Spies too far gone to be spiritual teachers
The measure of the man, a spy
That Gurdjieff might have been presenting an ancient teaching is entirely possible, but a century later the question is as unclear as ever, the reason we suspect being that everything Gurdjieff said was at best half-truth, if not an outright deception.
Thus what he describes as ‘ancient teachings’ is mostly a pastiche of bits and pieces of we know not what finally.
That is the problem with ‘esotericism’: you refer to something you never describe and then demand submission from seekers (or suckers) to approach the future day when the nature of the teaching will be revealed to you.
As with Gurdjieff and so many others, the magic day never arrives because the esoteric teaching isn’t there.
In general Gurdjieff is so unclear and secretive that we can’t verify any of his claims, none in fact.
It looks as everything is set up to keep people attentive for as long as they are useful to those promoting the deception.
And a lot of dangerous imitators, like E.J. Gold, are coming down the pike. so we should be clear: ancient teachings may well exist, that we don’t know about, but Gurdjieff told us nothing about any of them.
And no, reading All and Everything twenty times won’t help.
I guess you can never trust a spy. His sense of ethics is so far gone that any teaching he might have found, as in an act intelligence gathering, is going to be the object of still more bait and switch operations.
Compare all this with a genuine set of ancient teachings, the Buddhist, with clear indications of what it is, where it came from, and what to do about it.
This openness is transparent, so why did Gurdjieff, and sufis generally, spend so much time lying, if the reason is not that their motives and intentions are dishonest or malevolent?
The Gurdjieff Con 