Re: Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology
So I finished Gurdjieff and Hypnosis. I quite liked how he laid out various parts of Gurdjieff’s cosmology in more or less plain english, including his theories of the worlds, divine creation, and the laws that govern the cosmos which scale down to govern human behavior also. I wasn’t really quite sold on the proposal to toss all of what he said re: cosmology out. I mean it may not at face value reflect what we observe about reality in some ways, but one thing that stuck out for me from Gurdjieff’s writings were his repetions of the Hermetic maxim that the microcosmos and macrocosmos are analogous structurally. This was epitomized in Gurdjieff’s epiphany in Life is only Real when he concluded that he was God, with the only difference being scale. So reading G’s cosmology while understanding the types of filters in G’s thinking, as well as some of his “scatterbrained tricks” (his words, not mine) in his writing to hide certain ideas and concepts may still yield helpful information on psychology.
As Tamdgidi points out in some of his re-tellings of Beelzebub’s Tales, often Gurdjieff is distracting you with one thing while trying to convey the truth of something altogether quite different. This is a classic hypnotic technique, by the way: distracting the critical faculty while simultaneously feeding information to the subconscoius in subtle ways.
A more or less concrete example of this was given in the book Gurdjieff and Hypnosis, when Tamdgidi discusses the story G related of the earth’s formation. Essentially a comet struck it, creating the moon and a smaller satellite, which drastically altered the types of energies the beings on earth needed to generate to maintain that system. So the Kundabuffer organ (essentially an instrument inducing people to life in sleep and hypnosis) was installed by Archangels so the system would be maintained, but at the cost of habituating people to sleep long after the organ was eventually removed. Tamdgidi’s understanding of this story was that it in fact relates to the functioning of the sexual center prematurely, and how sensitive its development is to shocks (either through chastity past what is deemed reasonable, or premature sexualization) that can cause a wrong working of that energy in the growing organism.
This is one example, and in the context of Beelzebub’s Tales (where it is discussed on the forum) often numerous connections between superficially cosmic descriptions of processes or instruments in actuallity are describing the microcosm in some form or other. I believe the story of the initial creation is one such example of this; the “initial” creation being the STS path where there is no outside world (it is ignored or shut out) to counteract the “gravity” of God, thereby causing the world of God to gradually implode and collapse into a black hole. Contrasting this is the updated STO path, where one is actively giving to the outside world (instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or shutting it out) and creating. Just a theory. I mean one could huff and puff “if God’s so perfect he should have got creation right the first time”, but I think that ignores the iterative nature of creation. Organisms and psychological archetypes evolve over time (and some are simply tossed out), and imo it makes sense for a similar troubleshooting and trial and error in the higher organizing principles or laws of the universe.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell when reading Gurdjieff it is meant to be taken as cosmology or as an allegory. The prime goal of Beelzebub’s Tales was, in G’s words, to shatter the illusions we have of the world. It was only with the incorporation of Meetings with Remarkable Men that something was to help take its place and plant a seed in people (the seed being interest in Gurdjieff and his teachings, go figure).
But, at the same time, one can realize the main flaw that prevented Gurdjieff from understanding the real nature of some phenomena: his insistence that all was matter. And this wasn't some lack of terminology problem, or anything like what lilies suggested above; it is clear and unequivocal; and for G, "data" was matter.
That kind of assumption of G’s definitely can put blinders on the ability to see reality clearly. One thing that always bemused me about Gurdjieff was he has literally nothing to say about spirit attachments, in spite of the fact that his experiments with hypnosis would certainly have suggested that as an avenue of investigation given his exposure to Islam (which is obsessed with the Jinn and spiritual obsession).
One of the goals of the "Gurjieff and Hypnosis" book, as stated by Tamdgidi in the introduction, is to determine to what extent Gurdjieff was using hypnotic techniques both in direct interactions AND in his writings. I suppose that the same question would apply to his responses to questions by Ouspensky that were recorded in ISOTM. And so, of course, one wonders if his students, who spread his work around, were - so to say - in his thrall? Reading this hermenuetic study pretty much lays out what WAS in his work, both implicit and explicit. Because, truly, considering what else was available at the time, one has difficulty imagining why his ideas got such traction.
I was quite taken back when Tamdidi pointed out that Gurdjieff more or less did take people under his wing during his early teaching career and hypnotize them in ways to serve as fodder for his own psychological experimentation. Supposedly he did help give them the keys so they could consciously overcome it, but this really jarred with my view of him. Before, I couldn’t fathom him doing that to someone he took under his wing as a Fourth Way student. I felt a little betrayed, although I know he ostensibly had the interests of humanity at heart, and that he WAS troubled by this behavior he forced himself to undergo to acquire more data.
I tried to include a bit more information about what is said in the book, and hopefully what Tamdgidi says and my own thoughts on things are easy to tell apart.
