False Prophets and Messiahs, Teachers and Gurus
Cons and Cult Leaders
PART II
CULTS AND DETERIORATED SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS
‘Counterfeit gold exists only because
there is such a thing as real gold.’
Rumi
In many countries in the contemporary world, especially in the West, there are representatives of virtually every religion, spiritual teaching, cult and metaphysical system in existence. How can the earnest spiritual seeker distinguish between an authentic teaching and a cult, between a real and a false spiritual teacher? What are the salient characteristics of a genuine spiritual group or organization and what are the warning signs for detecting a spurious or misguided one? Psychiatrist Arthur Deikman provides a succinct working definition of a cult:
The word cult refers to a group led by a charismatic leader who has spiritual, therapeutic or messianic pretentions, and indoctrinates the members with his or her idosyncratic beliefs. Typically, members are dependent on the group for their emotional and financial needs and have broken off ties with those outside. The more complete the dependency and the more rigid the barriers separating members from non-believers, the more danger the cult will exploit and harm its members. (1)
(1) Arthur Deikman The Wrong Way Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p.1
The deterioration and distortion of a spiritual teaching over time is aptly illustrated by the history of Christianity following the death of Jesus as his message of love, forgiveness and redemption passed through successive stages of deformation:
(1) The being and enlightenment of Jesus Christ: Love and mercy
(2) The words and actions of Jesus as a teacher: Spiritual impact on those who came in contact with him during his lifetime
(3) Recollections of the direct followers of Jesus: The twelve disciples of Christ
(4) Selective oral and written records of his teaching: New Testament and Gnostic teachings
(5) Censorship and removal of the esoteric teachings: Council of Nicaea 325 A.D.
(6) Division and fragmentation: Roman Catholic church vs. Protestant church; splitting of Protestantism into competing sects
(7) Fanaticism; true believers vs. infidels: The Inquisition
From gurdjieffandfourthway.org/pdf/CULTS
Artemis44 â July 25, 2019 – Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
A friend of mine that was also a FOF member and left 10 years ago told me that the book The Wrong Way Home: Uncovering the Patterns of Cult Behavior in American Society by Arthur J. Deikman was very useful for him to understand why he joined the FOF.
This is the Amazon link:
amazon.com/Wrong-Way-Home-Uncovering-Patterns/dp/0807029149
This is from the bookâs commentary on Amazon:
âThe author, a psychiatrist, argues that cult behavior is not limited to members of religious groups but is based on childhood desires for meaning and dependency that we all share. Although we live in a democracy, cult behavior manifests itself in our unwillingness to question the judgment of our leaders, our tendency to devalue outsiders and to avoid dissent. We can overcome cult behavior, he says, by recognizing that we have dependency needs that are inappropriate for mature people, by increasing anti-authoritarian education, and by encouraging personal autonomy and the free exchange of ideas.â
Has anybody read that book? Any comments?
Joey Virgo â
Sargan of Akkad reviewed Deikmanâs book for 35 minutes in 2016 on YouTube. Most of the views discussed in the review have already been discussed here at the FoF discussion blog. Sarganâs review contains many excerpts from Deikmanâs book and at 20:05 or so, Deikmanâs description of the cult matches thoroughly with the FoF. A cult follower is not crazy, Deikman says, but he or she has a moral failing in self-reliance or in coping with dependency needs, i.e., immaturity.
I liked Deikmanâs idea that the cult leader is as trapped as are the cult followers â to submit to a certain unchanging standard of behavior in order to sustain the fantasy world they both have created.
Bryan Reynolds â July 25, 2019
I first found out about Arthur Deikman from a book titled The World of The Sufi which is a collection of essays about Sufism edited by Idries Shah. Dr. Deikmanâs contribution was an article which outlined how modern psychiatry by focusing on mental illness does not really have answers to questions, âWhat is the function of a healthy person?â or âWhat is the sense and purpose of existence?â
“Sufism and Psychiatry”
~~~~~~~~~~~
Treating Former Members of Cults
Exploring the CULT in culture
Following is a revised version (including additional material) of an article by Ivan Tyrrell, first published in 1993, that explores Dr. Arthur Deikmanâs enlightening work on cult behaviour.
SOME years ago Arthur Deikman, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, took part in a research seminar on new religious movements, held at the University of California at Berkeley. Former cult members came to speak to participants. As the seminar progressed, Deikman was struck not only by how normal the people seemed but also by how similar their experiences in cults were to all sorts of every day experiences â in work, politics, psychiatry and traditional religions. Most people regard cults as dangerous but rare: Deikman argues that the patterns of cult behaviour are much more widespread than people think. He went on to study cults extensively and published his findings in The Wrong Way Home: uncovering the patterns of cult behaviour (Beacon Press) and an updated version of that book called Them and Us: Cult thinking and the terrorist threat (Bay Tree Publishing).
Ocean Tiger – July 23, 2019
Please enjoy these 47 previously unreleased photos of Robert Burton and his associates:
Cult Survivor – July 26, 2019
Hello all, Iâm back. I replaced the picture of Burton on the FoF article on Wikipedia (that was from 2004) for a more recent one (from 2015) that was part of the set of 47 that Eric/Gaia uploaded to Dropbox. If you have a suggestion of a better one let me know.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellowship of Friends
ton2u â
Joey V @ 40
Thanks for the video link⊠I paraphrase a few salient lines from the narrative below⊠brings me back to my difficulty in leaving the cult⊠regarding whatâs been referred to in the past on the blog as the âinvisible fence.â Canât really blame the folks who stay on â they believe they have no choice but to stay:
Leaving a cult is extremely difficult because cults prey on the emotional instability and dependency of the individual. To an outsider it might seem there is nothing forcing an individual to stay in the cult, ostensibly they have freedom of movement and self-determination, but from the perspective of the person in the cult, the cult is all consuming. Everyone closest to them reinforces cult beliefs and compliance â withholding affection, companionship and support when the individual dissents / diverts from the cult narrative. This puts an individual under tremendous duress â not only will they be unable to pursue their own âhigher purposeâ through remaining in the group, they will lose their entire social support structure, and in many cases the individual is completely financially dependent on the cult. These pressures can be insurmountable and so people remain trapped in the cult even if they appear to be physically able to leave.
Artemis44 â July 26, 2019
Iâm finding Dr. Deikmanâs writings fascinating – Iâm looking forward to reading his book The Wrong Way Home.
I found an article from him online called âEvaluating Spiritual and Utopian Groupsâ at
Here is an excerpt:
âIt is because the leaderâs role is functional rather than magical that genuine spiritual teachers can be seen to obey implicit rules. Despite the general impression that great teachers indulge in any and all behavior, careful attention to traditional teaching stories and anecdotes reveals that there are certain principles that are never violated. For example, I can recall no anecdote depicting a teacher ordering one student to harm another or condoning such an action. Nor are there examples of students being encouraged to compete for the teacherâs attention. There are no examples of teachers entering into sexual relations with their students or enriching themselves with their money. All these examples have been common among current and past âspiritualâ groups.
The reason why such examples are absent in authentic spiritual groups is that real teachers do not use their students to advance their own personal interests. In this matter the mystical literature is quite consistent and clear: a spiritual teacher does not have license to exploit students in any way or for any cause â the only legitimate basis for the teacherâs actions is the advancement of the student along the spiritual path. This is not to say that larger purposes may not be served at the same time; indeed, such synchronous activity is said to be the norm but it is never at the expense of the studentâs development. The fact is, far from having unlimited license, a genuine spiritual teacher obeys functional requirements that far exceed the restraints most people are accustomed to impose on themselves in the name of religion or common decency. The behavior of many so-called spiritual leaders is a travesty of the authentic situation.â
IMO the term âtravestyâ for Burton seems very appropriate by the way.
Invictus maneo – July 29, 2019
50. Artemis44
[Quoting an article] ‘âŠI can recall no anecdote depicting a teacher ordering one student to harm another or condoning such an action. Nor are there examples of students being encouraged to compete for the teacherâs attention. There are no examples of teachers entering into sexual relations with their students or enriching themselves with their money. All these examples have been common among current and past âspiritualâ groups.’
Perhaps because followers of âtrue spiritual teachersâ in the past had better control of the story after the spiritual teacher died. Now, with the internet still somewhat free and open, it is harder to whitewash history. There may never again be a spiritual teacher who was never known to abuse students, in one way or another.
We are all fallible humans who make mistakes and do things we believe to be wrong, including spiritual teachers.
REAL AND FALSE SPIRITUAL TEACHERS
18
By Jack Kornfield
No discussion of the perils and promises of spiritual life can ignore the problems with teachers and cults. The misuse of religious roles and institutions by TV evangelists, ministers, healers, and spiritual teachers, both foreign-born and Western, is a common story. As a leader of a spiritual community, I have encountered many students who were painfully affected by the misdeeds of their teachers. I have heard such stories about Zen masters, swamis, lamas, meditation teachers, Christian priests, nuns, and everybody in between.
ton2u â July 31, 2019
Itâs obvious that cult thinking and behaviors extend beyond the confines of little garden variety cults like the FOF⊠take a look at Trump political rallies, for example. Bringing âcurrent eventsâ from the political world into the discussion here may seem to some to be getting off track, but there is a parallel with the cult behavior and a type of thinking that manifests in the wider world and in little cults like the FOF.
(Artemis, thanks again for drawing attention to Deikmanâs work â itâs right on the mark. Iâll paraphrase a few lines below):
Cults are social organizations and can exist anywhere in society, cult behaviors and thinking are so pervasive, so “baked-in” as to be instinctive, everyone can be considered to be part of various âinvisibleâ cults â almost all people exhibit some form of cult behavior in their daily lives, conforming to group norms, dependence on leaders, devaluing those outside of their groups, avoiding media that does not confirm what they already believe⊠cult thinking is embedded in society but is usually not so all encompassing as to be thought of as a cultâŠ
The structure of cults is basically authoritarian: obedience and hierarchical power tend to take precedence over truth and conscienceâŠ
âŠcertain psychological benefits can make authoritarian groups very attractive â they provide the opportunity to feel protected and cared forâŠ
âŠcult thinking is the effect of psychological forces endemic to the human mind, forces that operate in the everyday life of each of us, distorting perception, biasing thinking, inculcating a belief structure which includes: compliance with the group, dependence on a leader, devaluing the outsider, avoiding dissent⊠a regression to a childlike state in which one is cared for by a parental figure so that they can abdicate responsibility for their own wellbeingâŠ
âŠa regressive wish for security uses the family as its model creating an authoritarian leadership structure (the parent) and a close-knit, exclusive group (the children). Since the leader-parent has many of the insecurities of the follower-child, reality must be distorted by both to maintain the childâs illusion (wish) that the parent can always provide protection, so that he or she has no weaknesses / vulnerability.
Dissent is stifled because it casts doubt on the perfection of the leader and the special status of the group. Group compliance preserves security by supporting the beliefs crucial to the fantasy of superiority, beliefs which also explain the powers and entitlement of the leader can not be challenged.⊠apostates are excommunicated.
Outsiders, non-believers are excluded and devalued for they do not believe what the group believes; if the group and leader are superior, the outsider is inferiorâŠ
At the time they joined the cult most were dissatisfied, distressed or at a transition in their lives. Typically the motivation was desire for a more spiritual life, finding community in which to live cooperatively, wanting to become more enlightened, to find meaning in life by serving others or simply to belong.
Artemis44 â July 31, 2019
21. ton2u
Very good points from Dr. Deikman, thank you.
Here is an excerpt from the book The Guru Papers by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad, another seminal work on cult behavior:
âBehind the masks of authoritarian power is the idea that there is some greater intelligence that knows what is best for others. What this always amounts to is that someone either claims to have that intelligence, or to have a direct line into properly interpreting it. This can occur in any realm and in differing degrees. Its most extreme forms occur when moral superiority is linked to infallibility. The image of the guru represents the epitome of this construction. Often included in this is the corollary that the authority cares more about your well-being than you do, and can do so because of being selfless. Whether or not a state of ultimate selflessness or infallibility is achievable by anyone can be debated. Then too, there is the question of how anyone could be certain someone else really is in such a state. What is clear, however, is that obeying others because they claim to be morally superior, or to have an inside track to the truth, not only breeds corruption and lies, but removes people from personal responsibility.â
Golden Veil â February 12, 2022
The Fellowship of Friends appears to be in the process of rebranding its image as a spiritual school. Itâs likely that this strategy, which is implemented through new website design, was instigated by the exposure of the cultâs dark underpinnings in the dramatic and critically acclaimed Revelations podcast on Spotify. The former website image of fellowshipoffriends.com and livingpresence.com expressed elitism and opulence. Images of Robert Earl Burton were prominent and his role as a teacher reverently promoted.
Probably with the aim to recast the cultâs identity, the websites now present a more corporate, almost austere, look. The rich colors are absent and have been replaced with a black and white theme and an image of international flags as the key image on the Home page of each website. Robert Earl Burtonâs presence is greatly diminished and he is presented more as a founder than teacher. There is only one book on the Publications page, Robert Earl Burtonâs Awakening (2016) and that book appears to be the only book available on Amazon. Fifty Years With Angels (2017) is now listed as out-of-print.
Although only Awakening is currently featured under Publications on the Fellowship of Friends website, there are actually two books by Robert Earl Burton ~ Awakening and Self-Remembering ~ in pride of place on the Recommended Reading page of the Living Presence website. They are included with books by Fourth Way luminaries Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Collin.
livingpresence.com/recommended-reading
Robert Earl Burton and The Fellowship of Friends
An Unauthorized Blogography of âThe Teacherâ and His Cult
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2022
London Meetup a Fellowship of Friends recruiting effort
[ed. – The Meetup announcement for the group “Gurdjieff Ouspensky – from words to being.” features this photo of a gathering in a private room at Aix in London’s Crouch End. Bistro Aix was established by Fellowship of Friends member Lynne Sanders. The Meetup organizer, Sharon Gordon and attendee Martin Courbet are Fellowship members in the London Center. Another meeting is planned March 6th.
See the Fellowship of Friends London Center Facebook page, A Fourth Way Symposium. With its myriad disguises, the Fellowship can make one’s head spin! (A plentiful supply of wine helps.) In Robert Burton’s Fellowship, “Symposium” has taken on a very special meaning.
To anyone who considers joining a group that claims to possess esoteric or “hidden knowledge,” especially a group guided by a “conscious teacher,” I highly recommend reading Ames Gilbert’s list of questions a prospective member should be prepared to ask. See: Due diligence before making a leap of faith]
Arts & Living
July 25, 2022
In His Memoir, Spencer Schneider Recounts
A Manhattan Cult Story
By Annette Hinkle
Back in 1989, when an acquaintance invited Spencer Schneider, then 29, to a nondescript unmarked building on lower Broadway in Manhattan for his first meeting, he was not all that impressed. Referred to simply as School, the group adhered to the teachings of two esoteric Russian philosophers, George Gurdjieff and Piotr Ouspensky, and on that first night, Schneider, who had never heard of the pair despite being a philosophy major at Washington University, found the lecture uninteresting and difficult to follow.
In short, nothing about that initial meeting made him think heâd return, and he certainly didnât think he was on the verge of being swept up into a movement that would become an all-encompassing part of his life.
But thatâs exactly what happened.
The Gentle Souls Revolution
Five years in a little cult called âschoolâ, oops, I mean âthe studyâ
Chapter 6, Part 2 â Work on the Self:
Psychological ideas [excerpt]
Think of your daily activities as a linear series of events: make three phone calls, wash the dishes, take Johnny to school, pay bills, commute to work, etc. You might begin to see yourself as a kind of human caterpillar, chomping and crawling through the tasks that make up your days, like a caterpillar chomps through leaves and grass, consuming the necessary fuel to keep consuming, often times to its death. I have heard that many caterpillars never evolve into butterflies. Those of us who found ourselves in âschoolâ are those who ache to become brightly colored beings flying above gardens, feasting on nectar and spreading seeds of beauty. We hope that our lives can spiral and evolve upwards, so that we do not simply traverse the same circle until we die, consuming and repeating the same activities, day after day; maintaining.
According to âschool,â if one makes âsufficient efforts,â s/he will cultivate the ability to rise above and see her/his life as though an impartial observer watching a play.
In its initial classes, school introduces the following psychological ideas. Initially, the ideas and the accompanying âhelpâ can feel like keys to evolution and eventual freedom:
Essence, personality and false personality:
Once upon a time, every human began as an essence floating in the starry world. Every essence, though, has a fatal flaw that can only be addressed by descending to earth and manifesting as human. This essence chooses the perfect set of parents to address its âflawâ and journeys to earth to be born as a boy or girl. Thereâs one major problem with this process: over time this young essence develops a shield called the personality. It is meant to protect this vulnerable essence, but as years pass, essence forgets that personality is merely a shield. It falls asleep to its journey and purpose, its true nature. Personality grows out of control, takes over, and begins to crystallize into âfalse personality,â that part of ourselves we create for others to see. Essence recedes further into the background. âSchoolâ tells its âstudentsâ we come here to reclaim that buried essence. We come here to âremember ourselvesâ.
