Gurdjieff didn't learn, how to use properly spiritual techniques?

Hitsu

Padawan Learner
PDF: _http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/danger.pdf

site: _http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/index.htm
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page 11
if you follow and analyze some of the techniques an d tactics employed by Gurdjieff, you can see how they were half-learnt. There is a great difference between learning a technique and knowing when to use it. You can learn the best technique in the world, but if you apply it at the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances, it will fall to the ground. (23)

Note (23):
(23) Omar Ali-Shah The Sufi Tradition in the West (New York: Alif, 1994), p. 225.

Omar Ali-Shah:

Omar Ali-Shah (Hindi: ओमर अली शाह, Urdu: عمر علی شاہ‎) was a prominent exponent of modern Naqshbandi Sufism who lived from 1922 to 2005. He wrote a number of books on the subject, and was head of a large number of Sufi groups, particularly in Latin America, Europe and Canada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Ali-Shah

page 1
The methods and techniques employed by Gurdjieff in his teaching, especially the difficult physical and emotional demands he made on his students, adversely affected
many of them. Some students experienced psychological breakdown, others the dis-solution of their marriage. Gurdjieff was even accused of contributing to the suicide of certain students, although a causal connection was never ultimately proven


Opinions?
 
Well, first of all, I am sure that Gurdjieff was not perfect and may have made 'mistakes' too regarding his students.

However, if a student becomes stuck and suffers the consequences of his actions - that is hardly something where the teacher is to blame.

A dissolution of marriage or even a 'psychological breakdown' can also be positive stepping stones on the Path - if the marriage was no longer beneficial, for example. Facing our own 'demons' for the first time may seem like a 'psychological breakdown' at times, but it is also a necessary step.
 
Hitsu said:
PDF: http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/danger.pdf

site: http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/index.htm
----

page 11
if you follow and analyze some of the techniques an d tactics employed by Gurdjieff, you can see how they were half-learnt. There is a great difference between learning a technique and knowing when to use it. You can learn the best technique in the world, but if you apply it at the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances, it will fall to the ground. (23)

Note (23):
(23) Omar Ali-Shah The Sufi Tradition in the West (New York: Alif, 1994), p. 225.

Omar Ali-Shah:

Omar Ali-Shah (Hindi: ओमर अली शाह, Urdu: عمر علی شاہ‎) was a prominent exponent of modern Naqshbandi Sufism who lived from 1922 to 2005. He wrote a number of books on the subject, and was head of a large number of Sufi groups, particularly in Latin America, Europe and Canada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Ali-Shah

page 1
The methods and techniques employed by Gurdjieff in his teaching, especially the difficult physical and emotional demands he made on his students, adversely affected
many of them. Some students experienced psychological breakdown, others the dis-solution of their marriage. Gurdjieff was even accused of contributing to the suicide of certain students, although a causal connection was never ultimately proven


Opinions?
I recommend becoming familiar with Herald of Coming Good. Gurdjieff was 'teaching' in order to acquire data for his own understanding, which he passed on in All and Everything, which, in my opinion, is the manual of G's real teaching.

Kris
 
[quote author=Hitsu]
Opinions?
[/quote]

Here are some facts and opinions.

Omar Ali Shah is the elder brother of the more "famous" Idries Shah. Idries Shah acquired a large following after Gurdjieff's death by claiming to be an emissary from the Central Asian Sufi tradition from which Gurdjieff had ostensibly obtained his teachings. There is evidence indicating significant portions of Gurdjieff's teachings have close parallels with old Zoroastrian religion which had influenced Sufism as well. For a more detailed treatment of Gurdjieff's "sources", I would recommend John Bennett's "Gurdjieff: The Making of a New World". Bennett was a close student of Gurdjieff spending considerable time with G towards the end of G's life. He also knew Turkish and had independent contact with several dervish and Sufi communities in Central Asia where he was invited to witness and participate in their practices in their original setting - in contrast to other western writers who were exposed only to Sufism exported to the west by the Shahs and other teachers. I think Bennett's work is a must read for anyone who has sincere interest in learning more about the sources of Gurdjieff's teachings.

Coming back to Idries Shah, he gained large popularity in the west by posing as the person who could give the west the "real deal", doing better than what Gurdjieff had done. Regarding the claims of his origin - that he descended from the line of prophet Mohammed (which obviously applies to his elder brother as well), do read James Moore's short piece titled "Neo-Sufism- The Case of Idries Shah" at _http://www.hermes-press.com/S_shah.htm.

As to the fruits of Idries Shah's "work", there is not much that I have found so far other than putting out enigmatic stories (which are thousands of years old in Asia) about the character Mullah Nasruddin for consumption of western audiences. He persuaded Bennett to hand over a thriving 4th Way school at Coombe Springs, promptly threw Bennett out of the scene once the "papers were signed" and destroyed the school.

My "opinion" is that Idries Shah was far from what he posed as being. He was a spiritual businessman who saw an opportunity for grabbing a piece of land in the prime spiritual real estate of the west through exploiting the Gurdjieff legacy and was successful in doing that.

I have not done a lot of research on Omar Ali Shah, Idries's elder brother. He ostensibly kept a much lower profile and had a different approach towards introducing his brand of Sufism to the west. As far as his criticism of Gurdjieff, Hitsu has picked up something as the title of this thread in a manner reminiscent of how a tabloid newspaper would pick out a sensationalistic headline. In the PDF document that is linked in Hitsu's post, there is an analysis of other people's experiences with Gurdjieff, including James Webb, John Bennett, Fritz Peters etc with the conclusion that yes, some students were adversely affected by the methods employed by Gurdjieff but a proper investigative analysis of the individual cases did not find Gurdjieff culpable. This is rounded off with Omar Ali Shah's assessment.

