Charles,

I won't go into the mother-hen analogies, other than to say that it is you here you set up the design for side-taking and see me as defending one person and attacking another. Perhaps it is like this; I think i disagree with you enough here to warrant it, but the only sort of exchange I care for is one of educational discussion. so be it. I agree with you here that it is easier to discredit someone than intelligently respond to their ideas and a lack of awareness usually results in the former. However I find that exclamations of assured certitude you have about my 'methodology' here (and your use of the word 'is'), conscious or not, is questionable.

"First, when you refer to the ‘after-death body’, I really don’t know what you are talking about; I don’t think anybody does..."

This is just precisely what I was expressing. Forming and crystallising an essence enough to create a body that survives after-death was an essential part of Gurdjieff's system, but people so often forget and stop short, assuming that the entire system is just about meditation, self-awareness, conscious 'doing' etc. It is, but it goes further. G himself was intelligent enough to realize that not everybody had the stamina and intelligence enough to go beyond a certain point of awakening, embodiment and transmission in their lifetime, so there was no need for him to put any emphasis on that issue. He was also aware, and it was part of his teaching, that given the Earth is so far away from the center of the galaxy - we are in essence 'doomed' to our place of evolution for now and do the best we can in the meantime in the most balanced and harmonic way possible. He was well aware that filling someones head with garbage about higher bodies and the promise of immortality and such, as was his harsh criticism of nearly all of the existing esoteric schools in the west at that time, would only set someone further off from their path of living life in resonance with nature in the present moment and with awareness. However, they were still very much a part of his teaching. You have read 'In Search of the Miraculous'? I would assume so. These are the things he said and which informed the higher octave of his teaching. Without the higher octave their would be no lower - his system was based on holography and harmonics, unifying together the most grosse and most subtle aspects of being.

And no - when he taught people this stuff, I don't think it was any sort of trickery! He was being for real! I notice in smug, aging Gurdjieff scholars, this sort of certitude - assuming he was something he wasn't, and projecting all of their sly old man vibe onto the idol of his being. haha

"G was a born teacher, and during his youth, other proclaimed teachers would have realized his position and there would be little, if anything, they could teach him"

This is what makes your posts stink for me - some sentences that just don't make any sense at all.

"And how would you know what Gs direct experience of consciousness was, unless, of course, you were him? "

I don't know and never will. These things I am assuming - I feel a resonance in his words that he was speaking from the authority of his own direct experience of his own nervous system, and was speaking in his own truth about these things.

"What exactly are the ‘experienced and awakening of Conscience’ and the “simulatnous engagement with the multi-dimensional totality of ones emotions”? Yes, these phrases roll nicely off the tongue but what does they mean? Nothing, really to me, except a bunch of mumbo-jumbo."

Well they mean a lot to me! This makes things quite clear to me. You just haven't had the experience I have had, and your over-certitude about things - dogma-hypnosis, in other words - has created a resistance in you whenever you hear someone talking about something that you haven't experienced. Dude - quite often I have 'spiritual' experiences - moments of pure being, moments of pure emotional reverie - moments of clear light - the sort of moments that inspired mystics in the past to want to claim they had been touched by god. And indeed, that is what it feels like. At these moments - I feel as if at once my sense-feel-focus attention is suddenly cast onto all of my being - all of my body, all of my heart, all of my mind - and this syncrony creates a moment of conscience - I know what it is to be good. I am in direct engagement, not with thought, not with knowledge, but with being. In 'In Search', G explains the mechanics of these moments - moments of self-remembrance when all 3 of the main bodies align with eachother, and being is accessed. He once said something like that the moment when you get a direct sense and feeling of the existence of a higher power, it inspires nothing but tears. There is a good quote somewhere. I am sure you yourself have had these sorts of experiences.

"
What ramajuju did say was, “Conscience is a state in which a person feels all their internal emotions at once.” With all due respect to ramajuju, the statement is meaningless; its fluff. It’s a minor miracle to get a glimpse of what is termed the multi-faceted diversity of a single emotion, and by the time you do that - it’s gone. Whatever emotion you do experience, is only the tip of an iceberg, of the bulk of whose mass we have most limited access to. "

Once again, this exposes something which no words of mine can tell you. Any more I could say would sound confusing, and it is not like it is my authority as mother hen (lol) to want to come and tell you something. I can only hope to inspire it in you by evocation. But in short - he doesn't mean like someone is experiencing the entirety of their subconscious ! He just means , that in a quiet moment, one is engaged with all of their being, all of their heart - and something awakens in them that helps them remember.

"The way I see it, we are going to accept whatever we are going to accept, and nothing more – or less. I don’t really see there being a choice in the process. Simply, we respond, and more likely than not, we seem to take some issue with our response, try to figure out what went wrong and how we’re going to fix it. And that’s what we end up doing a good deal of the time – such is human nature."

You seem intent of speaking for humanity here and seemed so certain that your experience of reality is what is really going on in the world. You also seemed harshly critical of anyone telling you otherwise

"I’ll clue you into something – this is a trick, whether it is used in Gurdjieff schools or elsewhere. The concept of ‘don’t take my word for it; verify it for yourself’ is one of the oldest tricks in the book. By telling someone to not accept an idea you’re creating space for them to absorb the idea, allowing them to play with it. And by the nature of playing with an idea it will become part of their repertoire. As I said, it’s a trick and a very effective one. A parallel idea is commonly referred to as reverse psychology."

Without wanting to critisize you further - I will say that I do agree strongly with you here that there are some teachers who say this to get a big of liberal credit, but I still go about the business of trying to invade the minds of their followers, disallowing their autonomy and trying as hard as they can to get them to buy into their BS (belief system/bullshit) and halting them from thinking for themselves. This exists in a lot of spiritual teachers. However, I think Gurdjieff was different. Though he still had a bit of old world in him - and I really mean a tiny bit - I think that his method of teaching and general way of being was always with the interest of all of his student's innate autonomy and integrity and freedom intact. There are a few other things he said as well which i forget now - but all in the effect of, like i said earlier - revealing to the students some really far out knowledge - then drawing attention to how carried away with it they were getting and/or how much they took it on without questioning it and integrating it with a critical mind.

But we will never know. There is a book come out called 'In Search of PD Ouspensky', where the author (the fromer bass-player from Blondie!) writes about Gurdjieff could at times be manipulative. He has such power to and despite his great struggle to be non-invasive I'm sure there were times when he was. Though we will never know.

Out of interest - thought this would seem obvious now - you are very critical of Gurdjieff then? You have read the books? ? ?