Multiplicity as opposed to unity:
In the process of developing false personality, we become psychologically splintered â we develop an internal cast of characters who have their own reactive thoughts, emotional responses and physical responses. âSchoolâ calls this having âmultiple Iâsâ. The âIâsâ who compose the internal cast of characters compete for the wheel. Moreover, these characters compete without any awareness of each other. Each one calls itself âIâ, believing itself to be one unified âIâ. One âIâ says it will wake up early; another âIâ presses the snooze button in the morning. One âIâ begins a diet; another reaches for dessert. With this constant cycle of changing captains, we have no hope of consistently steering the ship toward our destination unless we get âhelp.â We are a multiplicity.
Liars as opposed to sincere seekers:
Most people believe themselves to be unified, unaware of their internal and constantly changing cast of characters. We are unaware that, in any given moment, any one of these characters could be making decisions that will only be contradicted by another. Therefore, when we speak as though unified â i.e. any time we begin a sentence with the word âIâ (like, âI want a relationship.â) â âschoolâ teaches that we are lying: do we really want a relationship? If so, why do some of the Iâs in us push relationships away? See? Without the âhelpâ we donât even know we are lying. âSchoolâ tells us only âtruth can unbury and grow essenceâ and only âschoolâ can tell us what the truth is.
Asleep as opposed to awake:
Since we are unaware of our multiplicity, we do not have the knowledge necessary to understand that we are bumbling bundles of skin and bone and emotional, intellectual and physical reaction and contradiction (or as Joni Mitchell once said in an interview, âI was all salt and skin.â) We are asleep to our multiplicity and our reactivity; therefore sleep-walking through our days.
âSchoolâ claims the ability to AWAKEN us! This based on the belief that we are rarely, if ever, truly awake. The ideas as translated say that humans exist in four states of consciousness:
- Literal sleep (in bed, head on pillow, eyes closed)
- Waking sleep (moving through oneâs day without any awareness of our true nature, essence, personality, false personality, multiplicity, etc)
- Consciousness (living and working with awareness of truth and oneâs multiplicity)
- Objective consciousness (separate and able to observe our programmed responses, as though floating above, able to choose thoughts, emotions and actions that exist in a higher plane)
âSchoolâ taught its devotees that, at best, when out of bed and chomping through the dayâs events, most live in the state of âwaking sleepâ.
Mechanical humans as opposed to autonomous individuals:
As humans embodying waking sleep, âschoolâ teaches that we are merely empty machines, programmed to react to events by those messages and experiences we consumed from birth onwards. Put another way, âMan cannot do,â because man has no real free will to choose action, thought or feeling in any given moment. Man simply reacts. But with âschoolâ man may have access to certain tools/ideas that empower his/her ability to do. âSchoolâ promises to reveal lost knowledge that will provide true direction, especially through one idea that will constitutes it own chapter in the near future: AIM.
Imprisoned as opposed to free and autonomous:
In one of my initial classes, Robert [Klein] recounted the story of Platoâs Cave: prisoners who are chained to the wall of a cave, unable to turn their heads. Behind them, a fire on a raised platform throws shadows on the wall. All they know of life are these shadows; they believe these shadows to be reality. We are, according to âschoolâ, like these prisoners only seeing shadows and believing the shadows real. âSchoolâ claims it can show us the difference.
Self-Observations and Three âCentersâ or Three Brains:
âSchoolâ tells its seekers to approach this work with a âhealthy skepticismâ and to question these ideas until we have developed our own understanding. Those of us who entered the cave in Billerica heard our âteachersâ say, âVerify these ideas for yourself.â One of the ways to verify this idea of our own mechanical-ity is through a tool called self-observations.
âSchoolâ teaches that humans have at least three brains or âcentersâ: intellectual, emotional and moving/instinctive. Each center has its own intelligence and set of reactions to external events. In attempts to verify the ideas above, each student gets a little notebook and begins to record his/her observations throughout the day, in the very specific format below:
âI observe the thought [FILL IN THOUGHT] as a function of the intellectual center, when [FILL IN EVENT].â
âI observe the feeling [FILL IN EMOTION] as a function of the emotional center when [FILL IN EVENT].â
âI observe the sensation [FILL IN SENSATION] as a function of the moving/instinctive center when [FILL IN EVENT].”
In my initial experiences with self-observations I saw my âmultiple Isâ, my mechanical-ity, and my automated responses to events. I even began to name and categorize my characters. For example, if any of my classmates was presenting as a perfect student, the cast of the film, Clueless, would appear on my internal stage and think things like, âWell, it must be nice to be so perfect.â (insert snotty-teenage girl voice). I began to see that I could separate myself from those petty and jealous girls. If I was having a shitty day and feeling sorry for myself, I could see the self-pity as a âfunction of the emotional centerâ. I could say to myself, âThis self-pity is not âIâ.â Self-observations stripped judgment away from any number of things, depersonalizing emotions, thoughts, reactions, allowing one to watch oneself and learn how this âhuman machineâ operates. On occasion, I could separate enough to choose different and new responses. Imagine the wonderful possibilities with this idea!
The Bait and Switch
At the same time, some part of me could see the set-up in accepting that which âschoolâ preached in its hallowed halls: âI do not know myself; I am mechanical; I cannot do; I am not I, just a bumbling cast of characters reacting to external events; I am asleep, blah, blah, blah.â Self observations, i.e. my constant verification of âThis woman as mechanical beingâ, started becoming its own neurosis-induced prison that reinforced the question, âHow do I live?â It fed and grew my lifelong self-doubts and lack of confidence and fears. Instead of âremembering myselfâ, I felt myself slipping farther and farther away. I clearly recall the repetitive thought, âMy life is no longer mineâ that would plague me every morning during my commute to the job I hated. But instead of listening to my truth and seeing this thought as a siren screaming, âStep away from the cult, maâam.â I believed that I wasnât trying hard enough. âIf I try a little harder,â I thought, âI will âremember myself.â Thatâs what they told me.
Thus began the reliance on âteachersâ for guidance on how to live.
Welcome to âNAW Aware â School or Scam?â
What is NAW Aware?
This web site is here to inform you about a group known by the following names:
- The New American Wing (NAW)
- Balanced Life
- Higher Cosmos
- Inner Metamorphosis
Their original name was âThe New American Wingâ, and it was actively used for at least seven years. Since late 1998, they have been using various fake names, but for convenience here they will be called âThe NAWâ.
The NAW is a consciousness cult based on âThe Fourth Wayâ, a system of psychology and spirituality popularized by P.D.Ouspensky and G.I.Gurdjieff.
This site is necessary for several reasons.
First, it is aimed at current members of the NAW. If you are in the NAW now, you must understand how little access you have to information critical of the group. You are so busy with your chores that there is hardly any time left to do anything, much less read or browse the net. You are increasingly distant from your family, if not cut off completely. You are only allowed to read books sanctioned by the leaders. No one else there speaks out against anything. If you browse the Internet, say, at the office during the day, chances are very high that you limit yourself to searches relating to the Fourth Way, and even then, most of what you find out there is just more of the same propaganda and proselytising which may, even without your knowing, have dramatically limited your thoughts, your actions, and your true evolutionary possibilities. In the small chance that you have stumbled upon this place, you will find information which âthe teachersâ have intentionally kept secret, and more importantly, you will find a perspective that is highly critical of those leaders and of the entire social structure which has developed.
Secondly, this site is a resource for those of you who are considering the possibility of joining this group. As a new recruit, you will probably not find out about the true nature of the organization until you have been involved for months. By then, you may already feel a powerful sense of belonging, and your critical thinking may be impaired. At that point it may be very difficult to recognize how destructive the cult can be. However in the early stages, you are more likely to seek out information about the NAW, and also less likely to blindly dismiss the information. This site will let you know what you are really getting involved in, while you are still detached enough to listen.
Finally, the NAW is not fundamentally different from other cults. They may give lip service to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, but their actual behavior has much in common with other groups. Thus, the NAW can be used as a case study for understanding cults in general.
Back to NAW Aware âŠ
NAW Aware
Glossary of Fourth Way terms
The Fourth Way system has its own special language which may seem unusual to outsiders. This glossary is meant to help those of you who are not already familiar with these terms.
fourthwaycult.net/glossary.html
Reuben Kincaid â March 7, 2024 – Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
This essay, written more than a quarter of a century ago, documents the essayistâs experience in a group called âNew American Wingâ which has a lineage tie to the Fellowship of Friends:
âŠ..
The Numbers Game in the New American Wing
by JM
I was in a group called âThe New American Wingâ (NAW), a spinoff of James Randazzoâs âSpiral of Friendsâ (SOF), which in turn came from âThe Fellowship of Friendsâ (FOF).
The NAW teachers (a married couple, Jim and Carolyn Kuziak, aka âJ&Câ) had the final word on who was âa fiveâ, who had awakened. I knew two women who told me they âdidnât realize they had awakenedâ until a couple days later when the teachers told them so. This was an important clue that something was not quite right, because Man #5 is supposed to be objective in relation to himself. Also in my own personal experiences of non ordinary degrees of consciousness, it was obvious to me that my state had changed. These two women had actually believed they had awakened because the teachers told them so.
A few days after a friend of mine supposedly awakened, I asked him about what had happened. He didnât say much except âit changes your lifeâ, and âthe teachers say I am a five when I am self-remembering.â
There was little doubt who the fives were, because during meetings the teachers would occasionally ask the audience, âwho here has awakened?â (As though they forgot, as though they didnât know us each quite well.) Hands would rise into the air, like kids in a classroom. It was a public performance, resulting in a feeling of superiority in those who raised their hands, and a feeling of self-loathing in those who didnât. On one occasion, a student raised her hand and the teachers scolded her, âyou havenât awakened, youâve had experiences but you havenât awakened.â
The NAW has two main âcentersâ â one in Ann Arbor and one in Lexington KY, overall about 25-40 students combined. Of these, I can recall eleven who claimed to be Men #5. Generally, these were the older students who had dedicated their lives to the school and had bought-in 100% to the game. People usually awakened during one of the major ceremonies we had during the year (Christmas, Easter, July 4, Thanksgiving). It also usually occurred during âobligatoriesâ â the ritual movements.
These students had special privileges after their conversion experience. They could attend special private meetings, held only for those who had awakened. They were also given special exercises. At the time I left, I was just starting to be included in these âolder studentâ activities, even though I had not awakened. They were giving me exercises that did not seem to be practical for me â imagining myself the size of the earth, imagining energy and directing it through my body, etc. There was a thrill in receiving these new exercises, because it gave me the illusion of being an advanced student, of being part of the inner circle, etc.
Fives also had a more prominent role during ceremonies and obligatories. They were also allowed to ask less practical questions at meetings â they could ask theoretical questions regarding higher energies, the ray of creation, symbols, etc., and the teachers would entertain those questions now. This was not an explicit privilege, but was a sort of unwritten understanding, as though now the students had enough being for these questions to be considered âpracticalâ.
Strangely, once someone awakened, they were allowed to take much greater care of their instinctive functions. The teachers would not complain if an older student dropped out of some âwork octaveâ because of physical discomfort. If a non-awakened student tried this, the older students and teachers would come down hard on them. âDo not let the instinctive function eat your workâ, âlearn how to dominate those queen-of-clubs âIâsâ, âno half effortsâ, âonce you decide to do something, do it whole hog and twice the postageâ, etc. But awakened students were allowed much more sleep, more breaks, less strenuous work, more desk jobs. The rationale seemed to be, âin a higher state, you are much more sensitive to the needs of the instinctive function.â Or, âif you donât take care of your machine, it will become negative and eat you when in a higher state.â The teachers exemplified this behavior. They received massages and sexual favors from the innermost core of students, took considerable time each day in a hot tub, and spent hours each night laying in a bed with about 15 pillows watching a $3000 wide-screen TV. One particular student, the teachersâ pet, cooked their meals each night with utmost care: only the best organic foods, making handmade ice-cream, all sorts of special dietary requirements, etc. While preparing food for them, we were told that if we were in a negative state while cooking, they could tell from the food itself, as though our negativity had corrupted the food.
But being considered a Man #5 was not all positive⊠Awakened students were given additional duties and responsibilities, such as being sent out to start centers in new cities. They were also treated more harshly by the teachers, because they had âverified that this was a C influence schoolâ and were now supposed to devote their entire lives to it. The teachers claimed to control the higher states in the fives, âwhen you awaken you swim in our higher being bodies.â They also used this as a threat, âIâve got your nickel ⊠once youâve awakened, you belong to me â do you understand me?â
Outwardly, there were various signs that would indicate one of these students were supposedly in a higher state. Often they would shed tears, sometimes tears of horror and sometimes tears of joy. The state was usually onset by heavy controlled breathing on the part of the student â such as during obligatories, or during a meeting if a student wanted to be seen making a âsuper-effortâ. They often had a far-away look in their eyes, as though they were not interested in the trivial events taking place around them.
They usually would not look directly in your eyes, and others generally didnât âphotograph their instinctive functionsâ (stare at them) either. If I looked them in the eyes, sometimes I felt waves of shame arise within me, fearing they could see into my horrible feature-ridden soul. This kind of self-hatred was glorified in various subtle ways throughout the school. A common expression was, âyou cannot look in the face of something higherâ (without becoming extremely identified). This grand suggestion actually encouraged us to become more identified in these situations.
Sometimes they would experience brief twitches, as though bolts of energy were shooting through their system. One student kept experiencing these jolts frequently a few days after he had âawakenedâ, until the teachers scolded him during obligatories, âyou canât go there every time, now it is time to get serious.â
The fives quickly became more self-confident, especially around non-awakened students. I can remember how quickly one particular student changed after going through this experience â within a couple weeks he changed from being a true wuss into an assertive person able to take what he felt he deserved. (In many ways it was an act and after a few months he gradually returned closer to his original state.) This new self-confidence came from a renewed certainty about their faith, and also seemed to justify their increased outbursts of negativity towards others. In other words, they were now peers with the other awakened students, and, lacking that fear to keep them on-guard, they were more likely to try to control situations with negative emotions. Their new strength, self-confidence, and perceived power gave them a kind of charisma.
The teachers probably liked the idea of having more awakened students too. They validated their credentials, âproof that this school worksâ. Awakened students were fully crystallized in their devotion to the school â it seemed that these were the students who would do ANYTHING for the teachers (get a divorce, move to a new town, make large payments, sexual favors, hold multiple jobs, etcâŠ) It justified giving these core devotees extra privileges and extra duties. It maintained the hierarchical power system and justified it with a spiritual basis. It gave these students a feeling of increased being.
Older students also took over many of the public responsibilities previously performed by the teachers. By allowing them to hide in their bedroom, with all contact fully controlled and orchestrated, the teachers were able to generate a kind of mystique. In their absence, we had less chance to âcatch them in the actâ, less opportunity to discover if the teachers were truly higher beings. When we finally did interact with them, it was so formalized and so fear-laden that we were easy prey. And with mere fives running most of the show, any faults could be blamed on them, thus protecting the teachersâ facade of perfection. And although fives were supposedly conscious, they were not fully objective to the external world, so their eventual mechanical flubs and failures could still be forgiven without breaking our belief in the actual existence of something higher.
Source: www.fourthwaycult.net
The Work, The Fourth Way, The Theatre, Cults, Cult Leaders, George Gurdjieff, Sexual Abuse, Beverly, Massachusetts, Gurdjieff Ideas, Work on Oneself, Spiritual Groups, Teacher-Student Relationships, Cumbres, Work Group
Golden Veil â February 1, 2019 – Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
Big Fish Teaches Students to Deep Dive in a Small Pond
Apparently a former member of the Gurdjieff Foundation, William Patrick Patterson is satisfying the thirst of some teacher seekers and monetizing his knowledge of the Fourth Way in a seminar next month in Tucson, Arizona.
Love the photo!
gurdjiefflegacy.org/20announce/events.php?page=2#seminar1
Artemis44 â July 21, 2019
I downloaded a complimentary issue of Pattersonâs âGurdjieff Journalâ (the link is at the end).
I noticed that the free issue was no. 29. Since the current issue with REB on the cover is 79 and itâs a quarterly publication, the complimentary issue is from 2009 or before. The first article is âRosie, Sharon, Alex, Robert & The Workâ which indicates that Patterson has been in a crusade against REB for a while, probably to avoid competition to his online school as WR suggested.
Tim Campion â July 21, 2019
A short excerpt about Robert Burton from Pattersonâs 1998 book, Taking With the Left Hand and another anecdote about close encounters with Pattersonâs group can be found here.
Insider â July 22, 2019
Here is the link to Issue #79 of The Gurdjieff Journal:
Gurdjieff & Taking With the Left Hand by William Patrick Patterson (Author) and Barbara Allen Patterson (Editor)
Prologue [excerpt]
GEORGI IVANOVITCH GURDJIEFF, the extraordinary messenger who introduced and established in the West the ancient esoteric teaching of self-development of The Fourth Way, understood thatâas with all things in timeâgaps, intervals, counter currents would appear that could deflect or distort his teaching from its original direction. There would appear self-appointed teachers who would distort or deflect his message and Mr. Gurdjieff would call them âCandidates for Hasnamuss.â They would âtake with the left hand,â as it is said in the East, where the left hand is used when toilet paper is lacking.
