26.09.08
Your ace in the hole: Samkhya
Anyone who feels beholden to, mesmerized, or dominated by the Gurdjieff legacy should consider a good exit strategy in its poorly disguised bootleg teachings, ‘fenced’ as I put in a previous post.
The classic example is the ‘classical Samkhya’ that is the grinning Cheshire Cat in the background behind the ‘ray of creation’ and the schemes of ‘cosmic laws’. Which I referred to yesterday in a previous post.
How/where/when this enters Gurdjieff’s thinking is not clear, but all his indirections can’t conceal the obvious resemblance to an Indian tradition (whose own source, however, is equally obscure, beyond the clear signature of someone called ‘Kapila’ in six century BC India).
This is a suspected ripoff that has been unscrewed from its atheist sockets and turned into a theistic myth.
So you simply flip the bird at the thief Gurdjieff and his propaganda and go your own way with the original (unfortunately a very difficult thing to do).
These people did this repeatedly: look at Bennett’s work in the Dramatic Universe. The work of Schopenhauer on the ‘will’ has been crystallized into something that confusingly metaphysical where the original was a disciplined critique. The pasted on Christian theology is especially outrageous.
This is just a reminder that these people are fast talkers, and you owe them nothing as spiritual authorities.
Meanwhile I hope I was able with a woefully inadequate quick sketch to give some flavor of Samkhya in my discussion of the levels of the gunas, an ancient atheistic materialistic/naturalistic teaching that has been ripped off so many times it sets your teeth on edge.
A further point here is that, as with this example, it could be possible to make this stuff ‘open information’ accessible to anyone who needs it, done honestly without organizations and authority figures of the exploitative type. Most of the fourth way material should have been given this treatment so the world could have learned and moved on. The artificial carrot dangling of tidbits that are designed to be too limited to have any effect has gone on too long.
The original Samkhya was no doubt intended to serve that purpose, but it is not intuitive anymore, if it ever was. The point is to get past all these middlemen.