| Spiritual
|
[
Spiritual ] [ Main Menu ] |
|
|
|
27687 |
|
|
Date: December 21, 2021 at 21:48:48
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: The Needs of the Earth |
URL: https://www.gurdjieff.org/ |
|
The Needs of the Earth
Jeanne de Salzmann
The Earth is in exchange with higher levels of existence. For this an apparatus is needed. Mankind is that apparatus. This exchange is not automatic; it requires work.
Without man the Earth cannot receive the energy from a higher level. So, if some people work consciously, they assist the descent of this energy. Otherwise, there is discord on the Earth. One can sense it.
It is important to bring the body and the mind—a different mind, not the usual mind—to the same rate of vibration. Then there is a relationship, as between a man and a woman, and a child can be produced—a new feeling. Higher energy is there, but we do not receive it because we are fragmented. The purpose of man’s existence on the Earth is to allow the exchange of energy between the Earth and higher levels of existence. That is not possible without the relationship between the body and the mind.
Man has a special function, which other creatures cannot fulfill. He can serve the Earth by becoming a bridge for certain higher energies. Without this the Earth cannot live properly. But man, as he is by nature, is not complete. In order to fulfill his proper function he needs to develop. There is a part in him which is unsatisfied by his life. Through religious or spiritual traditions he may become aware what this part needs.
The whole universe is made up of forces and energies. They have to be in relationship with one another. The Earth has its own level of energy; it needs human beings for the purposes of right relationship with other energies. This is what man is meant to serve.
To be able to bring higher energy in contact with the Earth, man must have a harmonious relationship—a right exchange—among his centres. Everything is in movement. The energies of our centres are in movement too, but not in harmony with each other.
The world needs certain vibrations which are produced only when some people work intentionally.
Man can serve the Earth by becoming a link between two levels. He can receive energy from a higher level in order to have an action on the level below; not a reaction.
The Earth needs conscious work. It is in need of higher energy. If I do not let the higher energy descend to the Earth through this body, how else will it come down?
The most important thing is conscious attention—finer and finer, stronger and stronger.
The body is not the most important thing. The important thing is the real I, which is independent of the physical body. But the body is very necessary because the higher energy needs the body in order to manifest itself. The body is needed so that the I can have an action. The I can create a new body if the connection is strong enough, that is to say, if one permits the higher energy to pass into me. The conscious response or attention, which arises from the me, which is personal, serves as a thread for connecting the I and the me. The I is not personal. The I can awaken me and serve the Earth. The Earth as a whole has need of more conscious energy.
It is necessary to face the idea that the Earth will fall if we do not work. This will help your work and help you understand that your work is necessary.
Ravi Ravindra, Heart Without Measure: Gurdjieff Work with Madame de Salzmann (2004) Sandpoint, Idaho: Morning Light Press, pp. 33–34, 87, 127, 131, 151, 194.
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27711] [27713] [27714] [27715] [27712] [27703] [27697] [27690] [27693] [27694] [27695] [27698] [27700] [27701] [27699] [27696] [27702] |
|
27711 |
|
|
Date: December 30, 2021 at 04:41:44
From: Akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
I’m curious about the pre-christian, Egyptian source material Gurdjieff
referred to which seems to be the foundation of his philosophy, writings.
Have you come across any of that original source material in your studying
of Gurdjieff’s work?
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27713] [27714] [27715] [27712] |
|
27713 |
|
|
Date: December 30, 2021 at 12:05:55
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
Pre-christian is a bit misleading, since gurdjieff maintained the christian concepts and religion began a long time before the life of jesus, in ancient egypt...
he mentioned finding some old scrolls while digging through the ruins of ancient ruins, and other snippets about stuff he found here and there...but no, i have nothing to offer about original source material...i only know that georgi said there were a bunch of civilizations a long time ago that arose and fell, that were more advanced than anything we have today...
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27714] [27715] |
|
27714 |
|
|
Date: December 30, 2021 at 12:35:54
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
URL: https://gurdjiefflegacy.org/70links/search.htm |
|
Gurdjieff's Search
Dissatisfied with the answers of contemporary religion and science, Gurdjieff intuited that the wisdom societies of ancient civilizations held the real key to his question. And so with a group of like-minded friends who called themselves the Seekers of Truth, he made many journeys into remote and dangerous areas with the aim of rediscovering this ancient knowledge.
Excavating ruins of a 4000 year old ziggurat in Mesopotamia, Gurdjieff, Fourth Way, Egypt, Christianity
In the ruins of Ani, the ancient Armenian capital, Gurdjieff and his friends discovered correspondence that spoke of an esoteric brotherhood called Sarmoung. The brotherhood had existed in Babylon in 2,500 B.C., and subsequently migrated northward to the Izrumim Valley. Some believe the Sarmoung to have been a sixth or seventh century Aisorian school located between Urmia and Kurdistan. There is also in Tibet a group of monasteries known as Surmang. The tenth Trungpa Tulku, their supreme abbot, died in 1938. Tibetans believe he reincarnated as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the eleventh Trungpa Tulku, who came to America in 1970 and often spoke of Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff certainly did travel to Tibet and speaks about his experiences there. See Voices in the Dark.
Gurdjieff set out for the valley hoping to contact the Sarmoung, but on the way he unexpectedly came upon a map of 'pre-sand Egypt.' Immediately, he changed course and in 1895 arrived in Egypt. What did Gurdjieff see on the map of 'pre-sand Egypt' that caused him to immediately break off his search for the Sarmoung and go directly to Egypt?
Karnak, Egypt, Gurdjieff, Fourth Way, Christianity
He worked as a guide at the Giza Plateau outside Cairo, and then traveled up the Nile to Upper Egypt and into Ethiopia. He lived for a time in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the desert necropolis on the west bank of the Nile opposite the ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes, modern-day Luxor. Located just south of the city and considered the most remarkable religious complex ever built by man, Karnak's pylons, temples, chapels, obelisks, columns, statues and man-made lake are situated on 250 acres. Among its sites is the great hypostyle hall where 134 columns are surrounded by more than 120 pillars. Stone slabs (now gone) served as the roof, with carved stone windows allowing light to penetrate the area. The Karnak King List, discovered on the site, contains the names of more than 60 of Egypt's ancient rulers.
It was there in Egypt—"only not from the Egypt we know," Gurdjieff said, "but from one we do not know "—that he discovered "the true principles and ideas" of the ancient teaching that could show Man his place on earth and the reason and meaning of his existence.
Gurdjieff realized that elements of this teaching over time had dispersed northward into Babylon, the Hindu Kush, Tibet, Siberia and the Gobi desert. He set out on a second journey to re-collect them. See the documentary video Gurdjieff in Egypt.
