07.09.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 3:36 pm
by nemo
One of the most devious, essentially fascist, strains in Gurdjieff can be seen in his spurious tale of Lentrohamsanin. The account in Beelzebub’s tales is completely opaque, but at several points he gives his game away when he tries to make a villain out of a proponent of Equal Rights!
Anyone thinking of the ‘fourth way’ as a path should note this point. You are essentially declared unequal in this game, and therefore the question of your receiving anything of the teaching beyond rote obedience to the outer form of its doctrine is taken away at the beginning.
In general, Beelzebub’s Tales is the most grossly overrated piece of deceptive junk in the New Age movement, generating its poisonous doctrines behind a veil of obscurity.
It is all the same ‘New Age’ propaganda against modernity and its democratic innovations, an issue that sticks in the craw of guru after guru, among them, beside Gurdjieff, Rajneesh, who also concealed his fascist tendencies behind a lot of fine words.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 9:45 am
by nemo
sillykitty:
as far as non-answers go, that was an exquisite one, or several. a lot to think about. thank you.
From Is there a path?, 2008/09/06 at 4:41 PM
The question of a spiritual path could go on and on, amounting to not much. But, why not, let’s ‘go and on’ a bit on the subject, worthy of a blog.
I should add at least that I am not a spiritual teacher, so the question is, evidently, to the wrong person, and secondly I don’t have a spiritual path, so how would I know?
The question is frustrating because I have covered a lot of ground here, A LOT, and yet at the end, what is the result? Nothing. Look at it, the number of gurus and the rest of it in the last generation. If, after all of that, one comes away without a path, then as a veteran one should caution against facile notions of spiritual paths.
Especially in the fourth way stream I would say, by and large you don’t have a path, armed with Ouspensky and various tidbits of gossip, mostly disinformation.
I said I have covered a lot of ground here, I meant it. I have penetrated the core of the ’sufi path’, found that Big Secret, and the result: I want no part of it. I tried to give this info away free, once, at Darwiniana, to no avail. Noone will listen! Not that they should, it won’t help them.
Actually, that’s confusing! The ‘real’ path, it struck me, isn’t really a path, but a kind of Faustian bargain with hidden unknowns mediated by public fronts. The result could be robotization on a higher level, serving the interests of other hidden people. No pacts with the devil, please.
So, in that sense, forget the ‘real’ sufi path.
My experience was different: I penetrated the sufi veil, but managed to escape from being a sufi (I hope), a statement that might leave some puzzled.
And I must protest that thousands of people via Sufis and Gurdjieff are systematically given come on’s with false or too general information and waste all their time. So don’t trust the Gurdjeff legacy. Erase it from your candidates to find a ‘path’. Study it historically, undoubtedly, but move on.
That’s a lot to erase!!! If it’s that bad, talking about spiritual paths is probably hopeless.
It’s like asking if there are any honest men as you enter a jail.
And talking about a path someone else invented for you will not solve the issue. Further, look at people like E.J. Gold, if they find you on a ‘path’ they will try to destroy it. And you.
They have their ‘monopolies’ to maintain, and have to fight against upstarts. Devils at work.
So, I guess, it’s a liability to talk about it in public.
Is it hopeless? One way out was provided classically in the Buddhist emergent stream in the Axial Age. I put it that way because that was a long time ago, and the result in modern times, or even in, say, Tibetan Buddhism, is very different from that source.
But the point is that, if you study the eonic effect, you see a suggestion of what happens when the legacy of Indic religion intersected with the greater stream of Nature in the evolution of human civilization.
Many of the problems simply disappeared, because the result was done by honest men, was ‘open’, directly shown, practical, and actually built around one honest standard: the ‘path of Enlightenment’, which was put in writing. That’s clear, and even clearer than what we find in the rest of the Indic stream, which proliferates in the chaos of gurus and disciples, and the complexities of Hinduism, Brahmanism, and the rest of it.
