When I first wrote this piece in 2005 it was an attempt to rid myself once and for all from the nightmare parts of Alex Horn's group, not the good I got out of it. Of course I got good out of it. I wrote using an abrasive taunting form, because it was what worked for me at the time. And, publishing it to the net, then receiving dozens of emails from people who agreed, and some from those who did not agree, I began to see more of what I did get from Horn, and it softened my former outlook a little. At first I wrote that Alex was not a "real" Gurdjieff teacher. Actually, upon much reflection, I came to realize he was indeed a "real" teacher. And a brutal one, like G himself. Whatever "real" means, sanctioned, recognized, etc., for me he sure was. The brutality that surrounded him, as mostly reflected toward "us" by Alexs' "special students" was appalling. I needed to heal. I wrote the piece below as an over-written rant, a crap fountain to simply get it out of my system, (if possible) certain doubts and ideas haunting my life. They no longer do. It worked for me. Therefore, I have gone over this article recently and tried to convey some of the good as well as the bad. It's still abrasive in the style I "chose" when first writing it. However, I now recognize that everyone has a unique experience with the Work and cut some slack for that. I cut no slack for abuse of students, as counter productive, injurious, and at times evil in action. I have also tried to take out some of the overwritten crap, attempts to be "too" funny. Humor is the weapon of choice for me. Sometimes I get carried away with it, and it turns on me, then later, do not like the over-the-top excess. Still, I did not want to ruin the mess, or should I say, take away the original intent and flavor. Just tighten it, and take out the obsessive need to make bad jokes. There are still plenty of bad jokes here, but I have trimmed the worst.

A FOURTH WAY STANDUP

Gurdjieff is psychic crack cocaine for eggheads.

People who would never suck a glass pipe in a million years.

Upscale seeker-something's; subscribers to Intellectual Lifestyle Magazine, or they meet an off-lander "G" sharing a cab in the rain, or an old friend calls and they click-in and never click-out, even after they leave or get thrown out. 

First hit.

Z'it.

Z'ven free.

Self-Remembering.

In the vernacular: Split Attention.

For instance: WATCHING myself make little notes for writing this, while watching: Gone With The Wind, and not getting lost in Scarlet O'Hara's perkies, yes, just because I'm gay doesn't mean I don't appreciate a great rack.  BEING, in the Roxie-retro, observing O'Hara's honey pots, while simultaneously observing my own thoughts, and posture, that is, my own hairy Norwegian hooters,  passing thoughts, passing popcorn shots, passing gassings, gobbling rational Raisinettes, SPECIFICALLY: my predicament in time and space, but especially: tits.

Working toward experiences when intellect, emotion, and body are balanced, even for a moment --- bucking the tide of insidious sleep,  in the quest of, "Esoteric Christ Sun Absolute," feeding, strengthening: "essence" through "being Work" whatever the heck that might be. 

So, I got some good things out of it I still use today. Thank you. I also got hammered bad, along with a lot of others, and I'm still deciding if what I got was worth what I paid. That's all. There was a lot of student abuse. A lot, both by the teacher, and students going after each other. Come on, it's time to rip a new asshole in the body of so called: "Esoteric Christianity" and shine a six-cell Maglite light up Beelzebub's boiling butt.

There are things you ought know before SCUBA diving with the Creature From The Black Saloon. G Work is transformation through eccentric (esoteric) ideas you would have rejected one hour earlier. Anything that has the effect of "changing," an entire worldview in one hour, beware. Study all maps. I didn't, and fell into a manhole. I survived with injuries; the telephone guy I landed on however, died of a broken neck. Six weeks later his pregnant wife died of a broken heart. The only good news, the baby survived. The bad: the kid was raised by Gurdjieffian child neglectors. It's true: my observation and that of dozens of others is this: not insignificent numbers of Gurdjieffians consider children fairly worthless until after they grow up, therefore ignore them using situational sliding scales from say, mildly creepy to out right odiferous.

Indeed, since releasing this four and a half years ago, I have recieved dozens of emails from grown kids raised in G. They tell me they did not  see sex in public, but they were terribly negelected, one of the most horrible ways adults treat children. One that is not recognized nearly enough, yet truly, one of the  top cruelest forms, right in there with verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

Just reading "G" can release: Endorphilect, psychically identical to to pharmaceutical grade morphine.

An occult feast upheld by books, for edifying the "Sly Man's Way," of rousing AWAKE through: Self-Remembering with the right teacher and Group. Shop around carefully. That's my advice. There must be some good teachers out there who don't want to "sheer your wool" and become millionaires at their students' expense. There must be some that don't want your ranch.

When you first hear the Work is called the "Sly Man's Way," unless you are Clem Kadiddlehopper ripping-off a can of pork and beans in Safeway, or the Long Island Lolita shooting Mary Buttafucco in the jaw, naturally, you recoil like Fisher's pistol. Let me put it this way: if you stay, and later down the road, find yourself acting as if you've been ear-tagged by the, "Inner Circle Of Humanity," for a little "Objective hoodwinking," such as stealing a bottle of Dom Perion from your boss, because after all, your boss lives at best, in the "Subjective" Good Householder Exoteric Circle of Outer Darkness and babbling homo--hobo's like me, that is, where fools die in ditches like dogs ...  (STOP!) if you wish to shove your face into The Devil's rectum, at least kiss your medula oblongata first, and forget, "... we'll meet again in Springtime ..." anytime soon.

As Ouspensky (direct line) Gurdjieff Teacher, Mr. Robert S. deRopp, warned me on my first morning with Alex Horn: "If you sup with the Devil have a long spoon ... "

I should have listened. Still, in retrospect, I did get  good out of Alex's wild ride. For one thing, sailing the Pacific from Hawaii to San Francisco on the 161' Goodwill, one of the world's great yachts. Calling for volunteers for the crew, Alex said anyone owing money to "the Work" (him) could not go.

Busted.

Man, I wanted this trip more than anything I had ever longed for in my short nasty life. Nancy, my Group girlfriend at the time, looked me in the eye and said, "Alex says rules are meant to be broken David". A direct challenge. I sailed. And left the Work too, owing Alex. Ha! That's the only way to leave a Magus. They hate your guts if you pay them before you boogie. Oh, they'll take the bucks. Even though my experiences on the high seas were nothing less than lordly, after what happened in my life, plus lives of some of my best friends after we left the Group, I could have done without it. Let me say this. I chose to join up. It took two friends to convince me. I did not want to join. I take full responsibility for eventually "tagging along" and joining. No excuses. I may sound like I'm "blaming" others for my choice. I am not. I am pissed off at some of the outrageous things I witnessed. I got myself in, not my friends, and I got myself out.

The Gurdjieff Work is a Magus Licensing "School" having to do with Lucifer, not  Christ, esoteric or not. Gurdjieff said the Fourth Way was against God. I'm not Christian, still, this seems ridiculous.

SLY: that fine homosapian attribute most often endured on the face of some oleaginous SUV pusher nurturing a nose longer than a prize bull pizzel. Both Teachers and students handle this permission in a variety of ways: sometimes, ah,  rather badly.

Hitler said: "The best liar is the best magician".

I never thought I would say, "Thank you Herr Shickelgruber". I must though, for unlike Gurdjieff, at least Mr. Benzedrine-fatty-thighs put it succinctly. The way of relying on yourself, and yourself alone, echoing Crowley's: "Do As Thou Wilt Is The Whole Of The Law". You Work with a "Teacher," and Group, however you are your own walking forensics and bio-tech lab. The Teacher is there to smack your ass awake. Beware Teachers who smack with swords. Ron Russell witnessed Robert deRopp running a student out of his ashram door, then down Sonoma Mountain Road, "smacking" away with a Samurai sword and barely missing.

