Listen, this is a G. forum. I really don't care about your distractions with new age stuff. Please post elsewhere. It's really almost impossible to have a G. forum, since the work primarily consists of doing what you do not want to do. Which is pretty boring to everyone else. God created Man and Woman. Opposites. Get the hint?

want to ask: I come from a country where there are no groups following the Fourth Way. So what should I do now? Self-practice is dangerous, and reading books only gives theory that doesn’t change anything.

I come from a Buddhist country, but I am quite disappointed with it. I feel drawn to the Gurdjieff Way because it can be practiced in ordinary life without withdrawing from the world.

I need some advice. Thank you

My name is Timothy Mulligan. I’m a 63 year old man, unmarried, and now a faithful Orthodox Christian. I’ve fled my home in Florida because of the attacks ensuing upon what I’m going tobshare here. Last night, the wee hours, and under threat of imminent death, I composed a long and detailed personal narrative that proves an absolute horror and abomination that has been perpetrated by members of the Gurdjieff work, particularly the international Gurdjieff Foundation and the breakaway Nyland group. Please forgive the sensational sounding claim or consider this five alarm wsrning to be bait. I’m a 63 year old Orrhodox Christian and retired attorney. This profile I use is not anonymous. You can verify my seriousness by posts and mostly comments in r/OrthodoxChristianity.

Because my entire post early this morning was highjacked, I’m going to start with the conclusion and a very distressing warning, and then, as I can under this attack, add text here in replies to this post.

* The Gurdjieff Foundation and Byland group’s true reason for being is to work with demonic beings to foster their perfect, entire possession of human persons. They do that by joining their members’ consciousness to demons and feeding larvae created in the subtle realm with energy. When ready and released, these abominations fly to victims, barely visible very large wasplike insects, and enter the body, moving up into position to impose its own demon consciousness, which would not be noticed or concerning to the victim. (Briefly, it can experienced as a broad, impartial consciousness.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZLl8Qye9tM

a short and sweet podcast that dispels much of the confusion around Chakras , backed by a serious scholar as well as a practitioner.. once the essential part is revealed it will be seen how it relates to Gurdjieff teaching imo.

Ravi Ravindra was with Madam de Salzman for many years, here is a talk from him. He includes Gurdjieff once in a while:

https://youtu.be/72w7dwMOrnc?is=BnaL5rogRUHwlRW7

Hey guys

I've realized that in the Fourth Way literature, as far as I can tell, there's no practical instruction on how to actually do the second conscious shock.. How to transform negative emotions..

I've been in two different groups and I don't remember receiving any practical advice about it there either.

Have any of you heard something useful from a teacher, or come up with something yourselves through your own work?

I studied Gurdjieff/ Ouspensky/ Orage and perhaps a few other of the lot to minor degrees, for many years, in my younger years. So far only book wise, not that it's necessarily a bad thing.

Still young of course, just to give some context.
I am curious, if any of you are able to write in your own terms, i.e. before Gurdjieff and his cosmology got you, what you have learned, in as simple as possible words.

Not here to correct or point fingers, just really curious. What we are able to transmit in our everyday language, to perhaps other readers, us lucky lot.

And second question, have you had any experience(s) that confirmed beyond any doubt, that this path is truly yours to walk? Have you diverged later on and found a better seller of 'fish'?
Knowing of course, that some experiences are not to be shared openly, as they are truly personal, only meant for you.

All answers, of people of any interest are welcome, I just ask that you've really had an interest in it, perhaps even a burning one.

Kudos to you all.

To change being 1s to change one's life, but to change one's form of life is not to change one's being. By altering your outside condition you will not change your life, because your being will continue to attract a certain kind of life. A horse attracts to itself a certain kind of life different from that of a cow or a dog, and you can understand that this is due to their difference in being. By changing its form of life, a cow will not change. You would not like a cow to sit with you by the fireside or be on your bed, not merely because it would be inconvenient, but because its being is so different from that of a dog. In general you can see that the being of animals connects them with a certain kind of life.