Let me note that dabbling in Buddhism in modern times is not the same, although, I don’t reject it out of hand. But let me note that that required formal world renunciation, and much else, something the modern world isn’t going to allow, if you try it in public. Perhaps with good reason, the world has moved on… A lot to say there. But once you start adding this and that to the whole game, you end up with a mess of pottage, between Tantra and the later path of the Boddhissatwas, which does not lead to enlightenment. It can be another trap. And keep in mind that Tibetan Buddhism was a political structure, with the ‘truth standard’ sacrificed on the altar of the unknown designs of later Buddhists, so all of that is probably also part of the problem we have detected with Sufism. Who knows? I never figured out the arcana of Tibetan spiritual politics.
The ‘path of enlightenment’ is not the grand total here, it is a severe restriction on your future! The term ‘enlightenment’ should not be used. How about ‘historical termination’? Cessation from the round of rebirths, if there is such a thing. Anyway, it points to the possibility of streamlining your thinking and dispensing with all the baggage of disinformation that these other ‘paths’ have used to deceive you.
It was my indication nonetheless, that next to this ‘path beyond time’ there should be a ‘path through time’, but the question is precisely what has bedeviled all the ‘paths’ we see in our discussion of Gurdjieff.
It should be the ‘path of will’, but that’s a term so hopeless vitiated by impostors, that careful thought is required to know what one means. Perhaps more on that sometime later.
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05.09.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 8:29 pm
by nemo
sillykitty:
do you believe that an authentic spiritual path exists?
From ‘You cannot get esoteric truth from esoteric lies’, 2008/09/05 at 7:32 PM
Good question, one that lurks in the background here. But we should approach it slowly, almost indirectly. I won’t answer it this time, except to say…
We are speaking to several audiences here, and as we peruse the rickross.com documents, and those from various sources, we realize that we are talking different languages.
In some the issue is cults and deprogramming, in others something else, then again something else in a third case. Finally we confront the issue of religion and secularism, often cast in a not always profitable debate.
Most of all we impinge on the questions of occultism, and there we find a parting of ways between the views.
Update: I should add that we chose to do that on this blog, not directly, but because we had no choice. We didn’t set out to explicate spiritual paths. The question of occultism has wrecked more so-called spiritual paths than anything else in existence, so we should remain wary of verbiage on the subject.
We can call Gurdjieff a fraud, but we can’t call him a fraud, as an occultist. We are protesting, not just some falseness in a fourth way cult, but the exploitations of occultists.
And that tends to isolate us from the secularist discourse. I can easily navigate those extremes, for I am certainly a secularist, but what is a secularist?
In any case, all are welcome here, and we look at the issues from several perspectives.
But you and I share a sense, in dealing with a figure such as E.J.Gold, that there is more to cult exposes than the airing of scandals. We can see that some are able to outsmart all the critics, and never get caught, or so it seems. You know, Idries Shah was a critic of cults, these people are too clever to get caught in run of the mill cult games.
But to answer your question, there are many answers.
In plain terms, of course there is an authentic spiritual path… (I dislike the terminology, spiritual path)
History shows the legacy of Buddhism (I am not a Buddhist) in its canonical form generated from the Axial Age.
We cannot just dismiss that in the name of cult exposes.
More generally the problem is simply the chaotification of the means for man to come to the realization of his potential, and that chaotification has made the obvious obscure.
The ‘path’ of last resort is that human potential, man’s self-consciousness. It should be a plain matter, but it has become surrounded with an extravaganza of sophistries and exploitations.
The irony is that the ‘fourth way’, an idea stolen by Gurdjieff, expresses this ‘embedded path’ as no more than the living of ordinary life, in ordinary life, lived with consciousness. Gurdjieff got the question upside down. The way of modernity, in principle, by demanding human freedom and autonomy, generates the real ‘fourth way’.