He had brought this sacred teaching to the West because he realized, as he said, âUnless the âwisdomâ of the East and the âenergyâ of the West was harnessed and used harmoniously, the world would be destroyed.â Being esoteric in the true sense, the teaching, he said, had been âcompletely unknown up to the present time.â
The deflections and distortions that have occurred have manifested at the margins of the teaching. However noxious, they have had their use in that they served to test a seekerâs desire for spiritual evolution and knowledge rather than power, beauty and sex. Previously, these âtakers of the left handâ have been ignored, for whatever is said only brings them attention. And yet a time comes when so much has been taken that the publicâthe seedbed of the teachingâmust be warned against the false posing as the true.
Robert Earl Burton I have never met. I know of him through newspaper accounts, personal contacts with his former students, and his book Self-Remembering. Burton claims his Fellowship of Friends is a school of the Fourth Way. However, Burtonâs only teacher was Alexander Horn, a faux-Gurdjieffian, who tried to enter but was not accepted into the teaching.
Of all Burtonâs students Iâve met over the years, the only one of his inner circle was Ed Grieve. He was at the dinner Burton held for Lord Pentland. Pentland had contacted Burton because he was having his students put bookmarks advertising the Fellowship of Friends into Fourth Way books and with the film version of Meetings with Remarkable Men, he had students standing outside theaters passing out Fellowship flyers. Grieve told me that Burton believed Pentland was coming to hand over his students to him because he had recognized Burtonâs âhigher development,â and even bet on this with several students. In fact, Pentland was coming to ask Burton to make a sizable contribution to the film inasmuch as he was falsely profiting by it.
On Pentlandâs arrival, Burton presented him with an expensive sleeping pillow, his idea of an esoteric joke. Several of Burtonâs close students joined the two for dinner, Grieve was one of the servers. âWatching the two of them together,â Grieve said, âthere was just no question of who was awake and who asleep, and I left the next day to become a student of Lord Pentlandâs.â
I met other former long-term members of the Fellowship when I made cross-country trips to promote one of my books or films. Following a talk I gave at a bookstore in Missoula, Montana, a couple came back with my wife and me to our campsite. The man had been with Burton fifteen years, the woman eighteen. Disillusioned, but not as hurt or angry as many we had encountered, they were trying to put the best face on their “Fellowship experience.” They had learned something, they insisted; it hadn’t been all bad. But the continuing scandals and lawsuits against Burton brought by former male students whom he had sexually seduced had forced them to leave. But they still felt he was teaching The Fourth Way, though they had no other experience of it to inform their judgment. Sitting by the campfire, watching the flickering flames on their faces as they tried to make sense of it all, I wondered how much Burton actually did know, and so on my return I read his Self-Remembering and saw the truth of the matter. There is little that is new in it, almost all a rehash of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous. (I have reviewed the book extensively here in the section on Burton.)
The number of Burtonâs students has greatly declined with the continuing sex scandals and lawsuits, but those who believe he is, as he declares, âa goddess in a manâs body,â stay blindly loyal. Always a great merchandizer, Burton has attempted to solve the student problem by creating an online school, headed by a married Israeli student, Burtonâs âclose friendâ Asaf Braverman. So the âesotericâ Fellowship parade continues.
Golden Veil – September 12, 2023
A quick glance at the Gurdjieff Legacy Foundation website reveals some congruity between the teachings of William Patterson and Robert Earl Burton / the Fellowship of Friends. Burton has always emphasized the Fourth Way teachings of Ouspensky and Rodney Collin along with his own superstitious, outlandish beliefs, rather than focussing on Gurdjieff, but check out the following page on Pattersonâs website. There may be some secondary source cross pollination going on.
gurdjiefflegacy.org/wpp/soul.htm
Beelzebob â September 17, 2023
Golden Veil (#23):
Per his website, Patterson was a student of Lord Pentland (probably in the 1970s). Pentland was in charge of the Gurdjieff Foundation in North America after Mr. Gurdjieffâs death in 1949. The Gurdjieff Foundation has always had a low regard for Ouspensky and takes no notice of Collin at all. The article you referenced is pure Gurdjieff.
Golden Veil â September 18, 2023
Beelzebob, youâre definitely right about the Gurdjieff Foundation, not so much, I think, about William Patterson. I see much parity between R.E.B. and W.P. They both set up their own organizations in Northern California with themselves in positions of authority and use the Fourth Way as a basis, mixing in Egyptian and Christianity theology and emphasizing concepts such as the necessity of growing a soul â as exemplified on the link I referenced above in post 23.
It is interesting that Lord John Pentland, who co-founded the first Gurdjieff Foundation center in New York after Gurdjieffâs death, studied with Ouspensky for many years yet with Gurdjieff less than a year, just prior to Gâs death. I never met him, but I remember Lady Pentland; she continued to visit the Gurdjieff Foundation centers in the U.S. A key strength of Lord Pentlandâs was as an editor and publisher of Fourth Way books and the journal Material for Thought through his Far West Editions, and his co-founder of the first center in New York, Jeanne De Salzmannâs special strength was as a transmitter of the Movements, as can be seen in Peter Brookâs film adaptation of Gurdjieffâs one truly accessible book, Meetings with Remarkable Men.
As R.E.B.âs physical and mental health decline, his minders do what they can to prop him up as the Fellowship of Friends figurehead. His students help compete with the Gurdjieff Foundation for the âmagnetic centersâ enthralled by the Fourth Way, casting a variety of nets for new members, with websites such as fourthwaytoday.org/.
I hear that though his teaching skills have lapsed, R.E.B. is still most particular that his underwear is ironed and his sexual needs fulfilled. Didnât he once say that people will especially manifest their true essence as demonstrated by their interests that remain as they near death?
Bob Patterson â September 19, 2023
Golden Veil (#25):
I donât know much about Patterson except that he is an ex-Foundation member who went âmaverickâ and formed his own group (and also that he writes bad books).
The concept of the necessity of growing a soul (as opposed to being born with one) is central to Gurdjieffâs teachings.
As I understand it, prior to his death in 1949 Gurdjieff appointed Lord Pentland to lead the Work in âAmericaâ, the principal centre of which was then (and still is now) in New York. Pentland took the remnants of the existing Gurdjieff groups in the New York area (amongst others, Madame Ouspenskyâs group and the group led by Orage in the early 1930s and various people after that) and established the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York.
In contrast to the FOF, for most of its history the Gurdjieff Foundation assiduously avoided any kind of proselytizing. It was secretive â âmagnetic centresâ had to find it. I believe that has changed somewhat owing, amongst other things, to the âgreyingâ of the membership and a resultant decline in numbers. It seems younger people donât resonate with the âQuiet Workâ (Madame de Salzmannâs invention) that the Foundation is still peddling.
Reuben Kincaid â March 18, 2024
Gurdjieffâs ideas, âobjective knowledge,â bosh. You can criticize them on their merits, AND you can criticize the turkey who trumpeted them. The latter is criticized as ad hominem argument, but itâs really no different than observing what a schmuck Trump is AND talking about what comes out of his mouth. Frank Lloyd Wright heard G to claim 104 sons and 27 daughters; G had at least seven children with six different women. The guy couldnât keep it in his pants. (Small wonder he stigmatized âa policeman attitude towards sex.â) G was an alcoholic drunk driver who bragged about âshearing sheep,â the people who looked to him for guidance. He painted sparrows and sold them as canaries. He was a con man and had no compunctions about it. At least O., in his fifties, confessed that he thought âthe systemâ was a fraud but he couldnât give it up because he was addicted to the lifestyle.
The claim that âGurdjieffâs ideasâ are âpureâ and Burton âcorruptedâ them is a weak argument masquerading as strength. If you want to insulate yourself from critical examination of your ideas, describe them as âpureâ and âsacredâ and make a cornerstone of your system the dogma that âif you disagree, you do not understand.â Weak, weak, weak. Instead of grappling with the claims Gurdjieffâs ideas make about reality, the defender of these ideas becomes the champion of purity and sacredness. Itâs a moral stance which inflates its proponentâs conception of himself as an heroic defender of the faith.
The response to criticism of Gurdjieffian ideas is usually a refusal to engage. Seldom if ever does one see Gurdjieffian ideas defended on their merits in a debate. William Patrick Patterson says publicly, âI donât take criticism of The Work seriously.â The further position he asserts, based on lineage and sacred purity claims, is that people in the Fellowship didnât really have contact with The Work. But that position misses the boat, because both the Fellowship and The Work itself are defective to the very core of what they purport to be.
From the Skeptic’sDictionary
by Robert Todd Carroll, est. 1994
G. I. Gurdjieff (1872?-1949)
George S. Georgiades was a Greco-Armenian charismatic spiritual leader who was born in Russia but who made a name for himself in Paris as the mystic George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. In Russia, he established what he called âThe Institute for the Harmonious Development of Manâ (1919), which he re-established in France in 1922. It was at his Institute that Gurdjieff promoted a litany of hilarious occult and mystical notions about the universe, which he claimed he was taught by wise men while traveling and studying in Central Asia. He put down his âinsightsâ in books with titles like Meetings With Remarkable Men, All and Everything, and Beelzebubâs Tales To His Grandson: an objectively impartial criticism of the life of man. Gurdjieffâs obscure musings were presented in more accessible language by his disciple Petyr Demianovich Ouspensky.
To some devotees of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky was an incomplete mystic. Other disciples find Gurdjieff and Ouspensky to be co-gurus. They have much to say about many things, including the moon:
The influence of the Moon upon everything living manifests itself in all that happens on Earth. Man can not tear himself free from the Moon. All his movements and consequently all his actions are controlled by the Moon. The mechanical part of our life is subject to the Moon.*
The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity. [In Search of the Miraculous]
What makes a guru such as Gurdjieff attractive as a spiritual conquistador is his seemingly shrewd observation that most human beings who are awake act as if they are asleep. Gurdjieff also observed that most people are dead on the inside. I think he meant by these claims that most people are passive sheep and need a guru to give their lives vitality and meaning. That is to say, I believe Gurdjieff correctly noted that most people are neither skeptics nor self-motivated, and that many are easily duped by gurus because they want someone to show them the way to live a meaningful life. He offered to show his followers the way to true wakefulness, a state of awareness and vitality which transcends ordinary consciousness. He was able to attract a coterie of writers, artists, wealthy widows and other questing souls to work his farm for him in exchange for sharing his wisdom. He offered numerous claims and explanations for everything under the moon, rooted in little more than his own imagination and never tempered with concern for what science might have to say about his musings.
Gurdjieff obviously had a powerful personality, but his disdain for the mundane and for natural science must have added to his attractiveness. He allegedly exuded extreme self-confidence and exhibited no self-doubt, traits which must have been comforting to many people. My favorite Gurdjieff story is told by Fritz Peters. To explain âthe secret of lifeâ to a wealthy English woman who had offered him ÂŁ1,000 for such wisdom, Gurdjieff brought a prostitute to their table and told her he was from another planet. The food he was eating, he told her, was sent to him from his home planet at no small expense. He gave the prostitute some of the food and asked her what it tasted like. She told him it tasted like cherries. âThatâs the secret of life,â Gurdjieff told the English lady. She called him a charlatan and left. Later that day, however, she gave him the money and became a devoted follower. He might have hit her with a stick like some Zen master and obtained the same result.
To those on a quest for spiritual evolution or transformation, guides like Gurdjieff and Ouspensky promise entry into an esoteric world of ancient mystical wisdom. Such a world may seem attractive to those who are drifting at sea and rudderless.
The Gurdjieff Foundation has about two dozen centers, mostly in north America.
There are Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Centers in over 30 countries around the world; they are operated by the Fellowship of Friends and are not associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation but with Robert Earl Burton.
Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way:
A Critical Appraisal
Almost from the beginning of Gurdjieff’s teaching mission in the West, he was surrounded by controversy, rumour and speculation.
Critics, outside observers and even some of his own students questioned his intentions, credentials as a spiritual teacher, methods, traditional attitudes and beliefs, use of alcohol, sexual behavior and validity of the ideas he presented.
Was he a genuine spiritual teacher or a charlatan, an ‘Emissary from Above’ or a ‘black magician’?
Associated Press â May 7, 2019
Digging further found:
A project of:
Learning Institute for Growth, Healing and Transformation (LIGHT)
Golden Veil â May 7, 2019
I found it, too. Fellowship of Friends former member Joel Friedlander is quoted [in the part below] footnoted (30) and William Patterson (35) in âGurdjieff and the Fourth Way: A Critical Appraisalâ in the section Contemporary Status of The Work, pages 6 – 17, which I have excerpted below. In footnote (33), the Fellowship of Friends is specifically mentioned.
~ ~ ~
The techniques used by some âteachersâ to transmit Work ideas can have a powerful and potentially negative effect on students if not properly employed:
âIt has been reported that in an effort to provide the âfrictionâ or difficulties that are deemed necessary to the Work, âteachersâ have made their unwitting students endure extreme periods of sleeplessness, fasting, silence, irrational and sudden demands, extraordinary physical efforts, and so on.â (30)
A more extreme distortion of the Gurdjieff group dynamic occurs in the case where the leader manipulates students for ego satisfaction or personal gain. (32) Some of these groups have all the characteristics of a cult. (33) Psychologist Charles Tart warns of the dangers of becoming involved in such groups:
Gurdjieffâs ideas readily lend themselves to authoritarian interpretations that turn work based on them into cults (in the worst sense of the term), giving great power to a charismatic leader. Some of these leaders are deluded about their level of development but are very good at influencing others. Some are just plain charlatans who appreciate the services and money available from devoted followers. It is dangerous to get involved with any group teaching Gurdjieffâs ideas. It may be led by a charlatan, it may be only a social group with no real teaching effect, it may be riddled with pathological group dynamics that hurt its members. (34)
FOOTNOTES for the above:
(30) Joel Friedlander âThe Work Todayâ Gnosis No. 20, Summer 1991, p. 40.
(32) Frank Sinclair, a past president of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, with many years experience observing various Work groups, writes in Without Benefit of Clergy (Xlibris, 2005, p. 15) that many group leaders are âsubject to weaknesses and sins, not to speak of downright ignorance, appalling self-conceit, unexamined arrogance, and presumptuous elitism: how many there are who profess to have been âspecially preparedâ and singled out (often only by themselves) to carry the torch.â
(33) An example of a cult masking as a Fourth Way group is the Gurdjieff Ouspensky Center, also known as the Fellowship of Friends. The organization refers to its studies as a Gurdjieff/Ouspensky teaching (although Ouspensky is clearly their major inspiration) and claims that it has expanded the scope of these teachings by introducing cultural and philosophical material from the worldâs great spiritual traditions and thinkers. This organization differs from most Gurdjieff groups in their active recruitment of followers; and there have been a number of serious allegations about the organization and in particular the leader of the movement, Robert Burton. See James Moore âGurdjieffian Groups in Britainâ (Religion Today, Volume 3(2), 1986, pp. 1-4), Theodore Nottingham: âThe Fourth Way and Inner Transformationâ (Gnosis No. 20, Summer 1991, p. 22) and William Patterson Taking With the Left Hand (Fairfax, California: Arete Communications, 1998).
(34) Charles Tart Waking Up (Boston: Shambhala, 1986), pp. 288-289.
~ ~ ~
Word about the Fellowship of Friends does get around! At times, former members even broadcast their own experiences and raise awareness about âThe Schoolâ without revealing that they, too, were once members.
Gurdjieff International Review
The Strange Cult of Gurdjieff
An Insiderâs Story of the Most Mysterious
Religious Movement in the World
by Armagnac
What has usually been printed about Gurdjieff, who has tried to translate Eastern knowledge into Western psychology, has been highly fanciful and mostly tosh. Practical Psychology Monthly here presents an article, not by a journalist hastily writing up the impressions of a single interview with Gurdjieff, but by a student who for twelve years was a member of the cult1 that attracted so much attention in Paris, London, Berlin and New York. The subject has never before been so thoroughly covered in a magazine article. [Editors of Practical Psychology Monthly, 1937]
Probably you have never heard of G. I. Gurdjieff. Itâs largely because the man shuns publicity. The newshawks have descended upon him from time to time; there have been stories in the New York newspapers and in the news-magazines. But the pickings have been scanty. There have been a few articles about his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man when it was functioning at Fontainebleau, France, but they have been written by visitors who stayed there for only a very brief time. Recently a book2 devoted to modern religious leaders carried a chapter about this enigmatic teacher of psychology, but this chapter like most that have been written about Gurdjieff is highly fanciful.
But if little has appeared in print about this man (or superman, as some of his followers think), much has been gossiped about him in the great capitol cities, Paris, London, New York and Chicago. The fantastic tales I have heard! Usually, without a speck of truth in them. But Gurdjieff is like thatâa legendary figure. Many people have called him a charlatan; some think he is a hypnotist who exploits his followers; some, including very shrewd and highly intelligent persons, say frankly that he is the greatest man alive. To the present writer Gurdjieff is an enigma, a strange individual about whom it is impossible to make up oneâs mind.