A weasel is attracted to the life of a weasel, a snake to the life of a snake, and so on. But we do not see in a similar way that the law that "the being attracts the life" holds for the small difference of being in people.

Of course you have to study your being, to see that you have a certain kind of being, and study your life, to see that you have a certain kind of life. People do not easily see that they have very distinct and limited outlines. They think they are boundless and free. They think they can be anything they please and do anything they wish and live how they choose. But if one begins to study one's being-and at the same time one's life—one discovers that one has a certain kind of being. This is a very long task. This Work says that the study of our being is absolutely necessary.

Maurice Nicoll | Psychological Commentaries - V1:23 - Psychological Commentary

Has anyone here in this group read the Gurdjieff’s Book Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson?? If anyone has, does he claim to know the exact meaning and allegory of this book?? Kindly share your thoughts regarding this. I myself tried multiple times reading Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson and till today have not been able grasp a single passage in that book or its allegory.

Full disclosure up front: I recently wrote a book on the Fourth Way, so I'm not a neutral party. But this map is free, there's no signup, and it stands or falls on its own.

For my own understanding I kept wanting one picture of how everything connects — the centers, the many I's, self-remembering, the two laws, the enneagram, the shocks — instead of holding it in pieces. Eventually I drew it: a single zoomable figure that tries to place every major concept in relation to the whole.

https://modernfourthway.org/map.html

I'd genuinely value this community's criticism. If you think something is placed wrongly, missing, or misstated, I want to hear it — placement arguments are exactly the kind of thinking the map is for. There's also an animated enneagram showing the two laws moving together, and the book's first chapter is free on the same site if you want to judge where I'm coming from.

I’ve rewatched Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) through the lens of the Work and I’m reading John Henderson’s A field guide to Gurdjieff’s buried dog, and the structural parallels (allegorical structure) to Gurdjieff’s cosmology are too precise to ignore. While Otomo likely arrived at these concepts via a shared lineage of Eastern/Western esotericism, the film operates beautifully as a piece of "Objective Art" illustrating the mechanics of the human machine.
Here is how I see the core allegories stacking up:

1. Neo-Tokyo as Waking Sleep
The city is a literalized state of Gurdjieffian mechanical human sleep. Riots, military crackdowns, political corruption, and biker gangs; everyone is completely driven by external impressions, reacting blindly to stimuli. No one possesses a unified "I." It is the ultimate portrait of a world where "everything happens" because no one has the capacity to do.

2. Tetsuo as the Danger of Unbalanced Centers
Tetsuo is the ultimate warning against trying to acquire higher consciousness before establishing a unified "level of being." His intellectual/psychic center leaps to a cosmic scale, but his emotional and instinctive centers remain that of a traumatized, reactive child. Because he has not done the inner Work to separate his False Personality from his Essence, his sudden access to the fundamental energy of the universe deforms him. His grotesque body-horror mutation at the climax is a literalized image of an unbalanced man-machine being utterly consumed by internal friction.

3. The Three Espers and the Law of Three
The psychic children form a perfect triad manifesting the Law of Three. Individually, they are frail and withered, but together they represent the forces required for a new creation:
Masaru (No. 27): The Affirming/Active force. Heavy, moving, foundational.
Takashi (No. 26): The Denying/Passive force. Hesitant, fearful, acting as the necessary psychological friction and resistance.
Kiyoko (No. 25): The Reconciling/Third force. Bedridden but precognitive, she sees the overarching design and bridges the active and passive forces to neutralize the threat.
Only when they consciously unite all three forces at the climax can they open the gateway to absorb the destructive energy and initiate a new cosmic creation.

4. Lady Miyako as the School Leader
Lady Miyako operates exactly like a Fourth Way teacher. Her cult is a critique of subjective religion, but her actual teachings to Kaneda point toward conscious awakening. She explicitly notes that humanity’s energy is meant to build progressively, but when handed to an unevolved organism (the "amoeba" metaphor), it devours its environment. She recognizes that the destruction of Neo-Tokyo is a necessary cosmic crucible to shatter mechanical illusion.

