18.09.08
Lane’s Making Of A Spiritual Movement
MBFM’s link connects to David Lane’s Making Of A Spiritual Movement, apparently a whole online book (scroll down the page).
Some good data from MBFM, & The Unauthorized Eckankar
From Rawlinson: A HISTORY OF WESTERN SUFISM, 2008/09/18 at 7:50 AM
mybrainisafleamarket:
Dont give up on Rawlinson. Here is some additional info
The UnAuthorized Eckankar page–written by a former disciple
http://www.geocities.com/eckcult/
An arcticle from this Unauthorized page by Dodie Bellamy
http://www.geocities.com/eckcult/
(quote)
In Twitchell’s book The Far Country, alone, Lane found over 400 plagiarized paragraphs. “The more research you do the more you realize that Twitchell was an incredible plagiarizer.” He smiles to himself as if he were having a beatific vision of Paul Twitchell hunched over some Radhasoami text, scribbling away. “In order to find out the full extent of Twitchell’s plagiarism, you’d have to go through all the books that he read in his lifetime. I don’t mean just an idea or a thought, I’m talking about the reproduction of grammatical mistakes, semicolon misuse. I’m talking about the very form of that truth being copied. Not the truth itself. I don’t know what that is.”So who was this mysterious Paul Twitchell? Twitchell claimed to have been born on a boat on the Mississippi, a few minutes after a great earthquake shook the mid-South and formed a lake in its wake. Twitchell told his second wife Gail that he was born in the early twenties, but in one of his books he places the date of his birth as, fantastically, in the early nineteenth century. Lane’s research indicates, however, that Twitchell was born between 1908 and 1912, on dry land in Paducah, Kentucky.
During the 30s and 40’s Twitchell was a prolific writer. He’s listed in Ripley’s Believe it or Notas having sold an article every day. The Courier-Journal Magazine,to which he was a regular contributor, reported that he sold 1,800 stories and articles in three years.
In 1942, after a stint in the Navy, Twitchell moved to New York, where he continued his journalism career, attended many churches, and read extensively on spiritual subjects. A job as a correspondent for Our Navytook him to Washington, D. C. in 1945. There he and his first wife, Camille, joined the Self-Revelation Church of Absolute Monism, a system of yoga founded by Swami Premananda. In 1950, the Twitchells moved to the church compounds, but five years later Twitchell was asked to leave the Church for “personal misconduct”. That same year he and his wife separated. Their divorce was finalized in 1960.
After leaving the Self-Revelation Church, Twitchell dove in the Radhasoami movement. Radhasoami is a yogic teaching which, according to Lane, “is designed to enable the soul or consciousness to ascend beyond the physical body to higher spiritual regions by means of an internal sound or life current.” Central to the teachings of Radhasoami, continues Lane, “is the necessity of a living human master competent in initiating disciples into the practice and technique of listening to the inner sound, contemplating the inner light, and leaving the human body at will.”
The Indian guru, Kirpal Singh, figures prominently in Twitchell’s early writing. Eight years later he broke with Kirpal Singh and thereafter denied any involvement with him. In the late fifties Twitchell also became a staff member of L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, another association that would later be denied
(unquote)A link to ‘What is Eckankar?’
http://www.religio.de/indien/eckankar/whateck.html
(quote)What is Eckankar?
by mike@cellbio
Eckankar is a religious cult founded by Paul Twitchell in the mid 1960s. It is a hodgepodge of Sant Mat, Scientology, Theosophy, and Twitchell’s own fertile imagination.
Twitchell invented an historic context for his religion based on the fictitious vairagi eck masters. Research by Professor David Lane and others has demonstrated the eck masters were invented by Twitchell as an attempt to produce an aura of uniqueness and mystery around his religion in order to sell it in the marketplace. Paul’s young wife (40 years his junior) was the real driving force behind the creation of this religion. She apparently wanted a better life style and pushed Twitchell into using his knowledge of the occult and eastern religion to make some money.The sacred works of eckankar “written” by Twitchell, including the eck bible, the Shariyat-ki-Sugmad, have been demonstrated to be plagiarized from a number of other sources, most notably the works of Julian Johnson written in the 1930s. This is significant because it demonstrates that Twitchell was lying when he claimed that these works were obtained from the “inner planes” or dictated to him by some fictitious eck master. Present day eckists have to come up with all kinds of fantastic excuses in order to rationalize Twitchell’s blatant literary transgressions.