Edited by J. Walter Driscoll
New Cult: Forest Temple of Hard Work and Rough Food
E. C. Bowyer
Journalist E. C. Bowyer spent a week visiting Gurdjieffâs Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau France, five months after it opened. He begins with an account of the Study House and the studentâs spartan daily life. Bowyer interviews his guide, A. R. Orage and describes the various stages of instruction at the Institute, the participation of children, the practice of movements, and the occasional feasts enjoyed by everyone. Returning to London, Bowyer interviewed P. D. Ouspensky. His reports were serialised on front pages of the Daily News (London) 15-19 February, 1923. The word âcultâ did not then have a pejorative connotation. J. W. D.
FAMOUS DISCIPLES
In the following article a Special Correspondent of the Daily News reveals some of the leading facts relating to a remarkable new cult which has attracted to itself many Englishmen and Englishwomen bearing well-known and even famous names. The leader of the movement is Gurdjieff, an Eastern philosopher-mystic, and the article describes the âStudy Houseâ in the historic Forest of Fontainebleau, some 40 miles from Paris, where his disciples follow a course of hard work and harder fare.
The Forest Philosophers
C. E. Bechhofer Roberts
Carl Eric Bechhofer Roberts first met Gurdjieff in Tiflis in 1919 and visited Gurdjieff’s Institute several times but “preferred to remain an intimate and disinterested spectator.” The English spelling Gurdjieff / Gurdjiev was not yet fixed. J. W. D.
Of all the mystics who have become prominent in Europe during the last twelve years or so, and especially since the war, when their numbers have been doubled, I cannot recall that any has attracted so much interest in so short a time as George Ivanovitch Gurdjiev, the founder of the “Institute for the Harmonic Development of Man” at Fountainebleau, near Paris. I exclude Rasputin from this statement both because his “mysticism” was of a somewhat peculiar nature and because his notoriety was due rather to political than to intellectual influence.
The wider public first became interested when Katherine Mansfield, the writer, died in the institute; immediately people were interested to know what mysterious sort of place this was where the clever young author had preferred to pass the last months of her life. And yet reliable information has been lacking. Except for one or two vague articles in two London papers, no account of Gurdjiev’s institute has, I believe, yet appeared in print. I shall endeavour to set down here the main theories that underlie Gurdjiev’s methods and the form they take in practice.
A Visit to Gourdyev
Denis Saurat
Professor Saurat visited the PrieurĂ© for a weekend in February 1923. He describes contradictory impressions of Gurdjieff who appears alternately contemptuous, provocative, irritable then finally serious and âextraordinarily courteous.â This skeptical article stimulated discussion about Gurdjieff among French intellectuals and journalists. Saurat eventually revised his opinion of Gurdjieff and came to recognize Beelzebubâs Tales as a major work. The English spelling of Gurdjieffâs name was not yet fixed and is here given as âGourdyevâ in keeping with the Russian pronunciation.
Saturday morning, February 17th 1923. The Fontainebleau station.
Orage comes to meet me when I arrive by train from Paris. Orage is a big Yorkshireman of vague French descent; hence his name is taken from the French word for storm. For fifteen years he has been a power in English literary circles. He owned a half-literary, half-political weekly review, the New Age, which was the most lively intellectual organ in England between 1910 and 1914.
Orage might have been the greatest critic in English literature, which has produced few critics, and which is dying of that lack, though it revives every time a writer of genius emerges and joins a great tradition. But Orage sold the New Age and went to Fontainebleau: literature interested him no more.
I am surprised at his appearance . . .
(p. 7)
The disciples add that [Gourdyev] has defined himself as a disseminator of solar energy, which they pretend not to understand.
Is there a God? I ask.
âYes, and Gourdyev is in communication with Him. Almost like an independent, obstinate minister with his king.â Women, they say, have no real possibility of acquiring a soul except by contact and sexual union with men.
From gurdjieff-bibliography.com/Current/index
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
âą Susan B. Anthony, in an address to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1896)
Colin Wilson writes about “Gurdjieff’s reputation for seducing his female students. (In Providence, Rhode Island, in 1960, a man was pointed out to me as one of Gurdjieff’s illegitimate children. The professor who told me this also assured me that Gurdjieff had left many children around America).”
Although no evidence or documents have certified anyone as a child of Gurdjieff, the following seven people are believed to be his children:
- Cynthie Sophia “Dushka” Howarth (1924â2010); her mother was dancer Jessmin Howarth. She went on to found the Gurdjieff Heritage Foundation.
- Sergei Chaverdian; his mother was Lily Galumnian Chaverdian.
- Andrei, born to a mother known only as Georgii.
- Eve Taylor (born 1928); the mother was one of his followers, American socialite Edith Annesley Taylor.
- Nikolai Stjernvall (1919â2010), whose mother was Elizaveta Grigorievna, wife of Leonid Robertovich de Stjernvall.
- Michel de Salzmann (1923â2001), whose mother was Jeanne Allemand de Salzmann; he later became head of the Gurdjieff Foundation.
- Svetlana Hinzenberg (1917â1946), daughter of Olga (Olgivanna) Ivanovna Hinzenberg and a future stepdaughter of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
In the early 1930s, Gurdjieff publicly ridiculed one of his pupils, Alfred Richard Orage. In response, his wife Jessie Dwight wrote the following poem about Gurdjieff:
He calls himself, deluded man,
The Tiger of The Turkestan.
And greater he than God or Devil
Eschewing good and preaching evil.
His followers whom he does glut on
Are for him naught but wool and mutton,
And still they come and sit agape
With Tigerâs rage and Tigerâs rape.
Why not, they say, The manâs a god;
We have it on the sacred word.
His book will set the world on fire.
He says so â can God be a liar?
But what is woman, says Gurdjieff,
Just nothing but manâs handkerchief.
I need a new one every day,
Let others for the washing pay.
From Episodes with Gurdjieff by Edwin Wolfe (p. 24)
In 1939
I was alone with Mr. Gurdjieff at a table in Childâs Restaurant on Fifth Avenue near 57th Street. It was almost dusk of a winter day. The Childâs Mr. Gurdjieff called his night office. Another Childâs over on Columbus Circle was his day office.
We sat for awhile in silence. He seemed to be looking out the front window at the people passing by in the waning light. It was beginning to snow.
âWolfe,â he said, âtell. How your handkerchief?â
âMr. Gurdjieff,â I said, âIâm going to ask you to not speak about Dorothy like that. We are trying to live a good life together. A decent life. We are even trying to learn how to love one another. So, please, donât call her my handkerchief. Please.â
âI not promise,â he said.
But he never called her that again.
Gurdjieff International Review
Further Episodes with Gurdjieff
Related by Edwin Wolfe
October 17, 2011
George I. Gurdjieff, Peter D. Ouspensky and the Fourth Way
. . . Looking at his life and teachings, it is not difficult to determine whether or not Gurdjieff was an honest and sincere guru: he was a self-proclaimed and proud liar, a con man who delighted in remembering, as well as embellishing, his successful frauds and scams. He was an alcoholic tyrant, an avid opium user, a ‘successful’ hypnotist; his personal habits were deplorable to say the least, and he took all kinds of sexual liberties with his female followers by procreating several children with them.
Gurdjieff on Sex: Subtle Bodies,
Si 12, and the Sex Life of a Sage
Johanna J. M. Petsche
Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949) was an Armenian-Greek teacher of esoteric doctrine. His rather candid teachings and views on sex and sexuality, which are scattered through his writings and those of his pupils, are seldom discussed by writers on Gurdjieff, though they are intrinsic to Gurdjieffâs overall vision of human beings and their potential for spiritual development. Gurdjieffâs fundamental teaching hinges on the precept that human beings are mechanical, habitually carrying out their lives in a sleep-like state. In his system, this is largely explained by the bodyâs continual squandering of the potent sexual energy produced by its âsex centreâ. The ultimate aim of Gurdjieffâs teaching is to harmonise the different âcentresâ that exist within the individual, so that the individual might âwake upâ and break out of their usual somnambulistic, mechanical state and, in this way, develop within themselves subtle bodies. The sex centre plays a surprisingly significant and unique role in this soteriological process, as will be demonstrated.
This chapter will begin with a brief background to Gurdjieff and his teaching. Gurdjieffâs views on the sex centre, which governs mechanical behaviour but can potentially liberate individuals, will then be examined and positioned within the context of his âthree-octaveâ system of food transformation outlined in Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskyâs (1878-1947) In Search of the Miraculous. Following this, Gurdjieffâs views on heterosexuality, homosexuality, masturbation, and gender, with a focus on his contentious statements about women, will be assessed within the context of his teaching. Finally, Gurdjieffâs own flamboyant and controversial sex life will be considered.
The Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley, examines the lives, teachings, and influence of three of the most controversial, important, and interesting âcrazy wisdomâ teachers of the 20th century. It was published by O-Books (now Axis Mundi Books) in December 2010 and is available in major bookstores and via Amazon.
Despite the consistent focus and research required to produce a work like this (230,000 words and 714 pages), ultimately it was not hard for me to write, because the subject matter is absorbing and juicy (in contrast to the repetitive dryness of so much of the written material concerning transformational inner work). Crazy-wisdom type teachers, at least those of an impactful and influential nature, are profoundly interesting, if only because they run counter to the mass doctrines of religious programming that in large part is concerned with dividing human beings inwardly via a morally simplistic dualism. This simple-mindedness shows up a great deal in so-called ânew ageâ teachings, with their tiresome âwarriors of the lightâ mentality and tendency to perpetuate standard Christian programming that ultimately reinforces the repression of the nastier, more hidden elements of the ego (what Jung called the âshadowâ, essentially). The Great Work lies in the uniting of Opposites (a work that often is necessarily antinomian), and more subtly in the embracing of paradox, not in âdivision for moralityâs sakeâ. I address some of these matters in my book Rude Awakening.
As to the matter of what exactly âcrazy wisdomâ is, the term technically derives from the Tibetan yeshe cholwa, which means roughly âwisdom gone wildâ. The Indian equivalent of the Tibetan crazy wisdom teacher is the avadhuta, a term that refers to a wandering mystic who flaunts social conventions and whose concern with awakening transcends moral frameworks. The best two treatments of this difficult subject I am aware of are Chogyam Trungpaâs Crazy Wisdom and Georg Feurensteinâs more scholarly Holy Madness.
P. T. Mistlberger | ptmistlberger.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From Chapter 8: Self-Perfection and the Myth of the Infallible Guru (p. 218)
A bleak fundamental of Gurdjieffâs teaching is that man is not born with a soul â and that without one, he will âdie like a dogâ. (Gurdjieffâs reference to âdying like a dogâ is interesting in that the dog is a symbol of death in many cultures â not least of which was in ancient Egypt, where Anubis, generally recognized as a canine-type god, is a chthonic deity of embalming and death.) Consistent with some elements of ancient Egyptian mysticism, he believed that the soul could only be created by working on oneself â by becoming, at the least, a âman number fourâ.
From Biographies
By Peter Holleran
George Gurdjieff â Mysterious Trickster
Proponent of âThe Fourth Wayâ, George Gurdjieff taught a hard school of self-understanding.
Pema Chodron tells an amusing story of Gurdjieffâs particular manner of teaching:
âThere was a man in his community who was really bad-tempered. Nobody could stand this guy because he was so prickly. Every little thing caused him to spin off into a tantrum. Everything irritated him. He complained constantly, so everyone felt the need to tiptoe around him because anything that might be said could cause him to explode. People just wished he would go away.â
âGurdjieff liked to make his students do things that were completely meaningless. One day there were about forty people out cutting up a lawn into little pieces and moving it to another place in the grounds. This was too much for this fellow, it was the last straw. He blew up, stormed out, got in his car, and drove off, whereupon there was a spontaneous celebration. People were thrilled, so happy he has gone. But when they told Gurdjieff what had happened, he said, âOh no!â and went after him in his car.â
âThree days later they both came back. That night when Gurdjieffâs attendant was serving him his supper, he asked, âSir, why did you bring him back?â Gurdjieff answered in a very low voice, âYouâre not going to believe this, and this is just between you and me; you must tell no one. I pay him to stay here.ââ (4a)
At one time John Bennett believed that Pak Subuh was the âAwakener of Conscienceâ mentioned in All and Everything who was supposedly destined to complete the work of Gurdjieff. Their teachings are very different, however (which is perhaps why he was to be the completion), and Bennett is not joined in this view by the majority of Gurdjieff students.
Gurdjieff evidently had yogic powers of a sort, but controversy exists over his morals and ethics, no doubt due to his use of âcrazy-wiseâ methods. Many students were pushed to extremes of discipline, and a few went over the edge. This might be looked upon as the mark of a good teacher, using forceful means for the benefit of his disciples, but many thought otherwise. Rom Landau wrote:
âSome of his pupils would at times complain that they could no longer support Gurdjieffâs violent temper, his apparent greed for money, or the extravagance of his private life.â (5)
John Bennett said that
â(Gurdjieff) spoke of women in terms that would have better suited a fanatical Muslim polygamist than a Christian, boasting that he had many children by different women, and that women were for him only the means to an end.â (6)
Every teacher has his detractors, particularly those teachers who make bold, dramatic use of the energies of life for teaching purposes, but it is not our intent to criticize character. Teachers can make mistakes, however, and the ways of any one teacher are not necessarily the way for all students. Gurdjieff used strong and shocking means to reveal his students to themselves, and he particularly liked to hit upon the âsex nerveâ and the âpocketbook nerveâ. He said that ânothing shows up people so much as their attitude toward moneyâ, and through casual incidents he delighted in awakening people to the hypocrisy of their gentile ways. He liked to keep people on the edge of financial ruin, creating one disaster after another, saying that if they felt too comfortable they would not grow.
The âcrazy-wiseâ teaching methods have a long history, and must always be seen in context. What works for some, may not work for others, and cannot be imitated. What is most important to remember about a teacher, says Arthur Deikman, is this:
âTeachers will be imperfect. What you need to be able to count on is them doing their job.â (6a)
Gurdjieff apparently had yogic powers, and it is said that he purposely helped to delay the death of his wife a few more days because she was close to enlightenment. Through his help it is claimed that she would not need to come back to this world because she did in fact attain awakening.
As mentioned earlier, Gurdjieff (because of his obscure writing style) is better understood through his interpreters. Indeed, when writing All and Everything, Gurdjieff continually changed his wording in this long book whenever he saw that disciples understood what he had written! Again, this was an example of his âburying the dog.â He felt that the work was more useful when one was kept in a state of confusion on the level of the mind, forcing one to dig deeper for the truth.
John Bennett summarizes his basic form of argument:
âYou think you know who you are and what you are; but you do not know either what slaves you now are, or how free you might become. Man can do nothing: he is a machine controlled by external influences, not by his own will, which is an illusion. He is asleep. He has no permanent self that he can call âIâ. Because he is not one but many, his moods, his impulses, his very sense of his own existence are no more than a constant flux⊠Make the experiment of trying to remember your own existence and you will find that you cannot remember yourselves even for two minutes. How can man, who cannot remember who and what he is, who does not know the forces that move him to action, pretend that he can do anything?â (7)
The âFourth Wayâ was Gurdjieffâs term for the way taught in his system. According to him, there are three traditional paths, those of the faqir, the monk, and the yogi. The faqir works on disciplining the physical body with harsh austerities. The monk works on his emotions with prayer, fasting, and meditation. The yogi attempts to discipline his mind and alter his state of consciousness. âThe fourth wayâ is that of simultaneously working on the other three dimensions (which correspond with the three bodies: physical, emotional or astral, and mental (which Gurdjieff called the spiritual) while applying the process of self-observation to make oneself less mechanical. This is the way of the âcunning manâ, who thus surpassed the faqir, the monk, and the yogi and came to know the true âIâ which was the presiding ego, the âdivineâ body, the owner of the other three bodies. With this language, almost theosophical in character, one can see the possible limit of Gurdjieffâs teachings in encompassing the higher non-dual philosophy. How many of Gurdjieffâs followers found the Self, as opposed to the âIâ or âego-soulâ? How many knew the âI AMâ? Did Gurdjieff himself attain such realization? Anthony Damiani suggests that the Gurdjieff work did not produce realization of the subject, but only an objective âfourth state,â perhaps a purified ahamkara:
âIf you go to a higher level than this one, it will still be a content of consciousness [rather than consciousness itself]; and if you go up to an even higher level, or even to the level of being itself, there will always be a content of consciousness. Unfortunately this is an idea which neither Ouspensky or Gurdjieff could grasp. Although Ouspensky talks about the fourth state of consciousness, he fails to understand that it could be analyzed just as at the empirical level or any levelâŠ.This is true of all the seven levels of existence, even if you live in the angelic world. So if someone comes from another level of existence and said, âYes, but your analysis doesnât hold for my plane of existence,â I would say, âIs it a content? Is it an experience for you? Is it a world that you are perceiving? Is there a perception taking place? You know it? Yes? Then itâs subject to the same analysis.â Thatâs how it cuts through everything and thatâs why this teaching is direct and the most comprehensive one you will find. This teaching has been around for thousands of years and it wonât disappear.â (8)
Gurdjieff’s teaching: for scholars and practitioners
A NOTE: ON THE DOG GURDJIEFF BURIED
By Sophia Wellbeloved
(with 13 comments)
GURDJIEFF: LIFE AND CONTROVERSY
A critical investigation of a subject who inspired a partisan movement and also much controversy. Gurdjieff has been diversely described as an occultist, a hypnotist, a mystic, a holistic philosopher, and a charlatan.
