Gurdjieff Links
Looks like Tim Boucher is getting into Gurdjieff and there are what potentially promise to be some great discussions developing over there on Gurdjieff’s ideas.
I tend to waffle on about Gurdjieff quite a bit but it occurred to me that his thought might be quite difficult to get into from scratch. I don’t mean this from an intellectual point of view but rather that these days there is so much fluff and general crap around that it might be difficult to find the real ideas. As with most things ‘spiritual’ a whole ersatz ‘work industry’ has sprung up populated by cultists and assorted oddballs - they have even ripped off the Enneagram and divorced it totally from any Work related context.
But I digress (must...not.....express.....negativity...must.....not.....), the purpose of this post is a constructive one and I thought it would be good to list some useful resources and links for an intro to Gurdjieff’s teaching. I will add more in the comments as time goes on but for now I have found the following site which is a great source of interesting PDFs btw): Gurdjieff: A Reading Guide.
However there is a small issue - the problem with Gurdjieff on the internet is that 99% of the data is unobjective - in the sense that it does not aim to be a critical appraisal (in fact, any appraisal) but is intended rather as an intro to one or other ‘school’ or ‘group’ which purports to operate under the Gurdjieff banner. Imo, no such authentic school exists but that is another story.
Anyway, I have formulated a workaround - rather than go down the road of compiling a list of links which are essentially the subjective opinions of various interest-groups, I have opted instead for a ‘scatter’ technique and will post interesting links about people who genuinely were involved with the work and studied under Gurdjieff and thus any interested reader can form an opinion based on the ‘being’ of the informant which itself should partly be a result of Gurdjieff’s method. Or something.
Hopefully these pointers will be sufficient springboards for anyone’s further researches. So - here is an interesting (and amusing) article about P L Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins (itself an interesting esoteric motif) and student of G.
I will post some more in the comments here when I dredge them up from my bookmarks and subject them to a rigorous vetting procedure.
