/lit/ - Literature

>>20404957
So a core insight of Gurdjieff is that these latent potentials figures like Christ were trying to awaken in humanity, did not indeed become awakened in humanity at large. The heart-awakening (growth of conscience) and wisdom-awakening (growth of consciousness) did not fully happen to all of humanity, and original teachings of and transmissions of this became gradually diluted due to humanity’s mechanicality and lack of conscience and consciousness.

In “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,” he speaks of Christianity as based on "resplendent love," saying also that among all of the ancient religious teachings none had so "many good regulations for ordinary everyday life." He believed that Christianity is the best of all existing or future religions "if only the teaching of the Divine Jesus Christ were carried out in full conformity with its original." In the aforementioned book, “Views From the Real World,” when asked by someone if Christ was God, Gurdjieff answers, “Yes, but on His own level.” As a young man, he actually grew up steeped in the Greek Orthodox Church and was training for priesthood.

But, as he recounts in his autobiographical “Meetings With Remarkable Men” — in the fascinatingly syncretizing, intercultural locale of Armenia lived and grew up in, there were Yezidis, Muslims, and Christians intermingling, as well as many folk tales and anecdotes about miraculous and supernatural happenings and healings (some of which he even claimed to have witnessed or were known to have happened to people in the town), and he grew a conviction that there had to be some greater sources of miraculous knowledge and wisdom outside of ordinary life but sometimes seeping into it.

So this is where he started his travels — which he actually did and didn’t just bullshit about, as it would seem Blavatsky partially did. He appears to have learned from and studied under Sufi schools, wandering fakirs and dervishes, Buddhists, and in Tibet amongst Tibetan Buddhists. He essentially saw that these people of different cultures and religions had the development of higher heart-awakening and wisdom-awakening, conscience and consciousness, as part of their traditions and which some of them had even developed to an unusually high, miraculous degree. He recounts meeting a wandering fakir who blew his and his traveling companions’ brain circuits when they saw him casually stopping and walking with a bear without any fear whatsoever, then stopping to talk to them and give him his thoughts on religion.

So Gurdjieff’s life-mission, then, became, “How can I bring what I’ve learned and saw to the West, where the role for them is rather unconventional — where I cannot just become a priest, since any established church would view me as ‘heretical’ for what I am trying to teach?” Hence, this is why Gurdjieff became an infamous “cult-leader”, with all the connotations and sometimes imperfections and scandals that implies.