/lit/ - Literature

>>20394863
What Gurdjieff calls “conscious labor” and “intentional suffering” in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, and what more prosaically is called self-observation and self-remembering as in his disciple Ouspensky’s account of Gurdjieff’s teachings, “In Search of the Miraculous,” as well as the elimination of the outward expression of negative emotions meant to be paralleled by an inward abolishing of the expression of negative emotions. This is also conceptualized as “working on oneself” or “the Work.” >>20395125 somewhat describes it, even using examples given in ISoTM, but with some of the more sensational mystical ideas G. was transmitting.

The idea is a sort of reverse of how people typically view religious traditions. In the typical view, a certain faith is taken as the end-all be-all of one’s possible spiritual development, dogmas and rites and symbolism crystallized into a church. For Gurdjieff (and others like him), it is the reverse — the religion started with an awakening, a truly awakened person or group of people trying to awaken others. But the core of awakening became degenerated, because humanity at large is “asleep” — so sleeping people took what awakened people did and said, and made cults around it to keep themselves asleep but simply in a somewhat higher-seeming way — now with emotional and intellectual titillation bound up in it which they took to be “religion.” For Gurdjieff, he would not deny that Christian monastics, Buddhist monks, Hindu yogis, and Sufis could and have all been “awake” and used their religious faith and practices as a means of becoming so. But he would have a rather cynical view on how many of these people truly are awake, ensouled. For G., anyone who becomes awake is because they necessarily did “the Work,” worked on themselves, no matter who or where they learned it from — whether from Christ, the Buddha, or the Upanishads. It is not the reverse, that one system or figure is the origin of the Work (which comes from the divine or a higher level of reality and therefore involves opening oneself up to it, as well), rather, it is that any authentically spiritual figure simply did the Work and tried to teach others how to do the Work on themselves.

Of another main purpose of the book — Gurdjieff notes, in his opening to the book, that of its destructive aspect. Here:

>ALL AND EVERYTHING

>Ten Books in Three Series

>FIRST SERIES: Three books under the title of “An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man,” or, “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson”

>SECOND SERIES: Three books under the common title of “Meetings With Remarkable Men”

>THIRD SERIES: Four books under the common title of “Life is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am.’”

>All written according to entirely new principles of logical reasoning and strictly directed towards the solution of the following three cardinal problems.

>FIRST SERIES: To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world.

>SECOND SERIES: To acquaint the reader with the material required for a new creation and to prove the soundness and good quality of it.

>THIRD SERIES: To assist the arising, in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, non-fantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality.

Hence, Gurdjieff’s works might be compared to a spiritual existentialism, with its focus on authenticity — whether what one is doing is genuinely spiritually authentic and developmental; and the same about humanity’s philosophizing, theologizing, scientific endeavors, literature, and artistic creation; and also having a relation to the Zen question in the Tien Tai sect, “Why am I doing what I am doing right now?” — or, by extension, believing, saying, thinking, feeling, or even doing overall with one’s life. Gurdjieff’s conception of the fully-lived authentic life as being the actualization of carrying out one’s conscious duty towards God and humanity is rather traditional and religious, but his own character, his teachings, and his literature is anything but strictly “traditional” in the sense we usually take it — as in, adhering strictly to some sect or one tradition. Although, of Christ, he/Beelzebub notes, that it was Him and His Teachings that Divine Individuals had invested the most faith in, the one believed to be the best of all the religious teachings of humanity, per Beelzebub’s viewpoint, and the one that, if truly carried out in accordance with His original instructions, would truly be the best for humanity.

However, besides being me, Q is also some guy even more enlightened and advanced than me. He’s my own guru who did a similar thing to me that I’m doing right now to some of you a few years back. He is the current Avatar, an especial incarnation of God on Earth. At first, I almost hated Him, God, myself, and the entire universe after the experiences that website caused me to have. It triggered my contact with some aliens who scared the fucking shit out of me. I sent hysterical emails to him begging him to talk with me, comfort me, reassure me, maybe even give me his address so I could find him personally and talk to him. He stayed silent as a stone, and I love him for that. He has a big role to fulfill and doesn’t have time to physically meet every student personally. However, you can make great use of his website, and even talk with him telepathically, as I have at times. The strongest telepathy I had with him occurred when I first found his website.

Someone seriously just had a heart attack and died! This is no laughing matter, unfortunately. They were a good soul and they’ll be at rest now. God must have decided He didn’t want to torture him by keeping him alive as a shattered, broken man who just had their entire worldview overturned.

These are the Avatar’s websites: https://absolutoracle.com/
http://www.world-teacher.org/

He’s actually a composite incarnation of the souls of some of humanity’s wisest figures like Socrates, Shiva, Buddha, Milarepa (a historically famous Tibetan Buddhist), a Sufi from a few hundred years ago whose name I forget, and, amazingly enough, of Adam himself! In fact, ridiculously enough, Adam and Shiva were the same person.

A few of you here reading this will learn to do amazing things in the future, like those done by shamans like Don Juan and others described, again, in the Castaneda books.

Well, what else? Boy, this is a huge doozy which is gonna take a really long time. I may give my brain and your brains a rest for now. I can answer questions too eventually maybe.

Someone is maybe fingering their vagina right now and thinking of me. Maybe it’s the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, who knows.

Wanna hear about the link between Sufism, telepathy, and aliens.

Ah, how sad that you’re trembling and crying in shame right now! Just know I myself personally as a human dislike causing people pain even if it’s to teach them a lesson. My own human soul is hurt by it, but All-Pervading God or my Godself forces me to be stern at times. At these times, I can become horrified and remorseful afterwards and don’t even know why I did what I did. I’m sorry, you’re sorry too, we both forgive and love each other. Hooray.

>>15006523
Did you read it three times?

Beelzebub actually is a book that gets deeper and deeper the more you read it, in my opinion. John G. Bennett, one of Gurdjieff’s closest students, claimed at some point that he had read it 20+ times and that a lot of things which seem like jokes or meaningless fairy tales on first readings reveal deeper and deeper meanings the more you ponder them. I myself can attest to this, too, with interpretations which go way deeper than just being coincidental.