Being a Gurdjieff student comes with the "right" to steal, cheat, fool, lie. Believe me, this was freakin' fun. Many Gurdjieffians would highly disagree with me, because they are not like that in their New Hampshire Group or whatever, and they never terrify students into staying by threatening to chuck them into a ditch. I'm not writing about them.

Gurjieff was a hurricane force humiliating SOB. Stories abound of his Talmud temper: THUS, handing-off Full License to later Klingon Kommandos and their progeny.

Face it, judging Objective / Subjective in the world, was like getting a brand new amoral trampoline of my very own.

As if my amorality wasn't bad enough already.

Let's hear it for Gerald McBoing-Boing.

Objective Eukanuba's: GOOD! Subjective sheep: baaaad. 

Sheep are to be fleeced, period. Gurdjieff taught that.

Those billions of dying dogs so horrendous they pee their used armagnac on the davenport, then sleep on it. Puppies so unConscious I get to pick their purses and laugh about it later with my Objective friends. Good evening, I'm Riddick. I will be your waiter tonight. Welcome to Café Crematoria de la Paix.

We always hear about Monsieur's enormous compassion; that G took care of a lot of people financially. This is true no doubt. Of course, he used student money for it, plus, the fortunate were after all: his Prieuré family members, countless illegitimate kids, and immigrant friends.

When it came to G's view of the world however, absolute zero. There is no compassion in this Guote:

"One may say that evil does not exist for Subjective man at all, that there exist only different conceptions of good. Nobody ever does anything deliberately in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil. Everybody acts in the interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands it in a different way. Consequently men drown, slay, and kill one another in the interests of good".

Gurdjirrhea.

Katmandu-du.

Gurdjieff notion: all hominoids are criminals. 

Hey, make it work for you.

Which is fine if you want to be a Magus, however, most people do not, even when they think they do, and this can lead to psychotic breaks, which are rather nasty for intellectuals considering their brain is their most effective Nautilus machine.

Externally Consider if you will: "Night Stalker," Richard Ramirez' baphomet-scrawled hand held up in court. The same hand that murdered women after raping and torturing them (AND) making them recite, "I love Satan" before slicing them up and writing on the wall with their blood. Gurdjieff would say Ramirez was killing for personal "right," reasons, therefore another Subjective tragedy, not evil.

Bullshit. Ramirez wasn't having his own "conception of good" at all.

Go back and read the highlighted line again.

The line is a G-key into you.

It is not a you-key into G.

Gurdjief is not giving you some "ancient" Victoria's Secret. Maestro is magnetizing your moral compass. And this is a power key, opening your wallet, ranch, and ALL of your time. Or, it can be, and often enough has been exactly that. 

A Magus never lets anyone near their inner real estate, only allows them to Work on the farm they just gave them. Planting, digging sewer lines, cleaning the pool. Notice where the line is placed in the quote. Read the quote again and see how easily it slips between your common sense filters. It is not truth with a capital t, yet one tends to buy it. Especially those thirsting for something real  for whom it can stand taller than The Philosopher's Bone.

Don't drop your Dove in the shower.

In slight-of-hand card magic it's called: forcing. There are classic "forces". I saw Penn and Teller do a great bit on card forcing once, explaining exactly what a card force is while they were actually doing card forces, and people took the forced card every single time anyway, convinced they were choosing randomly.

Blavatsky was infamous for using slight of hand. Gurdjieff too, preforming tricks on stage.

That Gurdjieff was an accomplished hypnotist --- as are Penn and Teller, as is every magician, stage or mage --- is not only standard knowledge in Gisney Land, it is honored by many, even when they suspect, as if hypnosis used by a Lucifer Magus is a good thing for anyone who wanders in. Folks, people. We are told Gurdjieff helped people through hypnosis with alcoholism. Great. Too bad he didn't use it on himself. Mother's Against Drunk Drivers would not have had to award him a posthumous plaque made from what's left of the tree he ran into. Oh, that's right, G staged his car crash to shock his students. 

Stop!

Watch Christian, "Magus": BENNY "Brother Justin," HINN use standard stage hypnosis healing people who go home and send him a big check, then choke to death of throat cancer.

The highlighted line is a hypno-move into you, as dangerous as getting stabbed in the chest. If you don't give a crap what happens to your psyche, and you like to do terrible things to yourself, because you are a riddled with guilt, and you need to be punished for your secrets because no one in society knows about them, therefore, the Puritan in you, MUST do it, you'll love Gurdjieff because he'll squeeze every last blackhead out your face with a jackhammer comadone.

Evil is ACTION.

Not THOUGHT. 

A truth so blatant the Roto-Rooter guy  gets it.

Rape is evil. You can say a rapist commits every crime in the "interest of their own good," from their own, "understanding," still, their action is evil. If you think the "Night Stalker," was following "his own conception of GOOD," therefore his action was not really evil, you are indeed the idiot G declared you to be. 

Society has always needed a word to designate action beyond the pale. 

Evil is it.  Eight year old kids know it. Ah, six year olds too. It's Common Sense, THE ancient repository of Esoteric Truth flushed during Philosophy 101. Intellectuals think too much. And they know it too, which is why Orage dug a hole to Hell, then filled it in again for G. To be fair, the "job" did give Orage a body to live in plus six-pac abs: a plus there. Digging dirt did get Orage out of his poet-head into sweat and extreme pain. Perhaps pain is after all,  the only way we ever heal and grow, really. Benny Hinn should haul off and sock every pilgrim in the jaw. It might work better. Healing through intentional pain is a Native American right of passage, thousands of years old.  And, rape is still frickin' evil.

Gurdjieff professed this in the 20's, 30's & 40's. We thank the man for his early observations, held however to 2009, we evidently know more about evil than he did. We need no ancient Sarmoung scroll to know evil is action, not thinking, therefore, fairly easy to Grok in almost every case.

Gurdjieff teaches: "Subjective man" cannot DO.

Please.

Two longtime neighbors in New Orleans, got into an argument over the Ten Commandments. One went home, and instead of getting his Bible and checking the passage, grabbed his .38, then went back and shot the 6th Commadant straight through his neighbor's heart as he sat rocking on his front porch thinking, "... jeeze, I sure hope Barney moves to Florida soon".

Barney DID the guy okay.

He was wrong about the Bible too.

Bummer day.

Action. If the man pulled the trigger during a schiz-isode, thinking he was killing Quasimodo, that is not evil, that is mental illness and he goes to the lock ward. There are reasons to shoot, i.e., some creep driving off with your kid. They are not always easy to sort out, but in the Objective sense, they represent Justice, a fine Lady indeed; one that Gurdjieffians reject as the projection of Subjective humanity.

Shooting your neighbor is usually evil. My dog knows that. The last time she shot another dog over scripture, she crawled away ashamed of her own doing, and did a doo doo on the floor.

The problem G's have with Common Sense, is they do not like common folks, externally considering them as mechnical meat-machine robots, rather than simply: being them, as they are. They get used to using them. There's a separation, subtle at times, blatant at others. G's profess being in the midst of the County Fair, NOT of it. G-folk, dislike "the herd" as much as eco-protesters squirm around rednecks. We get that way, because we think we are a little more awake than others. They are wriggling pupae. We may not be butterflies yet, but least we have brilliant cocoons. 

Working toward "Conscious," in the midst of the marketplace breeds a form of G License called: "Not Identifying," AKA: one giant rover-come-over step "out of THEM," as if "they" are the enemy, or at least suffer mental and emotional TB.

"Not Identifying," is like the movie COLLATERAL, when Tom Cruise's character says, "No, I didn't kill him, the bullets and the fall killed him".

It just so happens that by, "Not-Identifying," many G's end up: Oh --- So Special.

Dying dogs like me: Oh ---  So Not Special.

That is, until their Subjective brownstone is on fire and they have to call some sheep at 9-1-1, then endure all those sleeping firemen rushing to save their lives and put out the blaze they started with an unobserved candle.

When I joined Alex Horn's Group, on the morning of the first day, we Gurpies walked around nude on the ranch wearing "Special Asshole" signs hanging around our necks.

