25.04.10

Critiquing what G said, vs what his supposed teaching was, never revealed

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:19 pm by nemo

One of the confusions on the question of Gurdjieff is the difference between critiquing Gurdjieff, critiquing what he said, and critiquing his teaching, about which we know almost nothing.
Many complain that one should not criticize Gurdjieff (why on earth not???) or his ‘sacred teaching’. But the strange reality is that what Gurdjieff said was not his teaching, as the obscurity of All and Everything makes clear.
We have criticized his advertising, but his real teaching is nowhere to be found in print, even A & E being devious material.

A typical example is the enneagram stuff. What Gurdjieff says is complete idiocy, from other sources. But what the real teaching of the enneagram is, he never says, implying that some unstated esoteric something consitutes objective knowledge, the public stuff being exoteric, and possibly nonsense.

These tactics are hard to defeat, since idiots will get hooked on the esoteric pretense, and become willing victims for something else, never stated out front.
Only when you travel through the actual terrain, of corrupt sufis, do you come to realize the nature of the swindle going on.

In any case, we have gotten enough hints of what Gurdjieff really thought to be suspcious of what he was saying.
It is tricky, however, because some of what he says in general would be hard to fault.
Thus there were undoubtedly ancient teachings of great moment. But it doesn’t follow that Gurdjieff know what they were, as he invented a lot of garbage, like the table of hydrogens, orthe enneagram myths, etc…

As we pointed out Danielou is similar to Gurdjieff in that respect, pointing however specifically to verifiable (up to a point, and debatable archaeologically, of course) historical givens, like the history of Shaivism and Jainism. These histories are probably on the right track and point to something specific that we can learn from, and also clarify the distorted history of Hinduism.
But with Gurdjieff we learn almost nothing, and are even given probable myths made up like the fake legend of Ashieta Shiemash, with its confused and never specific references to Zoroaster, about whom Gurdjieff seems to claim a special knowledge, without proof.
So in this cleverness, we can never really get at Gurdjieff because he never said what he was about.

Meanwhile Danielou gives us a great hint about how to study Indic religion, by showing how the incredibly ancient Shaivism, and its associate Jainism, or Jainiesm’s ancestor goes back to the Neolthic of India, if not before.
(But Danielou ends up confused about the spurious law of caste in a later book, spoiling his whole exposition)
We can see how the distortions of Hinduism have covered up the reality of Indic religion. The same could be true in the Occident, but we get almost no specific information that is reliable. Nonsense about pre-sand Egypt or the real Sphinx won’t hack it here.

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