Gurdjieff and Blavatsky: Western Esoteric Teachers in Parallel
Johanna Petsche
This article is concerned with the largely unexamined interrelations between the biographies (both factual and mythological), public personas, and teachings of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949). Although their lifetimes overlap in the late nineteenth century, Blavatsky and Gurdjieff never met.1 The years that most obviously link them are between 1912 and 1916, after Blavatsky’s death, when Gurdjieff was establishing himself as a spiritual teacher and formulating his teachings in Moscow and St Petersburg. At this time Theosophy was flourishing in Russia, particularly in these cities, which were major centres for the occult revival. It will be posited that Gurdjieff capitalised on the popularity of Theosophy by donning a Blavatsky-like image and using recognisable Theosophical terminology in order to attract followers in Russia.
Blavatsky and Gurdjieff were pioneers in reviving occult traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in introducing Eastern religious and philosophical ideas to the West. Charismatic and controversial, both courted reputations as charlatan gurus,2 impostors, and spies,3 and they remain problematic figures, vilified by some while emphatically honoured by others.
Gurdjieff International Review
Gurdjieff
Chronology
James Moore
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Winter 1998/1999 Issue, Vol. II No. 2
Special Issue on P. D. Ouspensky
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gurdjieff International Review
Rodney Collin
A Man Who Wished To Do Something With His Life
Terje Tonne
Since I first came into contact with Rodney Collinâs writing, his simple and honest approach to life and the Gurdjieff Work has always struck me deeply. Whether it is in his books, collected notes, unpublished manuscripts or his personal lettersâitâs always there.
Rodney Collin-Smith was born on the 26th of April 1909 in the coastal town of Brighton, England. His father, Frederick Collin-Smith, had retired early from his business as a general merchant in London and after traveling in Europe and Egypt had settled down in Brighton. There Rodneyâs father married Kathleen Logan, much younger than he and the daughter of a local hotel owner. Kathleen was a member of the local Theosophical Society and had a strong interest in astrology, possibly the source of some of Rodney Collinâs later interests. She also worked extensively with transcribing books for the blind.
After boarding school at Ashford Grammar School in Kent, Rodney Collin studied at the London School of Economics, where he received his Bachelor of Commerce degree. He worked as a freelance journalist supplying articles on art and travel to the [London] Evening Standard and the Sunday Referee. In 1930, on a pilgrimage organized by the Christian organization Toc-H, he met Janet Buckley. That same year he read Ouspenskyâs A New Model of the Universe. Four years later, Collin and Buckley married in London.
In 1935 Collin and Buckley attended some lectures given in London by Maurice Nicoll. After meeting Ouspensky in September 1936, Rodney Collin knew instantly that he had found that which he had been looking for in his extensive reading and traveling. Robert de Ropp, at that time also a member of Toc-H, was most likely a source for their developing interest in the Work ideas. Regardless of what perspective one assumes for a description or interpretation of Collinâs work, it is not possible to overstate both the direct and the indirect influence of Ouspensky.
Man, The Universe, and Cosmic Mystery
By Rodney Collin
INTRODUCTION [excerpt]
Meanwhile, to the ordinary man, interested in his own fate but not particularly in science, it can only be said that perhaps, on closer examination, he may find this book in fact not so ‘scientific’ as it at first appears. Scientific language is the fashionable language of the day, just as the language of psychology was the fashionable language thirty years ago, the language of passion the fashionable language in Elizabethan times, and the language of religion the fashionable language of the Middle Ages. When people are induced to buy toothpaste or cigarettes by pseudo-scientific arguments and explanations, evidently this in some way corresponds to the mentality of the age, and truths must also be scientifically expressed.
At the same time, this is not to suggest that the scientific language used is a disguise, a pretence or a falsification. The explanations given are, as far as it has been possible to verify, quite correct and they correspond to actual facts.3 What is claimed is that the principles used could with equal correctness be applied to any other form of human experience, with equally or more interesting results. And that it is these principles which are of importance, rather than the sciences to which they are applied.
Where do these principles come from? To answer this question, it becomes necessary to acknowledge my complete indebtedness to one man, and to explain to a certain extent how this indebtedness came about.
I first met Ouspensky in London, where he was giving private lectures, in September 1936. These âlecturesâ referred to an extraordinary system of knowledge, quite incomparable with anything I had encountered before, which he had received from a man whom he called âGâ. This system, however was not new: on the contrary it was said to be a very ancient one, which had always existed in hidden form and traces of which could from time to time be seen coming to the surface of history in one guise or another. Although it explained in an extraordinary way countless things about man and the universe, which had seemed hitherto quite inexplicable, its sole purpose â as O. constantly stressed â was to help individual men to awake to a different level of consciousness.
Any attempts to use this knowledge for other and more ordinary purposes he discouraged or forbade altogether.
Yet despite the staggering completeness of this âsystemâ in itself, one could never entirely separate it from the âbeingâ of the man who expounded it, from O. himself. When anyone else tried to explain it, the âsystemâ degenerated, lost quality in some way. And although no one could entirely neutralise the great strength of the ideas in themselves, it was clear that the âsystemâ could not be taken apart from a man of a certain quite unusual level of consciousness and being. For only such a man could induce in others the fundamental changes of understanding and attitude which were necessary to grasp it.
3. Even ‘facts’, however, are not sacred. Of two recognised and reputed scientists, writing in two books published in England in the same year (1950), one states as a ‘fact’ that the moon is moving away from the earth, the other equally categorically that it is moving towards it.
This âsystemâ, in the pure and abstract form in which it was originally given, has been recorded once and for all by Ouspensky himself in his In Search of the Miraculous. Anyone who wishes to compare the original principles with the deductions which have here been made, would do well to read that book first. They will then find themselves in a position to judge whether the applications and developments of the ideas are legitimate. And in fact, from their own point of view, it will be their duty so to judge.
Personally, I felt myself at a crossroads at the time, and on the first occasion I saw O. in private â at his crowded little rooms in Gwyndyr Road â I told him that I was a writer by nature, and I asked his advice upon the courses which then lay open to me. He said, very simply, âBetter not to get too involved. Later we may find something for you to write.â
It was typical of the strange confidence that O. inspired that this seemed a complete answer to my problem â or rather, I felt that I no longer had to worry about it, it had been taken from me. In fact, as a result of this conversation, for just over ten years I wrote practically nothing at all. There was too much else to do. But in the end O. kept his promise. And the outline of the present book was written in the two months immediately before his death, in October 1947, as a direct result of what he was trying to achieve and show at that time. Later, a second book, continuing where this leaves off, was written after his death.
During the ten yearsâ interval, O. expounded to us in countless ways â theoretical, philosophical and practical â all the different sides of the âsystemâ. When I arrived, many of those with him had already been studying in this way, and endeavoring to penetrate to the result he indicated, for ten or fifteen years, and they were able to help a newcomer like myself to understand very much of what was and what was not possible. O. tirelessly explained, tirelessly showed us our illusions, tirelessly pointed the way â yet so subtly that if one was not ready to understand, his lessons could pass one by, and it was only years later that one might remember the incident, and realise what he had been demonstrating. More violent methods may be possible, but these can also leave scars that are difficult to heal.
O. never worked for the moment. It might even be said that he did not work for time â he worked only for recurrence. But this needs much explanation. In any case, he quite evidently worked and planned with a completely different sense of time from the rest of us, though to those who impatiently urged him to help them achieve quick results, he would say: âNo, time is a factor. You canât leave it out.â
So the years passed. Yet although very much indeed was achieved, it often seemed to us that O. was too far ahead of us, that he had something which we had not, something which made certain possibilities practical for him that remained theoretical for us, and which for all his explaining, we did not see how to get. Some essential key seemed missing. Later, this key was shown. But that is a different story.
O. went to America during the war. In connection with this strange unfolding of possibilities which went by the name of Oâs âlecturesâ, I remember how in New York about 1944 he gave us a task which he said would be interesting for us. This was to âclassify the sciencesâ, according to the principles which had been explained in the system; to classify them according to the worlds which they studied. He referred to the last classification of the sciences â by Herbert Spencer â and said that though it was interesting, it was not very satisfactory from our point of view nor from the point of view of our time. He also wrote to his friends in England about this task. It was only when the present book was nearing completion, some five years later, that I realised that it was in fact one answer to Oâs task.
O. returned to England in January 1947. He was old, ill and very weak. But he was also something else. He was a different man. So much of the vigorous, whimsical, brilliant personality, which his friends had known and enjoyed for so many years, had been left behind, that many meeting him again were shocked, baffled, or else were given a quite new understanding of what was possible in the way of development.
In the bitter early spring of 1947, he called several large meetings in London of all the people who had previously listened to him, and of others who never had. He spoke to them in a new way. He said that he abandoned the system. He asked them what they wanted, and said that only from that could they begin on the way of self-remembering and consciousness.
It is difficult to convey the impression created. For twenty years in England before the war, O. had almost daily explained the system. He had said that everything must be referred to it, that things could only be understood in relation to it. To those who had listened to him the system represented the explanation of all difficult things, pointed the way to all good things. Its words and its language had become more familiar to them than their mother tongue. How could they âabandon the systemâ?
And yet, to those who listened with positive attitude to what he now had to say, it was suddenly as though a great burden had been taken from them. They realised that in the way of development true knowledge must first be acquired and then abandoned. That exactly what makes possible the opening of one door may make impossible the opening of the next. And some for the first time began to gain an idea where lay that missing key which might admit them to the place where O. was and where they were not.
After this O. retired to his house in the country, saw very few people, hardly spoke. Only he now demonstrated, now performed in actuality and in silence, that change of consciousness the theory of which he had explained so many years.
The story of those months can not be told here. But at dawn one September day a fortnight before his death, after a strange and long preparation, he said to a few friends who were with him: âYou must start again. You must make a new beginning. You must reconstruct everything for yourselves â from the very beginning.â
This then was the true meaning of âabandoning the systemâ. Every system of truth must be abandoned, in order that it may grow again. He had freed them from one expression of truth which might have become dogma, but which instead may blossom into a hundred living forms, affecting every side of life.
Most important of all, âreconstructing everything for oneselfâ evidently meant âreconstructing everything in oneselfâ, that is, actually creating in oneself the understanding which the system had made possible and achieving the aim of which it spoke â actually and permanently overcoming the old personality and acquiring a quite new level of consciousness.
Thus if the present book may be taken as a âreconstructionâ, it is only an external reconstruction, so to speak, a representation of the body of ideas we were given, in one particular form and in one particular language. Despite its scientific appearance, it has no importance whatsoever as a compendium of scientific facts or even as a new way of presenting these facts. Any significance it may have can only lie in its being derived, though at second hand, from the actual perceptions of higher consciousness, and in its indicating a path by which such consciousness may be again approached.
R.C.
Lyne, August 1947
Tlalpam, April 1953
WhaleRider – April 29, 2019 – Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
It dawned on me today that one of the reasons the fourth way works so well not only to recruit followers, but to funnel unsuspecting victims who join the cult directly into Burtonâs predatory orbit is that Ouspenskyâs books focus on both the âeffortsâ required in the so-called, pseudo-scientific âsystemâ and also a great deal upon Ouspenskyâs close relationship with his teacher, Gurdjieff.
To my recollection, Ouspensky doesnât mention anyone else in his writings in such vivid detail.
It was all about Mr. O. and Mr. G., with musical accompaniment provided by Saltzman.
(Toward the end of Gurdjieffâs life, apparently it was all about the BenjaminsâŠdetermining who could pay the most to have direct contact with him, of course after he disavowed any connection with Nicollâs American extension of his cult. All roads lead to Gurdjieff, just like all roads lead to Burton, there are no others.)
So as a result of my intense study of Ouspenskyâs three main books (required reading according to my center director) thatâs what I was led to expect when I joined the so-called âfourth way schoolâ called the Fellowship of FriendsâŠthat I eventually needed to have as close a relationship with my âteacherâ as Ouspensky did with his â sans the âexpression of negative emotionsâ â in order to âevolveâ.
And in order to be a member and be âphotographedâ in the fourth way tradition or shown just how âasleepâ I was, payment was necessary, the perfect setup for Burtonâs (or otherâs) predatory sexual, emotional, and financial exploitation.
IMO, thatâs what makes the fourth way and supporting âwork languageâ so incredibly toxic.
The more depersonalized I grew through the practice of âself-observationâ of âthe machineâ, the more compliant I became. Any resistance to Burtonâs agenda was negatively labeled as âwillfulnessâ or succumbing to âfeminine dominanceâ.
Fourth way ideas are also used by the cult as a self-destructive weapon to turn a person against themselfâŠhence the evolution of âfalse personality versus true personalityâ into the FOFâs splitting of a personâs psyche into the âupper self versus lower selfâ.
Modern Psychology, on the other hand, teaches one to have a more constructive, nuanced, and inclusive relationship with a personâs unconscious parts, generally in an empathetic setting, without mystifying spiritual and delusional superstitious beliefs.
Bear in mind that the language of psychology, i.e. terms like cognitive dissonance, magical thinking, ideas of reference, thought reform, narcissism, ego, personality, sociopathic behavior, etc., are the lens through which the public at large can safely comprehend the cult experience (and many here regularly use to describe and understand our cult experience) without having to join a cult and learn first hand or reduce our cult experiences into a simplistic battle between good and evil.
For example, we look to the work of Margaret Singer, PhD, a Clinical Psychologist, who was a leading expert on the topic, to articulate the underpinning of cult behavior for us.
In other words, psychological language can help a person understand that in order for a pathologically narcissistic personality to thrive in a cult situation, he or she must be surrounded by people with pathologically accommodating personalities who lack healthy narcissism, myself included at the timeâŠthe cult milieu functioning as the arena for the interplay between the selfish and the selfless in all of us, without becoming self derogatory about having joined or simply pointing the finger (or giving the finger in my case) at Burton.
And one of the proven methods to deprogram a person from cult indoctrination such as the fourth way is to strongly suggest they âABANDON THE SYSTEMââŠironically Ouspenskyâs famous last words)âŠand the language associated with it.
(And on the off chance that anyone still in the cult is reading this, thatâs your C-influence for today.)
Coming Out of the Cults
Psychology Today, January 1979
By Margaret T. Singer
Nancy Gilbert â July 21, 2019
npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/07/21/743408637/how-microexpressions-can-make-moods-contagious
This article summarizes research on the phenomena of group feel and group think, which are shown to be part and parcel of human and other animalsâ inherent neurological wiring. Very interesting in view of how friends, cults and other groups affect and convert our thoughts, feelings, POV, etc. A bit like the discovery that trees and other plants in an ecosystem are all interconnected by complex pathways with mycorrhizae in the soil.
WhaleRider â July 22, 2019
Nancy Gilbert:
Thanks for the link. Hereâs another aspect of FOF groupthink that can cause a follower to remain a loyal follower, waste years of their lives serving Burtonâs narcissism and continue to recruit others to join the cult despite Burtonâs history of collateral damage and failed predictions: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
âIn the field of psychology, the DunningâKruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.
People perceive confident individuals as competent and, as a result, promote individuals with higher self-confidence.â ~Wikipedia
âWe argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. InsteadâŠthey are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.â
semanticscholar.org/paper/Unskilled-and-unaware-of-it%3A-how-difficulties-in-to-Kruger-Dunning/
Direct lineage to Gurdjieff is neither a measure of intelligence nor competence.
Narcissistic, overconfident individuals who claim to be more âconsciousâ than others continue promoting the delusional ideas of the fourth way due to their own incompetence in the field of psychology and to compensate for their own lack of self-awareness, IMO.
DunningâKruger effect
âTo be ignorant of oneâs ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.â âAmos Bronson Alcott
The Dunning-Kruger effect (also known as Mount Stupid[1] or Smug Snake[2]), named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger for their seminal paper of 1999.[3] The effect occurs where people fail to adequately assess their level of competence – or specifically, their incompetence – at a task and thus consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. This lack of awareness is attributed to their lower level of competence, which robs them of the ability to critically analyse their performance, leading to a significant overestimation of themselves. In simple words: âpeople who are too ignorant to know how ignorant they areâ. When people do not recognize their own mental illness, this is known as âanosognosiaâ; this is common for people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.[4]
The principle is illustrated indirectly by the common saying that âIâve learned enough about ________ to know what I donât know.â The implication is that someone who hasnât learned much about the subject would have no appreciation for how much there is to learn about it, and so might grossly overestimate their level of understanding.
