Introduction
We have uploaded all the posts from the old Gurdjieff Con: it might be time to distill the gist with a selection, commentary, and a short book about the issues raised in a unique blog: as far as I know noone has ever stood up to occult gurus and lived to tell the tale. Such people can be dangerous. I would be delighted to see counterevidence! But my experience with the New Age movement was grotesque and I pledged to warn the next generation based on my experiences, if they can even be called that: meditation, and for that matter, the dark path is not always an experience at all and operates possibly with respect to consciousness from some kind of non-consciousness, super or sub. You never know what hit you with people operating from malevolent occult angles.
The New Age movement is a non-starter filled with idiots who still believe in the Kali Yuga and/or that modernity is some evil that must be overcome…That’s nonsense. In fact the New Age movement is aspect of the Reformation and the Enlightenment and emerged in the period of the Romantic movement, the British period in India in the eighteenth century and the thinking of figures like Schopenhaeur. By the time of Gurdjieff and Blavatsky the whole game was coming from the ‘dark side’, it seems, and the result was entangled in the rise of fascism, and here the charge of Rajneesh that the Nazis were connected with this and Hitler a buddhist drone, however preposterous at first, killed off the movement without anyone realizing it. Or at least intelligent liberal new agers were suddenly aware they weren’t welcome in most new age circles. The whole game has become malevolent, if not almost ridiculous.
We can create a short book here to introduce the archival material in question. We leave the above as the ‘introduction’… We need to finish this mini-book on the spot, and then will be able to incrementally comment further.
1. New Ages and New Age movement
The spiritualities of the NAM (new age movement) were mostly conservative traditionalism in motion with some dangerous ideologies of the great evil of modernity and its decline in the Kali Yuga. Secularism is charged with spiritual barrenness and the whole nine yards of higher consciousness is bandied about in a silly set of gesture to pull rank on the entropic modern. The rather odd reality is that this is upside down and the so-called decline is in reality a robust progression into the future.
2. Epochs in transition: the eonic effect
A good way to see this is via the study of the eonic effect and its discussions of modernity as beginning in the modern transition to a new epoch in world history. In this context so-called ‘new age’ movements tend to be reactionary gestures attempting the hopeless task of restoring the past. The reality is that the modern age is staging a ‘reformation’ for ancient spiritualities and trying to sort out the remnansts of ancient religious formations in order to move on from the past.
3. The Axial Age
The Axial Age is one aspect of the eonic effect and shows some spectacular evolutionary dynamics in the parallel emergence of multiple cultural streams: we see the Greek ‘miracle’, the Israelite/Zoroastrian generation of forms of monotheism, the buddhist movement in India, and such mysteries as Taoism and Confuciansism in China. Note that this period includes the invention of ‘secularism’ in ancient Greece, an ironic commentary on the spiritual obsessions of the many groups who to a close look originate in the Axial period. But hinduism would seem to be an exception. In fact, there is no contradiction: the hindu tradition was very ancient and precedes the Axial period which wasn’t going to reinvent what already existed. The real history of the hindu tradition and the Axial Age in India is thus confusingly complex but we can resolve some of the issues with the idea of relative transformations: the Upanishads are a classic example: some very ancient suddenly at the dawn of the Axial interval suddenly retransforms and creates a new tradition which falls back into hindu obscurantism and the confusion over the red herring Vedism and the question of the indo-european invasions. But the Axial Age interval in India is a mixture of transformed upanishadism and buddhism which is the grand experiment for all time, beside monotheistic religions, of a created world religion. In the nonce, the hindus imitated that with some concoctions from their rich lode, such as raja yoga, hatha yoga, and beyond in the context of an immensely more complex picture. The point here is that the yogas already existed and float down the stream while buddhism is a first born of the Axial Age. A lot more to say here…But the point that as Gautama well sensed the Axial Age was a great New Age, but in a prior time period. We can’t apply that to the modern case…
4. Ancient spiritualities
We are left to wonder at the greater antiquity of the spiritual traditions of man. We have a sense that india has traditions that may go back to the neolithic and we have to wonder what spiritual traditions emerged over the emergence of civiization, or even before. In fact we don’t know. Figures like Gurdjieff has often made claims along these lines but the evidence is unclear…The worst kind of nonsense tends to emerge in this vein, and we should be wary indeed of all such speculation.
5. The Descent of Man
The evolution of man remains a mystery and there is no new age short cut to knowledge of the facts. But man as homo sapiens, if not his predecessor homo erectus, seems to have come on the scene in a remarkably and mysterious explosive advance (fast relative to a million years, that is: a hundred thousand years is ‘fast’ by this reckoning. Man acquired (although we remain unsure who homo erectus really was) a remarkable package upgrade of language, mind, self-consciousness, art, ethics as a sense of good and evil, and more. The way this happened remains obscure and its relation to homo erectus (including the neanderthals) is a mystery. This brings us to debates over evolution, darwinism, and claims for spiritual evolution. The latter are mostly ill-conceived but leave a question about the way man integrated a host of characteristics that in the final analysis are the ultimate source of later spiritual traditions.
6. The Will, Being and the mechanical
There seem to be three aspects to human psychology: the being of man, the will of man, and the physical body of man. The world of yoga focuses on being (consciousness) while other traditions prior to the world of monotheism seem to have unknown teachings about the will, a subject we can defer on for the moment.
7. Last and First Men…
The question thus emerges, what is the real age of man, what is the modern age, and what will be the evolutionary future of man. It is not a simple question and if anything the flood of gurus has obscured the question with retrograde bilge that cannot grapple with the complexity of such a question. And the conservative character of so much new age thinking is a liability. Not a single new age figure has been a liberal/left advocate or had anything to say about social evolution beyond the spurious rackets of the guru ashrams.
The nature of man’s future needs a new approach and perhaps our study of the eonic effect can lay a foundation.
Conclusion: that’s a bare start on our book, and we can proceed to select a resource of blog posts from the old The Gurdjieff Con, which revolves around the dangers of certain new age movements, both the cultic factor and the occult dark side of so many spiritual failures who promote themselves in the west as realized beings. We will offer a warning about this, and cashier the whole guru phenomenon. The gurus ended turning their subject upside down: where yoga should be about freedom instead we find the guru to be antidemocratic, antagonistic to human individuality, vampiric as to conscious energies and in some cases explicity fascistic in their cabal and conspiracy to undermine modern democratic and/or socialist politics.
Our first recommendation is to NEVER surrender the will to such gurus. Sadly that stance must now include the fetish of christians, Jesus the grand guru and master. We must vigorously interrogate, then, the christian tradition also, and its now archaic ‘old new age’ dynamics…
Notes….
Archive of posts from 2008 onward from the Gurdjeff Con blog: we do this online and then as it becomes bulky transfer the corpus to a word document/pdf. The original blog contained over 3000 posts: we will be lucky to put up 2-300. The wordpress export file will be available to anyone interested. This blog contains about 2500 of the original posts…
Welcome to gurdjieff-con.net
/2008/06/19/welcome-to-gurdjieff-connet/
This is the blog accompanying a set of webpages, a work in progress, on the question of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, a kind of debriefing of the confusion surrounding that movement.This blog will produce a general statement, a series of links to resources, and some examinations of the question of guruism, the New Age movement, etc,..
/gmancon series complete, draft 1///2008/06/28/gmancon-series-complete-draft-1/
I have finished the introductory series of essays on Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, starting with: gmancon.htm… (no longer online)
This refers to what later became Debriefing Gurdjieffianity, a book now in print in Kindle format and available at Amazon.com
Ok, ready to go. Welcome, to the Orphans of Civilization
2008/06/28/ok-ready-to-go-welcome-to-the-orphans-of-civilization/
The purpose of this blog is assist those floundering in the so-called Gurdjieff work to recover their perspective on the confusion it has created, and to ‘snap out of it’ to the degree of recovering and hopefully moving on. However, this is done by a process of historical analysis, and I am not in a position for one on one interactions. But if you have a question, by all means. There is very little public help available here, and the ‘deprogrammers’ in the public sphere are ill-equiped to understand the position many find themselves in. And certainly the people in the movement are of no help. You need the presence of mind to walk away from it, and it can be a lonely moment to realize that you have no institutional resources that can be useful.Welcome, to the Orphans of Civilization.
Groupie’s plight
/2008/07/07/groupies-plight/
Looking over the google links on Gurdjieff.What has been left behind by Gurdjieff is in the end almost useless, and yet the numbers of people fixated on the ‘superb sales job’ is staggering. Students of the subject have failed to grasp that the division into ‘exoteric/esoteric’ is exploitative and false. It is entirely possible for people to lie and conceal, but what is spiritual about that? And yet all this seems to have been deliberate. To create an underclass of followers intimidated in a subtle way to be submissive. Behind it is a reactionary political complot, and an intent to prevent the spiritual realization of the those connected on the (laughably) exoteric level.
‘prevent’, OK, in case you were thinking of something more than being a groupie.
Certain posts contain references to early fans/commenters on the blog, mostly anonymous. The links to their comments are mostly lost.
Danny comment. What is a ‘path’?
/2008/07/09/dandy-comment-what-is-a-path/
Comment lost…
Thanks for your comment, a good question. I am not another guru, and I am backed into the need to answer a question about ‘paths’, guru style. I can’t or won’t answer such questions, but my statement effectively does answer them, in a way. There is such a proliferation of ‘paths’, my point was to clarity two possibilities, the simple passage of time and experience, and the passage beyond. You are right that this seems to relate to the buddhist style of world renunciation. A path in time exists mathematically but it is very hard for ordinary man to realize his own ‘will’, and he is usually kidnapped by a larger religion.
It is not an easy situation.
My remarks actually were very general, based on a statement by Bennett about the Kwajagan, who showed the influence of Buddhism in Central Asia. My consideration was that lurking behind the obscurity of ‘sufi paths’, many of them hidden, many of them claiming extraordinary knowledge which they won’t reveal, to the confusion of seekers, there is a rough and brutal reduction of the question based on 1. history and 2. a statement about the dubious claims of many lost in the interstices of that history.
We can simplify the issue by looking at the streamlined history of religion, noting the peaks that stand out, and approaching the chaotic middles with a certain skepticism.
Gurdjieff claimed a great deal about lost knowledge, but those claims are undocumented, and dubious the more we learn about them. Many of these secret sufis were comparatively ignorant men, and prone to the mystical deviations that beset those who approach spiritual issues without metaphysical discipline. Gurdjieff is an adventurer, and much of his esoteric lore, if we can understand him, seem bogus. In any case, the so-called ‘path’ he proposes amounts to zilch, and has produced nothing in his followers. The behind the scenes action of insiders, I don’t know. But his outer ‘path’ is an exploitation, and a lot of dangerous people are making claim on it.
Disengage at once from such people, and consider my streamlined summary, dispensing with mystifications of ‘path peddlers’.
‘Intentional suffering’ and the sadists of the ‘work’
/2008/07/12/intentional-suffering-and-the-sadists-of-the-work/
Reply to Comment (RTC)
Reading Gurdjieff’s books is generally a waste of time. I wince at your statement that this effort is ‘intentional suffering’, that phrase of the ‘work’. Don’t get started with all that. It is a very ill-considered thesis with many pitfalls, to sabotage your life.You can read J. G. Bennett’s Making A New World for a rough estimate of what the book is about. And at that point I would say don’t trust Bennett, either.To conceal in this way suggests the author has something to hide. He does!As to ‘intentional suffering’ the idea is that humanity is asleep, a bunch of couch potatoes, Nature doesn’t like couch potatoes, so the ‘Work’ with a capital ‘W’ should be to track down these couch potatoes and torture them to death as a sacrifice to Gaian energy balance.Real fruitcake this fellow. It doesn’t follow. Nature loves the hippopotamus, so I guess couch potatoes can’t be much worse. Moral: masochism suggested by the ‘Work’ is a very dangerous tactic, life has enough rude shocks, and the question of creating more is not so clear, especially if the later followers of Gurdjieff turn out to be a bunch of sadists, like the notorious E. J. Gold, who has tried a take over bid of the G situation, and seems to enjoy ‘intentional sufferings’ a lot, his intentions, your suffering.
The whole thing is already corrupt, so don’t let any principles it proposes linger in your mind without examination, e.g. ‘intentional suffering’.
Exercise 1: what are the crimes open to invisible men?
2008/07/22/exercise-1-what-are-the-crimes-open-to-invisible-men/
A tremendous amount of nonsense is written about Gurdjieff by his ‘followers’ (in fact he had none).It can be useful to induce a bit of skeptical analysis by asking a series of questions which require a kind of tacit response.The first one is ‘silly’, but will induce the right frame of mind, but probably all sorts of wrong answers, or at least not very useful ones.Note, in passing, the resemblance to the tale of Frodo the hobbit (and all that jazz).
Exercise 2: What are the crimes open to occultists?
/2008/07/22/exercise-2-what-are-the-crimes-open-to-occultists/
This follows the question in the previous post. Of course, the term ‘occultist’ is highly ambiguous, the creature’s existence mostly denied in modern scientific culture.We assume anyone in a Gandalf suit like Gurdjieff is going to be a saintly guide for his devoted and uncritical fan club.But the question stands. Delete from consideration the usual crimes of ‘criminal elements’ (although Gurdjieff was a somewhat shadowy character in that respect) and think in terms of the powers of suggestion.The real issue in the question, requires another question? Can the occultist track the victim’s next birth cycle, and exploit the allegiance priorly given? Is the predator now a ghost or what?
There’s the trap for the innocent seeker. Sign on the dotted line, nothing bad happens til you are vulnerable in the next cycle.
Comment from James Moore
/2008/07/22/comment-from-james-moore/
Remarkable, Comment from James Moore , author of Gurdjieff, Anatomy of a Myth (and there is also James Webb, with his book on Gurdjieff), a book worth reading. Welcome.
But the information available to those who get lost in Gurdjieffianity is still insufficient for anything except, well, getting lost. How about some biographical evidence for the shadow sufis who lurk like predators around the Ouspensky troupe, picking off victims with ease?
The issue finally isn’t Gurdjieff but the use made of Ouspensky’s sales tactics for those who come later and invoke both to justify their exploitations.
Good example, E. J. Gold. How about an expose here?
Mr. E. J. Gold, a big fan of genocide?
/2008/07/26/mr-e-j-gold-a-big-fan-of-genocide/
Comment from ‘sillykitty’,
who has previously commented/posted at Darwiniana extensively. He is one of Gold’s earlier victims. We can put some links for all that soon.
This ‘review’ is the typical inhouse promo from another of the suckers going through Mr. Gold’s revolving door. In three years, he will be history.
I passed very briefly along the fringe line of Gold’s circle many years ago, and as I recall I didn’t like him on sight, and he didn’t like me. Perhaps a premonition on his part. You’d think conscious types could have foreseen the Internet, and the undoing of their stealth operations.
Mr. Gold has managed to find the bottom of the ‘sufi/gurdjieff’ trashcan, the result of trying to use violent occult means to destroy all rivals, and even destroy the potential of any youngsters that even hint at being future rivals, such is his paranoia. The ‘new’ material at the site linked to is the umpteenth permutation of his tiresome comedy routine, and its effect on young seekers should be classified with child molestation. Over and over he reshuffles the deck with the same old combination of ripped off gurdjieff, ripped off Tibetan Book of the Dead, adolescent scifi junk, and ‘isn’t this original/cute, wow sufism’ New Age brochuring.
It takes time to grasp that a good stand up comedian can do a pretty good fake of ‘higher consciousness’, if people fall for the ‘zanny’ zen paraphernalia which is actually enough to fool most people.
It would not matter if, claiming to be a sufi teacher and the successor, no less, to Gurdjieff, he had a kind heart. But that’s just the problem: here we have a uniquely vicious predator of young adults trying to find their way through the Gurdjieff deception (already tricky enough), desperate and frustrated because they can’t find a ‘school’, and thus vulnerable to the false trust that is easily exploited by Gold’s predestigation.
It is a bit late in the day to say so but the basic rule is NEVER get entangled in the baited trap, bait ans switch traps, that Gold plays with. Relax, the odds are in your favor: you will go through the revolving door, and he will forget you. The selected victims, which we need to track down, are even now getting their ‘essence’ destroyed to fuel the consumption of this uniquely hateful vampire of human spiritual energy. This creep has been overheard endorsing the holocaust, and he has secret disciples who have actually done a fascist/nazi group, complete with nazi armbands, this from a jewish kid from Brooklyn. Make a note of it. Saying Heil Hitler is somebody’s idea of the esoteric ‘work’.
Let us remind ourselves as a note in passing that this guy works in duets, with his sidekick the ‘archdruid’, viz. the pornographer/owner of the San Francisco Ball. Whenever this arsehole calls himself a ‘sheik’, remember where they get their money from.
More later. But, sk has raised one of the real issues or questions raised by this blog: the legacy of Gurdjieff is highly toxic, and getting worse. We need a counter tradition of critique that can warn people of the degenerating character of that legacy and the real character of the people who are trying to rip off the work of, well, not Gurdjieff who have little to say, but poor old Ouspensky who got conned into writing one of the best come-on books ever written for a mafia anywhere.
Poor fellow, how very sad that his last instructions insisted that his ‘Fragments of an Unknown Teaching’ not be published. But it was, and the results are coming in: they all stink.
All And Everything: refighting the battle of Marathon
/2008/07/27/all-and-everything-refighting-the-battle-of-marathon/
There is already some discussion of Gurdjieff’s mighty tome, a book that would seem overrated. And one that most readers would find offensive if they realized its meaning and intent. It is mostly a lot of rehashed ‘new agism’ of the early twentieth century, and its core set of values is not wholesome. Gurdjieff was clearly an enemy of democracy and the modern establishment of rights. His material on Ashieta Shiemash fails to really make its point because it is unhistorical and therefore in no sense a reliable judgment of history. It seems that the legacy of Zarathustra and the Persian world and empire that competed with the rise of Greece is still stuck in the craw of these people. It is a completely balderdashed view of things. One would be more than happy to see a revisionist view of Zarathustra, if that can be backed up with some real data, but instead we have this pastiche of pseudo-esoteric mythology designed to distort Zarathustra, half reinvent him, and end up a disguised PR mockup of Gurdjieff himself. The true history of Zoroastrianism, I would grant, has not been told, but I long ago began to doubt that Gurdjieff knew what he was talking about here. Zarathustra was finally the template of the plain vanilla monotheist preacher that comes later. The great esoteric mystery behind him just might not be there at all. We don’t need a lot of junk esotericism on this. We need some good historical research, and that has not yet fully gelled in this case, but I find it hard to place an Ashieta Shiemash anywhere in the vacinity, or anywhere else in antiquity. It is unlikely that anyone ever discoursed on the issues the way Gurdjieff does. To backdate that to somewhere between Sumer and the Persian satraps isn’t very helpful. The only reason it is taken so seriously is because noone sees what the Beelzebub tome is about. The hidden fascism of a number of mystic types in the post-Blavatsky era has been well documented. Gurdjieff always cagey didn’t quite show his hand here, but the indirect evidence is clear, and is certainly a part of his succession.
Thus the diatribe against the Greeks and Romans in his work is simply a misunderstanding, evidence that Gurdjieff was always way out of the mainstream. Do people still feel so strongly that the Greeks won the battle of Marathon and founded democracy as an historical first? What a bunch of useless reactionary diehards, really.
I am all for a careful critique of the Greeks, if that’s your view, but in the final analysis their place in history is secure, and critically so. In general, the question of the Axial Age emerges here, to show the real evolutionary progression visible in history, something that Gurdjieff and his ilk simply could not grasp. Thus all their efforts to pull rank, so to speak, with esoteric claims, is mostly a pack of nonsense. And it has wasted a lot of time for a lot of people, as the whole postmodern game of anti-modernism starts to generate more and more chaos.
As for these teachings of Ashieta Shiemash, and the great trumpet for ‘Objective Conscience’, etc…, it is mostly hot air, a ‘good idea’ that never goes anywhere. The legacy of later Gurdjieffianity shows how little interest these people have in really doing any of that. Instead we see the behind the scenes operatives plying a reactionary anti-democratic propaganda operation to serve some very ancient vested interests. They have little interest in the august profundities of this imaginary Ashieta Shiemash.
Ouspensky and Gurdjieff the rapist
/2008/07/28/ouspensky-and-gurdjieff-the-rapist/
A lot of ink has been spilled on Ouspensky’s break with Gurdjieff, in fact, whole books have been written, with a lot of backdated kibitzing about how Ouspensky was some kind of betrayer of the cause, or that he should have persisted in the great teaching to the end, etc, etc…
The reality would seem a bit different. Consider this from James Webb’s The Harmonious Circle, p.384,
Orage’s explanation of the split is therefore of great interest. He always maintained that it was Gurdjieff’s near rape of Mrs. Y in1923-24 that finally decided Ouspensky. The date tallies and the scandal was of such proportions that the explanation is very plausible. If Orage were right this would explain Ouspensky’s obsession with Gurdjieff’s ‘integrity’ in his conversation with Boris Mouravieff after Gurdjieff’s crash, and why–out of loyalty to his teacher as a ‘member of the same family’ he refused to tell Mouravieff why he had decided to work alone.
Ouspensky suffered a great disappointment, and saw that the whole game was going to suffer failure and collapse, and he was right, although the immense proliferation of Gurdjieffianity he did not foresee.
The ‘work’ was a failed enterprise by 1924, and it is no use blaming Ouspensky.
World History And The Eonic Effect on the ‘fourth way’
/2008/07/31/illusions-of-the-fourth-way/
One of the reasons for this blog, apart from its obvious intent, is to amplify to some degree on some of the issues raised in World History and the Eonic Effect (third edition), which has just been listed at Amazon.com. The book discusses the issue of the ‘fourth way’ in world history, and also issues of the ‘new age’, and its mythologies of age periods, a confusion the book clarifies greatly.
The book also exposes the strategy of postmodern anti-modernism that runs rife through the whole of the New Age movement and its ideologies.
In general, the default foundation for whatever we wish to call it, after the term ‘spiritual path’ has been retired, is laid out in a highly generalized historical framework.
More generally the wild claims for ancient knowledge posed by Gurdjieff can be put in a better context, perhaps one without much data, since we have very little, the pronouncements of Gurdjieff providing no remedy for that situation.
Gurdjieff as spy? A comment
/2008/08/02/gurdjieff-as-spy-a-comment/
Two comments about Gurdjieff as a suspected intelligence agent.
I will upgrade these comments to post level, due to their interest (keeping in mind the author speaks for himself, we are crippled by our ignorance here). Thank you for the insight.
I tried to indicate a similar sentiment in the /gmancon series (see the links), but of course it is difficult to know, and Gurdjieff’s activities are a reminder at least that not only he but many others have used the ‘esoteric’ to deceive people. Behind Gurdjieff perhaps lies ‘another’ unknown who must have thought it would be intelligently ‘funny’ (someone’s bon idee) to make a guru out of a spy, and in any case get someone with the devil’s talents to root out whatever might be rescued from the truly obscure labyrinth of the ‘sufi’ world.
Another issue, as the commenter states in his own way, is the ‘switch’ to a politician’s ethics (and thence the spy’s ethics!) in the sense of Machiavelli and the stance toward ‘lies in public’.
Gurdjieff suspected of being an intelligence agent
/2008/08/02/gurdjieff-suspected-of-being-an-intelligence-agent/
Here are the two comments I said I would upgrade to post level due to their interest. The comment trackback at the end is from ‘admin’.
#
mybrainisafleamarket said,
08.02.08 at 8:17 am ·
My personal guess is even if Gurdjieff had had genuine spiritual traditions shoved right in his face, he would only have seen them as power tools and as resources to manipulate people.
James Webb makes a convincing case to this reader (The Harmonious Circle) that G was employed as a spy by the Imperial Russian secret service, and this enabled him to travel as widely as he did.
Now…consider the life of a spy. You live with the knowledge that you are expendable. If you are discovered, your handlers may disavow your existence. You may well die nastily and quickly or slowly and miserably in some prison.
Meanwhile if you’re free to operate as a spy, you pretend at every moment to be someone you are not. You live behind a mask. Your mind is under tension. You dare not make a wrong move. Intimacy is impossible. Tender feelings are suppressed because they may cause you to blow your cover.
Meanwhile, all persons you come in contact with are used by you as objects to be manipulated and milked for information.
This is a state of mind and body incompatible with receiving and benefitting from even the most elementary spiritual instruction. A spy has to operate from ego to be successful and live behind a mask. A spy cannot get beyond ego. Instead, whatever he learns from a spiritual preceptor
will be run through the filter of the spy’s own priorities and will be seen as a set of power tools.Now, after G had to leave Bolshevik Russia, and the Brits denied him a visa (Webb suspects that was because they knew he had spied against them in India and Tibet)…Gurdy settled in Paris.
We have learned a thing or two about how often career military men find themselves depressed and disoriented when they retire from the service.
What happens to an unemployed spy whose government no longer exists?My hypothesis, based on Webb, is that by creating his fake esoteric school, Gurdy could enjoy the use of his spy master talents, like the character ‘Control’ in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He introduced his followers into an exciting cloak and dagger world, taught them to spy on themselves (self remembering) and relate to themselves as objects and to all around them as objects.
It was fun for Gurdy. Without it he would’ve been another traumatized White Russian, having to drive a taxi cab in Paris.
Just my opinion.
Anything derived from Gurdjieff is a fake of a fake.
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mymindisafleanmarket said,
08.02.08 at 1:00 pm
And, in a sad way, Gurdy may well have been trying to persuade himself as much as his students..namely persuade himself that he still mattered and had something significant to offer.
Problem is he created an infra structure that has empowered several generations of charlatans, and entrapped generations of sincere people. Ive read accounts from children
who grew up in Gurdjieff families. The parents were so involved that they were not present to thier kids. So..some kids made themselves get interested in the stuff so that as Fourth Way prodigies, they could elicit some nurture from the adults. Thus the malaise passed on.
#
08.02.08 at 1:39 pm ·
[…] Two good comments about Gurdjieff as a suspected intelligence agent. I will upgrade these comments to post level, due to their interest (keeping in mind the author speaks for himself, we are crippled by our ignorance here). Thank you for the insight. I tried to indicate a similar sentiment in the /gmancon series (see the links), but of course it is difficult to know, and Gurdjieff’s activities are a reminder at least that not only he but many others have used the ‘esoteric’ to deceive people. Behind Gurdjieff perhaps lies ‘another’ unknown who must have thought it would be intelligently ‘funny’ (someone’s bon idee) to make a guru out of a spy, and in any case get someone with the devil’s talents to root out whatever might be rescued from the truly obscure labyrinth of the ’sufi’ world. Another issue, as the commenter states in his own way, is the ’switch’ to a politician’s ethics (and thence the spy’s ethics!) in the sense of Machiavelli and the stance toward ‘lies in public’. […]
James Webb on Gurdjieff the intelligence agent
/2008/08/02/james-webb-on-gurdjieff-the-intelligence-agent/
Another comment on Gurdjieff as intelligence agent, upgraded to post level.
I will comment in another post.
#
mybrainisafleamarket said,
08.02.08 at 5:37 pm ·
Just wanted to make clear what my source was:
James Webb is the one who strongly suggested that Gurdjieff might have been a secret agent in the Imperial Russian secret service. Webb made this suggestion in his book The Harmonious Circle. Webb had access to old files kept by the British Intelligence service (I cant remember if it was M 15 or M 16, and traced G’s probably itenerary in India and in Tibet. It appears that G posed as a Tibetan and Webb has some interesting photographs. Webb was cautious and did not want to jump to any conclusions beyond what the records could bear, but he took the trouble
to lay out the evidence, and allowed his readers to be as jurors and come to our own verdict. I personally thought that Webb’s secret agent hypothesis fit the points on the curve rather nicely.As for the enneagram, Webb gave a long, long list of theosophical and occult books that would have been available in pre-revolutionary Russia and provides us with an enneagram like diagram that can be found in the works of Raymond Lull.
I still think it very interesting that in the 1840s and 50s Captain Richard F. Burton exhaustively studied sufism and occult practices in Sindh, India, and Egypt, looked for manusripts in libraries in Sindh, the Al Ahazar Mosque in Cairo, and in Medina, did all he could to learn information, spoke Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Sindi and some Pastu fluently, yet never mentions a trace concerning the enneagram. Burton was eager to publish information that would be to the advantage of other travellers and agents wishing to go undercover and “pass” as natives, and I am personally satisfied that if the enneagram had in any way been important to the Sufis, Burton would have heard about it, learned it and mentioned it. A man who took the trouble to describe the favorite epic poems and stories in Sindh, the local methods of alchemy, how crooks counterfeited documents, coins and signet seals, ettiquette, the various methods of preparing and smoking hashish (we are told exactly how to prepare the stuff and how to fill the pipe) the differences between Sindhi chess and Western chess, the method of doing the mandal or ‘magic mirror’ trick, and who gives us the exact method (plus diagram) on how Sindhi soothsayers read the future from a sheeps shoulderbone, would, IMO have told us about the enneagram had it existed and been at all important in the areas where he travelled.
(Note: it is also most interesting that Burton opens his chapter on Sufism (which he correctly names ‘tassawuf) in Sindh by listing 3 representative poets, one for Arabic, one for Sindi Persian and one for Pastu–Ibn Faris, Hafiz, Shah Betai and Abd el Rahman. Rumi is not mentioned!
Earlier in that chapter, he does mention Rumi but in passing–’A system of belief adopted by such minds as Jami, Hafiz, Saadi, Jelal el Din (Rumi), Abd el Kadir, Ibn Fariz and others…” (page 200 from Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus by RF Burton)
It is very interesting to see that in Burton’s careful survey of Sufism in what is now Pakistan, in an area heavily influenced by Persian/Iranian culture, he refers to Rumi as just one among many–an interesting contrast with the fad status that Rumi has today in English translation!
More cloak and dagger: gold?
/2008/08/02/more-cloak-and-dagger-gold/
A comment form SK
#
sillykitty said,
08.02.08 at 4:15 pm ·
these comments open a pandora’s box of questions. thought ‘reform’ and mind control are agendas long shared by cult leaders and the secret corners of governments. many gurus have been rumored to have links to one government or another. (blavatsky, crowley, hubbard, jim jones, etc)
e.j. gold used to brag about his participation in a ’secret’ cia psi unit called ‘the witches.’ remote viewing. hypnosis. mind control.
it induces a nauseating miasma of paranoia (i speak for myself) to contemplate the exchange of information between these factions. and if you begin to investigate it you enter the labyrinth of conspiracy theories where it is difficult to sort fact from fiction from intentional misdirection and disinformation. robert jay lifton is helpful. as a presumably neutral psychologist he has researched thought reform technology and thought reform movements within both cults and governments.
if gurdjieff was a double-agent as is suggested, is it plausible that he was NOT unemployed at all (in terms of a government affiliation) during the time mymindisafleamarket mentions??? i.e. the prieure and after?
Burton vs Gurdjieff
/2008/08/03/burton-vs-gurdjieff/
Comment from MBFM
mybrainisafleamarket said,
08.03.08 at 8:42 am
Its a bit easier to impose on Buddhists than one might think, even Tibetan lamas and rinpoches.
Alexander Berzin has a great book entitled Healthy Relationships with Spiritual Teachers.
He notes that it is considered bad form and a violation of right speech to flat out tell someone he or she is an imposter. Traditional Asians shun confrontation, even if that means not confronting a con artist.
And many Tibetan Buddhist teachers might take the time to teach Dharma to a scoundrel hoping that in another life, that persons potential will ripen into sincere practice.
However, high level teachings in tantra, mahamudra and dzogchen would never be given unless someone has done foundational practices and throughly commits to living by the Buddhist ethical precepts–and has studied with a teacher for years.
Someone on a spy’s hectic schedule would not be able to do this.
Richard Burton had considerable leisure to do his undercover work–General Napier wanted as much information as possible about local habits and customs and wanted the kind of information that would enable future agents to pass successfully. Burton worked for him in the 1840s, and had the leisure to try many different covers and learn the ettiquette appropriate to each. (He found that a great source of information was if one could gain entry to the ladies harems. Burton found that the best method was to impersonate being a merchant, have excellent goods and sell at a reasonable price. If a suspicous husband or father arrived, all Burton had to do was display his stock of jewellry and the ladies raised hell and insisted that he stay!)
Burton actually liked the people who he impersonated, and though many of his comments are miserably racist and sexist (he was Victorian), one thing comes through…he was sympathetic to the local cultures, lived with the people, to the point where he lost the trust of his superiors–he was much too willing to ‘go native.’ Fawn Brodie, one of his biographers stated that Burton was special.. he was willing to live with the people whose customs he
studied-he did not treat them as specimens.Quite different from Gurdjieff.
And, throughout his books, Burton was scrupulously careful to list his sources and provide accurate information–for he knew that future travellers lives might be at stake and he wanted them to have the best
information he could provide.Again, quite different from Gurdjieff. Burton also had a radical belief that women were as entitled to sexual pleasure as men and noted that British officers rarely won the affection of their Indian mistresses because the Brits were poor at making love.
Quite different from Gurdjieff who was an utter boor in these matters.
Rajneesh charge of fascism against the ‘buddhists’
/2008/08/03/rajneesh-charge-of-fascism-against-the-buddhists/
These different perspectives are useful (although if Burton was another intelligence agent, I am getting restive. We seem to find nothing but the public hype of celebrities and intelligence agents passing for ancient wisdom. I am not going to take on Gurdjieff and exempt sufis).
We, of course, don’t know a thing of what Gurdjieff did in Tibet, and before we denigrate Gurdjieff lets keep in mind that Buddhism hides figures a lot worse than a mere fakir like ‘G’.
Already with Blavatsky we suspect something strange going on, with many vague and indirect hints leading nowhere.
It was therefore a bombshell when the figure Rajneesh flat out charged ‘buddhists’ with fomenting the Nazis. Since he didn’t pursue the matter in detail, he left the quesion hanging.
But we can easily detect the gestation point in the late nineteenth century, with the lines of influence hopelessly obscure.
It is thus awefully strange that Gurdjieff should be roaming around here at the critical point (which is not an accusation) but I suspect he sensed something afoot, and he in general clearly poised toward a rightist/reactionary stance.
The emergence of clear fascist group(s), completely hidden, in the fuzzy milieu of the Gurdjieff succession viz. the Gold circle is another suspicious sign.
Since these deep sources always work through proxies it is impossible to know for sure, and it is equally important not to get into the spiritual surrender mode. Those dumb enough to surrender end up the proxies.
The whole sickening business.
We must of course be wary of the term ‘buddhism’. It covers an immense range of different things. And the hidden figures of Tibet, who never appear in the open line of the lamaist tradition, but are there somewhere, are the suspects, not ordinary Buddhists.
There was of course the public nonsense of the Dalai Lama’s youth and association with German agents, but at this level there is no contact with the deeper skulduggery. These people are oblivious to the game.
Sk wonders about G–and Gold
/2008/08/03/sk-wonders-about-g-and-gold/
There is something strange about Gurdjieff’s way of following the trail of the greater emergence of fascism (amidst the Bolshevik conflagration). He could hardly have been an agent after the fall of the Tsars. He was doing something different. He suddenly shows up in Germany at the seminal moment of Hitler’s emergence, and the thirties and war period show a strange resonance. As if he were observing events at close range (for an occultist), which is not an accusation. Trying to piece it together.
There is of course the visible, if minor, evidence of his association with the occupation in Paris, with his well-stocked larder during the times of privation.
But Gurdjieff was in a position to know the tactics of esoteric fascists and proxy mass-murder agents, and may have been able to follow the sequence to some extent.
We should not be unfair. For all we know, his collapsing teaching during the thirties might have reflected a sense of shock at the coming extremes of the Nazis.
As for Gold, he is always trying to ‘me too’ with Gurdjieff, and he would no doubt claim to have been a secret agent too, as a form of bragging.
who knows.
But your suspicions suddenly seem possible.
Why doesn’t someone ask Mr. Gold. He is still alive. Get to the bottom of this sick game that is already claiming an escalating number of victims.
Burton on Sufism
/2008/08/04/burton-on-sufism/
mybrainisafleamarket said,
08.04.08 at 9:07 am ·
Nemo will probably relish this.
Burton appreciated Islam learning and Sufism but at the same time had a very clear eye as to their limitations. He studied Sufism in Sindh, describes its practices and initiation ceremonies in detail, and claimed to have recieved a murshids diploma, which he reproduced in his book describing his journey to Medina and Meccah. (A Personal Narrative of a Journey to Medina and Meccah)
Here is what this very sympathetic person had to say about Sufism in Sindh–the organizational aspect of it.
‘Tassawuf, under the native governments (the rule of the Emirs prior to Napier’s conquest of Sindh in the 1840s) was as formidable a political engine as most of the secret confraternities recorded in history. Hasan Sabah, the celebrated ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ showed what use could be made of it by a talented and unscrupulous villain.
‘Even among the mild Sindhis, a noted Pir (religious superior) formerly might safetly order one of his murids or disciples, to murder an enemy. Yet the native princes encouraged it, partly from superstition and partly because the price (amount needed for bribery) of every Pir was well known to them. Unlike the Assassins, the order in this province had no Grand Master…
To the Pirs great advantages accrued…Udner our government they have of course lost the right of flogging and beheading their followers, so that their power now depends primarily upon the ignorance and superstition of the populace. As they are usually the vile descendants of of some ancestor celebrated for virtue and learning, they think it necessary to keep up appearances; yet their garb of goodness is a very flimsy one. The Pir who calls himself a Fakir or beggar, will probably maintain an establishmetn of a hundred servants and as many horses, it is sufficient for him occasionally to show a camel hair vest under his garments and his followers will excuse his ostentation.
‘The vanity of the disciples induces them to believe in, and to vaunt the supernatural powers of their superior; his bieng able to work miracles and visit heaven gives THEM additional importance.
….the pecuniary position of the Pir is an enviable one. He levies a tax of from one-eighth to one-half upon the income and produce of his followers who are too timid to defraud the saint., and who not infrequently make him expensive presents when any unexpected stroke of good fortune attributed to his intercession, enables them to do so. (this in addition to the many taxes levied by the old government which Burton listed in an earlier chapter…unless perhaps the Pir found ways to negotiate with the local princes to lighten the tax burden on followers? editorial comment.)
‘It is not too much to say that some few of the chief Pirs could, by good management, commend an income of 30,000 L (am not sure if this is rupees or pounds-editor).
‘Besides emolument, these holy men enjoyed and enjoy the power of committing any villainy upon the principle that from the pure nothing but what is pure can proceed…
‘The practical results of the Pir’s imposition are, that the Murids, in their delusion, look to him as the gatekeeper of Paradise, and respect him accordingly. Even the most cowardly Sindhi would assault a man that ventured to curse his Pir; the Affghans and the Persians woudl consider the instant murder of such an individual a highly meritorious action.
‘The effects of Tassawuf upon the people in general (this from a man who appreciated so much of it) can be easily conceived. The disciples sink capital in a speculation that can never pay in this world; and besides the monetary loss they throw away all chance of moral improvement.’
(Burton, pages 203–207 from Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus)
(from RF Burton: Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus)
Age periods and the decline of ancient spiritualities
/2008/08/04/age-periods-and-the-decline-of-ancient-spiritualities/
SK:
this is a great excerpt from burton. very helpful. thank you.
truly there is nothing new under the sun. this stuff has been going on…??? since the beginning of time???
do you think it is possible that collectively, as a species, we might outgrow it, before it is too late?
Good questions.
I was perhaps unfair in using the term ‘guruism’, despite the similarity between Indian guruism and the lines of ‘sheiks’ or ‘pirs’. Separate judgments are required.
The problem is precisely the antiquity that SK refers to. The Indic tradition seems to be five thousand years old. Buddhism was already a kind of reform movement.
As to the Middle East, the picture is less clear, but we can see proto-sufism already at work in the Jesus figures, so we know that we are missing a lot there.
It is necessary to be wary of the concealed ‘new agism’ that is attempting to denigrate modernity and reestablish these decayed traditions, when what is needed is what we see in the Axial period, which is the renewal in a real New Age as an escape from the past. Now a similar transition is occurring in modernity itself.
It is hard to say what the fate of the Indic tradition will be, since it is able to survive on its own, so to speak. But the proliferation of rancid sufism is going to prove something we should resist, expose, and do that by whatever documentation we can bring to the hidden strains and scandals.
In any case, the Gurdjieff work has proven an abortive yet spreading, now global, confusion that will prove difficult to counter.
My consideration here is to provide information so that bemused young adults, the prime victims of these Ouspenskian revelations, will confront the lore of sufis, sheiks and gurus without the abject submission that can only get them in trouble.
There is an emerging modern path that has already left all this behind, and its elements are seen in the basics (all over again) rediscovered of ‘self-consciousness’. At that point (this is a bit vague so far) the confusions of these rapidly decaying traditions will be seen for what they are.
The problem with ‘renewal’ is that, precisely because of figures like Gurdjieff who will infiltrate and create fronts within fronts out of pastiches of ancient teachings in the name of that ‘New Age’, it may never happen and all we will get is the proliferation of confusion we see now.
The fag end of the enneagram malarkey
/2008/08/05/the-fag-end-of-the-enneagram-malarkey/
Check out the compilation of nonsense at: Enneagram Institute
At least they don’t claim it is ancient wisdom. The blame it all on Oscar Ichazo, who was involved in a lawsuit on the question.
We can then ignore this as a sideshow (and delusive ripoff) and consider the question of Gurdjieff and the enneagram. As to types, I think this area of his teaching was a weak spot in the sense that he overcrystallized the claims for ‘types’ (they don’t really exist in any rigorous sense) and ‘chief feature’. You can see how he fudged around the question of astrology here, probably making it up as he went along, wary of any direct correlation, eager to produce his own version (and never reveal it).
As to the enneagram itself, it is cleverly presented you can’t refute what is suggested to be non-public. This evasion is suspicious.
Gurdjieff obviously didn’t intend to teach anything about the enneagram, instead making it a point of mesmerization with respect to something not referred to directly (‘esoteric’), preempting exposure or falsification.
These people at the enneagram institute aren’t so clever. Put it in writing, and the result is….vomitatious.
Anirvan’s To Live Within
/2008/08/05/anirvans-to-live-within/
Amazon review:
This is a link to a review of a book called ‘To Live Within’ written by a confused and fawning Indian disciple, not of Gurdjieff, but of some other guru.
It is the kind of propaganda for the guru system that gets people into trouble. In my tangential travels on the fringes of sufi disneyland I saw it used and exchange hands (in an old first edition) in the Gold world as a bludgeon to keep people subtly in line. For someone who never met Gurdjieff and understood nothing about him to produce this sly kind of guru pornography is both unfair and finally dangerous, since he drops the subtle hints about the ‘murder’ to be expected from those who don’t submit to the absolute authority of the guru.
Solionensius
/2008/08/06/solionensius/
Here’s a quote from a J.G. Bennett site: jgbennett.net/
Bennett was introduced by Gurdjieff to the notion of Solioonensius, or times of heightened energy within a part of our planet, or the whole of our planet. Bennett researched this idea, and reached the conclusion that times of such heightened energy are often seen as terrestrial catastrophes, but that in fact these have always been times of accelerated evolution for the human race. In other words, this is a time of great creativity for us people.
Gurdjieff indicated to Bennett, that according to certain ancient and secret wisdom schools, the present period of Solioonensius commenced as early as 1903, and will continue for some considerable time into the future, placing great demands on all forms of life, particularly human beings. This is a challenge for mankind. The nature of our world will change and humanity must adapt, evolve or be destroyed.
This is a typical statement from Gurdjieff about ‘new ages’, the kind of thing he gets away with due to ‘general prestige’ but which sow complete confusion in the minds of Gurdjieffians for the simple reason that it is nonsense. To say that certain ancient schools could predict a ‘new era’ from thousands of years ago beggars belief, and the simple retort is to ask where is the proof.
One of the reasons for the study of the ‘eonic effect’ is to try and sort out this outrageous and self-serving claims about ‘new ages’ all of which are really an attempt to displace modernity and its democratic breakthroughs.
Following a beelzebub is never a duty
/2008/08/07/following-a-beelzebub-is-never-a-duty/
Link: Comment from angry groupie (lost)
Mr. Printer, before you preach with such indignation consider that Gurdjieff called himself by the name of a devil, Beelzebub, and that following a devil is never a duty. Does it not strike you as odd? Cease and desist, and leave the ordinary people in life who know better alone. The joke’s on you.
Just what the blazes is the ‘work’?
/2008/08/09/just-what-the-blazes-is-the-work/
I have to ask a really basic question at this point. What the blazes is the ‘work’. The whole game is suspicious.
Note that Buddhism makes very clear what it is up to: the path toward enlightenment. Any cavorting in archetypal space gets prompt feedback with reality: what are you doing….
Students of Gurdjieff suffer unconscious despair and create a life-cave in which their spiritual path is in actuality turned off, and they have nothing to do with themselves. Behind all the noise about the work there is nothing. In part because Gurdjieff being unenlightened had to make up a substitute/
The subtle trick of the Gurdjieff formulation is to keep you twiddling your thumbs with a non-aim, the ‘work’, by someone’s else unspecified definition. If that means slave labor over ten reincarnations, then you asked for it and any criticism is a failure of spiritual obedience.
If is a false formulation.
And it has, as we saw yesterday, subtle political implications of a reactionary kind. These people are really a kind of capitalist class who think their disciples are ‘shit’, and can be exploited, the ‘work’.
Gurdjieff’s language speaks of the ‘factory’ of spiritual energies, and the game is to skim the sucker in the ‘work’ off the top, bleed off his meagre supply of hydrogen 24, and he none the wiser. An honest Christian no less. Aha, esoteric Christianity.
Dunno, was Jesus another ‘big devil’ like Gurdjieff. I am amazed at old G’s presumption to speak for the Nazarene.
So don’t get jerked around by the ‘work’. It is an undefined abstraction that will automatically set up in the direction of a phantom ‘aim’ as the idea revolves in the brain looking for a concept slot it was never given.
So these ‘workers’ are really scabs on the strike line.
In Search Of P.D. Ouspensky
/2008/08/10/in-search-of-pd-ouspensky/
There is an online selection from Lachman’s In Search Of P.D. Ouspensky, a not entirely adequate but still somewhat critical look at Ouspensky.
Don’t suffer Ouspensky’s fate! Don’t get conned into donating your talents to the propaganda systems of occultists too corrupt and too ignorant to produce their own books. Examine the Gurdjieff legacy, it seems to be a series of predatory episodes in which he tried to induce some high-powered public intellectuals to write his books, the rest being mostly sawdust ‘work’ with people for who he had no further use beyond being stage props in a ‘school’.
The need for critique
/2008/08/11/the-need-for-critique/
The reactions to criticizing Gurdjieff, witness the comments, are likely to be caustic, but the time has come to move on, and, in any case, these ‘defenses’ of Gurdjieffianity are invariably misinformed or ‘true believer’ spiels.
What is needed is a critical literature that can forewarn the innocent reader of Ouspensky of the deceptive quality of the so-called ‘teaching’.
The whole game has expanded to vast proportions and yet produced nothing, taking up the time and energy of those who might more productively search elsewhere.
WHEE and modernity
One of the objectives of this blog is to correct the false understanding of history visible in Gurdjieff’s rants on the subject, and in the process to amplify on the treatment of the issues in World History And The Eonic Effect, a book recommended on this issue. The book has an approach to recasting the misleading issue of the ‘fourth way’, a path that is summoned up yet never really specified in the discourses post-Ouspensky.
In general the conceptions of the New Age in many ‘spiritual’ groups are misleading and denigrate the culture of modernity, one that is probably far more conducive to ‘spiritual action’ than anything in antiquity. We are beset with all these reactionary ‘gurus’ who claim a preposterous authority, when in reality they are ignorant.
I hope that WHEE can help in correcting the false historical perspective peddled by so many New Age ‘prophets’ who want to overturn the modern world in the name of some kind of absurd ashram politics.
Ouspensky and the Code of Manu
/2008/08/12/ouspensky-and-code-of-manu/
The list of books we have discussed refers to Ouspensky’s Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, a very dubious analysis of the question of evolution in terms of Gurdjieff’s oversimplified rubric of the ‘man one through seven’.
In addition Ouspensky’s book is vitiated by some really reactionary remarks about the Code of Manu and the spurious Hindu law of caste. The idea that this the division of castes has an evolutionary basis is the most harebrained nonsense, the worst of the rubbish emerging from the false Gurdjieffian view of history.
Never preach to victims of torture
/2008/08/13/never-preach-to-victims-of-torture/
Mr. Parzifal is well satisfied with ‘work’ cliches. But could just shut up, and should keep in mind a basic thought:
Don’t preach to the victims of torture.
Limits of enneagram and rational fractions
/2008/08/15/limits-of-enneagram-and-rational-fractions/
I have always had a problem with the enneagram. A glyph of universal knowledge selects one rational fraction (1/7) as the basis (evidently implied) for indexing this. Another Pythagorean disregard of the real numbers.