In his travels Gurdjieff visited many monasteries, some of which were Sufi. He also spoke with many learned beings, some of whom were Sufi. He had a great respect for the Sufis and it would seem likely that he may have been initiated into several of their orders. A selection of the music he introduced was Sufi in origin. This, however, does not mean he was a Sufi. He had already found the principles and ideas of a Christianity before Christ and was only looking for elements of this prehistoric esoteric teaching that had migrated northward over time.
The Fourth Way teaching predating all teachings and religions, it is not surprising that there would be similarities to Sufism, as well as other approaches. For a discussion of Sufism as it relates to The Fourth Way, see "Neo-Sufism: The Case of Idries Shah."
Having the true principles and ideas of the teaching, he was then able to reformulate these elements into a practical and powerful teaching for modern mentality. He called it The Fourth Way.
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27715] |
|
27715 |
|
|
Date: December 30, 2021 at 12:44:44
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
URL: https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/g-i-gurdjieff-the-hidden-history-of-the-sufis |
|
G.I. Gurdjieff & the Hidden History of the Sufis
By Victoria LePage
Sufism belongs in spirit to the modern age. It has an affinity with it; it is in tune with secularism, with the modern thirst for objective knowledge. Yet the Sufi tradition is immensely old. In some quarters a belief still persists that it is a mystical offshoot of Islam, but most reliable sources claim it is far older than the Muslim religion.
Evidence is emerging that suggests the tentacles of the brotherhood reach out to many religions and cultures and extend thousands of years into the past, and that its members were once better known as the Friends of Truth, the Builders, the Masters, the People of the Way and numerous other appellations that had been circulating for far longer than the lifetime of Islam. The Friends, it is said, were already present in Medina during Muhammad’s lifetime and adopted the name Sufi after taking an oath of fidelity to the Muslim cause.1
A number of derivations of the word Sufi have been put forward, including Ain Soph, the Kabbalistic term for the unknowable, and Sophos, meaning Wisdom. This is in line with the view held by many students of Sufism who claim that it corresponds with the hidden esoteric wisdom-dimension that underlies all religions. Thus the British Sufi fellow-traveller and author Ernest Scott believes the Sufi tradition has impregnated Western culture to a degree we rarely realise, leading him indeed to call it the Invisible Tradition. Its covert influence, he says, has been strong in Manichaeism and the Cathar faith, in the Troubadour and Jester traditions of medieval Europe, in the evolution of Jewish Kabbalah, in alchemy and in Christianity itself. Scott quotes the Afghan Sufi teacher Idris Shah as saying that “there is evidence that at the deepest levels of Sufi secrecy, there is a mutual communication with the mystics of the Christian West.”2
Scott further quotes Hakim Jami, a twelfth-century Sufi master, as implicitly denying Sufism’s Islamic origin by declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes lay on an unbroken line of Sufi transmission, thus making a causal connection between Sufism and the Greek Mystery schools of antiquity.3 The British esotericist J.G. Bennett goes further, claiming that the Sufis are the descendants and spiritual heirs of the old master magicians of Altai, and that Central Asia has been their heartland for forty thousand years or more. He says that it was from the Altaic shamans that the Sufis inherited the religious tolerance, supremely practical expertise and democratic ideals that are their hallmark today. And it was from the Siberian schools of wisdom that they learned their unique way of surrender, the way of total obedience to a higher principle than man which has earned them the soubriquet “the slaves of God.”4
Bennett gained much of this knowledge of Sufism’s hidden history from his mentor George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1877 – 1949), the Armenian-Greek mystic and spiritual teacher who travelled extensively in the Caucasus and Central Asia and who received Sufi training in the dervish schools he encountered there. In The Masters of Wisdom, Bennett recounts:
Gurdjieff told me that he had learned about these ancient schools of wisdom from researches he himself had made in caves in the Caucasian mountains and in the great limestone caverns of the Syr Darya in Turkestan. I have since learned that there is a Sufi tradition in Central Asia that claims to go back forty thousand years.5
Gurdjieff also told Bennett that the paintings in the Lascaux caves in the Dordogne, France, which the great authority on parietal art, the Abbé Breuil, has dated to about thirty thousand years BCE, were the work of later Sufi descendants of the shamans.6 Gurdjieff took the story of Atlantis literally. He associated it with pre-sand Egypt and believed the Lascaux artists were members of a brotherhood that survived after Atlantis sank seven or eight thousand years ago.7 They were highly evolved Masters of Wisdom, “‘psychoteleios’ who had learned the secret of immortality,” and whose centres of initiation on the now submerged Atlantic continental shelf have left us, in their paintings of deer, bison and auroch, a magical message of prehistoric spirituality that lay undeciphered for many thousands of years.
In that palaeolithic age art and religion were still one; secular and religious consciousness had not yet separated out, and spirit and matter were not yet in opposition; nor was evil an absolute force seeking the overthrow of good. All things and all attitudes to things were filled with the magnetic, synthesising radiance of hypercosmic energy, which Gurdjieff called conscious energy. In such a unified world the great Initiates developed the unique type of spirituality that still distinguishes Sufism today, wherein the polarising activity of mind is submissive to the over-riding Spirit that ever seeks a return to the One. Only in the later more alienated religious systems, Gurdjieff believed, do we find the divisive seeds of philosophical dualism.
The Sarmoun Society
At the apogee of the Sumerian civilisation, Bennett continues, the Sufis are believed to have founded a brotherhood called the Sarman or Sarmoun Society, which, according to Gurdjieff, met in Babylon as far back as c. 2500 BCE and was responsible for preserving the inner teachings and initiations of the Aryan tradition in a period of religious decline. Sarmoun is a word meaning bee in Old Persian, and refers symbolically to the practice of the brotherhood of storing the “honey” of both the traditional wisdom and the supernatural energy or baraka enabling it to be understood, and sending this double “nectar” out into the world in times of great need.8 The word Sarmoun can also mean “those who are enlightened.” The Sarmouni are believed to have secret training centres hidden to this day in the most remote regions of Central Asia.
In Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Bennett conjectures that around 500 BCE the Sarmoun Society migrated from ancient Chaldaea to Mosul in Mesopotamia, moving north into the upper valley of the Tigris, into the mountains of Kurdistan and the Caucasus. There it became active in the rise of Zoroastrianism under the Persian monarch Cambyses I. According to Gurdjieff, the Society later moved eastward to Central Asia, twenty days’ journey from Kabul and twelve days’ journey from Bokhara. “He [Gurdjieff] refers,” says Bennett, “to the valleys of the Pyandje and the Syr Darya, which suggest an area in the mountains south-east of Tashkent.”9 Although Gurdjieff was never explicit about his relationship to the Sarmouni or the precise locality of the monasteries in which he trained towards the end of his travels, he provides many hints in such autobiographical writings as Meetings With Remarkable Men that this Sarmoun brotherhood, whose monasteries were situated on the northern slopes of the Himalayas, was the custodian of the most ancient wisdom known and the primary source of his extraordinary esoteric knowledge and powers.