More generally your question is ambiguous, and frustrating, because how we answer will alienate one audience as against another.
So the answer to your question is to point to the species character of man, his distinctive potential for self-consciousness.
But your question betrays an ambiguity. We can’t answer to a Buddhist and satisfy a Christian, and vice versa. So the question fails, and waits upon its possible clarification.
I dealt with this in the first post on this blog (and before that at Darwiniana): there are only two ways, the movement in time, and the movement beyond or out of time. Sometimes we find the first by pursuing the second, but, as with the fourth way, we rarely find the first by itself, because the ‘path’ and the ‘passage of time’ are not distinct, hence there is, is not, a ‘path’ that is other than the passage of time, which may lead somewhere, or nowhere.
The path through time requires ‘will’, and we must find that, or be objects in time, a not very promising possibility.
As to paths, the Buddhists answered, of course, with a non-answer: meditation, which was simply a form of waiting on a new question, through the attempt to rescue the key to the whole issue, the power of attention.
We have cited Christopher Calder, with his essays on Rajneesh. He also had a page about meditation, to be taken with some circumspection, and yet he survived Rajneesh with a discipline of meditation, somehow. Good for him. It’s incredible, but Rajneesh nearly destroyed meditation, for his students, and the rest.
But meditation, what is that? Let’s say it is just sitting for a period of time. Note the cleverness of it: it is the path in time, perhaps the path beyond time will appear, else…
So note the point. Meditation isn’t the answer, it is just the path in time…
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 6:23 pm
by nemo
Here’s the search link for Gurdjieff at rickross.com, for future reference.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 5:38 pm
by nemo
Another Gurdjieff page from rickross.com, and here’s a nice quote:
Agehananda Bharati put it nicely when he said, you cannot get esoteric truth from esoteric lies.
I am often struck by the way people simply accept the ‘esoteric’ proposition thus: certain people claim authority in the name of unspecified ‘esotericism’, and proceed to tell lies about it. And this is the spiritual path.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 3:50 pm
by nemo
From the Rickross forum
On Traditionalism. Note the links to this blog. (We are ‘eccentric’, could be worse)
Sufis have had severe travails. As if distortions from Gurdjieff and Shah were not enough, yet another ideology, traditionalism, has used Sufism as a means to an end. Native American spirituality, throughout the Americas, found itself misrepresented and commercially distorted by opportunists such as Carlos Castaneda.
A similar set of misfortunes befell Sufism. Genuine Sufis are modest much as Quakers are and dont usually speak up to defend themselves. This has left them dreadfully vulnerable to misrepresentation and exploitation by ambitious characters.
One source of confusion, in addition to Gurdjieff (who will be discussed below) has been yet another ideology that has mixed matters up in Sufism, a European ideology termed ‘Traditionalism.’
Traditionalism, in its current form, was refined by Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Julius Evola. It was Guenon who came to the conclusion that Islam and Sufism met Traditionalist criteria. It should be noted that other Traditionalists have reached different conclusions. But..many have become converts, on thier own Traditionalist terms, to Islam via Guenon.
Traditionalism holds the view that the modern world is in decline, that what we see is progress is actually regression and the only hope is to find an authentic, uncorrupted religious tradition that will give us an authentic intiation. But there are many, many ‘counter-intiatic’ counterfeits so one must beware. Guenon came to belief that Sufism and Islam represented a valid initation—but he interpreted Islam through the framework of his own personal biases, seeing it as a means to fulfill the Traditionalist agenda. Guenon died in 1951 but his ideas remain influential to this day.
One bookseller at a European mosque told Mark Sedwick that the two factors that were most important in causing a European to convert to Islam were, in this order, marrying a Muslim….and having read Guenon.
Mark Sedwick writes:
“Many seem to become Sufis and even convert to Islam, not because of primary commitment to Islam, but in order to derive an ‘initiation’ that meets Traditionalist criteria for authenticity—using Islam and Sufism as a means to an end.