E.J. Gold more the ‘magus/beast’ type
/2008/08/16/ej-gold-more-the-magusbeast-type/
I wouldn’t want to be unfair to a major devil like Gurdjieff/Beelzebub by calling him a ‘magus/best’, a designation more fittingly applied to E. J. Gold, save only that he flunked the magus category, and, pursued by the Abramelin demons, he can only manage voodoo, and roves the sufi wasteland trying to take over the ‘work’ for Crowleyanity, Ouspensky fans beware
Review of Ouspensky’s POMPE
/2008/08/17/review-of-ouspenskys-pompe/
Laying to rest the great lie of the Code of Manu, September 5, 2000 (from Nemo)
An old review of Ouspensky’s Psychology Of Man’s Possible Evolution
In this work Ouspensky perpetuates an historical confusion that vitiates his presentation of the so-called ‘Work’ and the ‘Fourth Way’ by injecting his obsessive concern with the antiquated law of caste and the Code of Manu. The claims for the esotericism of the Work, derivative from Sufism, whatever their merits, are needlessly and quite egregiously burderned with this aura of the archaic Russian reactionary. Ouspensky’s almost de Maistrean viewpoint, so popular among oblivious liberal westerners lured into this esoteric hunger by its beguiling inuendoes, contains the absurd suggestion that spiritual esotericism condones and sanctifies one of the most oppressive exploitations in history. Check the history here, unvarnished, and the place of this thinking in the destruction of the Indian Buddhist world. The Code of Manu is an impostor, and springs from the post-Buddhist consolidation of the brahmins whose legacy was to make spiritual equality seem anomalous, when it was always fundamental. Such thinking emerging in the context of early twentieth century fascism was, and is, provocative in the extreme, and should be laid to rest.
What is surprising is the inability of many adherents of this so-called spiritual path to face the simple reality that the classic spiritual paths were and are more compatible with a basic democratic attitude than otherwise. The reason is desperately simple, these ways prosper better in an open society!
Never feel obligated to take this nonsense seriously.
Review of Ouspensky’s ISOM
/2008/08/17/review-of-ouspenskys-isom/
In search of the head on one’s shoulders, August 29, 2000 (Nemo)
…and an old review of In Search Of The Miraculous
As a classic account of Ouspensky’s encounter with Gurdjieff, thence with a disguised version of the Sufi world, this book is remarkable and worth reading as reminder of the many spiritual disguises of one and the same potential self-consciousness of men of all eras, but as an indication of a spiritual path actually existing it deserves a severe caution, if not a skull and cross bones, as on a jar of poison. Beware of it, and the people who claim to exemplify it after so many years. Disappointing, but necessarily so. Try reading a similar work such as Idries Shah’s The Sufis, and note the arbritrary nature of all the content (by and large) describing about the same type of predestigation of method, always the same wiseacred method in the end described plainly in Buddhist sutras on vipassana. The question of the esoteric belongs to authoritarian worlds in a state of hiding, one that is unnecessary now. Bright-eyed candidates of liberal bent for this path created from thin air from a mess of theosophical pottage might consider the reactionary nature of this sage Gurdjieff, the book’s account of the trail of the Whites heading south at the onset of revolution, and the plain fact that Gurdjieff, for all his fancy occultism, was a de Maistrean sort of guy, who disapproved of the abolition of slavery, and liked a submissive relationship in disciples. The grounds of spiritual authority subtlely suggested to induce the impulse to surrender the will as one’s freedom are spurious, the more so if Gurdjieff in Ouspensky’s own view was not even an honest man. This work belongs to an ancient world, and is misleading because it seems to draped in the esoteric and a touch of the modern, when in fact the cosmology is a pastiche of ancient Indian Samkhya transformed in magician smoke. The verdict on a method of spirituality should be the number of its successes, and it was the Indian teacher Rajneesh who noted that this path has never produced a result, realized men. The reason is that the terms described, both as philosophy and method, are too arbritrarily exotic, and finally under suspicion of being made up and leave enthusiasts permanently frozen at the starting point. To concoct a mystery of the enneagram and call it esoteric wisdom takes a peculiar type of brazen hucksterism, since the whole notion is surely a complete fiction, not to say a put on. One of the warnings of Buddhism is, don’t get fancy, and beware of speculation. These vices of metaphysical salesmanship are grimly pervasive in this work and leave desperate seekers tying their head in knots trying to compute self-remembering or produce an alchemy of higher hydrogens in an addlepated brain. Be ye Lamps unto yourselves, the Buddha warned. Before becoming the piece in another all too tricky play designed to stun the wary, and reveal nothing at cost, it is well to remember the warning. And it is worth remembering Ouspensky’s starting point in Tertium Organon with its solid Kantian beginning and metaphysical austerity, all thrown away in this beguiling path that left its own expositor with nothing. Anyway, Gurdjieff is curiously unique, do not therefore grant this to those who claim his teaching. As for the occult demos claimed, either they are fake, and we have fraud, or they are genuine, and we have a fallen yogi indulging in left-hand path skullduggery.
Sadists and masochists
/2008/08/21/sadists-and-masochists/
There is a lot to talk about here, if you are interested or agreeable. I am a little wary here since I am not a teacher (but could have been), and have no interest in being one. So I would merely point out that you have learned the first lesson here that setting oneself up as a teacher is an unconscious impulse in many, and too frequently in just the fashion you indicate, complete with BDSM implications.
That’s one way to tell the impostors here, neurotics oblivious to Freud (of whom one should be wary, another false ‘teacher’), what to say of the sufisitic realm.
There’s another dimension to this at the next level, beyond the fools you have encountered: sufi sharks who want to know if their ‘marks’ are masochists. In a teaching with so much dark stealth manipulation as the Beelzebub game exploitative versions of ‘conscious labors and intentional sufferings’ can be deftly betwisted into torturing an unconsciously willing victim.
Make darn sure you aren’t a masochist before you tackle Gurdjieffianity’s devil’s lair of these ‘psychologists’. Actually, everyone probably has the whole shebang in their unconscious in different combinations, the question is to be able to exorcize this module and neutralize in your own self-consciousness (hopefully with better methods than the Freudian).
Exploiting the masochist (‘he really wants to be screwed’) is a shadow sufi game I have seen, sometimes with a decoy girl to stage a come on. The motive was ‘thieving baraka’.
So, there are all stages to the ‘evils’ that sufis do.
So relax, at least you survived a useless phoney. Not too much harm done. Be ready for the trickier swindlers down the pike.
Dracula gurus
/2008/08/23/dracula-gurus/
Years ago, living in Sacramento, I ran into a down and out psychically sensitive ‘disciple wannabe’ of Da Free John, who couldn’t manage to ‘reach the ashram’ (they wouldn’t let him near the place, they are quite hoitytoidy it seems), content to read one of his books, staring at the photos of the ‘master’ in rapt devotion. At some point he had got into a compulsion to sell plasma, that racket for the financially desperate.
I didn’t connect at the time, but years later I read that Da Free John was setting his own disciples to sell plasma for the ashram, incomprehensible behavior until you get his ‘vampire/dracula’ fixation (which is in one of his books).
That’s an example of the dangers sensitive people can suffer around gurus (an extreme case, perhaps) in these ‘energy fields’. The problems can never be resolved in public.
Go to Darwiniana, find the search box, and type in ‘da free john’, ‘vampire’, and ‘plasma’ and you should find the previous discussions of all that there.
Some of these ‘fuck ups’ are draculas, then, and incarnate to suck the blood out of a fresh group of disciples, if you get my drift.
Somebody drive a stake through his heart.
Rajneesh and the fascist connection
/2008/08/27/rajneesh-and-the-fascist-connection/
(I am not sure who put up this comment post. Update from Nemo, 2019: I was for long confused by Rajneesh, aware only of his books and never having seen his ashram. The early years of this blog assumed that he was ‘enlightened’, but recently, cf. the recent documentary on Netflix, I have rejected this idea…cf later posts)
It’s funny, I encountered this phenomenon, also in 1988, but in New York’s East Village, at a time when hundreds of sannyasins lived there.
From Calder’s essay on Osho
The last time I visited the Rajneesh ashram in Poona, India, was in 1988. The ashram was literally like a loud convention of German Brownshirts (storm troopers) by that point. Rajneesh, alias “Osho,” was still very popular in Germany, due in part to his comments in the German magazine Der Spiegel, which were widely interpreted as being pro-Hitler. Many young Germans, who were looking for a strong and charismatic leader, were thrilled by his words. Those who lost loved ones during World War II were justifiably shocked.
Even in the early 1970s in Bombay, Rajneesh made careless statements which could easily be interpreted as being pro-Hitler and pro-fascist. In one lecture on “esoteric groups” he claimed that Adolf Hitler had been telepathically propped up by an occult Buddhist group that Rajneesh himself was in contact with. During World War II it is well known that a number of Brahmin Indian yogis and Japanese “Zen masters” had supported the Axis cause and the extermination of the “inferior races,” so Rajneesh’s claim was not entirely surprising, if not totally believable.
In Poona, Rajneesh gave an infamous lecture in which he stated that Jews had given Hitler “no choice” but to exterminate them. In his last years Rajneesh declared that “I have fallen in love with this man (Adolf Hitler). He was crazy, but I am crazier still.” Rajneesh said that he wanted his sannyasins “to take over the world” and that he had studied Hitler to gain insight into how to accomplish the task. For a man who portrayed himself as the world’s smartest, highest, and greatest soul, such remarks were proof to me that his drug use had destroyed the quality of his mind.
Rajneesh’s comments about Hitler could be discounted as obnoxious but largely harmless hot air if it were not for the fact that he put many of Hitler’s techniques into practice. Rajneesh used Hitler’s “big lie” method of mind control very effectively, and he demanded total surrender from his troops (disciples). Rajneesh condoned illegal spying on his own followers and used informants to weed out the disloyal. Ma Anand Sheela, his personal secretary, turned the tables on Rajneesh by bugging Rajneesh’s trademark high-backed chair, a betrayal his “third eye” never detected. The Oregon police later found Rajneesh’s illegally taped conversations, but due to rules of evidence they could not be used against him in a court of law. The tapes were reported to be highly damning as to Rajneesh’s culpability in much of the commune’s day to day illegal activities.
Rajneesh turned many of his disciples into the equivalent of armed Brownshirts. I have received letters from several of Rajneesh’s former security guards who admitted they had fallen under the spell of fascism and now regretted their behavior and attitudes. One wrote that he did not even know how to meditate, and that the thrill of power was what kept him loyal to his great leader. In Poona, Rajneesh guards beat up an annoying local resident, his hands held behind his back as the guards pummeled him. In Oregon, Rajneesh guards were armed to the teeth with handguns and military style semiautomatic assault rifles. Rajneesh was never an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian pacifist, but he did have a unhealthy fascination with Adolf Hitler, as well as the United States Army General, George Patton. According to Hugh Milne (Shivamurti), Rajneesh watched the movie Patton over and over again on his big screen projection television at his ranch house in Oregon.
Bennett on the two ways
/2008/08/29/bennett-on-the-two-ways/
There is a lot to say here about this essay, cited from: Ibrahim Gamard, but I am treading on somewhat difficult terrain, so I will make some tentative commentary.
The author is giving some significant advice, which Westerners simply won’t take: make your ‘sufism’ sit under the umbrella of Islam. That’s unrealistic advice, at this point, but raises an issue that lurks behind the Ouspensky/Bennett reactions to Gurdjieff.
First, let me say it: how do we know if this prejudice against gnosticism isn’t just the usual ‘outsider’ bias? I won’t denigrate this author on those grounds since I don’t really understand him or, for that matter, the culture of Islamic Sufism.
But this issue is transposed in Bennett’s writings, but recast in a form that can make sense to a secularist, or secular religionist, e.g. a Protestant Christian. (I don’t buy the usage of ‘secularism’ as being anti-religion necessarily, I am not a Protestant)
Bennett quietly distinguishes the ‘path of accelerated transformation’ and the ‘path of Objective Morality’. The author here is trying to do that also, but he is up against the wall and substitues ‘Islam’ for Bennett’s ‘objective morality’.
The point is that the whole question of transformation has been hijacked by what seem to be a bunch of hooligans, can this be right? So Bennett points to another way, slower, but steady, within the context of, note he doesn’t say religion, although he means that, but ‘objective morality’. Bennett is very devious and makes things up, but his point is clear: being a gnostic Faust like the Gurdjieff’s raises the question, is this spiritual at all? How could nature destroy all those in pious honesty that endure the tide of history only to be destroyed while a bunch of gnostic gangsters form a criminal monopoly on soul. That can’t be right, although many in despairing panic have thought as much.
Thus he points to the possibility of those in the general stream of life who try to abide by a basic ethic, and survive without the spiritual fineries of Mephistophelean gnostics (or sufis?).
The point is vital, save only that there are no specifics. You need to keep your eyes peeled on life, and find your way through its confusions with some kind of basic integrity. Sadly, the religions themselves are degenerated vehicles many times for that. In some ways secular culture offers an equivalent vehicle.
Issues of soul are confusing because the language is decayed and useless. I will post something from Schopenhauer that might help. The term ‘soul’ is being used in different senses in these discussions, and the essay cited rightly protests that the ‘gnostic’ claim on soul is wrong, but what does it all mean?
The basic point, and the term ‘soul’ is useless now, is that everyone has a soul, in a sense compatible with science in the sense of Kantian/Schopenhaurian transcendental idealism: this is the case by definition of terms, almost, in that our ‘totality’ is not fully a space-time entity.
All these ‘gnostics’ like Gurdjieff are talking about something else.
The basic issue here is that you don’t need to find some fourth way school, to pursue ‘soul’ or the rest of it: it’s all embedded in ordinary life. But your position is not secure in that regard, you have many chances and opportunities, but they are no unlimited.
Behind the degenerated stupidity of fire and brimstone preachers lies a simple issue: as just said, ‘soul’ is your birthright, but you don’t have forever to play around with that.
Enough just for the moment.
These issues are important for those entangled in the ‘fourth way’ stream: your chances of finding these hidden schools are almost zero. Be about your business in ordinary life, as the vehicle by default, and beware of entanglement with these ‘gnostic’ desperadoes, you will not only not get the booby prize, you will end up worse off.
Be alert to life to figure this all out on your own, wary of all parties, secular, religious, or (Mephistophelean gnostic/sufi)
The guru puzzle and the gang war
/2008/09/03/the-guru-puzzle-and-the-gang-war/
One of the puzzles of the last generation is the extraordinary number of scandals that have taken down one guru after another. There is something suspicious about it, and as we focus on discrediting these people we should also keep in mind the spiritual war going on in the background, and further the clear signs of a certain kind of malevolent action targeting the character flaws of sundry teachers, and then unleashing subtle attacks on that basis. The favorite is the likely presence of unconscious sexual issues, making even figures of ‘higher consciousness’ vulnerable, often not knowing what hit them. So be advised if you ever are tempted to be a guru yourself! Those black magicians will attack your unconscious forthwith.
No kidding, and I have met such people, even caught them in the act of indulging such tactics. One of the most suspicious characters here is E.J.Gold, and some figures unknown in public connected to him.
Remember, in the Crowley game you are either top dog, or nothing, which generates a morbid impulse to attack and destroy other spiritual figures. Watch out for this sordid figure name of E. J. Gold, he is very sneaky, and has never generated the kind of scandal that besets others. Perhaps because he knows the dark side of the game in practice.
Note, indeed, how none of his disciples, yet, has been able to produce an expose, so far.
This is then a first. Say your prayers, sillykitty.
It was Crowley, at a dumb moment, who challenged Gurdjieff to a magical duel! A stupid thought for him, but in a larger context not so far off what goes on. Crowley was a small fry, so…
Maybe they will kill each other off.
The Sci Fi connection
/2008/09/03/the-sci-fi-connection/
good link from SK. I put ‘sillykitty’ on the link list, so he can generate one of our ‘sub-blogs’.
I need to get the material at Darwiniana on the suspected connection between Hubbard, science fiction writers in the early ‘Amazing Sci Fi’ days, E.J. Gold, and finally various ‘sufis’ in disguise.
The sci fi idea, of course, is already present in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub, with its rocket ship. There is a connection vis Idries Shah and the writer Lessing. There was some sufi circuit in the sci fi world and its writers back when, and the family connection and emergence of Gold from that milieu is well known. Not all these figures have the sheer vulgarity of Hubbard, and are too clever to indulge in his style of shennanigans, and that makes their trail much harder to follow. You easily fall for their spiritual sufi front. Lest you do, remember that Gold’s sidekick is the ‘archdruid’, ‘archie’, the founder of the pornographic magazine, the San Francisco Ball.
I think pious sufi types should be advised of their silliness in thinking in terms of ‘sufi saints’.
Gold, by the way, had a long preoccupation with Hubbard (styling himself his critic) and his emeters, and there was a ‘course’ sequence, and era, when the emeter was part of his imitations or play on scientology. But of course the game was different.
The emeter, by the way, is basically a galvanic skin response circuit, absolutely nothing mysterious, and a bargain basement version of a lie detector. There was a gold group that tried to produce their own version, in a piece of electronic junk for sale. Also, Idries Shah was an electronics whiz, supposedly. This was in the seventies.
SK, thanks
(maybe we should just put the whole Hubbard article on the blog here. I am a little leary of people’s copyright affirmations, if any)
Lentrohamsanin and Gurdjieff’s attack on democracy
/2008/09/07/lentohamsanin-and-gurdjieffs-attack-on-democray/
One of the most devious, essentially fascist, strains in Gurdjieff can be seen in his spurious tale of Lentrohamsanin. The account in Beelzebub’s tales is completely opaque, but at several points he gives his game away when he tries to make a villain out of a proponent of Equal Rights!
The portrait of this figure is a complete setup of paste up.
Anyone thinking of the ‘fourth way’ as a path should note this point. You are essentially declared unequal in this game, and therefore the question of your receiving anything of the teaching beyond rote obedience to the outer form of its doctrine is taken away at the beginning.
In general, Beelzebub’s Tales is the most grossly overrated piece of deceptive junk in the New Age movement, generating its poisonous doctrines behind a veil of obscurity.
It is all the same ‘New Age’ propaganda against modernity and its democratic innovations, an issue that sticks in the craw of guru after guru, among them, beside Gurdjieff, Rajneesh, who also concealed his fascist tendencies behind a lot of fine words.
In general the semi-mythical figures invented by Gurdjieff completely distort the history of religion when what is needed is the simple history of known historical individuals and their movements.
Confusion over evolutionary spirituality
A Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality:
Three centuries of progressive thinkers reveal that evolution has always been a fundamentally spiritual concept.
Is this really true? Out of context New Agers will make mincemeat of the statement, even as the sausage of Kant, Schelling, Hegel under the misleading label ‘idealism’ is connected to the new ‘evolutionary ideology’ of the gurus.
Another liability is the hopeless confusion of ‘involution’ and ‘evolution’ in New Age circles. This distinction has never been clarified. To use the term ‘evolution’ threatens still another piece of dead meat in that sausage. Maybe let German idealists alone, unless you care to study them, or create a consistent evolutionary theory that is practical and sorts out the various usages, a task, I can assure you, that is completely beyond the capacity of systematically muddled New Agers.
Study of the eonic effect can help here: a genuine depiction of ‘evolution’ in terms of history and the evolution of man, that has some empircal and practical aspects, and which can create a context for the study of the evolution of religion, and yet give some meaning to the sense desired, but mislabeled ‘evolution’ as ’spiritual practice’.
The term ‘evolution’ has been botched by Darwinists, but the New Agers have done no better, and it is false that these gurus are ‘evolutionary guides’.
Early nineteenth century ‘New Age’ movement sources
/2008/09/10/early-nineteenth-century-new-age-movement-sources/
Rawlinson’s essay starts with some interesting points: he notes how the flood of gurus has reached a point that the West now has more activity in this field than the East (a distinction I dislike). Note how the real source of this energy is that of ‘modernity’, in the context of globalization. It is not inherently spiritual. Note the irony. The New Age is filled with so much nonsense along anti-modernist lines, but these impulses are really cut flowers with no generative power for the future. We need to take stock of this phenomenon beyond the say-so of the gurus themselves who are elements in a larger field.
This phenomenon Rawlinson describes is actually sourcing around the time of the Romantic movement, and as so often the first to note it had an objectivity that was later lost.
I recommend studying this early history before Blavatsky because this moment when, e.g. Indian texts, began to reach the West animated figures like Schopenhauer who produced what is most certainly the best rendition of ‘sutric psychology’ in existence. That’s the irony. The ‘great work’ of translation was done instantly, and all the rubbish that comes later has served mostly to confuse people. The whole thing is latent in Kant, whose key or clef was transposed by Schopenhauer, who detected the latent strain of ‘upanishadism’ in the Kantian critical system.
It is interesting that Schopenhauer read the ‘Upanishads’ in an english translation of a Persian translation!
Look carefully at Ouspensky (Tertium Organon gives the game away), and then Gurdjieff, and then finally Bennett. They are trying, without saying so, to bypass the ‘Kantian revolution’ in metaphysics, because they have an agenda that wishes to revive a pre-Kantian world of thought.
Signing away your rights
/2008/09/15/signing-away-your-rights/
As noted in the Lentrohamsanin post, the Gurdjieff work is a stealth come-on for getting a ‘disciple’ to surrender his ‘rights’ in the name of the work, no laughing matter when you discover that this will be taken literally, leaving you open to some devastating forms of cruelty.
This isn’t a fictional paranoia, but an ongoing operation in the present.
We need to call it quits on the whole idea of the Gurdjieff work: it is an impostor in the general stream of cultural movements, this fact disguised behind its made up hype over various cosmic laws, their status about that of the enneagram.
Now we know why All And Everything is so unclear!
Gurdjieff’s guinea pigs, the dark hints
/2008/09/15/gurdjieffs-guinea-pigs-the-dark-hints/
The point of the theme about rights is the concealed exploitation on that basis of various individuals for experiments. Gurdjieff, unbelievably, hinted as much and gave the game away, almost.
This issue requires tremendously knowlegable people to detect and police, and, there is no such police!
This question should be one of the first foundations of an indictment of the grotestque ‘Gurdjieff work’, but since we can do nothing, it is important to at least sound the warning through whatever media we have available.
Don’t let this legacy become a tradition! There is absolutely no special priveledge granted gurus in such matters. Get someone to beat you over the head until you realize the ethical issues here.
We can beat this cancerated sufism, all it takes is some public exposure. The lilly wilts pretty fast as people come to and snap out of the propaganda.
Why was Gurdjieff worried about Kant?
/2008/09/15/why-was-gurdjieff-worried-about-kant/
It is interesting to realize the concealed theme of Kant in the Gurdjieff legacy, a point that is obvious from Ouspensky’s Tertium Organon, a fairly typical effort in the line of works attempting to ‘beat the rap’ against metaphysics.
But with Gurdjieff there is a suspicious strain (as in his incoherent discussion of ‘conscience’) of ‘Kant avoidance’. (He may have been too stupid to read him)
One of the great tools of self-defense is to consider, then, the austere points of Kantian ethics ( a very difficult subject, find some introductory work), and to see how Gurdjieff, and for that matter many other New Age figures, is trying to bypass the issues of the categorical imperative. Lucky for him, the general public is too ignorant to realize how they are being manipulated, and simply gape at the wonders of the magicians as these steal attention from the blatant lie that fronts the whole game.
No ‘consciousness’ doesn’t override ethics.
Gurdjieffianity and right-wing political tactics
/2008/09/22/gurdjieffianity-and-right-wing-political-tactics/
It is worth studying what has happened in the last generation in the American political sphere, where the onset of neo-liberalism was fueled with a set of tactics to coopt ordinary, working voters. There is no other way for an elite to dominate majorities from a minority stance. The dynamics of this political finesse are worth careful study.
From there you can begin to study the analogous, if quite different, tactics behind the ‘game owners’ of sufistic/Gurdjieff (and other, viz. certain Buddhist) legacies. How to create allegiance to elites from those who stand to gain nothing from such movements? The work is like that, and, indeed, the overtones of the term ‘work’ itself are ironically a play on the idea of those who are the workers and those who are the bosses.
Study Ouspensky’s book (and Gurdjeff’s) and try to find the way in which the ‘sale’ is made with clever come ons and insistence on traditionalist obedience. And the whole nine yards. As years go by and the revolving door spins around the functioning of this swindle slowly become clear.
You would do well to consider if you are really ‘in’ this game, or just an Ouspensky bibliomane/idiot with zero prospects in a rigged game that has no intention of helping you out, quite the contrary. This game is especially vicious, with its hidden fascist anti-modernism. The game has given itself away, but such is the momentum of propaganda and the magnitude of the background tradition of spiritual authority wrested from thin air noone seems to put two and two together. And it takes a considerable experience and occult savvy to come upon the completely concealed conspiracies of reaction being played out even as we speak.
It would take five minutes to produce a thriving democratic spirituality for a new age of freedom, but there is noone with the nerve to take on the ancient establishments whose self-perpetuation is accomplished anywhere but in public movements.
Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe
/2008/09/28/bennetts-the-dramatic-universe-2/
The posts on Samkhya are also an indirect commentary on the writings of J.G. Bennett, and I have been looking over his The Dramatic Universe again, a book I read many years ago at the same time Star Wars appeared, and the effect of the book was a similar transient enthusiasm. On the one hand a critical examination of the claims of Gurdjieffianity are important, on the other a blanket rejection of the traditions cited in this ‘religion’ is not responsible history, just because one is critical of Gurdjieff.
Bennett’s work, as noted, reflects the legacy of Samkhya and his rendition is open to a lot of questions. But there aren’t many exemplars of that ancient genre, which could, potentially, become a lingua franca of religious questions (always a failed hope), and the attempt of ‘the next lunatic who wants to try’ has a morbid interest. Bennett was a man of very high intelligence in many areas, and the audacity of his project requires a kind of chase plane approach just to keep up with him. This man figured in the twenties or thirties the Kaluza-Klein wing of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and wanted to adapt it to his, or Ouspensky’s, system. A foolish idea, or brilliant, it makes one sit up and take notice.
But his systematics isn’t rigorous enough for this kind of grafting. Things pop out of the woodwork with a kind of facile logic that can leave you paralyzed at what seem to be valid, often cogent, insights, but which conceal the outrageous premises of the whole operation. To do this at all requires an endrun around a basic Kantian challenge to metaphysics, and, wouldn’t ya know, the first pages of the first volume show Bennett, either with a guilty conscience or else at the stage of crossing the threshold of delusion, claiming he is going to replace Kant’s categories with his own. That’s a foolish beginning for such a smart endeavor, and I fear that if you are wondering about the details of the result, you may not succeed, because they are a labyrinth that began with shaky starting assumptions.”We aren’t going to be stopped by Kant” seems to be the shadow motive here.
So you can pull the plug there if you want. The other alternative is to be strapped to the mast like Odysseus as you go past the land of the lotus eaters, and keep a list in your mind of the assumptions being bought on cheap credit as this remarkcagle systematics starts to fill with hot air.
The basic assumption, which long predates Bennett, is that there is a basic cosmic triad of three impulses, a view that is as persistent as it is undemonstrable, or even explicable. Unless that question can be gotten straight the whole Samkhya enterprise remains a mysterious puzzle. Theological renditions are completely worthless, and litter the landscape of Hinduism and Christianity. Bennett’s attempt to rationalize that legacy of hopeless confusion is not without value, but he changes gears and accepts stray dogs in the middle of his serious section, because he is too humbly prone to look the other way when the distortions of Samkhya in other religions are under examination. We have to suspect that the doctrine of the Trinity is a garbled version of a Samkhya idea, and, boy, what a garble.
Perhaps the whole mess of pottage is beyond rescue. Modernity made a good attempt to escape from the past here, but, with Hegel and his dialectic, the whole question resurfaced like the White Whale in the middle of that modernity, and has been in the Marxist version the source of some considerable chaos. So the subject won’t stay buried. The reason for my continuing interest.
One reason the issue is important is that any use of the Samkhya, so clear on the surface in many ways, requires a strategy to deal with its basic framework which is that of the ‘gunas’ or basic triads, whose character between everything from the non-dual of Vedanta to Gurdjieff’s law of three to the dialectic of Hegel/Marx. Getting that straight is perhaps impossible, and one has to ask, where did the original Samkhya come from. Gurdjieff, in fact, noted that the human mind can’t handle this kind of logic. Period. So what to do with it, if you can’t handle it? Bennett does a series of compromises and lays down what might be a flatland version that is at least consistent with itself, leaving a mysterious result hard to evaluate, the more so as it does produce suggestive solutions to some of the obscure puzzles of self, will, and mechanism. But always the result is not something you can finaly bank on.
A further problem is the way Bennett got hijacked by some kind of Christian path of his own (it is visible in his autobiography) and his effort to adapt Samkhya to his Christian theology, at the seams, in many ways discredits the whole work. We discussed the issue of ‘pandit-knapping’, or the kidnapping of potential propandists of high intelligence, at Darwinian blog, and maybe we should repost some of that here. I think Christians should stop this pilfering from the Samkhya cookie jar. Its legacy was not theistic.
There is a lot to consider here, maybe a series like the /gmancon series on Bennett’s DU might be in order, but the labor required is considerable, and the logistics impossible (I don’t even own copies of the books, obtained from a distant library to get the original first edition version of Vol I, and always due for return before I get any work done), so we shall see.
Bennett slipping away from Gurdjieff?
/2008/10/04/bennett-slipping-away-from-gurdjieff/
Looking at Bennett’s work we have to ask if he created a toxic hybrid of an ancient and classic Indian sutra discourse and the deceptive and misleading Gurdjieff racket. The answer is that he did, but… By the time he writes The Dramatic Universe he has created an independent discourse, with, unfortunately, some links still embedded, but the text is already virtually independent of Gurdjieffianity, e.g. the dangerous issues of reciprocal maintenance, etc..
In any case this is not true of Gurdjieff’s legacy as such. Any student of Samkhya will not realize the vicious and predatory novelty Gurdjieff has created of their subject.
Sounding an alarm!
Standing up to pseudo-authority
/2008/10/07/standing-up-to-pseudo-authority/
One of the strangest things about the Gurdjieff movement is the way it has created a myth of the indispensability of the guru. This, of course, has a long history. Yet the irony is that Gurdjieff himself threw a monkey wrench into that tradition. The evidence of the potential for and reality of exploitation, the spurious character of much of the so-called teaching left behind the obvious fact that the hue and cry over the need for a teacher is actually false. Groups without teachers, suitably organized, could probably do better.
We have reached the end of the age of the guru, and the cynicism of many of its exemplars proves the point, and shows the cynicism in its temporary renewal as part of the New Age movement.
Working alone has its problems! But if there are no other alternatives then best to get on with. Meanwhile, please note that this is already the case: all this Gurdjieff group talk is just that talk, done without teachers.
So be it.
Sufis, poet-knappers, Shah’s poppycock on Shakespeare
/2008/10/19/sufis-poet-knappers-shahs-poppycock-on-shakespeare/
Charles Upton’s case is recognizable for anyone who lived through the New Age seventies, and I give a somewhat indirect or riddling discussion here, linking to Darwiniana, Rumi, sufism, poets….
The Tibetans and Sufis were lustful in their hearts to kidnap poets for their causes, to bestow celebrity glitz and social legitimation. Upton’s fate in that regard is the standard game: turn him into a promoter of anti-modernism. To the term ‘pandit-knapper’ we should add that of ‘poet-knapper’.
They tried that with me (I was a very good poet, maybe, or else no celebrity) and I found them out.
After all the talk of sufi love the tactics of hatred in the ‘anti-modern jihad’, fully evident in Upton’s junky System of Antichrist, are breathtakingly disingenuous.
The loss of autonomy is also tragic.
We aren’t kidding here if we are indulging in warnings about sufistic quicksand paths, keeping in mind that we can’t judge a whole movement by its behind the scenes operators. But in the final analysis we need to call a spade a spade and warn a new generation to be wary of the exploitations of spiritual paths. These issues can’t be lumped together the usual analysis of cults, although that is a relevant additional discourse.
We are so conditioned to spiritual reverence in a false mode that the history of sufism appears to us only as some museum worship of the Rumis and their sagas. The question of poets in sufism is especially ancient, and it seems as though the ‘sufis-come-lately’ of later times are predatory operators trying to imitate that ancient world, unable to do so.
I note in passing Idries Shah’s absurd attempt at another variant of poet-knapping in his claim that Shakespeare was a sufi. Proof?
Nonsense.
Cycles, eschatology, and the idea of progress
/2008/10/21/cycles-eschatology-and-the-idea-of-progress/
It is definitely important to distinguish cyclical and eschatological thinking, but there is also a close connection between the two, a logical one at least, whatever the history.
It is hardly surprising that the two might blend in the minds of New Agers. Cyclical thinking, at least most versions of it, see a kind of timeless or non-progressive cycling of ages. While the eschatological idea projects to the end times beyond such a static, if cyclical, world.
It is worth reading Norman Cohn’s book, cited here, Chaos, Cosmos, and the World to Come, where the author makes the case that the birth of Zoroastrianism witnessed the birth of the first version of the idea of progress. Time was no longer seen as endlessly cyclical, but as culminating in an endtime resolution. Entering into the Biblical epics, thence to the legacy traditions of monotheistic civilizations, they, supposedly, give birth to the idea of progress in modern times.
This is ironic since the apocalyptic eschatology of much Christian/Islamic theology is projecting the coming of the endtimes in relation to the perceived inadequacy of modernity.
An Experiment, scanned text: Prem Nath Bazaz
/2008/10/29/an-experiment-scanned-text-prem-nath-bazaz/
I have three scanned chapters from a fascinating and rare book on the Gita in Indian history.
This book is unique in its ‘cut the bullshit’ history of the relationship of Buddhism and Neo-Brahminism in the post-Axial Age India. The book has many problems, and might be challenged by conventional scholarship, which, however, is highly deceptive.
The scanning is so-so, at best, and I am going to put in three posts, to check how good/bad it looks, and also to use the WordPress software to strip some of the strange features of the scanjob. Then do some corrections and then make a web page out of it.
It is a pity the book is out of print, but its radical viewpoint dooms it for conventional histories, mostly lies.
Try to read around the garbled passages.
It is a chilling tale, one that those who naively enter Indian spiritual paths should be aware of, as they become disciples of these Brahmin gurus.
LC Control No.: 75904001
LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/75904001
Type of Material: Entry Not Found
Personal Name: Bazaz, Prem Nath.
Main Title: The role of Bhagavad Gita in Indian history / Prem Nath Bazaz.
Edition Information: 1st ed.
Published/Created: New Delhi : Sterling Publishers, 1975.
Description: xii, 747 p. ; 23 cm.
ISBN: Rs100.00
The ‘new age’ of modernity
/2008/11/01/the-new-age-of-modernity/
Our discussion has frequently touched on the crypto-political character of the ‘Work’, and of the Traditionalists, but the ‘New Age’ confusion has missed the epochal character of the real ‘new age’, the rise of the modern period, as such, the only candidate for that spurious phantom, the ‘second Axial Age’. Here is a short piece on the issue, The Politics Of Evolution
The result [the eonic effect] allows us to challenge the anti-modernism and anti-democratic subversions of classic, and contemporary, reactionaries with a cautious demonstration of historical directionality,…
Figures such as Gurdjieff are still caught in the perception of the decline of modernity from a ‘higher’ antiquity, and this misleading perspective throws doubt on their understanding of history and evolution. What to say of their authoritarian conspicacies against modern freedom.
Crowleyanity (beside Gurdjieffianity)
/2008/11/02/crowleyanity-beside-gurdjieffianity/
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
Although it can be dangerous for many people to even dabble in the strange world
of Aleister Crowley, in considering sufism one has no real choice.
All the sugary stuff on the surface about love hides
the behind the scenes viciousness going on.
Crowley is a strange fish in that context, an perhaps
beyond the shock of seeing such a figure in public he (and Gurdjieff) served the purpose
of giving the public negative warnings in disguise.
Actually Crowley is a fairly transparent figure, despite
the disinformation of his (auto)biographical details.
‘Do what thou wilt’ appears to be an injunction he
never understood, as he bombed out as a ‘finished Faust’
and drug addict. Gurdjieff’s encounter with this fellow
has been recorded, and, behind the surface hostility,
the two figures show a certain resemblance.
The first thing to consider as to Crowley is the sequence
of thematics on ‘will’, leading up to what appears to be his
deliberate desecration of Kantian ethics.
::Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, …..Crowlean parody.
That noone can really understand the complexity of Kantian ethics
let alone apply it is not proof that ‘doing matters of evil’ is esoteric
and thereby justified.
That’s the best self-defense: you may be ignorant as to the ‘secrets’
of occultists, but what you do know is that almost all such types
are not sufficiently intelligent to resolve the Kantian complexities
of ‘willed action’. It’s not ‘their word against Kant, et al.”.
There isn’t any superior ‘higher estoteric ethic’ that anyone
has ever demonstrated to the public world.
The reason the Gurdjieff work is so nervous about Kant
(I should hasten to add that Kantian philosophy is just that, philosophy,
and not off limits to philosophic critics).
The fad of the evildoers that suddenly appears around the time
of Blavatsky, Nietzsche, and others at the end of the nineteenth
century is a significant, and somewhat mysterious, movement
in itself, but one that has left a bit too many people confused indeed.
All you can do is backtrack to the point before it began to reach the larger context of
cultural ‘sanity’ where the escapades of such shadow figures
are the object of ancient and wholesome warning myths.
Typeset of DU
/2008/11/06/typeset-of-du/
We are offered a typeset edition of Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe, splendid.
The commentary on Bennett here has been of a different character to much of the discussion. I am critical, yet Bennett’s work contains some unique material of value in creating a general discourse on spiritual psychology. His indirect interpretation of classical Samkhya is of considerable value in the attempt to arrive at some understanding of that classic pyschology from ancient India.
So, good show.
Dear Nemo
If you want a set of the current edition of Bennett’s Dramtic Universe I will send you a set free of charge. This is not a new edition but a facsimile of the original typesetting. Sadly it includes many technical errors which you may or may not be able to detect. But your input would be useful.
Ben
From More on Bennett, 2008/11/06 at 7:28 AM
Cult concealment and the exploitation of hidden former followers
/2008/11/12/cult-concealment-and-the-exploitation-of-hidden-former-followers/
Yesterday’s post brings home a significant point: notice how all these gurus are unable to address themselves to public religious issues! They are supposed to be the great experts, but they have nothing to contribute. Now why is that?
Here we are in the middle of religious crisis, a crisis of culture, with every kind of religious confusion runningn rampant, and these people have nothing whatever to say. (Rajneesh was a slight exception, not that his meanderings amounted to anything).
Look at E.J. Gold. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, of any significance in any of his books. He never makes any statements, except obvious bullshit, about the nature of spiritual practice or anything else. If he does seem to say something, it is a red alert moment, he is sure to be lying, somehow.
In fact the whole game is just a revolving door as those dumb enought to ‘commit’ on their brief tour of the premises can expect mindfuck once contact has been broken and lost, and noone has a public record so and so was involved.
It is unlike the usual cult which everyone is eager to dismantle. In this case, the appearance of dismantling the cult is constant, while the shadowy aspects of a black magician masquerading as guru is carried out by other means on people no longer visible in public.
There should have been a public record of those involved, and a means to keep an eye on them for vital life signs.
Thus my concern over SK. The explosive rage all of sudden to break contacts, identity himself in public, and isolate himself.
It is good for those who approach the Gold outfit to be completely wary on this issue. The time in the ‘cult space’ is worthless. But once you come to the awareness of the operators you are vulnerable. And these people are no compassionate.
They expect you will never find out.
It is good to disambiguate your position. Make a declaration of non-involvement, like Ouspensky who saved himself unwittingly by declaring he was not a part of the work. What an irony! The man who started it escaped at the last moment.
Armstrong, compassion, and Axial Age confusions
/2008/11/14/armstrong-compassion-and-axial-age-confusions/
Gurdjieff’s anti-compassion problem in reverse!!
Armstrong and her tactics of deceit and VIP propaganda.
Her book The Great Transformation did immense harm to the archaeological site of the so-called Axial Age. Appearing in the wake of the first edition of World History And The Eonic Effect this book, without any acknowledgment stripped the Axial Age of its macrohistorical/evolutionary significance, and proceed to do a revolting sausage job on the religious manifestation of that mysterious period. Along with a downplaying of the Axial Greek phenomenon. The result was to make the Axial Age, among other things, safe for an age of Darwinists and Darwin mania. How compassionate.
Armstrong is a completely deceptive and brazen pretender who was ignorant enough to sausage up monotheism and Buddhism, one source, if not the source, in one great stream of the compassion theme. It is a complex Buddhist chord that will rise and bite you because it doesn’t mean what you think.
I am currently debriefing the Gurdjieff phenomenon, where compassion went in reverse. These people became so infuriated by false politician’s compassion they decided to conspire to promote hate instead of love.
Andrew Cohen’s bungled ‘evolution’ idea
/2008/11/16/andrew-cohens-bungled-evolution-idea/
Andrew Cohen has made a New Age fetish out of ‘evolution’, but his usage gets it wrong, no?
Readers of Darwiniana (an associate blog) know the harsh critique of Darwinism that is operative there. But the New Age cooptation of the idea of ‘evolution’ doesn’t quite make sense. Of course, there is a considerable ‘New Age’ tradition already in this regard, so it is not Cohen’s doing.
But, it seems to me, that evolution refers to the emergentism of species forms, genetic and more than genetic, as with the emergence of man (easily confused with involution). But just at that point we could well conclude with New Agers, some of them, that ‘evolution’ must therefore consider the evolution of consciousness, and the evolution of religion in the context of the overall transformation of ‘man’ as he became homo sapiens.
It is likely to be a false assumption that the pursuit of New Age practices could ever discover let alone replicate these now mysterious moments of man’s evolution.
To be sure ‘evolution’ is taken by some to mean the human response to an involutionary process in the oppositions of cosmic laws. I don’t really buy that kind of metaphysics (there is a version in Bennett) because it becomes metaphysically incoherent. Whatever the case we need to adopt a consistent usage.
In terms of the ‘eonic effect’ ( a depiction of ‘eonic evolution’) we can see that ‘evolution’ on the level of civilizationsn is far vaster than any of the eclectic machinations of gurus, who simply don’t have the capacity (whatever their claims of enlightenment) to grasp, as far as I can tell, the larger evolutionary movements of civilizations (to see that consider that the emergence of Buddhism was a dependent process, perhaps, in the Axial Age).
That fact alone, and along with the general critique of the usage of the idea of ‘evolution’, should be a self-defense tactic against the impudent attempts to take over the idea of evolution as some monopoly of the gurus.
Tracking down Lozowick’s Spiritual Slavery
/2008/12/04/tracking-down-lozowicks-spiritual-slavery/
mybrainisafleamarket:
LL must have renounced that book but good.
Try running a search for ’spiritual slavery’ and lee lozowick on bookfinder.com
That damn thing is priced in the 300 USD range!
From MBFM: On Lee Lozowick, 2008/12/04 at 12:51 PM
At least a copy still exists. A truly obscene book, but the idea lurks in the background of much guruism….The harm done by that book is great. It is still more evidence of the critique here of the latent fascism of the gurus.
Bennett turning tables on Gurdjieff
/2008/12/05/bennett-turning-tables-on-gurdjieff/
One of the ironies of reading Bennett, and its possible value for those critical of the guru phenomenon lies in the way it unwittingly undermines the Gurdjieff legacy even as it might seem to endorse it. I am referring only to The Dramatic Universe, which has very little of Gurdjieff, save the part transmitted and distorted from a version of Samkhya.
The point here is that these teachers and gurus have no hotline to God or the spiritual. Bennett, ingeniously, constructs the consequences of the tidbits left by Gurdjieff and shows clearly that the ‘spiritual’ domain we tend to imagine is quite imaginary: take an example: Bennett in his discussion of the relativity of the present moment (volume 4, our ‘present’ moment is sometimes ‘this instant’ or the more general contemporary ‘present age’, the ‘present’ moment of homo sapiens, etc…) lets out the idea that the present moment of the larger scale of intelligent life (thence his demiurgic sources) is many many millions of years, the scale of life itself (billions of years), which means that the relationship of these higher sources is analogous to the similar relationship we have to the cells in our bodies!
Such processes don’t even know we exist, and the sufi establishment, et al, certainly have no hotline to such ‘beings’.
Bennett is a clever ‘neither theist nor atheist’.
Such remarks in passing, as they add up, undermine conventional theology, and the authoritarianism of the very people trying to use all this as a source of authority.
Bennett was a bit clever, and behind his fronts he put forth something (easily refutable, because on the level, mostly) that one can use to ‘pull rank’ on gurus of all types with their preposterous claims of special knowledge, powers, and authority.
I fear that Bennett’s system won’t stand, but enough of it is reconstructable via the original samkhya to make it a candidate for a secularist’s self-defense kit against the flood of phonies besieging New Age consciousness.
All these god man pretenders and avatars have no more connection to a higher reality than anyone else.
The influence of Nietzsche on various gurus
/2008/12/07/the-influence-of-nietzsche-on-various-gurus/
After Darwin, and after Nietzsche
This post from Darwiniana brings up and issue that is seldom noticed, although a look at Ouspensky and Orage will remind one of the point. Which is that there is a suspicious connection, not to ancient teachings, but to Nietzsche in the unfolding of the Gudjieff ‘evil’ game.
You have to wonder if these fellows knew anything about ancient wisdom and just started some eclectic experiments in the style of Nietzsche inventing evil.
Prophet of Nazism?
/2008/12/14/prophet-of-nazism/
There was some discussion of Nietzsche at darwiniana, with some objections from one commenter. It is easy to be unfair to Nietzsche, it is even easier to be too fair
Stephen Smith recommends:
Here is an interesting read:
Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman–Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine (Paperback)
by ABIR TAHA (Author)
See:
http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Prophet-Nazism-Superman-Unveiling-Doctrine/dp/1420841211/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229060125&sr=1-4
From Note on Ascheim and his book on Nietzsche/Nazism, 2008/12/12 at 12:36 AMThis book certainly looks interesting, despite the howls of protest certain to arise from the Nietzsche defender/commenter of the last few days/week.
I accept that fellow’s dialectic, but after having been too fair to Nietzsche I have learned to consider renewed suspicions of the whole game that materialized in the generation of Blavatsky, young Gurdjieff, and a host of other figures. Something we can’t quite see, and which was very dreadful took root, and it is echoed in Nietzsche, one speculates. In part it is the general tide of the right rising to meet the surging left. ‘Echoed’ of course does not mean that Nietzsche was consciously aware of what was going on, even as he became a mysterious, but contradictory, mouthpiece. It seems that Nietzsche ‘came to’, somehow, and pulled up short, as he sensed the monumental bullshit over the era of the Bismarck Reich, emerging antisemitism, Wagnerian coteries of proto-fascists, etc… The result was the mixed and confusing legacy of Nietzsche in relation to both the first world war and the coming of Nazism. This issue requires careful study of such meticulous authors as Steven Ascheim (which can lead to other subsequent studies), which even at its most favorable must demonstrate the clear and obvious uses of Nietzsche by these later thugs, whether or not or to what degree Nietzsche would have repudiated them (and in fact did so before the fact).
The problem is Nietzsche’s loudmouth tendencies to say shockingly quotable things, unaware that dangerous idiots would take them literally.
So, I can’t vouch for this book til read, and even as the issue of ‘estoricism’ is brought in, it is inevitable that authors claiming to resolve this aspect of the question, invariably get it wrong.Product Description, Amazon
The “Cult of the Superman” has haunted humanity throughout history, yet it was only clearly expressed in the philosophy of its modern prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche, and culminated in its fiercest supporter, the National Socialist ideology, a political religion whose main ideal and objective were the creation of a superhuman species.
By showing the link between the Nietzschean and Nazi worldviews – and more specifically the Nazi Secret Doctrine which the author calls “esoteric Nazism”- the author’s aim is to demonstrate that the Nazis were pure Nietzscheans, thus repudiating the views of some scholars who deny or undermine any link between the Nietzschean and Nazi doctrines. She endeavours to prove that the Nazi esoteric ideology was primarily an endeavour to actualise and institutionalise Nietzsche’s cult of the Superman, applying it to a political system that would breed a Herrenvolk or “Master Race” in body and spirit, destined to rule the earth. Nazism was in fact greatly influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his concept of the Superman, giving it a political dimension in order to “put Nietzsche into motion” and turn the philosopher’s cult from an abstract notion into a concrete reality. The S.S. (Schutzstaffeln, or “Security Squads”), Nazi Germany’s racial and political elite, was indeed a self-proclaimed Nietzschean institution of Übermenschen or “Supermen” claiming to embody the creed of the Godlike man.Thus did both Nietzsche and the Nazis call for a revival of Aryan paganism, namely the ancient Aryan esoteric tradition from India to Greece, rejecting the Jewish religion of Christianity, which they believed was a gross distortion of Christ’s original teachings. Both doctrines acknowledged the Will to Power as the motor of history; both praised the qualities and values of the Superman, glorifying war, and advocating a radically aristocratic view of the world. Both Nietzsche and Nazism despised Western Judaeo-Christian Civilisation and its two products, Liberalism and Socialism, introducing a “third option” – aristocratic radicalism – between “corrupt egalitarian democracy” and the “materialist socialism of the mob”. In addition, both advocated the rule of an Aryan universal “Master Race” transcending the boundaries of states and nations; and finally, both Nietzsche and the Nazis dismissed the “decadent” Jew from civilisation, considering him alien to the natural order, an incarnation of the slave morality.
About the Author
Abir Taha, currently a diplomat and a “doctorante” in philosophy at the Sorbonne University, is an expert in Nietzschean thought. For yearsshe has extensively read, studied, and analysed Nietzsche’s philosophy. She has written several studies and dissertations on philosophy and political theory, particularly Nietzschean thought. Whereas most Nietzsche scholars ignore the spiritual dimension of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the author contends that there lies the essence of the great German philosopher’s work. She thus put special focus on Nietzsche’s spirituality, which is deeply influenced by Greek and Indian philosophy. Having deep knowledge of Western and Eastern esoteric thought and the influence of esoteric schools on current political ideologies, the author underwent extensive research on Nazism and its occult roots, paying special attention to Nietzsche’s influence on what she calls “Esoteric Nazism”, thus unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine and establishing a clear link between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Nazism as a spiritual Weltanschauung. The author is currently publishing a book in French entitled “Nietzsche’s Coming God, or the Redemption of the Divine”.
