ifen writes:
'soul food'?
It's been decades since I read any Gurdjieff but as I recall that was what he taught. Well, he said the moon ate our souls but a few people could develop so they could escape being eaten.
Decades, indeed: that name brings back memories.
I do think there is a tradition of the moon as soul-eater, perhaps shamanic, but I can't recall which: I'll let my back mind chew on it for a while.
I spent several years fascinated by Gurdjieff though not in any organized way.
The question of what is ancient and what made up is always a nagging problem with Gurdjieff. He provides an interesting perspective on what makes a person believe in a god, given that he was able to atrract and hold both the wealthy and the literati in "spiritual" thrall.
He was clearly steeped in some shamanic and mystical traditions but was a bit of a rogue and scoundrel as well. An accomplished hypnotist, he was also a chain smoker yet able to perform astonishing feats of strength and acrobatic skill.
His teachings seemed to draw on the Tibetan shamanic traditions that predated Buddhism (and were persecuted by it), Siberian shamanism, Buddhist thought, and Western occult traditions. I suspect he was also adept at the use of such entheogenic substances as the amanita muscaria mushroom, favorite of the Siberian shamans and possibly the mysterious soma. A read through his work and the contemporaneous books about him constitute a great romp through a time of spiritualism and romance.
For those unfamiliar, Gurdjieff taught among other things that one did not automatically possess a soul but could, with great effort and training, grow one. The enemy of soul-development was the sleep-walking tedium of daily life, the perpetually twilight world of an automaton, not truly conscious, not truly being here.
Consider the long-distance commuter, who becomes so absracted that his usual exit startles him "awake" from a dreamy state of half-formed thoughts, discomforts and desires: Is that a conscious being? According to Gurdjieff, we routinely spend most of our lives in a similar state, not even aware of our own existence.
While one could not wake up all at once, one could increase the frequency and duration of truly conscious intervals. He prescribed various exercises for this, including the notion of "watching" yourself, trying to maintain the state of mind of a close observer of your own actions and thoughts while going about the tedium vitae. This is harder than it sounds and, as he suggested, one does often suddenly realize that an itchy toe and the need to pee have one's full attention, and the resolve to maintain a conscious vigil evaporated.
He called his method the Fourth Way, the way of the clever man rather than the man of the body (yogis and ascetics), the intellect (esoteric Buddhist, Western occult, and other philosophies), and the heart (religious, traditionally conceived). Now we might say The Fourth Way works "outside the box," taking what it wants from other traditions and moving intuitively and lightly, always more focused on being than doing: clearly, there are parallels or borrowings from Zen and the Tao.
My favorite Gurdjieff story is about a group of "monks" who knew how to "wake up" anyone, temporarily putting them into a fully realized state via a sort of hypnosis. As an experiment, they tried their technique on a sheep and were successful.
When Gurdjieff had finished the tale to his satisfaction, a student asked, "What happened, then?"
"Why," Gurdjieff replied, "they ate it, of course."
* * *
The question of why people devote their lives to following someone like Gurdjieff as a spiritual master based, essentially, on his
performance, is fascinating: I suspect the answer might be as simple as our social nature and our yearning for an authoritative solution to our own mystery, a reaching for the father/mother who resolves all questions of identity and place in our social and natural worlds.
Of course, most people
are sleep-walking zombie sheep. He was right about that.
Edited by Omnivorous, : has->have (blush)
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