Gurdjieff came to the West as a man with a mission. He had journeyed extensively in the Caucasus, where it is thought he first entered the tekkes of the Yesevi dervishes of Sheikh Adi in the Kurdish foothills and later those of the Sarmouni in Afghanistan, receiving a number of initiations by the remarkable age of twenty two. Those closest to him maintain that he remained in touch with hidden Sufi sources throughout his life and received help and support from them. He clearly believed that he acted on their authority in setting up schools in the West that transmitted the cosmological and psychological teachings he himself had learned during his travels. Yet while freely recounting his many Central Asian adventures in his search for wisdom, Gurdjieff managed to draw a permanent veil of secrecy and ambiguity over all details of these intimate encounters with the dervish tradition. This of course is in line with the extreme reticence of the Sufi orders themselves.
Gurdjieff and the Masters of Wisdom
A charismatic hypnotist, carpet trader, Russian spy and mystic extraordinaire, George Gurdjieff was the son of a Greek-Armenian bard and was deeply impressed by his father’s songs concerning the great spiritual luminaries of a vanished past. The boy apparently began his search for the lost wisdom of the ancients at the early age of fifteen, and maintained it at huge cost to his health and material resources until he emerged, nearly thirty years later, a magus of mysterious yet undeniably charismatic authority. Possessed of enormous personal courage, during World War I Gurdjieff led a large posse of Russian followers across Eastern Europe to safety, through the raging battle lines of Bolsheviks and Cossacks in turn, eventually establishing a school in Fontainbleu, outside Paris, for the study and practice of methods of spiritual self-transformation. These methods, revolutionary in their day, are believed to have included the sacred dance and music exercises of the shamanistic Yesevi dervishes of Kurdistan, a community in which Gurdjieff seems to have received his initial training in Sufi techniques of “soul-making.”
The Yezidis, a secretive Kurdish religious sect from which the Sufi Bektashi order has sprung, live to this day in the foothills north of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan pursuing a cult of angels. According to the British baroness E.S. Drower, who in 1940 published a detailed paper on the sect, the chief Yezidi angel is Malek Taus, the Peacock Angel who has some likeness to Lucifer, the fallen angel of Christian fame. A black serpent is also held in special reverence in the Yezidi religion as a symbol of magical potency – no doubt ultimately a symbol of kundalini and the spinal system of energies elaborated in spiritual physiology. While paying lip service to the Muslim faith, the Yezidi have their own unique cosmogony, mythology and ritual practices, which have more commonality with the Magian or Gnostic belief-systems than with either Islam or Christianity. Ceaselessly persecuted and destroyed by Kurdish Muslims and Ottoman Turks as well as Islamic armies of both Iraq and Iran, the once powerful Yezidi tribes have been almost wiped out as heretics of the first order. Only isolated groups are now left. These include small pockets in Central Kurdistan, the Russian Caucasus and in satellite communities in Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia and Iran.
Sheikh Adi, a noted mystic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, was a Median Magi, and although he is regarded as the founder of the Yezidi faith and an incarnation of the Peacock Angel, both the religion and the tribe are ascribed a far earlier date of origin. They are believed to be heirs to an ancient ancestral tradition going back to Noah. Adrian G. Gilbert comments:
It is my belief that they [the Yezidis] are descended from the ancient Chaldaeans. Their own tradition is that they migrated from the South, and they may well be the lost remnants of the Babylonian Magi who disappeared after the time of Alexander of Macedon.10
This is certainly in line with Gurdjieff’s belief that the roots of Sufism lie in a spiritual tradition of extreme antiquity such as is found in the Yezidi faith, and that it was probably centred in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that Sufism continually developed beyond its initial form and amplified its teachings over the ages.
The late Hugh Schonfield, a noted Jewish scholar and author, says that by the third century CE Sufi schools were well established in the Middle East, particularly in Mosul, the heart of the old Assyrian kingdom, under the auspices of the Zoroastrian Magi. There the Sufis were joined by many Jewish refugees from Egypt fleeing Roman persecution. Among these were the Therapeutae, members of an Essene Order of contemplatives strongly imbued with a revolutionary New Covenant with God. The covenant involved a Judaic reformation that forbad militarism and animal sacrifice and embraced the principles of gender equality and an equitable distribution of wealth. The Therapeutae brought to the Sufi tradition not only these enlightened social ideals which were actually already enshrined in its own constitution, but much of the new Hermetic and Kabbalistic mysticism fermenting in Alexandria. Thus, says Schonfield, throughout Egypt and the Middle East
there were religious fusions and amalgamations, and the emergence of spiritual hybrids… Zoroastrianism and Mithraism lent their characteristics to Jewish Essene teaching, and found a Greek expression in the Hermetic and Christian Gnostic. The coverage of the Roman empire right round the Mediterranean carried the cults with it, and opened the way to new blendings.11
In this way Sufism was continually invigorated by new trends and in turn invigorated others. Then, when in the seventh century CE civilisation was in danger of total collapse through the ravages of global pestilence, war, earthquakes and the suppression of all Greek learning by Byzantine Christianity, the Sufi masters transferred their allegiance from Zoroastrianism to Islam, the latter offering the greater hope of rehabilitation for humanity. Thus the wisdom and science of Persia, with its great heritage of Greek learning, passed into the Muslim culture and was carried by Muslim sages into every quarter of the globe. The Dark Ages were halted and Islam, supported by the Sufis, brought about a brilliant revival of the Graeco-Roman arts and sciences.12
The conquest of Spain by the Muslim Moors meant Jews, Muslims and Christians were able to live there harmoniously until the fifteenth century, creating a culture of superb beauty and intelligence which lasted until the Jews and Muslims were banished to Byzantium, and which gave Sufism entrance into the rest of backward Europe. During the same centuries Crusaders such as the Templars encountered the rich Saracen culture in the Holy Land and secretly brought back the cream of Sufi thought to Europe to enrich Christian theological scholarship, art and sciences.
Himalayan Withdrawal
With the Mongol invasions, however, came difficult days for European civilisation as many sources of Sufi wisdom withdrew. The Sufi Masters of Wisdom known in Central Asia as the Khwajagan lineage withdrew at this time to the Trans-Himalayas, where their schools still persist. The Khwajagan were neither savants nor mystical ecstatics. They were practical men who assiduously practiced the breathing and mantric exercise of the zikr, fought their own weaknesses by means of trials based on humiliation and abasement, and during the Mongol depredations of the conquered western cities built new schools, hospitals and mosques. Some say these Masters, who may be synonymous with the Sarmouni, have continued to this day to head the Sufi hierarchy – which Bennett has called the Hidden Directorate – from its hidden Trans-Himalayan headquarters. Meanwhile, the Sufi orders left behind continued to strengthen their ties with other esoteric systems, such as the Magian secret societies in Persia and the Copts in Egypt, and to extend their formidable influence across the world into South-East Asia.
