “remove the resistors from below” so that everything falls indefinitely to a qualitatively inferior plane. Whether it is a moral resistance or a weak point in the structure of logical thinking of a individual, gurdjieffianism operates on the “lowest line resistance“, which can make the hard the easy, the obscure the evident, heavy the light, and do in a short time a normal man a sick, an intellectual an idiot and a decent man a thief. And “an complete inversion in the spiritual climb. As Whitall N. Perry says, “evil does not have a reality of its own, but it sticks together as a shadow on the dark side of the manifestation, with ‘gravity’ or suction of its own emptiness“.
Who is Gurdjieff
From what we’ve said so far, it’s already possible to understand that Gurdjieff — far from what the ones who would like to imagine and prefer to explain everything for simple and materialistic reasons, and that, in fact, in its apparent unbelief, are the most credulous victims of gurdjieffianism — it is not a simple “charlatan” in the current and human sense of the term. On the other hand, obviously not being spiritual master, he can only fall into the category of that what some traditions call “evil ascetics”; are figures that throughout history, in normal times, remain relatively obscure and unknown, but comes to the full light of the public scenario in times of extreme spiritual decay as in the end of the Egyptian Empire, the last days of Rome or our tormented end of the Christian Era.
With all its abnormality, rudeness, malice and stupidity, they do however have their role in the whole of the cosmic economy. Its role, within the doctrine of cosmic cycles, is to promote and accelerate the end. Withdrawal of traditional resistances (legal rituals) that during normal times of civilization kept them at a healthy distance from ordinary humanity, they advance through the portals, and are satisfied in a bloody feast with the souls of the unwary. Few are those who, in the face of this invasion, remember to seek shelter along with the old and infallible defenses of religion defenses that, while the rites and precepts, remain effective until the last day, and “the gates of hell will not prevail against them”. On the contrary: the majority, if they do not give themselves to slaughterhouse, seeks fragile havens in the shade of explanations of ideological and pseudo-scientific evasions of fashion, which they do nothing but make the attacker’s job even easier.
The “ascetics of evil” are equivalent, technically speaking, what in greek mythology — and also in buddhism — receives the name of titans: they are beings that, aberrant efforts and sufferings — turned, in the Gurdjieff’s own words, “against Nature, against God” — manage to become the pole of vast imbalances around, dragging many to the maelstrom of total and irremediable dissolution(for which, of course, there is no spiritual reward of any kind).
Such figures are not only not difficult at all to identify — except for those who don’t know everything about traditional doctrines or is already numb by some Gurdjieff-like practice — as well as the ability to identify and avoid them is kind of like an indispensable and preliminary requirement for those who wish to follow a spiritual path within the framework of traditional religions. Many saints and mystics from great religions, before finding their way, they were victims of transvestite titans in spiritual masters. Saint Augustine was deceived by the manicheans, and the greatest spiritual man of islam in our century, the algerian sheikh Ahmed El-’Alawy, even said that “there has never been a spiritual master whom God would not test, sending someone to deceive him, ostensibly or by the back”.
Unanswered Question
Finally, an interesting aspect of gurdjieffianism — and of which gurdjieffians themselves, unable to draw any conclusions from even the most obvious evidence, never realize — is the following:
In his book Beelzebub’s Reports, Gurdjieff says that the central rite of Christianity, the Eucharist, was a “anthropophagic magic” rite in which Jesus would have given pieces of His body to eat and shots of His blood to drink. This “information” is followed by severe criticism of the Catholic Church for having “forgotten the original sense of the rite“.
It is clear that Gurdjieff’s interpretation contradicts the letter of the Gospels (which say that Christ broke bread and poured wine, and called bread “meat” and wine “blood”); it is also clear that it hurts the most elementary aesthetic sense and lowers the traditional symbol to a profanatory and grotesque literalism; and it is also clear that it is incompatible with not only Christian’s symbolism, but universal, according to which bread represents exoteric doctrine and wine spiritual knowledge.
But the most interesting thing is that Gurdjieff complements criticism offering an alternative to “Christianity decadent“: he claims that his own school is nothing but “Esoteric Christianity”, that is, the original Christianity in its purest and unchanged form.
Given these data, we have the duty to ask: gurdjieffians and the like, being, as they call themselves, “primordial christians”, practice or not practice the essential rite of “early Christianity”, in the form in which do they describe it themselves?
If they don’t practice, then their so-called esoteric Christianity is only theoretical, with no more interest than any academic curiosity, of which they criticize so much.
If they practice, then they are anthropophagous.