04.09.08
Un-erasing personal history
Note to sillykitty comment: SK likes the ‘un-erasing personal history’ idea.
It was my observation (clear from Castaneda’s life itself) that the ‘erasing personal history’ routine is a way to conceal one’s real game.
Students of Sufism (or at least the Idries Shah brand) or Gurdjieff, and now the interloper Gold, et al., fail to see how they fall into the trap, virtually signing their life away in the expectation of finding a spiritual path or school, with people who have never really stated who they were, their personal history leading up to their current activities, who they studied with, and what their real intentions are.
Notice how almost everything to do with Gurdjieff is a lie, disiformation, or a come-on, based on a prospectus easily shown to be pastiche (e.g Gurdjieff’s ridiculous swindle/distortion of Samkhya), which prospectus is a kind of fly-paper to gain the allegiance of people who think they are doing one thing when Gurdjieff is doing something else with those people. What?
Note that when asked (good question!) what his aim was, Gurdjieff refused to answer, making it seem majestically esoteric. That refusal to clarify what he is doing should give anyone with sense pause, but it doesn’t. In fact, Gurdjieff’s ‘aim’ was something dark indeed, and his ’students’ were all expendable in that regard.
Moral: start un-erasing personal history, and demand to know the history of people who play spiritual teacher, and if they can’t satisfy that requirement, stay away.
Most Indian gurus do fulfill this minimum requirement. I am no fan of Rajneesh, but I had to live in the generation in which he lived, hence I looked at his materials. Whatever else is the case, he stated clearly who he was, what he studied, who he studied with, made clear his aims (more or less, in Buddhistic terms), etc…
With Gurdjieff people assume he was helping them reach a spiritual path. Was he? Rajneesh, who got suspicious after praising him (note how even an Enlightened man can be fooled by sufi sharks), noted that not a single exemplar emerged from the Gurdjieff line. Noone learned or developed, or had anything but bogus experiences. Like a thief in the night, Gurdjieff pulled off his thievery and passed on, leaving behind an immense confusion of disinformation.
So we should un-erase, for starters, his personal history. But unfortunately that is now impossible. We can’t really reconstruct a cold trail.
sillykitty said,
April 9, 2008 at 9:28 pm
it is an interesting consideration–erasing personal history–or remembering what one erased–etc. (or, nemo discussing un-erasing personal history but very reticent to discussing his own–teehee.) in 1997 i threw away ten years of personal journals and a short life’s worth of scrapbook photos. it was great! and i have not for one minute regretted it or missed a thing. and a lot of the accumulated baggage i dumped stayed gone. to be so now stuck on events already 6 years past, is sadly ironic. what is best in this stuff is also what becomes worst–until it all gets so jumbled it is impossible to separate the baby from the dirty bath. there is a beautiful baby in there somewhere–i still believe in that.
what about you, dandy?
nemo said,
April 10, 2008 at 6:43 pm
There are obviously different ways of taking Castaneda’s idea here, but it would be good to make it a definite demand that people who usurp the title of ‘guru’ be required to describe their personal trek.