Did Gurdjieff make mistakes regarding his dealings with people? From the evidence that I have read about elsewhere, the answer would be yes. He was not perfect or God. The more relevant question is what was his record regarding helping versus harming people? In that regard, his record speaks for itself. Thousands of people crossed Gurdjieff's path - many of them were well established people with significant public presence. Most were benefited; some left but how many chose to demonize him? Bennett wrote about Gurdjieff's methods - and how they changed over time - and how G might have allegorically alluded to this change of method through the stories in Beelzebub's Tales in his commentaries on the book. Gurdjieff experimented with human psychology - he was a maverick and trail blazer in this regard doing this work single-handedly. His work is now being corroborated by experiments in cognitive psychology - experiments conducted through the expenditure of large sums of tax payer dollars and conducted by numerous experimenters.

As a note, Hitsu previously started a thread on "solar and lunar astral bodies" citing Samael Aun Weor here which is in the New Age section of the forum. Omar Ali Shah is not that popular a figure in the esoteric landscape and from what I can gather, he did not make a career out of criticizing Gurdjieff either. The fact that Hitsu picked up on a paragraph and presented it in a way which questioned Gurdjieff's efficacy as a teacher without any significant data to support this in a forum that states in its guidelines that it is based in part on Gurdjieff's teachings is interesting. If Hitsu is sincere, hopefully he would do more research on such matters on his own in the future before throwing out tabloid like headlines.
 
I also think Gurdjieff did some mistakes but they were on purpose, for what I see and have read Gurjieff never played completely with the rules of this world, he tried to understand them but more importantly, why people made these rules and how they interacted with them. One example is the testimonies of a lot of people that Gurjieff sometimes tried to teach a lesson in a very eccentric way like, starting an orgy to then stop it abruptly and point to all of his students how easy and mechanically they felt for their sensations and emotions.

So if he was doing the work he knew that he was going to do mistakes, and that is an important part of the work, when you find the mistakes and what you are doing wrong through the mirrors and all types of feedback you can get, then you know what do to in a different manner. Like Putin says in an intervie, he asks that if it matters that we commit mistakes, then he replies to himself that the important part of this is acting immedietly on the consequences of our mistakes, that's what is important.

I also think Gurdjieff had acces to something few people in this planet has, for what I know Gurdjieff had a reunion with the heads of several religions in some sort of special place, when they reunited they shared the relevant teachings of their religions. So with this type of people you never know who's right, them or ourselves who understand less than they do.
 
How do we distinguish between Gurdjieff's -or any teachers- proper use and understanding of a technique or teaching and the use to which the student puts it? When one considers how many "I's" I bring to my teacher as their student, when one considers how each student identifies with a teacher and teaching to the advantage of their existing Egoic appetites, it's hard to establish objective lines of responsibility. As far as I can tell, any spiritual practice can have a disintegrating influence on the student merely by being inappropriate, or more commonly, because of how the student invests in it. The practice I use successfully for three weeks to my advantage can become irrelevant to my development very quickly without my recognizing it. The changing landscape of my motivations and understandings would make it awesomely difficult for my teacher to keep me on a perfectly even trajectory, and my expecting him or her to do that, while convenient to my sense of complacency and perhaps "devotion", seems unreasonable.

Was Gurdjeiff incompetant? or a rogue? I suspect not, but I don't see how he could do the work he was doing without some casualties along the way. Did his own drive to establish the Fourth Way make him indifferent to the occasional casualty? Or did he recognize the inevitability of such casualties? We'll prabably never know the answer. But certainly far greater good came from his work than harm, which is more than can be said for many...
 
Hitsu said:
PDF: _http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/danger.pdf

site: _http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/index.htm
----

page 11
if you follow and analyze some of the techniques an d tactics employed by Gurdjieff, you can see how they were half-learnt. There is a great difference between learning a technique and knowing when to use it. You can learn the best technique in the world, but if you apply it at the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances, it will fall to the ground. (23)

Note (23):
(23) Omar Ali-Shah The Sufi Tradition in the West (New York: Alif, 1994), p. 225.

Omar Ali-Shah:

Omar Ali-Shah (Hindi: ओमर अली शाह, Urdu: عمر علی شاہ‎) was a prominent exponent of modern Naqshbandi Sufism who lived from 1922 to 2005. He wrote a number of books on the subject, and was head of a large number of Sufi groups, particularly in Latin America, Europe and Canada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Ali-Shah

page 1
The methods and techniques employed by Gurdjieff in his teaching, especially the difficult physical and emotional demands he made on his students, adversely affected
many of them. Some students experienced psychological breakdown, others the dis-solution of their marriage. Gurdjieff was even accused of contributing to the suicide of certain students, although a causal connection was never ultimately proven


Opinions?

Hitsu, rather than simply quoting the opinions of another, why don't you give the forum a brief summary of Gurdjieffs material from your own perspective?
 
@everybody

Thanks for reply! :)

@obyvatel

The main point of my post was to discuss these informations, not to "make propaganda".
If you get it wrong - sorry for confusion :)

There is no secret. I just want truth. My background:
Hitsu said:
I discovered Laura "wave" about 3-4 years ago.
Still I haven't read it all :) It is in my TODO list (that's the problem with TODO list - they don't work :D).

I am very interested in Laura "world", in Gurdjieff and in gnosticism generally speaking.
They are some contradictions e.g. G. says that we don't have astral body and Cassiopeians says we have.
I want to discuss that on this board.

OK, so overall G. is pretty much legit, he just experimented with teaching in order to acquire data.
 
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