Da Free John…e j gold…spiritual rape…Da Free John the Vampire….
/2008/12/17/da-free-johne-j-goldspiritual-rape/
This guru was one of the most subtly destructive in my experience, often, I suspect, for people who had nothing to do with him (he had to treat his in house disciples differently), such as myself.
People need to be warned to never ‘guruize’ from a distance with a book.
If you thought Cohen or Da Free John were bad, consider e j gold.
As to Cohen’s ‘monopoly’,he has none, and he won’t/didn’t last long: the specialist in monopoly here is e j gold. Beside destroying the spiritual paths of anyone he can, he attacks other gurus and tries to destroy their reputation.
He is truly a strange menace, hurting those who never suspect, and never showing mercy. Recall, sillykitty and his charges of spiritual rape
Evolution, the fumbled football
/2008/12/22/evolution-the-fumbled-football/
The Upper Paleolithic, or the Great Explosion, and the eonic effect
Needless to say, the issue of human evolution is caught up in the various Gurdjieff myths. The Bennett version is a provocative version.
The study of the eonic effect can provide a neutral ground for non-Darwinian accounts in the inevitable failure of Darwinism.
At that point we have to insist that people with ‘esoteric’ credentials have no greater credibility than other struggling scientists. Gurdjieff’s fashion of making things up has destroyed his credentials on this and many other issues.
Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism
/2008/12/23/nietzsche-prophet-of-nazism/
I finally caught up with this book, pretty grim: Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman–Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine (Paperback)
by ABIR TAHA
Preface
The “Cult of the Superman” has haunted humanity throughout history, yet it was only clearly expressed in the philosophy of its modern prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche, and culminated in its fiercest supporter, the National Socialist ideology, a political religion whose main ideal and objective were the creation of a superhuman species.By showing the link between the Nietzschean and Nazi worldviews ¬and more specifically the Nazi Secret Doctrine which I have called “esoteric Nazism”- my aim is to demonstrate that the Nazis were pure Nietzscheans, thus repudiating the views of some scholars who deny or undermine any link between the Nietzschean and Nazi doctrines.
…Godfather of Fascism?
/2008/12/23/godfather-of-fascism/
There is another book with a similar title: Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Paperback)
by Jacob Golomb
Persian fire
/2008/12/29/persian-fire/
Persian Fire/Amazon
This book on the Persian Wars is an interesting reminder of a quarrel, that, most surprisingly, lingers in the background of the Gurdjieff work. At first you don’t realize this, of course, absurd as it is. But the battle against the Zoroastrians lurks in the background of the Persian wars, although it seems silly for anyone to hold this grudge over so many centuries. As if a murderer like Darwius had any connection!
But, without pressing the point of the Persian wars, it is important to see the obsure tactics in Gurdjieff’s revisionist myths of Zarathustra, thence to see that Nietzsche was also involved in this strange game.
The ‘esoteric’ is bullshit. But the invocation of it here indicates something that these figures have taken to their grave. The grudge match of Gurdjieff is an odd, and quite insidious thematic, with its parallels to Nietzsche.
I am beginning to find Zarathustra overrated, and in any case the object of preposterous revisionisms.
Nietzsche’s influence, on Nazism…and on Gurdjieff?
/2009/01/25/nietzsches-influence-on-nazismand-on-gurdjieff/
Endless efforts to resolve the influence of Nietzsche on Nazism.
What is even more elusive, so elusive it doesn’t occur to people, is the influence of Nietzsche on Gurdjieff.
To be clear, Gurdjieff was too cunning to fall for Nietzsche’s loudmouthing, but one has to wonder that Gurdjieff felt emboldened to attempt a concealed reactionary movement, givent the evidence from Nietzsche et al. that such a movement could succeed by appealing on the surface to liberal-minded modernists.
This happened successfully with Nietzsche even though he never tried to conceal anything, witness th e way that, with postwar commentators such as Kauffman, Nietzsche was rehabilitated to the point that he became a fixture of academic and other thought.
A similar, though concealed, effect is obviously visible in Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff, however, rarely spoke his mind.
How many know, as Bennett reminds us, that Gurdjieff disapproved of the abolition of slavery?!!
And, of course, the interest of Ouspensky in Nietzsche shows the card face up with respect to the Gurdjieffians, if not the groupies.
Gurdjieff/Ouspensky confusion on evolution
/2009/03/02/gurdjieffouspensky-confusion-on-evolution/
One of the strains of the Gurdjieff corpus is the play of isolated remarks on evolution. Here we confront a tricky question. The issue of Darwinism is one thing, check out Darwiniana, the blog, for a series of critical views of Neo-Darwinism. A critique of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky on evolution is not intended as a plus for standard Neo-Darwinian views.
The views of Gurdjieff here reflect the revolt against Darwinism of Blavatsky and the Theosophists, et al.
But Gurdjieff embroiders this with his own questionable interpretation in terms of the seven stages of man. That rubric sounds convincing on one level, at least to some, but surely ‘evolution’ can’t work that way. The idea of man evolving from man number 1,2,3 to man number 4,5, 6, … is a stilted and cliched formulation that confuses evolution with self-development.
The fault is one inherited from nineteenth century New Agers such as we see in the legacy of Theosophy.
To clarify, the various New Age intrepretations of ‘evolution’ have coopted the word for a different meaning, usually some kind of spiritual development process. But is that ‘evolution’?
The question can’t be answered since the neologism ‘evolution’ appeared in the nineteenth century as a near semantic orphan, one not even used by Darwin in the first edition of his Origin. An earlier usage was ‘transformation’, or ‘transmutation’.
Here confusion arises because of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and the legacy of scientism that it embraces with an overly narrow reductionist view of man. Darwinists correctly point to the fact of evolution in deep time, but their emphasis on natural selection is open to severe challenge.
The various groups in reaction to scientism, and Gurdjieff, and especially Ouspensky, fall into place here, correctly pointed to the failure of scientific reductionism to account for the complexity of human consciousness. But then these groups produced their own confusion, and began to concoct all sorts of myths about the descent of man, almost as unhelpful in reverse as Darwinism.
The nature of the confusion can be seen from the fact, as noted, that ‘evolution’ is a neologism, and that none of the ancient and canonical sutras of yore used the term. It is important to consider this point, since the modern usage of the term ‘evolution’ for spiritual development is a piece of speculative wiseacring, one that can lead to wrong work.
It would have been better to have chosen a different and clearer terminology, e.g. ‘self-realization’, which is a closer match to the usage of antiquity.
To say that people doing yoga are somehow doing ‘evolution’ is a botch of terminology, one that we can’t actually protest very easily, since you can use words as you please.
But the idea arises that New Age style paths are provoking a future evolution of man. We simply cannot be sure of that and it is in fact a doubtful assertion, one that might vitiate the real significance of the classic methods of the development of consciousness.
To be fair, the point is simply unclear, since we don’t know how man evolved, and how he evolved to be able to show the complex potential realizable as indicated by ancient sutric discourses.
Men of developed consciousness are nonetheless not in a position to pontificate on the descent of man, a thoroughly complex mystery as yet unresolved by any party to the debate.
Much more could be said here, but the bad usage that we see in Gurdjieff (as reported by Ouspensky) is highly misleading, and suggests incorrectly that a development of self-awareness is a form of evolution, and that, pace Nietzsche, that ominous figure in the background, self-aware men are to become a sort of ubermensch circuit. It all goes to show that these figures are not all they are cracked up to be.
Men’s self-realization is roughly the same, we suspect, at all stages of his history since the Paleolithic transition (??), and while it is entirely possible that this potential tends to remain hidden or latent, it is doubtful if its realization is a form of evolution. One suspects, given the striking image of the meditating yogis on cylinder seals from before 2000 BCE, that spiritual practices and tantras are very ancient with man. They are a given for man as he is now, not a result of his evolution which is probably static in this set of age periods (the last ten thousand years).
Man’s real evolution in the past is a mystery, and, remarkably, even a figure such as Buddha couldn’t resolve it.
More on this later.
But anyone entangled in the Gurdjieff confusion should realize the abuse of the evolutionary idea here, and its Nietzschean wiseacring at work: an isolated individual who thinks some occult knowledge makes him ‘more evolved’ and somehow a ‘higher being’ then proceeds to wreck the potential of others who have not found that set of states, in the process wreaking havoc with such people.
It is mostly fantasy, and a failure to realize the immense complexity of real evolution, which is not understood by man as yet, and not reducible to the provincial notions of Indic-style yoga practitioners, however significant such aspects of historical culture might be.
Again, it should be noted that the term evolution was not used in antiquity, even if we noted that various forms of Samkhya, for example, come close.
The question of ‘evolution’ is very deep, and the wrong interpretation promoted by Ouspensky, and Gurdjieff, can create endless confusion, and much unfairness and wrong work.
Evolution is better thought of as a species level action in greater nature. The self-realization of individuals in that context is a realization of the potential emerging from that greater evolution.
Gurdjieff does make a significant point, using the wrong language, that ‘evolution’ of consciousness can’t be mechanical, that unconscious evolution can’t be conscious. That sounds plausible, but the language is wrong.
Much of man’s evolution obviously was mechanical, or a complex hybrid of the mechanical and something else.
The point is that while evolution in general might be mechanical the process of self-realization requires self-consciousness, or self-awareness, not just passive awareness, and nature, so far, only brings man to the threshold. The rest is up to him. But to realize this potential is not ‘evolution’. We could certainly hope that some future ‘evolution’ might faciliate the realization of that potential. We have no grounds for saying what that might be like, or what process of nature could perform that. In fact, it is likely that the New Age thinking is a garbled version of the right idea, that man’s future ‘evolution’ must be his own creation. But so far the antics of a figure such as Gurdjieff really don’t foot the bill, and his obvious mistakes throw severe doubt on the authority he proposes for himself.
It is worth checking out both darwiniana.com and the site on the eonic effect, with its considerations of just these questions of macroevolution and self-development.
Fourth ways and the great freedom sutra
/2009/03/05/fourth-ways-and-the-great-freedom-sutra/
6.6.3 A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
One of the more notable anti-modern occult conspiracies springs from the shadow Sufistic world, as documented by the reactionary mystic Ouspensky. The Islamic oikoumene generates the remarkable history of so-called Sufism, and this carries a confused legend of the ‘fourth way’ (beyond ways of the body, emotions, or mind) as something deeper than the already complex yogas of the world of Buddhism, whose adherents are world-renouncing, leading to ‘historical termination of its exemplars’, the premonition of realized Man manifesting his full Will as freedom in history. Mathematically, such a being ought to exist, but… The Islamic hides a number of claimants to this category, rarely seen in public. This has nothing to do with Islam. Such a being would be limited from the start by the historical conditioning of his time and place. He would, for example, have no knowledge of modern physics, and live in mystic limbo (not that modern physics is much help here). A real man of will would require independent soul formation, and some objective in time, since he would more likely pass beyond the realm of rebirths, Buddha style. And just this rumor does exist in the corners of Sufistic lore. So we don’t know. Perhaps this man is a myth, his early exemplars poor imitations of themselves, too often ‘rogue buddhas’ wreaking havoc on the eonic sequence with delusive visions. Almost nothing public is known of this, although its possibility is easily deduced in the abstract, nor is its reality visible in recorded history, and yet beginning with Sumer or before these still rare individuals might have begun to emerge, injecting an obscure factor of unseen action in history, as they mediate remarkable initiatives via proxies. We ought to be entirely suspicious of any and all New Age mythologies on this issue, and point out that such individuals are not the ‘secret guides’ of human evolution. The point is that the early era of Sumer might conceal an entire spiritual tradition invisible to us, symmetric to the Indian. This Sufi myth indicates as much. We must be wary of any and all claimants to such a ‘path of will’, mindful of Dante’s systematic codification of devils.
In any case, we see that such beings would be limited to the local knowledge at the stage of civilization they found themselves in, and the Axial Age, given its stupendous scale, could not be the result of spiritual guides leading humanity with prophetic vision. Its scale is too immense, its action mechanized at a level of sophistication that eludes human intelligence. We can barely observe its manifestations, and have no idea what it is, save a ‘force of nature’. Founding a religion via proxies is, however, within their range of such possible types. Note this point and the clear difference of the ersatz religions arising in the wake of the Axial Age, as human realizations. Compared to the Axial scale, Christianity and Islam are different, and show clear ‘initialization’ points. We must remain suspicious of such isolated source points, our ‘floating fourth turning points’, that don’t fit into our sequence (and don’t have to), a good example being precisely the onset of Christianity and Islam themselves, with their unaccountable sudden success without eonic determination, albeit clearly in the wake of the Axial Age. We are missing the background! Our model doesn’t overdetermine history and doesn’t explain the mideonic worlds. The point is that we must stick to what the eonic sequence explains, and be wary of the obscurity of much that happens in between. Tracing diffusion is hard enough with tangible artifacts, in this case it is almost impossible. Thus we have no record of much that is crucial to history, save useless tidbits, such as the strange appearance of Three Magi out of nowhere in the gestation of Christianity. To suggest that Jesus and Muhammad were proxies in such action is unsettling and of course entirely beyond the possibility of current demonstration, and we can’t pursue the issue, save to be wary of the standard histories of these two religions springing form their delimited sources. The odor of occult artifice haunts their traditions.
The idea of the ‘fourth way’ is worthless in its current apocryphal form but suggests its own original meaning, and that, for the future, the conflict of secularism and religion is completely false. If one thinks otherwise, consider Karl Marx. The function of religion, in one sense, to assist the helpless individual in the mechanizations of the state ideology, or civil domination, succumbs to the disease it wishes to cure, and this function is wrested from ‘religion’ by an agent of labor unrest! Quite the religious man! The only real candidate for the fourth way (whose keynote is the ‘religion’ as the ordinary life in civilization) is the rise of secular modernism, escaping the dead end of theocracy. Much in modern life shows the echoing signature of this long lost ‘path of the will’, like a vehicle stuck in first gear.
The Great Freedom Sutra The modern transition has already stolen a march on the classic yogas of antiquity with its seminal discourses of freedom and autonomy, bursting asunder the spurious authority of the gurus. The passage of free men across the abyss of their freedom might prove so simple, yet the die is cast, and man is left to the existential reality of his own self-evolution.
Non other than Kant protests the comprised autonomy of the self mesmerized by religion and demands a ‘religion within the limits of reason’, whose vehicle is the will of the individual. Nothing esoteric here, the simplest of direct pointings to the ‘fourth way’. The right vehicle for this is secular society itself. The catch lies in the deficit between the ideal and the clear reality of the social mechanized state. The ‘fourth way’, civilization itself, has expanded to include all society, and the individual is left to an abstract possibility, one that existed in all stages of civilization. And yet the formulation is surely the right one, granting the result is like paper money, and the need to produce an enzymatic vitamin factor to assist this ocean of floundering wills. The great religions can be of little help here if they degenerate into ideologies. They simply put their adherents in cold storage. The question is one for the future. The apocrophyal ‘fourth way’ can be set aside, and graduate to the philosophies of freedom that emerge so clearly correlated with the modern transition, and whose status is something far more fundamental than anything legislated by the priesthoods of Christianity or the empire projects of prophets.
From Hinduism and the manu code to Gurdjieff/Ouspensky
/2009/03/31/from-hinduism-and-the-manu-code-to-gurdjieffouspensky/
Doniger/Hinduism
The portrait in Doniger’s book on Hindus of the way the brahmin caste took over the yogic tradition and then made the whole thing keyed into the Manu code is very outrageous.
And we can see the same tactics being used in the Gurdjieff legacy, or, rather, by Gurdjieff, and Ouspensky, who wrote a book, please note, on the code of Manu, that spurious piece of crap that has done such immense harm.
It is important to snap out of it and not let this happen to the current civilization. Stop buying into the con-man claims of authority for these people.
23rd tirthankar
/2009/05/06/23rd-tirthankar/
Jainism: History (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism#History
Parshvanatha, the twenty-third Tirthankar, is the earliest Jain leader who can be reliably dated.[10] According to scholars, he probably lived in the 9th Century BCE
The statement above may be an indirect clue to our puzzle: if the 23rd tirthankar lived three centuries before Mahavir, and if this kind of separation in time characterizes the whole sequence of Jain ‘jinas’, then that puts the origins back very early indeed.
Well before the IE entry (assuming the AIT).
The question of Jainism/Mahavir
/2009/05/06/the-question-of-jainismmahavir/
The issue of the Vedas, and then the Upanishads is hard to resolve in the absence of data. But I have always suspected the classic dharmas spring from a different source than the Rig Veda tradition.
Perhaps one clue lies in the relationship of Mahavir, Jainism, and Buddhism. The Jain tradition asks for some historical analysis: what is its relationship to Hinduism? And what of the tradition of 23 teertankers prior to Mahavir, the last.
In any case, we need to consider the effect of the Axial Age. The sudden jump in quality has its own explanation. But it doesn’t follow that there wasn’t an earlier tradition.
Also, consider the Samkhya: are its origins purely in the Axial Age?
It is important for western seekers to orient themselves on these questions because the dangers of ‘authority’, as with Gurdjieff, in a bogus tradition are great.
Ouspensky, Gurdjieff not Darwinians
/2009/05/23/ouspensky-gurdjieff-not-darwinians/
Comment on Selection from Book on Social Darwinism
Andrew said,
20.05.09 at 4:51 am ·
Ouspensky was actually an anti-Darwinist, but his arguments are very cranky and ill-thought out. Gurdjieff parodied Darwinism in Beelzebub’s Tales, saying that periodically people got together to work out whether monkeys were descended from mankind or vice-versa.So I don’t think either of them can be counted as Darwinists in any sort of way.
Thanks for the comment. My post was misleading perhaps, to many. I had thought that everyone was aware of Ouspensky’s anti-Darwinism (and I hadn’t recalled Gurdjieff’s comments on the subject)
My point was that the influence of Social Darwinism on such people was indirect, and connected with their own false views of evolution with the influence of Nietzsche in the background.
All in all, it is misleading to charge them with Social Darwinism if they were not Darwinists, which they weren’t .
But Darwinism seems to have somehow spoiled the tone of much guruism, as they gurus began to compete with each other and fight to destroy each other behind the scenes (but then again that was true long before Darwin).
Another critic of Darwin is J.G. Bennett.
Sufi hyenas on the lookout to vampirize/invultuate poets for reactionary agendas
MBFM in Gurus and creativity throws down the gauntlet here on the question of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and creativity.
Bravo for the nerve to spit it out. However, never be too sure of anything, and keep probing/reflecting on this. There are many dimensions to these tricksters. It is true that Gurdjieff lacked ‘creativity’, but a number of sufis I have met have expressed (religious/Islamic) contempt for the ‘creative types’, who are often egoic. Gurdjieff, who may well have been the ‘vampire’ MBFM depicts, nonetheless had bigger fish to fry, and, well….
A long time ago at Darwiniana I was pursuing a very similar theme but in the distractions of the blog, and fearful of not being understood (the Gurdjieff Con didn’t exist yet), and in the midst of Sillykitty getting upset, I got sidetracked from what I wanted to say, which was very similar to what MBFM is trying to say. This was under the category ‘sonnets’ which I have since deleted, although the posts are still there. Having gone through a renewed phase of writing poetry (I was pretty good at it once, long before, and then fell into silence) in the post-guru encounter phase of the seventies, I suddenly stumbled on what some insidious people are up to, and, remarkably, MBFM stumbled on it, although I might put it differently.
But you cannot talk about this and be understood (perhaps the readers of G-con blog are different tho from the darwiniana readers who would just freak out)
It is strange to discover that shadow sufis have poets on their radar (not all, most self-styled poets aren’t worth the bother), and with G or some circle around him, …how explain it…
Read the history of twentieth century poetry, and consider T.S.Eliot, who, we forget, was a conservative, and anti-modernist.
That’s what they are looking for: a pliable poet who can be invultuated without his awareness, and used to promote various cultural interests.
I have to leave you to figure it out, but it was all that point that I ‘caught the sufi hyenas red-handed’, as writing poetry died, and respect for sufis died, and…
Gurdjieff’s distortions, and distorted world view
/2009/05/30/gurdjieffs-distortions-and-distorted-world-view/
The teaching of Gurdjieff, and I suspect sufism generally, are fragments of something that has become distorted, nay, perverted, by the context and society in which these people were forced to live. It is nothing less than a misfortune that this supposedly new approach to spirituality got mixed up with the occult politics of the nineteenth century, the reactionary cultural milieu of Tsarist Russia (which Gurdjieff by his conditioning thought just!), and the whole legacy of sufistic tradition as it coexisted with the infelicities of medievalism, violent histories, and authoritarian government.
The result is a kind of cancerated non-starter, that noone can use, and that noone suspects for the dark teaching it really is.
Lozowick and the ‘god man’ fraud
/2009/06/02/lozowick-and-the-god-man-fraud/
Lozowick, in the wake of Da Free John, is seriously trying to promote the ‘god man’ garbage in twentieth/twenty-first century America.
There is a simple answer to this: don’t stand for it. Demand something different. How a confused jerk like Lozowick could think he was entitled to that is hard to grasp, especially after his disconbobulation. But people are highly suggestible, and it is possible this kind of thing will turn into a new ‘tradition’.
You have only yourself to blame if you do let this happen. Protest, and expose the game.
I is one thing with figures like Lozowick.
But soon figures like E.J. Gold will (and already have!!!! decades ago) will find a way to turn it against you.
(Gold long since claimed he was one of this elect, using slightly different terminology)
What is it with these self-appointed gurus??? Three of them now, with Gold using voodoo against any uppity New Agers who aspires to be a teacher or interfere with his monopoly (btw, he used to be explicit about his ‘monopoly’ game, although noone at first quite understood what he meant, controlling the guru circuit by declaring war against any other pretenders).
The point should be clear: either everyone is a ‘god man’ by definition (it is easy to make that case on the level of verbiage), or else we should not bother with the category applied to anyone. It is a dangerous attempt to void Western ideas of equality.
It is one of the most degenerate hold overs of the neo-brahmin pseudo-tradition, and arises because its bloodsucking possibilities and super-authoritarian basis.
Ouspensky’s mutterings on ‘criminal sudras’
/2009/06/14/ouspenskys-mutterings-on-criminal-sudras/
mybrainisafleamarket said,
14.06.09 at 8:36 am
There is a Buddhist quotation that seems more reliable:
You cannot find freedom by replacing one illusion with another illusion.
Good point.
It is a hard lesson for many of these liberal New Agers, and followers of Gurdjieff, to discover the extreme reactionary character of the man, and of his follower Ouspensky, who made the point clear if anyone has the attention to look at his plain statements.
For example, Ouspensky would ‘mutter’ about ‘criminal sudras’ in reference to leftist political figures.
If someone dislikes a leftist that’s one thing. But to call them ‘criminal sudras’ is a bit much, a sign of the state of mind of such nineteenth century reactionaries.
(Sudras were the low caste in the Code of Many caste system). Ouspensky’s Psychology of Evolution with its praise of Manu and Hinduism’s caste system should have blown the whistle, but did not.
It’s not just part of the background scenery.
An ISOM series. Ouspensky should have stayed in India
/2009/07/12/an-isom-series-ouspensky-should-have-stayed-in-india/
Since we are doing Bennett, it might be interesting to do the same for ISOM, by Ouspensky (somewhat abbreviated, since this material has been rehashed ad infinitum)>
I RETURNED to Russia in November, 1914., that is, at the begin¬ning of the first world war, after a rather long journey through Egypt, Ceylon, and India. The war had found me in Colombo and from there I went back through England.
When leaving Petersburg at the start of my journey I had said that I was going to “seek the miraculous.” The “miraculous” is very difficult to define. But for me this word had a quite definite meaning. I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say. I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The “miraculous” was a penetration into this unknown reality. And it seemed to me that the way to the unknown could be found in the East. Why in the East? It was difficult to answer this. In this idea there was, perhaps, something of romance, but it may have been the absolutely real conviction that, in any case, nothing could be found in Europe.
On the return journey, and during the several weeks I spent in Lon¬don, everything I had thought about the results of my search was thrown into confusion by the wild absurdity of the war and by all the emotions which filled the air, conversation, and newspapers, and which, against my will, often affected me.
The strange thing about Ouspensky at the beginning is that he could, in a considerable search, find nothing in India. How strange.
In fact he is being set up for the characteristic ‘sufi’ propaganda against Indian spirituality, which takes the form in Gurdjieff of concocting a ‘fourth way’ beyond the others, a fiction that claims to know of a ‘path of will’, very hard to find, etc, etc….
As we gaze over the twentieth century and the careers of those who tangled with Gurdjieff, we notice that while India has produced thousands of yogis, the Gurdjieff so-called path has produced no exemplars whatever.
Ouspensky should have stayed in India, and spared himself the Faust/Mephisto charade with Gurdjieff.
Replacing the Kantian categories
2009/07/13/replacing-the-kantian-categories/
Later in his introduction Bennett hints at his strategy: he is going to replace the categories of Kant with new ones!! Hilarious bit of nonsense, the whole and entire foundation of his system is going to rest on that.
I fear that Bennett has failed to grasp the Kantian critique of metaphysics.
His tactic is a complex combination of mysticism and realism, and can’t seem to grasp what Kant was about. This is important since there is nothing out of date about those categories of Kant. There are plenty of critics of that system, but Bennett’s approach suggests we are going to be treated to some metaphysics of illusion.
…Let us look at the requirements that such a pnnclple would have to satisfy. In the first place, it must provide us with new categones of thought to take the place of the awkward and pitifully inadequate forms that we have inherited from Aristotle and the German transcendental philosophers. When these categories were formulated, natu~al SCIence had not made the prodigious advances of the last two centunes. I.n any event natural science must remain limited in its forms of expreSSiOn so long ~s it is concerned almost exclusively with predictab.ility. If science is to transcend its limitations, it must, first of all, recogmze them. ~h~n only will it be possible to step out of the narrow f~rms of thought wlthm which the scientific intuition is now confined. It IS necessary to be able to think and to speak in new forms about quantity as well as about
quality.
Bennett/Idries Shah
/2009/07/16/bennettidries-shah/
MBTF said,
16.07.09 at 11:51 am · Didnt Bennett get ripped off by letting Idries Shah the pseudo-Sufi con him into believing that he, Shah, had access to the true source of gurdjieff’s much vaunted system?
And after Bennett was assured that Combe Springs would be used as a study center, signed it over to Shah, Shah then evicted everyone, then sold the property and made a tidy profit?
Some die hard followers of Bennett insist that the old man did this willingly, perhaps because it was painful to face their leader had been hoodwinked in old age.
Robert Graves was persuaded to make a translation of the Rubayat of Omar Khayyam from a manuscript allegedly known as the ‘Fishan Khan MS’, property of one of Idries Shah’s ancestors. But Shah and his brother never did produce the original and Robert Graves, himself an old man and vulnerable, was left holding the bag.For more, read the two volume biography of Graves, written by his nephew Perceval.
Show old men some mercy.
For one day we all shall be old, if permitted to live long enough.
These depradations of Idries Shah are important to recall.
But my complaint is that it is ultimately futile to extricate the useful material from The Dramatic Universe, because it rigged with Gurdjieff’s very dangerous ideas, ideas that will lead to destruction of human life.
Bennett became aware of his dilemma, but unlike Ouspensky was unwilling or unable or too afraid to resist.
my complaint is that Gurdjieff thugs will claim this work of Bennett as their ‘property’ and/or make their intepretation seem to be ‘objective knowledge’ when in fact everything they do is a devious dishonest scheme.
No readers for DU??
You have clarified the situation, thank you. I hope this is correct.
I think more people have read this book than you might think. It is, after all, resident in many major libraries. I have seen the stamped dates in the withdrawal count in several cases, over thirty years.
I am not sure what you mean by …nobody would read it would could understand it…
I read it in the seventies, when it made a considerable impression. I finished the whole text in a matter of days.
I have since felt the strangeness of that initial experience.
I have learned a few things from it that, as I can see, I won’t be able to explicate to anyone else.
The point here is that, had Bennett not rigged his work to match Gurdjieff’s system, it would have been a great breakthrough in the modern interpretation of Samkhya, to stand next to Shopenhauer. But sadly that opportunity got lost somewhere.
I think an opportunity has been lost here. The whole thing should have been beyond reproach, but instead the text suffers from careless errors of judgment in performing major tasks, e.g. the confusion over the Kantian categories. And much else.
But it is unusual in that it affirms the value of modernity, and its freedoms, at the end of the fourth volume. That alone made Bennett an object of enmity in sufistic circles. So, on those grounds, et al., despite my criticisms, I have often defended Bennett.
I have to throw up my hands here, I was embarking on a brief commentary, but I can see that would not work out as I had thought.
Logic, dialectic, and triadic thinking…
/2009/07/29/logic-dialectic-and-triadic-thinking/
A passage, page 24, from Volume I of The Dramatic Universe.
I tried to consider how to summarize and/or leapfrog the methodology constructed by Bennett.
It is a very problematical set of ideas, for reasons that suddenly become obvious if we consider the following passage:
Logical Thinking
When a measure of discipline is introduced into the associative process, thinking tends to become logical. Since ancient times, logic has come to be identified with the rules according to which we make judgments as to the truth or falsity of propositions. These latter are the verbal forms in which ideas are confronted in pairs, whereas in ordinary associative processes there is no effectual confrontation. Logical thinking therefore represents an important step forward from automatic association. A special effort, requiring either an unusual stimulus or a long training is needed before a man is able effectually to entertain two complete in- dependent ideas at once and to see their mutual bearing. The result goes beyond the content of the ideas as they are immediately presented and can be called polar thinking. Two ideas, in so far as they are in¬dependent and ri-J.utually exclusive, form a dipole with its own field of force. Through the ability to experience this force-field, the trained logical thinker can make synthetic judgments within the limits of the ideas he is able to formulate. The difference between synthetic judg¬ments and automatic association consists in the presence of polar experience. For example, the words ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ stand for two independent concepts that, when entertained as one single act of con¬sciousness, appear at once both compatible and incompatible. The mental process whereby the two give ~ise to a third idea that harmonizes them without destroying their separate significance is called the dialectic. Hegel, for example, sees in ‘becoming’ a concept that reconciles ‘being’ and ‘nothing’.”” Any pair of independent ideas can be treated as a polar dyad. Thus ‘kingship’ and ‘liberty’ can be reconciled through the idea of ‘responsibility’, which can apply to both and yet is different from either.
Dialectical thinking is certainly of a different order from that which consists in the automatic association and comparison of ideas. Though difficult in its exercise, this form of thought is, nevertheless, extremely limited in its scope. Experience has shown that it is inadequate for finding answers to the practical problems of life, and, indeed, the great exponents of the dialectic-from Plato to Hegel and Marx-have proved unsatisfactory guides to practical life, whether private or public. The dialectic leads also to a defective linguistic form. Our usual language, though full of inconsistencies and ambiguities, can be adapted to the description of two-term systems. When the meanings of words and sentences are defined with special care, a logic is constructed that turns out to be the law of two-term systems. The procedure by which language is made to conform to these rules is, however, an unavoidable im¬poverishment. The ambiguities and inconsistencies of our ordinary speech are not a defect, and recognition of them is a reminder that experience has more dimensions than logic. Analytical and sceptical philosophers have, during a hundred generations, exposed the barrenness of two-term thinking, and it becomes necessary to examine the possi¬bilities latent in higher modes of thought. In seeking tb go beyond logic, we run the risk of falling from serious inquiry into fantastical speculation; but it is more profitable to make the attempt than to remain condemned to the sterility that has overcome philosophy through using forms of
• Cf. Hegel, Logic, trans. Wm. Wallace (Oxford, 1892), pp. 158-64.
thought that are inherently incapable of discovering anything that is new.
( c) Supra-logical Thinking
Supra-logical thinking is both relative and transcendental. It therefore requires more categories than the simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of logic-. The need to go beyond the ‘pairs of opposites’ is a recurrent theme of Eastern scriptures. P. D. Ouspensky, in his remarkable book Tertium Organum, called supra-logical thinking the ‘third canon of thought’, which, in the next epoch, was to supersede the logical dualism of the preceding age. The dialectic is at best a halfway-house to creative thought, for which at least three independent ideas must be entertained. Such triadic think¬ing, however, is beyond the ordinary power of the instrument with
<;which man has been endowed by nature. ‘*’
. Contemplation of the triad is not merely recognizing a third idea as the reconciliation of two contradictories,-but rather seeing in the union of the three an exemplification of the fu.ndamental relationship by which all experience is governed. So long as nothing more is at work than the primitive associating mechanism, to speak of the ‘unity of the triad’ conveys little meaning. In order to perceive this unity directly, a power _ of attention is required that comes only with a change of consciousness.
. :;;.;.-
Such a change occurs so rarely, and in so few people, that, in the usual
studies of man and his nature, it is not taken into account.
Through failure to recognize either the extreme rarity or the extra..: ordinary power of triadic thinking, the usual histories of human thought cannot account for the authentic innovations that do, from time to time, occur in human understanding of the universal order.
Bennett unwittingly exposes one the deepest problems that haunts most spiritual movements and their concept structures.
By being systematic and thinking in terms of numerical systems (based on ordinal series) he constructs an interesting, if implicit, historical narrative, and shows why everyone is stymied by the result.
Human spirituality suffers a dilemma: man can only deal with logical thinking, while he is constantly being induced to transcend that for something larger. The results are invariably confusion.
Bennett constructs a complete numerology of ordinal series number, from the monad to the dodecad.
The result is intriguing, but never quite seems to work.
Bennett has actually made clear why: he speaks of three-term, four-term, etc, systems, but even the triadic level is vexed. Even the dialectic, pace Hegel, is confused. The distinction between the dialectic and the triadic, however, shows the cogency of Bennett’s attempt to be systematic. Students of Gurdjieff’s ‘law of three’ or Hegel’s dialectic are all confused, the reason being clear from Bennett’s misleading discussion.
The point here is that by the time Bennett reaches the dodecad, given the shaky foundations of the dialectic, or triadic, the results are mythological fantasy in a kind of science fiction.
Robert Anton Wilson
/2009/08/20/robert-anton-wilson/
Wilson is another of the lunatics in need of examination in the whole Gurdjieff/Crowley/…. circuit, exceptionally lunatic, but with some curious hints. Generally these people in trying to recombine their sources never get anywhere. The main obstacle is the expense of books, inaccessible info, etc… The books are basically worthless: some tidbits of useful info/disinfo nonetheless may exist.
His three volume Illuminati nonsense needs some intelligent ‘debriefing’, since he at least did raise the issue of Western occultists.
It would be useful to know Gold connection here. I once saw him intersect with the Gold circle.
The hyperzoic era
As noted I am going to accelerate the look at Bennett, by jumping toward the end of volume four, for his views on evolution, at which point we can wrap up our consideration of his work.
——————–
Bennett’s views on evolution are highly exotic, speculative, and open at any given point to the charge of pseudo-science. At the same time he is one of the most devastating critics of Darwin, despite some serious goofs of his own, because he attempts to do what Alfred Wallace suspected was needed, which is to explicate the nature of human potential (consciousness, creativity, will, etc..) that can never evolve by natural selection.
The result is something that I must say that I can’t easily accept, but which is interesting anyway because it states what others are too timid to declare, which is that human evolution is about the mind, ‘soul’, and consciousness, and these appear suddenly, as biologists now acknowledge, in a coordiination that is visible in the notable ‘great explosion’ of homo sapiens sapiens sometime after 100k years ago.
Read at your own risk, then, but at the same time it is important to examine these views, whether for the provocation, or their rejection in a critique.
I have cut to the end, with a short quote on the hyperzoic era.
Note that Bennett finds that human evolution straddles two eras: the era of life, and the onset of real man, as the ‘third chimpanzee’ enters the hyperzoic era.
This passage will explain this point, a bit.
I will note the reference to the ‘hyparxic future’, one of Bennett’s most exotic ideas, which might be thought of as the ‘virtual future’.
If you have a project for the future, say, writing a book, that lingers in your mind prior to any action, then the project exists in the virtual future.
Bennett’s thinking on the hyparchic future here is speculative science fiction, but the point he is making is that much of what we see is the realization of a teleological system.
Despite the objectionable formulation, the notion of the hyperzoic era remains for consideration. We tend to see mind and consciousness as the fruits of ‘life evolution’. Bennett is claiming that a new stage is reached with man, as significant as the origin of life: the hyperzoic era.
Note that for Bennett ‘conciousness’ is a cosmic energy, while what we normally call ‘consciousness’ he calls ‘sensitivity’, a life energy.
Chapter 17. THE HYPERZOIC ERA
Our first task must be to explain what we mean by the ‘Hyperzoic Era’. In Vol. I we divided existence into the Hyponomic, Autonomic and Hypernomic realms. Life lies entirely within the second; In Vol. II we similarly distinguished three tetrads of Energies: Material, Vital and Cosmic. Consciousness (E 4) is the coarsest of the four cosmic energies. Sensitivity (E 5) is the finest energy of life, so that the separa¬tion, organization and refinement of sensitivity all fall within the Auto¬nomic Realm. When, however, consciousness is added we enter the Hypernomic realm, and for that reason the stage of evolution in which consciousness appears will be called the Hyperzoic Era-not because it leaves life behind, but because it adds something that goes beyond life. We retain the form ‘-zoic’ to indicate that we are concerned with a stage in the evolution of life; but from henceforward, the emphasis will be upon mind leading to soul. The immense significance of the penetra¬tion of consciousness into the sensitivity of living organisms is not only that this makes possible the arising of selves, but that it is an awakening of the Mind of the Biosphere. Through the human mind, we see that the Biosphere begins to acquire the faculty of reflection, so that the earth becomes related to itself in a new way that goes beyond life alone.
The study of the Hyperzoic Era presents us with a new problem inasmuch as we are in the midst of it, and therefore cannot study the totality of this stage of evolution through its traces, as we have done with the others. We have adopted the view that the part cannot be under¬stood without reference to the whole. We must, therefore, make at least some attempt to construct a picture of the whole Era, even though we cannot say how events will turn out.
We have a few elements to help us:
I. The concepts of hyparchic plan and eternal pattern.
2. The notion of Demiurgic Intelligences working in the Hyparchic Future.
3• The traces of earthly life during the last few million years.
end of page scanned….
etc, etc,….
Danielou’s history of India
/2009/09/02/danielou-history-of-india/
A Brief History of India (Hardcover)
by Alain Daniélou
I came across Danielou’s book today, and have been reading it through with interest. No doubt the book has its problems, but it is a thunderclap of obvious insights after so much confusion on Indian history and religion.
After our many discussions of the Aryan invasion debate here, this older book (reprinted, but from the seventies???) which knows nothing of the controversy is very helpful.
Danielou is an especially close student of Shaivism, and its pre-Aryan origins, and this perspective hits the spot in sorting out the confusions of standard discourse on Hinduism/Vedism.
We can go into it here later, but, for example, the realization (which I had long suspected) that most of what we think of as the Indian religious tradition springs from the Dravidian and pre-Aryan period of India. The anti-invasionists have confused the issue: they are right, the Indian tradition is very much more ancient than we realize, but it wasn’t Aryan, but Dravidian.
Much more to say here.
Krishna the dravidian?
/2009/09/03/krishna-the-dravidian/
Google images for Sri Krishna
It is of interest, all of a sudden, to look at the images of Krishna, whose name means ‘black’, in most cases in a purple cast, less often black.
Clearly a Dravidian!
Comment on Sanskrit literature translations
Comment on Some Sanskrit literature transposed/translated
James said,
03.09.09 at 8:59 pm
You may be right. The Dravidian loanwords start appearing in the later parts of the Rig Veda. It may explain the shift in philosophical outlook. In the final analysis, I simply don’t know what to think.
Whatever the case with the Indus question, it seems that primordial Shivaism is the source of what we think of as Indian religion, with the Jain tradition being up in the air.
Comment on Some Sanskrit literature transposed/translated
More from Danielou
/2009/09/13/more-from-danielou/
Another passage from Danielou’s A Brief History of India about the probable pre-Aryan source of the Ramayana (!) and the basic orientation of primordial Saivism predated the Aryan phase of India, and the source of the basics of Indian religion in its archetypal yoga/tantra polarity.
The argument makes sense in general terms, despite my reservations (I simply don’t know) about the comparison of Shiva and Dionysus, or any specifics about an early Indo-Mediterranean cultural matrix.
Nonetheless, such an idea, details apart, makes sense of the Neolithic in human history: we are missing the key seminal innovations that predate the onset of higher civilization.
The narrative that gives a particularly interesting view of the pre-
Aryan world is the Ramayana…
Danielou book: Shiva and the Primordial Tradition
/2009/09/15/danielou-book-shiva-and-the-primordial-tradition/
Shiva and the Primordial Tradition: From the Tantras to the Science of Dreams (Paperback)
Was just reading this other work, quite short, of Danielou, and, despite its limitations, very interesting: have we at last found the key, in the open, to Indian historical religion.
Danielou shows how it is not the antithesis of Buddhism/Hindusism, for example, that illuminates Indian religious history, but the mutual of all these later upstarts with the underground stream of primordial Shivaism, the source of yoga, samkhya, and–tantra!
It is a complex history, then, and figures such as Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Vivekananda as amateurish as we are compared with this stunningly ancient tradition, so….
Shiva and Dionysus?
/2009/09/18/shiva-and-dionysus/
Looking at still another book by Danielou, Gods of Love And Ecstasy, The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus, which continues the themes demonstrated here in some of the selections.
But I think this approach fails to distinguish between historical analysis, and the embrace in almost cultic fashion of very ancient religious forms.
Actually, we can hardly know what those sources really were.
But the basic point appears sound: there is a substrate still visible of very ancient religous forms going back to the Neolithic.
Whether this is really connected with Dionysus, or whether the languages said to be related really are (e.g. Sumerian. Dravidian, Basque, et al.) is less clear.
Danielou and the open secret
/2009/09/21/danielou-and-the-open-secret/
The discovery of Danielou may seem a bit odd to some here: it is something that is only clear to someone who has devoted long study to the subject of Indian religion, and failed to penetrated its very simple riddle, which is shunted aside the moment people get close.
Danielou’s scholarship is a bit treacherous, and one needs to ‘get the point’ without accepting all his facts. The exact nature of the relationship of Shiva to Dionysus is not so simple, nor is the pattern of cultural diffusion and interaction in the Neolithic in any way clear.
But the issues raised by Danielou will explicate what is often unfolding in Indian and/or New Age groups behind a simple disguise.
Consider Rajneeh with his emphasis on tantra, almost to carry out the project indicated by Danielou.
Our concern here is history, not becoming converts to another historical fiction. Shaivism was not fiction, but its exemplars deal in fictions, we can be sure. Reviving the past is problematical.
With splendid naivete Danielou reveals the secret and the scandal where more tight-lipped poker players (and scoundrels) are plying this theme of the one and true ancient teaching, and doing shadowy things that the ancient Shaivism did in the open. Thus Danielou warns us of human sacrifice in the ancient tantric religion! Sufis, Gurdjieffians, et al. are not so talkative.
Thus, the somewhat thin quality of Danielou’s material nonetheless contains a set of keys to religious archaeology, and to what must have been the lost ‘religion’ of the Neolithic Indians, millennia before the rascal Aryans.
We don’t wish to be conned into another round of derivative new age tantra, but we can appreciate the historical value of Danielou’s key, so obvious, so out in the open, something we have read a few times before without it registering. After many confusing way stations on the road to Indian religion his most obvious analysis suddenly becomes clear (if incomplete, and riddled with possible scholarly errors)>
We cannot revive the past, and must beware of the crooks and con men who will recycle this material.
It all sounds suspicious reminiscent of Gurdjieff and his con, the ancient teachings, their secret, etc…
Use the historical clue, one the more useful from this naif, but beware of the conmen selling antiquities as spiritual paths.
Enter MBFM on Danielou question
/2009/09/23/enter-mbfm-on-danielou-question/
I have been getting several books by Danielou from Amazon super cheap, books from the seventies: the last one is Gods of Love and Ecstasy, The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus,
and also:
While the Gods Play: Shaiva Oracles and Predictions on the Cycles of History and The Destiny of Mankind.
This latter book shows the catch in much of Danielou’s system of thought and takes up the highly questionable cyclical view of history from those who propose the ‘Kali Yuga’
I was just about to comment critically on this when MBFM shows up with the right info here on Danielou’s background,.
Before proceeding let me say that I found Danielou’s history of India, despite its flaws, actually better than many of the last several decades, since the politically correct stance on the Aryan migration question has made them all suspect.
Danielou shows up this nonsense before it happened (his work is from the seventies or so) by assuming, this from a devoted fan of Hinduism, that the original assumption of an Aryan invasion was accepted even by most students of Indian religion (another good example being Rajneesh who denounced this fallacy when in started, in the seventies, or early eighties).
But the dross that Danielou accumulates is considerable and here comes MBFM.
good!
Danielou and Guenon’s Traditionalism
/2009/09/23/danielou-and-guenons-traditionalism/
comment from MBFM
mybrainisafleamarket said,
23.09.09 at 7:54 am ·
Alain Danielou appears to have been a perennialist, and a devotee of Rene Guenon’s Traditionalism. This is discussed in two comments I have appended to a later article.
MBFM is just in time to start looking at the context of Danielou’s New Age thought, and his connection with Guenon’s Traditionalism is essential to know, after we momentarily gave his works some credence.
The usefulness of Danielou was to have some support for what I have always suspected (but don’t really know for sure) is the solution to the Aryan migration debate: Indian spirituality predates the Aryans and has a Dravidian history going back to the Neolithic. The asseration that the Puranas are probably complex translations from some Dravidian source clinches the point right away, but most scholars are afraid to say such a thing in their books/.
But we need to scope Danielou against his background, as MBFM is doing.
Danielou and Guenon
/2009/09/23/danielou-and-guenon/
MBFM comments on Danielou’s knowledge of Guenon
mybrainisafleamarket said,
23.09.09 at 7:33 am
‘Guenon also acquired some new readers during (World War II), including Alain Danielou, a French musician and convert to Hinduism then living in Benares, India, who began the translation of some of Guenon’s works into Hindi. His elder brother, Jean Danielou, who at the end of his life was a Catholic cardinal and member of the Academie Francaise, became interested enough in Traditionalism to write occasional articles on the subject. (In his footnote to this sentence, Sedgwick cites three published sources for those who wish to go further).
Page 119-120, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, by Mark Sedgwick.
Booknotes: Against The Modern World
/2009/09/24/booknotes-against-the-modern-world/
MBFM comment.
mybrainisafleamarket said,
23.09.09 at 5:44 pm · (wiggle, squirm blush)
Well, I appreciate the compliment, but all I did was read Mark Sedgwick’s book, Against the Modern World, and keep it handy on the bookshelf next to my computer.
Danielou sounded like a familiar name, I knew he had some kind of tie to Rene Guenon, because I had read Sedgwick. So, all I needed to do was reach for the book and quote the necessary passages.I recommend all interested persons purchase a copy. It has just been reissued in paperback and if you go to http://www.bookfinder.com, you can do some comparison shopping.
The book is a pleasure to read and even the footnotes are terrific.
You are correct: I am going to get the book, even though I read it quite a while ago (with a library copy).
Hinduism a product of Kali yuga
/2009/09/24/hinduism-a-product-of-kali-yuga/
One of the funny ironies of the Traditionalists who are ‘against the modern age’ is that, given Danielou’s periodization of the various ages, among the Kali Yuga, much of the ‘tradition’ is itself a form of decline. Danielou seems quite aware of this, and isn’t it quite funny that Hinduism is a concoction of the Kali Yuga!!!
Bennett’s heresies
/2009/09/24/bennetts-heresies/
One of the reasons I deal with Bennett and ‘give him a break’ as it were, is that his The Dramatic Universe, however confused, is an evolutionary scheme, and shows the historical blocks of evolution/history in their correct progressive aspect. Although his formulation is not standard, it is nonetheless closer to a modernist viewpoint than to the ‘ages of decline’ cyclical mythology that Danielou wrests from the history of Indian religion.
Bennet deserves a little consideration here then, and, indeed, we should at some point cite his discussion of modernity, and the emergence of democracy.
All these traditionalists, near whom we must include such figures as Gurdjieff, see modernity as a decline and its democracy as some aspect of that, with the crypto-fascist implications of their period analysis.
Stripping the Gurus: download pdf version
/2009/09/24/bennetts-heresies/
Discovered Stripping The Gurus online for pdf download: http://www.strippingthegurus.com/ebook/download.asp
Evolution, and soul
/2009/10/17/evolution-and-soul/
Article on new Dawkins book
The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology.
It is amusing that this article mentions the issue of the soul and the ‘when’. Bennett is one of the few people to address this question directly, one of the reasons for his strong anti-Darwinism. His language is a little different, and he speaks of several phases, the beginnings of consciousness, the beginnings of creativity (soul?), etc…
Lozowick….and E. J. Gold
/2009/12/04/lozowickand-e-j-gold/
Lozowick is small potatoes at this point, and we can’t lose sight of the fact that E. J. Gold is the real menace here, along with sufis in general.
Three bum jews in the guru game in one generation, Cohen, Lozowick and Gold. Gold is the worst, absolutely the worst, and he won’t get caught.
It is a puzzle that someone Jewish could be so malevolent. This Jew was overheard saying the Holocaust was good fertilizer for the planet.
So don’t call me an antisemite.
It is worth looking at Gold’s rating at Sarlo (Sarlo completely missed this guy’s negative side): he is listed as Gurdjieff’s successor. My gosh, how did that happen??? I find Sarlo’s rating comical.