David Lane’s book, The Making of a Spiritual Movement, is an extensively documented expose of Twitchell and eckankar. Anything worth knowing about the cult can be found in it.
(unquote)David C Lane is a follower and scholar of a Northern Indian spiritual movement called Shabd Yoga/Radhasoami. And he has identified the sources Twitchell utilized (am being polite here) to create Eckankar.
Guru Maharaji, who created the Divine Light movement, now known as Elan Vital, also appropriated elements from this tradition.
http://www.ex-premie.org/papers/lane.htm
Going global
Global ambition, a map of fourth way contacts across the planet. Such a large scale phenomenon is not so easy to challenge!
Gurdjieff successfully calculated his game, and we can see his indifference to his ‘school’, and the larger aim of ‘invultuating’ key intellectuals to reify his ‘work’ (actually the details don’t much matter, just enough to get people hooked).
Sooner or later (already happened) this will become a source/front for a set of reactionary interest groups.
What is needed is an equally global response and critique, and, at least, some awareness on the part of those falling into this game that there exists another viewpoint, one neither bound up in excessive scientism (which Gurdjieff successfully outflanked) nor New Age ‘superstitions’.
17.09.08
Bennett and evolution
Evolution And The Problem Of Evil has some comments on Bennett, and his Dramatic Universe.
16.09.08
General Propaganda Machines And Occult Proxies
Selection From World History And The Eonic Effect
General Propaganda Machines And Occult Proxies
There is another side to ‘history’s black box’, and the argument by historical design: the history of robots and occult agents playing god, invisible history. Read the rest of this entry »
Reactionary complots
The crypto-reactionary character of the Gurdjieff legacy is one of the most insidious aspects of its deceptions.
Here is an old post at Darwiniana, a very popular one with a large hit count.
07.09.06
Gurdjieff comment: a reply
Posted in New Age at 8:07 pm by nemo
Thanks for your comment. Before pontificating on esotericism, tell me what is you connection with Gurdjieff? You read Ouspensky, and spend your time wishing you could find a fourth way school, but you never found one. As to my knowledge of Gurdjieff, I wouldn’t care to argue the point. I know more about sufism than most people who call themselves sufis, and as a result I stay completely away from the whole business of pious idiots and out and out sharks. Who needs it anymore?
As to Gurdjieff, you can prattle about the ‘work’, but what does it amount to? Self-remembering is one of the most ancient practices, but followers of Gurdjieff never do any because the presentation is so hyped with nonsense noone could manage what was originally a synonym for meditation, which Buddhists insist on day one. Did you ever find Ouspensky types meditating? Gurdjieff didn’t care because he wasn’t in the business of helping people. His dark business is something else.
The problem here is the deception perpetrated by Gurdjieff. He produced an immensely successful brochure that attracts thousands, consistently, but the fact is there is nothing there for them, except cynical promo designed to do nothing but make people tread water as they pay the bills. There is no school, fourth way, or esoteric way behind what is a lot pastiche stiched together like flypaper. Most of Gurdjieff’s teaching is just a bunch of junk, made up on the fly. These people are cynical and exploit beginners, and they never give a sucker an even break. When such people talk about esotericism, the reality is a reserved group to which anyone dumb enough to fall for Ouspensky wouldn’t ever be admitted. You don’t need to be a part of any of that. Forget it. Pure mephistopheles.But beyond all of that my problem is the crypto-political nature of these reactionaries who are almost at the level of Joseph De Maistre. They are trying to foment a kind of grand postmodern post-democratic culture and will use fascist means to that end. The spiritual teaching is just window dressing.