The original circle of around twenty five that formed around Alex started in my friend Ron Russell's living room, and contained other friends as well, almost all from the Sonoma, California area. In the beginning they had a meeting with Alex where "they" decided to go out and get good jobs to pay the Work i.e., Alex. So they did, then reGrouped in a few months, and invited their friends to join. Lucky me.

And since they already felt "Oh --- SO Special," they devised "Special Asshole," signs as a way of communicating to us, how "Oh --- so NOT special," we were. In retrospect, I was privileged to have a unique view of how a Magician forms a Group of loyal supporters almost over night: MAGNETIC CENTER, good jobs, money, money, money, feasting, wine, dancing, stories, plays, rituals, plus a "system of practice," that can never be mastered.

Sleeping people are to be charmed and manipulated any way a Gurdjieffian sees fit when it constitutes part of what is called: accomplishing WORK AIM. Gurdjieff was a spy. A real one. His Chief Feature: Intrigue. And spying requires sly lying. And sly liars are sociopathic in the sense of not feeling bad about what they "do". 

The notion: that when one sets out to truly "DO" something intentionally as a Work AIM, Mother Nature RESISTS their effort. A vine growing in rock makes the finest wine they tell you, because it has to Work so hard. The making of any Hollywood movie from, bad to best, is met with thousands of resistance's. It's all about people who believe in something so strongly, they push hard, then harder, and harder, for years, from script to screen, "by any means necessary".

Against resistance, G's use: force, slipping around it, digging under, becoming invisible, hiring a bulldozer to finish the job, sneaking into a farmer's field and stealing a sheep to sacrifice,  stealing hubcaps, plus a thousand others, excepted: if one is sly enough to get away with them, while accomplishing a Work AIM. In fact, NOT making a stated Work Aim is nothing less than: Ganathema, creating much crime in the name of knowing and practicing ancient nitty-gritty.

A woman in New York, the wife of a recent G abductee, called to tell me her husband was keeping books in a special drawer, each bookcover covered with brown paper. She was told never to look in the drawer. She said her husband, a waiter in a fine restaurant was gone a lot now. One night he came home with a stolen bottle of Dom Perinon, for which he was fired the next day. He's only been in the Work for a couple of months. Gee, I wonder where he got that idea. She said he had never stolen anything in his life before.

CHAIN OF COMMAND

Gurdjieff took an ETERNAL Sacred Oath (his words) to keep the Sarmoung Brotherhood secret, yet published his findings anyway. If you can't find the humor in that, you're hopeless. Parable or not, he even gave away the Sarmoung name ... well, of course he coded it, and that's not the real Sarmoung name, you know, which is: Gnumoras - pronounced:  (ga-new-mor-as).

And let me say this: Gnumoras is not one bit funny.

If you ask, "why would George do that?," at the wrong meeting, you might just get a mambo dance on your eardrums from a grapa guzzling witch uglier than one of those winged monkey's in The Wizard of Oz.

Dang good question too.

And don't tell me G did it for suffering humanity. The last time a Magus did anything for suffering humanity was when David Bowie helped a new musician without stealing his songs and making him crawl around the floor squeaking like a rusty hinge.

Face it. Gurdjieff's Work was debased by the man himself, until nowadays, every NET speck is there for all to see.

hey, it's ... one ... two ... three ...
Kali Yuga time!

Think of it.

The entire Ancient Order of Gnumoras: OUTED.

It's fairly funny.

Come on, admit it.

In the understatement of 2004 Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld testifying under oath before both the Congress, later, the House, concerning the Abu Ghraib prison Torquemada photos: (I paraphrase) "we're still learning, for instance, about operating in the DIGITAL age ...".

No e-shit.

Can you honestly look me in the I's and tell me Donald's "Rummy" isn't worth at least half a Rumi?

Not funny?

You can't  go to a proctologist today, without seeing a poster for the: "Sacred Gurdjieff Movements," in the waiting room, as if, "Hey, everybody gets to do it now, even Bill and Hillary".

Believe me, here comes Grobics. I mean, Richard Simmons, "Sweatin' To The Harmonium". Oops, we already have that in the Sacred Dances.  My critics say I should have done the "movements". They may be right.

So, how about a moving company: "Let George Do It".

Hey, it's White Glower Day at Macy's!

Only Bla-bla-vatasky MASS produced more taboo-cheese than Mr. Carpet Carney. Blavatsky wrote in, Secret Doctrines, "Lucifer represents life, thought, progress, civilization, liberty, independence. Lucifer is the Logos, the Serpent, the Savior". That could be, let's just come out and admit it. 

Gurdjieff certainly never equivocated like Madame Egg McMuffin. When speaking of his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, G told students: "There is something sinister here".

The Kissing Bandit published. And not one Gurpie on earth today can explain why he salad-shot his ideas over masses of meat-droids, except money. Gurdjieff kept running out of boodle because he spent every bulging box his students handed over, almost the same day, no matter how much it was, often on feasting. G partied like an ancient Roman.

The single tired explanation for every abuse he perpetrated is: teaching by confounding, yet, "Consciously administered wake-ups". Every nasty thing Gurdjieff ever did is excused by followers, with the same logic art critics use when Postmodernists exhibit blank canvas'.

If Gurdjieff had held his mud --- initiated students only --- the Work would be entirely different today and I wouldn't be writing this because I wouldn't know about it. Instead, G recruited porridge-buzzards and mustashe-ladies with money.  If Bon Bon Pockets had held his sacred secrets, all would be different.

G-ee, why tell us then.

Look, some of it helped me, the rest is maggot pie ala-mode. Grab the maraschino and run like hell.

One of my best friends, a dear, sweet, caring, kind and generous fellow named Ken Schooner; master of antique furniture refinishing --- having studied for years with a famous refinisher in his 80's --- joined Alex Horn's Group with me. After the Work, for the remainder of his life, no matter what he tried, Ken's psyche slowly unraveled over decades, until he went mad and cut a friend's throat with a linoleum knife, simply because the man asked him to turn down his stereo. The victim barely survived the attack. After a considerable jail sentence, my friend joined a Greek Orthodox church and spent hours collecting grasshoppers in jars. On my last visit, Ken's favorite grasshopper, George, helped him write a poem for me. A really bad Grasshopper Gurdjieff poem. Ken died self-medicating. It broke my heart.

Another friend, Larry Treadwell, joined with Ken and me. And like Ken, Larry was just fine before he joined. My friend was beaten, scorned, and humiliated until he left in terrible pain that took over a decade to overcome. In fact, he was so well balanced, his G-muggers couldn't "break" him no matter how hard they tried. Still, after he walked, Larry plummeted into depression and had to crawl out of Hell with no Virgil.

In 1967, after I left in disgust, fear, humiliation, depression and anger, I too went crazy. To be fair, I was crazy when I joined. My friends were not. I was. Alex seemed to like me for some reason, never once ripping into me during my year and three months. Perhaps, because I was crazy in a way he enjoyed. I'll never know. The other students however, smashed me into a bloody pulp. Once out, I was like Black Beard, a violent Alex pirate, hurting people right and left everywhere I went. I might have been crazy before the Group, I was not violent. It took decades and a lot of psychiatrists to even begin to deprogram. Yea, right. Nobody leaves. I'm writing this thirty five years later.

Another friend, Larry Wiener, an artist with few hang-ups, joined Alex Horn, with his wife Mary. Before joining, Ken Schooner, Larry Treadwell, and myself were "best-beatnik's" at their marriage performed by Suzuki Roshi in the Zen Temple in San Francisco. After Gurdjieff they went through a divorce that made the movie, "War Of The Roses," look like a Beatrice Potter story. Larry fell so far he ended up homeless. In the 90's I felt so bad about it, I allowed him to stay in his van behind my studio. What started as a "few weeks," ended seven (very) long years later, like the final show of a bad sitcom. With the help of the San Rafael police, I finally forced Larry to move, after all of my neighbors in the industrial park hated his guts, and mine, and I caught him messing with my truck one day during one of his less than enviable psych-outs. To my best knowledge, Larry has recovered some, and is finally doing better.

