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Gurdjieff
G believes that a man has many, many 'I's, not one constant, fixed self. This is in line with Buddhism. But he believes, unlike the Buddha, that man's purpose is to create one I, a soul. The soul doesn't exist right from the start, rather it has to be created through our efforts. This is radical, since most religions believe that a soul is eternal, not something you create later on.
For G, we are just machines ... and we have to develop consciousness through efforts. All we have now is memory, which we use to function. But we're not conscious except for occasional flashes. This too is a novel idea: we are computers on our way to developing self-awareness.
So what do you think? Was G right, since in evolutionary terms he is spot on?
For G, we are just machines ... and we have to develop consciousness through efforts. All we have now is memory, which we use to function. But we're not conscious except for occasional flashes. This too is a novel idea: we are computers on our way to developing self-awareness.
So what do you think? Was G right, since in evolutionary terms he is spot on?
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All I know is what I was told by a Sufi teacher, that he and other Sufi teachers had to spend a lot of time fixing ex students of Gurdjieff who had become unbalanced as a result of Gurdjieff's methods, which Gurdjieff had learned from Sufi teachers, but with fatal holes in his learning..
One well known Sufi teacher was in fact sent to the west specifically for that purpose.
The traditional Sufi community felt they had a responsibility in the matter.
But with what you wrote, Buddhism doesn't assert anything about the I. It just negates what is asserted as I, be it many I's or one I.
And in Buddhism the purpose is the recondition the body/mind so that one can develop the ground for penetration into the unconditioned, which is more accurate to describe as an unbinding, a letting go rather than a building up.
From a certain Buddhism point of view, we are complete perfection and the goal is to recognize and embody this realization.
So the point of view asserted by you about G, imho is not Buddhism in any sense.
In many ways it sounds like a materialistic philosophy mixed in with new age beliefs. Sorry about the harsh critique but thats just my opinion
A great character anyway. I once attempted Beelzbub's Tales but had to give up.
Here is Ramesh Balsekar, giving the meaning of ‘Wu Wei’, or non-volitional living. Following this is a exchange between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. It makes for an interesting comparison.
Living volitionally, with volition, with a sense of personal doership, is the bondage. Would, therefore, living non-volitionally be the way in which the sage lives? But the doing and the not-doing - the positive doing and the negative not-doing - are both aspects of ‘doing’. How then can the sage be said to be living non-volitionally? Perhaps the more accurate description would be that the sage is totally aware that he does not live his life (either volitionally or non-volitionally) but that his life - and everyone else’s life - is being lived.
What this means is that no one can live volitionally or otherwise; that, indeed, ‘volition’ is the essence of the ‘ego’, an expression of the ‘me’ concept, created by ‘divine hypnosis’ so that the ‘lila’ of life can happen. It is this ‘volition’ or sense of personal doership in the subjective chain of cause-and-effect which produces satisfaction or frustration in the conceptual individual.
Again, what this means is that it is a joke to believe that you are supposed to give up volition as an act of volition! ‘Let go’ - who is to let go? The ‘letting-go’ can only happen as a result of the clear understanding of the difference between what-we-are and what-we-appear-to-be. And then, non-volitional life or being-lived naturally becomes wu wei, spontaneous living, living without the unnecessary burden of volition. Why carry your luggage when you are being transported in a vehicle?
To be enlightened is to be able to accept with equanimity anything in life at any moment as God’s will.
Ramesh Balsekar
The Ultimate Understanding
"I asked G. what a man had to do to assimilate this teaching.
"What to do?" asked G. as though surprised. "It is impossible to do anything. A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before."
""How can one get rid of false ideas?" I asked. "We depend on the form of our perceptions. False ideas are produced by the forms of our perception."
G shook his head.
"Again you speak of something different," he said. "You speak of errors arising from perceptions but I am not speaking of these. Within the limits of given perceptions man can err more or err less. As I have said before, man’s chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him - all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.
Everyone finds that nothing is being done in the way it ought to be done. Actually everything is being done in the only way that it can be done. If one thing could be different everything could be different. … Try to understand what I am saying. Everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is."
This was very difficult to swallow.
"Is there nothing, absolutely nothing, that can be done?" I asked.
"Absolutely nothing".
"And can nobody do anything?"
"That is another question. In order to do it is necessary to be. And it is necessary first to understand what to be means."
P.D.Ouspensky
Conversation with Gurdjieff
In Search of the Miraculous - Fragments of
an Unknown Teaching (1949)
You might find his books of interest. Perhaps 'Learning how to Learn' or 'Knowing How to Know'.