So I think your comment fails to grapple with the dark side of this man, who, in any case, died a long time ago. What is our business with such a mess of pottage from the age of esoteric fascism at the beginning of the twentieth century? Their great conspiracy totally failed, so let’s be done with it.
Conservatives, liberals, religion, and the Gurdjieff legacy
The question of conservatism and religion is important for understanding Gurdjieff, but first here is a comment posted at Alternet.
There is a significant relationship between conservative propganda and its success in confusing working class cultures and the Gurdjieff legacy which is pegged at liberal adherents, yet wishes to impose a stealth anti-modernism. More on that later.
Comment at Alternet
Can liberals understand religion?
Posted by: nemonemini on Sep 16, 2008 4:42 AM
This article has too much interesting material for glib comments, and asks some very good questions, but why not consider some radical perspectives on the issue: can the scientific world view resolve the enigma of morality? I fear not, least of all the Darwinian version. Between the reductionist absurdities of Darwinian evolutionary psychologists, and false objectivity of Durkheim on the sacred, liberal culture has found itself proclaiming the ‘what’s the matter with Kansas’ cultures stupid and reactionary when liberal culture has itself produced a kind of stupidity in relation to religion. The current trend of the New Atheism, pace Dawkins, et al, shows this strange state of mind, divorced from reality and any chance of understanding religion from the word go. Liberalism need not be forced into this mould (any more than it should be forced to compromise with traditionalism) and needs a new public philosophy that can do better than Durkheimian rumination on the sacred or the Darwinian pseudo-science of evolutionary ethics. Current brands of scientism haven’t a clue on the issue of religion, and are surely far more stupid than anything Frank found in Kansas.
The best way to mediate science and religion was the stance of Kant, who was also a primordial liberal: the ‘religion within the llimits of reason’, however archaic it looks now in the Kantian version, essentially solved the issue of the (much ballyhooed, and verbiage prone)’sacred’ (with an atheist version in Schopenhauer perhaps) by constructing a rational mediation of the limits of both science and religion. Nothing that has come later has surpassed that perspective and we are inundated with the sophmoric diatribes of the Dawkins generation with its wilful blindness to the history of religion, a viewpoint totally incapable of anything but alienating those whose religious lifeboats, however conservatized (and mostly defunct thereby), are all they have, and which they aren’t going to exchange for the degenerated liberalism of techonological science whose imperial claims to explain reality to us are almost ludicrous in their one-dimensional incomprehension.
Meanwhile, the conservative character of much religion is arguably a form of religious decline, not religion at all, and these comments are in no way a request for compromise with the entropic remains of so-called religion so visible in the American religious culture spectrum.
To decipher the conservative degeneration of religion is a big study, and may as well start from the Axial Age, and an attempt to understand the mystery of that phenomenon (one whose existence modern science has suppressed because it contradicts its assumptions)
For a different type of analysis of the evolution of religion, check out http://eonic-effect.net
15.09.08
Why was Gurdjieff worried about Kant?
It is interesting to realize the concealed theme of Kant in the Gurdjieff legacy, a point that is obvious from Ouspensky’s Tertium Organon, a fairly typical effort in the line of works attempting to ‘beat the rap’ against metaphysics.
But with Gurdjieff there is a suspicious strain (as in his incoherent discussion of ‘conscience’) of ‘Kant avoidance’.
One of the great tools of self-defense is to consider, then, the austere points of Kantian ethics ( a very difficult subject, find some introductory work), and to see how Gurdjieff, and for that matter many other New Age figures, is trying to bypass the issues of the categorical imperative. Lucky for him, the general public is too ignorant to realize how they are being manipulated, and simply gape at the wonders of the magicians as these steal attention from the blatant lie that fronts the whole game.
No ‘consciousness’ doesn’t override ethics.
Gurdjieff’s guinea pigs, the dark hints
The point of the theme about rights is the concealed exploitation on that basis of various individuals for experiments. Gurdjieff, unbelievably, hinted as much and gave the game away, almost.