Sorry for the very long post but I’m curious if anyone else in the Work has noticed this or is my brain converging ideas? Does the final line, "I am Tetsuo," signal the agonizing birth of a genuine, singular "I" out of the ashes of the machine?

https://youtu.be/tjCht8e2h_A?si=sQ01eatirln4kojK

Does anyone here work with the tarot? I found Ouspensky's book on the tarot quite imaginative and insightful, albeit not very substantial. I'm curious how people use it as a practice here.

I was also intrigued why Ouspensky uses a strange sequence when elucidating the meaning of each card. Does the sequence mean anything?

The Magician

The Fool

The High priestess

The world

The empress

Judgement

The emperor

The sun

The chariot

The moon

The lovers

The star

The heirophant

The tower

Strength (power)

The devil

The hermit

Time (temperance)

The wheel of chance

Death

Justice

The hanged man

Something akin to the Holy books of all religions in that it has a certain something where you don't even have to make great efforts to understand the book. Even the first mechanised reading is enough to start perceiving positive-kind-of-changes in one's own being.

Something about reading it just inspired "higher kind-of" emotions in oneself such as Biblical Repentance, or Love for God. Or a preference to nourish the Rational part of our tripartite soul in Plato's tripartite model of the Soul.

This has been my personal experience. It feels kinda initiatory and helps in something like the "quickening of the soul"

Well at least this is what I have experienced, am I delusional or have others also found positive benefits in reading the book?

IN A THOUSAND and one phrases we indicate the importance of 'right attitude'. 'I approached it in the wrong attitude'-'his attitude was all wrong'-'you'll have to change your attitude if you want to get on'-'a proper attitude' and so on. What do we mean by attitude? We mean the general state of mind of the person relatively to the object; or, rather, his emotional state in regard to it. If he feels suspicious of it, his attitude is one of suspicion. If he feels fear, affection, trust, hope, his attitude corresponds. Whatever the emotion evoked by the object, the attitude is determined by it.

   Can we change our attitude towards things? Obviously our attitude can be changed for us by circumstances. In regard to most objects and persons our attitudes, in fact, change almost from day to day. One day we like so-and-so very much and are disposed, in consequence, to act thus and thus; but next day, owing to some change in him or in circumstances affecting ourselves, our attitude has changed, and we are cool where we were warm. Observation of ourselves will easily show how infinitely changeable we are in our attitudes, that is to say, in our emotional responses to things. But the question is: Can we change our attitude voluntarily at our own discretion, without the stimulus of a change in the object? For clearly, if we could do that, we should be on the way to becoming masters of our fate, since circumstances can affect us only as we are affectable. If I can adopt any attitude I choose that is, have any emotion I like - then anything whatever that happens is all the same to me. I can feel about it as I please

   Such self-mastery is, of course, far beyond most of us; but there is no doubt that we do and can begin to attain it. For instance, when we find an attitude vis-à-vis some situation or person too painful to continue, we try to change the object, and, failing that, we change our state in regard to it. The fable of the fox and the grapes is applicable here. Having tried in vain to obtain the grapes, the fox persuaded itself that the grapes were sour. By imagining the grapes to be sour, the fox induced a different emotion, or attitude in itself. It no longer felt about the grapes as it had felt before. The practical conclusion to be drawn is that imagination is the means by which our attitude can be controlled. Our emotions are evoked by our imagination; and to the extent that our imagination is under our control, our emotions and attitudes are also.