.” Being Muslim and Guénonian potentially gives rise to the same difficulties as does being Muslim and, say, Marxist: to what extent can a Muslim legitimately defer to an authority which derives its bases from outside Islam? Being Muslim because one is Guénonian is even more difficult: who comes first, the Prophet Muhammad or Guénon? That Pallavicini, for example, parted with Schuon because Schuon disagreed with Guénon - not with the Prophet or with Islam - would make most Muslims uncomfortable, as would Pallavicini’s habit of taking Guénon (rather than God or the Prophet) as his standard authority in his speeches and articles. This question of motivation may be the final irreducible difference between Guénonian Sufis and all others.”
[www1.aucegypt.edu]
( C comments here: Worse, in my opinion, many Sufi scholars, such as Lings and Nasr, have been covertly Traditioanlist, and don’t always make that clear in their writings, which meant that trustful readers imbibed unexamined and covert Traditionalist biases in the course of reading these books. The ones who were worst were those associated with Frijof Schuon. These adherants tended to recruit and cultivate well placed people. One such person who nearly fell into the net was none other than Thomas Merton, author of Seeds of Contemplation and the Seven Storey Mountain. Merton died before matters went any further. In 1980 Schuon, head of a “”Sufi”" order called the Maryamiyaa got into a scandal and left the US. He died in Switzerland in the 1990s. Two other Traditionalists whose writing have been highly influential have been Huston Smith–and
Mircea Eliade)
Professor Sedwick has written a survey of Traditionalism entitled Against the Modern World. It received reviews on Amazon that were either glowing or utterly derogatory–IMO, a sign that something is worth reading. What is interesting is that some seemed angry that anyone had dared write publicly about traditionalism and blown the cover on it…a sign that it was indeed high time to write publicly about Traditionalism and give it some long over due scrutiny–and assist others to scrutinize it. .C)
(It should be noted that this traditionalist Sufism is quite a different strand from the faux Sufism connected with the enneagram C)
Some discussions of Gurdjieff and sources for researching him. The website is rather eccentric but these articles may offer some leads.
[www.gurdjieff-con.net]
[www.gurdjieff-con.net]
[www.gurdjieff-con.net]
[www.gurdjieff-con.net]
(Includes some reflections on Burton and that he failed to find any trace of the enneagram
while he was pursuing Sufi studies—and manuscripts, in what is now Pakistan.)
[www.gurdjieff-con.net]
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 2:51 pm
by nemo
Answered my own question via google: Against the Modern World
Mark Sedgwick
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004
Against the Modern World is the first history of Traditionalism, an influential yet surprisingly little-known twentieth century anti-modernist movement. Involving a number of important, yet often secret, religious groups in the West and Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and religious studies in the United States.
Emerging from the ‘discovery’ in the West of non-Western religious writings, at a time in the nineteeth century when progressive intellectuals had lost faith in the ability of Christianity to deliver religious and spiritual truth, it was fuelled by the widespread religious scepticism that followed World War I. It found its voice in Rene Guenon, a French writer who rejected modernity as a dark age, and sought to reconstruct the Perennial Philosophy - the fundamental truth uniting all the world’s religions.
Mark Sedgwick reveals how this pervasive intellectual movement helped shape major events in twentieth century religious life, politics and scholarship - all the while remaining invisible to outsiders.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 2:43 pm
by nemo
Question from SK:
sillykitty said,
nemo,
what do you make of the ‘traditionalist’ school? rene guenon, frithjof schuon, rama coomaswamy, huston smith, charles upton. i tripped upon this by accident because
a rick ross forum thread (the one on gurdjieff you linked to here) was criticizing them…i googled and was intrigued–bought a book by charles upton, called the system of antichrist, on amazon. i’m reading it with great interest. i think you might hate it. the movement as a whole is overtly religious and calls for a return to the traditional religions as an antidote against our modern and post-modern excesses. including ‘new-age spiritualities.’ what, if anything, do you make of this bunch?
