Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Steiner, Wilber

alan kazlev Says: December 29th, 2006 at 10:31 pm Andy said “To me, these are the words more of a thinker, a philosopher, a systematizer, rather than a mystic. “

If you read Synthesis of Yoga you will find that Sri Aurobidno was also a mystic as well.

“But when you and Alan claim that he was the greatest realizer of all time”

I never said “the greatest realiser”. But were I to do so, I would probably give The Mother that status; in The Agenda she refers to details regarding the enlightenment of the Cells that even Sri Aurobindo doesn’t talk about.

What I did say is that for me personally their teachings are the most profound, the most integrative, the most inspiring. I have argued why in part 3 of my first essay on Integral World. But please don’t think I am saying this dogmatically, like some bigot trying to get everyone to think the same as I do. I am only talking about my own experiences and insights. And if someone could show me a more integrative, universal, and profound teaching, I will most certainly recognise that.

Andy I respect you when you say that you’ve had experiences, that you find Gurdjieff the most original teacher. I also have great admiration for Gurdjieff (although that doesn’t diminish my greater admiration for Sri Aurobindo). Ultimately this comes down to the fact that one can only follow one’s own Inner Light and Guidance, which when followed with sincerity is the only true Guru, and that whilemental discussions of this sort are great fun, they are ultimately futile, because realisation is beyond all such words.

“I would point out that he was teaching his students in Moscow about holarchy years before the term was even coined, about different brains half a century before Paul MacLean developed the idea of the triune brain, that his system specifically addresses questions of physiological events that occur during meditation,”

Yes the Fourth Way material is incredible. Here is something i have always wondered, but others on this forum are probably more knowledgable than I and better able to answer. How much of the Fourth Way is what Gurdjieff said, and how much what Ouspensky said? How much of such superb books as In Search of the Miraculous and The Fourth Way was Gurdjieff’s own words and how much Ouspensky’s? I don’t pretend to know the answer, nor am I or nor do I claim to be a scholar of or authority on Gurdjieff.

“that he was virtually alone in suggesting that there is a limit to how many people on earth can realize higher consciousness, and so on and so on.”

Yeah I heardabout this too (maybe in Ouspensky). Gurdjieff apparently didn’t want his knowledge to get out too widely, because there’s only so much enlightenment to go around, and if the knowledge he taught was made too readily available it will be used up. This very negative and closed exclusivist approach is the opposite of the more open and universal approach of people like Blavatsky, Aurobindo, Wilber, etc. There’s no popssibility of collective growth in Gurdjieff’s system, it’s the old school of individual realisation only.

Interestingly Steiner was somewhat similar in that he didnt want his lectures written down (because the spiritual presence is lost when words are written down, i don’t necessarily agree, although maybe sometimes it is), but I find his lectures far more interesting than his books. However unlike Gurdjieff, Steiner was concerned with collective as well as individual evolution.

Gurdjieff also supposedly said that the moon gets hungry and that’s what causes war. So there is all sorts of stuff there, some of it quite crazy! But even the crazy stuff had an occult truth (as with Steiner). Gurdjieff was an amazing person and he probably would fit the mould of manipulative guru quite well (according to Webb The Harmonious Circle he was a spymaster at one time). As with Steiner, the Fourth Way material can be better read as metaphor rather than as literal fact. For that matter so can Wilber-II, which has intriguing parallels with Steiner’s cosmology.