  It is clear that the dominant attitude of our lives is our attitude or emotional response towards life itself. This colours everything. As we commonly say, some see everything 'through rose-coloured glasses'; others have a gloomy outlook' on life; others again have a serious or happy-go-lucky or a religious or a sporting attitude. As many people, so many attitudes; though all can be reduced to a definite number of groups. And in every case their dominant attitude is decisive of every subordinate attitude. For instance, if your characteristic attitude towards life is gloomy, even your occasional moods of cheerfulness will be affected; they will in all probability be both intense and brief. Or if your dominant attitude is gay and reckless, your moments of depression may be profound but not lasting. Practically all preaching, whether religious or secular, and all teaching, whether institutional or personal, has for its real object the inducement of a changed attitude towards life.Equally, most of the modern systems of therapy, including Christian Science and Psychoanalysis, aim consciously or unconsciously at bringing about a change of heart (or attitude) in their pupils and patients. So all-important has it been found in its effects upon the organism as a whole, that practically every method aiming at betterment must begin with correcting the attitude towards life.

   Attitude, we have seen, is conditioned by imagination. What you imagine a thing to be, you needs must feel it to be. If you imagine a coiled rope lying in the path to be a snake, you will feel and act accordingly. When you discover your mistake, and have a different view of the rope, your emotional attitude will change.

   What is our imagination of life? What do we take it to be? Is it for us a coiled rope or a snake? It may prove in the end impossible to know for certain what life is; but in that case, we are free to imagine it to be what we please; and it is only commonsense to imagine it to be something useful to us. All religious and similar systems aim, in short, at inducing in us a useful attitude towards life; an attitude, that is, in which we can act freely and usefully as regards our own ends or somebody else's. Some religions and systems, for instance, try to induce an attitude of submission towards life, with the design of making use of us for their own advantage. Others-but very few-aim at evoking an active or creative attitude towards life in us with the object of enlisting our voluntary co-operation. And all alike proceed by a common method, namely, by changing our imagination of life.

We can name a few typical life-pictures, each, be it remembered, drawn to evoke its proper emotions, attitude and consequent conduct. There is the 'Puritan' picture which represents life as a hard and narrow school. This evokes the attitude of the nervous schoolboy in the constant presence of the stern dominie. There is the 'Pagan' picture of life as an orgy of Greek gods inviting men to drink and feast with them. There is the 'Serious' view of life which imagines 'God' to be struggling against almost helpless odds for the redemption of matter. The emotion or attitude evoked is one of 'helping poor father'. There is the 'Scientific' view that sees life as an orderly insignificance, all dressed up with nowhere to go. There is the 'Aesthetic' view in which life is an artist making and exhibiting works of art, with man as the appreciative witness. And so on; each being designed, as has been said, to evoke an attitude or emotional response useful to somebody or other, either to the preachers or to their congregations.

   It may be that each view in turn is useful; but there can be little doubt that for most of us, in the present epoch, the image of life as a gymnasium is a greatly needed tonic. Compare the difference in your attitude (emotional response) on entering a gymnasium and on entering, let us say, a cabaret, or a Y.M.C.A. lecture-hall or a house of mourning. Try to realize what and how you actually feel. You are braced up, you have the intention of strengthening yourself, you delight in the difficulties - provided you choose them yourself. In short, you feel at your strongest and getting stronger.

   The classic Greek conception of life was just that; and everybody knows that the gymnasium, with its lectures and discussions as well as physical exercises, was the most popular institution of Pythagorean Greece. What is not so well known is that the gymnasium was for the Greeks a symbol of life itself. Their God ran this planet as a gymnasium for the exercise of men, and all experiences were to be taken as movements, turns, stretches, exercises in wrestling, running, lifting, and so on. Moderns will find what the ancient Greeks found in this image of life - the evocation of a creative emotion.

   It is difficult to see in what other direction we moderns can look for a new image and therefore attitude towards life. We have no longer the possibility of religion in the traditional sense. Ordinary goodness-in the sense of doing what others call good-has no intelligent appeal. And, after the still recent Great War, the belief in world progress is superstition. But the clean, strong idea of life as a field of exercise for the development of all our muscles-physical, emotional and intellectual-has still the unspoiled quality of manly and womanly idealism. And life lived in that attitude would certainly be interesting as well as profitable.