In the Sunda Islands they amalgamated successfully with the indigenous shamans, Hindu-Buddhists and Taoists and were instrumental in establishing in Java one of the most influential schools of Tibetan Kalachakra Tantra in the world. The result was a chain of hybrid secret societies around the globe whose roots were buried deep in a freedom-loving soil compounded of Sufism, Magian wisdom and the Solomonic and Hermetic wisdom of the Egyptian Essenes. It was these pan-religious amalgamations that produced over the centuries initiatic schools like the Templars, the Chartres masters, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Theosophists, all dedicated to working for the religious and scientific dawning of a new age free from religious intolerance.
Throughout the long Sufi saga, the West had been unaware of intervention in its affairs, or indeed of the very existence of a powerful organisation in its midst that was monitoring the course of history and at the same time maintaining its own hierarchy, objectives and worldview independently of the visible political and religious structures of society. But the Sufi masters knew that this unconscious condition, mainly imposed on the people by repressive forces outside their control, must end, and that the time of awakening was drawing near.
Sufi Masters and Rosicrucianism
The two Rosicrucian manifestos pseudonymously published in Germany in the early years of the seventeenth century marked the first Sufi venture into the public domain and caused a sensation. The manifestos purported to advertise a mysterious order called the Fraternity of the Rosey Cross which had been founded, it was claimed, by one Christian Rosencreutz; and a third publication called The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, written in high Dutch, came out soon after. The manifestos declared that Fr. Rosencreutz had obtained the inspiration for his brotherhood from Arabia, Fez (the home of Sufic alchemy since the eighth century) and Egypt, all centres of Sufi activity. And Rosicrucian tradition has it that Fr. Rosencreutz was initiated in Palestine by an Arabic sect. Observes Ernest Scott:
When it is realised that the Sufi teacher Suhrawardi of Aleppo had a teaching method called the Path of the Rose and that the Sufic word for a dervish exercise has the same consonantal root as the word for a rose, the Sufic origin of the Rosicrucians may be inferred with some confidence.13
As we now know, the series of Rosicrucian publications with their visionary and reforming talk of an invisible college, a “winged academy” dedicated to a commonwealth of man, created a furore in Europe. Some saw the publications as a hoax, others as a God-given sign of the millennium. As ever, the Sufis were not directly mentioned: but, sweeping like a rejuvenating wind through Protestant and Catholic lands alike, the movement stirred up by the mysterious manifestos became a potent though short-lived catalyst for change. It instigated a religious and intellectual uprising that sought reform in education, religion and science, promising a coming utopia in which the dignity and worth of every man and woman would be recognised.
Frances A. Yates, a foremost Renaissance scholar, believes this period in the seventeenth century can rightly be called the Rosicrucian Enlightenment and that out of its “great reservoir of spiritual and intellectual power, of moral and reforming vision”14 came the Royal Society and the age of scientific revolution.
Full of Christian mysticism yet also permeated with Hermetic-Kabbalistic angelology and alchemical religious philosophy, the Rosicrucian teachings proclaimed that this age of enlightenment, in which religion and science would no longer be antithetical, was at hand. Great advances were to be made and a reformation of the whole wide world would presage “a great influx of truth and light” into fallen society such as shone on Adam in paradise. For a time large factions of the Church espoused these ideas, and the Jesuits, themselves of occult and hermetic origin, took over much of the Rosicrucian symbolism and emblematics.
Yet in the event the whole programme was aborted by the fiercely reactionary response of the Spanish Inquisition and its political ally, the Hapsburg dynasty, which instigated the Thirty Years’ War, forcing thousands of religious dissidents to flee with the seeds of the new vision to the New World. The Sufi programme had to incubate in secret for several more centuries.
Sufis Re-emerge in Twentieth Century
Not until the twentieth century, in a more tolerant and receptive age, were the Sufis finally able to reveal themselves openly. In 1921 Gurdjieff, the emigré and entrepreneur from Armenia, was the first to make this possible. He came with a crucial message for the twentieth century and, as we shall see, for our own era in the third millennium. Of great personal magnetism, drive and unusual psychic powers, Gurdjieff burst upon the Western scene with his programme for spiritual development, bringing to the European cognoscenti for the first time an awareness of the sacred ritual dances and dervish exercises of the East. These, he said, had strong links with Altaic shamanism and Tibetan and Chinese Tantra.
But Sufis have never regarded spiritual exercises alone as adequate. Generally speaking, little is said in Sufi literature about baraka, the effective grace that makes spiritual development on this path possible, yet its importance is primary. Baraka, as transmitted from teacher to pupil, is said to be a high emotional energy associated with the heart centre, and according to Bennett, enables the pupil to do what would be quite beyond his unaided strength.15 It is this inner infusion of conscious energy – energy of a high spiritual nature – that enables the zikhr, the Sufi invocatory exercise, to be fruitful. Discipline, austerity and voluntary suffering, which Gurdjieff translated as conscious labour and intentional suffering, were also needed. By intentional suffering he meant exposing oneself to painful situations in order to help others.
While the southern Sufi orders embraced the mystical doctrine of love and union with God, these northern Sufis were strongly influenced by Buddhism and, like the Khwajagan, were concerned with a total liberation from self and the world of appearances. They were regarded by the more conservative southern Sufis as unorthodox, even being accused of magical practices learned from the Siberian shamans to the north. Nevertheless, Gurdjieff saw great benefit for the West in the dervish practices, disapproved though they were by the more purist brotherhoods such as the Nach’shbandi and the Qadiri, and made his unique programme available to all those wishing to develop their human potential.
At his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainbleu, Gurdjieff trained his students in group dance movements set to dervish rhythms that demanded of them intense physical effort and coordination and which raised the body to a “high state of consciousness” conducive to a transformation of energies. He also encouraged his pupils to observe intensively their own psychic centres of thinking, feeling and instinct as a means of achieving a degree of self-government that man at present entirely lacks – but without which, Gurdjieff insisted, it is impossible for him to govern and maintain the planet. Public performances of Gurdjieff’s dervish dances were put on at various theatres, even in the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York, and Europe and America marvelled: nothing like it had ever been known. Sacred dances, Gurdjieff said,
have always been one of the vital subjects taught in esoteric schools of the East… Such gymnastics have a double aim: they contain and express a certain form of knowledge and at the same time serve as a means to acquire a harmonious state of being.
At one time it was his intention to use the movements in the traditional way for which they were principally intended in the ancient temples of initiation – that is, as a means of transmitting knowledge directly to the higher centres without passing through the mind, which is the way of Tantra. But a car accident in which Gurdjieff’s physical health was severely damaged put an end to his wider plans for the movements and turned his attention to writing and training selected people to carry on his work at a more intellectual level.