My fine friend Mike Kelly worked the door with me at Big Al's nightclub in North Beach for years. After he left the Group Mike tumbled into a hellish limbo. At 66, he drives cab in San Francisco, where big city stress is killing him in cruel increments more brutal than I can bear. He hates anything having to do with Gurdjieff. Mike recently passed away in poverty so severe his apartment was like a blackhole.

Mike Benzon, another dear friend, left the Group, then joined another Group founded by followers of Alex in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Decades later, he hates Groups, yet remains obsessed with G ideas. Cant live with or without 'um.

And my Group-damaged friends constitute only a few of the people I witnessed have troubles after they left. I know of one couple hurt so badly they will  never speak of it, or what happened to their children in G, 35 years later. Understand one thing clearly. A Magus does not care about the trail of wreckage they leave behind them, period. Caring is not in their Job Description. Subjective people are things: chairs, dog houses, potential ranches. So make it about you, for yourself only. Do NOT drag your friends and family into a Magus School because you think it's cool, and might help them. Just go screw yourself up, and you may end up with self-respect again years after you leave. It's hard to think I brought people in that didn't deserve the abuse. Truly, you will be more than happy to have left your friends and family out of it.

It is written that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky died transcendental deaths at the level of Socrates. That both Teachers surely live on, in self-created bodies made of psychic-aerosoled hydrogen's on their way to the: "Sun Absolute". Whew. Because in his William Wegman memento mori, G sure looks like a dead rottweiler to me.

Nowadays people are channeling Gurdjieff & Ouspensky night and day. Good. I hope their groveling gurgles drive the two Masters out of their Kesdjan shorts I mean, giving advice on whether to dump the Econoline for a Mercury Saber, or  Waldorf vs. Charter must be worse than counting cracks. 

A Magus' Work is never done 
They Work and Work from sun to sun 
And even after they are dead 
They'll come and squeeze your tits in bed

In Horn's Group, no cameras allowed! Hey, it's time wires are worn into Gurdjieff Groups to expose them on national television. Just kidding. Well, quite easy actually, and bound to happen sooner or later. All one need do is tell the "screener" they are disappointed in life, feel there must be more, that they read "Miraculous," and "Meetings," and have never been in a Group before, and take no psychiatric meds, especially, how many piles of pesos they rake in every year from their cash taco chain. This can be coached by any number of apostates. Hey, even Gurdjieff's Ghost will help. He loves this shit. He told me the last time we channeled together, last night actually. Let's start with that Ferrigamo clicker Horn dropped like Rosemary's afterbirth on Red Mountain in Sonoma.

I was there. Many were. I was at the beginning for a year and three months. Mr. Appallo came along later and we don't remember him, which he, in proper Magus style, offers as his heftiest sly-PLUS, in that he was so hip he SUPER-OBSERVED and became a Number Jive Man just by snapping his three brains together. And to think, Alex only picked up him up hitchhiking. Cool. My hair is off to his Machiavellian move in twisting Alex's Minotaur horns into Unicorn spike. He sure missed out on the good part though. I'm telling you, we danced around fires naked and sacrificed a sheep for Passover. A sheep we'd rustled in the middle of the night from some Subjective farmer's field. Ah, those were the days.

Gurdjieffian Magus: sly, astute, deep, smooth, foxy, guileful, slippery, crafty, cunning, artful, insidious, vulpine, subtle, tricky, wily, genuinely disingenuous, calculating, unfrank, gifted, subdolous, designing, scheming, dangerous, cagy, devious, shady, shifty, shitty, erotic, slick, decisive, covert, furtive, secretive, stealthy, humorous, riveting, magnetic, underhanded, ruthless, predatory, dishonest, skilled, devising, contriving, quick, silky, haunting, silver tongued, Classics trained, sensate, animalistic, hypnotic, brutal, quote-cribbing, socio-separatist, profane.

Gurdjieff Work is not Sai Baba sprinkling thumb-tip ashes like an twelve year old magician. Hum,  Baba likes those too we hear.

In all Groups there is no doubt, an inner circle that forms, sometimes hidden from the rest of the Group. Well as Hightower says, the farther up the pole the monkey goes, the more we see his ugly side. It's always the four, or nine, or some such "natural" elite that forms via intellectual affinity and crotch kissing. The highest usually stays with the Teacher when it all goes to crap. We had one of those. Mike Hilsenrad. Others form their own Groups. The entire worldwide Gurdjieff community is not a community in the usual sense. Reading the same books is all some Groups share. They are much more like "cells" that do not know of each other. Some are well known via internet advertising for students. 

Activities and offshoots abound: octave schmoctaves, the enema-gram raging through Catholic basements and bowels, not to mention other mooovements. And hey, I like the octave model and still  use it.

I mean, tables of higher hydrogen's, hot tubs of coffee, barrels of red & white --- low paperbacks, medium paperbacks, high hard-bounds --- Pall Malls, juicy G-ossip, plus: all those SLY bobble-clerks in Field's Bookstore on Polk Street in San Francisco, ringing up each Gurchase, then handing it over with both hands as if worth, ever so much more, than the blood you just dripped on their mystic-meat counter for the most impressive, intriguing, air-Guitar instruction booklets you will never figure out. I washed one hell of a lot of windows to stock my G shelf.

At least the resale value on clean returns is good, unless your infantile Hell Witch makes you glue construction paper over the covers like some kindergarten kid. The "Commentaries" alone need cinderblock bookends and a whole roll of paper. That's a lot of gluing, but it's important. You never want your  Subjective spouse  to see your sacred bullshit. Because when they do, they often advise that it seems to them, the silliest crap anybody ever heard of. Plus, they can't believe you are giving away the family savings for it. Proof, of course, you'll need to dump them pretty quick. Oh well. Waking up is a bitch.

A famous G-iggled story concerns G selling, "American canaries," that were actually sparrows dyed yellow, in a mysterious marketplace in the exotic East. Gudents take this as a lesson in SLY. Shangri-La ain't mysterious no mo. You can explore it on your home computer now, from a camera in space. 

Gurdjieffians "believe": the world is one vast criminal enterprise ... all human beings are criminals ... "even us" ... shocking ... and only after we practice Intentional Suffering, finally groking just what little sociopathic shitheels we actually are, only then, will our three brains finally get together and be worth a bucket of warm spit, well Chardonnay, and since our realization is of the Universal sort, it's objective, with a big o.

At an Alex Horn meeting once, a student asked, "Who is the Devil?" Alex said, "A dwarf who wears stripped trousers and uses snuff". We all laughed. It was a cult thing. Sounded right to me.

Canary Code: We award ourselves official  Human Hunting Licenses from the Gnuomras Bait Shop, to fascinate the  Swami-boy cobras out of your California baskets. And oh yea, now that I am remembering myself again, my next moves I make involve your brilliant fiancé. God, she's pretty, and all mine sucker.

I remember when only lunch was naked. Because if we aren't crazy before we get into it, after, with a rewired brain folks cannot imagine just how naked one's lunch actually looks; just how psyched-out they might  get, especially after G-oons body-block them down the stairs --- or they "leave," like nearly all eventually DO, with liberal exceptions for the intellectually challanged. Unless, that is, you become yet another art collecting brain-stem in penny loafers and become a Teacher, instructing young men how to chew their naked dinners, one hundred times each bite, before swallowing.

Another Guote: 

"A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror". 

No cigar really, as Night of the Lving Dead comes as little surprise anymore. It worked back then.

"BOO!" The quote is a stroke of Magus fear used on students to keep them hooked, attached, and handing over buckets of bucks.  A Magus is a painter, using people instead of oils.

