Approaching Infinity said:
SeekinTruth said:
I read another book by him a while ago about Toomer and Gurdjieff and take what he has to say with a large grain of salt. He got most of his ideas about the Work and Gurdjieff from Toomer while growing up. While Toomer was a very interesting, and what could be considered talented, person outside the Work, he never really got it when it came to Gurdjieff and the Work.
I think G sensed the possibilities in Toomer to be able to free himself completely from the normal societal influences and become a Man in the true sense of the word in Gurdjieffian terms. But Toomer was more entangled in the whole "racial" and other social limitations imposed by society than he understood. He seemed to have dedicated his life to trying to not be labeled and pigeon holed this way, but he approached it in the ordinary, non-Work ways, and remained entangled.
Just want to say that I read Taylor's book "Brothers in Elysium" and there was some definite bias there. However, his Gurdjieff biography is pretty balanced, IMO. Taylor takes a scholarly approach to documentation, so there isn't much fluff in this one.
OK, that's good to know. I haven't read the new biography, but I'll try to elaborate on what I think the crux of the matter is. It's good that Taylor wrote a well documented biography on G. It's all additional data. But profoundly objective interpretations and conclusions remain elusive when it comes to what G accomplished, I think. And this is also partly due to G himself, he had totally different views on everything, including what is commonly thought of as morality. And he didn't seem to care what people think of him personally, all these things were just subjective judgments for him.
In Toomer's case as well as many others (e.g. Orage, Ouspensky, etc.) G took a chance that they will be able to spread his message to a larger audience who in turn would continue to convey it to even larger numbers of people. G understood that each took only a part of the Work and mistook it as the whole thing. But I think he was looking at the big picture as he was experimenting with groups, trying different things and even failing to get a "real group" together, as he put it. But he was trying to set the stage that at some point a "nucleus of more conscious people" would form in the future who could actually pull off the almost impossible and pull humanity's buns out of the fire -- to actually change the course of history by utilizing the impetus he started.
This, I think, is the real value of G's Work. He was human with flaws like all of us. But he seemed to have a "superhuman" amount of energy (not unlike Laura
and the core group/QFG) to keep trying to set these things in motion. We should not get bogged down with the the all-too-human (and all-too-common) flaws of G, the man, and put it all in the proper context of his aim and what he accomplished as far as planting a seed with the hope of future growth and development.
I think we can all agree that what he was doing was, overall, done with beneficent motives, and a colossal amount of energy and effort and commitment. That is the true value of his life and efforts. And it IS amazing how much one man knew and understood at that time to be able to accomplish what he did. And he even knew and understood much more than he emphasized to his students because he did not see any benefit in doing so. He wanted to convey his message to humanity with enough of "the terror of the situation" intact without overwhelming nor attracting too much attention from the General Law to accomplish his Aim. He only gave obscure hints of more of the objective situation to some he estimated could handle it and further convey these clues. All of this also indicates a great amount of strength and control over himself AND responsibility to his life's mission.
In several threads over the years, there have been people who came here with Gurdjieff "work groups" backgrounds and tried to tell us that we have strayed from G's methods, etc. And Laura has said in these threads that the foundation of our Work is the Cassiopaea Experiment and the research that grows out of it. G's system is more akin to the layout of the rooms, but not the foundation upon which this Work is built. We also have experimented with what works and what doesn't and adjusted our approach and activities accordingly and still do. Without continuing research, experimentation and verification we cannot keep on the straight and narrow path. And Laura has pointed out that G did not "have the whole banana," but it is still quite astonishing how much of it he did have. G's particular approach and exercises, etc. do not work for most people (even those who are capable of Working), it may work for a some, but not all.
We HAVE experimented with G's approach and changed what was not working as we went along. This is to be expected. The shocks to sleeping man are crucial, but how they are administered is also crucial. Administering the shocks can't be done just for the sake of shocks but has to be done in a way to maximize the chance of having the desired effect of subjective man seeing himself in a much more objective light.
So in the big picture, all of these things about G AND our group are side issues. Neither G nor Laura nor anyone else should be idolized and put on a pedestal, nor dismissed out of hand because they are not perfect. Everything should be judged by the fruits. And we are all individually fallible and lack the level of Being individually to accomplish this Great Work. But the network group is MUCH less fallible and as a larger organism has that level of Being that we lack individually.
We should continue with our HEAVY responsibility and give it all we got to accomplish the almost impossible. Everything else is a distraction, although everything has valuable lessons.
