Saints and Sinners
The ongoing Gurdjieff discussion at Conclave has got me thinking - which is good because that’s what it’s designed to do....err… anyway, I’ve been thinking about conceptions of ‘piety’ as opposed to the paradigm of traveling a path or ‘seeking’, however one frames that.
Gurdjieff, as is well known, had a somewhat bad reputation - admittedly one which he was at lengths to perpetuate himself - and this is often used as an argument against him and his work. The argument is that he was somehow ‘unholy’ because he slept with his female disciples on occasion, treated people badly, was rude - even fraternized with Nazis in occupied Paris. Of course, Gurdjieff ‘supporters’ have answers for all these accusations (actually this is what they essentially are) and point to various mitigating circumstances as well as the hoary old cliche that Gurdjieff was operating in the tradition of the Malamatiyya.
The problem with both these approaches is that they both hold ‘good behaviour’ (ie a subjective societal norm) to be a benchmark of spirituality and worse, to judge a teacher’s validity in the spiritual realm by the standards of a non-spiritual world-view - one which the spiritual aspirant is trying to see-through, to awaken from.
I am not rejecting society’s rules (well, ok, I reject some of them and they way things are going I will soon be rejecting a whole lot more) but am saying that they are not necessarily spiritual - especially today in the west - and as such one cannot judge Gurdjieff, or any ‘eastern’ teacher or teaching, by the rules of a vastly different system. That is why both the criticism and the justifications are invalid - and perhaps this was the purpose of the behaviour - the only important thing is whether you can connect to it. That is all. If a moral conditioning stops someone from working on their conditioning...well....that’s hardly surprising.
But it occurs to me that there is a bigger issue: the concept of ‘holiness’ - as in ‘good behaviour’ - really belongs to the end of the road not the beginning. That is to say, if we complete the journey of an esoteric path, then at that point we may be able to tell the truth, to see things as they are, to ‘do the right thing’ - in a sense all claims to truth telling, ‘good behaviour’ and such are hypocrisy and of course these things are all too often all that organized religion has to offer. They have taken the end result and pretended that they already have it - perhaps even as a means to avoid the effort of having to do something about it.
Perhaps this is what the apparent ‘unholiness’ of such systems as Gurdjieff’s and the malamati are demonstrating. That we are what we are and we cannot change if we do not admit this - if what we are is somehow labeled ‘sinful’ or whatever else then so what? If this is what we are then this must be the starting point for change. Does this make sense to anyone?
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