Gold is no such thing, but in case he is a parody of that then it is worth considering that a successor to Gurdjieff will be a devil, under pressure to do some proven evil to make a name for himself.
Stay away from these guys, for your own sake!!!!
Be finished with the guru game. It might be more benign in India tradition, but its time is past.
Shadow of the Dalai Lama
/2009/12/04/shadow-of-the-dalai-lama/
Interesting book listed at Sarlo’s blurb on Dalai Lama: The Shadow of the Dalai Lama
http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Contents.htm
Buddhist fascism?
/2009/12/04/buddhist-fascism/
Here we go, the stuff Rajneesh warned about decades ago:
12. FASCIST OCCULTISM AND IT’S CLOSE RELATIONSHIP TO BUDDHIST TANTRISM
http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Part-2-12.htm
Visionary fascism was, and indeed still is, exceptionally deeply fascinated by the Buddhocratic form of state. In the late thirties (as the various fascist systems bloomed in Europe and the whole world) Spencer Chapman, a traveler in Tibet, wrote that even in the days of the dictators one can only be amazed at what uncontested power the Dalai Lama possesses” (Chapman, 1940, p. 192). The idea of kingship of the world, the uniting of spiritual and secular power in a single person, the ideology of war in the Shambhala myth, the uncompromisingly andocentric orientation, the tantric vision of the feminine, the whole occult ambience and much more besides were specifically adopted by several fascist ideologists and welded together into an aggressive myth. As we shall soon see, entire fascist systems are based upon the adoption of Tibetan/tantric doctrines.
It is important, whatever the case with the Dalai Lama, that he is also ‘small potatoes’, and probably has no knowledge of the behind the scenes action in the hopelessly obscure Tibetan system, with its connection to actual historical fascism/by report.
Shadow of the Dalai Lama, vs nineteenth century occult fascism
/2009/12/06/shadow-of-the-dalai-lama-vs-nineteenth-century-occult-fascism/
I am having a hard figuring out why I didn’t come across The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama sooner. I have been aware of its rough idea for decades, but without anything to back it up. I can’t match their grasp, if that, of Tibetan Buddhism.
Somewhere Buddhism went wrong, but when, and now?
Without fully endorsing that book, I would say, nonetheless, that it resolves the many suspicions I have had for a long time about Tibetan Buddhism, springing originally from a warning given by Rajnesh over thirty years ago on Buddhist fascism.
However, I do give the Dalai Lama a break, up to a point: he is a secondary effect here. The real problem lies in the action of a group, suspected to be Buddhist and/or Hindu (in quotation marks), that generated some western fascism. This previous generation is clearly detectable in the backwash literature, e.g. various junk New Agism themes like Ariosophy by those who overheard ‘occult whispers’, but understood nothing.
Nonetheless the text of The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama makes a new independent set of charges, which should be examined with care.
But I don’t think the Dalai Lama is fully aware of his own place in the larger context.
Hitler an avatar???? NOT
/2009/12/06/hitler-an-avatar-not/
I think that these cautionary critiques of The Shadow of the DL hit the spot, as to a feeling the attack on the DL is overdone, or off the mark in some way. And yet we can throw out half of it, or three quarters, and still be left wondering about Tibetan Buddhism. So we can proceed in both directions, exposing Tibetan Buddhism, and exposing the critiques.
The idea that Hitler was some kind of avatar is gross nonsense. As suggested in the post to which these comments were appended, this later backwash of something in the nineteenth century is secondary stuff, and second rate. Serrano and Evola are idiots on the sidelines and blabbermouths of no account. The real evil had long since been finished, and we are left to wonder at the phenomenon of Hitlerism. The issue, grotesquely, is not the spiritual grandeur of Hiter (for crying out loud), since he was clearly a man hypnotized and used because he wasn’t of any spiritual capacity.
There is something much deeper here, coterminous with the Blavatsky era, and we can see that Gurdjieff is in some way a response from the Sufi world to what they seem to suspect but don’t quite know either, in their partial sympathy with fascism, and reserve about an ‘esoteric’ operation they see coming, but don’t grasp.
Gurus as vampires, and the spiritual cannibalism racket
/2009/12/07/gurus-as-vampires-and-the-spiritual-cannibalism-racket/
MBFM’s instincts are right. With Gold the issue of spiritual cannibalism comes to the fore and remains the joker in the deck behind the front he calls his teaching (he actually has no teaching, and reshuffles bullshit every few years into a new concoction).
We are getting closer to the ‘motive’ behind the Crime, and the reason people like Gold have a sniggering substitute for a ‘teaching’ to get people through the revolving door.
It is a cynical mafia game, dressed up as spirituality, and a reminder that if you are stupid enough to buy into baloney about gurus or spiritual teachers, being a victim is a likely fate.
Time to warn people, and to demand that the guru tradition be open to inspection, and to a demand for a new way.
Guruism is dead
Data on Spiritual Cannibalism/book download
/2009/12/07/data-on-spiritual-cannibalismbook-download/
Comment on Rudi’s Spiritual Cannibalism
mybrainisafleamarket said,
07.12.09 at 3:42 pm ·
Note: The first edition of Spiritual Cannibalism was published in 1973 by Link publishing.Rudi died in a plane crash in February, 1973. I do not yet know whether he had already sent the MS off to the publisher, or whether his later successor, Chetananda, exerted any sort of control over its contents.
There are a succession of editions of this book, each one longer with photographs. Researchers will need to obtain all of them, by purchase or inter library loan, to compare and contrast contents and see if any important modifications were made.
——————-
mybrainisafleamarket said,
07.12.09 at 3:44 pm ·
An article on Rudi here, on a Muktananda expose site. It appears you can also download Spiritual Cannibalism if you wish to read it. All hail the Internet!
New Agers and new age confusions
2009/12/08/new-agers-and-new-age-confusions/
James comment:
…the 19th century was unusual in producing so many f*ckups in such a short period of time. Maybe you should incorporate this into some sort of reverse eonic effect. Blavatsky, Darwin, Gurdjieff, Nietzsche, Guenon, Coomaraswamy,Schuon, Crowley, etc….one has to wonder what the hell was going on.
You are certainly on to something, as I have noted before: check out the eonic effect on the issue of modernity, the modern transition, and the so-called Great Divide, and you will see why the logic of post-transitional modernity can result in confusion.
The question of these so-called ‘New Agers’ is a history of the ‘new age’ fallacy, and the misreading of epochs, something the eonic effect straightens out. The only real new age is the rise of modernity itself.
You are thus right, and I should comment on this further soon.
The Great Divide: get a copy of World History and the Eonic Effect
An Idries Shah chronology/sanitized sufism/vicious mafia of ‘real sufism’
/2010/01/18/an-idries-shah-chronology/
Comment/link on Idries Shah
mybrainisafleamarket said,
17.01.10 at 5:08 pm ·
This site offers a possibly useful chronology.http://wapedia.mobi/en/Idries_Shah //broken link
This material on Shah is important because his sanitized version of Sufism left a lot of people victims of entrapment as the ‘real sufism’ turned out to be a vicious mafia of evil types, a la Gurdjieff.
Nityananda
/2010/01/20/nityananda/
Comment on DFJ pseudo-path
J. said,
19.01.10 at 8:51 pm ·
It’s not like it takes much to convince people that you are some “enlightened” guru. Look at Nityananda, somebody who was obviously mentally disturbed and suffering from some form of retardation is one of the most respected “masters” today:“Of Muktananda’s own sagely guru, Nityananda (who died in 1960), the following information is extant:
He was a born siddha [“perfected being”], living his entire life in the highest state of consciousness (Muktananda, 1999).
He was an omniscient being; still he appeared as if he didn’t know much….
Only occasionally would he speak; however, you could not understand him (Muktananda, 1996).
“He was the best of gurus; he was the worst of gurus,” etc.[W]hen in his twenties, he would hide behind trees, patiently waiting for a cow to come his way. The moment the animal stood to drop a cowpat, he would rush forward, scoop up the dropping in midair, and then swallow it (Feuerstein, 1992).
Yum. Nor did such feasting exhaust the yogi’s interest in cows and their rectal output:He would at times be seen in the middle of the road (there was hardly any motor traffic in those days), catching the dropping from a cow before it fell to the ground, putting it on his head, and then whistling just like a railway engine and chugging away, as children often do (Hatengdi, 1984).
“Woo-woo! Next stop, Looney Station.”[Nityananda] would speak quite frequently about devotees who had the mentality of a crow. A crow, even in heaven, said Baba, insists on eating shit, because that is what he has been accustomed to. And this is exactly how these faultfinding devotees behave (Muktananda, 1996).
Cows, crows, choo-choos … and more:On another occasion, he besmeared himself from head to toe [i.e., including his lips] with [human] excrement. He sat near the lavatories, with large heaps of excrement piled in front of him. Each time a devotee passed him, he would call out, “Bombay halwa [sweets]—very tasty—want to eat? Can weigh and give you some” (Feuerstein, 1992).”
http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsamplechapters/muktananda.asp
The term ‘ashram’ should be translated properly, ‘clinic’ (maybe madhouse).
I guess the case of Nityananda shows that the whole continuity of the lineage has been violated. Too bad, a short circuit, and monstrous cases like Da Free John. Everyone go home.
Life, evolution vs mind and cosmic energy
/2010/02/08/life-evolution-vs-mind-and-cosmic-energy/
Bennett’s views are outlandish, no doubt, but he raises an issue that won’t go away: is mind evolution in man the same as life evolution in general? Bennett’s outrageous speculations nonetheless force the question. His system is divided into three levels, the mechanical, the life, and the cosmic levels. Man’s consciousness (what he calls sensitivity or life energy) is on the threshold of self-consciousness, the first level of cosmic interaction. (The terms are reversed in Bennett, consciousness means self-consciousness).
There is no way I know of you can proceed to verify or prove these ideas, but they have a mysterious potential plausibility that, stripped of speculative nonsense or the extravagance too present in Bennett, goes a long way to explain many things. That man’s mind is interacting with a domain beyond life via the vehicle of self-consciousness is an idea that is worth considering, without becoming a convert to it. Much that is garbled in standard accounts of human evolution suddenly might make sense if we adopt this perspective.
Much confusion arises in cosmology because we don’t make this distinction: the universe looks dead, by and large, but that is no impediment to the presence of ‘consciousness’ which is beyond life.
In any case, never become ‘convinced’ of these views. They are already so vitiated by Gurdjieff cult idiocy (although Bennett’s version is entirely alone and off by itself in a corner, unread) as to be toxic. But a few glimpses of what Bennett is driving at contributes at least a very good question to the enigma of human evolution, so badly treated by Darwinian incomprehension.
Note in passing: this issue arose very early in Bucke’s sense of ‘cosmic consciousness’ contrasted with consciousness. Bucke’s version is as confused as the rest, but it points to the similar thought in Bennett.
Anirvan’s Gurdjieff propaganda
/2010/02/17/anirvans-gurdjieff-propaganda/
To Live Within
Sri Anirvan (Author), Lizelle Reymond
This book was reprinted recently (you can check out my Amazon review). This is one of the most insidious brands of falseness in the Gurdjieff corpus.
As cute garbage it is uniquely effective in making submissive ‘disciples’ out of idiots who don’t know better.
I am not sure how this book came into being, but it is suspicious from the word go: what is a Hindu disciple who lived in a relatively benign ashram in India doing promoting Gurdjieff propaganda, when he is unfamiliar with the fourth way, of the criminal tendencies of sufistic teachers and groups in general, and Gurdjieff in particular.
Something is missing here, and we never see the ‘rigged’ game that produced this piece of deceptive rubbish. But we can certainly guess without much trouble, if you catch my drift.
Note the way that someone who has never had to suffer through Gurdjieff deceptions, and who lives in an environment of those seeking enlightenment heaps praise on a completely different ‘path’ situation about which he is ignorant, and which generally tries to suppress the potential for enlightenment.
The author is a first class windbag, and makes a lot of stupid fan-club statements about Gurdjieff’s teaching, from the enneagram to everything else.
This fellow doesn’t understand Gurdjieff at all and this grafting of yogic ashram lore onto Gurdjieff fantasies in a passive masochistic idiot disciple is dangerous for the many who have taken this as the Gurdjieff party line.
Never give a credit card number to Gurdjieff types
Update from the Darwin/Gurdjieff post
Note: I suggested a summary of this article in the comments, but no reply. I would be happy to buy the issue, but I would never trust a Gurdjieff outfit at any time with a credit card number. No way.
I remember one of E.J. Gold’s students trying to rip off credit cards years ago in the name of the work.
Be ware of these con men.
The Gurdjieff pseudo-tradition
/2010/02/19/the-gurdjieff-pseudo-tradition/
The point about the Anirvan book, and a lot of others, is that a subtle effort is pervasive in the Gurdjieff legacy to make the guru status normative. But the Gurdjieff legacy is a perverted and abnormal one, and most emphatically does not deserve the slightest bit of its authoritarian norm.
It is a cynical kind of front, and a scheme to ‘fleece the sheep’. Where it comes from in world history is not clear, but the net result is a form of degeneration of the socalled spiritual path.
We need to prevent this kind of degraded exploitation desguised behind ‘sufism’ from becoming any kind of a standard.
Some free advice on ‘spiritual paths’
/2010/02/22/some-free-advice-on-spiritual-paths/
A few weeks ago someone asked what we recommend here in the light of our critique of Gurdjieff and Sufism.
As I noted I am not a teacher, or guru, so I recomment nothing, except to note that secular modernism, attacked by Gurdjieff et al., has far more potential for a spiritual ‘path’ than the archaic societies of tradition.
Whatever the case, hightail it out of sufiland and Gurdjieffianity forthwith, and don’t look back.
One of things in the Gurdjieff corpus is the idea that there are three main traditions, of which the Indic is somehow the lowest. The path of the will, supposed source in some obscure other Shangri La of Central Asia has been used to create a false authority and in the process deflect attention from the Indic line. I have learned the hardway that this is probably a lie created by Moslems with a cultural inferiority complex trying to repackage Indian spirituality in a monotheistic form.
In any case, the ordinary westerner has no future whatsover in any of these sufistic mafia games, so I recommend abandoning all that completely.
It is just hypnotic advertising by a truly clever Madison Avenue propagandist (Gurdjieff) that makes converts to his exploitative and sadistic pseudo-path whose concealed aims are anti-modernism, destruction of democracy, creation of spiritual slavery, experiments on ‘low class’ victims, and concealed aristocratic paths for a select few.
You have no future whatsoever in that world, and the dummies who write books on the subject to do the free promo for these gangsters are the biggest rejects of all. You can glimpse that from the life of Ouspensky who realized at the end of his life that he wasn’t included in the game at all, and that he had produced a masterpiece of propaganda for others, just as he was being ejected forever from the ‘work’.
So as I suggested hightail it out of that realm. It is a strange world, too obviously a strange creation by gnostics who had found power but never really connected with a spiritual domain.
In another post I can make a suggestion: check out what’s left of the Rajneesh world, the ruins of that ashram have a lot of open gateways leading to the Indic tradition.
The problem with Hinduism
/2010/02/22/the-problem-with-hinduism/
As per the last post I am sorry to pursue a line of critique of Hinduism, and such as line doesn’t really mean what it seems to mean.
If you have followed this blog you may recall our enquiry into the AIT/OIT (Aryan invasion question), then the works of Danielou on the history of Indian religion, and it suddenly became clear that we might have solved the obvious problem stuck in the craw of many Hindu Indian religionists: the Vedic tradition, as Danielou points out, is a late addition and not the source of the great yogic or tantric traditions. This insight is not even controversial really. The term Hinduism itself is very late, almost nineteenth century, and repair of a false tradition would be a lot simpler than one might think. But obvious one of the factors arresting progress is the tradition of caste, Brahminism, the code of Manu, and, finally, somewhat sadly, the impostor tradition of Vedism.
That’s why a way toward the future, like water seeking a path around obstacles, seems to have spawned a future tradition in the Jain cultural context, where the immense obsession and red herring of Hinduism is rendered irrelevant.
Dalai Lama: I am a marxist
/2010/05/21/dalai-lama-i-am-a-marxist/
Will Dalai Lama’s Embrace Of Marxism Help Where Hollywood Failed? By ABY THARAKAN
This week, the Dalai Lama told a Manhattan gathering that he is a “Marxist”, half-a-century after he fled his homeland of Tibet, following occupation by Chinese Communists.
“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures. …
Shadow of a (fascist) marxist Dalai Lama?
/2010/05/21/shadow-of-a-marxist-dalai-lama/
The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: so is the Dalai Lama a Marxist or is the ‘expose’, Shadow of…, on the mark?
We never finishe our discussion of the latter, or of MBFM’s post on the ‘ancien regime’, Tibetan style.
The Dalai Lama, I feel, is entirely sincere, but desperate, therefore, a special kind of sincerity!
The problem here is that the Chinese Communistis aren’t really Marxists, and have made a boondoogle of cowboys and Indians out of Tibet with Han mirgration. Is it too late?
Destroying the whole of Tibetan tradition will end up a mistake, needless to say.
Meanwhile the Western left, gorging on Michael Parenti, will be sure to look the other way at this ethnicide.
Getting past the Satsang guru gang
/2010/05/22/getting-past-the-satsang-guru-gang/
More comments: Lozowick et al.
#
nemo said,
22.05.10 at 5:50 am ·Thanks for comment. All this preoccupation with Lozowick, Da free john, Andrew Cohen, and worst of all E.J. Gold, is a waste of everyone’s time. These people are in the business of preventing your spiritual path, as far as I can see. Especially Gold, who talks about ‘denying force’ to undermine paths (and rip off conscious energry). Recall SillyKitty and EJ Gold, that monstrosity who seems to specialize in Gurdjieff demonology.
Gold is a slightly different case: an avowed student of Aleister Crowley, and deliberate black magician.The ’spiritual path’ is relatively clear if you can evade the ‘guru worship’ circuit which attempts to stop spiritual development behind the veil of disciple mania, etc… Beware of the ‘satsang’ guruism started by Da Free John. It is pure crap, and it explicitly coopts spiritual practice.
And I am suspicious that the ‘god game’ has been brought to the fore to create a ‘path’ that coopts Indian religions with a dose of monotheism.
That is probably what also happened to Sufism at some point. Sufism has to be the biggest bum steer, Unless you have connections, forget it.
#nemo said,
22.05.10 at 5:54 am ·Say ‘goodbye’ to all these (Western) gurus and get to work. Deepak Chopra talks a good game, but he gets up and meditates two hours a day.
Look at Gopi Krishna (not the best example): he meditated to the point of visualizing a lotus. etc, etc… (his kundalini obsessions, however, are not very helpful, don’t get hung up on kundalini speculations). That takes a lot of time and heavy effort, while all these satsang assholes are worshipping the asshole of Da Free John and the stupidoes who came out of it.
Don’t wake up in your seventies, to start a path, after these people have exhausted your opportunity.
All these gurus in the Da free john gambit are trying to stop the ’search’, i.e. destroy/control the disciple totally. That’s bullshit. (Gopi Krishna is a special case, there are better examples, but he shows the way that the path is accessible to the crudest kinds of search. It is waiting out there if you can stop asskissing in this grotesque cult started by Da Free John).And you can see the result of this Western conspiracy in Andrew Cohen: a fake guru produced to make this racket seem real. Ditto, with Ken Wilbur, save that he is frozen in place and can’t seem to develop at all. Suspicious. OK, why waste your time with these pretenders?
The classic Indian path (corrupted by Hinduistic confusions) is not so complex.
This gang of Western fakes is an attempt to forestall Indian religion with monotheistic monopolies.However, as we have pointed out the Hindu field is hopelessly confused. The Brahmin game is corrupt and yet controls a lot of the guru circuit.
I know Rajneesh is controversial, but forget the man for a moment and look at the way he revived the very simple ancient Indic stream, visible in the yogic and tantric source traditions in ancient Shaivism. Before Buddhism there was Jainism, please note, without the Mahayana boddhissatwa game which freezes people also. Finding your way through these distractions is tricky. Don’t spend a life being the dip shit for the likes of Lozowick.
I don’t recommend an obsession with monotheism. It is a very late product of the Kali Yuga.
Sufi snapshots
/2010/05/23/sufi-snapshots/
Historically Apolitical, Sufis Now Side With the State
By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO, May 21, 2010 (IPS) – Although Egypt’s many Sufi orders have traditionally been known for keeping a safe distance from politics, recent events suggest they are now closer than ever to the ruling regime.
“The Sufi orders have practically become part of the state apparatus,” Abdel Menaam Mounib, head of the Islamic affairs department at independent daily Al-Dustour, told IPS. “Sufis can now be found in all branches of the regime, including the judiciary, the police and the military.”
These surreal glimpses of the world of ‘sufism’ in the Islamic world, almost a form of mass religion, seem incomprehensible to those who have followed the grotesque sufism-so-called of figures like EJ Gold.
Perhaps it is one’s good fortune to be forced out of the whole game instead of being swallowed up in a labyrinth of deceptions.
Work on self?
/2010/06/02/work-on-self/
I commented on ‘work on self’ here, and put it up at post level.
The idea of ‘work on self’ is too much of an abstraction invented with a hidden Gurdjieff agenda. Best to stop using it.
Remember that Gurdjieff was basically a kind of right wing ideologue whose take on ‘work’ resembles that of capitalist expoiters, and he was in fact ambiguous about slavery, thinking abolition a mistake.The use of the idea of ‘work’ to describe spiritual practice is therefore a play on the idea of ’surplus value’ and its extraction from ‘workers’.
Yogis don’t need this! Say goodbye to it.
The idea of ‘work on self’ is too much of an abstraction invented with a hidden Gurdjieff agenda. Best to stop using it.
Remember that Gurdjieff was basically a kind of right wing ideologue whose take on ‘work’ resembles that of capitalist expoiters, and he was in fact ambiguous about slavery, thinking abolition a mistake.The use of the idea of ‘work’ to describe spiritual practice is therefore a play on the idea of ‘surplus value’ and its extraction from ‘workers’.
Yogis don’t need this! Say goodbye to it.
nemonemini@aol.com
nemo
1
More on Danielou and primordial Shaivism
/2010/06/14/more-on-danielou-and-primordial-shaivism/
Reply to post on Danielou, and my reply to the reply:
Thank you for your feedback and critique. It is easy to go astray on such questions, and we need all the help we can get. I appreciate the need to be wary of a figure such as Danielou, but why only he? I am not a ‘true believer’ in Danielou’s theories, and I appreciate the problematic character of his notions of an Indo-Mediterranean religio-cultural complex’. It is also true that much conventional, supposedly non-speculative scholarship on Hinduism, is even worse, and has gone completely astray, terminally muddled, although taken as normative.
So, however shaky, Danielou’s unwitting commentary is a clue, no more, to a possible solution to at least some of the problems of the religious traditions here. Hinduism, if not a modern invention, and whatever it refers to, is a series of bum steers and gross historical fictions, so the sudden jolt given by Danielou can act like shock treatment, and reorient one’s thinking, hopefully without buying into all his other speculations.Note however that none of that add on speculation from Danielou was really implied or needed for my basic point, which was Danielou’s, and not only his, intuitive sense that the Indic stream of religion is far older than the probable entry point of Indo-European cultural/linguistic influence, leaving the situation as it conventionally taken equally problematic.
The question of translations from a presumably oral Dravidian tradition in such instances as the literature of the Puranas is indeed speculative, and, again, not necessarily the point. We can set that idea aside, and the basic issue remains. Many of the OIT proponents rightly point out that, as noted, Indian religion seems very old, almost Neolithic (whatever that means) in its character, but then go astray in trying to backdate the Aryan wrapper to such earlier periods. Vedic Sanskrit in the year 5000 BCE is a proposition that can’t be right to me, even given my poor understanding of historical linguistics here. If I am not mistaken the linguistics point to a cut off of around 2500 BCE at the absolute outside for Aryan influence, and Vedic is already far later than that. Vedism in the Neolithic has to be nonsense, blinding us to the obvious other point that non-Aryan Indic religion might indeed be that old. As a non-specialist I must nonetheless point to what was always my perspective, visible in the analog of the Aryan invasion of Greece. The OIT protest against an Aryan invasion ought to be equally indignant with respect to Homeric invaders, and bloodthirsty Spartans with their helots. The Greek case is the other instance of the obvious pattern that would seem hard to throw out.
Setting that approach of Puranas as translations aside for a moment (I can take the idea no further and appreciate the suggestion the idea doesn’t work), it makes sense to consider the antecedents of Shavism, with its yoga/tantra, and putative proto-Jain spinoff in some non-Aryan form going back to very early times. The discovery of yoga via elements of tantra is a concept that might almost prediate even the Neolithic and be a Paleolithic brand of evolutionary psychology, as Danielou suggests. The discovery of some connection of self-consciousness and sex as cave man stuff sounds right to me!
Again that is speculative. But at the very least it would seem that Jainism, from which Buddhism is in many ways a side branch and renovation/reform, had an entire interval going back several millennia or more. A similar prior record for proto-Shavism makes altogether a lot of sense.
The notion from Danielou of a Mediterranean cultural/linguistic complex is probably too speculative, I would not waste much time on the otherwise tantalizing idea of a Shiva/Dionysus collation. But I can’t reject out of hand the existence of a Neolithic ‘commons’ in the sense of a series related religious formats in an early oikoumene passed on via oral traditions. Without more evidence it is hard to proceed, but we should keep in mind the idea put forth by a recent author of a text on the Neolithic, After The Ice, that the Neolithic is the real source of all later civilization, in its basic elements. It makes sense to consider Danielou’s suggestion that the great Indic religious traditions crystallized around the sixth millenniusm BCE, the onset of the second Neolithic stage, also the probable birth point of proto-Dynastic Egyptian and proto-Sumerian cultural streams. We should note the parallel emergence of great temple complexes in the Mesopotamian field after ca. 5000 BCE in the era prior to what we call the ‘rise of higher civilization’, viz. ca. 3000 BCE. Higher civilization (as opposed to first Neolithic villages) sources earlier than that, and gets underway more that two millennia earlier. A parallel religious foundation period in Indian would make sense. Much of Indian religion still looks Neolithic.
That a tradition or version of Shaivism with its yoga/tantra and/or proto-Jain spinoff sources at this time is a notion that would explain many things. Note that this is five thousand years before the Axial Age, the latter closer to our time than to its antecedents. We see the same in the Occident, as the earlier sources of the Old Testament come to light.In any case, there are many minimal versions/variants/hypotheses as to Danielou’s basic point (and it wasn’t his thinking only) that might help toward a more historically based understanding of Indian religion which is entirely confusing in its current form because the dogma of Vedism is clearly grafted onto something that predates its appearance on the Indian scene.
As to the question of Dravidian, my suggestion could be off the wall, but there aren’t very many other candidates for a pre-Aryan linguistic backdrop. I would note also the puzzling contradictions in the figure of the blue/dark (dravidian?) Krishna, as if a very much more ancient myth is painted over with later mythhistory. In any case, South India (which I note in passing has some of the most ancient genetic strains known to man, standing in the direct path to the Out of Africa migrations) holds still many archaeological secrets, no doubt, and the remains of trace elements of primordial Shavism are all there to be understood.In any case, the basic streamlined version of Danielou’s idea might help many, especially New Agers sold into slavery in the Neo-Brahminical guru circuit, to sort out their confusion and entanglement in the so-called Hindu history of Indian religion here. It comes as a shock to realize that this history is false, an already ancient brand of propaganda, and makes no sense for the obvious reasons Danielou points to, minus his other speculations. Danielou unfortunately compromised with this latter Hinduism even as he seems to have undermined it, adding another layer to his complicated reasoning.
I might conclude by noting that while I give little credence to Indic notions of age periods, it is amusing, a real howler of a laugh, to consider that Hinduism is a concoction of the Kali Yuga, Indic religion in decline, and that Buddhism (I am not a Buddhist) as a restoration movement availed itself of much of the stream of Jain religion, trying to evade the crystallizing Hindu nexus coming into being on its ancient archaeological site. The orphaned Jain stream was already ancient by the time of Mahavir/Gautama, speaking of not less than twenty four teertankers. The odd way Mahavir comes at the end of something, and Gautama at the beginning suggests the Danielou idea of something very ancient.
If you do the math (??) at a rate of one teertanker per century that puts us back to ca. 3000 BCE. I find it comical to consider ‘Hinduism’ a stage of the decline of Indic religion. In any case, Indian religion was already ancient by the period of the Axial Age and the formation of Buddhism, Hinduism based on Vedism, and the rest. In some ways Buddhism would seem closer to our own time than to the primordial birth of Jainism in the Shaivite complex, whatever exactly that was, and which is arguably a Neolithic legacy.Again, Danielou may be wrong at many points, but he points to the altogether complicated nature of the whole history, especially the way that the ancient Shavism resurfaces at odd points, the sudden eruption of tantra into Buddhism being a possible example. It is very hard to make one’s way in this labyrinth, and it is clear that everyone is confused, Hindus most of all. Looking at Indian religion it is often hard to grasp what one is seeing.
The basic outline of Danielou, stripped to essentials, without any other embroidery, might help to orient oneself in this succession of mirages.
John Landon
Summary re: Danielou
/2010/06/15/summary-re-danielou/
A final email to cybalist@ …x
Just a final note on the question of Danielou and I will leave it at that: his work has many extraneous issues that don’t concern the main point. The stream of Indic religion goes back before the putative Indo-European entry point, and the appearance given by so-called ‘Hinduism’ is completely misleading, the Vedic tradition being a later construct, which a serious New Ager might learn to disregard apart from its intrinsic historical or achaeological interest. It has no relevance to the mainline of Indic spirituality. Thus the status of Hinduism is highly misleading and any student thereof might judiciously consider the primordial Shaivism and Jain traditions, as outlined by figures such as Danielou, taking these with care. This is a treacherous line of study, but the basic outline is clear. This tradition belongs to noone and the student of the great yogas should altogether defy the propaganda and outright exploitations of the Neo-Brahmin tyranny over the Indian tradition which has been crippled by sophistical doctrines and class warfare of the most subtle brand.
But the basic outline or periodization given by such as Danielou can help to orient oneself toward the real Indian spirituality. This is no small matter as the implications of these views show that, for example, the endemic confusion with caste is a later imposter and has nothing to do with the real tradition.
Without getting into the equally treacherous realm of Buddhist propaganda, we can see that it represented a reform movement trying to outflank the crystallizing Hindu establishment.
New Agers are often systematically misled by these phantoms of ‘Indian religion’ in decline as of the Axial Age. It comes as a shock to realize that two thousand years of Hinduism has been based on a set of distortions, but the defenders of Indian tradition would do better to write off their losses and pick up the real threads of yoga/tantra spawned by primordial Shaivism. In fact, those traditions, to a close look, are already the case tucked away behind the various fronts of the Vedic phantoms.Thank you for your time, and the insights of Indo-European linguistic studies on this, for many, a practical life and death issue of entanglement in endless confusion.
John Landon
There is more on this at The Gurdjieff Con blog
Post on New Age ‘evolutionism’
/2010/06/21/post-on-new-age-evolutionism/
I am reposting here the (surprisingly popular) post on Cohen and evolutionaries here: http://darwiniana.com/2010/06/20/andrew-cohens-muddle-over-the-evolutionary/
Enlightennext magazine in endless issues peddles the idea of the ‘evolutionary’, and the connection between ‘evolution’ and the ‘path to enlightenment’. About once every few months I try to scotch this confusion, not created, but amplified, by Cohen, who seems confused about spiritual teachings in general. He is a strange manufactured pseudo-guru with no spiritual practice who is running on empty after the interacton with an Indian yogi who must have pointed his shakipat ray gun in the wrong direction and zapped Cohen by mistake.
To say that ‘spiritual practice’ is a form of evolution is, in some ways, understandable, since we naturally tend to think we ‘evolved’ our consciousness somehow. But the promotion of a spiritual path as evolution, and this promoted by a guru who is self-interested in the equation, financially and organizationally, is sly, and possibly dishonest. In fairness the confusion has sourced elsewhere long ago, and we can see the confusion already in Blavatsky.
Evolution brings complexity into time at the species level (although Darwinists wouldn’t agree necessarily), while the path of enlightenment is the process whereby an individual proceeds beyond time, and rebirth cycles. (Leaving alone the really hard question of how man evolved that potential)Of course, you might think that ‘evolution’ might bring into being an organism with a different potential for consciousness. But as Gurdjieff noted, ‘consciousness’ tends to flee such mechanical achievements. The issue is to produce ‘self-consciousness’ through the tools already given by nature. Note the ordinary confusion over and equation of consciousness and self-consciousness. Man’s mechanical consciousness arises as function of birth and organism, with a dose of self-consciousness given by his powers of attention. Beyond that his behavior is mechanical, until the will awakens, whatever that means.To confuse the two, spiritual practice and evolution, is a modern fallacy, for the word ‘evolution’ in the modern sense didn’t exist in ancient times, and wasn’t used to describe spiritual paths. Correct me if you disagree and have some counter-facts.
Also note the way that the term ‘evolutionary’ is a crypto-rightwing piece of invented verbiage to counter the term ‘revolutionary’. Suck up to Andrew Cohen, an pay your monthly asskissing tithe and may be you will evolve.
Bullshit.Again, it might be the case that man is ‘evolving’ toward a greater awareness complete with psychic extensions to his current state. That would not be Darwinian evolution, and would imply directionality and some kind of teleology in the stages of ‘man’s evolution’. Could be so, but it wouldn’t follow that individual effort here would be the same as species level emergentism.
Perhaps man is evolving with respect to consciousness. I am not in the position to deny it. But most New Age thinking here is confused. I doubt this New Age mythology is correct.
The strange case with man is that he has all the pieces in his kit to do all that from scratch, as he is. He doesn’t need to evolve that because then it would be a mechanical appendage to his organism, of no value for the development of consciousness. It is nonetheless true that man has a poor percentage here and rarely achieves his potential. To evolve to a better starting point that made these things easier can’t be ruled out, but it is not likely: man is already there, so to speak. He just needs to activate his freedom to be who he is already. You can’t sell fire. You sell matches.
Still, the confusion here is not surprising, but beware of gurus who think they understand evolution. They don’t.
Note that Gautama began to sense the Axial Age but couldn’t quite make it out, not surprising. The ‘evolution’ on the species level of religion and the spiritual paths of individuals intersect in the spectacular Axial Age phenomenon, but they are not the same.
You can see the difference there between individuals, and groups of individual, complete with gurus, buddhas. But the period of the so-called Axial Age was far larger in scope, and was ‘evolving’ civilization at a macro level.Gautama thus by inference could not understand how man had evolved his ‘consciousness’. The point is obvious, and alarming. But the issue is inevitable, ‘evolution’ is a process of prodigious scope stretching over billions of years. And the complexities of organisms, and their potentials for consciousness couldn’t be unraveled by a man in the age in which Gautama lived. By inference the same would still be true of our time.
For example, ….
Noone can grasp how man evolved from homo erectus to homo sapiens, most probably the canonical case of evolution that had a by product of so-called spiritual evolution, i.e. an increase in consciousness AND one that became a mechanical product, up to a point, of the organism. Note the catch.
But we have no idea how that happened, or, in fact, what happened.
I can’t rule out that a kind ‘evolution agent’ appeared like an avatar to guide human evolution here, as some have said, protesting that the term ‘evolution’ breaks down at this point. They may be right, but most probably wrong here also. Buddha was such an avatar (a Hindu word that has turned into junk thinking, so also unusable finally) in the sense that his appearance seems strangely timed to the revolution of ages we called the Axial Age, but he couldn’t produce evolution in the true sense any more than he could control cosmic forces. His basic message, btw, wasn’t evolutionary, but started with the First Noble Truth: the whole mess is a huge mistake. So goodbye to all that. Adios.I don’t know. period. Noone else does either. And to promote the idea that you are guiding evolution here with New Age muddle is a disservice.
Unless these ‘gurus’ can speak there to that they have few grounds to claim knowledge of evolution. (I should note the discussions at The Gurdjieff Con of J.G. Bennett’s borderline wacko science fiction speculations there: the task required the gift of consciousness from beings beyond the body level of organism. In his scheme ‘consciousness’ is a cosmic energy that doesn’t interact easily with the life energies of the organism).The term ‘evolution’, btw, is not present in the Yoga sutras. What sanskrit words were mistranslated into the word ‘evolution’?
Check out that text, without modern embroidery.
Again, noone has a monopoly on the term ‘evolutionary’. That some should make this ‘mistake’ after essentially redefining the semantics of the word would is not something I could forbit, since it would mean I am a central authority on other people’s verbiage. That I am not. So this new usage is not something I can absolutely negate. But I should note that this usage arises from confusion, not clarity.
Mr. Gold’s endless ‘judas’ game/syndrome
/2010/06/26/mr-golds-endless-judas-gamesyndrome/
This tragicomedy over the fake ‘James’ is illustrative of the problem with Gold’s so-called school, and finally with Gurdjieffianity in general.
As this episode makes clear Gold and his student imitators are dishonest and completely untrustworthy at all points.
In fact, Gold is fixated on the ‘Judas’ question (cf. the recent books/literature catching up with the issue of Judas as a special disciple), and it corrupts the entire circumstance of his so-called (non-existent) teaching. Be wary, it seems the ‘judas’ legacy has a demonic cast, not unlike the case of the devil Gurdjieff who ‘first’ injected this ‘judas’ theme, without explanation
I can’t think of a single episode to do with Gold and his school that wasn’t a betrayal, a deception, a cuinning lie, and worse, voodoo, black magic, attempts to influence the unconscious of others, etc, etc…
Again, I can’t think of a single exception. In every case, there was a problem.
Naturally, it becomes essential to void relations completely.
I hope others will snap out of it, given the warning here.
Reply to reply from Koenraad Elst re AIT/OIT
/2010/06/27/reply-to-reply-from-koenraad-elst-re-aitoit/
Email response re AIT/OIT from Dr. Koenraad Elst and my reply from Cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Thank you for your reply.[see below flap] I have learned a few things here, which is that in broad strokes something might be true, but then we add details that won’t work. Thus I have no real idea about whether the Puranas show evidence of translation (etc..) and to cite Danielou’s idea there precipitated possible deserved charges of speculation. Similar pitfalls surround Indus archaeology. I can make my point without deciding about the Indus. I just don’t know. This ‘extras’ precipitate chaotification of the basic simple idea, that, pace. Jainism, Indic spirituality goes back a long way, and it is hard to take Vedic Sanskrit along for the ride.
But what we are talking about here is something that is doubtfully speculative, the great age of the Indic tradition. I will accept the critique of speculative notions on a case basis, but let me note my late discovery in a short life that the entire history of Hinduism is mostly speculative form of thought, based on the false sequence: Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, etc… That sequence makes no sense. And, as I recall, through all the years that I believed that history, I also assumed, why I am not sure, but instinctively, that the Jain tradition was older. That’s a contradiction that is easily resolved by Danielou’s perspective, minus the add ons.
We are confronted by several likelihoods:
The Indic religious tradition is very ancient, perhaps even going back to the Neolithic
Indo-European linguistics (cf. a recent book by Beckwith: Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. The appendix has an interesting take on IE differentiation dating) makes it awfully hard to posit ‘Vedic Sanskrit’ at anything like an early date, viz. prior to 2500 BCE. And even the later is unrealistic. We are talking about the obvious parallel of the lead up to Homeric Greek, and the obvious analog to Vedic Sanskrit. That makes just after 2000 BCE at the absolute outside an important probable cut off. So, unfortunately, just as the AID gang tended to suggest, we are talking about second millennium Vedic Sanskrit.
Even for an amateur such as myself, this seems an obvious situation, one that is a hard given that is hard to reinterpret.As to the colonial question, I am a trained student of classics, with reverent awe of Homeric Greek literature, and I find it hard to admit (as Nietzsche discovered, before going off the deep end here) that, viz. the Spartan canon of ethics was ‘colonialism squared’, and a sadistic endeavor at keeping helots subjected.
If anything the Indian analog shows the strange way in which the subjected overcame the conquerors. What seems to have happened is that an oral tradition was written down in ‘Sanskrit’ and other related languages.
But even as we cite Nietzsche we come to what is possibly one of the root errors, not the least of modern fascism, here: a kind mystic Aryanism, that had all sorts of preposterous notions about Indo-European tribesmen as superior beings. Nietzsche’s nonsense about the ‘overman’ is an obvious muddle of eugenics, and garbled Buddhism, with highly fascist material lurking in the background. The IE’s were highly intelligent primitives, the source no doubt for the stunning over 160-200 IQ’s that were nonexistent or rare in the older oikouemene, that’s it. It was perhaps that factor that seeded the deranged mystique of the Aryan supremacists who are truly nutcases.
They entered the old oikoumenes and contributed fresh troopers to the advance of civilization, often with spectacular results, but rarely with the seed ideas that had generated civilization. You can see the point in the Iliadic literature: a sudden apparition of the highest quality art, but a still primitive barbarian world view.The idea that the IE’s in India wrote down the Vedas, and then developed Indian spirituality along the lines of yoga, has contributed to that false mystique, with the spin off notion of the garbled ‘overman’ nonsense. But we can see that the real aspirant to ‘overman’ was the humble fakir and yogi of primordial India, I will wager a lowly Dravidian. Nietzsche’s, among others’, hopeless confusion here has still to be properly critiqued. And he is highly clever in his own way at hiding his real views.
Again, all this is not necessary to the basic idea: that Indic spirituality is ancient, and probably not linguistically IE at its root. I can’t honestly see any other possibility here.
It is in this context that reading Danielou made sense. There are many very loose or streamlined versions of Danielou’s thesis, without his other hypotheses, that are robust, and very hard to reject. Viz., I cannot find any source for Jainism in Vedism. Impossible for me. In that sense, Danielou made official what was obvious all my life, in a state of contradictory confusion. It is an important clarification. Anyone who tries to get from Vedism to the Upanishads to Buddhism can easily end up horribly confused. Hindus ended up with the impudence to accuse Buddhists off being outsiders, or of distorting the tradition. In fact, Buddhism makes sense as a rebirth of Jainism, other things being equal. Its allergic refusal of Hindu extraneous elements was in fact an aspect of canonical tradition that knew nothing of Vedism.
The simplest perspective here wouldn’t even need an idea of ‘primordial Shaivism’, but simply refers to an Indic stream of religion going back very early, and including sources of yoga/tantra, Jainism, etc…
As to Rajneesh, I am not one of his followers, and merely recall an one-liner from him from somewhere, speaking as a Jain by birth scoffing at the Hindutva attempts to rewrite the AIT as OIT. The charge of colonialism produced derision in him and others. He was too busy colonializing Western seekers to care less. In general he represents the spontaneous revival of Shaivite elements in India, over and over again, and his indifference to Hinduism made his teaching highly popular in the West, and in India also. I would not be so certain of who he was based on the journalism over him in the West. In any case, his remarks here were en passant, and never developed. I merely indicate the way a person from a Jain background thought less of Hinduism than of Aryan barbarians.
I am interested that OIT predates the AIT, as noted. But then, so what? Again, I need make no hard assumptions about AIT either, but I do have a problem with Vedic Sanskrit in the Neolithic. That won’t work.
As to Gurdjieff, I referred to the blog The Gurdjieff Con, a critique of that fellow. Actually, Gurdjieff had a perspective not unlike Danielou’s. He also thought the traditions of esoteric spirituality went back thousands of years. But his statements are actually less reliable than even Danielou’s and make obvious errors, so, in any case, that doesn’t really concern us, save that he is perhaps in general correct that some things are very ancient indeed. Danielou is more honest, as a scholar, where Gurdjieff makes things up, outrageously, viz. the reference to a complete fiction, Ashieta Shiemash, then collated with Zoroaster, to say nothing of Nietzsche’s brand of the recycled zarathustras of the late nineteenth century, unspoken in the background, etc… In the same way he claims that ‘pre-sand Egypt’ was the source of his ‘fourth way’, a typically preposterous, if possibly true, claim, for which he presents no evidence. Nothing Gurdjieff claims is thus reliable.
Danielou, as far as I know, was respectful of scholarly honesty.The question of Nietzsch is highly complex, and not irrelevant to this issue, since he is the source, often invisible, of much Aryan supremacy nonsense, as this is mixed with Darwinian-style eugenics, and the whole witches’ brew of the last century.
For a wild yet sober book (self-published), out of the mainline of Nietzsche research, which sanitizes Nietzsche, check out
Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman–Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine Abir Taha (cf. Amazon.com)
Read at your own risk, this highly toxic, but cogent underground perspective. Mostly it is quotes form Nietzshe’s writings, which many Nietzsche scholar assist readers in never reading. The confusion over the overman, eugenics, reductionism scientism mixed with Aryan nonsense (in part from Nietzsche’s studies of Archaic Greeks) as a ‘transvaluation of values’ etc etc lurks behind this AIT/OIT imbroglio.Three cheers for the Dravidian fakirs.
John Landon
Gold senior/junior, scifi and a sufi gambit
/2010/07/11/gold-seniorjunior-scifi-and-a-sufi-gambit/
MBFM sent me two issues of Galaxy Magazine, the science fiction magazine of E.J.Gold’s father, October 1968, and February 1961.
This issue is of importance for understanding the context of EJ Gold (and the idiocy of his non-teaching).
It also leaves a series of questions about the exploitation of science fiction by some group of sufis at some point, and the relationship of this, still unclear, to the history of science fiction. One reason I ended up unwelcome at the Gold enterprise was my condescension at the time to sci-fi, which showed I was totally in the wrong place. Greek scholar and all that, real snob.
An number of scifi authors have a disguised spiritual theme, sometimes as with A Voyage to Arcturus, a genuinely excellent novel, with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc, etc…
Some hidden sufi shark must have been playing Mephistopheles to a lot of scifi writers and their careers. And they all seem to have experienced Faustian burn out.
This issue intersects with Idries Shah and Doris Lessing, and the ‘rocket ship’ theme of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub, to say nothing of the Sirius invaders ‘secret’. Gurdjieff hinted he knew that aliens had arrived on earth and that sufis knew the secret…
more lies and disinfo?
We talked about this at Darwiniana several years ago, and I might review the archives there and repost some of that here.
Anyway, that’s an important item of the history here of the Gold operation and the way it used scifi garbage to front itself. Galaxy magazine is almost unreadable trash at this point, at least for me, and a reminder that Gold was lacking real smarts, and the reason he so viciously attacked people with potential that he found threatning (I was one of them, I ought to know). But he did have connections, and was able somehow to parlay that into becoming a (self-appointed) sufi sheik, or when he felt like it an avatar, a godman, and god knows what else. All self-appointed credentials from a fast talker and stand up comedian. At least Gurdjieff was honest, and called himself a devil.
Gold was too cunning to risk that.
A stand up comedian can fake a guru without too much trouble. Thus Mr. Gold’s mesmerizing pitch to desperate New Agers frantic to find an ‘esoteric school’. Thus the demand, thus supply.
However, Gold did have a breakthrough as a black magician and turned out to be quite an accomplished devil in the Gurdjieff vein. So chock that up for his curriculum vitae.
Crowley and the Parsons connection
/2010/07/12/crowley-and-the-parsons-connection/
Re: Crowley and the Parsons connection/broken link
nemo said,
12.07.10 at 4:56 am ·
The issue of Hubbard is connected to all of this, as you know. EJ Gold was a chronic Hubbard stalker/watcher and had clones of the Dianetics meter as part of his paraphernalia and constantly remorphing game plan. That device is a fraudulent take on a lie detector and can be mimicked with a simple galvanic skin response device, which is a hobbist level apparatus.The Hubbard question is also connected with the Crowley legacy, and we can reresearch that anon.
MBFM said,
12.07.10 at 11:14 am ·Read up on Jack Parsons and his quite strange household.
The 1950s were not so staid, after all.
Not even in Pasadena!
Chomsky, conservative occultism, etc…
/2010/07/21/chomsky-conservative-occultism-etc/
Chomsky a controlled asset?…. old link
We have discussed many times the conservative conspircy behind Gurdjieff, and that points to many others.
We should note it is not hard to psychically invade a celebrity and dampen his views unconsciously. With Chomsky we don’t know.
Link to Hubbard/Parsons, googled
/2010/07/25/link-to-hubbardparsons-googled/
http://www.watchman.org/sci/hubmagk2.htm
It is not surprising then, that an examination of L. Ron Hubbard’s life reveals he was significantly influenced by, and was a practitioner of, the black arts – the occult.
Jon Atack, a former Scientologist and highly repected biographer of Hubbard and Scientology, has collected probably the most extensive research archives on Scientology. Atack writes, “It is impossible to arrive at an understanding of Scientology without taking into account its creator’s extensive involvement with magic” (FactNet Report, “Hubbard and the Occult” p. 2).
Atack states that when one examines Hubbard’s private letters and papers which were revealed in the Church of Scientology vs. Armstrong trial, and compares the teachings of Scientology with those of the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley, the connection is inescapable (Ibid.).
Hubbard was clearly involved in the occult. In 1945, L. Ron Hubbard met Jack Parsons, who was a renowned scientist, protégé of occultist Aleister Crowley, and a member of the notorious Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), an international organization founded by Crowley to practice sexual black magic.
Parsons had Hubbard move onto the property of Parsons’ Pasadena, California, home. It was there that Hubbard began to practice the occult and sexual magic. Parsons’ mistress, Sara Northrup, left him for Hubbard and later became Hubbard’s second wife, even before Hubbard had divorced his first wife (The Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1990, p. A37).
