Friday, February 2, 2024

Art Work, Soul Work, The Work and Cults, and the great pussy grabbers G.I. Gurdjieff and Donald Trump

 

    During the latter half of my 81-plus years, I read about and met and got to know a lot of people who had a spiritual teacher, or guru, which I have written about elsewhere from time to time. 

    My first encounter with such people occurred in the early 1980s, when I was moving toward winding down my law practice in Birmingham, Alabama. The spiritual teacher, or the guru, of those people, G.I. Gurdjieff, had died some years prior, and they were following him via his writings and whatever they were able to discover by reading elsewhere. Their leader was a physician perhaps around my father’s age. The called their spiritual endeavor “The Work,” which I later learned is what the grinding spiritual climb is called in other spiritual traditions.

    I attended a number of their meetings, and eventually a man from a Gurdjieff community in New York City came to Birmingham and started a second Gurdjieff group, and I attended a number of their meetings. I was quite intrigued by Gurdjieff, but I found it difficult fitting into the two Birmingham groups, which seemed to me to be religious cults.

   I closed my law practice and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to attend a natural healing and massage school. hoping that would turn my life around. It was a terrific experience, I met a lot of new, very interesting people, who were on their own spiritual journeys, but it did not turn my life around.

    So, one morning, feeling like I had failed in every way a man could fail, I prayed, “Dear God, I do not wish to die like this, failed.” I paused, added, “I offer my life to human service.” I felt something emotional inside of me, and then went on about my day.

    About ten days later, I woke up in the wee hours, maybe 2 a.m., and saw two white-ish etheric beings shaped like shifts hovering above me in the darkness. I heard, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you.” I saw a white flash and was jolted physically and otherwise by something electrical, which happened two more times, about 5 seconds total, and the beings faded away, and I was shaking and sweating.

    The changes began slowly, and about that and where all it went I wrote about elsewhere, now told in posts at this and other blogs, and in quite a few books at the free internet library, archive.org.

    Today, I will discuss Mr. Gurdjieff, who was a very different pussy grabber cult leader than, say, the make America great pussy grabber Donald Trump, who, I imagine, wouldn’t be interested in Mr. Gurdjieff at all :-), but perhaps this post might interest Americans who worship him who would be king, if some day they decide belonging to a cult is not really the best thing they can do for their soul. 

    I could say the same for people who worship Sleepy Joe Genocide Biden :-).

    And, I could say the same for people who think they were saved by Jesus, simply because someone or a book told them they were saved by him, even though they don’t behave much like he behaved in the Gospels.

   In Poetic Outlaws today.

Lost Art
By: G. I. Gurdjieff

POETIC OUTLAWS
FEB 2, 2024

“Ancient art has a specific inner content. At one time, art possessed the same purpose that books do in our day, namely: to preserve and transmit knowledge. In olden days, people did not write books, they incorporated their knowledge into works of art. We would find a great many ideas in the works of ancient art passed down to us, if only we knew how to read them.”
—G. I. Gurdjieff

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) was a mystic, spiritual teacher, and philosopher who developed a unique system of self-transformation that reconciled the great mystical and spiritual traditions. It was known as the "Fourth Way”.
Gurdjieff's life and teachings are shrouded in mystery and ambiguity, and he deliberately maintained a certain level of secrecy about his background.

Gurdjieff's teachings embody a wide range of ideas and concepts, from Self-observation and Self-awareness to the notion of different levels or centers of consciousness within each of us.
 
Ultimately, he believed most people live their lives in a state of mechanicalness, reacting to external stimuli without true awareness of who they are. But he also believed in the power of art and sacred dance as potential tools for inner transformation and awakening higher states of consciousness. 
 
He once said: “Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave...

"Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it.”

The following is a passage from "Views from the Real World" — a collection of his talks and writings first published in 1975. 

THE KEYS TO ALL THE ANCIENT ARTS ARE LOST, were lost many centuries ago.  
 
And therefore there is no longer a sacred art embodying laws of the Great Knowledge, and so serving to influence the instincts of the multitude.

There are no creators today. 

The contemporary priests of art do not create but imitate. They run after beauty and likeness or what is called originality, without possessing even the necessary knowledge. Not knowing, and not being able to do anything, since they are groping in the dark, they are praised by the crowd, which places them on a pedestal.
 
