ROEL said:
Remember what Gurdjieff wrote about the very knowledgeable Persian who expounded on Western writing, showing the shallowness of said writings.
I think I know what you're saying. If I may elaborate this idea, you are then invited to say whether I'm on the right track. :)
Personally, I would call Gurdjieff "Essentialist" as a way to relate his own fiction with his serious teaching.
Somewhat like comparing these two ideas: "Words are not monotonous, linear phenomena crawling in straight lines across a page, like a monotonous and wide-spreading sea, which is great in extent but shallow in depth..." rather, "...meanings are intricately interwoven, as in a delicate Persian carpet."
This would also make sense of his often alleged condemnation of shallow, secular ideologies that undermine genuine religious spiritual values.
For anyone who already agrees with the above, there's probably no need to read further, but if interested, here's a couple quoted passages from a book, referenced later, that may help clarify what I mean by the 'essentialist' quality. Following the quotes, I'll offer my take on how G might suggest we evaluate our choices of fiction.
Gurdjieff’s writings as a whole—especially the dialogical style and structure of all his writings in their various forms where significant public issues and meanings are intricately interwoven, as in a delicate Persian carpet, into the fabric of everyday personal conversations within and across all the “three brains” of his invented personages — present an ingenious and creative way of exploring and advancing the sociological imagination in comparative and transdisciplinary trajectories.
Gurdjieff was an ashokh. His text is not confined to the printed word, nor even to the oral tradition he left behind, but is also written in the physical movements, mental exercises, emotional dances, and the music of a legacy that radically challenges the narrow and dualistic Western notions of the self and society, and thereby sociology. His mystical tales—linking the most intimate personal troubles with ever larger, world-historical, and even cosmically-conscious, public issues concerning humanity as a whole — are highly innovative and colorful exercises in alternative Eastern sociological imaginations meeting their ultimate micro and macro horizons.
IOW, Gurdjieff wasn't concerned with any kind or type of B.S. He wanted everything he said, did and wrote to communicate something meaningful and be relevant to life - our personal life and life in a wider context.
To contrast his own teaching from other mystical paths in pursuit of human spiritual awakening and development, Gurdjieff reportedly distinguished three traditional mystical ways of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi from one another (Ouspensky 1949:44), depending on whether the physical, the emotional, or the intellectual center of the human organism is respectively exercised as a launching ground to attain ultimate, all-round spiritual development of “man’s hidden possibilities” (47). He argued that these three one-sided ways toward self-perfection are more prone to failure since the required trainings in each take longer (thus are often unrealizable during a single lifetime) and their adepts become often vulnerable to habituating forces upon reentry into social life. In contrast, Gurdjieff reportedly advocated an alternative “fourth way” approach characterized by the parallel development of the physical, emotional, and intellectual centers of the organism not in retreat from, but amid, everyday life.
My take after comparing descriptions of Gurdjieff's own writings with descriptions of his Fourth Way teaching is that Gurdjieff wouldn't trash any work other than his own; rather he'd probably just see the usefulness in more limited terms whereas his would be more holistic in nature, thus more useful.
As a result, G would probably advise that we choose our fiction on the same basis that we choose his Fourth Way: as something that, when we "come back to reality" after reading or working, we are much less "vulnerable to habituating forces" of everyday life. This might be another way to explain why reading matters.
Just my thoughts. Other views also welcomed.
Full quoted passages and phrases in quotes referenced from Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study, Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Palgrave Macmillan, (2009, 2012)_https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0230102026