Biographer Russell Miller wrote, “Parsons considered that Ron had great magical potential and took the risk of breaking his solemn oath of secrecy to acquaint Ron with some of the O.T.O. rituals…. Parsons wrote to his ‘Most Beloved Father’ (his term for Aleister Crowley) to acquaint him with events: ‘About three months ago I met Captain L. Ron Hubbard…. Although he has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduced that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. He describes his Angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through his life and saved him many times. He is the most Thelemic [self-willed, independent] person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles’” (Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: the True Story of L. Ron Hubbard, 1987, pp. 117-8, emphasis added).
“Parsons wanted to attempt an experiment in black magic that would push back the frontiers of the occult world. With the assistance of his new friend, he intended to try and create a ‘moonchild’ – the magical child ‘mightier than all the kings of the earth,’ whose birth had been prophesied in The Book of the Law more than forty years earlier” (Ibid., p. 119).
Former high ranking Scientologists Brent Corydon and Hubbard’s son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., wrote, “In order to obtain a woman prepared to bear this magical child, Parsons and Hubbard engaged themselves for eleven days of rituals ¼ on January 18th, Parsons found the girl who was prepared to become the mother of Babylon, and to go through the required incantation rituals. During these rituals, which took place on the first three days of March 1946, Parsons was High Priest and had sexual intercourse with the girl, while Hubbard who was present acted as skryer, seer, or clairvoyant and described what was supposed to be happening on the astral plane” (Bent Corydon & L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, 1987, pp. 256-7).
MBFM on The Harmonious Circle
/2010/07/28/mbfm-on-the-harmonious-circle/
Comment from MBFM on Enneagram Junk
MBFM said,
27.07.10 at 10:57 am ·
If you are prepared to de-mythologize both Gurdjieff and the enneagram, get a copy of James Webb’s The Harmonious Circle (1978). It is a vast and marvellously researched book. If you are lucky and can purchase a hardbound copy with its original dust cover, you will see on that cover, a diagram of a 17th century representation of the enneagram, from the frontispiece of Athanasius Kircher’s Arithmologia. James Webb gives us a tour of Gurdjieff’s sources in the last chapter of the book–feast of many courses.The reader can accomplish a lot by reading first the introduction, and then go and read the last chapter in which Webb traces the sources. He finds versions of the enneagram throughout Western Occult texts, especially Raymond Lull and Athanasius Kircher. Webb suggests and carefully offers diagrams and evidence that Lull and later Kircher used the enneagram to diagram the tree of life in the Kabbalah and Gurdjieff used it in that same way. It was not original with Gurdjieff at all but, once again, derivative.
‘Countless examples show how the philosophy elaborated by Francisco Gorgi is the source of Gurdjieff’s cosmogony….Although Athanasius Kircher does not acknowledge Giorgi as source for his Arithmologia, there ican be little doubt he borrowed extensively from his predicessor. From De Harmonia, Kircher’s universe, dominated by the Triple Ternary of th enneagram, receives a fuller explanation; we learn that the first triad produces the angels, the second, the heavens, and the third the four elements. On the authority of Plato, Giorgi maintains that the octave can be used to scrutinize the human soul; for as man is constructed as an image of the greater world, the same laws apply to him as to the cosmos.
…Kirchers experiments into the effects of sound on matter went further than any of his predicessors in arguing that the universe was based not only on number and harmony, but on sound itself…there is no doubt that Gurdjieff made thorough researches into musical literature and though he might have picked up the principles of Pythagorean harmony from the classical texts, the version which he expounded quite difinately derives from the revival and adapation of that philosophy from the late Renaissance. The portable organ, like Gurdjieff’s own, but with the assembly of pipes, was known to both Fludd and Mersenne, whle many ofhte miracles which Gurdjieff attributed to ‘Essene’ music are discussed by Kircher. It is much more likely that the teacher of an ‘esoteric Christianity’ would have taken his version of harmonial philosophy from the more orthodox writers and practically certain that Gurdjieff’s interest in th effect of sound on matter would have led him to Kircher.
*What of the enneagram, the blazing Triple Ternary that dominates the frontispiece of the Arithmologia of the learned Jesuit, (Athanasius Kircher)?
‘ Kircher’s universe is governed as Gurdjieff would have said, by the Law of Three. From the intellectual world the astral world descends and such is the engravers skill that it seems to spin the emanations from the ennead…
‘Whatever Gurdjieff’s intention in adapting the enneagram to his own synthesis, or even whether he inadvertantly destroyed its original significance, it seems clear that the function of the enneagram is linked closely to another esoteric diagram: the Cabalistic Tree of Life.
(Webb pages selective quotes 510-513, from The Harmonious Circle)
‘In the Arithmetica, Kircher was quite explicit that his enneagram was equivalent to the Hebrew Tree of Life, and the diagram of the Tree places some of the ‘correspondances’ which his lists as appropriate to each Sephirah. (Webb page 515)
Here is a telling paragraph:
“The most unexpected occult source for Gurdjieff’s ideas is the American “Rosicrucian” Paschal Beverly Randolph, who flourished in the third quarter of the 19th century. Rudolph was a talented and extraordinary figure. Half-Negro by birth, he made a reputation as a lecturer on the American Civil War adn other patriotic subjects, but felt always that his ancestry prevented his real merits from being recognized. Eventually he relapsed into a welter of occultism and quack medicine. The essence of Randolph’s teaching was sexual. Gurdjieff sometimes gave personal advice on sexuality by word of mouth, but his general teaching was clear enough. Sex was a sacred function of which there should be two results: the procreation of children and “the coating and perfection of …’higher parts’. In Russia he taught that the most refined substance produced by body was sperm, and that it was sperm that formed the fourth body which made man immortal.
‘This, (writes Webb) is Randolph’s doctrine in all respects.
‘The detail which really ties Randolph to Gurdjieff is the American’s constant references to ‘Ansairetic Mysteries’ said to be secrets of ‘the Syrian mountaineers.’ This associates him directly with Gurdjieff’s emphasis on the ‘Aissors’ in Meetings With Remarkable Men. Unfortunately for any theory which would make Gurdjieff and Randolph heirs of the same esoteric tradition, the latter (Randolph) later decided to to reveal the source of his wisdom in The New Mola (1873) “Early in life” (Randolph wrote) “I discovered the fact of my ancestry on one side, being what they were (sic) was an effectual estoppel on my preferment….so I called myself The Rosicrucian and gave my thoughts to the the world as Rosicrucian thought; and lo! the world greeted with loud applause what it thought had had its origin adn birth elsewhere than in the soul of PB Rudolph!…Precisely so was it with things purporting to be Ansairetic. I had merely…got hold of a new name, and again mankind hurrahed for the wonderful Ansaireh, but incontinently turned up its nose at the supposed copyist.” (Webb 532-533)
Webb, tragically, died a suicide at the young age of 33 in 1980. My reading of his final months has convinced me that Webb suffered from a medical conditon, that would probably be diagnosed today as bipolar affective disorder.
In James Webb’s case, there is an added sadness. Many resent his work and will not frankly admit they dislike his work or feel threatened by it. Instead, they enjoy suggesting that he was driven mad or hounded into depression by a conspiracy of vested interests that resented his enlightening research. The unspoken moral of this conspiracy theory is anyone who dares to research esotericism and its destructive gurus will die under a curse.
Bullshit.
No domain is priviliged from scrutiny, especially when power abuses are regularly reported.
The take home lesson from James Webb’s great career and his tragic and early death is, keep on researching, hold power and powerholders accountable and stay balanced and healthy and hearty while doing so.
Many lives of great achievement, great and valid achievement were fueled by early onset bipolar affectiive disorder. Modern treatment and insight into the condition is keeping more and more persons with bipolar alive and happy. The ones who do well are the ones who do not draw attention to themselves, except when they invite us to their next booksigning party.
That James Webb died young from bipolar and suicide does not invalidate his scholarship. That some gloat over his fate demonstrate that he was right to ask tough questions of certain vested interests.
His suicide was not due to conspiracy but a tragic and frequent outcome of untreated bipolar affective disorder. The condition is seductive, for in early stage hypomania, the persons work is of high quality, he or she has enviable stamina and can go for days without sleep. An acquainance of mine with bipolar told me she was convinced that revolutions and breakthroughs may often be accomplished by talented persons on bipolar upswings. She witnessed many of these persons creating the stunning breakthroughs that created Silicon Valley, California, and two others I have met have been mightily productive artists.
The tragedy is that the superb creativity and energy of the manic phase is succeeded by varying degrees of depression unimaginable physical exhaustion. One cannot sleep even when one needs most to sleep, and worst of all, modern living gives few encouragements for rest and balance.
Forty years ago, there were few resources for recognizing and treating bipolar affective disorder. Even today, most persons suffer for an average of ten years until they are diagnosed and even then, medical care must be tailored to the individual needs of each person.
Intelligence agents/occultism/Gurdjieff
/2010/07/29/intelligence-agentsoccultismgurdjieff/
CIA out of control, the JFK assissination literature,….old link
Another issue at the fringe here is the relationship, if any, between intelligence agencies and the Gurdjieff (et al) legacy. Especially with Webb’s suggestions about Gurdjieff the spy.
The rightwing conspiracy to destroy liberalism finds occult echoes in many places, not least the Gurdjieff gang.
Review of DU lost and found
/2010/08/02/review-of-du-lost-and-found/
Finally found my old review of Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe (there are so many editiions, it was lost for several years)
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Hyparchic Future Shock, April 23, 2002
By John C. Landon “nemonemini” (New York City) – See all my reviews
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1UXMI70OHBIYK/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
This review is from: The Dramatic Universe: The Foundations of Natural Philosophy (Paperback)
I recall coming across this book while living briefly with some students of Gurdjieff, who never seem to open it. And I recall reading the first volume without putting it down,in a blind heat, then the whole four volume set three times. The experience was a powerful one, but before long the curious effects of this eerie metaphysical drug composed of dodecads and general relativity wore off and became an oppressive mental burdern,as I simply moved on, almost with a need to simply forget it. Gurdjieff burned his way through two mathematicians in his bizarre schemes to launch the perfect trojan horse into Western Culture. Ouspensky was the first, and being to mentally club-footed, Bennett was the second, it seems. And he was a brilliant man in many ways. Anyone who can spot Kaluza-Klein theory in the thirties and attempt to redo Ouspensky’s six dimensional universe game makes one scratch one’s head in some curiosity. Clever folks, but in vain. The work as a whole is almost endless in its scope, and contains a fascinating but hopelessly flawed series of incompatible ideas stuck together in a way that doesn’t jel. That said, Bennett’s idea of ‘being, function,will’ is quite engaging, as is his conception of this in relation to the dimensions of time, eternity, and hyparxis. Neat, for a while, few New Age texts are this ingenious. However, this is metaphysics, not science, and to pretend otherwise is dangerous medicine for passive disciples if it is made the focus of a cult, beyond criticism of one’s peers. Still, Bennett was no rote disciple, and he must have sensed the handwriting on the wall with the ‘work’ and moved to bring his system within the scope of science, there to founder at once as an attempt to escape reductionism that can only end as the best grounds for the reductionist enterprise. The rubble is still interesting in a distant way, although the work is entirely treacherous and filled with erroneous curiosities. For the whole vision is a phantom. What a phantom however. His idea of the hyparchic future, unverifiable, unfalsifiable, is nothing but ‘science fiction’ by another name. Yet it is on that basis a curious and compelling notion, before it crashes. I was asked to comment on this work by a Gurdjieffian. I could not do so here, but I would point to the core strategy behind this surface brilliance,the statement of intent in the first few pages to replace the categories of Kant with his dodecad, a hopelessly quixotic foundation of quicksand. A clever jack, but a poor student of philosophy. He must have feared Kant in his bones.
One should note that the triad of being, function,will, is reminiscent of Schopenhauer, a point Bennett seems to sense, but a Schopenhauer as if redone by a Hegel, gosh forbid. This ‘metaphysics’ of the will can never be as profound as it seems, and is a permutation of an old game. Still, if you have a week, check this book out, if only as science fiction. But only a week, and then move on. Any esoteric pretensions are bunk. Never lend your scholarly talents to a Gurdjieff.
‘Barry Lyndon’ as a carrier wave signal in a ‘thieves of baraka’ game
/2010/08/10/barry-lyndon-as-a-carrier-wave-signal-in-a-thieves-of-baraka-game/
This movie came out when I was travelling through EJ Gold terrain, and its hidden meaning (in the movie, not the book) would be totally incomprehensible to anyone not involved in the incidents in question, where the approximations, Barry, and Lyndon were used to refer to real people: Barry Lyndon /http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072684/
Note the plot of the movie, with its story of someone plundering someone else’s inheritance. Note that movies, like sci fi, are sufi games of the last generation, and here Stanley Kubrick, with his 2001, was manipulated by sufis for the obvious strategy of seeing the book made into a movie. Gold is a frequent dabbler in this direction.
One of the targets was the reincarnation of Ouspensky whose lode of ‘baraka’ from Gurdjieff was tremendous. The sufis hyenas were lying in wait.
Making a movie (via drones in Hollywood) is one of the black ops of this gang.
All it requires is telepathic suggestion at the starting point, plus other things unknown to me.
I cite this as a reminder that you are in totally obscure and unknown terrain in the Gurdjieff/sufiganster realm, where one of the exercises of crime is to take away/steal the baraka of various unsuspecting sufis.
How and why certain sufis leave their signature in Hollywood movies (a surface manipulation, not as hard as it looks) is beyond me, but it is perhaps a higher form of impudence to use other people as toilets for one’s magical ops.
Here the hidden message is ‘Barry stealing the baraka of Lyndon’, and how I know that is pretty hard to explain at this point.
My moral is that the Gurdjieff world is an advanced game of black ops, and if you are a stupido in that world you are at risk.
Moral 2 is that even if you actually (fat chance) succeed in sufi game there are ‘thieves of baraka’ out there licking their chops at another spiritual sucker trotting down the pike.
Moral 3, find a real path that doesn’t deal in ‘spiritual energies’.
Future of buddhism??
/2010/08/18/future-of-buddhism/
The Future of Buddhism in the West Link still works: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-nichtern/the-future-of-buddhism-in_b_682408.html
Guruism versus democracy: the fatal confusion that will be the undoing of Buddhism, but not of its remade content, perhaps. We should consider the reality of the ‘new age’, which is leading beyond Buddhism to its recreation, perhaps. But consider that while the Jain lineage became ‘Jainism’ in the Axial Age as Buddhism took up the torch, so a new path will emerge as the Buddhist lineage turns into,well, ‘once and future Buddhism’. The mechanization of a tradition is too hard to overcome, it would seem.
Gopi Krishna
/2010/08/19/gopi-krishna-2/
Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man [Paperback]
Krishna Gopi
Gopi Krishna is a fascinating figure, and his use of the term ‘evolutionary’, however problematical, is intriguing in pointing beyond its own incorrect usage to something that lurks behind the standard Darwianian accounts with a supreme question mark.
To correct Krishna’s language, we should distinguish the energy leading to a particular (kundalini) state of consciousness from the evolution of the potential for that energy use, or something to that effect. Kundalini, I suspect, is a very later ‘sculpture’ of body potential made from the evolutionary clay.
The issue is not the stereotyped framework of kundalini but the complex potential deeper than that, and the really hard question, how did it evolve? What was the real history? What is going on with those who describe the phenomenon in their own experience…Note, the whole chakra scheme is a garbled mystery…
Cacophony of voices
/2010/08/21/cacophony-of-voices/
Comment from Dandy
Your question is a good one, but there are no real answers here. The problem is that everyone is already psychic, but their apparatus is a cluttered cacophony of voices, as it were. It is like a filthy kitchen owned by a couch potato: last clean up was ages ago. The kitchen is an archaeological horror of mouldy plates of rotting food, the ghosts of dead meals seem to speak in belches. A spiritual slob, in the same way, can’t hear anything but noise. A spiritual slob badly needs a tune up.
Gurus, I suppose, were intended to solve the problem of spirit guides, and vice versa.
The mere use of the term will produce imagination and false beliefs. But, perhaps, when the time is ripe, the cacophony will subside for a moment and the silence will produce a moment of clarity.
Note the Kantian distinction of phenomenal and noumenal. It is highly unlikely that the things on the phenomenal side correspond exactly to the stuff on the other side. So one must be wary of it all. The messages are on this side: what chooses which one on the other side is another matter. That’s not much of a method.
You are often getting help without realizing it. The action never enters consciousness. So it is important to find who is tampering with you. It is very hard to navigate Christian culture with an Eastern religious path. ‘Spirits’ doing Christian domination magic will destroy such paths to maintain the Monopoly. This will produce howls of protest from Christians. Actually, sad to say, Christians are immersed in an occult world, but it always keeps them in check. Born again Christians, if real, often have a brief spell of interaction with an unknown power.
I was once down and out in LA (another penniless scholar of Latin and Greek) and spent many nights in the insufferable born again beans for prayer gospel missions, and suddenly realized that in some cases the ‘born again’ phenomenon was real, and propelled people into a new life. But only locked inside the Christian cult. But mostly it is prayer for beans, and worthless.
Is is an ugly side of Christianity but it is real, sometimes, and secularists have no understanding of it.
A lot of direct action springs from surprising sources, dead authors, or famous persons of one kind or another, ‘hungry ghosts’, who want contact, but can’t do anything but choose messages on this side. But you sense often they are there. You can often feel the prescence of such, often bewildered, unaware they are dead, seeking solidity from their admirers.
BTW, this happened to Wallace, someone who never had much occult savvy. But he must have sensed something, some tampering with the theory of evolution. Note the extraordinary way that Wallace and Darwin interacted in 1859 (and before). It looks like tampering to me. Something mysterious was at work, and it seems demonic: get the smart fellow (Wallace) to do the work (he produced the theory), and then get the establishment figure (Darwin) to rip it off, and promote it more successfully. The occult world that later produces esoteric Darwinian genocide is initiating somewhere/somewhen in the nineteenth century. The strange coincidences of Wallace and Darwin don’t seem coincidence to me. Some demonic force suddenly grasps the logic ten moves ahead with the theory of Darwin. Social Darwinist demonology was very real, you have but to study German occultism after Blavatsky to sense this.
And Blavatsky had experiences, probably mostly fake, of this kind over and over again. She clearly, despite her multiple strikeouts, had many intersections with spirit guides. Perhaps the whole confusion/mischief starts with her.
The beauty of Darwin’s theory for a devil who wants to initiate conflicts and strife, is the appearance of science given to what is really an injunction to such conflict in the name of evolution. It is a horrible swindle on its suckers.
I can’t figure it out, but it is clear that Wallace suddenly sensed the ghost world. He also saw that his theory, by now Darwin’s, had to be wrong, but he had no further opportunities to change the situation he had created.
In general, the question is beyond our understanding, since we can’t visualize a timeless reality without paradox. But note that the eminence of a dead ghost is ‘present’ to our time, because out of time.
Indians have noted this over and over, and speak of strange experiences near the tombs of dead saints, or spiritual figures of the past.
Again, we cannot easily understand this. Schopenhauer notes something else, that he felt his life had an overall logic to it, as if its incidents were precomputed, in general strokes, not details. He was onto something. and it is worth considerig that few, very few, can advise others if they don’t grasp this prior logic to an individual’s life.
Note that others can harm you with advice: who you are is already computed by nature, your ‘destiny’ is already fixed, maybe,up to a point,as a potential. But have you lost contact with that? Probably. So before trying the hopeless venture of contacting spirits, consider uncovering your own. Grafting a spiritual path onto that prior being is not likely to succeed. But spiritual methods can work, willynilly, because (e.g. meditation) they assume nothing about that deeper momentum. They work on whatever is there. You can remorph who you are, but it would be nice if nature had granted that deeper self a spiritual path, then it succeeds. most are trying in vain because they are spastically in contradiction to their deeper orbit through life.
Dandy has tricked me–again–into dispensing (spiritual) advice, but I am not a guru, merely jawboning on various subjects.
Ouspensky’s cafe spirituality
/2010/08/24/ouspenskys-cafe-spirituality/
Your other question I can’t answer, and at this point the moment is lost.
This is my fault to have reified concepts of the ‘spirit world’ in terms that reify more than we can know. But my original point is true enough. People suddenly graduate from the useless public discussions of spirituality and move on to something more practical in a tacit dimension.
Beware of Gurdjieff, he is one of the most successful hucksters, but the substance isn’t there. Ouspensky can’t help, and the world has moved on.
dandy said,
24.08.10 at 12:26 pm ·
“It all started with my beginning to hear his thoughts. We were sitting in a small room with a carpetless wooden floor as it happens in country houses. I sat opposite G., and Dr. S. and Z. at either side. G. spoke of our “features,” of our inability to see or to speak the truth. His words perturbed me very much. And suddenly I noticed that among the words which he was saying to us all there were “thoughts” which were intended for me. I caught one of these thoughts and replied to it, speaking aloud in the ordinary way. G. nodded to me and stopped speaking. There was a fairly long pause. He sat still saying nothing. After a while I heard his voice inside me as it were in the chest near the heart. He put a definite question to me. I looked at him; he was sitting and smiling. His question provoked in me a very strong emotion. But I answered him in the affirmative.
“Why did he say that?” asked G., looking in turn at Z. and Dr. S. “Did I ask him anything?”” – From In Search Of The MiriculousI think this is might be a good example of transference, of contacting higher forces. I highly doubt it was Gurdjieff who directed the question to Ouspensky. Am I wrong? And by the way, have you sensed something unusual in the last 24 hours?
Ouspensky and The Bourne Identity
/2010/08/28/ouspensky-and-the-bourne-identity/
The Bourne Identity (link still works)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Identity_(2002_film)
I finally got around to seeing the film The Bourne Identity after a curious experience of twice seeing the opening on late night TV as I was falling asleep.
It tweaked my curiosity, for a reason that at first escaped me. I never read thrillers, or go to see movies of such, but this film, or its opening seemed to have a remarkable symbolism.
This was confirmed by the film as a whole. On the surface the title, the ‘Bourne’ (born!) identity, and the opening with a near death experience at sea are good examples of the writer’s unconscious symbolism associations at work. Such things are very frequent in writers, but in this case the arrangement of pieces is remarkable (whatever one thinks of the Hollywood aspects)
Further the film is unusual in being a testament to the revolt against identity created by a social framework, and includes the attempt to remember the past identity involved.
I suddenly realized the unconscious attraction in me: the resemblance to the case of Ouspensky, or his reincarnation, a man who is trying to escape a previous identity in an ‘esoteric’ (‘intelligence agency’) after refusing a criminal mission.
More on this another time, but many have failed to see the ambiguity of Ouspensky, and the way he turned against the ‘company’.
//This is not a case of sufi tampering we have discussed, but an interpretative whimsy…the scriptwriter stumbled on a remarkable ‘who am I’ contemplative archetype.
Self-remembering confusions
/2010/08/29/self-remembering-confusions/
Dandy on self-remembering link lost
Self-remembering is a way Gurdjieff used to give some apparent substance to his teaching, in the realm of practice. But it is mostly a brochure mode philosophy. Anyone with any savvy would be wary of this abstraction and follow the classic paths of meditation, which are mapped out. C’mon, this buddhist mindfulness repackaged to look original, but that it is because it explores the ‘energies/matter’ of mind/consciousness…
Self-remembering, as with everything in Gurdjieff is so hyped by lies that it ceases to be on the level, leaving one suspicious it is just window dressing.
Noone ever succeeds with this method, which is poorly defined. Look at the Gurdjieff people, they are the most retared spiritual types, without any practice. They just reread Ouspensky and hope.
later note: Nevertheless, Gurdjieff was a ‘materialist’ in a novel fashion, like the students of Samkhya: he wished to explore the material aspect of consciousness and the result is uncanny at times…His strange scheme of hydrogens is most strange. Too bad the whole game was left concealed and mixed up in his black magic..
Any teacher will even a trace of an objective of producing successful disciples who can graduate to real self-awareness wouldn’t inflict the confusing and impractical self-remembering on confused beginners.
Ouspensky says goodbye to fouth way, g,and sufis
/2010/08/31/ouspensky-says-goodbye-to-fouth-way-gand-sufis/
(I forgot why there seem to be two editions of this book, with different subtitles)
Patterson’s book is misleading on Ouspensky, and my suggestion to consider the analog of The Bourned Identity might help. But it is hard to credit what I learned in my own way a long time ago, which is that Ouspensky’s rejection of Gurdjieff became amplified in his ‘return life’. He is a bad source for fourth way thinking, even as he is the main source. What a mess.
Patterson’s take is complete imaginary.
Gurdjieffians seem insenstive to the poignant dilemma: looking the other way at crime, to continue in the work. Ouspensky saw that was hopeless, and checked out early, willing, like Bourne, to take his chances in the attempts to ‘kill’ him.
Our whodunit continues re: the fascist destruction of German modernity
/2010/10/17/the-whodunit-re-the-fascist-destruction-of-german-moderntiy/
The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century
Peter Watson’s colossal encyclopaedia, The German Genius, might have been written for me, but not only for me. A journalist of heroic industry, Watson is frustrated by the British ignorance of Germany, or rather by an expertise devoted exclusively to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. Watson wonders not just why the nation of thinkers and poets came to grief between 1933 and 1945 but also how it put itself together again and, in 1989, recreated most of the Wilhelmine state without plunging Europe into war or even breaking sweat.
The New Age attack on modernity is totally misconceived: we see the effects of the modern ‘Axial Age’ in Germany, and, indeed, Schopenhauer virtually rewrote the Upanishadic philosophy (but not its practice, of course) for the modern age.
Bennett’s demiurge
/2010/10/22/bennetts-demiurge/
We have discussed this question in another form here: the idea of the ‘demiurge’ in Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe.
Bennett actually tries to get specific on some points: e.g. the claim that ‘bodies of ligtht’ are made of ‘conscious energy’, after the fashion of his outlandish, tho interesing, formulation of transcorporal beings.
As democracy suffers crisis
/2010/10/23/as-democracy-suffers-crisis/
Let us remember during periods of hard times, that Gurdjieff’s long term aims were the destruction of labor power, the establishment of elite domination, and finally the reestablisment of slavery.
It is important to be vigilant at the point where democracy is suffering, to remember that the ultra-rightist doctrine of Gurdjieff lurks in disguise in his ‘teaching’.
Such con men have no authority beyond their power to mesmerize, and their followers even less, as total nullities exploited by this dark teaching.
These people hope to undermine democratic life. Time to stop this Gurdjieff fan club nonsense
Booknotes: AIT debate
/2010/10/25/booknotes-ait-debate/
The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate [Paperback]
Edwin Bryant (Author)
Useful and iinteresting text on the issues, but a bit opaque as the author tries to fend off both sides in a neutral pose.
Full disclosure on Rajneesh
/2010/10/27/full-disclosure-on-rajneesh/
Full disclosure (amounting to not much):
I said I have had no contact with the Rajneessh orgs: not quite true. First I was one of the first to start reading Rajneesh in 1975 (in the general public in USA), met and lived briefly with one of his sannyasins in New York (who pressured me to join, in vain). I often visited the various centers in their public aspects, and saw sannyasins in New York, on the East Side (in their flowing robes). But I was always on the outside. Then in the eighties I lived in the Ashram in Oregon for three weeks in their homeless persons program.
A spectacular moment when outsiders could gain access to the Oregan chaos. I had heard of this new program in Colorado and took a set of freighttrains to the Oregon spot (no mean feat). To get to the nearest town you had to ride a train from Klamath Falls to Washington State, and get a train back that would stop in the little town near Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. I will always remember the miraculous moment when the freight train stopped in that town, unpexpectedly. From there I walked the twenty/thirty miles to the ashram, where they admitted me. I stayed a few weeks, but couldn’t last, the homeless program being suddenly marginalized, a pity, since a month later Rajneesh started speaking again and produced his classic ‘Rajneesh Bible’ series. Then everything blew up and that was the end of it. The whole experience was downright spooky.
Watching that freighttrain stopped so unexpectedly was an instant shearing of reality. The hobos on the train were dumbfounded, and I walked with some hobo wine jugs to the New City across the Oregan wilds in about a day and a half, guzzling down the hobo wine, trying to figure out how the ‘guru field’ could alter freight train movements. The world seemed suddenly like a cartoon. That experience of the ‘guru’, something that was beyond the figure Rajneesh, yet triggered by his presence several hundred miles away (update: more like forty or so miles) was an eyeopener, to say the least. It had nothing to do with him.
I say that, because if you get ‘too close’, sometimes, you end up very far away again.
That was a real ‘darshan experience, just trying to approach that guru prescence, and walking two days in the Oregon wilds. It was over before I got there, and my visit to Rajneeshtown was almost beside the point after that. Actually getting to Rajneeshpuram was almost a let down (I was so anti-social I couldn;t handle the place) and I realized I had already ‘done it’. One thing was clear, darshan is real, but not in the way you expect.
But observing the place was an important experience. A warning to get the facts, if that is possible.
I never saw an infrastructure as they had put up in Oregon. That it was betrayed is obvious, I guess, but as with everything Osho did, the beginning was a stupendous effort, then everything collapsed.
I was totally lucky to get in briefly still as an outsider.
The critics of that ashram don’t really know what happened there, before the crooks spoiled it. A fully functioning city, with all its parts and pieces at a high level of function. And an awful lot of CIA agents, FBI and other saboteurs.
I never understood why Rajneesh put someone like Sheila in charge, when the general tone of the sannyasins there was the highest level of integrity and massive effort to create a complete society with all its infrastructure. It is amazing what they were able to accomplish.
Small wonder the CIA et al. were absolutely terrified. The experiment was genuinely revolutionary, until it derailed. The powers that be had to destroy it asap. That leaves me suspcious of all accounts. I do not exhonerate anyone here, not Rajneesh’s group, and certainly not the army of hidden goverhment agents out to destroy it.
It is hard to get to the bottom of what happened, and I was there!
But from its ideal aspect, as I noted, it was a genuine and cleverly disguised revolution: if a group of people could produce a social structure at that level of cooperation and justice in a mere three years, the status quo was in deep trouble. The whole thing, like any revolution I guess, suddenly went off its rails;
Then a few years later when Rajneesh died I thought it sad he had died so soon, and applied for sannyas via mail order and was duly sent a mala and name.
With this I attended a large something/what? in upstate New York at the famous New Age center there. I bombed on the first day and disappeared in the woods losing my hard earned money shelled out for the various group dingdangs. I coulnt’ handle being a member and panicked. Further, an Indian sannyasin there told me my sannyas name got by mail order was a Sanskrit mistake and had a double entendre in Hindi and said I shouldn’t use it, which made some of the org people furious. i was so put out by that I invented my own sannyasin name and took off on my own. The name I gave mysefl was Swami Anand Purusha, but none of the sannyasins would acknowledge it. So on I got the message I was in the wrong place and skulked off in disgust/disarray. But that was me: the tone and vigor of the Rajnessh movement was something elemental, whatever the case with what is left.
That’s why I am wary of the vicious and hysterical anger of many of his critics. It is a strange phenomenon, all around.
That’s the grand total of my Rajneesh interactions, a sorry tale. But it has made me observe it from, well, not a distance, but relatively close up.
What I saw doesn’t really correspond to the desperate and hysterical denunciations from some quarters.
Reincarnation vs recurrence //updated
/2010/11/04/reincarnation-vs-recurrence/
Dandy brings us the issue of reincarnation vs recurrence. The distinction is best studied in the works of Bennett.
Let me say that the Ouspensky issue complicated the discussion, and I think that is a mistake. Reincarantion thinking is confused, but the recurrence discussion is even more so, even though the issue raised is significant. I see no reason to agree with Ouspensky that we are frozen forever in a particular life that recurs over and over. But, as Bennett notes, it is a question of getting past primitive reincarnation notions, to see the ‘eternal’ dimension and what it implies.
OK, but the Ouspensky ‘quibble’ confused the entire movement, and I think that reincarnation is the real issue. We can’t answer these questions, so let’s twiddle our thumbs further.
Note: In a way both sides are right, but if you introduce ‘eternity’ you are stuck with recurrence…Something is wrong with the whole scheme???
I don’t think we should abandon recincarnationist considerations just because of Ouspensky, both models need to be reintegrated…
update: two comments on the issue
dandy said,
02.11.10 at 2:26 am ·“Q. What is the difference between the theory of reincarnation and the theory of recurrence?A. The idea of reincarnation is a kind of adaptation of the idea of recurrence to our ordinary understanding, because, as a theory, the idea of recurrence is much more difficult for us—it needs quite a new understanding of time. Even educated people need a certain amount of mathematical knowledge to understand the idea of return. Recurrence is in eternity, but reincarnation is in time. It supposes that time exists apart from us and that we continue to exist in this time after death. For instance, in Buddhism they take it that a man dies and is immediately born again, so that one life follows another, because this is easier to understand for ordinary people. But we have no evidence of the existence of time beyond our life. Time is life for each person, and it includes in itself all time, so that when life ends, time ends. So reincarnation is a less scientific theory than recurrence—too much is taken for granted.”
– Ouspensky from the fourth wayOuespensky says that we create time, that is, time is not universal as a kind of independent system that beats everywhere on its own and in its own pace for all of reality – as people tend to think about it. Time is singular for each person and each and every person creates and lives in its own time. That’s more or less what I meant. Could you say something more about this subject of time?
——————————-
Richard said,
05.11.10 at 10:04 am ·
“For instance, in Buddhism they take it that a man dies and is immediately born again, so that one life follows another, because this is easier to understand for ordinary people. ”Such a claim is never made. Even eternity in Buddhism is considered a dimension of time (time gets more refined if one isn’t born in the sensual realm). Only the “Unconditioned” (beyond samsara) is considered to be truly beyond time and space.
Freight trains and the lore of hopping freights
/2010/11/08/freight-trains-and-the-lore-of-hopping-freights/
Sorry for delay in posting your comment: didn’t notice it on the dashboard.
Riding freight trains is an ancient American practice, and if it survives it is because the employers in the California/Arizona truck farms make sure they can get plenty of workers at key points of the year. Farmhands, now many of them Mexican, get a free ride, no problem, at many times of the year. That hyprocrisy makes it hard to fully police the train yards, which are immense zones with all kinds of hiding places. One sheriff in a pickup soon gives up and goes through the motions. I have seen hobos ride car rigs with brand new cars, turning on the heaters, without getting caught. The logistics of policing such immense industrial yards makes it impossible to stop hobos.
And the logic of the situation makes it counterproductive to succeed: a hobo about to catch a freight is one less ‘unsavory character’ on your beat. Why arrest someone about to leave town. So the schizophrenic mood of enforcement is all in favor of someone’s using a freight train to get out of local jurisdiction.
The same for the apple harvest in Washington, and, and….When you add up all the labor zones that need cheap transport at various harvest periods, you have most of the West covered.
That this is the case can be seen from the way that Union Pacific is close to hobo free while Southern Pacific is totally laid back on the question. So the authorities could stop the practice, more or less, but the economic result would be counterproductive. Arizona has thousands upon thousands of tiny truck farm strips, run behind the scenes by Big Ag corporations, and vegetable patch parcels that take a lot of cheap labor to maintain, and the availability of cheap labor is essential. It takes twenty to thirty men a day with hoes (I recall the now outlawed short handle hoes for this, horrible) to weed a strip. The work has to be done, can’t be automated, or the crop will fail. You wouldn’t see lettuce in supermarkets without the open freight trains.
The authorities have tried a massive number of times to stop the practice of freight hopping, and there were even periods in the nineteenth century when railroad agents opned fire on riders. But they have never to my knowledge suceeded in stopping the practice, which became an American institution during the Great Depression.
Amateurs get caught, but decided freight hoppers can easily get away with free rides, hiding in the front hole of a grain car, for example…., and many other hard to stop practices.
The surveillance issue could change at any moment with new technology, but in general the railroad agents (‘bulls’) have a hard time policing large freight yards where riders hide until the crucial moment.
Rail riders are too clever for the practice to fully stop. This was a few decades ago, so I don’t know.
The union men on the trains are often sympathetic, also, and I have ridden in the back locomotive in a double/triple engine lien in the end cabin of the front section (nicely heated in winter) while the crew was aware of my presence.
They are unarmed workers, and as long as there is nothing they must see they see nothing.
You learn about these things by going down to the outer sectors of a rail yard and talking to the guys there waiting, sometimes for days on end. They will have all the current info, viz, the bulls are active here ‘this month and so…’, etc…
In general, especially during recessions/depressions, people hit the rails looking for work. I don’t know if this is still the case.
MBFM
66.81.240.202 2010/11/05 at 9:20 am
Nemo, you are so fortunate that you survived your freight train journey. Ive never done anything of the sort, but have read a small section in Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book describing how to hop freight trains. (Note today one probably cannot do it, survaillance is tighter)1) Watch out for the bull who supervises the yard
2) Choose your car carefully–open cars get ferociously cold at night and if one doesnt have enough warm clothing and food, death by hypothermia is possible…..
The yogi’s jungle and American open spaces
/2010/11/09/the-yogis-jungle-and-american-open-spaces/
//www.gurdjieff-con.net/2010/11/08/freight-trains-and-the-lore-of-hopping-freights/
There is a lost context to these posts on the freight riders world, from Darwiniana several years ago: the efforts by E.J. Gold to imporverish selected student/victims and make them into economic orphans. The constant and repeated voodoo war against many of his undeclared guinea pigs left them unable to cope, street people.
Few grasp what that black magician was up to, with his asshole groupies being none the wiser.
The other context here, for my own thinking, was the search in the great American open spaces for the American equivalent to the yogi’s jungle, the open zones of India where the pursuit of spiritual paths by lone individuals was once possible. The search for that in the American scene is mostly a lost cause, with everything mapped out, controlled by property rights, and generally trashed beyond repair.
Still someone analogous to the India jungles of meditation can be found via the great freight riders world. It is no longer a ‘sacred space’, but perhaps that doesn’t matter to ‘real’ yogi.
Svengali manipulations of Hollywood
/2010/11/20/svengali-manipulations-of-hollywood/
The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Introduction
http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Introduction.htm
But the cream of Hollywood also gladly and openly confess their allegiance to the teachings of Buddhism (or what they understand these to be), especially when these come from the mouths of Tibetan lamas. “Tibet is looming larger than ever on the show business map,” the Herald Tribune wrote in 1997. “Tibet is going to enter the Western popular culture as something can only when Hollywood does the entertainment injection into the world system. Let’s remember that Hollywood is the most powerful force in the world, besides the US military” (Herald Tribune, March 20, 1997, pp. 1, 6). Orville Schell, who is working on a book on Tibet and the West, sees the Dalai Lama’s “Hollywood connection” as a substitute for the non-existent diplomatic corps that could represent the interests of the exiled Tibetan hierarch: “Since he [the Dalai Lama] doesn’t have embassies, and he has no political power, he has to seek other kinds. Hollywood is a kind of country in his own, and he’s established a kind of embassy there.” (Newsweek, May 19, 1997, p. 24).
I keep thinking we should proceed through this book bit by bit, but I doubt, finally, if that will work.
The problem is understanding the viewpoint of the authors to put a fix on their bias. Much of their critique is ‘right’ in quotation marks, but misplaced, or slightly off target, as here.
The authors miss the point that the high-powered Tibetan occult zone manipulated Hollywood to serve their purposes. I am also critical of this: I am not a celebrity and don’t stand a chance in this scheme.
We have discussed the multiple vultures trying to manipulate Hollywood, and E.J. Gold is notably sordid in this vein.
Da Free John, idiot, godman parody, dracula and fraud
/2011/02/05/da-free-john-idiot-godman-parody-dracula-and-fraud/
This balderdash about Da Free John is a bit much. He as a uniquely disgusting slob and dracula parody who was totally unable to produce a ‘religious tradition’. His students are unique in their passive stupidity and acquiescence to a brand of spiritual exploitation.
Rajneesh a generation ago at once warned naive Western seekers against him.
The idea of being a godman is crud at this point. Give me a break.
Monex
Comment on ‘Western Paths?’
200.124.14.101
2011/01/29 at 2:42 amDistinguishing his from other religious traditions Adi Da declared that he was a uniquely historic incarnation of a god or divinity in human form . As such Adi Da stated that devotional worship of him is the sole means of spiritual enlightenment for others.
Distinguishing his from other religious traditions Adi Da declared that he was a uniquely historic incarnation of a god or divinity in human form . As such Adi Da stated that devotional worship of him is the sole means of spiritual enlightenment for others.
Satan, lies, and Gurdjieff devils
/2011/03/03/satan-lies-and-gurdjieff-devils/
It is not surprising that Gurdjieff idiots should defend the the Gurdjieff Con, but the real source of lies is Gurdjieff himself. And his imitator Gold is even worse. Machiavellians usually lie to further some agenda, but Gold lies all the time. Almost everything, everything, he says is deliberate untruth, exaggeration, or sly hyped baloney
Thirty years of EJ Gold voodoo was enough!!
/2011/03/29/thrity-years-of-ej-gold-voodoo-was-enough/
Thirty years is a long time!
People who attack me are generally outsiders who know nothing beyond what they read in Ouspensky, and don’t seem to grasp the reality, which Gurdjieff more than indicated by warning that he was a devil. You are NOT required to think much of someone who is a devil.
As for EJ Gold he is almost worse, because he has no teaching at all, parasitically uses Ouspensky to attract victims and in general uses a stand up comedy routine to hide his lack of any intelligence.
He also gave a warning, back in the seventies, his mafia rap when he said he would select certain people for mafia contract treatment, ie. would try to kill them using black magic.. in the name of the work, but in reality as a sufi at the time warned me, to ‘consume’ the essence of victims driven to insanity.
It didn’t work for me!!!!
Those who think the guru/surrender game with a teaching is what is going on with him should reflect on the reason someone who endured thirty years of Gold’s style of attempted assassination would be constantly wary, without let up, day after day, year after year.
Most people would simply die of shock to know the reality behind the really stinking sufi bullshit out front.
Asshole here should be grateful the ‘work’ gang ignores them.
I was once told by a sufi type to go see a movie called Jeremiah Johnson (a forgettable, but not uncharming Robert Redford movie of the seventies), about a mountain man who lived in the Rockies and had to be constantly vigilant to survive endless Indian warriors out to get his scalp). There was no point at which the danger would pass, or any resolution of the mindless danger. The astral passage is like that, a field of demons, and in that morass gangsters like Gold and Gurdjieff. The point is that there is no point at which you can say enough, let’s do something else. Like Jeremiah Johnson the ‘threat’ was costant twentyfour hours a day forever.
The idea of the ‘work’ is a joke so sick I have to wonder.
Anirvan review
/2011/03/29/anirvan-review/
Review of Anirvan’s To Live Within (with Lizelle Reymond)
I reviewed this book at Amazon, but I have recently heard that, as with Ouspensky, a disillusion has set in with the post-Anirvan, whereever he is now (ditto Ouspensky): These two men are a caution against the induced propaganda for Gurdjieff by beginners whose effusions are then used for promotion (Anirvan’s book was very influential in the seventies). Anirvan makes some mistakes which we can discuss here. But basically he is applying his experience with an unnamed Indian guru to Gurdjieff under the delusion that ‘samkhya’ as he knew it applied to Gurdjieff’s teaching.
Rajneesh, and the old Poona texts
/2011/05/04/rajneesh-and-the-old-poona-texts/
Comment on Rajneesh
Robert Brizel
67.247.22.13 2011/05/01 at 6:23 pm
Fascinating historical documentation, accurate about many details often misinterpreted. As a guru, the materialistic west ruined Rajneesh the moment he set foot in America, misaligned from converting his visitor’s visa into a long term visa due to surrounding himself with individuals beyond his control. Despite the negatives (which are extensive), nonetheless Rakneesh (Osho) left behind many interesting lectures from the period in India (before he came to Oregon) and many fascinating writings after his arrival on the commune. Ma Anand Sheela, still hiding in Switzerland, was never charged with attempted murder for her dealings within and outside the commune. She stiill should be.A man in declining health for years, his story remains worthy of big screen treatment. It has yet to be told factually.
Fascinating historical documentation, accurate about many details often misinterpreted. As a guru, the materialistic west ruined Rajneesh the moment he set foot in America, misaligned from converting his visitor’s visa into a long term visa due to surrounding himself with individuals beyond his control. Despite the negatives (which are extensive), nonetheless Rakneesh (Osho) left behind many interesting lectures from the period in India (before he came to Oregon) and many fascinating writings after his arrival on the commune. Ma Anand Sheela, still hiding in Switzerland, was never charged with attempted murder for her dealings within and outside the commune. She stiill should be.
A man in declining health for years, his story remains worthy of big screen treatment. It has yet to be told factually.
Robert Brizel
1
I recall the whole story from the seventies and eighties, and find the current view of him totally distorted. Rajneesh was a threat to many people and the character assassination was successful, for a while. But I think that the work he did has remained.
Note: in retrospect a more critical view of Rajneesh is needed. As this post makes clear his books are misleading.The strange reality now is that he was not enlightened, a puzzle in itself
I think it is too bad that his beautiful books published in Poona hardcover with color plates, the famous series of orignals, are no longer available. They should be reissued in their original form. Gosh knows what the texts you see now in the bookshores result from. The hash made out of the Patanjali commentary, for example, is not woth buying. The effect of that moment of the Rajneesh explosion in the seventies (and before Oregon) in New York, among a hundred other places was electric.
I recall as each of the several hundred texts came out, then in the old Weiser’s bookshop in the East Village, and the effect was stupefying. He had vastly more disciples then than any other guru, bar none. Those texts are his testimony, and inaugurated a new birth of the classic Indic tradition beyond Hinduism.
He tried to be kind to Gurdjieff, but left him behind, and strongly urged G-followers to ditch a failed teaching and take up his teaching, which is more than a teaching, such is the vastness of what he covered in his discourses.
As to the Poona texts, I doubt that the plates still exist, which means they get reissued in edited forms. A pity. The junk you see in Borders Book store does him no justice.
Will, free will, and spiritual traditions
/2011/08/12/will-free-will-and-spiritual-traditions/
It is worth noting that Gurdjieff’s legacy (like a great deal of monotheistic theology) has a complex legacy of its own on the issue of free will. (See previous post today).
His insights (mostly implicit in yoga) into the mechanization of behavior and habit are both a negation and affirmation of the issue of will. The question of will is not so simple, of course.
Between Schopenhauer, Kant, and Bennett/Samkhya, we have a set of ideas that might help to refound the question.
Bennett, age periods and astrology
/2011/08/29/bennett-age-periods-and-astrology/
Note that the study of the eonic effect can dispense with all of that once and for all.
Astrology as flotsam of pre-Axial Age
/2011/10/12/astrology-as-flotsam-of-pre-axial-age/
I am going to simply bypass any discussions of astrology. There is no reason for it, and it has done immense harm to the New Age movement. Buddhism, Christianity and Islam were careful to keep the subject away from students and disciples, but now we see that the whole plague of astrological muddle infect the spiritual followers of medium intelligence, corrupting their understanding beyond repair.
So we should be wary of even discussing it: the solution to a vampire is to stop feeding it. Astrology is confusing to many modern seekers because it seems a legitimate object of tradition. But it is not. It is a virus of the mind that arose in the wake of Sumerian civilization, reaching its modern form in the backwater of Chaldean culture. Its sources in Sumer have little to do with the Chaldean superstition and were a still primitive ‘map of reality’ that is described nicely in Nicholas Campion’s The Great Year. The Sumerian original was a transient moment of proto-astrological cultural myth, and innocent enough. Its later pernicious form has no foundation in any real spiritual tradition. It is therefore a tremendous disservice to the less intelligent seekers who fall victim to this set of fallacies and get no real guidance from their peers. It was very different in the phase of the early Axial Age religions which were quite aware of the dangers of this remnant strain of the Sumerian cultural sewer.
Another sad irony is the way that modern skeptics lump everything together, astrology, religion in any form, beliefs in mind beyond neuroscience, anything beyond reductionist science, as ‘superstition’. The result is ironically a way to feed astrology, since people tend to associate the issues with other issues, controversial but not so easily rejected, ending in a validation of all of it. But the different character of astrology as a kind of flotsam of greater antiquity that passed through and survived the Axial Age which never validated any of it requires its dissassociation from more general questions of spirituality.
Astrology and the myths of age periods
/2011/10/12/astrology-and-the-myths-of-age-periods/
One aspect of the question, discussed here many times, is the side show to astrology involving the measures of the Great Year based on the precissional periods of the equinoxes. The issue was the set of age periods related to that. To measure age periods based on the Great Year is not inherently superstition, but the associated beliefs connected to all that certainly were superstition. There is no real way to associate those age periods with historical dynamics or cultural content. But the match is close enough over a short range to confuse many.
Here, J. G. Bennett did a lot of harm by falling for the confusion and adopting the measures of The Great Year in his book on the ‘dramatic universe’. The result is that the Gurdjieff movement caught the diisease, where its sufi background should have spared it that fate.
I have always recommended a lot at the ‘eonic effect’ which shows how the long view of antiquity might confuse someone into thinking in terms of astrological age periods. But the explanation is something totally different.
In general, Bennett’s work is completely spoiled by this add on confusion. A pity
New Age reactionaries
/2011/11/11/new-age-reactionaries/
Notice: have you ever met a guru with liberal views? There are such, no doubt, but they are afraid to speak in public: they will be attacked with occult force. They shut up…
One of the hidden strains of the New Age movement is its conservative, in reality, reactionary state of mind, as this supports the authoritarianism of the guru world. The reality, visible in Rajneesh, is that the world of ashrams and gurus should be truly ‘new age’, on the left, in the service of social justice. The point should be obvious from the early history of revolutionary buddhism, now seen in the hidden reactionaries of Tibet (granting the sense that the Dalai Lama gives of an attempt to moderate this).
Those who fall in the trap here should note the way that the emergence of freedoms in social and political histories, especially modernity, have a spiritual lineage, secular or not.
