http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2008/08/02/james-webb-on-gurdjieff-the-intelligence-agent/ Debriefing the Gurdjieff work Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:41:49 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2008/08/02/james-webb-on-gurdjieff-the-intelligence-agent/comment-page-1/#comment-68 The Gurdjieff Con » Response to Gurdjieff the spy comments Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:57:27 +0000 http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/?p=34#comment-68 [...] Post on James Webb Webb’s book is invaluable, and I wish his other book on the occult renaissance were cheaper. I think I read it once, and it has been many years since I researched this material. The comments on the sufi tradition and the absence of reference to the enneagram is significant. I would offer one caveat: although Gurdjieff was clearly brazen in his deceptions, those deceptions betray a man with a few consistent themes, one of which is the claim for a tradition deeper than the sufi stream, the whole point about his wild statements about greater antiquity and lost knowledge, all the way to Sumer. I don’t find his conclusions about this reliable, but he is saying that the enneagram is something he found after very difficult efforts, resulting in the discovery of the Sarmon monastery, where he found the enneagram. A possible reason noone had ever heard of it. Packaged in disinformation is something that rings true even as it rings false. Don’t know, but the whole game is impossible to get quite straight. Could all be balderdash anyway. And the result, the enneagram, we live in another age that can take this bit seriously, and least not I. It is just ingenious enough to confuse a mystic, but obviously a flawed instrument of knowledge. [...] [...] Post on James Webb Webb’s book is invaluable, and I wish his other book on the occult renaissance were cheaper. I think I read it once, and it has been many years since I researched this material. The comments on the sufi tradition and the absence of reference to the enneagram is significant. I would offer one caveat: although Gurdjieff was clearly brazen in his deceptions, those deceptions betray a man with a few consistent themes, one of which is the claim for a tradition deeper than the sufi stream, the whole point about his wild statements about greater antiquity and lost knowledge, all the way to Sumer. I don’t find his conclusions about this reliable, but he is saying that the enneagram is something he found after very difficult efforts, resulting in the discovery of the Sarmon monastery, where he found the enneagram. A possible reason noone had ever heard of it. Packaged in disinformation is something that rings true even as it rings false. Don’t know, but the whole game is impossible to get quite straight. Could all be balderdash anyway. And the result, the enneagram, we live in another age that can take this bit seriously, and least not I. It is just ingenious enough to confuse a mystic, but obviously a flawed instrument of knowledge. [...]

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