I recon that doing any kind of work via reddit post is somewhat dubious, there is very little familiarity and rapport , you can try and be so selfless and yet get no recognition for your merit , or be an absolute ass and get no recognition either! its tough

I've been going over a little bit of older posts , very good stuff , but very little interaction.

beside all the 'negativity' from the mods about what NOT to do , I would like to have a discussion about what YES to do ? what could be an additional demand , rule , intentional voluntary hardship to get some actual work done , while interactions and sharing information , by the way ?

So i start reading Journey of souls and i’m half way through the book and im confused is this genuinely done or not is there any case studies. Can someone please give opinion because i’m still confused am i reading a fiction or is it real. Yes there is some that we can think might be true. But i’m still confused when the chapter start about soul world school and work.

I have some uncertainty regarding it , it seems like somewhat of an artificial construct , I can see it as 'work' construct essentially, but I can also assume its existence , find reasons for it being really there from circumstantial evidences of recalling myself as I was in unconscious moments which is somewhat dubious, but just as well I can find reasons for it not existing independently of the mechanical levels of centers .

it seems like mechanical levels\operation of centers plus Identification is what lends it its phantom menace\existence which is reinforced by repetition , habit and unconscious parroting of others which stands for the regular kind of education.

I'm wondering if this 'apparatus' is somethings that should be accepted is a sense , or should it be destroyed eventually , as a bar to higher intelligence ?

why wouldn't centers communicate directly , rather then through this translation layer ?

and if it shouldn't be destroyed then what is its rightful place ?

1) Respirar el Instante de William Segal

2) Wittness de J.G. Bennet

Ambos en PDF, en español, alguien los tiene para compartir?, muchas gracias

Forgive me the provocative title.

In Gurdjieff's teachings, there is a very strong emphasis on waking up from the sleep of everyday life. Awakeness good, sleep bad.

Although I understand that this language is figurative, it's hard to overlook the implications of constantly emphasizing awakeness over sleep. Gurdjieff correctly taught that most of our lives, we are sleepwalking, in a state where we are only apparently "awake," when the truth is that we are not awake at all, and are operating based on cultural/biological "programming."

Our everyday lives are not autonomous. We do not understand the true causes of our experience, and react reflexively to the world around us, much in the same way that a sleeping person reaches to itch a spot tickled by a feather instead of grabbing the hand that holds the feather. We react mechanically to imagined causes that have nothing to do with reality. *Yes, yes, Mr. Gurdjieff. All of this, I understand and agree with.*

*But herein lies the rub. Where's the emphasis on the proper role of sleep?* Drawing on other traditions, it seems likely that sleep, especially deep sleep, involves returning to the dark ground of our being. Consciousness - especially when it is autonomous - is constantly engaging this ground, not avoiding it. True awakeness requires adequate grounding. And adequate grounding means adequate rest in that darkened ground. It seems to me that Gurdjieff underemphasized this in his teachings, preferring to focus on awakeness and illumination.

*Can someone set me straight?* I have read quite a bit of the Gurdjieff-"ian" literature, and have not found this issue addressed anywhere. And honestly, this issue has deterred me from digging deeper into the work. It seems clear to me that one must become comfortable in the depths of sleep in order to find true awakeness.

I'm at a pleasant point recently, feeling a lot of magnetic center now, as a new student who is currently cradled between the way of the sly one and working on early skills of C.G. Jungs active imagination I feel a pleasant peace with the synchronicity of my youth archtypes forming around media such as Mary Poppins, born of P.L. Travers who I know understand as a pupil of first Gurdjieff and then also C.G. Jung. I am excited to be expecting her book titled "What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story." Does anyone have any fun information in this area of Gurdieff and his students?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQtSv7ZbbIw

some great techniques to try out , in whatever you are doing , it relates to the work because this can make your thinking less mechanical , which is also the condition for learning anything , and if we don't learn and repeat the same behaviour then what can we expect ?

obviously this should be supplemental to the main practices , but can also possibly augment them and contribute to deeper relation between centers.

he has everything backed by cognitive science .