Gurdjieff and the Women of ‘The Rope’ (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Gurdjieff and the Women of ‘The Rope’ (1997)

gurdjieff.org

51 pointsacsillag40 comments

Alan Watts on Gurdjieff:

"Gurdjieff was a magnificent old rascal, who lived a joyous life, and most of his disciples live extremely restricted, rigid, and serious lives -- because the object of Gurdjieff's method was to weed out those who understood from those who do not, and those who understood went away and those who did not understand remained.

"Gurdjieff laid a trap for people who think that the purpose of life is power, that is to say, to control everything, and he beguiled them with the idea that they were all asleep and not fully in control of their own processes and their own organisms, and he assigned them the impossible task of being the Lord God Jehova each for one's self. He set them to doing this with great rigor and he added to this the discipline of dances in which you could exercise every limb working on a different rhythm to give yourself the illusion of omnipotence. But if you persevered in these exercises hard enough, you would discover they were all nonsense, at which point you would have attained Gurdjieff's stage of illumination."

So, like Zen for people with control issues.

One must consider that Alan Watts himself was a magnificent old rascal. He made no pretense about it and described himself as a "philosophical entertainer". When you verify his teachings (either by experience or by going to the source) you find a lot of deliberate bending. His interpretation of the Tao Te Ching is deeply idiosyncratic, for example. Though I suspect there's some degree of truth in his opinion of Gurdjieff, I wouldn't take his word for it.

As someone who had much more to do with Gurdjieff followers when growing up than is healthy or happy, this is a very refreshing perspective on his followers at least, and absolutely hits the nail on the head as far as my experiences go!

Also, if you read his works they are not top shelf philosophy by any means. They are more an organized compilation of thoughts he came across than a true original opus. I have no idea how anybody took it seriously, beyond the observation that humans do many irrational things.

What were your experiences with Gurdjieff followers when growing up? I've not heard any stories from this point of view. Would be interested in whatever you can share.

I am not going to pull all that shit back up since it would take a lot for me to find my calm afterwards. Suffice to say its structure was fluid and never totally defined, its fuel was sophistic like much of Gurdjieff's maxims (there was a lot of fuel), and its hidden goal was always unacknowledged control masquerading as wisdom. It wound up spiraling out of control. The tight clamps could not hold back the more powerful fuel and people burned themselves out.

> the object of Gurdjieff's method was to weed out those who understood from those who do not, and those who understood went away and those who did not understand remained.

It is kind of like when scammers claim they are from Nigeria or purposely misspell words or use bad grammar. "Here! Perform these 40 silly dances and you'll become omnipotent" is the early 20th century version of "Hello kind sir/m'am. I am the crown prince of Nigeria..."

There's a fun interview I ran across recently with Gary Lachman (a.k.a. Gary Valentine, early bass player for Blondie!) who knows a ton about this stuff. Though he's strongly biased in favour of Ouspensky against Gurdjieff. Pretty entertaining though, for anyone who likes esoterica about esoterica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgurBMfwQw4

You ever see the OA on netflix?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurdjieff_movements

An interesting review of a 2012 book with the same title as this article: http://www.josephazize.com/2016/04/01/gurdjieff-and-the-wome...

That book appears to be the personal notes of Solita Solano, which are mentioned in the article. This bit is hilarious:

Gurdjieff has given them some “special liquor chocolates”, and Jane Heap, thinking to flatter Gurdjieff, says to him: “Every day in your house is Christmas.” Gurdjieff replies with this remarkable repartee: “Excuse! Twice a day in my house is Christmas. Look, Mees Gordon, she wish belittle me!”

From Wikipedia's article on Gurdjieff:

>> Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff described a method attempting to do so, calling the discipline "The Work"[5] (connoting "work on oneself") or "the Method".[6] According to his principles and instructions,[7] Gurdjieff's method for awakening one's consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk and yogi, and thus he referred to it as the "Fourth Way".[8]

So, a typical charlatan selling spiritual enlightenment.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think Hitchens' razor applies there. "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"

Would you leave the same remark under a comment dismissing some flat-earther?