This Works as a psychic rarefier. Students latch on to it's obverse, since they at least are trying to wake-up, and hearing it reinforces their desire for: IN Group. I don't care if it's Knights of Pythias, the Elks, or the Lion's Club ... folks are social animals and love grouping.

NOTE: Some tribes are good. If there are any Gurdjieffians out there who don't know this, the Lion's Club raises funds that have helped hundreds of thousands of people keep their eyesight. A gifted visual artist friend of mine named Walter deSanti was beaten on the street by thugs causing his retinas to be detached, ending his career. The Lion's Club paid every cent of Walter's eye surgery with no expectation of reimbursement. The bill was huge. As Gurdjieffians, since you can't be bothered with Subjective dead people, I just thought, that in case one of you Special Assholes ever has a retina detachment during one of your bogus Group fist fights, and you don't like being blind, you might USE the Lion's Club if you want to save some scratch. Sheep are for fleecing.

I honor most of all, those who stood up and left right in front of us. They were hooted and jeered. Some were beaten with fists and thrown down stairwells. 

One day on a ranch I was actually  goaded into pretending to butt-hump the man I found most "attractive," a man to this day I sympathize with, not, because Marty R. bent over and took it like a repressed bonobo, but  because not one of us hollered, ENOUGH!

Well, except me.

"I" left, just not in front of the Group. I didn't want another fight. I slithered.

And yes, I know, I should have finished digging that septic tank for Alex. Read it and weep.
People actually followed me and pushed notes under my door. I wanted to spray them with Raid. I moved. I had a psychotic break. Got married. Had another psychotic break. Got divorced ... had another psychotic break, died, and was reborn as a name painter. What the hell else could I do.

My friend Mike Benzon left nearing the end, when the remaining men decided the only indecent thing to do was have a series of blunt force trauma encounters among themselves. And that's how Alex Horn's original Gurdjieff Group "ended" folks. In a series of hardcore fist fights over weeks of elimination bouts; winners IN --- losers OUT.

Teachers hate the I.R.S. more than pimps, counterfeiters, and safecrackers put together. They never pay taxes on the cash they rake in, and the I.R.S. is missing out on millions. It's the Number One reason for Gurdjieffian secrecy. Although, they are Objective thieves remember, which makes it okay for them. It's a cash business. Gurdjieff ain't no religion. Don't forget to Self-Remember that. It's a School. There are tests.

G said men and women are: "Towers of Babble," (no kidding) consisting of hundreds of separate "I's" at odds with each other, (warning: proceed here with caution ... further absorption of this idea might  well "I"-bomb your amygula with a good deal more of a Gnuckle sandwich than you currently think possible. In other words, there is an ancient reason why breaking a mirror brings seven years bad luck. 

Each "I" vying for the stage of the so-called, "false personality," to the egregious suffering of the "essence," whatever that might be. That these "I's" come and go, each misrepresenting itself as YOU. Hundreds of them.

Divide and conquer.

Gurdjieff convinced folks they were actually jillions of, "I's," & proto-selves. Some ex-G's handle it okay. I know them too. Martin Van Der Kamp for one. He loves it, even becoming an appreciator of G's harmonium playing: for me, music to grout by.

Guzak.

Any so-called awakening that shatters minds like mirrors is best left to the Magus and the Shaman. And you are not a Magus or a Shaman even if you live in Mill Valley. Standing before a  Magus often shrivels ones spleen to a crispy bacon strip.

A Magus uses divide and conquer as the shortest route to total freedom (money, sex, power, Oriental carpets, crumpets, strumpets) for them. After you cross their bridge they close shop and take off in the other direction like the carpetbaggers in Mark Twain.

Never give up your common sense, intuition, and reason for anyone else's "truth". Since you are required to make your own truth in the Work anyway, why not actually do that instead of projecting onto a Teacher who is half amazing, half psychic vampire. At least learn to follow your common sense, that still small voice that says, "this is crap ... he's in it for the money and sex".

Avoid rules that are not self-imposed.

If you cannot ask questions without being shot down, you're up to your neck in sucking sand and Swamp Thing is resting on the bank watching.

Any Gurdjieff idea that cannot be transferred orally, in a circle of quiet discourse with later mentation, using simple, gentle shock exercises and self-observation is bs. 

There are hundreds of Gurdjieffians who upon reading this (which is funny, since most won't) would surely declare that I was never in the REAL Work, because I studied under Alex Horn, and of course, they declare him, NOT a real Teacher. Bullshit. They're full of it. I've thought about it and changed my mind. Actually, the late Alex Horn was more of a Gurdjieffian in one earlobe than all of them put together which is why they hated him. Alex was a force of nature. Gurdjieff was a force of nature. And nature is kinky. Most critics never met or Worked with Alex, therefore, with no direct experience are violating their own G laws. There is not one Gurdjieffian in the world today who could motor their skiff into Horn's harbor and not get Rob Zombied, and probably learn a lot. Those who think Alex was not a true Gurdjieffian, simply have not taken a freezing look at who G's actually are. Sometimes violent, manipulating, mystic motherfuckers who don't give a turd about anything except their personal AWAKENING fueled by student money. You can say a lot of things about Alex Horn, and I do, but the man was not asleep. Credit goes where credit's due.

Alex was a lightning rod. When you hang with an iconoclast, you'll get burned. I'm just another lunch-gut who got hit, and, unless Fool's Fate placed me there at the beginning of Horn's ripping romp, for some reasons I do not yet understand, I should not have been there at all. At the time, I needed AA, not to mention serious psychiatric integration, not an atomic "I"-bomb.

I have nothing against anyone who takes any self absorbed path except suicide bombers, after all, I am a life long painter, and if painter's are not self-absorbed, who is.

Gurdjieff is rules and laws. Rules ABOUT laws. In my experience, rules do not awaken. What wakes me up is waking the phuque up. Nothing else. Some some simple exercises. 

Rules are Military School.

Rules against personal expression.

Rules against being black. Yes, some Groups discriminate.

Rules against students meeting outside meetings.

Rules of reporting everything via telephone to some piss-elegant egomaniac you do not know: who cannot possibly know you. 

Rules that insist you wear certain clothing and chew every bite of food with "Conscious intention".

Rules about your mouth, as in: you have two months to get your teeth whitened because I never have sex with my students if their teeth are not polished into boy-pearls.

No bow-ties.

No watches.

That's all raven crap. Even G didn't do that.

If your best friend of thirty years takes you to a so-called real G meeting with a so-called real Teacher, make sure your Terminator arm has a new fuel cell. Never hook-up like I did, not knowing who the hell Gurdjieff even was.

Never listen to a so-called telephone "sustainer". Blow a siren-whistle in the mouthpiece and wake them up.

If you do try a Group, read up and: be SLY, for YOURSELF. The older Groupies are snoring, almost every one. They "act" awake, which is another form of sleep. You are their new robo-sheep-wakeup-unit. Later you will USE newcomers as your robo-sheep-wakeup-units, shearing off their fluffy wool and eating their lamb chops with mint jelly. Um.

If they say: "BOO! You'll die like a dog!" lift your leg and tinkle on their brogans.

If your so-called Teacher tells you to give them more money than you can afford for hosting a Tupperware party for eight say, or five CD's from the Computer Professor, call the Scooter Store and roll. Especially if you are a millionaire. If you "trust" a Magus to leave your money alone, you will lose it for sure. They will tell you that you cannot value what you do not pay for and since you have millions you need to pay BIG. Bullshit.

Well, the Apostles had Amex.

If you answer an ad, and they ask if you have read about them on the NET, hang up the phone as you would any computer call. They are manipulators who will squash you like a potato bug.

Over time, G ears clog with Subjective wax. We''re spies remember, which leads to self-centered impaction of more than ear canals. Think very hard arteries in people with less compassion than a wolverine taking out a fly fisherman. At least the wolverine rips into Eddie's throat first.