Sacred art vanished and left behind only the halo which surrounded its servants. All the current words about the divine spark, talent, genius, creation, sacred art, have no solid basis—they are anachronisms. 

What are these talents? We will talk about them on some suitable occasions.

Either the shoemaker’s craft must be called art, or all contemporary art must be called craft. In what way is a shoemaker sewing fashionable custom shoes of beautiful design inferior to an artist who pursues the aim of imitation or originality?
 
With knowledge, the sewing of shoes may be sacred art too, but without it, a priest of contemporary art is worse than a cobbler. 
 
Sloan BashinskySloan’s Newsletter
In the early 1980s, as I wound down my law practice in Birmingham, Alabama, I hired a publicist to promote books I wrote for people who bought and sold homes and used lawyers. The books were not well received by real estate companies and lawyers. She told me about a Gurdjeff group she belonged to in Birmingham, and I started attending their meetings. I was by then interested in the New Age and just about anything viewed as “esoteric spirituality”.

The publicist said it was believed Gurdjieff was from Armenia, and he at one time had the ear of the Russian royal family and very much wanted them to get rid of their Russian orthodox priest, Rasputin. Later, Joseph Stalin was one of Gurdjieff’s pupils for a short while.
 
The publicist got me to read the Russian P.D. Ouspensky’s book, IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS.” At one time. Ospensky and Gurdjieff had some dealings.
 
Then, she got me to read Gurdjieff’s first book, MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN, in which Gurdjieff reveals a good bit about his early searching and how he eventually was invited to join a secret brotherhood, which had monasteries in out of the way place. There, Gurdjieff received his training in the basics of the brotherhood's knowledge and practices to recover their essence. 
 
In that book, Gurdjieff recounts being told by brothers who had been there a while of two very old men, hundreds of years old, who traveled between the brotherhoods’ monasteries, sharing what they knew. 
 
One of the elders was so eloquent in his speech that they swooned on his every word. The other elder’s speech was guttural and they could barely understand him. After the two elders left, the brothers discussed what they had learned and discovered they could not remember anything the eloquent elder had said, because he had spoken to them from his mind, but they remembered everything the other elder had said, because he had spoken to them from his being.

I didn’t stay with the Gurdjieff group, and not long after I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to attend a massage and natural healing school, and to explore various spiritual movements that interested me.

It was there that I had my first encounter with angels, who quickly impressed me to shed all the other stuff, because they had taken over. A few months later, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, where the angels began in earnest trying to help me recover my essence. 

I won’t say more about that here, other than what happened in Santa Fe and in Boulder and later elsewhere is reported in quite a few books I wrote, which are free reads at the internet library archive.org. Three of the books are novels, the rest are stranger than fiction true stories:-). archivel.org 

In Boulder, I read Gurdjieff’s second book, BEELZEBUB'S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON: ALL AND EVERYTHING, in which Beelzebub is Gurdjieff and his grandson is the reader, or Gurdjeiff’s students. Beelzebub recounts his own early goofs and growing ups, and stuff he learned along the way, some of which is quite interesting, such as, of all the great saints who had lived on Earth, the one whose teachings had he best chance of helping humanity was St.Jesus. When I mentioned that to my publicist friend, she looked like she had been stung by a wasp.

Beelzebub described human beings as three brain beings, one brain was in the solar plexus, another was in the heart, and the third was in the head. And, it was for human beings to fully develop all three of their brains, to be their true essence.

I then read Gurdjieff’s third book, LIFE IS REAL ONLY THEN, WHEN “I AM”, which he wrote as himself, candidly sharing events from his own life and work and of his students. He said he had hoped to teach by writing books, but he had found only his students could understand his books. That book ended in mid-sentence, because he had died.

Later, I stumbled across a book entitled ON A SPACESHIP WITH BEELZEBUB: BY A GRANDSON OF GURDJIEFF, by David Kherdian, a professional writer, who had belonged to a Gurdfiellf group in New YorK City, from which he eventually weaned and moved to Washinton state, as I recall, where he joined another Gurdjieff group, in which he participated a few years, before he decided he needed to leave it proceed on his own. 

For me, Kherdian’s book is the most important book about Gurdjieff, because it brutally describes the workings of Gurdjieff communities and the power the leaders of those groups have over the community members, and the extreme difficulty of members leaving and striking out on their own. I recommended Kehridan’s book to several people, who belonged to Gurdjieff groups, who were trying to leave and make their own way. It is very difficult for anyone in a cult to leave it.

