Dharma Combat

Where Spiritual Giants Duke It Out

George I. Gurdjieff.
Post-Gurdjieffians
Taking Hits

Robert Ornstein:

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 'I must wake up' while reading obsolete doctrines. A fragment of a coheren approach has become honored among those who look to eachb new teacher for the secret that will allow them to turn away from their morbid self-proccupation and experienc ethe wholeness of life . . .
Here, then, is an essential distinction between the obscurantist esotericizers, who continually proclaim to 'search the heavens' and the 'depths of their souls' for isolated bits of knowledge, and a potentially viable contemporary spiritual teaching. Reductionism, or inflation, can exist on all levels, including the petaphysical. Merely writing in effulgent and self-denigratory terms about an outmoded cosmology is no more relevant to the real development of human knowledge than are psychiatric theorizing or the double=talk of commercial awareness-training groups. That the dead hand of a cold, sterile Metaphysical Inflationism should have touched the students of Gurdjieff - a man, for all his shortcomings, who always sought genuine development - is a great irony."


Arnaud Desjardins:

"Although the Gurdjieff teachings did not enable me to stop being a machine, they did at least convince me that I was one."
"Then the years passed. I left Gurdjieff's teaching and experienced extraordinary joys (the highest I have ever known) . . ."

 

Torkom Saraydarian:

"Temple dances create mental unification. Some of Gurdjieff's dances create mental plane unification. However, most of his 'movements' are limited to the lower mental plane. A few of his dances are on the higher mental plane . . ." (Sex, Family, and the Woman In Society, 87)

 

Sheikh Daud Yusuf:

". . . Picking up scraps of jumbled information like a dog scavenging in a refuse pit, and you use this great travel as an excuse for your lack of finesse and try to pry from me answers to questions that do not concern you about a man whose message is dead! I should have judged you elss harshly if you had asked if the original teaching had or would reach the West again, instead of trying to blow on the dead embers of the shadow of a fire.
Gurdjieff is dead . . . Gurdjieff passed his authority to none. His message died with him."
- quoted in Teachers Of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort

 

Dharma Combat

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