Sufi prescience, Sufi aptitude for the right teaching in the right time and place, is well attested. In many respects, Gurdjieff’s writings contributed enormously to the familiarisation of the West to the radical idea of the psyche or soul – the dynamic centre that mediates between the spiritual and the sensory functions – which at that time Sigmund Freud was also bringing to Western notice. Recognition of this unifying centre of relativity, which modifies the traditional absolutes of philosophy and religion on one hand and the physical sciences on the other, was just then opening up, and Gurdjieff’s psychological brand of theosophy, which became the vogue at the same time as Freudian and socialist theory, made a very great impact.
The Gurdjieff schools of self-development spread to numerous countries and his ideas became common coinage in the new enlightenment of the sixties. Through the interest aroused in his methods and teachings, in which the centrality of individuation was paramount, Gurdjieff was able to give out for the first time a certain amount of information about the Sufi tarekats hidden in Eurasia. And in his train came a school of eminent Sufi writers like Guénon, Bennett, Ouspensky, Schuon, Hazrat Inayat Khan and Idris Shah, all of whom further opened up the world of Sufism to a vast reading public.
One of the central strands in Gurdjieff’s belief-system was the principle of world-creation and world-maintenance, which he said was derived from “an old Sumerian manuscript” discovered by a great Kurdish philosopher. The doctrine can be summed up very simply: “Everything that exists maintains and is maintained by other existences.” Peculiar to Sufism and appearing in no other religion, it states that the whole of the universe is a web of mutually supporting systems, “apparatuses for transforming energy,” each one of which produces the means of sustenance for others.
This law of reciprocal maintenance governs all of life and applies to man as well as in his relation to Mother Nature. The world is not made for man, as we have been taught; both are made for each other. Man’s destiny and the destiny of the earth are interdependent. The evolution of the one depends on the evolution of the other, the survival of one on the survival of the other. Man is not separate from the cosmic process; he is himself part of the ecosystem he observes out there, and he must serve the evolution of the world as well as his own. That is the law of the cosmos, even as the palaeolithic shaman defined it many millennia ago.
From the Sarmounis, Gurdjieff learned that man is at present an automaton, a mere mechanism driven by the blind forces of action and reaction, his sense of identity fragmented, his will almost non-existent. Yet even work on himself will not redeem him without an acceptance that he is here to serve the world. Through Gurdjieff, therefore, the Sufis gave out to the twentieth century a new teaching, a new outlook on life that was revolutionary seventy years ago: man cannot advance spiritually unless he fulfils his obligation to planet earth, and through planet earth to the solar system. He must “pay the debt of his existence” by nurturing that which nurtured him.
For man’s cross is a twofold spiritual destiny; to evolve as an individual, but also to serve the evolution of kingdoms other than his own, lives other than his own. Out of the friction these opposed drives generate, said Gurdjieff, there comes a transcendental third, the birth of conscience. This suffering of the tension between the opposites is the law of true religion and is alleviated only by the awakening of the mediating force inherent in the soul; that is, conscience or love. The Sufi theory of world-creation and world-maintenance – “a new master idea for the coming age,” as Bennett called it – has become increasingly relevant as the planet’s ecological crisis has worsened over the decades; and now, looking back from our vantage point in the new millennium, we see how it has indeed become the hallmark of our time, perhaps the key to its essential meaning. Wherever the next civilisation is centred it must be where the third and reconciling power can operate; where conscience can find a home. That is the prime Sufi message for our generation, as it was Gurdjieff’s.
This article was published in New Dawn 107.
If you appreciate this article, please consider a contribution to help maintain this website.
Footnotes:
1. Ernest Scott, The People of the Secret, Octagon Press, London, 1985, p.45.
2. Ibid., p.118.
3. Ibid., p.45.
4. J.G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Turnstone Books, London, 1973, p.94.
5. J.G. Bennett, The Masters of Wisdom, Turnstone Books, London, 1977, p.40.
6. J.G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, p.86.
7. Ibid., p.86.
8. Ibid., p.57.
9. Ibid., p.64.
10. Adrian G. Gilbert, The Magi, Bloomsbury, London, 1996, p.49.
11. Hugh Schonfield, The Essene Odyssey, Element Book, UK, 1984, p.166.
12. J.G. Bennett, The Masters of Wisdom, Ch. 6.
13. Scott, op. cit., p.176.
14. Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1986.
15. J.G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, p.278.
© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
27712 |
|
|
Date: December 30, 2021 at 05:17:17
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: also.. |
|
|
I wonder why Gurdjieff identified that material as being Christian since the
word refers to the teachings of Christ, as far as I know.
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
27703 |
|
|
Date: December 23, 2021 at 20:08:57
From: Sue/Seattle, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
Unless humans can do a far better job being one with
mother nature the "higher level of existence" will never
happen. We are so out of sync with nature right now, more
than any other time in history. Its a hierarchy of needs.
This needs to happen first
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
27697 |
|
|
Date: December 23, 2021 at 00:55:31
From: sher, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
27690 |
|
|
Date: December 22, 2021 at 05:28:40
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
Ryan, of all the writings you've shared here over the
years from Gurdjieff's angle of offering either directly,
from his own hand, or by others inspired by it, this is
one I can say I genuinely resonate with... ;) Thank you
for sharing... ;)
IMHO humanity is, yes, the literal living bridge between
the energy of Infinite Love/Spirit currently arising, and
Mother Earth, currently in such a state of abused
chaos...with our collective and individual choices,
whether from understanding of wholism/balance needing to
be enacted, or based in complete ignorance of how we're
charged with redefining how we exist upon her...telling
the tale every moment of whether the sanctity of that
living bridge will be fulfilled in a renewal of willing,
educated, conscious balance, or not...
To our great shame, so many see this precious planet as
merely a temporary throwaway backdrop for a polarity-
based passion play from which can emerge only one group
of "winners," who will then graduate Elsewhere and leave
its wasteland to the "losers"... *erp*
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27693] [27694] [27695] [27698] [27700] [27701] [27699] [27696] [27702] |
|
27693 |
|
|
Date: December 22, 2021 at 11:59:19
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
URL: https://www.gurdjieff.org/ |
|
happy for your concurrence...here's a followup"
Gurdjieff and Ecology
We did not come into this world. We came out of it, like buds out of branches and butterflies out of cocoons. We are a natural product of this earth, and if we turn out to be intelligent beings, then it can only be because we are fruits of an intelligent earth, which is nourished in turn by an intelligent system of energy. –Lyall Watson
James George
T
o make a case for regarding Gurdjieff as a father of modern ecology, while possible, would be unnecessarily provocative. It is probably closer to the mark to claim that his work has been a major unacknowledged influence contributing to the paradigm shift that includes the environmental movement and all other aspects of the more holistic approach that is obviously beginning to permeate contemporary culture.
