Gurus /2010/02/08/gurus/ What do you suggest…?

What do you suggest…? I suggest nothing.

(Update 2018; Do what homo sapiens has done since the dawn of homo sapiens, pay attention. Period.That’s the path
The issue of a spiritual path has been so clobbered everyone is knocked senseless.First stay away from gurus, and that includes jesus, moses, mohammed, psychiatrists, preachers, etc… Flip the bird to all gurus. Jesus Christ is NOT your savior. Flip the bird, and make him happy. Bye The larger society plus gurus is doing all it can to keep you mechanical. Your consciousness is a precious commodity: ripping it off and keeping you mechanical is their game.
Prayer has been burnt out, skip it. The amount of damage done by monotheism is staggering. Try to quietly escape. Now hatha is the new idiocy, drop it.
Since I am not a guru I will suggest only what a fellow caveman would suggest: ancient hominids acquired a new form of consciousness, self-consciousness (the name confuse the issue): The key is so ancient is doesn’t register anymore. Do what homo sapiens has done since the dawn of homo sapiens, pay attention, the doorstep to self-consciousness. Period. That’s the path. What’s a path? They don’t exist, in time.
Paul Brunton had a useful idea: the path in time is a causal illusion but try and pay attention in time as a good temporal path. Note this point: the path is impossible. Try anyway. Maybe something else will happen. But clearly trying to pay attention is a ‘waste of time’, strictly speaking, ironic phrase. Or maybe not: the timeless consciousness will come sooner or later. If you can pay attention for a second, you have refuted the above statement, you are already almost there. Paying attention never seems to succeed, but note this: if the causal path isn’t real, then what does it matter if you are distracted, just relax and keep trying to pay attention.

Pay attention: That’s the only path. Attention invokes the issue of concentration, and the latter is the gateway to more complex states. The yogic term ‘enlightenment’ is burnt out. Check out the version of the philosophes, the Enlightenment path of reason: you must must reason your way, in relation to attention to some higher state beyond mind or reason. Reason is a bit on the side of mind, so what: break from reason into attention. Mystics will protest the Enlightenment in the west is ‘evil’, reason blocks feeling. Nonsense. There is only one enlightenment, feeling and reason are connected. Reason is no more complex than carpentry or cooking, if feelings enter fine, they might help. But the term is verbiage. The ancient cave noticed that beside sleep, consciousness. self-consciousness there was a fourth something.
Calling it enlightenment (in english anyway) probably wrecked it. As Kant noted, the their is a noumenal field, hardly any different from raja yoga, cave man yoga…You have no control over the noumenal, so pay attention in time, a waste of time to be sure, …
Almost all the books on meditation are crap, but you can summarize them all with one book of raja yoga, to see that it says no more than the above, raja yoga is the most cliched yet classic part of the field, a version of the homo sapiens in deep time paleolithic yoga. (ivekananda stole the idea from cave men.) Don’t own a copy, slyly find a copy in a bookstore or library and read a bit and memorize what you need. Don’t look for a guru to explain it. Attention is your guru. You already understand it. Don’t tell anyone what you are doing. Everything in public field has been wrecked. Now mindfulness workshops are mechanizing the key for corporate profit. It will die out soon enough, it doesn’t increase corporate profits. Raja yoga brought the world hatha yoga and the result is a colossal mechanization of stupidity. Skip it. It is almost unblievable what has happened to yoga, now a diet fad. But a defensive strategy is, to pay attention… Note that paying attention can’t be mechanized, so you are safe…)

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Andrew’s ‘good question’ has no simple answer, but a dozen suggestions, based on the facts on the ground in the generation(s) of the New Age movement(s).

The suggestion of this blog is to be wary of gurus, and refuse allegiance to all of them. Period. You can still study what people have to say, without the dangerous and now obsolete ‘surrender’ games that too often destroy the potential of normal people turned into abnormal people under the influence of the endless perverts thrown up by this New Age dynamic.
Da free john, Lozowick, Andrw Cohen, Ken Wilbur, full stop, you don’t need these perverted creeps trying to gain power over your psyche.
Would you were lucky enough to have never met them or interacted with them, but if you have say NO immediately.

Da free john, at least, was honest, almost, if you could read him for his veiled confessions: he said, I am a vampire who needs ‘disciples’ to gain sustenance for my future existence in the death state.

Frightening. And you will find the ‘small change in your pocket’ one day gone without a trace around such people.
Surrender the surrender game and hightail it our of guru land. Piss on it. It has gone on too long, and has been perverted by Aryan caste/Brahminism for over two thousand years. The whole game is corrupt.
Consider Rajneesh. He said very clearly: I NEVER had a guru.
It is a very sad question. The New Age milieu is littered with thousands of spent disciples.

Giving advice or teachings always gets into a snafu. Ouspensky is popular because he was good at transmitting what looked like simple techniques. But a close look shows the simple and good was mixed up with the lies of Gurdjieff, who covered his tracks well with phony teachings. Sorting out the two is impossible now, so that is lost.
But some of the things are obvious and ancient simple truths, like ‘self-observation’.
Everyone is obsessed and in a hurry to do something that will reach the ultimate in twenty four hours.
That was the point of meditation, stop doing anything, and wait for the answer to come while sitting. It probably won’t come but rushing around won’t help either.
In general, there is only one method: developing self-consciousness, and learning about your powers of attention.
It has always been that. But even that has been ruined by the gurus.

Modernity and secularism are the conditions of modern man. Their destruction in the name of some ‘New Age’ of postmodern spirituality is so stupid (Andrew Cohen’s favorite idiocy) as to be unbelievable. The new age is precisely that modernity, and it has already created an explosion of consciousness.

Lots to say on all this. But as to Gurdjieff, his reactionary authoritarian and corrupt vampiric entanglement of fake disciples is not a spiritual tradition, but an exploitation that arose in a culture of idiots who couldn’t defend themselves. So learn and move o