Good question. I read the book and reviewed it at Amazon when it came out, but the review was removed, for some reason. (I was very critical of the traditionalists).
It’s been awhile, and the details of the book are hazy (not the book you cite, what’s the title?).
We need to pursue this, and it ties into my discussion at /gmancon.
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04.09.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 2:31 pm
by nemo
Rickross.com has their own blog: here’s a piece on TM and the Maharishi: here
and the next story links to another blog on cults: Splinter in the mind
Blowing the Whistle, Chpt. 1: The Hidden Agenda of Mantra Meditation
This is the first chapter in an evolving book, “Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment: Confessions of a New Age Heretic,” by Bronte Baxter
What I expected to see when I came back to the Fairfield scene after 20 years away from Transcendental Meditation was a group of mainstay meditators true-blue to Maharishi and a group of robust dissenters, whose minds questioned everything they learned from their guru days. Instead, I found the true-blue meditators, but not the kind of dissenters I anticipated. I encountered people who had left the TM movement but hadn’t substantially changed their belief system. This latter group had changed in the way that people change hats, or redecorate their homes, leaving unaltered the structure underneath.
The dissenters had splintered into a myriad of Eastern or Eastern-related philosophies: Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie and Andrew Cohen were popular, and Neo-Advaitin gurus had rallied many behind their minimalist philosophy. “Saints” like Ammachi visit Fairfield regularly, dispensing dharshan and picking up new recruits. Across town, small groups meet in “satsangs” to discuss their growing enlightenment or to chant songs to the gods. Heated debate is common between adherents of competing gurus, and people grow vitriolic over whether Maharishi has slept with young women or not. There is a smattering of hedonists and atheists, but ex-TMers in the Fairfield circuit mostly show up with an intact Vedic worldview. That worldview is a lens through which they perceive and measure all gurus and reality itself.
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03.09.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 9:19 pm
by nemo
I have created a link category ‘working links’ for some of the links on the blog, which are getting lost in the sprawl. ‘Working links’ are not really blogroll links of recommended sites, but simply some of the weblinks with relevant information posted in the general stream. I will go back through the blog and try and recover the ones already posted.
Also, SK now with a ’sub-blog’ on the blog, as ’sillykitty’, along with ‘mybrainisafleamarket’
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 8:58 pm
by nemo
good link from SK. I put ’sillykitty’ on the link list, so he can generate one of our ’sub-blogs’.
I need to get the material at Darwiniana on the suspected connection between Hubbard, science fiction writers in the early ‘Amazing Sci Fi’ days, E.J. Gold, and finally various ’sufis’ in disguise.
The sci fi idea, of course, is already present in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub, with its rocket ship. There is a connection vis Idries Shah and the writer Lessing. There was some sufi circuit in the sci fi world and its writers back when, and the family connection and emergence of Gold from that milieu is well known. Not all these figures have the sheer vulgarity of Hubbard, and are too clever to indulge in his style of shennanigans, and that makes their trail much harder to follow. You easily fall for their spiritual sufi front. Lest you do, remember that Gold’s sidekick is the ‘archdruid’, ‘archie’, the founder of the pornographic magazine, the San Francisco Ball.
I think pious sufi types should be advised of their silliness in thinking in terms of ’sufi saints’.
Gold, by the way, had a long preoccupation with Hubbard (styling himself his critic) and his emeters, and there was a ‘course’ sequence, and era, when the emeter was part of his imitations or play on scientology. But of course the game was different.
The emeter, by the way, is basically a galvanic skin response circuit, absolutely nothing mysterious, and a bargain basement version of a lie detector. There was a gold group that tried to produce their own version, in a piece of electronic junk for sale. Also, Idries Shah was an electronics whiz, supposedly. This was in the seventies.