G's rarely respond to critics. Why would they? To come out of personal hiding would be to actually engage Subjectives, for them, the horror of horrors. They're stuck in Goodoo up to their slies. Objectives can't reason with Subjectives, because sleepers don't understand elite intellectual magicians. Imagine Orage teaching the Law Of Seven to Gomer Pyle.

If they say: "We are THE Conscious School," call Yellow Cab. If they say, "We are just a little PREP School," (as G did) get on your stick-horse and gallop. Their little "prep" School has probably been slumming off newcomers for forty years.

A Gurdjieff spouse begins (usually quite early) to see how his/her partner is a sleepwalking duffas. It's like racism. Call it "sleepism". We are cool awakeners. Everybody else including the spouse: is the OTHER --- "hi honey ... I'm home! And I'm dumping your bubble butt today to just get it over with now, right in the beginning. Sure, we had a terrific marriage, but baby, you don't want no mystic lessons at all ... I'm gone ... !"

Divorce is common. Even demanded at times by some scumbag teachers.

ESSAY ASSIGNMENT: 
Due Monday / What Happens When The Work Goes Wrong?

Gurdjieff Work is serious psychological reorganization at depth. You don't know how, or if, you will heal after your brains are shattered and glued back together. For sure, never, ever, let some gang of Gurpies out for a little Synanon encounter fun, circle you chanting: "gooble-gobble, gobble-google, we will make you one of us". Just haul off and kick the nearest idiot in the balls as hard as you can and run for your car. Taser the Teacher. Carry a CS canister and use it while bolting backwards out the door.

If your "Master," ever sucker punches you in the stomach, wait until he/she's off your case, then return the favor with brass knuckles. A Magus never calls the cops.

Never go to your first few months of meetings alone. Join up with a sumo. If they won't let you join with a sumo: DON'T. If they will, witness for each other. Then if anyone beats the crap out of you, walk out of the meeting, cellphone 911, wait for the Subjective cops, and herd those sheep back into the meeting and swear out a sumo witnessed  formal complaint for Conscious assault and battery. The teacher will make bail the same night, and the entire "School," will disappear the next day, however, you will have bummed their evening, and there's something to be said for that. Plus, the teacher will then be wanted by the police. Not that he/she isn't already, but every little bit helps.

It is said, that everybody in the Work eventually "falls", (sooner than later) where they have a group experience and finally see themselves as others see them. Followed by becoming their own negative "enemy",  the same way they see "mechcanical humanity". It's mystical mirrors, but it Works great on people suffering modern angst who need to dig in the dirt because their intellect is driving them crazy and they need to first "locate their body in time and space" using a shovel, then go out and get laid like never before, a lot, thus balancing the three brains, Intellectal, Emotional, and Physical . 

Namasté Motherfucker

A Gurdjieff shunning has the effect of turning one completely invisible. When I did it to others, I called it: Work. When others eventually did it to me, I called it: "the invisible shuffle", or something, I know I had a name for it.  I felt ashamed for having done it to others before I left. I remember in a San Francisco Safeway once, looking up to see a woman I had been close to in the Group, and she simply would not see or hear me. I had done the same. These living-dead were pervasive because the "prep School," I was in had three hundred students at one point. As an exie, running across them was not uncommon. As I galloped past on my stick-horse calling, "hi ho Silver," I got the same mummy-mugs I no doubt gave others before I left.

Gurdjieff Work teaches out-and-out heartlessness in a way. At least admit that for cripe sake. We carried it like vise-grips in our amoral tool-belt. If a student got booted (in order to spread terror through us Sunday fainters) the rest of  the mob, me included,  jeered like slavering jackals,  until before leaving  I finally stopped from embarrasment. I was "waking up". Other's went quietly, though, just as melodramatically, because we loved them so much, we couldn't jeer.

Ah yes, heartfelt croc-tears that only seem "real" in stilted situations.

Don't worry, be happy, Gurdjieff will never die.

In 2005, G has finally become nothing less than George Ivanovitch Einstein. This is America, not Kurdistan. Nowadays G is a full-blown cultural "I"con. Coming soon to a boutique near you: Gurdjieff wearing eyeball-spring glasses on G-shirts.

No?

Oh yea.

After leaving my forehead back along the trail of broken bonobos, it was like walking around with someone else's mental illness. Gurdjieff is not some box of frozen veggies like Deepak Chopra, or any other awakening you ever careened into a tree before, no matter how bad that may have been. I don't care if you got diddled by Dicktananda. When the Work goes wrong, it eviscerates self respect, common sense, and reason, all while warping good will into philosophically sanctioned AIM making misdemeanors and other crimes.

Never let yourself be manipulated, ever, through fear of not getting in, or leaving. Then you know instantly you are in the wrong room. If any person gets humiliated and kicked out, leave the meeting with them and go have coffee together. That person probably has a lot on the ball and the Teacher realizes they are beginning to see through their b.s. Teachers have a keen sense of exactly when to boot the next sucker out for the best dred result. Have several cups of strong coffee with your new friend and enlighten each other.

A lot of seeker-somethings embrace Gurdjieff ideas like widows reading supermarket romance novels. It's musketeer meets maiden on horseback in twilight with gold, fire, feasting, tobacco, booze, broads and bad boys. The type-set  evokes wanderlust, burning punk, yak butter tea. Just, chuck the ancient wisdom of the Middle East at the meeting room door. Cover your ASP. Be ready to strike.

If you like American Idol,  you'll love Gurdjieff.

Imagine your boss is  Simon Cowell and you work for him seven days a week.

For years.

Cards up, Gurdjieff is a bait and switch with brilliant bait and a dark switch. The warnings --- if you get any these days, which you probably do not --- are bum, because one cannot possibly imagine the changes that will come into their life as a result of being mangled by Gowdy Goody puppets.

Gurdjieff enjoyed the finest, even during times of war. Nazi's were stalking the streets of Paris, yet G's larder was stocked with everything from roasted witchity grubs, to crab cake Rangoon's, and ice-girl-milk with chocolate covered flies. I mean, Gurdjieff had cheeses made from the pupae of select Chinese butterflies, canned sex organs of rare starfish, preserved probosci of anteater (with red ant garnish), harmonium cake, even shoepick de garliqué. Ah, fresh manash-potat with cutcut-purrie. Oh yea, and pickled squirrel eggs. Lots and lots of little pickled squirrel eggs in Mobster Sauce. Even mockingbird chimichangas for crap sake.

If "they" claim the Work is an Express Subway (and) when it pulls into your platform, don't miss your single opportunity to board their Conscious Cars, because so important are these pearls, you will never find an open door again, even in five lifetimes, kick your Nike's and miss THEIR single opportunity. They're slyers. The Work is not supposed to jump to warp-speed. It should crawl slower than a dead garden snail. Well, escargot-got. Gurdjieff said people should completely leave the work, then come back later, if they desire.

Fine, you are accepted by a Teacher, (on review) after some rigamarole, grilling, including a telephone friend (sustainer) to keep you on KEY through octaves of asleep-at-the-wheel skidding during your flatland pay job, and begin Working toward becoming a "Numbered Man," that is: from brainy ditch-digger to "Esoteric Christ". Ha!

Secretly of course.

Another reason for secrecy is, say Homer Simson has you over for barbecued squirrel eggs with manash-potat and canary chips, and you happen to let it drop you think Marge's hair looks like some bouffant cartoon, you come off lower than mildew. Talking about what you are doing outside the Work, breeds incredulous reactions. They don't want that, because you might start thinking for yourself again and they'd lose your cash donations.

"They know not what they do," is an example of a redefined scripture, used as an "Esoteric," logging-wedge between: WorkGroup / world-at-large.

Us and Dem.

Gurdjieffians do not "believe," the way other's do. They Work toward self-made immortality through cigarettes. Hey, fine. Who cares if they don't believe in "belief".

