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Gurdjieff Studies Gurdjieff Studies Ltd, Registered Charity No. 1098600 |
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What did he teach?
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Gurdjieff was a fate-changer, a catalyst to self-initiation. Today his teaching still offers a supremely practical, streetwise Existenzphilosophie for independent spirits who cannot quite swallow society's consensual lies. Perceiving men and women virtually in trance using only a fraction of their latent powers and forces, his call was urgent and uncompromising: Awake! Awake from your unsuspected hypnotic sleep to consciousness and conscience..... Unlike his contemporary, Heidegger, Gurdjieff translated his massive interest in Being into an evolutionary psychology. To the purposeful cultivation of I-HERE-NOW (an unmistakable psychic event sometimes involuntarily tasted in moments of danger and crisis) Gurdjieff harnessed a subtle, non-mechanistic methodology centred on mobilised attention and sensory self-awareness. Abjuring lop-sided genius, he promoted the balanced development of head, heart and hand. Like every major ideology or religion, Gurdjieff's System is a complete and précis-defying critique - nourishingly, if contentiously, explanatory on three levels: social and cosmic as well as individual. His key dynamic of "reciprocal feeding" anticipates various Green and holistic paradigms (Schweitzer's "reverence for life", Vernadsky's biosphere, and Arne Naess's "deep ecology"). If Gurdjieff's so-to-say Hubble-telescope-vision or "celestial optics" assigns humanity at large a chasteningly subordinate and involutionary role, it nevertheless reserves for a questing minority a radical, survivalist option of service to Higher Powers. Click here for a more detailed résumé of Gurdjieff's life and teaching (from the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism). |
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