SK, thanks
(maybe we should just put the whole Hubbard article on the blog here. I am a little leary of people’s copyright affirmations, if any)
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 8:22 pm
by nemo
From The guru puzzle and the gang war, 2008/09/03 at 7:56 PM
sillykitty:
what you didn’t know about scientology, by mark owen:
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Commentary/Scientology.htm
quote:
In a 1983 Penthouse interview, L. Ron Hubbard Jr. stated that he was born prematurely after his father botched an abortion attempt on his mother. He claims that his father used copious quantities of drugs and even witnessed him injecting cocaine. Hubbard Jr. has stated, “I believed in Satanism. There was no other religion in our house! What a lot of people don’t realize is that Scientology is black magic spread out over a long time period. It’s stretched out over a lifetime and you don’t see it. Black magic is the inner core of Scientology and it is probably the only part that really works. Also, you’ve got to understand that my father did not worship Satan. He thought he was Satan.” Ron Hubbard Jr. also claimed that his father practiced something called ‘soul-cracking.’ Hubbard Sr. would apparently beat his many mistresses and shoot them full of drugs in order to reach a state whereby, like a psychic hammer, he would break their souls and allow demonic powers to pour through them. Junior also declared that the Scientology Operating Thetan techniques do the same thing. Junior would go on to co-author the popular 1987 book L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman. In that year the Church listed $503 million in income.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 4:17 pm
by nemo
One of the puzzles of the last generation is the extraordinary number of scandals that have taken down one guru after another. There is something suspicious about it, and as we focus on discrediting these people we should also keep in mind the spiritual war going on in the background, and further the clear signs of a certain kind of malevolent action targeting the character flaws of sundry teachers, and then unleashing subtle attacks on that basis. The favorite is the likely presence of unconscious sexual issues, making even figures of ‘higher consciousness’ vulnerable, often not knowing what hit them. So be advised if you ever are tempted to be a guru yourself! Those black magicians will attack your unconscious forthwith.
No kidding, and I have met such people, even caught them in the act of indulging such tactics. One of the most suspicious characters here is E.J.Gold, and some figures unknown in public connected to him.
Remember, in the Crowley game you are either top dog, or nothing, which generates a morbid impulse to attack and destroy other spiritual figures. Watch out for this sordid figure name of E. J. Gold, he is very sneaky, and has never generated the kind of scandal that besets others. Perhaps because he knows the dark side of the game in practice.
Note, indeed, how none of his disciples, yet, has been able to produce an expose, so far.
This is then a first. Say your prayers, sillykitty.
It was Crowley, at a dumb moment, who challenged Gurdjieff to a magical duel! A stupid thought for him, but in a larger context not so far off what goes on. Crowley was a small fry, so…
Maybe they will kill each other off.
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02.09.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 7:27 pm
by nemo
Here is a companion piece to ‘New Ages’ (previous post), from the second edition to WHEE, “New Age Movements”.
I have nothing against the New Age, as such, but when the strain of anti-modernism kicks in it is important to grasp that the authority of gurus is bogus.
Note: the XE “xxxxxx” stuff in the essay is the indexing mark up from Word, which Wordpress can’t handle. Just jump over it.
The generation of the sixties and seventies in the West with its plethora of New Age movements rising from the multicultural compression of the emerging world culture, in a proliferation of spiritual groups whose radical therapeutic fringe mixed with an easternizing, semi-Theosophical character, proceeds by such a swift and grim law from the language of spiritual renewal to the commercialization of astrology, pseudo-yoga and channeling that one must wonder what happened. The question of world religion is crucial to our subject, but it is hard for standard historiography to get to the bottom of it, impossible in an age of Darwinism, and the history of India is especially interesting and difficult in this respect. Our discovery of the Shiva seal puts the whole question to the fore, and we have fulfilled our task, to a first approximation, by placing these issues in some relation to real historical evolution. Read the rest of this entry »
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