The “ecological age,” as Father Thomas Berry has christened it, can be said to have begun in 1968 with an Apollo astronaut’s photograph of the earth as we had never seen it before, a beautiful blue planet hanging in the black emptiness of space. That image changed human consciousness. It showed us our only home, with no political boundaries—one fragile, integral spaceship of life. It made the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Environment possible. But, forty years earlier, Gurdjieff had been on an Apollo mission of the imagination that was much more than science fiction. He had been writing about Beelzebub observing the earth from space, earth’s role in this “ray of creation,” the laws that apply at every level of order, and the way human behavior looks to a being of higher intelligence who can see human foibles from a cosmic perspective in a time frame of thousands of years.
In science, the key ecological concept of the biosphere is usually attributed to Gurdjieff’s Russian countryman, V. I. Vernadsky, whose paper on the subject was published in Leningrad in 1926. Ten years earlier, in the same city, Gurdjieff had outlined to p. D. Ouspensky and others in their group his vision of organic life as a sensitive film covering the planet and interacting with forces having their origins in the other planets, the sun and the stars.
In his careful record of these early teachings, Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff as saying: “Organic life is the organ of perception of the earth and it is at the same time an organ of radiation.”[1] “In nature everything is connected and everything is alive.”[2] “Nature transmits to us through our impressions the energy by which we live and move and have our being.”[3] In Beelzebub’s Tales ... Gurdjieff later develops this idea further as a “Trogoautoegocratic process,” the interlinking of all life in a chain of interdependence of eating and being eaten, or “reciprocal maintenance,” through which energies involve and evolve in a cosmic circulation of descending and ascending forces. An earlier epoch might have called these forces “angels,” and a later time may consider some other hypothesis to explain why the universe does not simply run down entropically through the passage of time, which Gurdjieff calls merciless.
As Gurdjieff’s Kurdish philosopher, Atarnakh, puts it, “In all probability, there exists in the World some law of the reciprocal maintenance of everything existing. Obviously, our lives serve also for maintaining something great or small in the World.”[4]
To show us our place in the great scheme of Nature is not enough to wake us up. It can remain no more than an ecological or cosmological idea, filed in mental memory, unconnected with our feelings and our being. To be touched by our situation and that of the earth, we need not only to “know” it, we need to experience our real living connection with Nature, our essential relationship. When we are truly related to Nature, we too can share in the “sudden expansion of awareness” that Edgar Mitchell felt when he saw earthrise from the moon. Nothing less than a taste of that awareness will affect our actions. Nothing less will change anything or reduce the harm we are inflicting on the earth.
Gurdjieff makes this point early in Beelzebub’s Tales, in a chapter significantly called “Becoming Aware of Genuine Being-Duty.” Here Beelzebub tells his grandson (and us) that in order to prepare himself to be able to fulfill the obligations of a responsible three-brained being:
It is indispensably necessary that every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendor, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence. Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts—as if they were conscious—that if they hinder your general functioning, they, in the period of your responsible age, not only cannot fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence of which they are part, will not be able to be a good servant of our common endless creator, and by that will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and existence.[5]
Beelzebub is tireless in explaining to his grandson how the “unbecoming” behavior of humans on planet Earth is disturbing the natural order:
And when I had ... begun to observe and to study their strange psyche, only then did I finally understand to which end Great Nature herself ... always patiently adapts ... to everything, and concerning this, the following personal opinion was formed in me.
That if these favorites of yours would at least properly ponder over this and serve Nature honestly in this respect, then perhaps their being-self-perfecting might as a consequence proceed automatically even without the participation of their consciousness and in any case, the poor Nature of their ill-fated planet would also not have to ‘puff and blow’ in order to adapt Herself to remain within the common-cosmic harmony.
But unfortunately for everything existing in the Megalocosmos, there is no honesty in your favorites even in respect of their fulfillment of their duties to Nature.[6]
And, in an earlier passage:
[As] they created for themselves all sorts of conditions of external being-existence thanks to which the quality of their radiations went steadily from bad to worse, Great Nature was compelled gradually to transform their common presences by means of various compromises and changes, in order to regulate the quality of the vibrations which they radiated.... For the same reason, Great Nature ... gradually increased the numbers of beings there.[7]
When we consider the tremendous contribution that the population explosion is making to the ecological crisis, it may be of special interest to consider Gurdjieff’s highly original views on the causes of the growth in the number of people on this planet. Where others have seen the population explosion as a function of the improvement in health services and nutrition, and the reduction in mortality, Gurdjieff proposes that the fundamental reason is that Nature needed more people because the quality of the vibrations of humans on this planet had degenerated to the point where Nature had to make up in quantity for the decline in quality. In Beelzebub’s Tales, he attributes to this:
Concerning the absence in [their] psyche ... of a cognized need of absorbing these higher sacred cosmic substances, ... [and] together with the cessation of the intentional absorption of these definite cosmic substances necessary for the arising and existence of higher being-parts, there disappeared from their common presences not only the striving itself for perfection but also the possibility of what is called ‘intentional contemplativeness,’ which is just the principal factor for the assimilation of these sacred cosmic substances, then from that time on ... Nature gradually had to adapt herself to arrange that for each of them, ... such ‘unexpectednesses’ [shocks] should occur.[8]
These extracts from Gurdjieff’s writings also show how he holds that Nature tries to maintain a homoeostatic environment favorable for life—just as James Lovelock believes, in his Gaia hypothesis. Recently, however, Lovelock has said that he thinks that Gaia can easily cope with anything we humans may do to hurt her. In this respect, Lovelock[9] seems to be considerably more optimistic than Gurdjieff—and most scientists—about the earth’s capacity to withstand the depredations of human beings over the long term. Lovelock’s Gaian colleague, Lynn Margulis,[10] is closer to Gurdjieff in her description of the nature and role of the film of organic life.
Many influences have been important in the development of modern ecology and the environmental movement, but I think both may owe much more of a debt to Gurdjieff than has so far been generally acknowledged. A case in point is the story of E. F. Schumacher, whose Small is Beautiful[11] was as seminal in the ‘seventies as, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring[12] in the ‘sixties. What is not widely known is that Schumacher was for many years a friend of John G. Bennett, from whom he had a detailed exposition of the Gurdjieff Work. This is perfectly clear from Schumacher’s last work, A Guide for the Perplexed,[13] in which Gurdjieff’s ideas appear on virtually every page.
Another case is the writings of Carlos Castaneda. Any Gurdjieffian will recognize, especially in his later works, that Castaneda was an astute student of Gurdjieff’s and Ouspensky’s books, to say nothing of the fact that Lord Pentland and other leading members of the Gurdjieff Foundation in California met with him on several occasions prior to 1984. In the introduction to The Power of Silence,[14] Castaneda describes using body awareness as an instrument of knowing in order to face the riddles of mind, heart and spirit.
At the end of Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff describes the river of life dividing into two; one stream terminates in the crevices of the earth and is lost forever, while the other stream empties into the boundless ocean. Then he adds:
As long as we remain passive, not only shall we have inevitably to serve solely as a means for Nature’s “involutionary and evolutionary construction,” but also for the rest of our lives we shall have to submit slavishly to every caprice of all sorts of blind events....
