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.