The Omega point bodhisattwas
/2012/01/01/the-omega-point-bodhisattwas/
Scott said,
30.12.11 at 11:58 am · Edit
Buddhism is dead. The Big Bang took care of that.
You don’t know the story of the Omega Point Bodhisattwas, Tweedledee and Tweedledum were their cover names, who both delayed playing enlighenment chicken with their bodhisattwic vows, as to who would be the last liberated as the universe went into its final blackhole. Thus both survived as higher being bodeis to reincarnate in the next mahakalpa or cosmic cycle–as bodhissatwas, guaranteeing the survival of buddhism. So the big bang is irrelevant. Tweedledee and dum have returned and will be your final undoing.
Human experimentation is criminal/ end of story
/2012/01/04/human-experimentation-is-criminal-end-of-story/
Defending the guru game is a lost cause at this point. Especially in the context of Gurdjieff (and his creepy imitator EJ Gold) who virtually confessed to using human beings as guinea pigs for a series of experiments. That dreadful legacy must be set as a warning to naive followers to beware, and begone. Read the material, but never submit to any authorities here. It is a dangerous possibility to be used in an experiment by a rogue sufi like Gurdjieff. And EJ Gold is an eager beaver following in its footsteps.
Is bdsm an occult conspiracy?
BDSM: Inside the World of Kink (link lost)
A look at San Francisco’s kink community with an assistant anthropologist and author of “Techniques of Pleasure.”
An old commentator, MBFM, commented on the guru game and bdsm here. I think his points were important, but somewhat off the mark. But he sensed that there was a problem.
I think that the current culture is beginning to go astray here in any case. But then again there is a lot of dissenting opinion.
My point, related to MBFM, but quite different, is to issue a warning of the occult basis of bdsm, or, at least, its occult exploitation as an otherwise marginal neurotic nexus of long standing.
The occult basis of bdsm should be obvious from the class context of its dominance/submission routines, and it is this that, before the dispersal into flotsam of the whole metaphor, was an occult tactic of reactionaries. Like Gurdjieff, and shark sufis who want to find masochists because they offer a royal road to explotiation (‘they asked for it’).
So these cavalier articles are a bit naive, although here skepticism is balanced with the obvious temptation to tolerate all this in the name of sexual liberation.
In any case, the occult basis of bdsm makes it highly dangerous as a symbolic form of ‘practical magic’ or magic in reverse, and some grining sufi sharks are waiting, licking their chops, that willing victims are plentiful and will unwitting applaud their own dominatin and destruction.
Danger of Gurdjieffianity to the Christian legacy
/2012/02/15/danger-of-gurdjieffianity-to-the-christian-legacy/
Gurdjieffinaity, an obvious pun on Christianity, is actually a liability for Christianity. It seems strange that Gurdjieff would speak of ‘esoteric Christianity’, without any real evidence. I will be that the real esoteric Christians have always been horrified at the torpedo in disguise Gurdjieff launched at that religion: the outcome is the loss of the innocent trust that animates real Christians, and the entry of a cynical reactionary black magic that makes all spiritual cults into dishonest scams demanding money. So I think that Gurdjieff, whatever his intent, was far more destructive of Christianity than the secular crowd.
Bennett’s miscast version of the demiurgic powers
/2012/03/01/bennetts-miscast-version-of-the-demiurgic-powers/
I must wonder if J.G. Bennett hasn’t miscast the legacy of the ‘Demiurge’ with his somewhat peculiar treatment in The Dramatic Universe. The ‘demiurgic powers’ are made out to be some kind of carnivorous devil pack in the scheme of Gurdjieff’s completely speculative and malevolent ‘food hierarchy’ of cosmic beings. I think that Gurdjieff’s scheme has done more to confuse the issue, and discredit his movement, if not the general field of gurus, than any other of his outlandish nonsense. It is not the case that humanity is ‘food’ for celestial powers, and the notion is a remnant of some ancient occult paranoia, and, of course, the realm of animal sacrifice, whose deeper meaning was long ago lost, and in any was a stage of primitive humanity. Gurdjieff on the subject of food is the man’s belly chakra projected on the universe, next to the sufistic mental block on spiritual vegetarianism. Gurdjieff’s food hangup is perverse. It IS true that certain black magicians act after the manner of vampires, appropriating the conscious energies of various human victims, but to project this scheme of occult stupidity onto the divine scale is one of the notably grotesque aspects of Gurdjieff and his dark sufis sources. If the divine/angelic world had to depend on man for ‘food’, god help them, they would starve. Gurdjieff’s whole notion of ‘god’ is perverted by this thinking, as if good were some vagrant in his own universe who has to prey on lowly humans to maintain itself. Where did this paranoid insanity come from? And how pervasive has it become in Islamic sufism?
This is one of the issues that has wrecked Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe, and behind that the legacy of sufism. You have to just stay away from all of it, and of all the vampire gurus, like Da free John, and E.J. Gold who want to target victims in these schemes.
They have non canonical statud in any real spiritual tradition, and they have clearly destroyed much of what is called ‘sufism’. But as our previous link shows, the greater world of sufism is almost unknown to us here, or to me, so I hope they are all happy with their ‘ism’, whatever it is.
The psychotic cannibal occultism of the Gurdjieff madhouse is pathetic, where not dangerous to your health.
Moral: ancient sages milliennia suggested the spiritual path be vegetarian, but the lapse of that tradition has produced an immense circle of hell where the norm is cutpurse guruism, sufism, and Gurdjieffian sharks. It has no real status as spirituality, whatever its occult basis.
The same was said of Crowley’s magick, and Hubbard’s Scientology. But these adventurers are changing the environment of religion to a dark version of their malevolent visions.
It is not entailed by religion.
Worth reading Tolkien’s books here. But, unfortunately, people like Gold have tried appropriate that for their own purposes. Suruman dressed up as Gandalf.
Don’t be fooled.
Did Gurdjieff wreck Christian faith?
/2012/03/03/did-gurdjieff-wreck-christian-faith/
I think that the comment today on Philokalia is of interest.
More gnerally, I have to ask, did Gurdjieff sows the seeds of the destruction of Christianity.
Note: there wasn’t much left to wreck…
Not trust, but paranoia before the demonic, attends the figure Gurdjieff, and this seeps into the stance toward religion, as the claims for ‘esoteric Christianity’ give the impression that behind the veil of piety lies a demonic realm of figures like Gurdjieff and other sufis, prepared to transmit evil on believers, unsuspecting in their faith.
It is strange that Gurdjieff behave the way he did. Anyone who gets a sense of his meaning would decamp not just from his ‘work’, but from Christianity altogether.
I think a lot of very high people are very angry with what Gurdjieff did. The whole religion of Christianity (and Judaism) is at risk.
Free will debates and black magic
/2012/03/04/free-will-debates-and-black-magic/
There is another dimension to the free will debate in the realm of the black magicians (like Gurdjieff) seeking to use unconscious hypnosis to enslave the wills of others
The issue of human evolution
/2012/06/05/the-issue-of-human-evolution/
The Darwin bluff on human evolution/Darwiniana
A good book for New Agers confused by evolutionary debates
Descent of Man Revisited http://www.amazon.com/Descent-Man-Revisited-World-History/dp/0984702903/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334574170&sr=8-1
The application of Darwinism to human evolution is a huge bluff, and the way world history shows something different should consitute a falsification, but the Darwin establishment knows they can get away with a lie here.
The Rustling in the bushes…
We began with a challenge to find, at a minimum, the ‘rustling
in the bushes’ that would constitute evidence of the non-random,
thence of some ‘systems action’, dynamic or design, visible as
a surface effect (phenomenon) before a suspected ‘deep action’
(noumenon).
The Evidence of World History The existence of a clear
derandomized pattern in world history puts an immdediate
block against attempted Darwinization of world history via
reductionist theories. Such a thing is not supposed to exist,
but it pervades our visible history, as the stock of Darwinian
speculation plummets for the history/evolution that is not visible.
Falsifying Darwinism Karl Popper claimed that Darwinism
was not falsifiable. But our demonstration has clearly come
close to falsifying Darwinian theories of human evolution: they
cannot be claimed as science.
Evolution: the bottom line The public is under tremendous
pressure to accept the Darwinian framework on the grounds that
it is science, in a struggle with religion. But Darwinism is clearly
a pseudo-science, and has lost the real meaning of evolution.
Facts and Values The question of science is sidelined step one in
the way our evolutionary matrix is based on the value domain
in relation to facts. This tells us immediately that standard
reductionism fails, and that evolutionary ‘science’ is beyond the
purely physical. We must resist the propaganda of religionists
attempting to claim this as their monopoly. There is no science
(yet) of evolution in the standard sense.
Dangers of Social Darwinism Darwinian theory is an accident
waiting to happen, and the false hope that human self-evolution
via eugenics can create evolution via Social Darwinist scenarios
is an ongoing fallacy of reductionist literalists. There is a
real danger of doing damage to human potential with these
delusive ideologies, which are also the mainstays of economic
exploitation. Darwin lunatics should be considered ‘armed and
dangerous’ theoretically.
Noone can get evolution straight
/2012/06/13/noone-can-get-evolution-straight/
The previous post was about the public’s refusal of evolution (or Darwinism?). But the current view is so far from the mark that it is not surprising people are wary.
Keep in mind that scientific biology has bungled the whole question of the evolution of ethics, human consciousness, routinely justifies social darwinism (behind public denials), enforces economic ideology, negates the factor free will, and we haven’t even mentioned theism (probably right not to), and much else.
The worst indictment is the hopeless stupidity and inability to learn on the part of academics and bureaucratic scientists. The ‘best’ scientists are apparently the biggest idiots….
Public full acceptance of evolution in this Darwinian brand would probably be a disaster and a cultural calamity.
Not even religion at its worst is this bad.
Biologists have failed to grasp what evolution is: DMR might give some hints about what science is going wrong.
Meanwhile the New Age groups have produced still another baloney sphere in the ‘evolutionary enlightenment’ and ‘spiritual evolution’ muddles.
Gurdjieff’s celestial hierarchy of cannibals???
/2012/06/19/gurdjieffs-celestial-hierarchy-of-cannibals/
The previous post raises an issue for the Gurdjieff Watch groups, who, of course, are well aware of the sci-aspect of Gurdjieff’s writings (at the dawn of the age of sci/fi and its pulp fiction, in the thirties when All and Everything was being written. We have commented on the sufi influence on sci/fi, and the sufi ‘myth’ of hidden invastion of aliens on earth, hinted at by Gurdjieff and Idries Shah. I could never get to the bottom of it).
Gurdjieff injected some speculations about the tampering with human evolution by cosmic beings, causing retardation, and this was partly picked up by J. G. Bennett.
Since Gurdjieff hadn’t the ability to provide solid evidence of this, his views are suspect, especially his scale of beings (the Food Diagram) which is so crudely sadistic (a hierarchy of cosmic cannibals, with God the top cannibal) that we must wonder if Gurdjieff (or one of his idiot ‘esoteric’ sources) wasnt’ just a lunatic psychopath.
It is essential, as we have said here repeatedly, to realize that Gurdjieff has absolutely no real spiritual authority (any more than the pope) and that these concoctions which have created psychological distress in hundres of Gurdjieff students are pure myth, complete fabrications used to justify the discovered vampire tactics of various pseudo-gurus (Da Free John openly confessed to it, proudly calling himself a vampire superman) and psychopaths in the failed byways of the Greater Path to Enlightenment.
Tibetan buddhism and other fronts
/2012/06/27/2949/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/27/nicholas-vreeland-dalai-lama_n_1628517.html?utm_hp_ref=religion: Dalai Lama Taps Nicholas Vreeland, American Buddhist, To Bridge East And West At Rato Monastery In Southern India
Is this just a superficial concession?
I have long suspected the Tibetan system is a total waste of time for most Westerners (and probably most Tibetans). It is atroubling question, this closed world of Tibetan buddhism. It is a huge trap and a dead end, I suspect.
And it tends to dominate the whole field. The Dalai Lama never once acknowledged the existence of the living buddha Rajneesh, and never visited his ashram, a very telling bit of behavior.
The whole of Tibetan Buddhism seems to be a front for unseen ghostly lamas unknown even to the Dalai Lamas. They are obscurely associated with a fascist/nazi trend, beyond the grasp of most Tibetans, but probably contacted by Gurdjieff.
I think that the whole of Tibetan buddhism is a fake front, for what is not clear.
I can’t offer advice here, but for myself have absolutely no plans to go anywhere near Tibetan Buddhism.
E.J. Gold’s demonic streak freakishly adopted as Gurdjieff imitation!?
/2012/07/05/e-j-golds-demonic-streak-freakly-adopted-as-gurdjieff-imitation/
The question of E.J.Gold is very troubling for many, as the previous post, and many others, make clear.
My own experience has left me puzzled: this man, who once cogently critiqued scientology as a cult (it turns out he was almost jealous of Hubbard’s success), can easily fool people, and he fooled me for a few months ca. 1965 as I moved along the fringe of his group formations. It is doubly confusing because he plays on the Jewish reputation for integrity, and then does a beelzebub on it.
Let me say that I was finally coached (by a Jewish New Ager, who knew what he was talking about) on the issue of his deceptiveness, and warned to simply stay away from him. Don’t start, since once you initiate anything your status is ‘you asked for it’. Nota bene.
The puzzle isn’t complicated: Gurdjieff was a devil, by his own admission. If you want to compete you have to be an even bigger devil.
Update note: Hubbard did/didn’t get away with it, don’t let Gold get away with it. He is a little different from Hubbard, who, actually, remains obscure.
A lot of poeple will try to change the record, declare a sufi saint in Gold and cash in on this demonic game.
Since this con is pervasive in sufi circles, it will prove hard to stop. Be advised.
Spread the word: these formations have absolutely no authoritative status. The attempt to enforce absolute spiritual obedience is a terrible danger to the innocents who fall in these traps.
This kind of thing seems to be sufistic. I think the reputation of sufism has plummeted these days. There is doubtfully such an ism, so be careful.
Gold is too clever to be completely exposed, so it is important to create a group of people who can stand up to this new form of spirituality.
I fear, however, that, like the neo-con right, it will have a permanent footing. The expose must match that.
The problem is that people like Gold are selective in their exploitation, and leave victims alone until they have left his premises. That leaves a lot of groupies who will aggresswively defend him in all ignorance.
The devil is clever, remember….
The legacy of Gurdjieff and guruism as class warfare
/2012/07/13/the-legacy-of-gurdjieff-and-guruism-as-class-warfare/
One of the puzzles of the behavior of figures like Gold and Cohen as gurus is the way they tend to trash disciples. It is a curious tactic that is so completely counterproductive that it leaves a puzzle in its wake.
But there is no puzzle at all if you look at the influence of Gurdjieff on subsequent so-called teachers. Gurdjieff was the first (in the Western public sphere, anywhere) to indulge in disciple trashing.
I recall see the tactic in E.J. Gold who would do that on people he met the same day, not yet even knowing their names: an important hint the tactic hasn’t much to do with ego, but some other agenda.
And that agenda becomes clear in Gurdjieff (and the hidden influence of Nietzsche), the posture of the self-styled overman beating the lower caste of subhumans to keep them in line, old tactics from colonial days, and degenerated sufistic circles, no doubt.
The class warfare in Gurdjieff is veiled, until it becomes transparent: after all this was a teaching that took on the Russian revolution. There are a thousand ways a Gurdjieff could have critiqued that revolution, but instead he chose to defend the Tsarist treatment of peasants.
In any case, the ‘shockabooku’ tactics (which produced their vocabulary) that became public in the Gold sphere, bypassing the sweet tempered Lozowick (I think, ???), and reappearing in Cohen, have a known false legacy.
To be fair, the harsh treatment of people no doubt has a sufistic lineage, but, in any case, its class warfare overtones, which seems outlandish to point out at first, should become apparent when you realize that those who perpetrate them, like Gurdjieff, Gold, and now Cohen, are not enlightened, and have no call to ‘destroy ego’ when their own ego nexus is untouched.
The Gurdjieff teaching wasn’t a teaching at all, but a rightist authoritarian initiative to establish some kind of conservative spiritual authority, making the disciple a cringing dog.
Harsh tactics are a sign on non-enlightenment, and don’t appear in real gurus, with important exceptions, no doubt.
If a guru tries to trash you, fight back at once. If you see him do it to another, call him on it.
Guruism as an equalizer
/2012/07/13/guruism-as-an-equalizer/
I should hasten to add that in its original pure form the institution of the guru was an equalizer in the revolutionary initiative of the spiritual democrat, and the reason for India’s early great success in the field of religion. The world of the Brahmins and the law of caste are later stages of Hindu decadence.
Black magic ops, BDSM and rightist mass hypnosis
/2012/07/13/black-magic-ops-bdsm-and-rightist-mass-hypnosis/
From Darwiniana, below
The tactics of mass hypnosis discussed by Blavatsky are being covertly used by rightist groups, and the manipulation of BDSM (sensed many times by the old poster here, MBFM) as class warfare is explicit in some degenerate sufi circles, as per the Gold field, where finding out if someone is a masochist is a top priority toward imposing ‘suffering’s, as ego bashing (the victim ‘likes it’, etc).
Gold, of course, is always on the prowl for getting a hold of people’s sexual unconsciousness, the better to trash the person and/or use hypnosis to create a sex scandal. Sex scandals are one of the prime black magic ops of the right.
Few have the sheer skill of E.J. Gold in being a human monster, so don’t worry too much about the right, which can’t get past simple fascism, and covert ops type of crime.
But the grand shebang of rightist fascism/nazism emerging in the nineteenth century clearly echoing in the incomprehending Wagner, and his pal sidekick Nietzsche (who had no idea what was gong on) was a potent brew. Rajneesh accuses Buddhists outright of this, but I can’t follow the complex thread of rightist resurgence in the early twentieth century.
We are seeing its successor in some form in the return of the right in the USA since the seventies.
Fifty Shades of Capitalism: Pain and Bondage in the American Workplace
The symbol of capitalism was lately a vampire. Enter the CEO with nipple clamps.The relationship of BDSM to class warfare (a theme of multiple postings at The Gurdjieff Con) should be transparent (but isn’t) from its sources in the modern mind in figures like De Sade. The suspicion always lingers that the phenomena are not psychological states, as traits of character, but unconscious suggestions in the field of mass hypnosis, a subject better discussed at The Gurdjieff Con.
The field of liberal thought doesn’t see the connection with rightist resurgence in the spread of the dangerous BDSM archetypes. That said, as the phenomena enter into the open public sphere they tend to degrade and disperse and become silly.
It is important to consider the egregious insertion of the slave motif into the otherwise unconnected pattern of dominance/submission, which is in principle distinct. The politicization of dominance/submission, in reality always present some would say, should be an extreme caution against indulgence here in the name of the sexual revolution.
Study, as this article senses it, the class warfare of BDSM promotion as mass hypnosis, to try and catch the process in action.
The point here is that BDSM by and large isn’t an aspect of character, but a Trojan Horse effect to master the unconscious of others.
I would note the obvious appearance of the female version at a point of wished-for conservative revanche against women’s lib.So how does all this work? Too bad for you. It’s esoteric. You don’t rate, peon.
Adjourn to The GC….
An old sufi phrase, ‘immortal within the limits of the solar system’
/2012/07/17/an-old-sufi-phrase-immortal-within-the-limits-of-the-solar-system/
Jim Buck said,
July 16, 2012 at 1:12 pm ·
I have just bought this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fallen-Angels-Watchers-Nephilim-ebook/dp/B005012H0K/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2
Dare I say it’s cheaper, shorter, and more scholarly, than Scott Roberts’ book. I think “origins fiction” is a more useful term than “science fiction”.
Thanks for tip. I am, of course, very much the skeptic here, but the issue of what I call hyperlife won’t go away.
There is a telling, haunting, phrase that the figure Gurdjieff got from some sufi source: ‘immortal within the limits of the solar system”.
The suspicion continues, and an adherence to science remains in the background, that the soul/hyperlife factor is pervasive in the universe, and that beings of some kind in the realm of hyperlife accompany the course of the solar system.
I can’t take that any further, and don’t adopt beliefs here, but the many myths on this subject sound like distortions of something lost to us.
Meanwhile, New Agers should be wary of the world of reactionary gurus: they are phonies of the first order.
The strange irony is that the atheist left probably has more spiritual hidden support than the always conservatizing mainstream religions, which sink into bogus formations at the hands of priesthoods.
These hyperlifers resemble Bennett’s ‘demiurgic powers’, about which too much speculation has already swamped the idea. The point is that self-consciousness is the groundstate of hyperlife, in beings with bodies of light (Bennett’s take).
Reject that as nonsense, but the suspicions remain here of a form of existence that doesn’t evolve in the normal sense: it is hyperlife.
As these books make obvious, the rumours and confusions here won’t go away.
But Bennett’s strange reverence to the ‘new age’, to the demirgic powers setting up modernity, and his out of place reference to the birth of communism in 1848 is a curious tale itself: Vol 4 of Dramatic Universe.
As a student of the eonic effect, I sit up and take notice, but Bennett’s account is garbled and unclear. I think my idea of the ‘modern transition’ is far more coherent.
It is important to consider that such beings, if real, would have a very hard time getting focussed in the human timeframe. Events at the human time-scale would be beyond their form of experience. But perhaps they can operate to some degree at the level of millennia/centuries.
Proceed with caution: these are not grounds for belief.
Manchurian candidates
/2012/07/25/manchurian-candidates/
We have discussed this here several times (not this case) in terms of MKULTRA style covert action and the related but totally different effect in occult/spiritual circles, especially sufi mafia telepathic invasion and control of victims (I would not exempt Indian gurus). Sirhan seems the first type. Adolf Hitler is rumored to a case of the second type.
In spiritual circles you will get found out, and sooner or later attempts at outside intervention will try to liberate victims (don’t count on it). The veil of secrecy in fascist occult buddhism is impenetrable.
In June 1968, Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy dead in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, moments after he had clinched victory in the California Democratic primary for that year’s presidential election.
Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, cried “I did it for my country” when arrested. He kept diaries detailing his hatred of Kennedy for promising military support for Israel, a year after the region’s Six-Day War.
Yet Sirhan’s lawyer claims he was programmed to shoot the politician while under hypnosis.
Osho commune overpriced, suspiciously so
/2012/08/01/osho-commune-overpriced-suspiciously-so/
This is an important history, but I think that (to continue something I wanted to do yesterday) this colonial/anticolonial system works both ways.
The Osho ashram in Poona is a subtle exploitation of Westerners who are grossly overcharged, and given inferior goods in return. I have seen this situation, much worse, in the Gurjieff world, where cynical overcharging with no real result is the norm.
The expensive nature of the Osho path was obvious from the start, but seems to have gotten worse. I admire Osho, but I never bother with his ‘path’, because I can’t afford it. I had a remarkable experience in the 1980’s going to the Osho Commune in the brief period when it was free for ‘homeless’ people.
Others had to either live/work at the Commune for zero pay (and thousands were willing and enthusiastic, but over time that would have become a problem), while some of the outsiders who paying many thousands for short stays/darshans.
Trust erodes eventually in this situation. I recall years ago coming by accident on some sufis discussing this
Coming across Indians or sufis laughing hysterically at the naivete of Westerners will quickly jolt you out of this situation. I can understand the deep hatred of Westerners given the destruction of India created by colonialism, but the average Joes struggling in the new economies of the West isn’t fair either. The days of easy money are passing.
Let me note that primordial buddhism was quite free of charge: a begging bowl was all you needed to start.
I should note that the case of Osho commune is complicated, and I don’t want to be unfair. But many are cut out of this system with its round trips to India, and ridiculous fees for therapy groups, and now the daily entry charge, a real insult. What’s going on here?
This is a bit harsh, maybe, but I have completely lost a great opportunity here, and really don’t give a shit about being polite about it.
But then, perhaps one is better off working without these organizations.
Osho also had a lot to say about wealth and poverty, and his path was a deliberate effort to deal with spiritual poverty syndrome, so how to judge here?
The easy money days of the last generation are passing, and continued overcharging here will rapidly create a class basis for ‘sannyas’.
Did Tolkien understand his own book?? /// EJ Gold’s fake Gandalf and his ork squad of ‘disciples’
/2012/08/03/did-tolkien-understand-his-own-book-ej-golds-fake-gandalf-and-his-ork-squad-of-disciples/
The Gurdjieff gangs, especially in the Gold realm, have tried to appropriate Tolkien and his lore, playing the Gandalf card when their realityh is closer to Saruman, or worse.
Reposted from Darwiniana: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/fall-mortality-and-the-machine-tolkien-and-technology/260412/#
Fall, Mortality, and the Machine: Tolkien and Technology
By Alan Jacobs
This is a useful and interesting take on Tolkien, and, having passed through such phases of ‘anti-machine’ cultism during college years, I am not surprised, and can’t challenge the author’s documentation of Tolkien’s views.
But having watched the film series multiple times, I must say that this issue never impinged on the value I took from the film series. That is no doubt an effect of the film, which concentrates on the ‘virtual classic’ that Lord of the Rings represents. As Tolkien seems to have sensed, the world of Beowulf never quite got is great epic, perhaps due to the influence of Christianity, and the trilogy/plus The Hobbit intro, create an after the fact extravaganza for that epic lore, in the permutations of the genre through the Indo-European corpus, like Icelandic Amlothi turning into Hamlet. In many ways Tolkien succeeded here, granting that the format of prose loses a poetic dimension that epic (and tragic) genres came into being with.
But I think this focus on technology misses the point of the archetypal epic that Tolkien unwittingly invoked with great success, speaking no doubt from his unconscious, as it were, and there the issue is not technology as magic, but magic as such. Tolkien’s theme means less to moderns than it should.
But having escaped from the clutches of sufistic villains who succumbed to the darkness of the ‘one ring’ the point of Tolkien’s epic is crystal clear, and means what it says: the dark side of magic, like the dark side of the force, is a reality that overtakes those who use it. It is worth noting that in that other epic, of sorts, the Star Wars trilogy, Darth Vader explicitly distinguishes magic and technology, rightly so. Figures like Gurdjieff with a magical sideline that colors their grotesque gullet and vizard with a demonic smirk is really quite real, and the hobbits in the neighborhood would do well to be off on the ‘return trek’.
In an age of scientism, this ancient lore is lost on the popcorn crowd, perhaps less so, however, than the academic crowd, since the archetypal unconscious of the popcorn crowd is healthily intact.
So returning the one ring to the Cracks of Doom is not really an anti-technology issue, despite what seems to be Tolkien’s rational surface thinking, and his invocation of the great archetypes of epic echoes something deeper, and he clearly, fortunately, ‘didn’t know what he was talking about’, despite the clear Gandalfian wisdom emerging in the text.
Commune-ism
/2012/08/09/commune-ism/
Havng said goodbye to Osho Commune, the next step is a takeover from the left.
We are out of time, and the left (=communist left) needs a religious vehilce association. Buddhism has been captured by fascist reactionaries,….
From Darwiniana:
Socialists in three-cornered hats?
/whee4th/chap6_5.htm: the fixation on the generation of 1848, and in relation to the previous period of the Enlightenment and French Revolution is no accident. The timing of the mysterious world system shows that the conclusion to the modern transition had left the world of the secular in an incomplete state, one in which the status of capitalism remained undefined in the emerging canons of the liberal ideology. That was the point of the new socialists, expropriated by Marx and marxists: they wished to complete the French Revolution.
But instead a reaction formation emerged (analogous to the later one of the postmoderns) to destroy modernity and create a new age or starting point. But that strategy was doomed to create a jackknife against the whole modern transition. The early socialists understood that the value of socialism was connected to its liberal framework in the creation of the still unclaimed term ‘democracy’.
The issue here is not the destruction of the liberal state, pace Leninism, but the realization that, e.g. the American Revolution had been wrought by people who finished the job before the rise of Adam Smith and the new ideology of capitalism, miscalculating the effect of their achievement. The immediate distortion of the system of rights, has escalated in our time into the destruction of democracy. But the solution is not Marx’s critique of right, but the creation of a system of socialist right. That task was started by Kant with his ethics of the republic of ends. Lockean property right is taken as the summa of liberalism, but the closer reality is that property right might be limited in a republic of ends. This simple starting point for a socialist liberalism, on its way to a still undefined democracy of men who have renounced private property in the rights of the Commons, was lost on both the early liberal sharks of capitalist mystification, and the anti-right disillusion with the democratic that lurked in the revolutionary anger of the left.
A revolution of communist completion to restrain the American rogue state, close to destroying the planet, requires thus something more than a Leninist revenge drama.
From Darwiniana: Buddha and Mara???
/2012/08/25/from-darwiniana-buddha-and-mara/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-richmond/mara-looks-just-like-buddha_b_1804369.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
Richmond’s view deserves consideration, no doubt, with leads toward further research, but surely the issue is simpler for most than this ornate embroidery of something Gautama probably never knew about. The issue is: the path of enlightenment attracts demonic oppositions. And these are intangible. Spirits, devils, unconscious projections? People who get close to a result often disconbobulate without warning. It is this issue that seems to many a demonic reality in action. Jumping to the conclusion can be problematical.
It is not enough to say these issues are a matter of one’s own projections, but the issue is not clear, and don’t believe those who are doing buddhist PR in a ‘secular’ age.
This is said in the context of a rapidly ‘naturalizing’ buddhism, which is going to be a nice job for those demonic oppositions, easy pickings. The result will be a disaster. Don’t listen to Mahayanists here: they have already conceded the game. They have their own defense here, as to this.
Consider Milarepa’s desperation: preaching the dharma to these devils, that sounds right: through the land of Whacko and onto the beyond, maybe.
It is hard to evaluate the buddhist tradition here: where this material comes from is not clear, but probably it has nothing to do with Gautama.
In an age of science, skepticism attends such statements, skepticism is the starting point: but here’s the point, a strong path of meditation is an empirical gesture, and experiment, among other things in reality of ‘devils’, in the discovery of any sense to such terms. So beware of prejudging the experiment.
Meditation, most ironically, is one of the few ways to conduct spiritual experiments. It is its own brand of science.
Bennett’s take on modernity (and communism)
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One of the strange ironies in Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe is the way he produced a model of the rise of modernity, and concluded with a reflection on the ‘new age’ of the modern, complete with a reference to communism in the year 1848. This concealed radicalism may well have taken even Bennett by surprise, but, at least, he must have felt uncomfortable with the reactionary character of the Gurdjieff groups, e.g. Ouspensky. A close look at the history shows the way that some hidden spiritual group initiated his drift away from Ouspensky in the later thirties, beginning the gestation of DU. I think that this is the first sign of some radical spiritual entity trying to correct the drift of the Gurdjieff movement toward the right. The whole game staged by Gurdjieff was an attempt to upstage the left (with its own hidden spirituality) and to try and use magical and esoteric mystique to create a reactionary spirituality and anti-modernism. The postmodern is one of the tactics in the wake of that.
In any case, the hidden spiritual left is clearly at work with Bennett, who may or may not have understood what was happening. His work, sadly, is compromised by its association with Gurdjieff, who is not the source of the DU materials.
Hyparchic future shock // Bennett discussion
/2012/09/28/hyparchic-future-shock-bennett-discussion/
Review of Bennett’s DU//AmazonA question about Bennett’s Dramatic Universe as a resource for the left..Be wary….
I am being asked a question, from various sources, re: the status of Bennett’s systematics. and his sense late in life of the virtual future. This is a subject that should be discussed at The Gurdjieff Con, but I will do it here, to create a bridge between several discussions. My review of his book is misleading: I have frequently thought highly of Bennett’s book, which I first read in 1977 or so (about the time Star Wars came out, btw. That movie, again, btw, is about the hyparchic past, or virtual past: unusual among scifi myths in being about the past) and reading the first volume flipped into what can only be called a higher state of consciousness. I read VOL I almost stunned, with a sense of dimensionality of objects, very brief, and then began to ‘come down’ from a strange ‘high’, as the model in book ceased to seem as clear as before. So, we can only get to step two and a half in the twelve step series (which can go on and on beyond that). OK, now, his categories make sense because they aren’t serious, yet: they project a future logic.
I think the book covers too much ground to be clear, and, as the other sole reviewer noted, the first three volumes make no sense, while Vol 4 was a revelation about human evolution. Well, maybe. In fact, the other volumes are relatively clear, but they depend on a controversial move by Bennett, to construct a new set of categories to replace those of Kant. A risky move, that doesn’t work, with the result that his dodecad remains on shaky foundations. None of this has anything to do with Gurdjieff or Sufism, and its source in Bennett’s life is still enigmatic. He was influenced by Whitehead’s book Process and Reality which created a stir in the twenties in British intellectual culture.
There is more to say here, and we will continue at The Gurdjieff Con.
He never understood what Kant was up to, with his transcendental deduction. But the attempt to critique Kant here began with Hegel, and Bennett, who is no match for Kant, may be right in another way. In any case, the whole issue was swept away by Schopenhauer, who reduced all the categories to one set of issues, the one category of causality, in relation to representation and thing-in-itself. Much clearer, and actually a better approach to the spiritual without trying (Schopenhauer, usefully, did all this with something like an atheist’s scorn of religion, stumbling on the spiritual walking backwards without the word ‘spiritual’). You can simply take Bennett’s system as something else, and leave Kant alone.
But the battle between the Kantians and the realists and/or Hegelians is a stalemate. I just think it an accident of British intellectual culture that Bennett jumped on the Whitehead bandwagon in the thirties. His book is practically the ghost of Schopenhauer in a box, forced to live among the realists (those ‘stiff upper brits’, so stuck on Darwin, but brilliant in most other respects).
Anyway, what to do: Bennett’s immense corpus is built on these foundations, which are shaky, what is left? Most metaphysical systems crash, as indeed Kant pointed out. But here, in a way, it doesn’t matter, because his exercise works just as well as an exploration into something this is undiscovered country. His ‘categories’ are twelve in number, reflect numerical sequences, are called systems, and begin as wholeness, polarity, relatedness (three term), tetrads (four term), potentiality (five term), six-term, seven term, etc, to twelve term. The issue is simple: a problem is defined beautifully, without the solution. So we can proceed in piecemeal research up the scale he foresees. A simple defense against crackpot thinking here. I was confused for a long time by this exercise until I realized, that, as Bennett hints, you can’t go any further than step two unless you can transcend the pairs of opposites, and trancend contraditions in your head as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, in one thought. Which means that almost noone could get past the second category, and therefore the whole remaining series is simply up in the air. So, the true comes out, we are in the foothills of a truly Himalayan question, nicely laid out by Bennett, and summarized with a toy model.
So it a good mirror of our thinking, stuck in polarity, trying to get beyond that, and using dialectic as a substitute that never quite reaches the third term system stage. Complete confuson reigns here, and many who claim to transcend duality are confusing us further.
Thus, if you take it that way it becomes very useful: as a toy model. If you take in on provision as a gedanken experiment, you can suddenly understand a lot of things. We have discussed one idea here many times, the three fold version of the hyponomic, autonomic, and hypernomic realms (falsely oversimplified and called the material, life aand spiritual realms): here we see that man’s confusion over consciousness and self-consciousness arises because he is on the boundary of the autonomic and hypernomic realms. Out of the blue a complete mystery of human consciousness pops out of Bennett’s system of categories. So we are left non-plussed in the end as to the status of his systematics.
This is getting long and we can adjourn to the other blog for more on this another time.
But this issue here is that Bennett’s systematics, given his sense of the hyparchic future shock of feeling the coming of communism, that his systematics, like Hegel’s book on logic, is too much to inflict on the left, but that it could make a useful source of a larger study, among other things showing the marxist left where it is getting stuck on the dialectic. In Bennett’s system the dialectic is a two term system trying to be three term system, and rarely succeeding. A good example of the power of Bennett’s system, even in its toy model version.
Once you see that the toy model is only that, the use made of the dodecad can be taken lightly as you breeze through the rest of Bennett’s remarkable book.
This is like science fiction, that a future science will find prophetic. Further research could improve this start, so, OK.
The left should keep an eye on this system, and take it the way some Marxists take Hegel’s Logic, as an exercise in research. And its use as some kind of theological propaganda on the Gurdjieff right can be exposed easily with a little study. Bennett’s history has a lot of problems, so the question of the overall argument as to evolution remains dubious, but of remaning interest.
Israel/Persia and the tragedy of monotheism
/2012/09/30/israelpersia-and-the-tragedy-of-monotheism/
The conflict between Israel and Iran has forgotten the way in which monotheism came into existence in a dynamic hybrid of Israelite and Zoroastrian strains, blended during the Exile (some make the Persian contribution critical), and yet, sadly, becoming a closed ethnic cult of post-Exilic nationalism.
One of the reasons for Islam, surely, was the attempt to reset the balance and free monotheism from its Isrealite covenentalism.
Both parties at this point should ask if they will burn out these religions and leave them as toxic remains. The core of monotheism was supposed to be universal, but this simple achievement was, and still is, unachieved.
The Axial Age: Religion, macro and micro
The phenomenon of the Axial Age shows us the solution to the riddle of evolution, but instead has produced a whole series of false interpretations. The only way out of the morass is to consider our frequency hypothesis taking the data as a set of discontinuities in a timed sequence. Then we must carefully study the differentiation of effects in different cultures. It is not a ‘common philosophy’ applied in different ways, but parallel transforms of source areas. To try and find a common denominator as an ‘Axial Age’ philosophy won’t work. We see contrasting opposites and a balance of diversities, increasing the future potential of the system. The ‘evolution’ of religion is powerfully illustrated in the way a ‘macro’ effect takes up the streams of religious culture and amplifies them, in two cases, India and Israel/Persia, into what will become materials for world religions. The Indian case is especially significant because a tradition of great antiquity, the so-called Jain, remorphs on schedule into Buddhism, in the wake of the terminating sequence of teertankers, concluding with Mahavir! The sudden coalescence of Persian and Israelite monotheisms at the conclusion of the Axial interval (by our measure) is a spectacular effect, leaving sociological casusation theory far behind. As the Isreaelites well knew there was a higher dimension to what befell them.
It nonetheless remains the case that Archaic Greece, our putative source of modern secularism (but in a flowering of polytheism as ‘art religion’), is the clearest exemplar of the Axial effect. Its massive cluster of innovations coming in and going out with a spookily exact schedule is far more ‘miraculous’ that anything portrayed in the primitive Old Testment. The riddle of Christianity and Islam show a beautiful resolution as Axial Age seeds come to full bloom in the ‘middle period’ of our sequential series.
Click to access DMR_review_copy.pdf
Tibetan occultists on the prowl for mussolini moments
/2012/10/05/tibetan-occultists-on-the-prowl-for-mussolini-moments/
The issues explored here have been adddressed many times in another form: the buddhist esoteric fascists, no doubt invultuating susceptiple fascists to do their bidding with telepathis hypnosis.\
Great work by the Dalai Lama spreading deodorant.
Amazon Review of ‘The Axial Age and Its Consequences’, Bellah et al.
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Amazon Review of ‘The Axial Age and Its Consequences’, Bellah et al.
/2012/10/17/amazon-review-of-the-axial-age-and-its-consequences-bellah-et-al/
I reviewed Bellah’s new book at Amazon: it hasn’t come online yet. I gave it three stars. I think the review, despite the haste, targets the flaw in the whole methodology used.
I put the review in a comment to another review: here
I speed-read this book very rapidly today after receiving a copy by express mail: I will upgrade this review after a second reading of the book: but the basic confusions are clear almost immediately.
This book is almost a charge of the light brigade of false scholarship on the confusing question of the Axial Age and its interpretation. Despite a great deal of new academic information on the periphery of the subject the overall interpretation fails to grapple with the phenomenon at hand. It is also a blatantly dishonest book on the editor’s part because it is a painfully obvious attempt to neutralize the seminal research shown in World History and the Eonic Effect (Amazon, or online at history-and-evolution.com) showing how the Axial period is evidence of a radical discontinuity in world history, whose correct interpretation requires zooming out to see its relationship to a larger pattern of ‘axial’ intervals, including the rise of the modern. The result is so massive that it suggests a kind of macroevolutionary system demonstrating teleological directionality. This approach involves a critique of Darwinism which conventional scholarship finds unacceptable, and it is no accident this compendium opens early (chapter 3) with an essay on evolutionary psychology to lay down the paradigm law on the subject. The Axial Age makes no sense in the form given: that it is a phase in a teleological sequence resolves at a stroke the paradox. But that is academic heresy. There is no clear way to explain religion via Darwinism, and no clear way to connect the Axial Age with the Darwinian account of human emergence. The Darwinian theory requires random evolution, and the Axial Age is the clearest case we know of a non-random pattern, one that shows how non-random sequencing just might explain the confusions current on evolution.
The attempt to make evolutionary psychology the starting point is hopeless: everything in the Axial Age resists the reductionist scientism of evolutionary psychology, whose mechanization of all subjects fails to account for human consciousness, self-consciousness, ethics or religion. With this foundation nothing is going to make sense thereafter. The take on the evolution of religion is almost preposterous ostrich scholarship given the plain, thunderingly obvious take on the evolution of religion given by the data of the Axial Age: we see a macrohistorical process operating to create two world religions, Buddhism and Israelitism (to become the post-Axial monotheisms) and this stunning mystery is only the beginning, we see whole civilizations remorph in under three centuries or so, producing a new culture in China, the classic transformations in India, Greece/Rome, and the truly mysterious Axial drama of the Israelites in the period from -900 to the Exile, and the connection with Persion Zoroastrianism at just he crucial moment. The confusion here created by a kind of Weberian Iron Cage mentality is almost baffling in its wilful refusal to examine the facts of the case, which don’t yield to reductionist platitudes about ‘transcendence’ or all the other fake efforts to mumble through a sociology of religion. Despite is mythological cast, the Old Testament explicates very well the sense that something mysterious and macrohistorical was at work. There is no Darwinian perspective that can make sense of the way the Axial Age unfolds: it is a global phenomenon seeding independent transformations across Eurasia. Trying to focus on the period in question (better seen as a kind of transition from -900 to -400, with a key division point around -600, as Old Testament history, and the Indian case of Buddhism make clear) will fail to produce understanding because the phenomenon makes no sense in isolation, and is part of a larger sequence of ‘axial’ intervals stretching back into the Neolithic, with a visible transition at the end of the fourth millennium in Egypt and Sumer, and a continuation in the rise of modernity after 1500. A little systems analysis of this type will rapidly unlock the riddle of the amazing dynamical effect.
The standard view of the Axial Age sees only classics, the works of sages and prophets. The creates the failure to see that the real effect is cultural, and that the Axial transformation remorphs whole cultures in its direct path. Look carefully at the case of Archaic Greece, and it is clear that the effect is a cultural one: none of these writers quite grasp the Greek effects, from the Iliad to Greek Tragedy, and the first Scientific Revolution. In the case of India, this books analysis fails completely: Buddhism is an Axial recreation of something that existed in India millennia before in the primordial Shivaist/proto-Jain traditions. It is false to say that Indian religion pace the Gita is an Axial phenomenon. Its ‘axial’ age came millennia before, no doubt. The Axial Age is recycling an ancient tradition, and creating a world religion out of it. And the take the Bhagavad Gita is a poor study: whatever its original sources in the Vedic epic tradition, this text is we suspect (cf. Prem Nath Bazaz’s book on the Gita) a very late neo-Brahminist propaganda text attacking Buddhism indirectly, and has no Axial Age basis. The great tradition of Indian religion is only secondarily graced by the confusing Gita, which is much later. The great Indian tradition has no direct Axial Age manifestation, except in the case of Buddhism, for the simple reason that it existed already, and requires no new starting point, except precisely in the remorph of Buddhism as an offshot set to become a globalizing version of the great indigehous Indian lore. Forgotten is the case of Mahavira Jain, concluding a tradition of twenty-four Teertankers stretched over millennia, as he hands the baton, so to speak, to the new tradition starting with Buddhism.
More generally the Axial Age is directly echoed in the rise of the modern world, whose seminal transition from 1500 to 1800 is a clever clone, in disguise, of an Axial interval in a single transition, with a close resemblance to the Greek case. The failure to connect the modern to the Axial period simply sinks the whole effort here, and it is disgraceful to try and hide the clear effort in World History and the Eonic Effect to rescue the subject from its confusions. There is a lot more to be said here, for instance, the phenomena of Greek literature in the Axial Age, and the rise of Greek democracy: clearly Axial effects, but these cannot seem to make sense to those who are trying to secularize the ‘Age of Revelation’ story with scholarly bombast about transcendence. Something far more complex is at work. The question of Buddhist enlightenment,and the complex issues of ‘self-consciousness’/’consciousness’ never enter this primitive mole discussion of scholarly sophistry. Evolutionary psychology completely misses the boat here, and is junk theory. At a time of rapid transition to postdarwinism this is perhaps a last gasp effort to save the Darwin myth.World History And the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution Fourth Edition, and the online text at history-and-evolution.com
A new shorter analysis is now available in Descent of Man Revisited World History: The Hidden Clue to Human Evolution, also available online at descentofmanrevisited.comThis book is a sad lesson in the way scholars with fine arrogance will try to impose paradigms on the public without really explaining what they are doing, here trying to neutralize independent sholarship on the Axial Age question, with a critque of the misuse of evolutionary psychology to enforce a brand of scientism that can’t explain human evolution or psychology. It wouldn’t have taken much to introduce a chapter on the model given by World History and the Eonic Effect, and tried to answer it if it were thought incorrect. But clearly these scholarly are afraid of anyone discovering an alternate interpretation of their bedraggled sociological muddle.
Corrupting Gurdjieff influence
/2012/10/20/corrupting-gurdjieff-influence/
Students of Gurdjieff should be mindful of the escalating damage done by corrupt New Age and/or occult/sufistic rogue spirituality. Gurdjieff’s self-styled demonological identity matched with spurious claims for esoteric Xtianity has clearly confused and corrupted an untold number of secret readers who never appear in public movements. You can see it in the corruption of the current Christian culture in America. Gurdjieff is of course only one among many here, e.g. Gold et al, but the general trend on the right is clear from twentieth century history. For what it is worth, it is all spurious,and Gurdjieff association with ‘(esoteric) Christianity’ is a monumental distortion.
The hundred year war between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
/2013/03/16/the-hundred-year-war-between-gurdjieff-and-ouspensky/
The Gurdjieff legacy is dangerous for many who become known to the sources of the work, including the disembodied G entity or related sufi sharks/devils.
We linked a while back to the movie The Bourne Identity: an agent suffers amnesia (a hollywood cliche, but…) and tries to ‘self-remember’ how he was programmed, if he was, and by whom, and how he can escape it. The movie is so-so, but the symbolism is apt. It comes as a shock to realize you might have been enslaved hypnotically by a devil like Gurdjieff. It is not a bit funny.
If you are part of the Gurdjieff legacy, if you have come to the attention of the G-process or related sufis (thousands pass anyonymously by), you have probably lost your spiritual freedom to a deep set of post-hypnotic suggestions that can persist between lives. Gurdjieff bragged of his power there, not being specific and he wasn’t kidding. It is a dangerous process, because such people do not allow awakening or enlightenment, using them in life after life as ‘energy drones’ milked for their small amounts of conscious energy. The torgoautoegocrat (“I eat ego-crats’: ensaring the will of another for spiritual food in the destruction of that will). Such are the perils of spiritual surrender. Ouspensk became infuriated that his life work was to be propaganda for such devils, and an implacable emnity arose between the two.
The figure Ouspensky reincarnated in the USA and passed through the work again (blunder!), briefly, gravitated toward Rajneesh (who even as an enlightened man was briefly fooled by Gurdjieff), but was never a part of his movement, as such. He was made to realize his ‘deep programming by the work entity, and has been in a kind of continuous warfare with Gurdjieff through two lives. The obsessive clinging of Gurdjieff to Ouspensky in the determination toward revenge is a unnerving, and a warning to naive readers of the corpus, from Ouspensky to the rest.
The only solution to such deep programming is to enter a higher path, the path to enlightenment (not the path of boddhissattwas), which sooner or later must uncover such unconscious hypnosis. Be afraid, if you have ever passed through the Gurdjieff work.
Ouspensky has, in any case, long since denounced/renounced Gurdjieff. The whole episode is unfortunate and has distracted spiritual history for a century with a difficult enigma.
You should be suspicious of the Gurdjieff canon, as was Ouspensky, who realized Gurdjieff was a criminal. No exemplars have emerged in the entire period since the era of Ouspensky. Nothing. Look carefully: enlightenment is never mentioned, because Gurdjieff was so graced, being an occult, a ‘Faustian’ case of unknown provenance.
One for the faq…are hungry ghosts possible spirit gurus…?
/2013/04/04/one-for-the-faq-are-hungry-ghosts-possible-spirit-gurus/
People who think in terms of spirit guides seem to expect Jesus Christ to be able to respond to a billion expectant seekers. No way, sorry… The reality is often very different, totally unexpected versions of the classic yogic experience, with neglected or lesser known spirits, like Shopenhauer: where totally unexpected.’Hungry ghosts’ are eager for ‘disciples’, cannibals on the astral plane. In a mockery of historical materialism, people often contact the spirit presence of what seems like Marx/Engels! It is hard to know the meaning of such things, if they are not illusions, since we cannot imagine the nature of anything beyond space-time. I often think the ‘bardo’ region can construct instantly fake ghosts of dead famous people who reincarnate very quickly: so obviously, all such experiences are worth little. But sometimes where least expected …
It makes no sense, but obviously a ‘timeless’ realm with be available in the unlimited future, momentarily, maybe…
This is not about seeking out such experiences. They will happen to you sometimes…what to do?
YEAH, yeah, you think I’m nuts. your move. There are many ‘idiot levels’ higher than yours now. Good luck…
Are gurus any help?