[But] even for you, it is not yet too late....
The foresight of Just Mother Nature consists in the given case in this, that the possibility is given to us, in certain inner and outer conditions, to cross over from one stream into the other.[15]
By his own account, in The Herald of Coming Good, Gurdjieff’s own search began early in his life with “an ‘irrepressible striving’ to understand clearly the precise significance, in general, of the life process on earth of all the outward forms of breathing creatures and, in particular, the aim of human life in the light of this interpretation.”[16] A satisfactory exposition of Gurdjieff’s life had to wait until 1991 when James Moore’s biography appeared. In it, Moore concluded his note on “Gurdjieff as Proto-Ecologist” in this way:
Gurdjieff disdained slogans and tendered to the ecological movement nothing comparable to Albert Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life or Ernst Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. He was neither concerned with a pantheistic liberal theology nor a utilitarian aesthetic. His vision was not teleocentric, still less anthropocentric; he envisioned nothing less than a dynamic and sacred universe with all its relationships implacably submitted to the Law of Three and all transformations to the Law of Seven. Nevertheless his intellectual triumph was to reserve within this awesome schema a plausible avenue for a man’s evolution in terms of being.[17]
□
Following a long and distinguished career as a Canadian diplomat, James George turned his attention to ecological issues, playing a leading role in the adoption of a moratorium on high seas whaling and in the international effort in 1991 to extinguish the Kuwaiti oil fires. His books include Asking for the Earth: Waking Up to the Spiritual/ Ecological Crisis,[18] The Little Green Book on Awakening,[19] and Last Call: Awaken to Consciousness.[20] He has been active in the Gurdjieff Work for seven decades and was a close student of Mme. de Salzmann. This text is from is from his book, Asking for the Earth: Waking Up to the Spiritual/Ecological Crisis, pp. 128–132.
[1] p. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (1949) New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., p. 138.
[2] Ibid., p. 322.
[3] Ibid., p. 181.
[4] G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950) NY: Harcourt, Brace, pp. 1094–1095.
[5] Ibid., p. 78.
[6] Ibid., pp. 1106–1107.
[7] Ibid., p. 106.
[8] Ibid., p. 783.
[9] James Lovelock (1919–) is an independent scientist and environmentalist. He is best known for his Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
[10] Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) was an evolutionary theorist and biologist, science author, and educator, and was the primary proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution.
[11] E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973) Blond & Briggs.
[12] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962) Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
[13] E. F. Schumacher, A Guide to the Perplexed (1977) New York: Harper Perennial.
[14] Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence (1987) NY: Simon and Schuster.
[15] Beelzebub’s Tales, pp. 1231–1232.
[16] G. I. Gurdjieff, The Herald of Coming Good: First Appeal to Contemporary Humanity (1933) Paris: Privately printed; (1971) New York: Weiser, p. 13.
[17] James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth (1991) Element Books Ltd., p. 344.
[18] James George, Asking for the Earth: Waking Up to the Spiritual/Ecological Crisis (1995) Rockport, MA: Element, Inc.
[19] James George, The Little Green Book on Awakening (2009) Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press.
[20] James George, Last Call: Awaken to Consciousness (2016) Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press.
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27694] [27695] [27698] [27700] [27701] [27699] [27696] [27702] |
|
27694 |
|
|
Date: December 22, 2021 at 15:33:02
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
Okay! Thanks for sharing, again... ;) While I can't say
for sure, because I don't feel enough personal resonance
w/Gurdjieff's manner of offering to hang with it long
enough to grok what the actual core, bottom-line
metaphysical/spiritual truths are, that his oeuvre as
well as his followers convey(s) in that inimitable shared
style & from that contextual frame of approach...my sense
is that if I could do so, at the end I would find them to
be at least somewhat parallel w/my own... ;)
That being said...what I offered in my post above, to
illustrate how that particular Gurdjieff-based writing by
Ms. de Salzmaan lines up w/my own spiritual truth around
how deeply our own spiritual self-awareness/evolution
impacts what transpires for Gaia, does seem however to be
where my personal resonance begins and ends, in this
instance... ;)
As we've agreed that we know, every single individual's
perfect curriculum and timing for discovering the need
for, and enacting, sacred conscious self-awareness is
entirely unique to each...and, praise be to all that's
holy, the Divine/Infinite Love's scope of wisdom ensures
that whatever each person personally requires in
supportive feedback to be able to accomplish that, will
inevitably and without fail appear for them, in whatever
form(s) will most powerfully serve at the time...
My own process in this way, while having once felt hugely
drawn to offerings that mirrored my awareness of
metaphysical truth as it exists within that specifically
unique context of higher-intellect/higher-mind has
completely condensed way, waaaay down into far simpler
and, for me, far more expansive-feeling contexts of
spiritual truth as Heart/Oneness wisdom... That not being
what I see as a "better way" than Gurdjieff's or any
other's! Merely where all my years spent in that space
eventually fell away into...
Sure would be cool someday if you felt like approaching
the endeavor of summarizing his bottom lines toward a
clearer comparison...but hey, who knows what the next few
hours, let alone tomorrow will bring to keep things busy,
right?...lol... ;D
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27695] [27698] [27700] [27701] [27699] [27696] [27702] |
|
27695 |
|
|
Date: December 22, 2021 at 19:28:19
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
i find that interesting since your presentation style is so "gurdjieffian"...lol...
the simple summarization? we are part of an interdependent system, which requires us to participate consciously to best maximize the possibilities of maintaining and evolving said system, both in the micro and macro sense...nature has bent over backwards to accommodate our ignorance and indulgences, and its striving to remind us of our forgotten duties and powers has never ceased...and yet, there is still hope...
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27698] [27700] [27701] [27699] [27696] [27702] |
|
27698 |
|
|
Date: December 23, 2021 at 05:28:07
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
What?
Okay, read what you just shared...and I think I know what
to offer back, but...
"i find that interesting since your presentation style is
so 'gurdjieffian'...lol..."?
...this from you takes me aback a bit. lol Could you
maybe clarify how you mean that? Do you mean just in
terms of my writing style being densely
verbose/intellectual-seeming, as you feel G.'s is, or
that the contextual substance of what I'm actually saying
feels similar? Asking as that'd factor into how I'm
sussing this, & thanks... ;)
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27700] [27701] [27699] |
|
27700 |
|
|
Date: December 23, 2021 at 11:40:16
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
|
lol...meaning your writing style necessitates a careful and focused reading to get to the core of what you are presenting...and also, generally, you are aligned with georgi's understanding, which, since it is based on truth, is not surprising...