Iâll Never Tell â January 29, 2019
The psychology of narcissism:
Graduates – June 13, 2007
Various posts that got deleted from blog eleven:
I had a friend in S.F., an Israeli who went by the name of J. B. (canât use his name) and one day he told me an interesting story: he had visited an Israeli friend who was working as a psychiatrist in Los Angeles and during his visit he told this old friend who shared an interest in various spiritual ideas that he was a student in a school with a conscious teacher. In point of fact J. B. went to meet with this old friend to âintroduce him to the school.â The psychiatrist asked for the name of the conscious teacher and when J. B. said Robert Burton the psychiatrist said sorry but your teacher is not conscious. Being as superstitious and we all once were J. B. was of course rather taken aback. Gathering some composure he asked his friend why he would say such a thing. Without disclosing the name of the client, of course, the psychiatrist told J. B. a story of a young man (barely 20 or so) who was in the FoF for just a few months who was allegedly sexually put upon by Robert Burton during a lengthy encounter while visiting the FoF property. He then left the organization with severe psychological problems. J. B. reported this meeting to Miles Barth forthwith and Miles requested that the psychiatrist ask his client to meet with Miles and tell his story, which then took place. One month or so later Miles Barth left the school without informing the rest of us why he had done so. What if we had all known, I mean all of us, way back then?
Burton on Armageddon (from a circulated memo):
[Florence, Italy, Nov. 2, 1982]
âRevelations: ââŠthe seventh angelâŠâ After the seventh conscious being appears, Armageddon will come.â (Burton believes that his teaching will produce seven conscious men.)
[Nov. 3, 1982]
âC-Influence will ensure that all that is left of culture will be taken to Renaissance [the Fellowship compound] for posterity.â
âFlorence, Venice, Siena will probably not be bombed. C-Influence has indicated to me that Naples (home of NATO), Rome, and Milan will be bombed. Neutron bombs may be used. (Neutron bombs destroy only humans.) â
[Nov. 4, 1982]
âWe are founding a new civilization.â
âArmageddon has wrung a school out of the gods.â
âThe only error in Christâs teaching was the statement âmy yoke is mild.â
[Nov. 9, 1982]
âMy role is to predict the fall of California and Armageddon.â
âPeople must come to us for souls.â
âDonât put money into banks after Dec. 1983.â
âThe depression will work to our advantage, we will go through it unscathed. We are very well prepared for the coming depression in 1984.â
âCalifornia is the artichoke capitol of the worldâŠIt means it will choke in 1998.â
âHaleyâs Comet is going to ruin it all, this whole decade is not a good decade.â
[Nov. 11]
âWe are a very high school on earth, Rembrandt and Goethe are in a higher school. There are angels at this table right now.â
âThe 44th president of the US will be in office at the occurrence of Armageddon, 2006.â
[Nov. 14, 1982]
âAfter the year 2006, Genoa may be the port where art is taken by ship to the East Coast â from there by existing highways to Renaissance [now called Apollo].â
[Nov. 12]
âWe are the greatest school since Christâs.â
From Burton (recorded from early âteachingsâ):
âThe formation that a humanâs scale of vision sees as coral may be in reality the earthâs set of teeth. Coral is found near shorelines and what we see as waves is, alarmingly, the earthâs tongue rolling upon the shoreline. The shoreline, then, would somehow be the earthâs lips. As one observes this phenomenon one can easily visualize the waves as a tongue licking the earthâs shorey lips. Storms, which are a strong negative force, are created out of hunger by the earth. The variety of organic death they leave in their wake is washed back into the earthâs main bloodstream, the ocean.â
âAs one awakens one sees the earth, humans and organic life on earth objectively, and finds oneâs visual properties are of the scale of an electron microscope. What we take for trees and rivers are, surprisingly, the earthâs hair and blood veins. What appears to us as a cloud formation is most probably the earth perspiring. On hot summer days clouds form over mountains, and fog sometimes rolls onto the land masses. Similarly, on hot days beads of moisture emerge from our body or cosmos. We call this noteworthy event perspiration.â
From court records, considers himself a âgoddess in a manâs bodyâ:
âBurton explicitly told Troy that the âangelsâ wanted Troy to disrobe, and the âangelsâ wanted Troy to submit to Burtonâs sexual advances because Burton himself was an âangelâ, a âgoddess in a manâs body.â
Commentary:
Ex-boyfriends have threatened Burtonâs life several times; he travels with an armed bodyguard. On one occasion, it was reported, a young man from Bakersfield showed up at the Fellowship dining lodge armed with a 22 rifle looking for Burton. He was tackled, disarmed and put on a bus. The police were not contacted. At one time guns were not allowed, but now almost every male member of the Fellowship living in Oregon House has a gun. There is an informal militia armed with shotguns, rifles and 44 magnum handguns in order to protect the “Teacher” from the disgruntled ex-members who regret their sexual encounters with Burton.
This is a direct quote from Robert Earl Burton (from an internal memo):
âI am the Avatar, and I was born in 1939. I am not Christ, yet I am the Christ of the ageâŠand I assume I prepare for him.”
âI would like you to take the idea simply. It simply means that of all the humans on the planet, I suffer consciously the most.â
Girard Haven, from Creating A Soul, page 62:
âHowever, some things can be verified only by adopting the attitude that they are true. For example, to verify that this is a real School, it is necessary to act as if that had been verified and then see if it produces the desired results. This means that we need to adopt attitudes at will without prior verification.â
From Girard Haven:
âStrangely, the shock which bridged this interval for me was the ânon-depressionâ of 1984. On the one hand, it was no longer possible to believe the predictions, for the depression obviously had not occurred as predicted. At the same time, Robert was still my Teacher and I had no doubt that he was conscious, so how could I believe anything else? In particular, I refused to allow myself to disbelieve him, that is, to believe that what he said would not come true. Not only would this have been a denial of my teacher, but it would also be one of the most mechanical responses possible, based as it is on both opposite thinking and feminine dominance in the form of the desire to minimize friction. Being thus unable either to believe or disbelieve, I was left in a state which could best be described as non- or suspended belief.â
Girard Haven, from Creating A Soul, page 576:
âIn particular, if he [Robert Earl Burton] knows what he is doing and we donât, we have no basis for judging or doubting him. Instead, we simply have to trust him, as a child trusts his parents, or dog trusts its master. If he asks us to do things which seem to have no connection to awakening â or even to be âwrongâ â we have no choice but to do them anyway.â
Ames Gilbert â July 29, 2008
Here is a great PBS (Public Broadcasting Service in the U.S.A.) interview in 2004 with a person who has been in advertising for his entire adult career. He talks about the similarities between brands and cults, the good and the bad, and how marketers use this knowledge of human psychology. There is a brief mention of the Fellowship of Friends and Robert Earl Burton as an example.
pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/atkin.html
Opus111 – July 29, 2008
I found the interview of Atkin quite interesting and revealing of the FOF cult phenomenon, at least for me.
REB may have innate qualities that made him a natural at manufacturing a cult brand. There were many aspects, features to that brand â intentionality and refinement come to mind â but REB’s own narcissistic, obsessive nature provided the necessary reinforcements for its proliferation and relative success. The creation of centers for instance, while not original in itself, created the tools for diffusion and marketing of the brand. The excruciating attention to details in preparing events, mostly dining events, provided that dazzle and buzz, albeit ephemeral, that keep people going. You package the whole thing in a rather complex and sophisticated system of ideas (rather irrelevant to REB, or so it seems), et voila, you have got yourself a pretty good scam, with plenty of access to money, luxuries and sex, along with the fantasies it provides.
A lot of current members do acknowledge in some ways the brand (as in refinement and intentionality for instance), and in fact are very attached to that lifestyle, to the concept of âFOF familyâ or âFellowship of Friendsâ, but in the process unknowingly have pushed further and further in the recess of their conscience the reality of coercion, corruption, fabrications, etc⊠let alone the dismissal of 4th way ideas that brought them here. They have replaced the enlightened ideals and ideas of their youth with the cold comfort and grim reality of a self-serving religion.
In a way, much like the supposedly cultivated and self-aware clientele of a Mac cafe (in Atkin interview) who know they are only using a box of electronics, still frown at the PC intruders, so do FOF members scowl at critics of their cult who dare question its validity and show its rot, not because it is not true, but because it is their brand, their family.
brucelevy – July 29, 2008
Opus111,
For me the âbrandâ was already there before I met the FOF and RB. Many people were attracted to the â4th wayâ as a brand through the series of books, and it only took the existence of an apparent channel that reflected the brand to attract people to something they were innately drawn to aside from RB and his delusions.
As far as Iâm concerned, RB bastardized the brand beyond recognition, where it is now simply the cult of utter stupidity, greed and obliviousness.
Opus111 – July 29, 2008
Bruce,
True. You know how some people will casually say about an object: âI could never live without itâ, obviously exaggerating the importance the object has in their existence and knowing perfectly well they would survive just fine without it. Similarly, a lot of current (long time) members say: âI could never leave the FOFâ, implying some sort of physical attachment to FOF and perhaps imminent death or other catastrophe if they were to leave. That being said, many testimonials here have revealed it is often difficult to overcome the grief and sense of loss after leaving.
I just think current times are different. The virtual and actual communities of ex and non members seem healthy and supportive, and as Atkin says, the crap that REB is trying to perpetuate does not fly very far before it gets caught in the world wide web.
Traveler â July 29, 2008
Rear View Mirror says: In some posts here on the blog, I sense an unquestioned premise that people within the FOF âjust wouldnât hear itâ if information were presented to them. I disagree. The information is very cleverly obstructed or distorted or downplayed. And I personally believe that a majority of the people in the FOF still havenât tuned into the blog for more than a few minutes. Were someone within the FOF to step forward and talk to people at length about what is happening, and present things in very formal way â i.e., hold several meetings in very public locations with many âstudentsâ around â it would have a profound effect on the opinions and attitudes of those in the FOF.
Very interesting, thanks for that! I wonder though. If many people in the FOF would hear dissent only when it became the next fashionable thing, has any essential change happened in them? It seems the question is big beyond how much time I want to give it right now, but I would like to hear more thoughts on this if someone else has already done the thinking. Do I want to influence members to make them change their opinions to be more in line with mine, because I know whatâs good for them, or do I wish for them to think for themselves and decide independently, regardless of where that brings them at this point in time â and how are these two perspectives related? Many sub-questionsâŠ
Rear View Mirror â July 29, 2008
Traveler,
People sometimes donât âhearâ information because they receive a preponderance of disinformation. Of course, none of the following will happen, but think of this example: What if the above posts by Ames and Associated Press were printed and hung in huge posters at several locations at âApolloâ and at âteaching housesâ around the globe? And left there for weeks? What if talks were given by cult experts every few days? Peopleâs thinking would begin to change.
Itâs stimulus-response thinking. And when thereâs no stimulus, thereâs no response. Thatâs one reason, as you say, itâs not âfashionableâ to hear dissent in the FOF⊠mainly because dissent doesnât last very long, is not very persistent, and therefore it doesnât leave much of an impression.
You wrote: âdo I wish for them to think for themselves and decide independentlyâŠâ
Of course. But do we? Does anyone? Those are two other questions.
Itâs very difficult for us stimulus-response humans to think independently when everyone and everything is telling us, âWe must go to war. We must go to war. We must invade Iraq. We must invade Poland. We must stay in the FOF. We must not question. We must obey.â
And by the way, âobeyâ is a very prominent word in Ouspenskyâs âNotes on the Decision to Work.â Whatever we may think about the man, he certainly had us primed and ready for the FOF experienceâŠ
âThink very seriously,â he wrote. âAre you really ready and willing to obey, and do you fully understand the necessity for it? There is no going back⊠Understanding of the necessity for obeying rules and direct instructions must be based on the realization of your mechanicalness and your helplessness⊠You can see, if you are sincere with yourself, all the blunders and the mistakes which you made when you tried to act by yourself. You cannot think rightly. You cannot feel rightly. You need constant help. And you can have it. But you must pay for it â at least, by not arguing.â
Traveler â July 29, 2008
OMG. This is from the Notes on the Decision to Work. To think how highly I esteemed that particular passage, how essential it was to my Work, how I would look down on those who did not take it seriously enough and with sufficient valuation, and how much I WANTED to follow. Mind-blowing.
Rear View Mirror â July 29, 2008
Traveler:
Yes, my sentiments as well. I hadnât read the passage for years. Apparently, I was vulnerable to such unchallenged premises â that we are weak and helpless, that we need to obey, and so forth.
âYou cannot think rightly. You cannot feel rightly. You need constant help.â We were bombarded by these ideas in the FOF.
Reminding ourselves that sometimes we do need help â or even that we often need help â is wise for all of us. But thereâs very little sound reasoning or âunderstandingâ in Ouspenskyâs unchallenged premise that âyou cannot think rightlyâ and that âyou cannot feel rightlyâ. Cannot is a strong word. And if I cannot, the hidden premise is that there is someone out there for me who can think rightly, and who can feel rightly.
AlthoughâŠ..since I cannot think rightly and feel rightly, itâs a little scary isnât it? How am I to truly recognize someone who does if I donât have the same in myself?
Yes, very mind-blowing that I bought into these ideas.
Notes on Work
Notes on Work, first printed in 1952, consists of three short essays: âNotes on Decision to Workâ, âNotes on Work on Oneselfâ, and âWhat is School?â All deal with the degree of individual commitment required from one beginning work in the system. The chief message of Notes on Work is contained in Ouspenskyâs opening paragraph: âThink very seriously before you decide to work on yourself with the idea of changing yourself . . . this work admits of no compromise and it requires a great amount of self-discipline and readiness to obey all rules . . .â
These five works were once printed in very limited quantities and made available to a small group of people who had devoted themselves for years to the study of Ouspenskyâs philosophy. The decision to reprint Memory, Surface Personality, Self-Will, Negative Emotions and Notes on Work for presentation to a larger audience is based on renewed public enthusiasm, much of it taking the form of inquiries about the P. D. Ouspensky Memorial Collection at the Yale University Library. It is hoped that the many scholars and interested lay people who have come to know Ouspensky through that, and other avenues, will gain further insight into P. D. O â and themselves â by discovering this remarkable new collection.
Merrily E. Taylor
selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/Ouspensky-Conscience.pdf
THEDOG
TEACHINGS
Podcast Series 3, Episode 9: Notes on Work
In this episode of our third series, we present two lectures, from P. D. Ouspenskyâs book, Conscience. The first lecture is Notes on Decision to Work, and the second is Notes on Work on Oneself. Discussions on the preparation, aims, means, energy, and control for undertaking personal transformation. The transcript for this podcast, can be found on our website at thedogteachings.com under Resources/Podcasts.
Joe Average â July 29, 2008
57. Traveler
65. Rear View Mirror
I remember at the end of a FOF center (it is deprogramming just to spell it the US way) dinner long ago, someone read the âNotes on the Decision to Workâ. As it was being read, Michael S-vick started, in a very low voice at first but building to a crescendo, to imitate the sound of a large plane flying low overhead. Initially people seemed to shrug off this markedly unFOFish behavior as just an idiosyncrasy, but eventually someone had the courage to ask him why he did that. He laughed and said âa B-52 loaded with Feminine Dominance dropping a load on us.â
I was able then to understand the remark and find it hilarious and simultaneously to totally accept Ouspenskyâs bullshit.
From Orwellâs 1984 (roughly from memory)
âIt goes without saying that the members of the Inner Party were the most artful and subtle practitioners of Doublethink.â
My ability to occasionally recognize the absurdities and manipulation in âThe Systemâ and Burtonâs psychotic chicken gumbo sauce overlying it and yet still be certain of its higher purpose was classic doublethink and put me in the inner circus. Movement within the hierarchy usually depended on the amount of absurdity/criminality one could recognize or even actively create while still maintaining the delusion.
Rear View Mirror â July 30, 2008
Joe Average, thanks for sharing that great story, and for your comments: âMovement within the hierarchy usually depended on the amount of absurdity/criminality one could recognize or even actively create while still maintaining the delusion.â
Thereâs a type of machismo related to this⊠The attitude is that I see what RB is doing and what heâs up to, but I am not one of the weak ones. I am strong and undeterred and honorable and loyal to what I believe to be a higher calling. If I see something unsavory, I donât get queasy like a girl. If someone is hurt along the way, I canât speak to that. It is out of my hands. I have no choice. I am strong.
But that person does have a choice. I always thought there was more strength and honor in learning to recognize the truth, and trying to live by it, and in following conscience despite the odds being difficult. To me, that is strength. Taking the viewpoint that people are hopelessly doomed and weak and âasleepâ â that is weakness, and just plain stupidity on my part when I believed it.
The six steps of the âsequenceâ â shocking news break â are not something new after all. The six steps were cleverly crafted by Burton from Day 1, or maybe Day 2 or 3.
Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey.
