From samkhya to presand egypt
Criticizing Gurdjieff can’t be the same as rejecting the legacies from antiquity that he claimed to represent. The point is clearer with Bennett, sometimes, who actually constructed a version of classical Samkhya in its complicated details. And I can’t refute the statement that something like Christianity pre-occurred in ‘presand Egypt’. In all my studies of world history I came to the suspicion that the ‘social religion’ was born in the high Neolithic (5000 to 3000 BCE), and the timing corresponds to that of Gurdjieff. But these wisps don’t amount to much.
I think that Gurdjieff gives himself away when he talks about ‘burying the bone’ deeper: he is going to provide confusing fragments that will get you hooked but the full discourse will always be hidden, forever beyond access. This strategy is malevolent and seems to characterize the real core of sufism which is simply a question mark, start to finish.
The table of hydrogens is another example: this piece falls apart fairly rapidly but one would like to see the source to see what the inspiration was. After all, as a gedanken experiment there may be something we miss.
Our discussion of the work and meditation shows that someone in the sufi realm is computing the energies of ‘meditation’ or ‘self-remembering’, e.g hydrogen 24 versus 48. I fear the intuition was cogent but foundered in the attempt to do theory with different forms of consciousness. But the distinction of hydrogen 24 and 48 is simply a version of the kind of distinction between ordinary consciousness and the higher grade ‘self-awareness’ sought for in self-remembering, etc… The theory didn’t help much. But the connection suggests the need for the Samkhya history made plain, or else the source of this souped up but misleading version. Not quite bullshit, then, but not exactly rocket science. The first problems if the misuse of the term or concepts of ‘energy’.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 