Much later, I met a woman whose grandfather [the physician] had run the Gurdjieff group I had run with for a while in Birmingham. She said it was well known that Gurdjieff impregnated a lot of his female students, who bore him children. I asked her why I had not been told that when I was involved in her grandfather’s group? She smiled, said, it’s not something they liked to discuss.

I knew from LIFE IS ONLY REAL THEN, WHEN “I AM”, that Gurdjieff’s wife had gotten sick and died while he was far away doing something, and he was so distressed, because had he been with her, he could have used his power to save her. 

Cleveland McLemoreCleveland’s Substack
As I recall Ouspensky expressed some remorse on his death for having devoted his entire life to this quest without much resolution. I would surmise that much like Jung's path of transformation through individuation we might arrive at better understanding of what it might mean to be fully present in the moment. "When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, 'One becomes Two,' and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation... a moment of deadliest peril!" Jung. Yet even here his final formula on becoming whole slipped into alchemy.

Sloan Bashinsky
It indeed is alchemy, of the soul, and it is a process, which has no end for most people, although I have read accounts of people who got to a singularity event, where they were one with God by any name called, and that’s where they remained until it was time for them to leave their bodies. For the rest of us, it's get up each morning and deal with what’s in front of us as best as we are able. In my case, I am assisted by angels, for which I take zero credit, nor do I take credit for the changes in me, other than I did not kill myself many times I wished I was dead, and even then maybe something stayed my hand :-). My take was Ouspensky searched for something magical, which would change him, and perhaps that does sometimes happen, but that’s not what Gurdjieff was about, nor Jesus, nor Rumi and his teacher, Shams, nor Kahlil Gibran, nor many others, some known today, most never heard of. One thing Gurdjieff taught, which seems the core of all spiritual paths, is not to react to what bugs us, and instead, simply sit in the discomfort, stew in it. This also is the  method presented in A COURSE IN MIRACLES, which said to do that for a year and you emerge a new person. 
 
Cleveland McLemore
Point well taken, Caroline Myss speaks of spiritual madness, transpersonal psychology thrives on spiritual emergencies, every time we crack the code of our own conditioning to reveal the original self, where we come face to face with the eternity of our own liberation, we are faced with a conundrum as we are no longer tethered to the mundane, as Jung says "a moment of deadliest peril." And why is that? Gibran suggest that "When a man hears to call of his heart and the cry of his spirit, we say that such a one is possessed of a madness and we cleanse ourselves of him." because we no longer fit the mold that we were cast into from birth. If we are wise we heed the warnings and keep such revelations to ourselves, otherwise the life of such an unfortunate seeker will be made very unpleasant. That is only to be expected for senseless lack of discretion. "Wisdom stands on the street corner and calls to us above the multitude, but we deem her thing without worth and despise them that follow her." Gibran. And yet we don't break the mold of our conditioning without some serious incentive, as the Taoist say, "Learn to die before you die." When you've already lost everything, what more do you have to lose?

Sloan Bashinsky
Heh, I lost everything twice, if you mean money. I lived on the street and just off it for five years, and then did a second stint of two years. I lost plenty else, too. But perhaps the most important thing I lost, because I destroyed it, was my reputation, and then I could be free, because there was nothing left to protect :-). I read some of Myss’s writings, and I watched a video of her speaking to an audience. I thought she was facile at collecting various spiritual concepts and putting them in books, but I did not think she had lived the theories in the way that, say, Gibran, Rumi, Shams, Jesus, Lao Tsu, Buddha, or even Gurdjieff lived them. A chapter of my book, A Southern Lawyer Who Became a Mystic, at archive.org, contains a psychic friend’s and my discussion of Myss. The psychic ws more impressed by Mysss, than me, who had somehow survived the dark night of the soul and the much worse black night of the soul described by San Juan de la Cruz in his commentaries, as presented in St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul, by the Spaniard poet Antonio T. de Nicholas. I take no credit for any of that, other than I did not kill myself during the black night, in which I was suicidal every day for 16 months. It arrived over 2 days' time, and it left over about 6 months' time. Then, the angels really went to work inside of me. That was in 1998. And they have not let up. but most of it became engaging the world as it engaged me. The internal work receded, except for dreams, which always are about something I am dealing with when I am so-called awake :-). Maybe some day I will get smart enough so that I don’t keep running off the rails at times and the angels spank me, and redirect me :-)