I'm afraid this comment is breaking the same guideline. Dismiss as much as you like, but please don't post like this to HN. It's informationless and therefore boring and therefore off topic here.

Dang's Razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without comment."

If it's about information content- I was concerned that people reading this article may not be aware that Gurjieff was a New Age guru. The article is written to present him as some kind of respectable philosopher who attracted a following of intellectuals and artists, rather than a cult leader. I felt it was important to point out what he actually was.

I still don't quite get why my comment broke that guideline. What would be a non-shallow dismissal of Gurjieff? I mean, give me an example here, because I'm a bit confused, really. The man had no "work" to dismiss, he was just full of hot air and making it up as he went along. What else can be said about him than the fact that he was a charlatan?

What, at the end of the day, is counter to HN guidelines about calling out cranks?

Seems like a weird take given the comment adds information from wikipedia, I hadn't ever heard of the dude, and that was useful information to me in quickly assessing what people were going on about.

Gurjieff was a new-age guru, a mystic, who taught a "Way" to find enlightenment with no scientific basis, or any other basis than the fact that he came up with it and managed to convince people to give him money to be taught it.

There is nothing there to engage in a "deep", rational manner. Are the guidelines supposed to protect "work" like that also? Should we spend time and energy carefully rebuffing every psychic, UFOlogist and astrologist, who is linked on HN, also? Or should we accept such articles as if they have something useful to contribute, just because someone took the time to write them?

How do you put scientific basis for enlightenment? Most of the people who have claimed to have a path towards enlightenment have focused on the mind and that too remains private to the practitioner. If it adds value to the seeker's experience or gives someone more clarity, then that method has gained popularity and acceptance. You don't see a scientific basis for his methods but your opinion is not based on experience either. It is indeed a shallow dismissal.

I think you miss the point a bit. The guidelines here are not unlike Gurdjieff's movements: formalism disguised as a practice of enlightenment. If your comment included something like "Lorem Ipsum's maxim from the 16th century was an example of this method being rhetorical and counter-productive", you would not have been taken to task because it would appear intellectual, even if it's nonsense.

The HN guidelines are very reasonable and they have created one of the least unpleasant discussion boards on the entire internet (and I mean, historically).

The particular guideline that dang brought up makes a lot of sense. I don't understand why he applied it in this case, but as a guideline, it's sound and solid.

This is a bit like saying that Big Brother created the ultimate utopia, all they had to do was take away individualism and impose guidelines. I agree that it's quite effective, but still doesn't root out that thorn called humanity. The harsh but necessary enforcement efforts are undertaken out of view, leading one to believe that guidelines are responsible for the present social reform; but only so much as the Newspeak dictionary was for Ingsoc.

How would we be supposed to "root out that thorn called humanity"? That is way beyond me.

I'd say it starts with the content. Some content is clearly going to cause conflict, and you've got stuff in place to catch some of it. More severe curating of content will help reduce this further.

Then there's the actual human interaction. We suck at communicating; adding tools to improve communication would help the discussions stay calmer.

Finally, there's the in-group mentality where people who perceive themselves as the same will act nicer to each other and perceive threats less often. By increasing the ways people can relate to each other, their empathy toward each other increases, communication becomes more friendly, and people try to work together more often.

Big Brother's approach was to attack all three of these areas rather than just create laws and police. It seems that utopian societies are a bit like gardens; if you want them to look really pretty, you'll have to do a lot of pruning.

If you don't have anything worth saying, silence is fine.

Calling someone out as a charlatan is worth saying.

If it's not substantiated, then it's not.

Often things are so obvious they do not require substantiation (see: the emperors new clothes).

Calling them out is enough.

It's not obvious to me from the provided quote that he's a charlatan. I do think he is a charlatan, but not everyone who uses new-age-sounding language is necessarily a charlatan.

It's possible to put many of the scientifically validated insights of modern psychotherapy into language that would make a lot of empirically-minded people sneer. In fact there are people who have done exactly this in the past.