This issue requires tremendously knowlegable people to detect and police, and, there is no such police!
This question should be one of the first foundations of an indictment of the grotestque ‘Gurdjieff work’, but since we can do nothing, it is important to at least sound the warning through whatever media we have available.
Don’t let this legacy become a tradition! There is absolutely no special priveledge granted gurus in such matters. Get someone to beat you over the head until you realize the ethical issues here.
We can beat this cancerated sufism, all it takes is some public exposure. The lilly wilts pretty fast as people come to and snap out of the propaganda.
Different levels of critique
We have to work on several levels when critiquing the Gurdjieff legacy. Here’s some material on Alex Horn, an extraordinary deviation from sensible thinking, but not, as such, indictable on the same grounds as the general Gurdjieff stream.
This Horn nonsense is equally reprehensible, but something different.
Odyssey Study Group
Read the rest of this entry »
Signing away your rights
As noted in the Lentrohamsanin post, the Gurdjieff work is a stealth come-on for getting a ‘disciple’ to surrender his ‘rights’ in the name of the work, no laughing matter when you discover that this will be taken literally, leaving you open to some devastating forms of cruelty.
This isn’t a fictional paranoia, but an ongoing operation in the present.
We need to call it quits on the whole idea of the Gurdjieff work: it is an impostor in the general stream of cultural movements, this fact disguised behind its made up hype over various cosmic laws, their status about that of the enneagram.
Now we know why All And Everything is so unclear!
How to address a sufi shaykh
“You dirty asshole motherfucking cocksucker scumbag….”
Quote/unquote….An esoteric tidbit I once got direct from a ‘sufi’, edited for virulence and length.
It is interesting, and controversial, and good reason to skip it, that Gurdjieff made solemn pronouncements about the failure of the ‘path of love’.
The problem is that the path of hate is a bit of problem, messieurs.
Below: a cute sufi front.
Objective: it is time for the world to pass beyond sufism. We need to see the last generation, if not of its self-perpetuation, like the Italian mafia, at least of its mystique and nauseating propaganda.
What is Sufism?
http://www.nimatullahi.org/sufism
“When I come to Love, I am ashamed of all
that I have ever said about Love.”
— RumiThe substance and meaning of Sufism
The substance of Sufism is the Truth and the meaning of Sufism is the selfless experiencing and actualization of the Truth.The practice of Sufism
The practice of Sufism is the intention to go towards the Truth, by means of love and devotion. This is called the tariqat, the spiritual path or way towards God.The definition of the Sufi
The sufi is one who is a lover of Truth, who by means of love and devotion moves towards the Truth, towards the perfection which all are truly seeking. As necessitated by love’s jealousy, the sufi is taken away from all except the Truth.
14.09.08
Depersonalization vs ‘self-remembering’
As we expose the Gurdjieff game it is also true that we ought to be wary of reductionist explanations of people’s ‘spiritual’ experiences, granting that the term ‘spiritual’ is highly problematic. (Actually the irony is that the disguised and purloined Samkhya in the Ouspensky system is a classic solution to the problem as it avers strict ‘materialism from low to high).
The experience that Ouspensky describes of ‘self-remembering’ seems genuine enough, complete with an occult twist. Trying to psychologize these out of existence it seems misses the point. People have these experiences, in a multitude of forms all the time.
I think ‘depersonalization’ reflects the concern of psychologists to keep people lowballed in ‘normal states of consciousness’.
This passage in Ouspensky with its bits about transspacial contact has sold a lot of books, and the issue is how unremarkable such experiences are in the end. They sucker in beginners as if they were evidence of something spectacular, when what they show is the social narrowness of beginners.
Gurdjieff hardly deserves such exalted status for this bit.
The problem is that people can contact the ‘noumenal’ briefly, it is their psychological makeup, but then imagination takes over, and the whole thing becomes the object of fantasies.
Read the rest of this entry »