/lit/ - Literature

>>20396593
In his terminology, it is also that they were able to find within themselves, bring their consciousness into the “higher thinking center” and “higher emotional center”, which are typically latent and unused in humanity, as opposed to the lower/normal emotions and thoughts/thinking we all indulge in. Indications of experiences of the higher emotional and higher thinking centers, can be found in outwardly unrelated yet apposite works, like Aldous Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy” and “The Doors of Perception,” and William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Ideas like these are not necessarily unfamiliar to the modern New Age dabbler or the mystical seekers of Gurdjieff’s and Ouspensky’s day, often steeped in New Age universalist lore like that of Theosophy (as Ouspensky started out as an explorer of, as well as of Eastern traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism).

However, Gurdjieff, as someone who had traveled much in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East, including Tibet, learned under many religious schools there and steeped himself in much religious lore, tried to take this one step further, beyond merely talking or thinking about such things and to actually realizing it within oneself. His system is thus an encapsulation of what he thought to be objective knowledge derived from these higher emotional center and higher thinking centers and the ways to get into them (which includes stilling, minimizing, properly putting in their place, the automatic reactions of the normal emotional and thinking centers — what the Buddhists conceptualize as “the monkey mind”, always hopping from one thing to another, uncontrolled, scattered, and disparate). As James and Huxley noted, those who had these mystical experiences seemed to be talking about very similar things and insights in very similar ways. This is also of course an insight Gurdjieff obviously had. For him, it was because the higher emotional and higher thinking center give one insight into reality as it really is, objective reality, as well as offering a pathway to communion with God. Hence, it is unsurprising that they indeed sound similar, even when coming from different traditions, places, and ages.

Gurdjieff’s system is no mere loose, wishywashy “just meditate” New Ageism, no, but rather an attempted genuine disciplining and perfection of the human being. In a way, its best insights are self-validating — because you can actually see, it IS better not to be addicted to negative emotions than it is to indulge in them; and you DO feel more awake, more human, more alive, when you are more conscious. For most people, they only truly become actually self-conscious at real moments of their life — near death experiences, being close to death, the death of someone else, or some sudden shock.