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27701] |
|
27701 |
|
|
Date: December 23, 2021 at 13:37:34
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
Okay! lol Thanks, ryan, that clarifies for me and was
very kindly put. ;)
And what's also clearer for me, now, after taking in what
you offered to summarize G.'s best possible, is indeed
that we're both speaking of the Oneness/Interdependence
of Creation, just coming from hugely contrasting contexts
of experience and understanding of that Oneness... ;)
And now I'm wondering...how far to go in attempting to
throw words around exactly what those contrasts
*are*...lol... See, cuz this brings me back full-circle
(again!) with my years-long intention of writing/sharing
my personal spiritual journey, here, its unique
twists/turns/evolutions of context...because I so rarely
see anyone sharing notes of their own, here or elsewhere,
that feel anything whatsoever like mine. And unless I can
lay it out as it's been, I'll never connect with others
who resonate, with whom I could share those angles of
experiential common ground... ;)
I think maybe the briefest note I could offer is that, to
me, Gurdjieff's approach sources from spirituality *of
the higher mind,* and that *the work* he refers to as
key...which I understand as how he frames the conscious
self-awareness process...is presented in a way that's
highly intellectual and *conceptual* in nature... This is
perfect and of immense value for anyone whose process
happens to be beautifully *aligned* with words coming
from that specific energetic scope, as support and
inspiration... ;)
I have no idea, obviously, whether this is/has been true
for anyone else...but my process has always involved
experiencing, and having to find ways to heal from &
reconfigure sanity from, deep lifelong emotional/physical
trauma...which at a certain point drove me elsewhere. I
savored higher-mind metaphysical/spiritual teaching and
writing for many years -- and in truth that's all there
really was available then, as our understanding of the
core of spirituality was/is slowly evolving... ;) But
when all the hell I'd suppressed for so many years from
all that came flooding up and out, smack into the middle
of my everyday life & psyche in a way I could no longer
finesse to the side...nothing conceptual nor intellectual
spiritually, nor classic psychotherapy approaches, held
any whiff of experiential hands-on value, or hope of
healing, in any way for me...
Hearing of Matt Kahn's offerings, experiencing them as
they've evolved over 10 years or so, are the first I've
ever come upon that illuminate clearest, superstition-
less understanding of heart-sourced/Infinite-Love-
centered consciousness and spirituality...and the closest
energy to what I feel Yeshua's actual teachings revolved
around. By its all-inclusive nature of all
facets/expressions of the human psyche & experience that
could appear within the conscious self-awareness process,
it exists entirely outside anything dualistic or
polarity-based (the third reality that is beyond both!),
embracing both and judging nothing, and offers clear
guidance on how to translate & integrate that *living
substance of what Oneness/Infinite Love IS* into our
human/egoic lesser minds, hearts and realities, which
cannot help but heal *everything*...
Perhaps others whose current soulgrowth theme is that of
navigating bigtime trauma *do* find exactly what they
need to catalyze their healing within
conceptual/intellectual spirituality, and the wisdom it
offers their process! Mine just happened to require being
taken Elsewhere... ;)
Heyyyy...lol...I think I've actually pulled this off, in
short...managed a chunk that might decently summarize
how/why my own orientation can feel/appear so different
than Gurdjieff's, especially to me!...although I see more
clearly now that we are, in fact, offering Notes on the
same outrageous Oneness phenomenon of life within Gaia,
simply from very different angles... ;D
Thanks ryan! ;D ;D ;D
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
27699 |
|
|
Date: December 23, 2021 at 10:32:29
From: Nevada, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
I'm pretty sure ryan just paid you a compliment shadow.
Our relationship to the "mothership" does not always
easily translate into our earthly "language" but one
has little choice other than to try.
It's becoming my understanding that we are "all" in
this "life experience" together and all of us were
brave and true to even seek such a difficult
incarnation.
The earth is a well equipped stage of life designed to
bring out "our" collective best performance. The best
actors don't willingly trash the performance hall which
is literally our stairway to heaven.
Season't best wishes to all my fellow earth boppers.
Lee
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
27696 |
|
|
Date: December 22, 2021 at 20:48:56
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
i forgot to add this story...
Our expedition of twelve reached the first camp in time to winter there.... Exhausted and famished, I stopped to camp. At that time the cattle had not yet been brought up to Meadowbrook, and I found nothing to eat. Then on the slope right opposite me I saw an old rock rat come out of his hole. It’s something between a field mouse and a groundhog. It came out to warm itself in the sun. Picking up a stone, I smashed its skull with a lucky throw, cooked it over a fire of rhododendrons, and devoured the leathery meat....
A month later, as I was about to start up the mountain again, I was called before the guides’ tribunal to answer for the murder of the rat. How they learned about it I’ll never know. The law makes no exceptions. Access to the mountain above Meadowbrook was denied me for three years. After that I could ask to leave with the first caravan on the condition that I make reparations for any damage my action might have caused. It was a numbing blow....
Finally, the day arrived I proudly carried with me in a cage a fat rock rat which I had captured easily and which I would free as we went by the place where I had killed the other one—for I had to repair the damage. Alas, the damage had just begun to show. As we left Meadowbrook just at sunrise, a terrifying sound filled the valley. The entire side of the mountain, which was not then cut through by the waterfall, collapsed and crashed down in an avalanche of rocks and mud. A cataract of water, mixed with blocks of ice and stone, burst out of the tip of the glacier which hung down to the upper slope, and wore great gullies in the sides of the mountain. The trail, which at that time climbed after leaving Meadowbrook to cross the slope much higher up, was obliterated for a considerable distance.... I was not allowed to leave until a commission of guides had determined the causes of the catastrophe. A week later I was called before the commission, which declared that I was responsible for the disaster, and ... would have to repair the damage.
I was dumbfounded. But they explained to me how it had all happened, according to the findings of the commission. They made the statement impartially, objectively, and today I would even say leniently, but categorically. The old rat I had killed fed principally on a species of wasp common in that spot. But beyond a certain age a rock rat is no longer agile enough to catch wasps on the wing. Therefore he lived for the most part on the sick or weak insects who dragged themselves along the ground and could barely fly. In this way he destroyed the wasps that were malformed or carriers of disease. His unsuspecting intervention protected the colonies of these insects from dangerous afflictions spread by heredity or contagion. Once the rat was dead, these afflictions spread rapidly and, by the following spring, there was scarcely a wasp left in the region. These wasps, visiting flowers in search of honey, also fertilized them. Without the wasps, a large number of plants which play an important part in holding the terrain in place □
René Daumal, Mount Analogue (1986) Boston: Shambhala, pp. 100–102. The book was never completed, hence no period after “terrain in place ”.
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[27702] |
|
27702 |
|
|
Date: December 23, 2021 at 13:39:06
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Needs of the Earth |
|
|
...and that's a wonderful, perfect-illustration story of
the far-reaching realities of Oneness/Interdependence,
right there! Thank you for sharing it! ;D
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
[
Spiritual ] [ Main Menu ] |