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I've read a portion of Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" and found it boring. Perhaps it would get interesting if I read more.

But now I'm reading "the fourth way" by Peter Ouspensky, the most famous (if we don't count Joseph Stalin) of his students and find it awesome. Very rational, explaining everything in an exciting, easy to grok way. It feels like a book I would recommend to everyone.

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Beelzebub's Tales was intentionally boring for the first 50 pages in order to scare people off. Gurdjieff famously wanted only the first 50 pages pre-cut (this was during the period when new books would have their pages stuck together & the reader would use a book-knife to separate them) in order to encourage people who were turned off by the beginning to return it. He did a lot of stuff to try to weed out insufficiently dedicated people.

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