Tell me. "not believing", is not another belief.

Gurdjieff said the Universe is 100% material, that by eating "higher hydrogen's," one can sort of aerosol coats of ionized gas into their insides to make an astral body, called, "the body Kesdjan". Alex Horn told us he chain-smoked Pall Mall's because tobacco contained higher hydrogen's needed to create his soul.

The Work's darkest side is: "inner-fascism" toward one's negative "I's". Students end up hating "sleep" in themselves and others. The problem: "hate" in any form is the worst negative emotion of all: blocking all chance of Work, or so it is claimed.

G comes complete with promise of the Inner Circle of Humanity sending "C" (Conscious) influences into the outer reaches of mechanical dog hell, where us sleeping K9's are messing up the world (and) the "Inner Circle of Humanity," never sends any negative influences because THEY are Objective loving beings at the level of Abraham, Christ and Mohammed, which is why those religions all get along so well today.

"Conscious," men and women, with extra assorted rascals, including a seminal list of very high order GIP's, mostly men, are trotted out to show how HIGH the Teacher must be. See it. The elbows they claim to rub are embarrassing. There is not one among them including Gurdjieff himself, fit to sweep the porch of those they claim to represent. They don't have enough GNA in their skin-tags to stand in shadow of Pythagorus. The man would have sent one of his lesser students out to run them off with a Golden Mean cattle-prod.

Another notion: so-called psychic "buffers" keep us from cracking up, while protecting our "essence" from hard knocks. We supposedly need buffers to walk around with polarities: i.e., sub-personalities, yet, they screw up our inner Work because they keep the so-called "essense" too buffered, thus: foiled from almost all authentic root expression. Could be right, so what. The Work you have to do is not good for most. Gurdjieff Work should be in small groups of carefully screened folks.

Gurdjieff said his Work had ancient roots --- which means it must be wonderful, right?

Ancient: Good. Modern: Mostly bad.

Sarmoung Scroll: Good. Computer Scroll: Mostly bad.

G said his presentation was new, and that the way he put it together had never been before. He stressed how impossible it all was: how one must have the right Teacher, and one must do exactly as the right Teacher instructs. For this you get to blood-blister your hands and feet all day and night while your teecher drinks Benedictine and Brandy and sexes students. I don't know about you, but I just love sacrificing my money and life to Super Special Assholes so they can have all the fun.

How in hell could anyone find the "right" Teacher and Group in this mess, which by violating oral teaching, Gurdjieff degraded himself?

There you are in your Group, (the elite on earth with a slim chance at Esoteric Heaven) slying-around, "externally considering," recruiting new people, in ways that, when you strike up a conversation in a Café de la Play, you listen and respond from, "School". It's what the Children of God called, "flirty fishing," only, without the b.j. Well, usually without the b.j. Shame on them. The least they could do is blow everybody equally.

Then you are home for Thanksgiving with your subhuman loved ones and your heart trips with "Conscious" caring for them, because they will probably never find this miraculous Work that you have found, and you can't tell them about it, (sob) therefore, mom & dad, will be eaten by the moon and crapped out at the level of the minerals, and there you sit at their table, "knowing," a lot about everything, forcing yourself to feel lower than them just to seem "equal".

It's okay. You're just nuts from not shooting the curl soon enough, that's all.  Cowabunga!

Thank you G, for the "I-balls" to see you with. And thank you for the poise to duck your pies. And thank you for the GREAT lesson you provided by skidding your Citroen into that tree. 

Gurdjieff renamed the mystic world with about fifty or sixty, perhaps one hundred, jargon words --- nothing wrong there --- except after I left, the jargon cursed my life with the torments of Job. Because you see, every one of those words, is full-term, conjoined-twins-pregnant, with levels of meaning, exercises, mentation.

Look rube, we are privy to the most ancient, Esoteric Christian Secrets of the Universe in the lives of men and women. Well, okay, not exactly secret anymore since Gurdjieff decided to give away the Sarmong Brotherhood, over the Parable of the Happy Meal, in some prewar-McDonald's, to Ouspensky, who after years ended up splitting from Gurdjieff and dying a lonely paranoid.

Other than that, Super Size me.

What I am saying is, the first good "shots" of awakening at the beginning: Self Remembering / Split Attention --- IS IT. With some other good things, all of which can be gotten from G's books.

Split your attention and split.

Gurdjieff said Self Remembering was only the beginning. He needed money for squirrel eggs, remember.

Don't let them blow your brain into ten thousand unconnected "I's" then refinance your mortgage. Split attention is the same as: Thich Nhat Han's: "Mindfulness". A much healthier approach. Mindfulness means washing dishes while WASHING dishes. This cannot be done without split attention. Case closed. Gurdjieff would have you washing dishes, while performing mental, emotional, and physical Gym-nasties to balance your "three brains," standing on one foot, tapping time with the other, counting in logarithms backwards, humming harmonium Guzak ... geeee-od ... !

Gurdjieff was: THE MAN.

He got, writers, musicians, photographers, accountants, biographers, cooks, coffee-runners, housekeepers, groundskeepers, artists in residence, massage therapists, even Fritz Boy Wonder.

In short, all the things a Magus pulls in with their psychic drag-net, on the one hand, fear and Coyote humor on the other, at least seven Master-rambles up the alpha pyramid: that is: Conscious One about town, all donated and controlled, along with plenty of gold bars, coins, watches & chains, gems, cameos, silks, oil paintings, temple prostitutes, Persian Polident (with ooze control), ivory dildos, magical broaches, ancient talismans, rare medications, jade pipes, opium balls, Tibetan turquoise, Tijuana velvet  paintings, African masks, goose-bear lozenges, Viking beads, Ionic Breeze machines with patented Zenion technology, bolts of silk, sable, crystal carvings, turquoise inlaid bone buttons, Egyptian embroideries, chod bowls, crystal yantras, lava-lamps, meteorite yakshas, manuscripts, parchments, not to mention a fine tailor, doctor, bail bondsman, and dentist. Let's hear it for the Magus!

Here's how it could happen.

You're lurching down Market Street one day humming, "Life Is But A Dream, shaboom, shaboom," on your way to your dead-end cubicle feeling "what's the use," and run into an old friend you really care about, who tells you over coffee, in so many words, that you only think you know what's really going on, and rather mysteriously challenges you to check out an introductory Gurdjieff meeting, where you'll be free to ask all the questions you want, no pressure. And you're a "seeker-something" (who isn't) ... out for a little quintessential truth, eh: Esoteric Good News.

There is only one reason for recruiting new blood: money for the teacher. Think about it.

Your "perhaps" friend even says to think of it as, "your meeting," which is another "sly," since no meeting is ever "yours" unless you're the Teacher. And you think you're pretty cool, so you drop in to check it out, and while you're there some gell-butchie with fried-egg-tits tells you to shut the phuque up, but you stay for some reason, and practice a couple of simple exercises, and see yourself as quite phony. This may or not be true. Still, nothing shines brighter than self interrogation light.

And you don't like what you see in yourself, and you want to change, and you feel especially devastated to "understand" what a cobbled together "Rube Goldberg machine" you are told you are, so much so, that, (SWITCH) you are told you need other self-diagnosed Rube Goldberg machines, called students, also seeking to awaken, in the School, composed of other Seekers of Esoteric Truth, shocking each other awake, which you are told, you cannot do on your own, because no matter how many alarm clocks you set, you will soon go back to sleep and not hear them anymore, therefore, forget to remember, Self-Remembering.

So you join a Group of students dedicated to waking each other through shocks. See, right there, words start flying like cannon shots and outright destroy some lives. Powder-monkeys love it because they get to jump around a lot, and prime the cannons. This is where you'll need your canister of CS gas.

