26.09.08
The Old Age Movement, …and the New???
MBFM on fourth way groups.
You raise a critical question, and it is remarkable how spastic these fourth way groups are. There are several things here, the neurotic psychology of pseudo-teachers, and the broader effect of the Gurdjieff corpus itself which actually, you may note, makes a statement about arrested development in human evolution. It is hard to read between the lines here, but this unsubstantiated myth of Gurdjieff’s is an excuse for doing the same thing to his own students/groups.
This factor is notable in a figure like E.J. Gold who creates an endless revolving door with the result that everyone ends up in the discard pile. It is so blatant it is almost sickening. Wikipedia has actually produced a list of the separate teachings he has invented since the seventies, in every case a piece of total pastiche used to spin the wheel with a new set of ‘disciples’. All these teachings are complete junk, and each one has a new set of students, isolated from the previous set, lest they catch on.
There is a phrase here, ‘increase your need’, which seems to mean that what you get depends on whether you need something (in whose estimation I would like to know). The point is that there is an ambition to play teacher because it ‘increases your need’, i.e. catapults you to some putative higher level on the backs of a passive group. It is a bogus protocol, but there is no doubt that the question of teachers has been corrupted beyond repair by this insidious tactic of exploitation.
In general, as I have pointed out already there is a definite conservative/reactionary bias to Gurdjieff’s legacy, and in that context, freedom, let alone some esoteric teaching, was never intended to be granted to followers. They are just led along with a string in their nose. Good to see that you have an ace up your sleeve here: this antiquated authoritarianism is nothing spiritual and is the doomed tactics of those stuck in the past.
That’s your ticket past these figures who seem to lure you on with the promise of some esoteric wisdom to come. They are really false imitators of traditions they don’t even understand.
History has moved on and the ‘Old Age Movement’ spuriously called ‘New Age’ shows in almost every case a remarkable misunderstanding of history.