The end of the ‘guru’ legacy?! So how did the ‘compassionate’ Gautama create so many genocidal fascists? Answer, Gautama was long gone, no longer ‘existed’ as individuality
The discussions of Gurdjieff strongly indicate the need to abolish the ‘guru’ legacy. If we can’t create a form of the spiritual path leading to enlightenment without gurus then the whole tradition is likely to die of its own successes turning into failure. The question is relative. Getting help from a source is one thing, like going to a library, or seeking counsel from a wise person but the demands of absolute surrender, too often with an invisible political subtext, are a puzzle that isn’t a puzzle at all. They are a corrupt and decadent brand of the guru legacy itself. This stance of surrender achieves no purpose: it doesn’t lead to spiritual realization, in reality destroying the whole possibility.
The issue with Gurdjieff is a misfortune. This interloper outside the main tradition uses exotica to mesmerize a following. But that is never connected to anything definite and we suspect is a way to create drones in service of the operator, Gurdjieff, in life and beyond.
The situation in the Indian guru tradition is more complex and has repeatedly produced realized men. But I think the successes are due to something beyond the format of the guru. Many gurus indulge in spiritual energy games that produce the illusion of realization. All of that is beside the point.
The ‘path’ requires autonomous individuals, whatever the need to transcend autonomy. If it can’t be done with autonomous individuals it is not doable at all. But here we have to face the complex history of buddhism where a suspicious tradition of esoteric fascism emerged, or so it is charged. The situation is most probably nothing to do with Guatama who seems to have delayed the final nirvana til the medieval era, dumping the whole game on the Tibetans, and dissolved into nothing. We had better hope it is so.
Let’s look at the paths of Osho and of Gautama himself: Osho had no guru, and Gautama had some very superficial contacts with peers, not ‘gurus’, as far as we know. In fact full story no doubt stretches over several lives, and we know little of any of that, the various biographies being mostly worthless.
The issue of Gurdjieff is frustrating. Over and over mesmerized outsiders plug his path, people kept well away from finding out the truth. Ouspensky is blamed for lack of surrender when in fact he surrendered far more than anyone should have done. His rejection of Gurdjieff has to be taken seriously. He could see that the guru game was going to be a problem.
The whole situation is an outrage against Ouspensky. It is Ouspensky’s book that created the Gurdjieff movement, as Gurdjieff well knew (his own writings without Ouspensky would never have been able to survive, such is there obscurity). And one suspects the exile of Ouspensky was deliberate: Gurdjieff knew that he would have a rival here.
Twice Gurdjieff played this trick: ensnaring highly intelligent outsiders (Ouspensky and Bennett, both with mathematical aptitude) and using them to create an attractor gravitating newcomers to his ‘teacher’ or ‘guru sphere of hypnosis’. Ouspensky began to sense the way he was being used, but in the end fell into the trap completely with the publication of ISOM after his death. The book he wrote has created an almost unlimited power source for the dead spirit of G, for generations to come, the damage created rarely seen by the dupes who almost always got where they are from Ouspensky.
It is time the whole thing passed away into history. The movement has not created a single case of higher consciousness, although fakes like EJ.Gold arrived at an imitation via other sufistic sources.
Bennett is another sad case: his brilliant book The Dramatic Universe was muddled by the addition of Gurdjieff elements. Bennett experienced a mysterious spiritual contact in the wake of his work with Ouspensky, before the second world war, and this led to a confusingly double project, on the one hand a brilliatn set of ideas based on his systematics, and then some Gurdjieff elements grafted on, corrupting the result. An example is the enneagram, which is most probably complete nonsense. Bennett convinced himself all these contradictions didn’t matter, but the his work as a result is confusing. Once you get a sense of the original project which comes from a different source his work makes better sense.
Gurdjieff wrecked two individuals in this fashion of his exploitative method, and as many sufis quietly realized the whole project was a failure.
You cannot mix scholarship with guru surrender games. You see the way this wrecked the Dramatic Universe. Many ideas of unsound basis enter the book as esoteric truths, no less, erosing the skeptical enquiry needed to bring off such a project. Much can be rescued from the Dramatic Universe, with the simple method of scholarly critique and analysis. What’s left is a lot of Bennett, a mysterious brand of the ancient Samkhya, which should have nothing to do with Gurdjieff’s purloined version, and a set of general philosophic and scientific ideas blended into an intriguing world history.
To see that Bennett unwitting stepped outside of the game plan read the fourth volume of DU and you will see something that contradicts the strategy of reactionary antimodernism that animates so much new age guruism and Gurdjieff in particular. The modern world is anathema and the rejection of modernity is basic to that. Bennett had no clue to that and actually entered a plug for communism in his depiction of the onset of a new age period in 1848. This blunder of Bennett has doomed his book in traditional groups, while the modernist crowd remains rightly suspicious.
So we see two brilliant individuals damaged by the guru context. Worse (read the Preface to DU) we suspect Gurdjieff didn’t give a shit and thought the placement of some of his material in Bennett’s book would be good for him. And so it has happened. The works of Bennett are all ‘higher powered’ by submission to the Gurdjieff sphere, which laughed all the way to the spirit bank at the easy attraction of many new students via the appeal of Bennett.
The whole legacy is trash,and needs to be scrapped.
We need to be done with gurus surrender games, which threatened the spiritual core of its victims, sufi con artists and the abuse of magical elements to induce dangerous forms of hypnosis…in a short list.
And I am more than sure that Ouspensky in his next life realized to his horror how he had been cheated: he produced a book that was dynamite propaganda for Gurdjieff , while he himself in his next life was completely banned from any further contact with the ‘work’. This strategy is horrendous, and so far is a brand of the perfect crime. Five hundred years from now the same racket will allow these spiritual criminals to feed off innocent suckers attracted by Ouspensky.
It is enough to make you puke.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 