Just want to chase some thoughts I've been having about the Gurdjieff work...
The Medium is the MessageMarshall McLuhan wrote a lot about the 'modal shift' between "tribal" culture and "literary" culture. Electric media, like TV and Radio nd the Internet, represent a return to tribal organizations. In pre-gutenberg times, before the printing press, knowledge was shared through these special tribes. Groups would have a shared, collective understanding of something, and would impart knowledge to newcomers piecemeal. Learning was personal, nonlinear. There are types of knowledge that can be transmitted through this medium, and not as well through the newer linear-literary medium. The study of the spirit is one of these types of knowledge... in the shift towards literary culture, we lost the best methods for transmitting some of these truths.
The Carpet DanceGurdjieff invokes the image of these old-world villages where carpets were made. Carpet making, he explains, is an ancient art. There used to be a lot of symbolism and ceremony in how a carpet was manufactured. In some places, an entire village would come together and make a carpet in one day. The village would be divided into different groups ,each group had a job.. and as they did these jobs, they'd be singing special carpet-making songs and doing special dances. Each motion in the dance had a meaning built up over centuries. All these dances came together to make a carpet. The music and symbolism and dance steps brought everybody's consciousness together, rolled it into a big ball. It was like the village became one entity, united through this task.
That's part of what Gurdjieff means when he's talking about Self Remembering... there is a mind, a self, that is bigger than the ego. We all share it, in some small way. We forget this, because we're distracted by the ego, we think the ego is the whole self. (The Sacred Dances are a way of remembering this)
The Loss of Secret KnowledgeThere was a lot of knowledge lost when we moved from tribal to linear / literary culture. There's a myth of progress, that we just keep advancing over time, and anything going on now is probably more advanced than anything happening in the past. And that's true in a lot of ways, but there are also types of knowledge that can't be encoded well into a linear, textual medium. They were lost. The modern mind thinks "eh, if it was lost, it probably wasn't valuable" - and "scientism" feeds into this as well - the idea that Truth is best captured through our modern empirical framework and cannot come from anywhere else.
But let's look at an example... One topic I keep thinking about is
Automatons. These super cool robots were built in the 18th century by these guilds of craftsman.. The knowledge of how to build these things was secret, just passed between master and apprentice when the apprentice was ready. And because this knowledge was hidden behind a veil of initiation, it was never encoded so that somebody could just read a book about it. When the guild structure collapsed, their secrets vanished. But they were cool secrets! Without computers, these guilds were able to produce these insanely complicated clockwork machines. We still don't know how they did it - and nobody alive today can make one.
So it is with matters of the spirit. People spent their entire lives studying the internal world. There was a rich network of symbolism and techniques which were used to pass on this information. A lot of this was lost. Or the modern version of it is reduced to a silhouette.
Tarot, for example, is basically just for fortune telling today. But it used to be part of a larger spiritual system... the goal of which is to transform the Fool into the World.
Alchemy... people think of alchemy as proto-chemistry.. those are the only parts of alchemy we care about today. But all that material stuff it dealt with (turning lead into gold, etc) was just a metaphor for its ultimate aim, which is to study SPIRITUAL transformation. How DOES a shitty person become a better person? Through these processes like calcination, fermentation, there is something (almost like a chemical process) which happens to the spirit. If you want to turn iron into steel, or you want to focus your life and will into a harder substance, it's a similar process ... you heat it up, you burn out the slag and impurities, you pour it into a form...
ahh I'm on a tangent...
What I'm getting at is --
The Incompleteness Theorem of the SelfThere are lots of ways to understand the self. No single way can reach every truth. Gurdjieff was missing out on modern science. But science is an incomplete picture too. If we insist on understanding the world using empiricism alone, we abandon the network of symbolism and meaning that humanity developed over thousands of years. You know what I mean here? There are truths you can reach through, say, Buddhism, that can't be expressed in terms of empirical findings which could be laid out in a textbook; they're too subjective, personal, internal, symbolic...
I share this only because it's a demon I had to defeat in myself - scientism and the dominance of literary culture. My reactive mind, armed with an experimental psych degree, rejected or dismissed anything that didn't fit into its linear/literary "mode".
That's part of why I'm on this Reality Safari - to explore what else is out there.