Leaving the ‘work’ mess behind…evacuating the suckers
Gurdjieff et al are going to end up ditching their own movement, in typical sufi plunder style, and it will be left in Ouspensky’s lap. There can only be one solution: leaving the ‘work’ movement behind, and an effort to try to help the ‘suckers’ who won’t give it up to break the attachment to a big Zero.
The followers of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky need to walk away from the whole game. It is a manifestly dishonest set of concepts concocted with considerable guile by Gurdjieff, but he was careful to leave no specifics of referents with the result that nothing follows from anything. A good example among many is the concept of the ‘fourth way’. It is a non-standard concept. It has not specifiable tradition or exemplars. This could be unfair: there may be an esoteric legacy never made public, but we don’t know and can’t be sure. We must take Gurdjieff’s word for it, and he is known to be unreliable. We thus expend a large amount of energy on an undefined, or partially defined, concept, but we aren’t ever sure if we are on the right track.
Buddhism and yoga are clear. They state what they do, the methods, and the result is open. But with Gurdjieff everything is a reference, incomplete, to something ‘esoteric’. And we aren’t cleared, apparently, for the full information needed to start. But as with everything to do with Gurdjieff we are induced to start, but always without a full picture. In the final analysis it amounts to a mindfulness exercise, but one laden with all sort of dubious extra concepts that confuse the clarity of serious ‘meditation in action’. We have all sorts of distracting nonsense, such as cosmic hydrogen 24, evidently connected somehow to the energy of self-remembering. But what is the connection? The whole game is a species of gibberish, an attempt to look original with something that is clearly made up from bits and pieces, made up as he went along.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 