(See Notes on the Decision to Work â 56.)
ton â July 30, 2008
74 elena âCommunication or sharing are aspects of loveâŠ.â
76 RVM âObey. Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey.â
This reminded me of something I heard on the radio a while backâŠ. one of the interviewees stated:
âListening is an act of loveâŠâ
There is no real listening going on in the followshipâŠ. The dictatorial nature (no pun intended) and existing power structure does not allow for listening, and any claim that it is a âschool of loveâ is completely fraudulent⊠How can anyone confuse Robert Burtonâs form of satyriasis with love? Itâs a school of selfishness, âprofoundâ only in how deeply misguided are its adherents. That people are still buying into it is astonishing.
democracynow.org/2007/12/3/listening is an act of love
lauralupa â July 30, 2008
RVM 54
âThink very seriously,â he wrote. “Are you really ready and willing to obey, and do you fully understand the necessity for it? There is no going back⊠Understanding of the necessity for obeying rules and direct instructions must be based on the realization of your mechanicalness and your helplessness⊠You can see, if you are sincere with yourself, all the blunders and the mistakes which you made when you tried to act by yourself. You cannot think rightly. You cannot feel rightly. You need constant help. And you can have it. But you must pay for it â at least, by not arguing.â
Now thatâs what I would call a series of dangerous memes! It would be interesting to do a serious study of Fourth Way books by various authors, and explore all the ideas that can be easily employed by ill-willing individuals to create coercive and cultish environments. Also, how these ideas were passed on and in different ways, modified and corrupted as they moved from Gurdjieff to his various followers and on to their followers. In the meanwhile, still playing with the memes idea (meme?), I found this on religion and faith:
Memes â the skepticâs dissection of religion
Among many anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, it has recently become fashionable to dismiss all religions as memes â parasitic mental processes which propagate in the same manner as chain letters [Dawkins 1989, Dennett 1995]. In this view, religious belief is a self-perpetuating delusion. A meme (rhymes with âdreamâ) may be defined as any self-referential belief system which contains within itself the instructions for its own propagation. Memes are often described as the cultural equivalents of computer viruses.
A meme carries exactly the same fear-driven psychological motivation as a chain letter â âIf you propagate me then something nice will happen, if not then something horrible will happenâ. In order to justify themselves against attack by reason, memes place absolute reliance on faith, which is seen as being superior to reason. They also contain self-referential or circular claims to the truth such as, âThis meme says it is the divine truth. Since it is the divine truth, whatever it says must be true. Therefore, it must be divine truth because it says so and all competing memes must be the work of the Devilâ.
These two types of self-referential statements: âpropagate meâ and âI am the only truthâ provide the driving force for memes to invade the minds of their hosts. In addition, many memes contain the instructions: âHelp people who believe in this meme, attack people who do notâ. These commands being the ultimate cause of all religious hatred, wars, pogroms and persecutions throughout the centuries.
The general defining features of all memes can thus be seen to be self-referential âclosed-loopâ type of circular statements, and a strong tendency towards hatred and intolerance.
The science of the study of memes, their internal structures and modes of propagation is known as memetics (by analogy to genetics â how biological entities propagate themselves).
More detailed analysis will usually show the following features:
Like a virus â such as rabies â a successful meme must perform two actions:
â Overpower the resistance of its host.
â Bring about the conditions for its spread.
To establish itself in the mind of its host, it will use some or all of the following mechanisms:
[1] Promise heaven for belief. This may involve frustrating the hostâs normal sexual urges and redirecting them into sexual fantasies of the hereafter.
[2] Threaten eternal punishment in hell for disbelief.
[3] Boost the believersâ egos by telling them they are âchosenâ or superior to believers in false memes.
[4] Disable the faculties of disbelief (âimmune responseâ) by claiming that faith is superior to reason.
[5] Establish itself as the One True Meme, usually by some sort of holy book containing a circular self-referential argument such as:
X is the one true meme. We know X is the one true meme because The Source of Universal Truth has approved X. We know The Source of Universal Truth has approved X, because X contains statements which say so. We know what X says is true because X is the one true meme.
Once it has parasitised the mind of its host, a meme needs to propagate itself. A successful meme will contain instructions for some or all of the following:
[6] Holy war â convert or kill all unbelievers.
[7] Intimidation and terrorism â threaten and discriminate against unbelievers.
[8] Enforced social isolation or even death to apostates. (An apostate is a host which has cured itself of a meme-infection. It is especially dangerous to the meme because it might pass on meme-resistance to others).
[9] Fecundism â encourage true believers to breed faster than believers in false memes.
[10] Censorship â prevent rival memes from reaching potential hosts (a theological doctrine known as âError has no rightsâ) and forbid rational analysis of the meme itself.
[11] Disinformation â spread lies about rival memes.
from kwelos.tripod.com/memes.htm
My book, âThe fourth way to nowhereâ is almost ready. Readers of this forum will probably feel that I pull some of my punches, and some may prefer that I would have performed a more overtly aggressive demolition. Certainly some of the material on this forum and on the REB blog would merit that. However, I have explicitly confined my commentary to what I myself witnessed, referring readers to the blog in the footnotes, and I think in the end the demolition is quite thorough. Perhaps it will lure some current members into reading it. I have not used my real name for personal reasons, although I would not be ashamed to be associated with what I have written if that were my only concern. I hope at least some of you will buy the book and post honest reviews on Amazon, even if you hate the book. The files are with the printer and I am aiming for next week for publication.
Rich â September 2, 2021
44thWay: During the time I was a member of FOF
both my parents died, and this year both my older
brothers passed on. I was never able to repair
the relationship with my family. Good luck with your
book!!
Rich,
Iâm sorry to hear that.
One of the points I make in the book is to question whether the FoF (and by extension any similar organisation) is really a Fourth Way school, given that the Fourth Way âtakes place in life.â Other Fourth Way schools had similar rules excluding or distancing from non-members, including (according to Joyce Collin-Smith, Rodney Collinâs sister-in-law) the remnants of Ouspenskyâs group, later to become the Study Society. I am inclined to think that the Fourth Way lends itself to this kind of abuse, and all manifestations of it tend to become absurdity-factories.
In the book, I make the point that âexternal consideringâ is supposed to be the emotional aspect of self-remembering, and yet âexternal consideringâ was hardly if ever talked about in relation to our âlifeâ families. I include more than one episode in which âexternal consideringâ was either criticised or manifestly not practiced as a direct or indirect result of the requirements of the FoF.
Another point: the foundation of the Work, according to Ouspensky, is âgood householder.â FoF was in general not in âgood householderâ regarding emotional connections with friends and family not in the Work.
We were hypnotised by the gradual and almost imperceptible addition of absurdity to what had seemed at the beginning to be a reasonable starting-point.
WhaleRider â September 4, 2021
ââŠin Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that acts of apparently consensual sex, when involving parties marked by a significant power differential, can in fact be instances of harassment. Mechelle Vinson was a young Black woman who said she had given into the persistent pressure to have sex with her boss because she was afraid she would be fired. Vinsonâs consent to sex, the court noted, did not mean that her bossâs sexual overtures were welcome, if her consent had been secured by coercion.
⊠in recent years our interest in consent has become single-minded. The habit of viewing all kinds of exploitative, creepy or troubling sex solely through the lens of consent has left us unable to speak, in many situations, about what is really going wrong.
Teachers, as teachers, understand how to do certain things; students, as students, want to understand how to do those same things. The tacit promise of the classroom is that the teacher will work to confer on the student some of his knowledge and understanding. In the best case, the teacher-student relationship arouses in the student a strong desire, a sense of thrilled if inchoate infatuation. That desire is the lifeblood of the classroom, and it is the teacherâs duty to nurture and direct it toward its proper object: learning. The teacher who allows his studentâs desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher.
Therapists are taught to anticipate and negotiate the fact that their patients will often develop feelings for them â what Freud called âtransference.â They are taught that they must harness those feelings and direct them toward the therapeutic aim â the well-being of the patient â rather than responding to those feelings in kind.
I have tried to explain here, that the absence of consent isnât the only indicator of problematic sex; that a practice that is consensual can also be systemically damaging; that the pedagogical relationship comes with certain responsibilities beyond the ones we owe one another as persons. I wanted to explainâŠthat it was precisely because pedagogy can be an erotically charged experience that it is harmful to sexualize it.â
âWhatâs Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students? Itâs Not What You Thinkâ, Professor Amia Srinivasan, New York Times, Sept 3, 2021.
ton2u â September 5, 2021
WhaleRider, thanks for distilling the gist of the article⊠a link for more context: nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/metoo-teachers-students-consent.html
Iâve worked as a teacher for the past 22 years â in the article I recognized the description of a âtransferenceâ that can form in some students⊠I feel that the abuse of power dynamics by Burton during my stint in the FOF has sensitized and informed the way I work with students who seem to be exhibiting signs of âtransference.â As a result Iâm very careful about the way I interact with students and Iâll add that working in close collaboration with colleagues helps in redirecting the attentions and intentions of students before unhealthy attachments begin to take root.
goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/issues/power
ton2u â September 6, 2021
43 â addendum:
Burton on the other hand, also works with his âcolleaguesâ toward a very different goal⊠and by âcolleaguesâ in this case, I mean enablers, or as the late-great Bruce L. would say âflying monkeys.â Speaking from personal experience, his enablers were (and probably still are) instrumental in directing and helping to deliver âfresh meatâ to the insatiable maw of this so-called âteacherâ â a predator preying on naive and gullible youth.
Posted October 7, 2020 by Claire Jack Ph.D.
Are You a Narcissistâs Flying Monkey?
Are you caught up in a narcissistâs emotional abuse of others?
Anyone who remembers watching the Wizard of Oz as a child will probably remember how horrifying the Wicked Witch of the Westâs flying monkeys were. These monkeys were sent by the witch to do her dirty work, and the phrase has since become synonymous with people who end up doing the dirty work of a narcissist.
Flying monkeys get caught up in a narcissistâs plan â often to damage the life of another person. The narcissist may use their flying monkeys as piggy in the middle, carrying information from party to party. The flying monkey may use gaslighting tactics, open aggression, and guilt-tripping in order to make another person feel bad and weak, whilst shoring up the narcissist. And theyâre often involved in pleading the case of the narcissist. Narcissists love having at least one flying monkey, as it makes them feel important and means they can appear to be above the people below them (on both sides) who are caught up in the messy parts of the drama.
WhaleRider â September 6, 2021
GullibleâŠor vulnerable? Are they the same? Yes and no.
Speaking for myself, having joined at the tender age of 21, there were core elements of the FOF doctrine of which I remained skeptical throughout my tenure, particularly when it came to burtonâs warped deployment of the concept of âC influenceâ, eventually appearing to me as a means to abdicate responsibility for his actions and predictions.
IMO, this is how burton exploits his followers through relying on him to interpret ideas of reference as âshocksâ from disembodied spirits, as in the reading of license plates and street signs, etc., instead of acting in the best interest of his students as an ethical teacher like ton2u does in an academic setting governed by rules designed to protect vulnerable students from such sexual predators as burton.
I can honestly say that in my early twenties with the divorce of my parents, alienation I felt from my peers at the time, and identity crisis I was experiencing back then, that I was ripe for cult exploitation due to my vulnerable mental state rather than inherent gullibility and naivety.
At the time I was keenly invested in my personal growth, could not afford college, and due to my emotional vulnerability, easily fell victim to cult âlove bombingâ.
It seems to me that the FOFâs recruitment efforts in Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain and breakup of the Soviet Union is further evidence that cults prey upon vulnerable individuals who have limited choices to escape the dire circumstances in which they find themselves and thereby causing them to choose in retrospect what would seem like the lessor of two evils.
Itâs no wonder that the FOF currently places so much emphasis on the magical thinking that joining a cult guarantees a followerâs entry into âParadiseâ after deathâŠ(not a prevalent idea during my membership), for isnât that the internal paradigm that would drive an individual to leave their destitute motherland and transition from their old way of life to the gilded labyrinth of the FOF, believing it to be a better life, only to discover after they have burned their bridges that an insatiable Minotaur resides at its center? Thatâs exactly how I felt after moving out to the âgolden hills of Californiaâ from my hometown.
I was only naive insofar as I was uninformed about the nature of cults. I strongly believe that education regarding the honing of sharp critical thinking skills is the antidote. My desire is to educate others to the best of my abilities to avoid the trap and drain the victim pool.
Once I learned first hand what burton was really up to, I left, eventually following the deathbed advice of Mr. O, the original person who led me into that morass in the first placeâŠto âabandon the systemâ.
John Harmer â September 6, 2021
#46 WhaleRider gives a clear account of how it is possible to become entangled in a fourth way cult like the FoF. At the end he quotes the famous Ouspensky advice to âabandon the systemâ. I remember how FoF members interpreted this phrase as if it were a deep Zen Koan that could unlock wonders, guided by Rodney Collin’s interpretation. However there are documents available that suggest it was more that Ouspensky truly lost his way. I found Marie Setonâs account quite shocking the first time I came across it (it was quoted way back in 2007 on the predecessor of this blog), and in looking for that also came across another account of his final days that suggests the same thing, i.e. that Ouspensky came to see that the fourth way doesnât result in the benefits he had hoped it would.
Here is Marie Setonâs account:
and here is the account of his final months:
ouspensky.org.uk/final-months-january-to-october-1947
John Harmer,
Thank you for those links. I was aware of the Mary Seaton but not the other link.
In some ways I think Ouspensky is a bit like us: starting out with a belief that there must be some way to a better way of living, seeking some kind of spiritual enlightenment, and becoming sucked in to the first genuinely new ideas he came across in the form of Gurdjieff.
The difference is that he left his teacher after a few years. However, it appears he became trapped by the teaching itself, unable to break free of the mythology he had created and the students who had come to depend on him.
Contrast Krishnamurti, who disbanded the organisation others had set up for him to become the new Avatar.
â
I shall not spam this forum, but I hope readers will indulge one more plug for my book, which is available on Amazon today. In it I make a systematic attempt to analyse the fourth way, not just the warped version promulgated by Robert Burton. The fourth way acquired some good advice that you can get easily from other sources, and packaged it together with some core teachings that are simply nonsense. In order to unpack the System it is necessary to acknowledge the fragments that are actually right, and that is one of the things I have tried to do.
The fourth way to nowhere
Publication date 7 September 2021
Book links:
USA: amazon.com/fourth-way-to-nowhere
UK: amazon.co.uk
or search on Martin Braybrooke
â
Reviews, good or bad, welcome.
A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FOURTH WAY
(pp. 65-94)
Ames Gilbert – September 7, 2021
Hi Martin/44th Way,
Iâve ordered my copy, and am looking forward to reading it.
However it turns out, for me and for you and for other future readers, I commend you for taking on the project, and for the enormous efforts it must have taken you to bring it to fruition. Thank you very much!
Thank you Ames!
For me, the book is an attempt to clarify for myself how I got into this mess in the first place, and by extension how other apparently intelligent people also get sucked in. FoF members for the most part are not dunces. It is not an academic thesis on the Fourth Way, although I have done most of the demolition work that is necessary.
Looking at some of the entries in The Greater Fellowship (ning) site, some ex-members seem still to be pursuing some kind of spiritual path. That might be fine, depending on what is meant by âspiritual,â but the same kinds of questions need to be asked about any spiritual path as should be asked about the Fourth Way.
The link John Harmer gives in 47: to Ouspenskyâs last days is from a web site that is generally not critical of the Fourth Way and by implication is saying that Gurdjieff was the real thing. The suggestion emerges that Ouspenskyâs mistake was over-intellectualising instead of doing the movements and diving into the living experience.
However, the Ray of Creation, the idea of planets as baby suns, the idea that our souls go to the moon unless we awaken, the possibility of âimmortality within the limits of the solar system,â and a number of other ideas are either just plain wrong or else totally without evidence or any method of testing them even in principle.
It also looks as though Gurdjieff got some of his ideas from Ouspensky and made the system up as he went along. That is perhaps material for a future essay by someone.
A Personal Essay
By Robert E. Ornstein
1976
From Chapter 7: Caveat Meditator (pp. 85-87)
For many people, the first experiences of an extended consciousness have come from newly organized groups. Some of these groups are resolutely commercial, others clannish and secretive. In considering both types of groups, we encounter, again, the difficulties of understanding and conveying an advanced knowledge of human capacities. In observing how these “franchised mysticism groups” promote and maintain themselves, we can note how the original knowledge seems to shrink to fit commercial requirements.
I
Many people have been associated with both psychotherapy and parapsychology for many years. The advent of trademarked, franchised mystic cults, however, is a more recent development. Some people seize upon them as the latest stage of their own continual self-preoccupation and indulgence; others seek new “experiences” for themselves. Such forms of meditation, and of awareness-training, have usually met with immediate and continued disdain from professional psychologists and educators, sometimes justified, sometimes for the wrong reasons. That these pop cults and organizations exist and thrive is in large part due to the same lag in mainstream awareness that has allowed the psychotherapeutic disciplines to extend their rightful role in our affairs. Along with our cultivation of intellectual skills, and the increasing prominence of those skills in education and professional life (with attendant specialization of function), there has been an almost complete abdication of teachings regarding the person and what could be called wisdom and self-knowledge. The trademarked awareness systems have, therefore, moved into an area of “applied psychology” in disuse within the academic and educational professions.