/2013/04/04/are-gurus-any-help/
I am sorry to be negative about Tibetan Buddhsim (the point remains valid that it tends to manufacture ‘boddhissatwas’ who then never develop), as in previous post, so let me generalize my statement: research the worldof ashrams and the huge business in that. None of that is a spiritual path leading to enlightenment. It could be, but…
By and large most gurus have no interest whatsover in your case. You can search fifty years to prove the axiom true that you must have a guru, but the chances are that it will be a waste of time. Don’t waste your time: proceed without a guru. You have no other option if you are poor or unknown.
The subtle conditioning in a cult is of no value. You can say the same about sufism: you can’t even locate a sufi, I would bet. Not in a decade.
As for Mahayana and boddhissatwas you cannot be such until your reach almost to the threshold of enlightenment. It is wrong to inflict that path on beginners. The whole experience of meditation is wasted…
There are some excellent opportunities: a year in retreat for several thousand dollars…But…
To me the point is obvious: I could never afford such things, and it the absence of funds I was never welcome anywhere.
The real ‘darshan’ for me, as depicted here, happened five miles from Rajneeshpuram in the wilds of Oregon. That ashram had a remarkable moment when it was open to homeless people and I recall approaching in that disguise… But the real experience started five miles away, and stopped when I arrived at the ashram…
In general the whole guru game can be seen to be counterproductive. It doesn’t work. Once in a while a celebrity like Milarepa will have a publicity sadhana for the historical record. But in the end it seems that you are on your own. The propaganda otherwise is strong, but the facts have to be faced. If I were a guru I would be able to prove that wrong,…but…
Argue otherwise, and a tour of the guur circuit is useful if you can afford it, but the real ‘guru’ is an intangible presence, and one open to deceptive illusions, to be sure, but that is all you have, finally…
You can contact many spirits, but with no real solidity to the experience. And you cannot understand the nature of that realm: the experiences can be illusions. But they can be real too. And sometimes the non-celebrities as spirits are more helpful.
Always assume such experiences could be false, still, they show the way, one that can be tried. It is not complex: Meditate! is the 99% of it, from whatever source.
You don’t have many chances working alone, but you have more thus than chasing the phantom of the guru…Think your way past this, but don’t consider the fashionable business of the resort ashram/guru as a spiritual duty.
Kalachakra Tantra, ‘buddhist’ criminal esotericism, and German nineteenth century occultism…
/2013/04/05/kalachakra-tantra-buddhist-criminal-esotericism-and-german-nineteenth-century-occultism/
The issue of the Kalachakra Tantra is disturbing, but I haven’t quite zeroed in there because there is something much more disturbing, as we have hinted here several times: the dark statements of Osho Rajneesh in the seventies of the involvment of ‘buddhists’ in the emergence of Nazism. This is very hard to take further, but we can see that the smoking gun points to esoteric Tibetan sources. We must be fair and not accuse Tibetans outside the inner circle. And people are innocent until proven guilty: so the charge laid by Rajneeh has failed to go anywhere. Many have a hard time understanding what on earth is meant, and lack the knowledge of occult potential to make sense of such a charge. Remote control of individuals is a known power of dark-side occultists like the second string Gurdjieff, so we have the key to the whole thing. We have pointed here many times to the obscrue origins of German occult groups of the late nineteenth century into the twentieth: these are the fronts who take the fall. More we don’t know. But the Kalachakra Tantra is a reminder that systematic training in criminal behavior started early in Tibet…
Buddhists need to be wary of the assumptions about spiritual authority, and submission to gurus. The whole game is Fuck you in your face. You owe fascit gurus nothing whatever…
The Dalai Lama rarely speaks to Western audiences about the higher levels of the Kalachakra Tantra, for example, the most important religious text in Tibetan Buddhism. The authors write that “In the eight secret higher initiations of the Kalachakra Tantra, extreme mental and physical exercises are used to push the initiand into a state beyond good and evil. The original text thus requires the following misdeeds and crimes of him: killing, lying, stealing, infidelity, the consumption of alcohol, sexual intercourse with lower-class girls. As in all the other tantras, here too these requirements can be understood both symbolically and literally.” This last point is important. While Tibetan Buddhists in the West argue that the violent passages in their religious texts are meant to be read as metaphors for psychological processes, there’s a great deal of evidence that in Tibet they were taken quite literally, and that the Lama community continues to take them literally today.
Tibet: The CIA’s Cancelled War
/2013/04/12/tibet-the-cias-cancelled-war/
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/09/cias-cancelled-war-tibet/
Tibet: The CIA’s Cancelled War
Jonathan Mirsky
Lhamo Tsering Collection
Resistance fighters on the Tibetan border during the early years of the CIA’s Tibet program…
Yoga, Patanjali and Buddhism
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/19/the-travails-of-yoga-mogul-bikram-choudhury/
This is an interesting article on commercialized ‘yoga’ in the West. I think the article is marred by its use of the concept of NPD (narcisistic personality disorder). This tactic has been a frequent label pinned on new agers, and it misses the point.
Is the search for enlightenment an example of NPD?
But the history of yoga in India has always been suspect, and tis snippet of history is of interest:
The AIT/OIT question, and Sujay Rao Mandavilli’s book
/2013/04/22/the-aitoit-question-and-sujay-rao-mandavillis-book/
I am upgrading Sujay’s comment to post level, withoout endorsement, as such.
Sujay Rao Mandavilli said,
04.18.13 at 10:55 am · Edit
I am publishing my sixth research paper directly online as it is an extension of my previous papers. Kindly read pages 4 to 18 as it contains a detailed discussion of the term ‘Aryan’. This paper explains why the Dravidian, Vedic and Paramunda Indus theories are not tenable.
Methods to reconstruct the languages of the Harappans were presented in the present and previous papers.
The older papers were written taking the 19th century school of Indology as a base and working backwards. These may appear to be outdated now (at the end of our very long journey). However, the fundamentals are still correct
Part one
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27103044/Sujay-NPAP-Part-One
Part Two very,very important!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27105677/Sujay-Npap-Part-Two
the first 5 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.72.239.115 (talk) 17:51, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
Sujay Rao Mandavilli sujayrao2012@g…
Last and First Men: beyond Nietzschean parodies // and Ouspensky’s idiocy about the future
/2013/04/29/last-and-first-men-beyond-nietzschean-parodies-and-ouspenskys-idiocy-about-the-future/
I am reposting this here from Darwiniana, with a reminder that Ouspensky’s chauvinistic idiocy based on Nietzsche and the Hindu Law of Caste (which even Gurdjieff was critical of) indicates the false understanding of evolution in much of the New Age movement.
We need a new version of the commuist legacy. Last and First Men can be a small step in that direction with
1. a new philosophy of history
2. a critique of the Darwinian paradigm used to promote class warfare
3. a collation of the exposes of neo-classical economics
4. new models of post-capitalist economies
5. a critique of marxist dogmatism, and its cliche syndrome
6. a new definition of what a ‘(new) communism would mean
7. a social communism able to be a foundation for the future evolution of man
beyond the idiocy of the Darwinian road to species degeneration.
The list continues…Part of the problem, and frustration, for leftist groups is the unrevised legacy fo marxism and leninism that is simply recycled without change. The public is automatically turned off by that.
Nietzsche’s Last Man is a grotesque distortion of what is needed: a species level evolutionary program based on the achievement of a new form of cooperative society beyond class. The idea that fascist eugenics of Social Darwinist superman parodies will advance the future of homo sapiens is a sick joke. The future evolution of man is an immensely more difficult task, not unlike the path of the Boddhissatwas who make a species level commitment. That Buddhist framework may not be viable as the Axial Age religions attempt to enter a new age, but the reality pointed to by some brands of buddhism is a warning that Darwinist ideologies are likely to produce a grotesque new form of human.
We see that the connection between a new communism and future evolution is direct, and a challenge to the crypto-fascist class warfare parodies of the neo-liberal regime.
We need a new version of the commuist legacy. Last and First Men can be a small step in that direction with
1. a new philosophy of history
2. a critique of the Darwinian paradigm used to promote class warfare
3. a collation of the exposes of neo-classical economics
4. new models of post-capitalist economies
5. a critique of marxist dogmatism, and its cliche syndrome
6. a new definition of what a ‘(new) communism would mean
7. a social communism able to be a foundation for the future evolution of man
beyond the idiocy of the Darwinian road to species degeneration.
The list continues…Part of the problem, and frustration, for leftist groups is the unrevised legacy fo marxism and leninism that is simply recycled without change. The public is automatically turned off by that. The left has to do better than the new atheism, and needs to generate enlightened figures beyond buddhism and Xtianit/Islam
Nietzsche’s Last Man is a grotesque distortion of what is needed: a species level evolutionary program based on the achievement of a new form of cooperative society beyond class. The idea that fascist eugenics of Social Darwinist superman parodies will advance the future of homo sapiens is a sick joke. The future evolution of man is an immensely more difficult task, not unlike the path of the Boddhissatwas who make a species level commitment. That Buddhist framework may not be viable as the Axial Age religions attempt to enter a new age, but the reality pointed to by some brands of buddhism is a warning that Darwinist ideologies are likely to produce a grotesque new form of human.
We see that the connection between a new communism and future evolution is direct, and a challenge to the crypto-fascist class warfare parodies of the neo-liberal regime.
Sufism and the Way of Blame
/2013/05/01/sufism-and-the-way-of-blame/
This arrived at my email box.
Sufism and the Way of Blame
Yannis
Toussulis PhD
The following is excerpted from Sufism and the Way of Blame: The Hidden Sources
of a Sacred Psychology, available from Quest Books.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/sufism_and_way_blameJ. G. Bennett was convinced that Gurdjieff’s greatest influence came from a group of proto-Naqshbandis in Central Asia, a brotherhood later verified by HasanŞuşud as the Khwajagan, or Masters. Idries Shah implied that his own perspective was influenced by the Khwajagan-Naqshbandiyya. Moreover, the father of Idries, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, was also known to have contacts among Afghan Sufis, some of whom (according to Robert Darr) were still active members of the Khwajagan…
The Hindutva ‘menace’
/2013/05/12/the-hindutva-menace/
You are absolutely right, but my knowledge of India is limited. I have tried via scanned text from a book from Bazaz to consider one issue, very controversial: I tried to use an Indian writer. I am not clear who Prem Nath Bazaz was, or how he fits into the picture. Nor am I completely confident of his interpretation. But his basic perspective clarifiews things considerably. But the contrast of Buddhism with the complexity of Indian religious history tends to backfire.
But, by all means help with the issue here if you link. You can post links and commentary and I will upgrade them to post level, as I have done here.
I recall the sage/gure Rajneesh criticizint the Hindutva already in the seventies/eighties. They seem to have gotten stronger. I have of course tried to get clear on the AIT/OIT questions, and your book is helpful here.
So by all means post any data you have here.
Sujay Rao Mandavilli said,
05.08.13 at 3:25 am · Edit
People like you must spend more efforts tackling the hindutva menace- create awareness among the public on what exacly they are upto . you are well-positioned to do this. I can help ypu if you like
Yes, beware of EJ Gold on the path to enlightenment!
/2013/06/03/yes-beware-of-ej-gold-on-the-path-to-enlightenment-2/
As per previous post…
People associated with Gurdjieff seem to be ‘formal devils’, apply the ‘counteraffirmative force’ to active spiritual efforts. Another definition of the ‘devil’, apparently.
Beware of such people. They WILL try to knock people off their path. Beware of them. They aren’t gurus…
Sufis, Tibetans, and the hint given by Gurdjieff
/2013/06/16/sufis-tibetans-and-the-hint-given-by-gurdjieff/
I am sorry to be hard on E. J. Gold, but the whole Gurdjieff legacy is even worse than the Tibetan. At least the standard of a ‘path to enlightenment’ is used (and then undermined) to give a rough measure of a path. But with these so-called sufis there is not declaration of intent, nothing. Gurdjieff via Ouspensky actually tried to provide a come-on substitute. But look carefully, it amounts to very little. And note the way Enlightenment is never mentioned in the whole corpus.
The figure of Gurdjieff may help to understand the Tibetan. Gurdjieff as local vehicle for a ‘beelzebub’ X factor, who is able to reincarnate over time, but who is a demonic closure around something unknown, but ominous: a sort of damned figure who is in a kind of reincarnational limbo, unable to manifest as the real buddhas, stuck thus in samsaara.
This phenomenon of Gurdjieff may explain what it happening with the closed elite of Tibetan lamas, and the figures they have to recruit and train to be their supposed ‘reincarnations’.
Don’t forget: you travel the ‘path of enlightenment’ alone
/2013/07/06/dont-forget-you-travel-the-path-of-enlightenment-alone/
The whole morass of Tibetan buddhism, and its endless practices are past times for those who are not really on the path at all.
Be wary of the whole game.
The real path is simple: meditation. That’s it. Probably alone. I have never been to a meditation seminar (save one in the early seventies for a few hours) so I can’t vouch for their effect.
Beware of the over mechanization of meditation. and the trap of limbs falling asleep. Westerners simply can’t do the Eastern ways easily. so what. Save heroic meditations til you are ready. You can keep the idea alive with five minute sittings, getting up slowly to try and ‘mediate in action’, the supremely hard exercise: don’t force sitting in painful postures (the minus in group meditations where group imitation takes hold). Forget the lotus posture if you can’t do it. Western bodies can’t handle it. A loose cross-legged ‘not even half’ lotus is terrific. Experiment with cushions in stacks: there is a trick method of making most of your legs ‘almost’ hover in the air at the end of the larger bottom cushion, etc… After that, no cushions. A cement block makes a good meditation device. Working alone is hard: you have one hundredth of the will power you would have in a group, not will power in that case?
Meditation is confusing because it is two things in one: a practice of the ‘will’ and a relaxing into ‘being’. If you are on the path of enlightenment you are trying to negate the will. The ‘demon Mara’ is waiting with a chuckle to get you to give up the will to enlightenment. The path of being is simpler: no more samsara, bye. The path of will is a great unknown, and demons like Gurdjieff are typical of those who lose their way there. The riddle here is for you to solve. Very scary.
You can’t do five minute meditations in a group. The frowns will destroy it. Try it alone (or any interval you find doable) and one day the desire to sit for long periods will come on its own..
See if you can catch the demon Mara, on one of his spawn (Mara entered the sangha under duress, finally): make plains to meditate in your, make plans to meditate according to written schedules, and make no plans at all. Compare the difference over time. Beginners usually find this too easy. But, in any case, reading ‘written’ texts is a known psychic power. Suspicious as you find the explicit meditations harder.
From this you can see the need to invent your own methods.
Should the ‘Dalai Lama’ institution be abolished?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/dalai-lama-birthday_n_3554261.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
The institution of the Dalai Lama can’t easily be salvaged, although the PR game and popularity of the current one will successfully kick the issue down the pike.
Keep in mind that beyond a small coterie of elite lamas, the buddhist sangha (in the Tibetan communion) is neutralized by mahayana, feed useless teachings that don’t do much, while the real Mccoy is an ‘esoteric’ stream for a few priviledged candidates.
The Lamahood emerged in the wake of the Buddhist refuge in Tiber, but somehow the real character of buddhism was lost.
In fairness, the current dalai lama, by showing an interest in marxism suggests the Tibetan path could be salvaged, whatever the case with marxism.
Another expose of gold…
/2013/07/31/another-expose-of-gold/
Another poignant, and incoherent, attempt to decipher Gold.
Don’t bother to decipher him. He has almost nothing to say, and can’t even handle subjects he copies, as from Ospensky.
The danger with Gold is the sufi occult hypnotic power, I wont go into detail. You don’t have to have met him to be at risk. But he has mindfucked a large number of his disciples, to break down long after departing from his gang space. You can do deadly damange to people that way, and noone will find out, until years later people like me find him out and try to speak out. The Internet has made that possible: note Gold’s horror online as he realized ca. 2000 or before he would be exposed thus. It is a deadly and unfair gift of the demonic to those who use fast talking to ape enlightenement.
It is nothing of the kind. Same for Gurdjieff: he made one nervous reference to enlightenment to Ouspensky in a flood of bullshit about states of consciousness.
There is a lower level of attainment called ‘self-consciousness’, blah blah: it is about the level of self-remembering for hours at a time. It blows peoplesl minds, and then they discover its occult aspect, and then start playing guru. It is a big zero, and a good path to becomeing a devil.
Abandon all of it and start over on a ‘clean’ path. If you can find one.
to see the trick look at stand up commedians: the ‘spiritual’ stream of consciousness is a gift to ordinary men of talent, but that can be used to mimic higher consciousness.
Anton Wilson and other occult jerk offs
/2013/07/31/anton-wilson-and-other-occult-jerk-offs/
It is hard to believe it possible but jerk offs like Wilson assume the right to sacrificial murder with bits from Crowley (and Gold who is too clever to confess in public like Wilson)
Here’s a nice piece (I had the sound turned off so I didn’t listen,yet) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGgBqyxaTnQ
The connection is Gold and Robert Anton Wilson: the latter an especially disgusting Playboy editor degenerate who thought he had learned something esoteric from Gold and/or Crowley, and who talked trash about ‘human magical sacrifice’. Dumb enough to pretend he understood Crowley. And psycopathic enough to buy into Crowley’s ‘beyond good and evil’ cult of trashing real humans (until he succumbed to that himself).
I can’t conclude much of anything here, but thirty years ago when Wilson wrote his idiotic book on the Illuminati he seemed to catch a whiff of EJ Gold fart and thought it some form of higher consciousness.
You can take under advisement Crowley’s declaration of your occult rights (??) and the need to protect yourself (not using the same methods, dumbkopf).
There are no such rights, but, in a way, there are…In any case, once you cross the boundary of murder, actual or hypothetically intended, you cross a point of no return.
Call on Jesus Christ, if you feel helpless. It can often help.
Secret talks with Mr. G and other fake exposes…
/2013/07/31/secret-talks-with-mr-g-and-other-fake-exposes/
I was briefly googling the gold operation, and there is a lot of stuff on the net. Here’s something I briefly encountered in the seventies: http://www.maybelogic.org/forum/26-broad-spectrum/2216-the-great-gurdjieff-hoax
This book makes no sense, and as usual isn’t (probably) as advertised. But it can confuse you completely with no recourse. The whole Gurdjieff field is like that: disinformation, to often veil psychic ripoff or other shenanigans. The book is not coherent, so I can’t finally say what it means.
Secret Talks With Mr. G. with a subtitle: To A Specially Formed Group As Recollected by His Pupils.
The idea that Gold is Gurdjieff’s successor is completely outrageous, an idea that Gold himself has planted in various people who unwittingly perpetuate his mythical credentials.
You can’t resolve any of these issues because the book doesn’t tell the truth, so what’s the point.
This ia an artificial game of secrets in a strip tease that doesn’t finish: enslaving those who hope to figure it out.
Go study the Buddhist canon: you have a clear path laid out. That’s all. These sufi criminals can’t manage such a thing and bullshit ad infinitum.
Don’t lose hope…Gold will pass soon enough…make up for lost time
/2013/07/31/dont-lose-hope-gold-will-pass-soon-enough-make-up-for-lost-time/
Many who encounter Gold don’t realize their spiritual path has been destroyed covertly. These people like Gold are paranoid and think the game of consciousness a zero sum game. They will never allow real attainment in anyone.
That refers only to ‘spiritual energy’ which is a material game finally. To work with spiritual energy you must keep it, but the game is lost, in the end.
Seek real enlightenment: which is in the category of ‘understanding’ It has no spiritual energy to cause it. It can’t be ripped off.
Gold will be gone soon, and you will discover you have to make up for lost time. Get the point and start now. Quietly, beyond the ken of the ‘dark lords’. You can start by studying buddhism, meditation, and five to twenty re-watchings of Lord of the Rings.
WHEE and the distance of the real spiritual plane.
/2013/07/31/whee-and-the-distance-of-the-real-spiritual-plane/
You might study the ‘eonic effect’ in my book WHEE online at history-and-evolution.com. It is interesting to see what we suspect is the real ‘spiritual’ plane acting on history. It never interacts with occultists, rarely with spiritual types, and seems to seed the elements of group/social action in the rise of civilization itself. Thus the history of the Rosicrucians, say, is misleading: it has no connection to spiritual depth.
This process in history acts very remotely over intervals of many millennia and then never intervenes. It is neither spiritual nor material, and creates sacred and secular culture equally. It is beyond ‘god’ and ‘beyond’ enlightenment, since its creates in both realms with contradictory signatures, a hint these are our own categories. This is what started the confusion over the Age of Revelation, which was a botched explanation. This process is not, I suspect, ‘god’ at all. That is something different. But we can see that both atheist and theistic religions had a deep support from this mystery, which seems to reawake at the dawn of modernity. It goes into overdrive and is hypercomplex, perhaps driving man to evolve out of his current muddles.
Enlightenment is therefore not yet quite a spiritual domain, but a realization of man’s evolutionary potential. A step into man, then a glimpse beyond man. We should feel some confidence that this mystery process was directly focused on re-amping the ‘paths to enlightenment’. Man has a hard time being man, and hardly as yet takes a first step toward the spiritual. Enlightenment is the state man should have all along. It is part of the mental equipment of savage human apes and (savage) modern monkeys. It is a species characteristic of homo sapiens. The whole thing gets lost over and over again.
However, the is process has clearly seeded monotheistic AND semi-atheistic religions like Buddhism. Buddhism in the Axial Age is a ‘souffle’ effect dished up from early Indian/Jain elements, to create a global religion. Magnificent. So this process both invoked a past legacy and recreated it en passant. The Occidental monotheism coming out of Israel was less successful, and became muddled over the ‘god’ question. Hidden Israelites seem to have adopted an Middle Easter legacy of not uttering the divine name, IHVH, yet the outer religion rapidly crystalized as a god cult. I am hardpressed to resolve these questions, but the framework of the eonic effect can give a sense of what real spirituality, from a distance. The term spirituality is wrong, because it has nothing to do with the religions we know.
In any case, figures like Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff and Gold aren’t even on the radar of this process, which works only with simple elements that can help ordinary culture.
WHEE is a hard book, many say. Maybe it is better like that. Note then that occultism is part of the legacy of mundane history. It has no real spiritual significance.
The place of middle era prophets like Jesus and Mohammed is not explained by any of this, although we can see the seeds of what they created appearing in the Axial period. These two are different mysteries, but they obviously ‘play with the local toys’ to communicate, Jesus in the Axial Age wake, and Mohammed the same, but with a Persian ( Zoroastrian) twist. So these foundational moments involve genuine spiritual beings, of a different melody. The practical cyclical grind of the ‘eonic effect’ is the different process of macro-evolving civilization. We should note how Christianity became too localized. The suspicion remains that the Israelites were hardly monotheists until in the Exile they mixed their emerging religion with Zoroastrainism. But this connection was forgotten, and then rediscovered in Islam (???).
The puzzle of the Illuminati
/2013/07/31/the-puzzle-of-the-illuminati/
I didn’t mean to denigrate Rosicrucianism in the previous post. But the study of the eonic effect leaves the issues of gnostic history unsolved. It is all I suspect ‘cultural trash’ floating down the stream from some unknown first appearance in the late Neolithic. ???
The point is that things like the gnostic stream are not touched by the larger macro process of the eonic effect which operates on purely wholesome cultural entities.
But just here I can’t pontificate. The history of Rosicrucianism (and or freemasonry) is a tough nut to crack, but, unless I am mistaken, it is not part of the macro effect in modernity. I think that Rosicrucianism predated the rise of modernity, and was never part of the real gist of modernity. It is a puzzle in part of German history, and that goes back to the obscurities of the Roman Empire encountering peoples at its fringes. Or else it is a seeded process of Islamic culture, like Romance poetry. The hidden influence of the Islamic tide is very hard to uncover, but it is there: consider Chaucer and his poetic themes. It is all mysterious. But the rise of modernity is something different, and and doesn’t operate via occult subjects. But there I can’t be sure: look at the confusion created by the Illuminati, near the French Revolution. A probable mason or Rosicrucian concoction it was accused of seeding revolution. But all the students here were hopelessly confused. A close look suggests the obvious fact that modernity springs from a different source and that this simply picked up the outstanding elements of the occult traditions momentarily the way a wave picks up a floating object and then leaves it behind. The revolutionary process and the emergence of democracy were something else then. The Illuminati are a complex hoax, in a stream that was highly reactionary, no doubt, but suddenly manifested a brief reign of radicals at the time of the French revolution. The amount of nonsense about this is beyond belief. But the later phase of some unknown German occultism that turned rancid and seeded a fascist milieu at the end of the nineteenth century produced much of the hysterical denunciation of the briefly appearing progressive Illuminati.
The attempt to blame the whole of modernity on the Illuminati via the revolutionary tradition is complete nonsense. Revolutions in modernity are part of the mysterious progression of epochs discussed in the previous post, and in WHEE.
So, this doesn’t force us to reject Rosicrucianism, which once had an upscale rendition: it is simply that we wish to distinguish the mundane historical stream from the interaction with a spiritual process.
So verdict for Rosicrucianism remains murky. Don’t expect such things to lead you to a spiritual knowledge or dimension. All this dead gnosticism is part of the dead magic of long lost Pharaohs still lurking in samsaric realms to feed on later life in the damned cycle of vampires.
The ancient traditions of the earliest stage of civilization before even the rise of Sumer are lost to us (and not clarified by the ravings of hucksters like Gurdjieff).
So the tide of modernity is part of a larger process of civllizational evolution. And this doesn’t contaminate culture with the refuse of long lost Egyptian occultism resurfacing ad infinitum long after its period of initial flourishing.
Gurdjieff foundation on Secret Talks
/2013/07/31/3662/
All That Glitters…
Crazy Wisdom and Entrepreneurialism in the Spiritual Schools of E. J. Gold: http://www.gurdjieff-legacy.org/40articles/glitters.htm:this is the info on ‘Secret Talks’ that I was looking for.
This is a reasonable discussion of Gold, but to bring in the ‘crazy wisdom’ excuse in the wake of the shoddy and pretentious procession of New Age instant junk peddled by Gold doesn’t wash. What of Crazy Wisdom after the students go crazy and have no further help from the sufi cocaine/spiritual cannibalism of these predestigators. Where do the victims go to complain. The New Age better be over at this point, as we help the human refuse left behind by figures such as Gold.
The fetish of ‘crazy wisdom’ teaching is beyond me at this point. I have been forced to live through and don’t find scholars like Feuerstein helpful in the least. I think the point has been missed, not that i really understand this (each phase seen by the participants is but a small part of the larger mystification): this was an upgrade of things like Scientology, an earlier and completely stupid ‘dosing sufi cocaine’ in a psychopath to create an experiment, with a large ‘karmic’ residue: a permanent movement of idiots trying to create a religion. I think with Gold an attempt was made by the same hidden sufis to study this problem, and try their luck with Jewish smarts (but Gold was a complete idiot, afraid of smart Gentiles), to achieve something better, with a series of rapidly appearing/disappearing pseudo-schools, all of them so stupid or undocumented noone would pick them up for permanent movements. But what was the point. Everything Gold did was a farce. And there was one strain few have seen: a strange Nazi/fascist genocidal theme: the path of mass death to feed the planet. That subsection never appeared on the charts of such as the Gurdjieff Foundation’s analysis. I found that aspect a strange puzzle, especially since it was carried out on the sidelines by his hidden groups of Jewish favorites, who ended up with Nazi armbands. What was that?
I thought once (I had a brief contact with Gold’s shennanigans from 1975 to about 1977). The result was so confusing that I feel out of the economy for three years, and was helped by a study of marxism: the left will settle this in the end, because it is a set of experiments in mind control, soon to be crowd control, soon to be another massacre staged with sufi baraka, etc., etc… It is clear now that Gurdjieff was a superreactionary, appearing at the moment of the Russian revolution to study the chances of counterrevolution in the Big sense: a rightwing takeover of modernity. Maybe Gold’s fascist phase echoed that. It wasn’t in character, so who knows.
Let me say that if this is unfair Gold has had decades to set the record straight, five minutes of honesty would do it, but the reality is that there is no mindfuck like Nazi occult mind fuck, and it is an experiment crazy wisdom addicts fall into finally. And it goes all the way into the mystery of degenerate ‘buddhism’ in the medieval period.
In any case, we must wrest the myth of gurus and spiritual sheiks from the clutches of baraka addicts. The result here has been a big zero, and Idries Shah warned of this: what’s the final tally? In Gold’s case, I see no benefit. Zero. It is a waste of breath to call this unfair. What of the victims? Gold will get away with a legacy of spiritual sufi. While the victims struggle to find a real path. It is ultimately a Nietzschean parody: mindfuck the ‘last men’, fuck their brains out for good baraka. The disciples are animals and riffraff and deserve nothing.
This theme was attractive behind the scenes from Gurdjieff onward in the creation of neo-liberal counterrevolution (Gurdjieff was a minor player here): we see the strain emerging in the renewed contempt on economic class issues of conservatives newly emboldened to class warfare of the most open and ugly type. The ‘work’ was always a crypto-capitalist con with the many new age groups clearly based on free disciple labor. We barely see the seeding of this process by figures such as Gurdjieff, who was a peasant taken up by hidden elites to do their dirty business, in the ‘spiritual’ sideline: we are maybe a little unfair: he was a fellow traveler who couldn’t quite keep the secret. And his disciple Ouspensky went into near panic near, a reactionary himself. It didn’t add up to him. The hidden figures we have never seen we can at best reconstruct from the misleading case of Gurdjieff. Being an enslaved pseudo-master operating on a Faustian bargain with sufi cocaine/baraka, he must have been tempted to break ranks, give the game away, and the evidence shows he did just this, sort of. It is interesting the J.G. Bennett, always close-lipped and obedient let slip a modernist, even hidden communist, mindset. He concealed it well, and wasn’t ‘discovered’.
In any case most of the New Age work is incapable, as we suggested in the previous posts, of any real spiritual depth. It is all ‘feeding the vampire’ of dead movements, like sufism, hinduism, and even almost, buddhism, which however seems destined for ‘death and rebirth’ in a new age of modernity. All the spiritual trash, as with sufism, is just flotsam of Egyptian (et al.) gnosticism and its dead vampires of false spirituality.
My marxist friend had much of the narrowness of dogmatic marxism, but he sized up the process of people like Gurdjieff almost immediately. The idea of the ‘work’ has never recovered from that moment of insight, and it is obvious the ‘work’ is a phony cover from class warfare.
Don’t let EJ Gold turn you into an antisemite
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Nothing we have said here about Gold is antisemitic, the thrust being first about Gurdjieff. But Gold is a dangerous viper and turning people into antisemites is not the least of his black magical options. Don’t react with anything antisemitic in trying to debrief/deprogram his brand of a (laughably so-called) sufi or fourth way teaching. Antisemitism was an ugly feature of ages of Christian domination. But in present culture Jews are often far more powerful than Christians: an antisemitic outburst (consider Mel Gibson) is now a funny joke in bad taste for Jews who mutter, next case, not without some justice.
In Gold’s case I had assumed that he was an impartial post-Jewish/Xtian neutral teacher. But over time I can see that was not true, as some have claimed long before. In fact, a strange bias entered his work: he spoke of ‘Jewish sufis’ and seemed to have a secret intent to create a chauvinistic jewish brand of sufism in which gentiles were exoteric outsiders, who got fake teachings, but paid the bills. Is that true? I think I spotted the hidden lineage transmission to hidden jews behind the fake nonsense he peddled to the public. Is this fair or true? In fact, who cares: the whole game is so trashy the only answer is, I am half-out the exit, and will be gone soon. Gold is too clever to catch, really. He performed the outer game of interdenominational Jewish/Xtian cooperation too carefully to be laid with that charge. But I think the danger in general is great: how are Judeo-Xtians to do sufism together? It won’t really work.
In general Jews and Xtians are too muddled to do a spiritual path, let alone one together. Jewish teachers no matter how hard they try tend to look down on Gentiles, and in too many cases a tacit sense of being in fact special in the sense of covenental Judaism takes hold, making the prospect of being a spiritual teacher hopeless. Xtians seem too often to be artificially dense, and strike such Jews as being dumb. It is a hopeless question. Jews tend to induce inferiority complex symptoms in gentiles, forget a spiritual teaching on that foundation. And something about Xtianity has made Xtians stupid: the fault must have passed through the Jewish legacy turning into Xtianity. Something went wrong, as Jews became implacable enemies of the outcome of their own tradition. What went wrong is obvious: three jewish founders of the new religion, and no real gentile input at the start, a botched operation. It is puzzling how it happened. The progression of Gentile geniuses in the early modern (or ancient greece) is almost unparalleled, but somehow the super-intelligent but barren jewish groups have taken control and make gentiles feel inferior. No spiritual work is possible from that. I think Moses and Jesus sitting in heaven must have repented of founding religions as they watched the unforeseen outcomes of their labors. Their fate according to Murphy’s Law is a heavenly penny dreadful. Really demonic messes.
Let’s forget spiritual paths for a moment and try to heal the history of the botched religion called Judeo-Xtianity, which separated at birth into two monster religions, Judaism and Xtianity (with an Axial Age Israelitism as a Canaanite theocratic cult being an historical source). (I would not equate the two, early Israelitism, and Judaism). No religion is possible in the perverted culture of Jews and Xtians. Xtianity at least was a religion open to all, confronted with a parallel outcome creating spiritual inequality. There must be a devil: as with Shias and Sunnis condemned to millennia of conflict, the division point of Jews and Xtians destroyed the whole game.
Let’s forget the past: we can drop the past and wait for a few more centuries for the Jewish/Xtian division to wane, disappear, in the healing of both parties.
Meanwhile, whatever the case, Gold’s school is a fake piece of nonsense, give it a wide berth. Meanwhile sufism is a lost cause.
But to call Gold and his Igor associates jewish chauvinists can’t be quite right. They seem more like the old Jewish Xtians who were very much in the legacy of the Jesus school. I think Gold has a strong Christ complex and unconsciously wishes crucifiction. His many aberrations probably violate ancient Roman and Jewish, if not modern, law, and we might easily mark him guilty as charged and get on with it.
Reincarnation…Batchelor’s scientism
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-rotondi/buddhist-backlash-stephen_b_521675.html; Buddhist Backlash: Stephen Batchelor Braves The Storm
Stephen Batchelor does not look like a man at the center of a storm. But the calm, bespectacled 57-year-old Englishman is in the eye of a hurricane of controversy taking place in the global community of Buddhism.
Batchelor is a former monk in both the Tibetan Geluk and Korean Zen traditions, and a noted scholar and translator of canonical texts. His original writing first began making serious cultural waves with 1998’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, which posited a radical new “existential, therapeutic and liberating agnosticism”–one which rejected the belief in reincarnation and karma, and proposed a secular approach grounded in meditation and mindfulness, along with a historical understanding of the Buddha, achieved through a modern lens.
I think that Batchelor is the victim of static buddhism in the Tibetan or Thai versions: these legacies are frozen and tend to produce a negative reaction after prolonged contact. The issue is not really karma or reincarnation beliefs. Karma beliefs are incoherent. But then take the extreme cases, like Hitler: if his behavior has no karmic kickback after death, then the doctrine is clearly false. But it would seem that the cosmos deals with such extremes, because it is inevitable. Who knows. We can’t verify any of this, and must, in a Kantian sense, exit on rumors. The problem here is in part that of scientism also. A better standard would be the Kantian, with its warning about metaphysics. Karma and reincarnation are metaphysical beliefs, as are their negations. The problem is not that they are fictions, but that they are Kantian ambiguities, beyond the realm of observation. If someone therefore affirms their reality we are in no real position to either believe or disbelieve.
The question of karma is simply unclear, while that of reincarnation is ambiguous. It is the last chapter in a story that omits the early introductory stories: to wit, the creation of soul in homo sapiens. That’s the catch in denouncing reincarnation: why stop there. The belief in a soul, then having a head, I guess, are the next to go. Something obscure makes the question beyond resolution. And the traditions that transmit these ideas don’t understand them. The question of soul, of immortality, as opposed to reincarnation, (and the Gurdjieffian recurrence, a bit different)
The answer is that these beliefs are not necessary on the path of meditation, however much they are present in the more general path of buddhist information or history. Sufis seem to believe in reincarnation, but never speak of it. I learned this when someone called someone in the Gold situation the reincarnation of Ouspensky. And the result of that? Spiritual thieves appearing out of the woodwork on the rumor this person bore a great baraka from Gurdjieff between lives. As a Judas to the Gurdjieffian religion not deserving such high energies he was marked for being stripped of this energy: they wanted to get their money back, so to speak, across lives. The thieves of baraka are thus of high enough attainment, it seems, to be able to read the rebirth circuits of famous former teachers. With such madmen little can be concluded, but I wouldn’t conclude the unreality of reincarnation. The issues actually began to get a form of scientism of their own, in, of all people, Ouspensky himself, then of J.G.Bennett, with his six-dimensional universe. The sense of the timeless is beginning of all these beliefs, and that sense is no superstition.
The issues are clearer in the thinking of Shopenhauer: the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself make the self a curious entity beyond time and space, and reincarnation the illusion of having been born: the self suffers a brief pitstop as a temporal object, but is never born and never dies. As with gravity turning into a spatial question in general relativity, so with the ‘soul’ and the related reincarnation are structural issues in a different kind of explainable (I can’t however say ‘spatial’/geometrical) context.
Retracting an apology to sufis….back to square 1: sufis are the biggest bums in spiritual history..bye
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This must be one fo the dumber posts on my part, although at the time it created a huge interest at that blog, due to the comments on communism and sufism, which came to nothing.
The danger here is that sufis who are ultrareactionary will target individuals who did anything remotely radical…
Sufism is said to be about love and gnosis. Pardon me if I puke.
Anyway enough is enough, good bye to all that. Let’s see it the sufi ringwraiths will give up the pursuit…Why me? Scroll down, probably the same reason Ouspensky reincarnated got the Treatment.
Unfair. I owe those bums nothing, and they know it.
The fourth way a bogus teaching…the fate of Ouspensky
/2013/08/07/the-fourth-way-a-bogus-teaching-the-fate-of-ouspensky/
The problem here is the reason for this blog: Gurdjeffianity is not sustainable as a ‘spiritual path’. People like Gold, by peddling the lie that his IDHHB is a fouth way school, cement a system of exploitation based on false spiritual authority. So the whole thing needs to be dismissed, and the figures of false authority deprived of their fake credentials enabling endless harm done to the unsuspecting.
And Gold has never given any explicit account of his life, his contact with spiritual teachings, his meetings with sufis, nothing, zero, beyond the usual pack of lies he spins in response to questions.
We have listed some of the anomalies of the Gurdjieff path, but here Gold cleverly drops most of the Ouspensky/Gurdjieff legacy (substituting it appears the even more toxic Crowley).
1. the enneagram is bunk…
2. the law of three doesn’t make sense, and merely echoes other teachings in order to look original (e.g. dialectic, or non-dual vedanta)
3. the idea of the work is a toxic ambiguity used for various deceptions, among them a rightwing philosophy of ‘extraction of surplus value’, and an excuse to not pursue a path of enlightenment
4. Gold has spread the falsity that he is the successor to Gurdjieff…
We will continue this list in further posts…
The point here is that Gurdjieff never produced a viable teaching. Gold is even worse. Further, part of the current battle with Gold lies in something hinted at: the way Ouspensky in his next life was persecuted without mercy to keep him from stopping people like Gold taking control of the Gurdjieff legacy…Ouspensky II became mad as hell that his ISOM became a tool for others to exploit people. While he himself was anathematized behind the scenes for spiritual disobedience. Outrageous: he saw through the Gurdjieff deception….
The fourth way illusion
/2013/09/01/the-fourth-way-illusion/
http://gurdjieff.com/fourth-way/
The creation of the ‘fourth way’ meme/paradigm is one of the sloppy ‘fast talker’ discourses that Gurdjieff laid on Ouspensky, the wrong idea perpetuated now ad infinitum. You can, of course, label anything you like the ‘fourth way’, write a brochure, and give the idea a fictitious existence. But the overall format of Gurdjieff’s thinking here is flawed, and unclear. But, at least, having proposed the idea, you should show an example in history. Not a single example has ever been given with a definite demonstration. And the idea tend to distract attention from real paths, e.g. the paths of yoga/buddhism, which are denigrated in favor of the confusion of seedy gangsters like Gurdjieff.
I think what Gurdjieff was trying to say is that we see paths based on ‘being’ but none on the factor of ‘will’. The canard has been used to discredit the path to enlightenment in favor of the kind of psychotic pastiche of people like Crowley. More generally, however, it may be true: there may be a hidden path of the ‘will’ that has never appeared in public history. I wouldn’t call the Gurdjieff fiasco an example. In any case, I think the reality is that the path to enlightenment beyond will is the only safe way to begin spiritual enquiry. The toxic lies of the leaders and the complete idiocy of the followers makes the whole Ouspensky stream decidedly short of fourth way glitz.
Ruthless separation from the Osho vampire
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I have been generous with Osho here, and hope I have cleared him of some of the misconceptions that surround him. But all this seems an exercise in futility at this point. In fact Osho warned about dead gurus, and he seems no exception. A dead guru is like a Halloween mask that any tom, dick, and harry (ghost/devil) on the astral plane can use to perpetrate mischief by another name.
But contact with Osho cn often be real. In any case the long years of association with the Osho ‘thing’ (cosa vuestra) has suddenly come to an end for me.
I finalized the deal by taking all my Osho books to the landfill and throwing the lot into the trash dumpter. A good hour of tremendous relief came over ‘me’. The rest will follow, no doubt.
Better that way. We won’t forget we are not friends.
Osho denounced books, so I guess this serves him right.
I wonder how many other fringe followers he has on the backburner, not allowed in, not allowed out, in waiting to try and keep his ashram alive in another life.
sorry, I quit.
A guru can’t do the one unforgivable thing: keep you asleep to serve his ends.
A buddhist somewhere said, if you meet the buddha on the way, kill him. I think that too violent. Did that ancient zany zenist understand what meant. Flip the bird, might be better.
I have read three hundred of Osho’s book three to five times each and suddenly realize I can’t remember a single thing of any of it. Strange.
Meanwhile, the Osho game serves no purpose to me, and never really did. In thirty five years since I first saw a poster of Osho in the East Village I have never been invited to a sannyasin home, save one instance of a gay sannyasin trying to pick me up off the Village streets. Quite a shock when he brought me home and found I was aware of Osho, and not gay. Perhaps I am better off that way, with no contacts. But association is then pointless.
I also did apply via mailorder for sannyas initiation. I received a mala and a sannyas name. When I proudly informed an Indian friend of this development, he gasped, and told me to never use the sannyas (Sanskrit name): it was a double entendre referring to a ‘loose woman’ in Hindi. That was the end of that. Was this delilberate? I think I sent the mala back. My final encounter was a freight train ride to Osho ville in Oregon, a curious told here already. Check the archives
In any case, I have finally gotten the message: not welcome. The closed world of Osho groupies is so idiotic anyway, who cares.
Too ugly to find a tantric sex partner I was never part of the group sentiment with this crowd.
The relation to a ghost guru is a fruitless one, and can be destructive. You can also be stunted in your growth by dead gurus trying to create ‘zombie’ disciples in their next life, to carry out a legacy. Not for me, thank you. To be fair, noone can expend spiritual energy on hostile outsiders. Point taken. Goodbye.
So that is that. Another thirty year waste of time like that with Mr. Gold, who is not yet dead, but almost as deadly.
Osho’s Beyond Enlightenment
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Go to this source http://www.oshoworld.com/e-books/eng_discourses.asp and click on the Beyond Enlightenment link for a classic little known discourse from Osho in the late eighties (I think).
Osho is something of a mystery: if you try to approach him (mostly futile in any case if dead) you encounter not a imge and being of bliss, but a kind of dysfunctional chaos.
The reason is puzzling until you conider the hitory of his public states and appearances. Everything is in the classic Buddha mode until suddenly everything seemed to go haywire. The reason he made clear several years later was his passage ‘beyond enlightenment’.
It is worth reading that sutra to see the way Osho is not always the man you think he is/was, at the end of his own travels. In that sense Osho is for too advanced/obscure/broken to make sense to beginners. I don’t know. But the person is no longer there: it is a void from which mental chaos can enter instead of enlightened bliss.
Who knows?
That sutra is one of the strangest, and I suspect it was related to a whole series of gurus falling apart all of a sudden. A good example was Da Free John who suddenly turned into a monstrosity:he actually declared he would give up enlightenment. You can’t reach enlightenment from such people. They aren’t there in that sense. The point is that enlightenment is still an experience, and that of an experiencer. After that I guess you just float in a fog. If you try to make a guide of that on the path, you end in a ditch drunk, to use Osho’s phrase.
Schopenhauer and the first real new age movements
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It may be that the whole new age movement era will pass as contradictions of the various groups in question come to the fore. One of the main ones is that the ‘new age’ is using the ‘old’ era’s stale and broken cliches with the result that everything is at best a kind of fertilizer dumped on western cultures. The results don’t quite gel and the result is failure to produce real development.
I think that this ‘new/old age’ effect will prove devastating to much of the whole movement. The problem is frustrating: the truly modern culture is losing its real coherence, a good example being scientism, the fraud of darwinism, and a shallow view that no longer reflects the modern enlightenment. Next to this is false attempt to graft the old on the new with a set of results that one after the other ends in nothing much: the proliferation of the former ashrams of former people, now departed. Schopenhauer shows how an unwitting student of modern themes (though no doubt a cynic about much of modernity) unwitting reinvented the whole genre in a new mode. The result, imperfect, nonetheless had a vitality that is intriguing. Then, of course, Nietzche ripped off the whole thing and turned it into a commodity the age of scientism could take up, with a Machiavellian twist.
The moment of the early contact with Indian manuscripts was alive with something that is now lost. After Blavatsky’s cascade of frauds the whole new age movement became lost in confusion, and the tide of vampire dead gurus began. (Gurdjieff is a big DITTO here). It amounts to nothing more than fertilizer. How the whole game will develop from that is not clear.
It is no use speaking of Indian spirituality if the whole game is a commercial imposition on westerners looked on with contempt by the source gurus.
But, in a way, this is not a new problem. It was originally the problem confronting India in the Axial period. A New Age dawned and the world of Mahavir and Gautama set a new tradition in motion. In a way Mahavir represented the ‘older era’ passing the baton to Gautama’s new tradition of buddhism. In this context the disparate proliferation of Indic traditions dawdled in decay, and never really escaped that decay. It was a confusing mix of the ancient tradition, and the false grafting of that tradition onto Indo-European nonsense resulting in such things as the Vedic canon, a phantom of nothing, foreign to the ancient legacy, but sophistically inserted into the tradition in deflection of its basic clarity. There the IE grotesqueness of caste entered the Indian sphere and corrupted everything with its Aryan confusions, even as the creation of a new spiritual medium with Sanskrit gave the emerging medley a new linguistic basis. This is perhaps why the realm of ‘later to be called’ ‘Hinduism’ was so stillborn: it was based on a forgotten set of contradictions, with confusing phantoms like the Vedic pseudo-spirituality. However, there was a huge diversity of outstanding religious elements beyond the intake of the Buddhist Reformation, and this gave the rotting mass of proto-Hinduism a kind of mulched vitality that often aped and even surpassed the somewhat colder and narrow Buddhist experiment attempting to create a reformed platform for the sprawl and degeneration of Indic religion. The author of the recent book Hot Yoga has a sense of this and tries to place yoga in the context of imitation Buddhism, with its eightfold steps an obvious imitation of the Buddhist eightfold way. The tragedy of India was the failure of revolutionary Buddhism to complete its task, even as it began to spread beyond the borders of India in a global expansion. The source world of India then suffered the machinations of neo-brahminism, the world of the Gita and its hidden complot to declare war on buddhism. The tragedy went full circle and the buddhists were forced to create refuge zones, such as Tibet. But the problem with Buddhism was its failure to produce a consistent set of realized men, the last in Tibet being the exotic Milarepa. A world plan of Boddhissatwas is all well and good, but the home world of India in dry rot of decaying ‘Hindu’ forms was actually better able to carry on the line of realized buddhas than buddhism itself. The beginning of the whole distorted mess of realized sages, also Brahmin elite chauvinists was under way. This tradition now is likely to succeed in outliving the now collapsing buddhism, and is becoming a business conglomerate of the era of globalization: consider the profits of the yoga corporations and the point is obvious.
A similar effect is visible in the relative relationships of Israelitism, Christianity, and Judaism, the latter not the same as Israelitism. In the same way Buddhism, proto-Hinduism, and then later Hinduism proceed toward a triad of mutual frustration as Christianity surges, like Buddhism, globally, followed by Islam, and then enters the new era under an ambiguous future, no doubt like buddhism to wane and disappear while, analogously, the original discard Judaism shows a resurgence that will overwhelm and destroy Christianity, and create with Hinduism and its caste a set of monstrosities of an older era. Sooner or later the new era will move to new religions or beyond religion. But the danger is of a kind of Hindu/Judaic chauvinism declaring themselves the sole true spiritual cultures and moving to destroy spiritual equality after the fashion of the old Brahmins. Is this alarmist? Let us hope so. But it is good to make public the complot foreseen by a number of Hindu chauvinists, in some cases joined by obsessive Judaic fanatics of the covenental tradition. I think this threat will fade away as all the religions of the old era begin to disappear.
I think then that the whole new age movement with its focus on Hinduism/yoga and its constellation of traditions from Vedanta onward will into decay next to the falling away of Buddhism/Christianity and leave the field open. But without an original new movement like the emergent buddhism of the Axial Age the field will fall prey as India did to false formations like those of the neo-Brahmins and the old Judaic purveyors of the covenental racism.