I disagree. Articles like this do have something interesting to contribute. They're for sure of historical interest, and to some subset of readers, perennial interest. Gurdjieff was a fascinating character who attracted an astonishing circle of followers. You've heard about the obscenity trial of Ulysses? Jane Heap was the publisher who got tried for it [1]. A.R. Orage was T.S. Eliot's favorite editor. These people were at the heart of 20th century modernism. Before that, his Russian followers were at the heart of the Silver Age, an equally interesting period. Words like "charlatan" and "guru" don't open any of that up—they shut all of it down.

No post gratifies everyone's curiosity. When something fails to reach yours, please just find something more interesting to read. There are lots of choices on the front page and endlessly more at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and https://news.ycombinator.com/front. Please don't rush in with shallow dismissals when something irritates you: that doesn't gratify intellectual curiosity. Worse, it leads to poor-quality discussion—so its signal-noise-lowering impact goes beyond just a single comment.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_trial_of_Ulysses_in_...

Thank you for replying, dang.

Yes, Gurdjieff's pupils were famous artists and intellectuals of their time. It is striking, reading his wikipedia page, how much of it is devoted to the account of who joined his circle, who travelled with him when he moved, who left his circle, etc. There is as much focus on Gurdjieff's pupils as on Gurdjieff himself.

Still, that makes him a guru with famous pupils. In fact, he is probably still remembered today because he had such famous pupils; certainly not because of his teachings or any kind of personal contribution to knowledge.

He clearly must have been a charismatic figure to gather all those people around him. Nobody becomes a cult leader by being boring and bland! But, charisma and imagination are gifts squandered if they are spent cooking up some ad-hoc "path to enlightenment" with the only purpose of seducing people into becoming your faithful followers. It is exploitative to use one's gift to inspire, only to steal your "students" time, to force them to believe your every word, follow you around and practice your silly little "system" in hopes of becoming "enlightened"- to promise everything when you have nothing.

I also know well the impact that meeting such a man can have: one becomes bound to them, perhaps for life. Having once basked at the glow of the Master, you can check out but you can never leave. Like human opiates, they offer brief pleasure and take everything from you in return, holding you captive with false promises and empty dreams. It is not they who are fascinating. It's the tendency of the human mind to fall down holes, forever.

No account of Gurdjieff's life is complete if it does not put the fact of what he really was, left right and centre. Especially not if it detracts from that fact with such exhuberant praise as the article above.

What if being awake is worse than the "waking sleep"?

Recently I was awoken to the reality of how fragile our lives are. I would prefer to stay asleep.

Would you really? Truly realizing your own mortality is very powerful. Would you rather prepare for a challenge, or be thrown into it completely unprepared?

I don't know - I have read somewhere that only depressed people have realistic views about themselves.

There may be reason to believe that depressed people are more realistic about certain things, but it doesn't follow that being realistic causes depression or that only depressed people are realistic.

One may be skeptical that a dog can solve differential equations better than an accomplished mathematician, but it is none the less true. Likewise it is easy to doubt that the spiritual enlightenment of a human has discerned a profound truth about physics, cosmology, or consciousness because like the dog, they cannot write down the formula for the epagogic mind to follow.

You'd think that argument would apply to physics, which is knowledge that exists in the mind and is nothing like everyday experience, but nobody has trouble writing that down. The most likely explanation is that nothing about this person's "enlightenment" can be written down because nothing substantial is there. In this case it's especially easy to realize that, because apparently his idea of enlightenment was to realize that his teachings were pointless...

Cult leaders, bad politicians and the dark side of enterprise software sales all run on the same principle: big false promises ("you will become God"), combined with a teaspoon of truth to make it believable to some ("you do not have control of your autonomic nervous system"), backed up by personal charisma of the salsesman (see: his description in the article).

Trying to extract the "nugget of truth," which was put in there just to make the false parts believable, is one of the worst possible ways to find truth. It's like looking for cheese in a mousetrap.

>bad politicians "bad" = "successful"

Wait... you are saying that a dog can solve differential equations better than an accomplished mathematician?

If so, please explain.

I'm guessing it has to do with chasing rabbits, but I suspect there are quite a few pro linebackers/jugglers/baseball players with similar abilities.

Just because a being is doing a physical thing well, it doesn't mean they are "math-ing".

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