        Here is a link to a podcast, in which I discussed Gurdjieff and related stuff. 

https://youtu.be/yNuStz5xLhE

Halloween- The Veil At Its Thinnest: A Discussion of Authors of Spiritual & Important Works

     About a week later: 

Cleveland McLemore
It is curious, we all have our particular challenges in life, all upon the premise of being human. I am still new to this site, and have yet to figure out how to navigate conversations such as they are, although I must admit that it is not at all what I had expected more of a dead poets society. When I was looking more for a place of creative exchange and expression. Just now finding my way back here and noticed, that this conversation does not appear to be a part of an on going thread. Not sure why that is. 
 
Sloan Bashinsky
Eric quoted Gurdjieff re lost art. I know a good bit about Gurdjieff, who was a spiritual guru and still has a pretty wide following. Dead Poets Society is one of my favorite films. Eric mostly features poets who have left this life. I didn’t know I had poetry in me until 1991, when this came out of me and became the back jacket of a book I had written, Prisons & Freedom, which is a free read at the internet library, archive.org. 
 
"Living Poets”
 
Dead poets are poets who never write
Who obey shoulds and oughts
Who live to please others
Who value money over God
Who die without ever having lived
Death is their mark 
Dead poets are remembered by the living.
Living poets are remembered by time
Dead poets never sing their song
Living poets never stop singing it 
The difference between the two is this:
One worships fear, the other life 
To be a dead poet is hard
It requires being someone else
To be a living poet is easy
It only means being myself 
One choice is hell, the other heaven
That is what is meant by free will 
Then a whole lot of poetry came up out of me. 
 
Sloan Bashinsky
A truly lost art today is spiritual alchemy, called “The Work” in some circles, which was Gurdjieff’s life work. As happened with some gurus, past and present, Gurdjieff had sex with female disciples, which he skipped over telling in his books. My poetry is about spiritual alchemy, as I lived it, and still live it. Ditto, my books, non fiction and novels, some of which contain poetry. Free reads at archive.org. 

    
Cleveland McLemore
My computer ate a large portion of my poetry files on the alchemical furnace as it is referenced in Taoist teachings. West meets East or so the expression goes. 
 
"The Tao of spiritual alchemy is none other than the Tao of the I Ching, the Tao of sages is none other than the Tao of immortals, and that the I Ching is not a book of divination but rather is the study of investigation of principles, fulfillment of nature, and arriving at the meaning of life."  
 
Liu I-ming  
 
"Although the words are very clear, yet they are also very vague. The shallow may take the I Ching to be a book of divination, but the profound consider it the secret of the celestial mechanism.” 

Lu Tung-pin
In The Dark 
We can live in the dark 
without a spark 
And call this the light 
We can live all our life 
In obedience to ignorance 
and call this divine 
We can worship our own 
intelligence and believe 
that what we achieve 
is worth the price 
Who is at the helm? 
We are a nation of fools 
In a world spun out of control 
In our bid for power 
Without honor or humility 
there is no impeccability 
We neglect the totality 
of the Self
~*~*~
Original natural reality
fire that burns
fire that heals
Return of the real
yin fire is restless
yang fire is true
when yin culminates
yang is born
light enters into the earth
a companion comes
reversing the path
creative energy is born

Sloan Bashinsky
Very nice.

I went looking for something and “accidentally” stumbled across this discourse during the covid pandemic, when I was using a different blog than what I now mostly use. I brought that old blog with me when I moved from Key West to Alabama in late 2018. 

Diving deep into Jesus and Mary Magdalene might be hazardous to Christianity :-)
https://afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com/2021/12/diving-deep-into-jesus-and-mary.html

Interestingly, today, I published something about my time in Key West and the Florida Keys at the blog I now mostly use. 
 
I was looking for something I had posted about the Tao, sort of. Here it is: 
 
And I was looking for this poem, which syncs, sort of, with the two Eve/Yin poems in the apocalypse post.

Earth, 
the sacred prism 
through which souls are refracted 
into their elemental parts, 
purified in Holy Fire, 
then one-forged 
and sent on their way 
to not even God knows where, 
simply because they are all 
unique emanations of God, 

evolving... 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

By Sloan Bashinsky at

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