
Gurdjieff and the Women of ‘The Rope’ (1997) - acsillag
http://www.gurdjieff.org/rope.htm
======
pmoriarty
Alan Watts on Gurdjieff:

 _" Gurdjieff was a magnificent old rascal, who lived a joyous life, and most
of his disciples live extremely restricted, rigid, and serious lives --
because the object of Gurdjieff's method was to weed out those who understood
from those who do not, and those who understood went away and those who did
not understand remained._

 _" Gurdjieff laid a trap for people who think that the purpose of life is
power, that is to say, to control everything, and he beguiled them with the
idea that they were all asleep and not fully in control of their own processes
and their own organisms, and he assigned them the impossible task of being the
Lord God Jehova each for one's self. He set them to doing this with great
rigor and he added to this the discipline of dances in which you could
exercise every limb working on a different rhythm to give yourself the
illusion of omnipotence. But if you persevered in these exercises hard enough,
you would discover they were all nonsense, at which point you would have
attained Gurdjieff's stage of illumination."_

~~~
sgc
As someone who had much more to do with Gurdjieff followers when growing up
than is healthy or happy, this is a very refreshing perspective on his
followers at least, and absolutely hits the nail on the head as far as my
experiences go!

Also, if you read his works they are not top shelf philosophy by any means.
They are more an organized compilation of thoughts he came across than a true
original opus. I have no idea how anybody took it seriously, beyond the
observation that humans do many irrational things.

~~~
neonate
What were your experiences with Gurdjieff followers when growing up? I've not
heard any stories from this point of view. Would be interested in whatever you
can share.

~~~
sgc
I am not going to pull all that shit back up since it would take a lot for me
to find my calm afterwards. Suffice to say its structure was fluid and never
totally defined, its _fuel_ was sophistic like much of Gurdjieff's maxims
(there was a lot of fuel), and its hidden goal was always unacknowledged
control masquerading as wisdom. It wound up spiraling out of control. The
tight clamps could not hold back the more powerful fuel and people burned
themselves out.

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neonate
There's a fun interview I ran across recently with Gary Lachman (a.k.a. Gary
Valentine, early bass player for Blondie!) who knows a ton about this stuff.
Though he's strongly biased in favour of Ouspensky against Gurdjieff. Pretty
entertaining though, for anyone who likes esoterica about esoterica.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgurBMfwQw4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgurBMfwQw4)

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lrenn
You ever see the OA on netflix?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurdjieff_movements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurdjieff_movements)

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MaysonL
An interesting review of a 2012 book with the same title as this article:
[http://www.josephazize.com/2016/04/01/gurdjieff-and-the-
wome...](http://www.josephazize.com/2016/04/01/gurdjieff-and-the-women-of-the-
rope/)

~~~
neonate
That book appears to be the personal notes of Solita Solano, which are
mentioned in the article. This bit is hilarious:

 _Gurdjieff has given them some “special liquor chocolates”, and Jane Heap,
thinking to flatter Gurdjieff, says to him: “Every day in your house is
Christmas.” Gurdjieff replies with this remarkable repartee: “Excuse! Twice a
day in my house is Christmas. Look, Mees Gordon, she wish belittle me!”_

------
YeGoblynQueenne
From Wikipedia's article on Gurdjieff:

>> Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness
and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it
is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full
human potential. Gurdjieff described a method attempting to do so, calling the
discipline "The Work"[5] (connoting "work on oneself") or "the Method".[6]
According to his principles and instructions,[7] Gurdjieff's method for
awakening one's consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk and yogi,
and thus he referred to it as the "Fourth Way".[8]

So, a typical charlatan selling spiritual enlightenment.

~~~
dang
" _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Gurjieff was a new-age guru, a mystic, who taught a "Way" to find
enlightenment with no scientific basis, or any other basis than the fact that
he came up with it and managed to convince people to give him money to be
taught it.

There is nothing there to engage in a "deep", rational manner. Are the
guidelines supposed to protect "work" like that also? Should we spend time and
energy carefully rebuffing every psychic, UFOlogist and astrologist, who is
linked on HN, also? Or should we accept such articles as if they have
something useful to contribute, just because someone took the time to write
them?

~~~
dang
I disagree. Articles like this do have something interesting to contribute.
They're for sure of historical interest, and to some subset of readers,
perennial interest. Gurdjieff was a fascinating character who attracted an
astonishing circle of followers. You've heard about the obscenity trial of
_Ulysses_? Jane Heap was the publisher who got tried for it [1]. A.R. Orage
was T.S. Eliot's favorite editor. These people were at the heart of 20th
century modernism. Before that, his Russian followers were at the heart of the
Silver Age, an equally interesting period. Words like "charlatan" and "guru"
don't open any of that up—they shut all of it down.

No post gratifies everyone's curiosity. When something fails to reach yours,
please just find something more interesting to read. There are lots of choices
on the front page and endlessly more at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/front](https://news.ycombinator.com/front).
Please don't rush in with shallow dismissals when something irritates you:
that _doesn 't_ gratify intellectual curiosity. Worse, it leads to poor-
quality discussion—so its signal-noise-lowering impact goes beyond just a
single comment.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_trial_of_Ulysses_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_trial_of_Ulysses_in_The_Little_Review)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Thank you for replying, dang.

Yes, Gurdjieff's pupils were famous artists and intellectuals of their time.
It is striking, reading his wikipedia page, how much of it is devoted to the
account of who joined his circle, who travelled with him when he moved, who
left his circle, etc. There is as much focus on Gurdjieff's pupils as on
Gurdjieff himself.

Still, that makes him a guru with famous pupils. In fact, he is probably still
remembered today _because_ he had such famous pupils; certainly not because of
his teachings or any kind of personal contribution to knowledge.

He clearly must have been a charismatic figure to gather all those people
around him. Nobody becomes a cult leader by being boring and bland! But,
charisma and imagination are gifts squandered if they are spent cooking up
some ad-hoc "path to enlightenment" with the only purpose of seducing people
into becoming your faithful followers. It is exploitative to use one's gift to
inspire, only to steal your "students" time, to force them to believe your
every word, follow you around and practice your silly little "system" in hopes
of becoming "enlightened"\- to promise everything when you have _nothing_.

I also know well the impact that meeting such a man can have: one becomes
bound to them, perhaps for life. Having once basked at the glow of the Master,
you can check out but you can never leave. Like human opiates, they offer
brief pleasure and take everything from you in return, holding you captive
with false promises and empty dreams. It is not they who are fascinating. It's
the tendency of the human mind to fall down holes, forever.

No account of Gurdjieff's life is complete if it does not put the fact of what
he really was, left right and centre. Especially not if it detracts from that
fact with such exhuberant praise as the article above.