My point is that most of what passes for new age spirituality, from sufism, to hinduism, to buddhism and christianity will prove unsustainable and begin to look for its true modern exemplars to come (like the somewhat primordial Schopenhauer still barely able to formulate a real path).
In any case, the destruction of buddhism and the resurgence of the dry rot of Hindu contradictions is likely to haunt the new era for some time to come.
Judaism, Xtianity and a new age principle
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Having tried to understand the Buddhist connection to the Holocaust, let me also emphasize an important critique of Jewish religion, culture, related to the exclusionist ideology depicted (in the previous post). Judaism, like Hinduism, is a religion based on birth. This is a very dubious and ultimately destructive way to do religion. It leaves the suspicion you are not doing religion at all, but something else. The principle is that only those born of a Jewish mother are Jewish. What a ghastly way to do religion. Made worse by the myth that God created a special covenant out of this. This is bullshit in motion for over two millennia. And it generated some powerful enemies, so powerful that we end up with the near ultra in hate violence generated against Jews. It is probable that this eerie malevolence actually made the problem worse: Jews have rejected assimilation and even made their own state, in which non-Jews have problem status.
Christians have a little more breathing room, but I think at this poinnt they should consider the nature of modernity and create a religion of passage into a new age.
The issue of Islam may be the same, but that is not clear. Islam, btw, tried to correct the idiocies of Judaism, and Xtianity, but the result is itself strange. We should defer the question of Islam on the grounds that its history contains mysteries till misunderstood. In any case, it is a job for Muslims.
If we study the era just after the Enlightenment we see a flood of Jews assimilating into Gentile culture, the case of Marx being one good example.
It is almost futile to propose this now, but I think the pendulum will swing back again: I think Jews and Christians both are at risk from the epochal tide that is moving beyond Axial Age religions. I fear the buddhists were roped into the Axial Age religious garbage disposal process in motion since the Reformation’s aftermath. I didn’t invent/propose this, so I can’t say in what way it is true, or whether you can defy it for another millennium.
I wouldn’t bother: see the handwriting on the wall: it is like saying spring shouldn’t come. Jews and Christians should study the ways they can enter into remade secular form of religion, if not no religion at all.
Please note the difference between Jews and Christians: the latter can drop a set of beliefs, while the formed must drop a form of social identity. Let me hasten to note that I am ignorant here, guessing. But I suspect that Jews, pace the Holocaust are marked men. If you are a Finkelstein, take twenty four hours to become a Findlay on the way ato becoming a… and skulk away into the new age of new men. Argue all you want, but delay of centuries will get still more people killed.
You have powerful enemies, deal with it. And help idiots stuck in the whole Old Testament which is slowing moving from sacred text to Axial Age rubbish.
Archaeological Discoveries Confirm Early Date of Buddha’s Life
/2013/11/26/archaeological-discoveries-confirm-early-date-of-buddhas-life/
Archaeological Discoveries Confirm Early Date of Buddha’s Life
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131125121710.htm
Nov. 25, 2013 — Archaeologists working in Nepal have uncovered evidence of a structure at the birthplace of the Buddha dating to the sixth century B.C. This is the first archaeological material linking the life of the Buddha — and thus the first flowering of Buddhism — to a specific century.
Gurdjieff and dead gurus
/2013/12/24/gurdjieff-and-dead-gurus/
All this special pleading is useless. It is now almost a century since Ouspensky encountered Gurdjieff. what has come of it? Nothing at all. Zero. Not a single realized man springs from that tradition. A figure like E.J.Gold fakes it by using a hidden Crowley form of black magic to ape Gurdjieff, but that is also a barren fake school.
These dead gurus are dangerous for people, because they get infected with inscrutable demonology. People need to move on to real teachings,and living teachers.
The Gurdjieff shadow world can be dangerous for the naive believer: these canrnivorous sufi sharks use idiots as ‘food’ and that is another reason noone develops: these con men never intended to help anyone. They use people til they become suspicious, and leave, which for many is, never.
The sufi ‘plexus-seed’ mystery..take a rain check and consider the ‘path to enlightenment’ /./.99% of all ‘sufis’ are fakes…
/2014/01/21/3922/
written a few days ago, and withdrawn temporarily…
John Shirley doesn’t sound at all as if he had any connection with the Gurdjieff game (I won’t say ‘work’). Actually the connection to sufis, if that was real in the period when Ouspensky et al. were alive, is related to a form of so-called ‘soul creation’ (but we all have souls already, so the lingo is ambiguous) and a related phenomenon its puzzled recipients refer to as a ‘solar plexus’ zone ‘baby’, or belly seed. My brief experience of this resulted in getting ripped off, good luck,I am free of the whole game which is really about something else, perhaps. If you have been connected to the work so-called for more than a year and don’t know what I am talking about, be gone: you are being manipulated as an outsider. This sufi signature shows no signs I can detect in the Ouspensky/Gurdjieff groups, but I can’t tell: moral, despite all his impressive circus acts Gurdjieff is ambiguously a sufi fake or perhaps not. ?
It is best to forget this phenomenon, and be glad you are an outsider. Seek a more transparent path.
John Shirley: quit while you are ahead. I doubt if you have any connection to the work gang, and be glad that is the case.
There, you got the sufi secret from an outsider. A warning to never trust sufis. (and my account her may be confused. But people who find out anything about sufis is so rare I will briefly spill the beans)
later comments:
This is strong stuff (cf the post from two days ago quoted below): you can implode people’s view of sufism in an eyeblink. I hope that’s the case. I think it is important and worth it to expose the confusion here. That’s hard: the ‘real’ sufis have a spiritual technology beyond anyone’s ken. But I wonder is they understand their own resource. 90% of ‘sufis’ are involved in a fake, and noone gives them a warning: don’t be a casualty of sufi/esoteric disinformation. The post above (several times discussed in my blogs, here and at darwiniana.com) is the real mccoy, as far as it goes. But I steered clear of the whole question, because it is a trap. I passed briefly through this zone of sufis, but my conclusions are cautionary.
The ‘sufi’ plexus ‘soul seed’ is a strange mystery, with no public information or resources. It is beyond the realm of manipulation. It simply happens to sufis in proximity to various sources, usually ambiguously disguised. Despite all this I refused to enter this path: it is suspiciously manipulated by demonic people. You are given a gift with a hidden price. And that’s the end of your spiritual path. A crucial question arises: why be a Faust to a sufi metphistopheles if you can do better, move beyond ‘soul’ on the path to enlightenment.
But this is nowhere a public phenomenon. The odds are that you will never find the ‘real’ sufis. I was cured of sufi interests, in fact. Who wants to be potted plant is some obscure sufi culture of medieval sheiks?
It is not funny. In fact you may fall into a real hell and stay there for a long spell of many many lives. The path of enlightenment moves beyond ‘soul’, while ‘paths of will’ (I am guessing here) can adopt a samsaric strategy of action. The latter seems the way to go, but in reality it will teach you the first noble truth, as your ‘will’ is made the object of capture. You will repent of being a sufi hotshot, really repent.
But the phenomenon is genuinely remarkable: a mysterious plexus ‘object’ evidently in a higher dimension interacting with the human body. Don’t waste your time trying to find this. And in any case, realize it is never worth getting anything free from the sufi mafia. So I must have been lucky I encountered the unique experience of ‘stolen baraka (actually the plexus ‘baby’ phenomenon).
There are a lot of mysteries to man’s ‘evolutionary psychology’. But they have fallen into confusion. Another example is the kundalini nexus, now almost impossible to figure out.
Sufis are total shits. They have misled thousands upon thousands of people with disinfo, wrecking their spiritual potential. Never have anything to do with them. I refuse to keep their secrets, and am persona non grata anywhere near them. Let me repeat, total shits. Exceptions: those who sweetly call themselves ‘sufis’ are usually naive and innocent people. Leave them alone.
The question of human soul is obscure, but it seems clear that ‘homo sapiens’ individuals all have a soul factor as a species character. This other mystery of the sufis is something else. The problem with the species level ‘soul’ is that it is not really permanent at all: you get a healthy run of human existences in order to accomplish ‘human completion’. That’ why, no doubt, the religious preacher rant, now so decayed, makes sense: be about your business of life and don’t be tempted by demonic sideshows. I have a bad feeling that conventional Xtianity no longer works anymore, so, with all due respect, you might do well to question what it offers. It is a complete mess at this point. Small wonder the new atheists refuse to put up with it anymore.
Still, it is a pity that science can’t study this phenomenon. The existence of a hyperdimensional object near the plexus, and ‘sensed’ partially by the physical nerve system is a puzzle of puzzles, especially in what is considered a backward cultural context! I can’t resolve this because my experience of this was very brief (fortunately, in retrospect). Embittered ‘sufis’ who sense they have missed the real thing converge on bewildered beginners to ‘steal’ the energy there, or so I suspect from my own case. (but it is also true that the energy involved is infinite, so why the egoic muddle?) Goodbye to all that.
They did me a favor, because I wish to move in a different world. But the whole thing is beguiling and strange. I suspect there are many such phenomena connected with the human evolutionary psychology, e.g. the mostly lost art of kundalini. What ancient knowledge is lost to us?
If you are an aggressive scioentist looking for proofs and evidence this is a cliffhanger: the evidence is there, but….!! In any case, I suspect the ‘soul’ is material in some sense. The spiritual/material division is misleading.
Anyway this was intended to warn John Shirley he has no connection whatsoever to Gurdjieff, unless it be the unconscious manipulation of a writer useful for propaganda. Get the fuck away from these devils, even as ‘soul’ peddlers.
Stephen Seagal the tulku?
/2014/02/19/stephen-seagal-the-tulku/
I suppressed this post, but I will repost it, with a caveat to be wary here, given the dangers of antisemitism. But Tibetan Buddhists have brought this on themselves. They have given preference m many times over to Jews over Gentiles, to the point that you have to wonder. Wonder on, because, you guessed it, Tibetan Buddhism is a private monopoly, and you are most likely not a part of it. And don’t be antisemitic here, thank your lucky stars you will never be a Tibetan Buddhist, and pity the Jews who will disappear into this dragon.
Meanwhile, if you are not Jewish or a Hollywood celebrity be glad, you are free of TB more than likely. Given the spiritual power of Tulkuhood to a creep like Seagal is dangerous, and a good excuse to stay out of the clutches of this kind of movement. You can be lost for many lives in this spiritual labyrinth. I would pass.
The Tibetan book of the dead as an instrument of murder: perhaps the Dalai Lama could police Mr. Gold’s abuse of Tibetan buddhism
/2014/04/04/the-tibetan-book-of-the-dead-as-an-instrument-of-murder-perhaps-the-dalai-lama-could-police-mr-golds-abuse-of-tibetan-buddhism/
Lot’s of luck for that idiot, the Dalai Lama. Tibetan buddhists seem unaware of diffusionist corruption of their already suspect teachings. The cover of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a handy excuse for a ‘death in life’ occult attack routine. It would be nice if the Tibetans who preen their feathers of wisdom could consider the casualties here, and some way to help the victims, in public, with public statements about abuse of their legacy.
Approaching a last birth…
/2014/04/16/approaching-a-last-birth/
I am sorry for the ambivalent judgments of Osho, but I risk a very dangerous situation here, one that most will not suffer. I still recommend the field of Osho as a buddha field for the left, but my personal situation here is strangely toxic. I have been getting warnings that his treatment of me is predatory: he wants to freeze people in place to make them find rebirth in a way he can exploit. I dunno, is that true. Meanwhile the whole Osho zone is a victim of disinformation that goes on and on. A pity. In a way the future of his work is in jeapardy due to this routine of savage attacks. Destroying ego can be a front for destroying the will to independent buddhas turning the dupe into the illusion he has transcended ego, when in reality he is a groupie still in the guru’s sphere. That deserves a hearty ‘fuck you, goodbye”.
I think that Osho should create an open space into which future realizations of this broad avenue of paths can be indpendently accomplished. Christians and Buddhists have suffered for being reduced to flunkie status in these two religions. There is, to be sure, ample evidence of realized buddhas in the buddhist tradition, with virtually nothing in the Christian, a barren field. But i think the deadzone of Tibetan Buddhism is going to destroy the future of buddhism. it may be time to create something new.altogether.
It is strange that Osho had himself killed in his last incarnation. One can reach a stalemate at the end of a life and be unable to close the deal.
The passing of authoritarian spiritual teacher traditions // How Hitler killed spiritual surrender…
/2014/05/19/the-passing-of-authoritarian-spiritual-teachers/
As the New Age movement spreads globally the core institutions inherited from antiquity are beginning to degenerate or shift into malevolent forms. It should never happen that a ‘spiritual teacher’ uses ‘disciples’ for magical experiments, or as guinea pigs. At that point we must sound the alarm and move to expose the guru phenomenon as antiquated, corrupted and superfluous. And it is all unnecessary. If there is one thing that can stop development it is dependency on someone else’s will. There is another side to this argument. And the meaning of the original institution should be clarified. But it never is, and the whole game is a form of guesswork. The question has many aspects, and many would disagree with this. But in a global context people are combining completely different traditions, from sufism, to Indian guruism, to the more ambiguous issue of authority figures long deceased, like Mohammed or Jesus.
It should be noted that guruism in India is more circumspect and effective. But the recent manifestations in the West have included a lot of dangerous new forms. I have to leave that world aside. I can’t generalize there because I have never seen the real original tradition.
First, surrender is an ancient concept, relevant to clear circumstances. But these have fallen away now. Let the history be told. But the generalized format crossing Indian to sufistic realms is an abuse by generalization, and has produced distortions.
The real of sufism is especially open to abuse, because it has no clear defining texts or traditions. People can declare themselves sufi sheiks with no open source credentials or histories. This is already clear with Gurdjieff, and his imitators. We have no trustworthy account of his life or study. Compare this every almost every Indian teacher. The legacy is almost always open.
The rule now is simple: trust noone. Surrender to noone. Don’t do it. The worst offenders in the sufi tradition have spoiled the whole game. The exceptions know themselves and arise in the context of personal relationships with trusted teachers in publicly documented contexts.
The extreme forms of super authoritarianism, died with fascism and nazism. The similar context in Gurdjieff should be a warning call. The danger is to become dependent over lives to an entity that will exploit in a second life. A terrible danger. The solution is to preserve one’s autonomy, dispense with spiritual surrender and stick to the classic formats of the path, like the Buddhist Eight-fold Way, which has not connection with gurus. With a few defining safeguards the institution could flourish once again, but the confusion now is almost incredible.
A figure like E.J. Gold calls himself a sufi sheik without a single documentation of any kind of who where and when. The suspicion is strong that he simply made it all up.
You should avoid at all costs occultists in disguise who can establish a hypnotic bond, fake a guru game, and then initiate exploitation after you leave his immediate circle. That calamity should be enough to condemn the whole set of traditions.
The exceptions here happen very naturally, as in the assembly of realized buddhas, a transient situation that seems to define itself by its immediate efficacy. But the confusion arises later in the working out of the original moment of transparency. It appears that something malevolent to the distant descendant disciples here, after Gautama finally passed away forever.
Incidentally, the reverse has come to be: now people wish to use figures like Aleister Crowley as the model of autonomous spiritual work. It is complete nonsense. But the impulse is not incorrect: to realize one’s own true will. Don’t imagine the degenerate Rosicrucian nonsense concocted by the occult traditions is effective here.
Stay away from it.
Almost a better study point to see the issue is a study of Schopenhauer. His views of the ‘will’ are complex and open to misunderstanding. But the nature of the ‘will’ is entirely mysterious and complex and is almost never even approximated by the idiocy of the texts left by Crowley.
The idea that the rite of Abramelin the Mage could be used to realize one’s ‘true will’, to me, is nutjob thinking at its worst. We must consider that all these things are junk from an earlier age that may have known the real meaning.
The thinking of Shopenhauer and Kant here suggests that the latent noumenal aspect of the ‘will’ (whose core meaning is not what we think) is protection against the abuse we see in guru games.
In any case the mixtures of gurdjieff, sufism, Crowley, buddhism, yoga, the list goes on, can only produce hopeless confusion.
The abuse of spiritual surrender that produced the fascist automaton and deviated into hidden political fascism was actually the death of the guru phenomenon. The abuse of surrender of the will to stage a revolt against modernity via reactionary hidden gurus with their zombies is over and gone.
It has hardly as yet died in the visible new age movement, but it has no future at this point. The suspicions of occult traditions manipulating nazism has poisoned any possibility of trust here.
So if you proceed alone you must transcend your own ego. Not a promising activity. But if it is going to happen nature will lead you to it, and then it will be obvious that you don’t really destory ego, but simply move beyond it.
Beyond gurus…to a stealth path of your own…ALONE
/2015/08/30/beyond-gurus-to-a-stealth-path-of-your-own/
In this kind of situation, which I recommend for others floundering in the master game quagmire, you must find a real spiritual path, fast. Easy!… Study a few buddhist sutras of the early kind, with not reference to Gautama, but to the larger tradition of man’s consciousness since the Paleolithic: the heritage of homo sapiens.
You can adopt a stealth path of meditation, meditation in action, study of the will, and a passage to a path to enlightenment, the latter belonging to noone. Nothing in the canon of buddhism says anything about gurus. Stay away from sufis, most monotheists (unless you are one yourself), with a possible hat-tip to ‘Jesus the Abstraction/Christ” (there is problem no such figure accessible at this point). Surrender to noone, and reserve your will to reflections on the highest good…Remember, the elements of buddhism were intended as a universal contribution to man via the Axial Age. You can quietly make neutral copies and use them free of the Gautama sphere.
Do not try to imitate Gautama or get into bullshit routines with the demon Mara, etc…Simply adopt a long path of meditation and reflection on the ‘cosmic’ question, i.e. god beyond god, or no god…The long path generates a wish for a short path, consider the reality of such in such figures as Paul Brunton’s short path. These probably won’t work, but they can bring dignity of a partial realization to the long wait of the long path…
You have a responsibility to keep your ‘will’ intact, and virtuous. Evade the rush of demons into the collapsing void of xtianity with the con artist versions of Crowleyanity. You cannot find your true will with occultism…You must consider a form of ethics. Better make it good! One false move and you are toast (with respect to your path).
You don’t have to dramatize any of this…a stealth approach is best…
Don’t be conned by xtian siren songs: Jesus is not a personal savior, but a ‘flag’ for those who can’t manage their own path. xtianity will ‘save’ people–to another rebirth…but provides no way to real consciousness…Be polite, sly and evade the whole mess…
Study the myth of Faust: spiritual power leads to the demonic…
I can’t change this situation. Gautama created one of the greatest paths, and then he killed it. One has to move in a new direction, alone…
Request to comment on non-dual or advaita popularity…
/2015/09/08/request-to-comment-on-non-dual-or-advaita-popularity/
now I am being asked to evaluate the ‘non-dual’ movement that has become very prominent…Ok, but I am overworked and out of my mind. Do you really want my advice?
Advaita: this path suffers from translation into english and the usual interpretation of the universe as conscious, the original idea may be different, and the english version is probably false. Note how ‘consciousness’ is only one small aspect of the larger dodecad of Bennett…
Review of Osho’s Power, Politics and Change
/2015/09/14/review-of-oshos-power-politics-and-change/
http://www.amazon.com/review/RE3KKURLYYDI2/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Power, Politics, and Change: What can I do to help make the world a better place? (Osho Life Essentials) (Paperback)
In Communism Zen Fire Zen Wind Osho offered a tantalizing view of a radical commune, but overall his view is ambiguous and in this book, beside a cogent discussion of power, Osho tends to enter the conservative cast of so many gurus (there is actually a section praising the code of Manu) and delivers the usual boilerplate about self-evolution rather than outer revolution. At a period of global crisis the passage to postcapitalism is suddenly betrayed by one who should have attempted to guide the process he probably saw was inevitable. By suggesting the authority of gurus/buddhas overrides the freedom of individuals the authority of these teachers is actually dissipated.
The fallacy here is that a higher state of consciousness is going to make the passage to a new politics possible. That is an unreasonable obstacle and a sophistical mystification. We know that a communist society would be hard to achieve but we must find the way to do that as a procedure of revolution, legality, rights, and a decision about capitalist private property. The world of the buddhas and their disciples has to decide if is a cabal of the haute bourgeoisie doing Club Med or a group seeking a new society. It is futile to preach spirituality against revolution. The original sangha of Gautama was a revolutionary project.
The path to a communist society must be a collective of individuals taken as members if they volunteer to join. No requirement of higher consciousness can be asked of men who might have been too exploited to meditate. Revolutionaries do not either have to submit to buddhas who have turned fascist as we discover the dark side of a buddhism that died at the dawn of a new era. I think that Osho commune is basically an Indian shopkeeper’s meditation business, a petit bourgeois enlightenment for profit outfit that beggars the original now reactionary buddhist renunciation of the primordial beggar’s sangha. Osho’s remarks on wealth versus the classic poverty of spiritual yogis are cogent but miss the point that his disciples are thus filtered out as class representatives of the higher bourgeosie. Men in capitalism aren’t poor because they worship poverty but because the class structure (which monopolizes methods of meditation) enforces that poverty.
His Commune has no appeal to a proletariat and Osho commune was a disctatorship of the buddhas that exploited free labor of disciples and left little room for autonomy.
To the hyena pack of scumbag vulture sufis and their creepy attacks on spiritual innovation…fuck off..time to dismantle islam to be rid of this mafia
/2015/09/15/to-the-hyena-pack-of-scumbag-vulture-sufis-and-their-creepy-attacks-on-spiritual-innovation-fuck-off-time-to-dismantle-islam-to-be-rid-of-this-mafia/
The minute I move away from Osho the sufi dog pack closes in, this time with a suggestion that sufism would do a better job than Osho’s framework.
It is worth considering the point.
But the idea I would endorse the pack of scumbag sufis at this point is almost beyond belief….
After forty years, no spiritual path, no guru, no more new age prospects, …
/2015/09/16/after-forty-years-no-spiritual-path-no-guru-no-more-new-age-prospects/
Looking for a solution for the mob of similar ex-new agers…
You can’t seize the unconscious of others in the name of ‘disciplehood’. If you do, and the gurus do, a war to the finish starts…
/2015/09/18/you-cant-seize-the-unconscious-of-others-in-the-name-of-disciplehood-if-you-do-and-the-gurus-do-a-war-to-the-finish-starts/
That war started with Gurdjieff/Gold/sufis, continues with Osho with the Tibetans in the wings, and I will win because the gurus are all degenerates, or worse.
/Christianity-Deadliest-Poison-Antidote-Poisons/
/2015/09/19/christianity-deadliest-poison-antidote-poisons/
Review of Osho on ‘rights’…Osho makes a foolish critique of human rights basics..concealed fascism of rajneesh (and his early flirtations with fascism in the background)
/2015/09/20/review-of-osho-on-rights-osho-makes-a-foolish-critique-of-human-rights-basics/
A fight to the death with Osho won’t work: the three way system of murder makes the killers rotate at random: sufis, gurdjieff, xtian demon police…
/2015/09/20/a-fight-to-the-death-with-osho-wont-work-the-three-way-system-of-murder-makes-the-killers-rotate-at-random-sufis-gurdjieff-xtian-demon-police
? The bardo of malevolent dead gurus…
Masters of wisdom, demiurgic nonsense, and the key to world history’s design
/2015/09/24/masters-of-wisdom-demiurgic-nonsense-and-the-key-to-world-histories-design/
http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Wisdom-Central-Asia-Liberation/dp/1620553619/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443109170&sr=1-1&keywords=masters+of+wisdom+of+central+asiaBennett wrote a book on this topic, before he died…I have been disllusioned with everything else to do with sufism…I won’t trust this brand then, especially if Gurdjieff was involved with it…
The question of Gurdjieff, sufis, and my antagonistic stance, reflects the issues of the ‘masters of wisdom’ question, or the Khwajagan topic of Bennett’s last book. I know nothing much at all about this, but I do sense a larger dimension to sufism, and this is one of them (the resemblance to buddhism is no accident).
I think that my references to Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe have backfired, and I need to revise my thinking here. The problem is that Bennett’s discussion of a hidden realm of demiurgic guides in history is mostly a lot of crap. His take on world history is so very odd I couldn’t for a long time put my finger on the difficulty.First his entanglement with Gurdjieff made him dishonest, as Gurdjieff was dishonest. The whole book is a compromise, as he failed to pursue his own vision, mixing in the crap from Gurdjieff to put the work in two modes. The enneagram is crap and Bennett must have known this, but he introduces the idea in the middle of DU to the confusion of the whole text. That’s one out of three dozens major issue, like the use of the model of the Great Year to clock his epochs.it gets worse in his later books and the twin dogmas of the law of three and law of seven become the core of a Gurdjieff myth. He was far closer to something good before that. Not that Dramatic Universe can be rescued.
In any case, the idea of a group demirugic guides mixed with the Islamic versions of this idea, plus the unknowns of such groups as the Khwajagan vitiates Bennett’s whole account.Bennett’s take on world history fails in the end, but I respect his work up to a point because he resisted the antimodernist new aging of the folks in the new age movement.
But his section of the rise of the modern is very poor.
Here’s my view: if you want to consider the action of higher powers in history you must reckon with my WHEE. And there you confront something far more difficult than the idea of some angelic hallucination tinkering with history. But noone will even consider this work.
I hope I didn’t spoil my Descent of Man Revisited and Last and First Men with references to Bennett. They were kept to the Preface to make a point. But in the end I think I must invent new terms and induce the final break with anything Gurdjieffian.
The term ‘demiurgic powers’ is a good one, but Bennett uses it up and it is beyond rescue.
Tibetan buddhism needs to be dismantled and that fart the Dalai Lama sent packing, with no successors…//the fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
/2015/09/27/tibetan-buddhism-needs-to-be-dismantled-and-that-fart-the-dalai-lama-sent-packing-with-no-successors/
Review of People of the Secret
Update: we have no real data here, and it is easy to confuse the ‘demiurgic powers’ and the ‘hidden directorarate’. I am very skeptical about the latter and have misjudged, I think, their place in the creation/onset of religions. I think I should amend my statements to note that the demiurgic powers should be a part of the onset of religions in the mideonic periods.
Who belongs to the hidden directorate? People like Gurdjieff? He made a total mess of what he did. None of the gurus and spiritual teachers could grasp the rise of modernity. And the book in question here shows that the sufis frittered away their energy in secondary occult subjects, alchemy, freemasonry (rosicrucianism), and the like. And these subjects are highly toxic and difficult to deal with because they are esoteric junk. These are precisely the results of the ‘hidden directorate’, I suspect. The onset of christianity is thus probably the result of two levels, a general format emerging from the Axial Age, from the demiurgic powers, and a series of more specific efforts by various planetary spiritual persons (consider the legend of the magi, useless, but significant), who completely fucked up the whole task, which nonetheless came about. The basic realization was prepared from the start in the Axial period, and the Old/New Testaments sense this with a lot of (dubious) claims they were foretold. What was ‘foretold’ was simply a very generalized format with few specifics…
http://www.amazon.com/review/R11H769JQ1SV0H/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: The People of the Secret (Paperback)
I can’t give five starts to a book like this, and it may contain many errors, but it is worth pointing to the reference to J.G.Bennett without endorsing the whole book.
I think Bennett (connected to sufis, and the book is an Octagon print, from Idries Shah zone) almost got it right. Readers should check out my World History and the Eonic Effect:
We must distinguish three or more different things, and they are all in Bennett, but not in the right analysis:
1. demiurgic powers
2. a hidden directorate
3. the cascade of cosmic laws as in Bennett with _!_biospheres in that sequence of levels.
4. Ordinary men, buddhas, and perhaps men with ‘permanent I’, whatever that is.
WHEE gives some insight into the wrong analysis of epochs in Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe. It contains its own model, which distinguishes the action of the Axial Age, and the onset of most religions.
Many students get evolution and demiurgic powers confused. Demiurgic powers probably don’t have the energy resources to terraform planets or do operations on a global scale: this springs from biosphere (GAIA!). Demiurgic powers can move inside this context like men in a factory but the larger system is different. This is why noone can figure out the evolution of religion, civilization and man, and the hopeless confusions of ‘design arguments’. The Axial Age shows the emergence of religion in a larger context of civilization: this is biospheric with demiurgic co-participation. But religions can arise at any time: men are free to create them. But if they arise in the transition cycle of age periods they ofen prosper better. But the modern new age throws a curve ball: our larger system doesn’t distinguish sacred and secular: note the parallel Axial Age Greece. This biospheric level seems cyclic as Bennett noted and this suggests it is hypermechanical, while demiurgic beings have ‘will’ of some kind (although in Bennett biospheres have ‘will’ in a different sense, 24 laws?). And this leaves the founders like buddha in an ambiguous context. The sequence of age periods is fixed: religions can arise in their transitions like Hinayana or Israelitism or they can arise in the middle periods like Mahayana, Christianity, Islam. It is important to study the difference because two sets of operations are different.
Religions are probably delegated to the hidden directorate, or figures like Gautama, who can initiate their starting points, while their actual construction sequence ends in the hands of men. This is why the Old Testament seems so smart and primitive at the same time. It clearly distinguishes ‘god’ and ‘elohim’ btw…
This can be confusing, the analysis of World History and the Eonic Effect can throw for loop and the Axial Age in India is more complex than just buddhism. Buddhism appears just at the boundary of the Axial period, like the ‘religion’ appearing with the Israelites after ca. 600 BCE.
These three distinctions (or four) go a long way to explaining the confusion over religion, civilization, secularism, etc… We have bioshpere, demiurgic powers, a hidden directorate, and buddhas who clearly did not see anything beyond their enlightenment, a very tricky situation. And then ordinary men. The Israelites were very smart and saw a higher power or the bioshpere where the buddha saw only a ‘turning of the wheel’, with a visit from the ‘god realm’ (???). The gestation of Christianity, Islam, Mahayana (outside of the Axial Age) are thus at best influenced by the hidden directorate, and then human agents, with the Jesus figure in between. Scott is close on many points but this analysis is filled with traps…His take on Islam and sufis is useful at a time when Islamophobes are rampant.The question of the hidden directorate is vexed. Just who are these beings and how do they relate to incarnation? The buddhas move beyond incarnation. There is a another category?? (the boddhissatwa perhaps being an artificial imitation). The emergence of Christianity was a complete mess, yet succeeded in spite of itself. This model may help. Being a part of the ‘hidden directorate’ raises as many questions as it answers.They must support themselves over many lives on the surface of a planet, not an easy thing to do. We have not facts here, so we should be wary.
Note that, and Bennett realized this, modernity is a new age. This confounds all traditionalists. But it is important to see that the progression of epochs is beyond the ‘sacred/secular’ distinction. A closer look shows the Reformation and buddhism reborn in spite of itself, just as Jainism was reborn in the Axial Age, but then giving way to buddhism.
We can see figures like Osho struggling in this context: his commune could foot the bill for a new era, as buddhism tides and then begins to recede…
Note: I am using other peoples’ terminology and can’t vouch for the foundations of Bennett’s system but I think mine is a better interpretation than theirs, but….it doesn’t follow I accept the cosmological conclusions of Bennett about biospheres. But people don’t quite know how to use his system (assuming it is valid…a big if)
This author doesn’t get entangled with Gurdjieff who has confused everyone. Bennett’s take is a hybrid with another source. Another discussion. I don’t know if demiurgic powers can communicate with humans: the scales are totally different.
Review of People of the Secret
Update: we have no real data here, and it is easy to confuse the ‘demiurgic powers’ and the ‘hidden directorarate’. I am very skeptical about the latter and have misjudged, I think, their place in the creation/onset of religions. I think I should amend my statements to note that the demiurgic powers should be a part of the onset of religions in the mideonic periods.
Who belongs to the hidden directorate? People like Gurdjieff? He made a total mess of what he did. None of the gurus and spiritual teachers could grasp the rise of modernity. And the book in question here shows that the sufis frittered away their energy in secondary occult subjects, alchemy, freemasonry (rosicrucianism), and the like. And these subjects are highly toxic and difficult to deal with because they are esoteric junk. These are precisely the results of the ‘hidden directorate’, I suspect. The onset of christianity is thus probably the result of two levels, a general format emerging from the Axial Age, from the demiurgic powers, and a series of more specific efforts by various planetary spiritual persons (consider the legend of the magi, useless, but significant), who completely fucked up the whole task, which nonetheless came about. The basic realization was prepared from the start in the Axial period, and the Old/New Testaments sense this with a lot of (dubious) claims they were foretold. What was ‘foretold’ was simply a very generalized format with few specifics…
http://www.amazon.com/review/R11H769JQ1SV0H/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: The People of the Secret (Paperback)
I can’t give five starts to a book like this, and it may contain many errors, but it is worth pointing to the reference to J.G.Bennett without endorsing the whole book.
I think Bennett (connected to sufis, and the book is an Octagon print, from Idries Shah zone) almost got it right. Readers should check out my World History and the Eonic Effect:
We must distinguish three or more different things, and they are all in Bennett, but not in the right analysis:
1. demiurgic powers
2. a hidden directorate
3. the cascade of cosmic laws as in Bennett with _!_biospheres in that sequence of levels.
4. Ordinary men, buddhas, and perhaps men with ‘permanent I’, whatever that is.
WHEE gives some insight into the wrong analysis of epochs in Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe. It contains its own model, which distinguishes the action of the Axial Age, and the onset of most religions.
Many students get evolution and demiurgic powers confused. Demiurgic powers probably don’t have the energy resources to terraform planets or do operations on a global scale: this springs from biosphere (GAIA!). Demiurgic powers can move inside this context like men in a factory but the larger system is different. This is why noone can figure out the evolution of religion, civilization and man, and the hopeless confusions of ‘design arguments’. The Axial Age shows the emergence of religion in a larger context of civilization: this is biospheric with demiurgic co-participation. But religions can arise at any time: men are free to create them. But if they arise in the transition cycle of age periods they ofen prosper better. But the modern new age throws a curve ball: our larger system doesn’t distinguish sacred and secular: note the parallel Axial Age Greece. This biospheric level seems cyclic as Bennett noted and this suggests it is hypermechanical, while demiurgic beings have ‘will’ of some kind (although in Bennett biospheres have ‘will’ in a different sense, 24 laws?). And this leaves the founders like buddha in an ambiguous context. The sequence of age periods is fixed: religions can arise in their transitions like Hinayana or Israelitism or they can arise in the middle periods like Mahayana, Christianity, Islam. It is important to study the difference because two sets of operations are different.
Religions are probably delegated to the hidden directorate, or figures like Gautama, who can initiate their starting points, while their actual construction sequence ends in the hands of men. This is why the Old Testament seems so smart and primitive at the same time. It clearly distinguishes ‘god’ and ‘elohim’ btw…
This can be confusing, the analysis of World History and the Eonic Effect can throw for loop and the Axial Age in India is more complex than just buddhism. Buddhism appears just at the boundary of the Axial period, like the ‘religion’ appearing with the Israelites after ca. 600 BCE.
These three distinctions (or four) go a long way to explaining the confusion over religion, civilization, secularism, etc… We have bioshpere, demiurgic powers, a hidden directorate, and buddhas who clearly did not see anything beyond their enlightenment, a very tricky situation. And then ordinary men. The Israelites were very smart and saw a higher power or the bioshpere where the buddha saw only a ‘turning of the wheel’, with a visit from the ‘god realm’ (???). The gestation of Christianity, Islam, Mahayana (outside of the Axial Age) are thus at best influenced by the hidden directorate, and then human agents, with the Jesus figure in between. Scott is close on many points but this analysis is filled with traps…His take on Islam and sufis is useful at a time when Islamophobes are rampant.The question of the hidden directorate is vexed. Just who are these beings and how do they relate to incarnation? The buddhas move beyond incarnation. There is a another category?? (the boddhissatwa perhaps being an artificial imitation). The emergence of Christianity was a complete mess, yet succeeded in spite of itself. This model may help. Being a part of the ‘hidden directorate’ raises as many questions as it answers.They must support themselves over many lives on the surface of a planet, not an easy thing to do. We have not facts here, so we should be wary.
Note that, and Bennett realized this, modernity is a new age. This confounds all traditionalists. But it is important to see that the progression of epochs is beyond the ‘sacred/secular’ distinction. A closer look shows the Reformation and buddhism reborn in spite of itself, just as Jainism was reborn in the Axial Age, but then giving way to buddhism.
We can see figures like Osho struggling in this context: his commune could foot the bill for a new era, as buddhism tides and then begins to recede…
Note: I am using other peoples’ terminology and can’t vouch for the foundations of Bennett’s system but I think mine is a better interpretation than theirs, but….it doesn’t follow I accept the cosmological conclusions of Bennett about biospheres. But people don’t quite know how to use his system (assuming it is valid…a big if)
This author doesn’t get entangled with Gurdjieff who has confused everyone. Bennett’s take is a hybrid with another source. Another discussion. I don’t know if demiurgic powers can communicate with humans: the scales are totally different.
Review of People of the Secret
Update: we have no real data here, and it is easy to confuse the ‘demiurgic powers’ and the ‘hidden directorarate’. I am very skeptical about the latter and have misjudged, I think, their place in the creation/onset of religions. I think I should amend my statements to note that the demiurgic powers should be a part of the onset of religions in the mideonic periods.
Who belongs to the hidden directorate? People like Gurdjieff? He made a total mess of what he did. None of the gurus and spiritual teachers could grasp the rise of modernity. And the book in question here shows that the sufis frittered away their energy in secondary occult subjects, alchemy, freemasonry (rosicrucianism), and the like. And these subjects are highly toxic and difficult to deal with because they are esoteric junk. These are precisely the results of the ‘hidden directorate’, I suspect. The onset of christianity is thus probably the result of two levels, a general format emerging from the Axial Age, from the demiurgic powers, and a series of more specific efforts by various planetary spiritual persons (consider the legend of the magi, useless, but significant), who completely fucked up the whole task, which nonetheless came about. The basic realization was prepared from the start in the Axial period, and the Old/New Testaments sense this with a lot of (dubious) claims they were foretold. What was ‘foretold’ was simply a very generalized format with few specifics…
http://www.amazon.com/review/R11H769JQ1SV0H/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: The People of the Secret (Paperback)
I can’t give five starts to a book like this, and it may contain many errors, but it is worth pointing to the reference to J.G.Bennett without endorsing the whole book.
I think Bennett (connected to sufis, and the book is an Octagon print, from Idries Shah zone) almost got it right. Readers should check out my World History and the Eonic Effect:
We must distinguish three or more different things, and they are all in Bennett, but not in the right analysis:
1. demiurgic powers
2. a hidden directorate
3. the cascade of cosmic laws as in Bennett with _!_biospheres in that sequence of levels.
4. Ordinary men, buddhas, and perhaps men with ‘permanent I’, whatever that is.
WHEE gives some insight into the wrong analysis of epochs in Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe. It contains its own model, which distinguishes the action of the Axial Age, and the onset of most religions.
Many students get evolution and demiurgic powers confused. Demiurgic powers probably don’t have the energy resources to terraform planets or do operations on a global scale: this springs from biosphere (GAIA!). Demiurgic powers can move inside this context like men in a factory but the larger system is different. This is why noone can figure out the evolution of religion, civilization and man, and the hopeless confusions of ‘design arguments’. The Axial Age shows the emergence of religion in a larger context of civilization: this is biospheric with demiurgic co-participation. But religions can arise at any time: men are free to create them. But if they arise in the transition cycle of age periods they ofen prosper better. But the modern new age throws a curve ball: our larger system doesn’t distinguish sacred and secular: note the parallel Axial Age Greece. This biospheric level seems cyclic as Bennett noted and this suggests it is hypermechanical, while demiurgic beings have ‘will’ of some kind (although in Bennett biospheres have ‘will’ in a different sense, 24 laws?). And this leaves the founders like buddha in an ambiguous context. The sequence of age periods is fixed: religions can arise in their transitions like Hinayana or Israelitism or they can arise in the middle periods like Mahayana, Christianity, Islam. It is important to study the difference because two sets of operations are different.
Religions are probably delegated to the hidden directorate, or figures like Gautama, who can initiate their starting points, while their actual construction sequence ends in the hands of men. This is why the Old Testament seems so smart and primitive at the same time. It clearly distinguishes ‘god’ and ‘elohim’ btw…
This can be confusing, the analysis of World History and the Eonic Effect can throw for loop and the Axial Age in India is more complex than just buddhism. Buddhism appears just at the boundary of the Axial period, like the ‘religion’ appearing with the Israelites after ca. 600 BCE.
These three distinctions (or four) go a long way to explaining the confusion over religion, civilization, secularism, etc… We have bioshpere, demiurgic powers, a hidden directorate, and buddhas who clearly did not see anything beyond their enlightenment, a very tricky situation. And then ordinary men. The Israelites were very smart and saw a higher power or the bioshpere where the buddha saw only a ‘turning of the wheel’, with a visit from the ‘god realm’ (???). The gestation of Christianity, Islam, Mahayana (outside of the Axial Age) are thus at best influenced by the hidden directorate, and then human agents, with the Jesus figure in between. Scott is close on many points but this analysis is filled with traps…His take on Islam and sufis is useful at a time when Islamophobes are rampant.The question of the hidden directorate is vexed. Just who are these beings and how do they relate to incarnation? The buddhas move beyond incarnation. There is a another category?? (the boddhissatwa perhaps being an artificial imitation). The emergence of Christianity was a complete mess, yet succeeded in spite of itself. This model may help. Being a part of the ‘hidden directorate’ raises as many questions as it answers.They must support themselves over many lives on the surface of a planet, not an easy thing to do. We have not facts here, so we should be wary.
Note that, and Bennett realized this, modernity is a new age. This confounds all traditionalists. But it is important to see that the progression of epochs is beyond the ‘sacred/secular’ distinction. A closer look shows the Reformation and buddhism reborn in spite of itself, just as Jainism was reborn in the Axial Age, but then giving way to buddhism.
We can see figures like Osho struggling in this context: his commune could foot the bill for a new era, as buddhism tides and then begins to recede…
Note: I am using other peoples’ terminology and can’t vouch for the foundations of Bennett’s system but I think mine is a better interpretation than theirs, but….it doesn’t follow I accept the cosmological conclusions of Bennett about biospheres. But people don’t quite know how to use his system (assuming it is valid…a big if)
This author doesn’t get entangled with Gurdjieff who has confused everyone. Bennett’s take is a hybrid with another source. Another discussion. I don’t know if demiurgic powers can communicate with humans: the scales are totally different.
Review of People of the Secret
Update: we have no real data here, and it is easy to confuse the ‘demiurgic powers’ and the ‘hidden directorarate’. I am very skeptical about the latter and have misjudged, I think, their place in the creation/onset of religions. I think I should amend my statements to note that the demiurgic powers should be a part of the onset of religions in the mideonic periods.
Who belongs to the hidden directorate? People like Gurdjieff? He made a total mess of what he did. None of the gurus and spiritual teachers could grasp the rise of modernity. And the book in question here shows that the sufis frittered away their energy in secondary occult subjects, alchemy, freemasonry (rosicrucianism), and the like. And these subjects are highly toxic and difficult to deal with because they are esoteric junk. These are precisely the results of the ‘hidden directorate’, I suspect. The onset of christianity is thus probably the result of two levels, a general format emerging from the Axial Age, from the demiurgic powers, and a series of more specific efforts by various planetary spiritual persons (consider the legend of the magi, useless, but significant), who completely fucked up the whole task, which nonetheless came about. The basic realization was prepared from the start in the Axial period, and the Old/New Testaments sense this with a lot of (dubious) claims they were foretold. What was ‘foretold’ was simply a very generalized format with few specifics…
http://www.amazon.com/review/R11H769JQ1SV0H/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: The People of the Secret (Paperback)
I can’t give five starts to a book like this, and it may contain many errors, but it is worth pointing to the reference to J.G.Bennett without endorsing the whole book.
I think Bennett (connected to sufis, and the book is an Octagon print, from Idries Shah zone) almost got it right. Readers should check out my World History and the Eonic Effect:
We must distinguish three or more different things, and they are all in Bennett, but not in the right analysis:
1. demiurgic powers
2. a hidden directorate
3. the cascade of cosmic laws as in Bennett with _!_biospheres in that sequence of levels.
4. Ordinary men, buddhas, and perhaps men with ‘permanent I’, whatever that is.
WHEE gives some insight into the wrong analysis of epochs in Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe. It contains its own model, which distinguishes the action of the Axial Age, and the onset of most religions.
Many students get evolution and demiurgic powers confused. Demiurgic powers probably don’t have the energy resources to terraform planets or do operations on a global scale: this springs from biosphere (GAIA!). Demiurgic powers can move inside this context like men in a factory but the larger system is different. This is why noone can figure out the evolution of religion, civilization and man, and the hopeless confusions of ‘design arguments’. The Axial Age shows the emergence of religion in a larger context of civilization: this is biospheric with demiurgic co-participation. But religions can arise at any time: men are free to create them. But if they arise in the transition cycle of age periods they ofen prosper better. But the modern new age throws a curve ball: our larger system doesn’t distinguish sacred and secular: note the parallel Axial Age Greece. This biospheric level seems cyclic as Bennett noted and this suggests it is hypermechanical, while demiurgic beings have ‘will’ of some kind (although in Bennett biospheres have ‘will’ in a different sense, 24 laws?). And this leaves the founders like buddha in an ambiguous context. The sequence of age periods is fixed: religions can arise in their transitions like Hinayana or Israelitism or they can arise in the middle periods like Mahayana, Christianity, Islam. It is important to study the difference because two sets of operations are different.
Religions are probably delegated to the hidden directorate, or figures like Gautama, who can initiate their starting points, while their actual construction sequence ends in the hands of men. This is why the Old Testament seems so smart and primitive at the same time. It clearly distinguishes ‘god’ and ‘elohim’ btw…
This can be confusing, the analysis of World History and the Eonic Effect can throw for loop and the Axial Age in India is more complex than just buddhism. Buddhism appears just at the boundary of the Axial period, like the ‘religion’ appearing with the Israelites after ca. 600 BCE.
These three distinctions (or four) go a long way to explaining the confusion over religion, civilization, secularism, etc… We have bioshpere, demiurgic powers, a hidden directorate, and buddhas who clearly did not see anything beyond their enlightenment, a very tricky situation. And then ordinary men. The Israelites were very smart and saw a higher power or the bioshpere where the buddha saw only a ‘turning of the wheel’, with a visit from the ‘god realm’ (???). The gestation of Christianity, Islam, Mahayana (outside of the Axial Age) are thus at best influenced by the hidden directorate, and then human agents, with the Jesus figure in between. Scott is close on many points but this analysis is filled with traps…His take on Islam and sufis is useful at a time when Islamophobes are rampant.The question of the hidden directorate is vexed. Just who are these beings and how do they relate to incarnation? The buddhas move beyond incarnation. There is a another category?? (the boddhissatwa perhaps being an artificial imitation). The emergence of Christianity was a complete mess, yet succeeded in spite of itself. This model may help. Being a part of the ‘hidden directorate’ raises as many questions as it answers.They must support themselves over many lives on the surface of a planet, not an easy thing to do. We have not facts here, so we should be wary.
Note that, and Bennett realized this, modernity is a new age. This confounds all traditionalists. But it is important to see that the progression of epochs is beyond the ‘sacred/secular’ distinction. A closer look shows the Reformation and buddhism reborn in spite of itself, just as Jainism was reborn in the Axial Age, but then giving way to buddhism.
We can see figures like Osho struggling in this context: his commune could foot the bill for a new era, as buddhism tides and then begins to recede…
Note: I am using other peoples’ terminology and can’t vouch for the foundations of Bennett’s system but I think mine is a better interpretation than theirs, but….it doesn’t follow I accept the cosmological conclusions of Bennett about biospheres. But people don’t quite know how to use his system (assuming it is valid…a big if)
This author doesn’t get entangled with Gurdjieff who has confused everyone. Bennett’s take is a hybrid with another source. Another discussion. I don’t know if demiurgic powers can communicate with humans: the scales are totally different.
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
The fascist gotterdammerung of archaeo-buddhism
ToI think that my references to Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe have backfired, and I need to revise my thinking here. The problem is that Bennett’s discussion of a hidden realm of demiurgic guides in history is mostly a lot of crap. His take on world history is so very odd I couldn’t for a long time put my finger on the difficulty.First his entanglement with Gurdjieff made him dishonest, as Gurdjieff was dishonest. The whole book is a compromise, as he failed to pursue his own vision, mixing in the crap from Gurdjieff to put the work in two modes. The enneagram is crap and Bennett must have known this, but he introduces the idea in the middle of DU to the confusion of the whole text. That’s one out of three dozens major issue, like the use of the model of the Great Year to clock his epochs.it gets worse in his later books and the twin dogmas of the law of three and law of seven become the core of a Gurdjieff myth. He was far closer to something good before that. Not that Dramatic Universe can be rescued.
In any case, the idea of a group demirugic guides mixed with the Islamic versions of this idea, plus the unknowns of such groups as the Khwajagan vitiates Bennett’s whole account.Bennett’s take on world history fails in the end, but I respect his work up to a point because he resisted the antimodernist new aging of the folks in the new age movement.
But his section of the rise of the modern is very poor.
Here’s my view: if you want to consider the action of higher powers in history you must reckon with my WHEE. And there you confront something far more difficult than the idea of some angelic hallucination tinkering with history. But noone will even consider this work.
I hope I didn’t spoil my Descent of Man Revisited and Last and First Men with references to Bennett. They were kept to the Preface to make a point. But in the end I think I must invent new terms and induce the final break with anything Gurdjieffian.
The term ‘demiurgic powers’ is a good one, but Bennett uses it up and it is beyond rescue.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 