If you are being hurt in a "G" Group, get out of there fast. I imagine it's hard enough to face your demons in a quiet study Group. The Work is Alfred Hitchcock dark, "murder by a babbling brook," that sort of thing. Lucifer the Light Bringer ... Age of Reason ... Morning of the Magicians ... the Dawn of Man. Or as Gurdjieff proposed in one his first recruiting pamphlet: Herald of the Coming Good. Magick. That's fine if you want it. If you don't want it, and don't quite understand what your are getting into, it can end up a misery like no other.

Gurdjieff said: "Man, as he is, is nothing more than a cork floating on top of a stream. The Real Objective Truth is that all of humanity is nothing much more than a blade of grass or a leaf on a tree".

ALL OF HUMANITY, for the love of Three Stooges, that is simply nihilistic beyond measure, really.

Thieves of awakening!

Sixteen men on a dead man's chest, yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.

I mean, talk about abject hopelessness as a motivator. Don't do it unless you're sure you want to evolve yourself into: "A GOD," thereby escaping the cosmic conveyor of factory chickens.

Yea, right.

That's like telling a rock climber: "see that pinnacle over there. It's never been conquered. Over two thousand climbers have been killed trying. Your chances of making it are less than theirs."

And the rockhound starts packing because she figures, if that many died before her, chances are better than excellent. With G it's like: "wow, a shot at being the one tuna in ten million who escapes the net and actually achieves higher water ... just think ... why ... I could hang with Jesus on Titan. Hey, I could BE Jesus. Hey, I could be Johnathan Livingston Tuna".

They tell you the world is strewn with dying dogs who attempted the "Work of Works," and your chances are less than theirs, and you climb the dang pinnacle and fall off. Strange smart-apes we. Thinking in fact, precisely BECAUSE the odds are so bad, we, individually, have a better chance. 

A dna quirk. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

And a Magus "Works the quirks," knowing the less chance a person has of actually getting something big, the harder they will Work: to never get it. This may be a vestige from hunting and gathering times, when it meant absolute survival to keep-on-keepin-on. Flash Forward to Ralph's delivering hot meals and forget hunting and gathering. Only the smart-ape brain is still wired for it.

And after a rain, there's that aroma of wanderlust. When you describe mechanical humanity: (dressed in: "Objective sorrow and suffering for sleeping humankind"), as a cork on a stream, you are not a person with the high aim of helping others awaken even more, from the tedious hypnosis of social activity and hive living. You are Darth Vader unmasked, a worm in armor.

What is astonishing to me, is after folks are kicked out, that at least one doesn't go back and take out the Group with a Super Soaker full of liquid dog shit. Fontainebleau Columbine: The Sacred Moooooov-ment.

Since Gurdjieff said higher Consciousness was only for the miniscule few, he must have been awake enough to know that this special knowledge was wrong for release into mass culture where it would be profaned and hurt thousands of people. He didn't care. This was all about fundraising through the: "Trick of Two," Acceptance / Fear. A Magus plays the two off against each other to make FRICTION, because friction is where the money and action are.

Ask yourself this: was it Objective Compassion that released Gurdjieff writings by himself and many others (in direct opposition to ancient ORAL traditions) to be misunderstood and profaned?

We Work hard though, sacrificing for the Magus ... the Work.

You've got to hand us that. When we go for it, we "sacrifice," a lot. For instance, I took everything I owned except clothes and shoes, etc., took it to a flea market at the Cow Palace in San Francisco and sold my entire childhood collection of fantastic art from around the world, to pay Alex Horn who used it to support his Gal-coholism.

You figure if you try real hard, even if you don't make Esoteric Christian status, at least all your Work will have made you a better, "more Conscious" person.

Clap-crap.

It won't make you any more Conscious than the first exercises you did that woke you up to begin with.

Look in the personals section of city newspapers. Masochists always WAY outnumber sadists. Always. Your poor-in-spirit heart is ashamed, in need of much correction. And even if you ever did attain, "higher Consciousness," according to The Lord of the Slies, you'd be one in a ten million. Let's hear it for brain spanking.

Glotto players love it.

Not only that, after all is said and done, you likely will have mistreated your spouse, children, brothers, sisters, friends, dog, cat, and goldfish, plus given quite a lot of your money, sweat, and time to the "Work" for not much in return.

You certainly will never end up a Number 5 or 6 "Man". So far, every Teacher claiming numbered status is an obvious fraud. They tell you, "higher people don't go around proving it! They don't have to!"

Well, Gurdjieff didn't exactly drive his Citroen through that tree.

Suddenly seeing yourself as other people truly see you, and have always truly seen you, is bad enough. I mean, people who have been unhappily going about their day job with the self-awareness of a house cat, (which is purrty good by the way) suddenly find themselves, "... walkin' on golden slivers ..." and even twenty seconds of this SEEMS worth twenty years of struggle, except most people simply cannot take a full-out assault on their Swinger personality.

It's nothing new. Fundamentalist Christians claim their worst defect is, and I quote: "shooting our wounded".

The whole mess is almost impossible to explain. Nobody has that much time. And dang it all anyway, you did get something from it. Of course, you could have gotten a lot from a Amtrak derailing. And you could have gotten "self-awareness" from any number of meditation courses.

COMMON SENSE: our most faithful Steward, we ignore: while manipulation, and con, we buy. Why? Because we want to graduate into doing it ourselves. Nothing has changed in twenty thousand years.

G professed the most bizarre flapdoodle to come down the line since the first red-assed confidence clown declared the end of the world was coming on Friday afternoon at 2:43 so you'd better get your act together and give all your wine, nuts, honey, and fruit preserves to ME, because I'm the only Gidiot that can save you. Oh, and don't forget your pots of wine, and your youngest daughters. Actually I'll take all your daughters except the cow with a wooden leg.

It's as ridiculous as Blavatsky, touting "Kut Humi," as her personal representative of the ancient "Ascended Masters," while claiming him to be the reincarnation of both: Pythagorus and Saint Francis. Oh sure, that must be true. After all, old Humi "materialized," letters from the spirit world just for her --- through outright fraud, by retiring to her room and writing Kut's "spirit notes," herself. There's something desperately Nora Desmond about it that makes my skin crawl. The real SHOCK, is that people actually believed her and still do. It seems Pythagor-sissi mostly wrote Fatassky's followers asking them to give her lots of money. And they DID! An excellent argument for psychiatric meds.

Nowadays, even before people hear about, "Work," it is as if they already have psychic receptor sites for it: dendrite cookies awaiting one command stroke at the right moment, and click: two weeks later their entire library is in boxes and they've sold the bedroom set.

And I'm talkin' receptor sites the size of the Grand Tetons, that decades earlier rejected UFO abductee meetings, said no thanks to Jehovah Witnesses, Scientologists, Lifespringers, Forumites, Mary Kay, and Thelema, yet, by way of Gurdjieff's flash-forward into "Self-Remembering," it's as if a string of psychic pop-beads closes, then on through years of concentric circling toward the ultimate: whispered: Inner Circle Of Humanity, until finally: reaching the very: "Well of the Work" itself, (yea, I know, a deep subject for a shallow guy like me).

Your big WIN: the Six Dollar Burger for $3.95.

Talk about bunion grim.

The sin is not getting fleeced. The sin is not facing up to getting fleeced. We're: IN. The whole rest of the world: OUT? Hey Gashole, get out of the group --- you put a question mark after out!

You sure cuss ... why?

Guck you poofter! You're out of the Group! Get the guck out!

Well shiver me timbers young Jim'arkins and please forgive me sin.  Can I stay if I do five thousand push-ups and promise to kidnap Santa Claus next December for the Feather River Winter Camp? I see clearly now, you must be right because you cuss like roustabouts on Carnivale, and, well, because you say so.  Good enough for me. Ha! You just say so, dang it. Finally, I see now how you are charged to carry elite wisdom because, well, you rejected certain things yesterday, then, turned around and accepted them all today, but especially how you put down your silver, every single time you chew/

Fine, I'm calling Kut Humi and telling everything. All of it.

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