A Masterpiece
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This is a masterpiece. It shows Gurdjieff's sense of humor as he imparts an enormous amount of wisdom and truths in this book. And, as he suggests, it should be read more than once to actually get all out of it that can be gotten.
To read it carefully, and with thought will show you just what 'man' is really all about, and so much more.
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Not for everyone
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This is not a normal book and it should not be purchased or read with that intention. Spiritual development is a complex question and one person may be drawn to one kind of spiritual development while another may be drawn to a different kind. Gurdjieff wrote this book so that different types are drawn to different sections. No one is supposed to be alive to the entire book. Moreover, it should be read in conjunction with a work group that is applying the Gurdjieff work method systematically. The book itself can only be understood in conjunction with practical application of work effort. Someone who attempts to read it as though it were Tolstoy is not likely to get much out of it. In the 1980s I belonged to a group in the Warwick, NY area called the Chardovoyne Barn that had been founded by Wilhelm Nyland, a personal student of Gurdjieff who had founded his group to cater to 1960s types, many of whom were still there. The Gurdjieff work method is a great tool that I gained a tremendous amount from but it is unlikely that everyone would benefit equally. If you are drawn to Gurdjieff I suggest that you contact the Gurdjieff Institute, and the Warwick group may still be there, or another group with direct links to Gurdjieff that doesn't ask for a huge amount of money. Gurdjieff was a bit of a con man, and there has always been a tinge of fraud surrounding some of his followers or would-be followers. It is nonsense to claim that tithing, for instance, is important to the Gurdjieff work.
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Devastating Trash Except...
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Maybe the joke is intentional. The anecdotes in the introduction, of the Trans-Caucasian Kurd and his Peppers, and of the Stray Dog Refinery, are wisdom well worth buying a book for, and we should wish everyone now and in the future to read them. The rest of the book is worthless glop. Basically, Gurdjief wanted to write a book and be a cult leader, for kicks. He wasn't too awfully concerned about any kind of intellectual legitimacy.
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It's a book!
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I read about 100 pages worth of book(s) a day, and I consider myself jaded to literature. This book, however, broke through my assumptions of what literature could be. With every fiber of my being, I consider it one of the chronicles of human achievement. Without this book, the world would be a more difficult place in which to live. I don't suggest everyone read it, but if you do, try to throw everything you know about everything away while reading. Relearn how to read.
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Reading this is itself an act of G's "conscious labor"
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This is one of the best works of spirituality ever written. Gurdjieff admits in his forward ("The Arousing of Thought"'s Warning to the reader) that he tried conveying his "wiseacring" in a straightforward, "newsworthy" manner but found that it failed miserably. So, being enamored his entire life by both the form and content of the "1001 Nights", he tried another approach. The genius of his writing is that it not only imparts information to you the reader, but performs or enacts the "cosmic principles" he's discussing in the very way the sentences are constructed (which many people find extremely difficult, overloaded, and dense). But his book was intentionally composed in a rhythmic & musical fashion. The sentences have distinct cadences (many of them have multiple embedded clauses) which when read aloud, as Gurdjieff recommends, are apt to put one in a strange state of mind. It takes a while to acclimatize oneself to the rhythm, but once one does it becomes easier to intuit--with something other than the "intellectual center"--the ideas behind the words. His neologisms are also meant to dislocate, but they are simply combinations of Russian, Armenian, and newlyminted words. About the content: Gurdjieff's system is often lumped in with many other fads and gurus' elixirs under the moniker "new age". Which is ironic, considering that these ways of being are apparently thousands of years old. But what feel-good new age movement starts with the axiom that human beings are basically in varying degrees of a hypnotic state, possessing only a shred of what Western philosophies call free will? (and that shred only "awakens" sometimes in "peak experiences" when the three centers work together--mortal danger, sexual union, etc., when the ego drops away). Yet this axiom is not asked to be taken on "faith" by Gurdjieff. His is a hard-headed empiricism--indeed, he thought most of humanity incapable of "faith". He never claimed sagehood nor superhuman powers of himself, and was quite satisfied to turn people away and even shock them with behavior at odds with the European conception of a guru. One can only really grasp Gurdjieff's starting point--"Man is asleep"-- by either already being convinced of this truth, or by doing experiments in conscious attention to convince one such.
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