The systems offer either one special technique or a synthetic amalgam of techniques drawn from many sources. These techniques, in spite of the opinion of most academics, may not be entirely worthless. The “systems” do continue the fragmentation and degeneration of an authentic mystical tradition. Although the piecemeal benefits of these cults may be of scattered and transient use, such benefits are often perverted to the perpetration and dominance of the system, or to the personal service and material benefit of the leader. The process is similar to the bureaucratic encrustation of a new and perhaps useful government program: the original impetus is lost. If quite important traditional teachings about the person and conscious evolution have fallen into the hands of the contemporary guru-superstar industry, then both the organizers of this industry and those responsible for our education share responsibility. After all, if one is denied normal food one will search out alternatives, even food that makes one sick.
In our society, where is one to learn how to calm one’s mind in times of stress, how to improve personal relationships, attain a measure of responsibility for the direction of one’s life, and come to terms with one’s own creation of experience of the world, let alone an intuitive wisdom of the purpose of life? The existence of “instant-weekend” and simpleminded meditation-training systems tells us more about what is missing from contemporary education, even at a rudimentary level, than any amount of professional criticism could do—we are a society of spiritual illiterates, suckers for a quick answer. Many have turned to the showmen/salesmen and to the recycled Indian dropout to make up for the basic shortcomings of our education—and at great, and often unnecessary, cost.
We are lax in the training of personal knowledge. We may spend years perfecting our tennis stroke, yet precious little training is offered on the nature of our bodies or on the personal dimensions of our own experience. Much modern research, for instance, shows our ordinary consciousness to be a construction of the world, a “best guess” about the nature of reality. Yet rarely, if ever, in psychology or education classes is this fact brought home to students and made part of their experience.
(pp. 98-100)
II
The noncommercial, secretive, esoteric cults are unfortunately similar to the well-advertised consciousness systems. The degeneration of a true religious tradition in the West has left those high-minded âmetaphysical peopleâ prey to those who substitute an ancient fragmentary teaching for a unified whole. David Pendlebury describes the current situation:
âSobrietyâ and âintoxicationâ are of course not intended literally; nor are they merely flowery metaphors: these are technical terms denoting twin poles of human awareness, each in its own way indispensable to balanced development. A man has to see the true reality of his situation; he has to take a very sober look at himself. Equally, though, he needs a taste of another condition in which his latent possibilities are recognized. Taken on its own, either pole is sterile, developmentally speaking. There are plentiful examples all around us of such imbalances. Perhaps you, too, had a Calvinist great-uncle who died heartbroken, having succeeded in convincing himself, a. that âthe grace of Godâ was essential, and b. that such âgraceâ had been withheld from him. Perhaps you, too, have friends whose Ouspensky-oriented understanding of Gurdjieff has left them eternally bewailing the (obvious) facts that âman is asleep,â âman cannot remember himself,â âman cannot do,â etc. Or other friends who have chosen to âfreak out,â to âblow their mindsâ; and are astonished, in rare moments of lucidity, to find themselves inhabiting a âbehavioural sinkâ or âterminal sewer.â Or other friends, perhaps, who inform you in and out of season that: âI was hopelessly at sea, until (name and address supplied) showed me the answer.â
Pendlebury mentions the Caucasian âmysticâ George Gurdjieff, whose followers unfortunately have come to represent the fragmentation of much of contemporary esoteric studies. Although by many accounts Gurdjieff was a man who personally could awaken a sense of life and action in his associates, his work has become the captive of his most doctrinaire and severe followers, who seem to cherish their incompleteness and merely shout âI must wake upâ while reading obsolete doctrines. A fragment of a coherent approach has become honored among those who look to each new teacher for the secret that will allow them to turn away from their morbid self-preoccupation and experience the wholeness of life.
This kind of esoteric school serves to promote the abnormality of those involved. Thus, the continuous search for âtrue teachersâ of mysticism often leads enthusiasts to an examination and popularization of the past, of teachings inappropriate for our time and culture. Outmoded books on alchemy, ancient mysticism, commentaries on Gurdjieff and other mystics are all scoured by the devout in their hope of finding âthe keyâ which will unite all. One of Gurdjieffâs teachers describes this process to one who sought out the teachings of the East: âYou are scrabbling about in the sands, looking for bits of mica to piece together to make a mirror, not realizing that the sand itself is capable of being transformed into the purest glass.â
From HERALD of COMING GOOD: First Appeal to Contemporary Humanity, initially published by Gurdjieff in Paris and 1933; later published by Samuel Weiser, Inc., NY, 1973
Only now, having prepared, in my opinion, by means of everything already set forth in this booklet, a corresponding, so-to-say, âground-workâ for depicting before the inner eye of every reader different outlines of the essence of this booklet of mine, called by me âThe-First-Appeal-To-Contemporary-Humanityâ, I consider it right, before other things, to announce in the hearing of all that, although I undertake at last the publication of my writings, I have decided to promote their circulation not by the usual ways, but in accordance with a definite plan worked out by me.
This plan, newly formed by me, consists in taking all possible measures to prevent my writings, with the exception of the first series, from becoming at once property âaccessible-to-everybodyâ.
This decision of mine, made during the last years in the course of my observations of those who listened to the readings of my current work, is the result of long consideration, and is a conclusion contrary to my original hope of the possibility of making some more, generally available contribution to the healing of manâs psyche, which has already become, during the last centuries, almost completely abnormal.
Is There “Life” on Earth? An Introduction to Gurdjieff
By J. G. Bennett, Stonehill, NY, 1973
From Chapter 2: Gurdjieff â The Man and His Work
Gurdjieff came more and more clearly to see that the ways of helping people which have been used in the past are no longer applicable â because modern man cannot even listen to what is most necessary for him to hear. Notwithstanding so many years of profound study of the human psyche, Gurdjieff reached the conclusion, as late as 1927, that a new and more penetrating approach to the problem must be undertaken. He accordingly imposed on himself a way of life that would, as he says, âcause each person to take off the mask kindly provided by their papa and mama,â and disclose the depths of his or her nature. The procedure adopted he describes as âfinding the most sensitive corn of each person from whatever class or race he might come and whatever position he might hold, and treading on it rather violently.â It can well be imagined that such a procedure made him many new enemies and even scandalized many old friends. Since he carried his procedure into every kind of relationship, it is not surprising that stories of a most damaging nature should have begun to spread at his expense.
Very few people were able to see the necessity or sense of his actions and there is no question that many obstacles were created to the acceptance of his teaching. Nevertheless, for anyone who has felt the obscurity of the human psyche, it is obvious that what he did was indispensable â partly to establish the facts which it was necessary to know and partly, also, for the further aim â equally important and necessary â namely, to try and recover his own health. Not only was his bodily strength almost destroyed by the automobile accident, but he carried the results of many serious diseases contracted in the course of his travels in different parts of the world.
In 1931, he again visited New York and, before the outbreak of the Second World War, paid several further visits to America. The Prieuré was finally closed down in 1932, and in 1934 he settled in Paris.
The period from 1939 to 1948 was one of utmost difficulty and privation for himself and his work. Those who were directly in contact with him were fewer in number than in the past, while those who misunderstood his ideas and mistrusted his methods had increased. Very much misunderstanding existed. Only a few who knew him well and had worked closely with him had some understanding of his aim.
So it came about that in the summer of 1948, many people who had not seen each other for many years, and others who had never met at all, began to arrive in Paris and went round to see him in his little flat, re-establishing contact first with him and then with one another. Everything seemed to be going normally as if work with him would continue as before, when again, there was one of these automobile accidents which, with bullet wounds and disease, make a terrifying pattern in his life. Once again, by all ordinary standards, he should have been killed.
âI am Gurdjieff. I will not die.â
Part I of III
The Counterculture and the Occult
From The Occult World (Routledge, 2014)
By Erik Davis
Perhaps the single most important vector for the popularization of occult spirituality in the twentieth century is the countercultural explosion associated with âthe Sixtiesââan era whose political and culture dynamics hardly fit within the boundaries of that particular decade. A more useful term was coined by the Berkeley social critic Theodore Roszak, who used the word âcountercultureâ to describe a mass youth culture whose utopianism and hedonic psycho-social experimentation were wedded to a generalized critique of rationalism, technocracy, and established religious and social institutions. As such, the counterculture significantly overlapped, though also sometimes resisted, the parallel rise of the New Left and its ideological and occasionally violent struggle against more-or-less the same âSystem.â
Within a few short years after its emergence in the middle of the 1960s, the counterculture had transformed social forms, creative production, personal lifestyles, and religious experience across the globe. Though the counterculture was a global phenomenon, its origins and many of its essential dynamics lie in America, which will be the focus of this essay.
By Hadrat Bashir M. Dervish
Octagon Press, London, 1982
Chapter 6 – THE CULTS
A dervish said to a devil: ‘Why are you sitting
there making no mischief?’ The demon replied
sadly: ‘Since the would-be teachers have
appeared in such numbers, there is nothing
left for me to do.’
Ghulam Haidar
SAINTS, SINNERS, AND MADMEN:
A STUDY OF GURUS
By Anthony Storr
1997
Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 27.3, 2014.
The Value of E. J. Gold:
Unearthing the Real Mr. G.
Johanna Petsche
University of Sydney
Abstract
In the 1960s, the highly elusive Eugene Jeffrey Gold (b. 1941) fashioned himself as a spiritual teacher and established a number of spiritual schools, most notably his Institute for the Development of the Harmonious Human Being (IDHHB), echoing Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieffâs (c.1866-1949) Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Little is known of Goldâs background and career due to his penchant for role-playing, practical jokes, fabricating facts, and mythologising details of his life. What is clear, however, is that Goldâs core teaching and eccentric pedagogic approach are largely modelled on those of Gurdjieff.
In fact, in his Autobiography of a Sufi (1977) and Secret Talks With Mr. G. (1978), Gold goes so far as to blatantly mimic Gurdjieff: his teaching, mode of expression, idiosyncratic terminology, and the very format of his publications. In Autobiography of a Sufi Gold even describes specific events in Gurdjieffâs life, passing them off as his own autobiographical accounts, while on the cover of Secret Talks With Mr. G. (a book deliberately meant to confuse readers into believing that âMr. Gâ is Gurdjieff) there is a photograph of Gold impersonating Gurdjieff in a false wig and beard. This paper aims to shed some much-needed light on the fascinating figure of E. J. Gold, and interrogate the bizarre ways in which he employs, copies, and unashamedly steals core aspects of Gurdjieffâs persona and teaching.
Literature & Aesthetics, Vol. 21, No. 1, June 2011, pp. 72-97.
An Enlightened Life in Text and Image: G. I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men (1963) and Peter Brook’s ‘Meetings With Remarkable Men’ (1979)
Carole M. Cusack
Introduction
This article considers the âautobiographicalâ memoir by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866[?] â 29 October 1949), Meetings With Remarkable Men (hereafter Meetings), which was published posthumously in 1963 under the aegis of Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieffâs designated successor. Almost all known about the Greek-Armenian Gurdjieff is open to question, from his birth date (variously given as 1866, 1872 and 1877), to the âWorkâ, as his teaching is called. The Work has been jealously guarded as a modern initiatory tradition by first-and second-generation disciples, and is controversial in terms of its sources, meaning and interpretation.1 The 1979 film, âMeetings With Remarkable Menâ, with a script co-authored by Madame de Salzmann, directed by Gurdjieffian theatre and film auteur, Peter Brook (b. 1925), depicts the young Gurdjieffâs spiritual quest reverentially.
______________________________________________
1 Sophia Wellbeloved, ‘Gurdjieff, “Old” or “New Age”; Aristotle or Astrology?’, Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies, vol. 1 (2005), pp. 75-88.
Carole M. Cusack is Associate Professor in Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney.
The Lives and Work of
G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky,
and Their Followers
By James Webb
1980
From Chapter 6: The Inner and the Outer Revolutions (pp. 134-36)
Ouspensky’s doubts were dissipated by his first meeting with Gurdjieff. They were replaced by other doubts, of a quite novel sort. Gurdjieff answered his questions precisely and neither stumbled nor prevaricated. But there were some strange inconsistencies. Ouspensky’s description of this first encounter is probably the most famous portrait of Gurdjieff:
We arrived at a small cafe in a noisy though not central street. I saw a man of an oriental type, no longer young, with a black mustache and piercing eyes, who astonished me first of all because he seemed to be disguised and completely out of keeping with the place and its atmosphere. I was still full of impressions of the East. And this man with the face of an Indian raja or an Arab sheik whom I at once seemed to see in a white burnoose or a gilded turban, seated here in this little cafe, where small dealers and commission agents met together, in a black overcoat with a velvet collar and a black bowler hat, produced the strange, unexpected, and almost alarming impression of a man poorly disguised, the sight of whom embarrasses you because you see he is not what he pretends to be and yet you have to speak and behave as though you did not see it. He spoke Russian incorrectly with a strong Caucasian accent; and this accent with which we are accustomed to associate anything apart from philosophical ideas, strengthened still further the strangeness and the unexpectedness of this impression.
They talked of Ouspensky’s travels and his interest in narcotics. Then they went together to a meeting of Gurdjieff’s pupils, which was to take place, Ouspensky gathered, in an apartment which had caused Gurdjieff great expense, as was only fitting for an undertaking in which many “professors” and “artists” were concerned. Gurdjieff refused to say precisely who among the intelligentsia were intrigued by his work; and it emerged that the meeting was to be held in the sort of barely furnished flat Ouspensky recognized as probably belonging to a municipal schoolteacher, with an audience drawn from the poverty-stricken lesser intellectuals. He was read the story, Glimpses of Truth, and noticed a reference to The Struggle of the Magicians, which he too had seen advertised in the press. About the actual work which went on in the group he could learn little. Gurdjieff had said that it was something to do with chemistry, and the schoolteacher types talked indefinitely of “work on oneself.” Despite the absence of the professors and artists, and despite Gurdjieff’s refusal to identify the “famous dancers” who would appear in his ballet, Ouspensky was fascinated by the evening. He had the conviction that he must at all costs arrange to meet Gurdjieff again. He was caught.
I felt myself very strange — a long reading which I very little understood, people who did not answer my questions. G. himself with his unusual manners and his influence on his people, which I all the time felt produced in me an unexpected desire to laugh, to shout, to sing, as though I had escaped from school or from some strange detention.
For the next week he continued to meet Gurdjieff in the same shabby cafe. He rapidly came to see that Gurdjieff deliberately created unfavorable conditions for such conversations, and that over ideas which Ouspensky felt to be profoundly true would take pains to spread a gloss of apparent shiftiness. For example, they were talking about money. Gurdjieff said that his fee for a year’s work was a thousand roubles. To Ouspensky this seemed a large sum for someone who did not have private means. Gurdjieff replied that he could not have many pupils and ought not to spend his own money on “the work.” People who could not provide such a sum, he said, were probably weak in life and therefore might be weak in the work. Knowledge was not valued unless it was paid for. Ouspensky assented to all these propositions, yet with a sense that Gurdjieff was overacting a part. “I was surprised at G.’s apparent desire to convince me of something in connection with the question of money when I needed no convincing.”
When the week was past, Ouspensky returned to St. Petersburg where he had to prepare books for the press, including a new edition of Tertium Organum and his Occult Tales. Gurdjieff had let him know that he sometimes traveled to St. Petersburg and would contact Ouspensky if he did come. The war went badly, and Ouspensky buried himself in his work, consoling himself that if necessary, he could always go to Gurdjieff. Then in the autumn of 1915 he was telephoned by Gurdjieff, who was on one of his periodic visits from Moscow. From this renewal of contact with the man who had almost imperceptibly become his Master, sprang the “St. Petersburg group,” a group whose activities during the next eighteen months are chronicled by Ouspensky. The internal revolution which he records was paralleled with an extraordinary exactness by the events of the outer world.
It was Ouspensky who was chiefly responsible for creating Gurdjieff’s following in St. Petersburg. In 1937 he told his pupils that there had been an explicit understanding that he should screen prospective recruits. By his own account it was largely through his material support that the groups could exist at all, and his new prestige as author and lecturer made him an ideal channel through which people infected by war weariness and ennui could pass to Gurdjieff. An account of this period has recently been published which bears out the impression that Gurdjieff was using Ouspensky as his second-in-command and front man.
An Appreciation of the Life and Work of James Webb
Compiled by John Robert Colombo
Gurdjieff and de Hartmann’s Music for Movements
Johanna Petsche
Between 1919 and 1924 Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949) and his devoted Ukrainian pupil Thomas de Hartmann (1885-1956), two men of utterly distinct characters, backgrounds, and musical abilities, composed music to accompany Gurdjieffâs âMovementsâ or sacred dances. In following years they went on to compose more music for other purposes. This article attempts to establish basic academic groundwork on the music for Gurdjieffâs Movements. It assesses the unique process of its composition, examines the sources and styles of the music, and analyses the various ways in which the music interacts with the physical gestures of the Movements. It also considers the orchestrations of this music, and the recordings and sheet music that have been released both publicly and privately. The distinctive role of the music in Movements classes and its significance in light of Gurdjieffâs teaching will also be discussed. Finally, as Gurdjieff and de Hartmann worked together on music to accompany Gurdjieffâs ballet The Struggle of the Magicians in the same period as their music for Movements, there will be an exploration of the ballet and its music.
March 26, 2000
The Composer, The Cult and the Musical Guru