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John Shirley on Gurdjieff

G.I. Gurdjieff was a fascinating, influential teacher informed by western esoteric traditions. His teachings have been passed on over the years, called the Gurdjieff Work or the Fourth Way. Several years ago when I was editing the Stay Awake! issue of FringeWare Review, I was thinking a lot about Gurdjieff's teaching that almost everyone is asleep, that what we call waking consciousness is just a kind of somnambulism. I wanted an article about Gurdjieff, so I asked Jay Kinney, then publisher of Gnosis, a magazine dedicated to the Western inner traditions. Jay had recently published a whole issue devoted to Gurdjieff. He referred me to John Shirley, science fiction/horror author who was one of the co-creators of the cyberpunk subgenre. John wrote a great piece called The Shadows of Ideas. A decade or so later, John has written a biography called Gurdjieff: An Introduction to the Man and his Ideas, just published by J.P. Tarcher. John's discussing the book in a conversation on the WELL led by Jay Kinney. [Link]

So as a guy trying to do the Gurdjieff I look at how I feel--I'm angry because of a rip-off producer (or it may have been a coincidence--the uncertainty is maddening), things going badly when I'd worked so long on them, and I see my STATE. That is, I look at myself, my inner state, with my attention, as if it were something objective to me. But it's me who becomes objective. Once I do several things (meditative, somewhat esoteric, taught privately) to get into this self observational state, I see my anger and disappointment as things in themselves, like WEATHER in my inner being, that I have become IDENTIFIED with. That's key to Gurdjieff and certainly to Buddhism, at its best, the study of how we become identified with subjective states, so that we're caught up in desire, or reactive emotion, negativity. (All this sort of thing is parroted by celebrities in a vague, distorted, trendy and childish form, when they become interested in pseudo-Cabbala and the like, which has points of relation. They wouldn't know real Cabbala, or Kaballah, or Qaballah, etc, if it bit them in their surgically perfected asses.) Now that I see my state, I'm no longer identified with it. Through other methods I'm centered in my body's sensations in a way that prevents this nonidentification from being disassociation. I mean, two minutes ago DISASTER struck. Now I'm able to type up this material, grousing but functional, in a more or less objective fashion, thinking about a subject that was initially far from my mind. I did it through the Gurdjieff work.

jon posted this at 1:38 PM
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