Dark Journalist - DARK JOURNALIST X SERIES XX(2): GURDJIEFF ENNEAGRAM & MYSTERY SCHOOL RENEGADES!
Aired: 2018-07-29
Duration: 02:37:21


=== Touching the Tip of the Iceberg (04:19) ===

[00:00:04]  And we are live.
[00:00:05]  This is Dark Journalist.
[00:00:06]  It's great to have everyone here.
[00:00:07]  Wow, it's a huge crowd.
[00:00:09]  Tonight, for Saturday night, this is kind of special in a sense because it's a back to back episode, and that's how we end every 10 episodes with a kind of a two episode finale for the X series.
[00:00:21]  And for this one, of course, I'm joined by the lovely Olivia.
[00:00:24]  Hi, everybody.
[00:00:26]  And Olivia's been already lining up the great second half of the show with questions and everything from all of our viewers here.
[00:00:36]  I'm sure she'll deal with a few gremlins after all.
[00:00:39]  There's a big kind of eclipse hanging over this evening and a green moon, which is even more interesting than that blood moon they were talking about.
[00:00:50]  So the green moon only lasts about 90 minutes, from what I understand.
[00:00:54]  But these are certainly rare times, and Mars is very close.
[00:00:58]  So this is kind of a good time for a breakthrough show.
[00:01:01]  And here we are.
[00:01:03]  Tonight, we're going to do something very special.
[00:01:06]  I would say, in the first part of episode 20 of the X series, which is what we're doing.
[00:01:11]  Here, the X series, and part one was last night.
[00:01:13]  Part two of part 20 is tonight.
[00:01:16]  And the first half dealt with Rockefeller, his art collection, the invisible tech, and all of the kind of shenanigans around Rockefeller's death and the JFK involvement with the space program.
[00:01:32]  This is a very important setup, but the flip side of that coin is the mystery school presence.
[00:01:38]  And we have to understand the mystery schools in order to understand other things, like the deep state, for example.
[00:01:45]  If you don't understand one, you don't understand the other.
[00:01:47]  And when these things move, very often it's this kind of marionette dance where everything's linked.
[00:01:53]  So if one thing moves, they all move.
[00:01:56]  And it's kind of a crucial realization on our part because when we get into the ex steganography, you can only go so far at tracking it through government programs, as we've done in this program over 20 some odd weeks.
[00:02:10]  You do get very far in understanding that government process of secrecy around these kind of super secret technologies.
[00:02:19]  But The deeper we got, of course, we certainly saw that there was a much heavier picture to deal with.
[00:02:27]  And what we had was an entire legacy of using the ex steganography through the mystery school traditions, through persecuted traditions, through religious traditions, through traditions that went underground and came back, through traditions like the Rosicrucians who came out and said, We're here, and then went back underground.
[00:02:51]  So, This is a very interesting history, and we've really just touched the tip of the iceberg with it.
[00:03:00]  We're going deeper, and after the finale tonight, we're going to do another 10 episodes on the X steganography, and those will do for you later in August.
[00:03:13]  But in any case, tonight we have the very special teaching of the fourth way through the figure of G.I. Gurdjieff, who is a real Mystery School Renegade.
[00:03:25]  And the title for this one, Gurdjieff, the Enneagram, Ospensky, and Mystery School Renegades.
[00:03:34]  How could the Mystery Schools have renegades?
[00:03:37]  They do.
[00:03:38]  They do, as a matter of fact.
[00:03:42]  Some people who come on the scene can be experiments from the Mystery Schools, or they can actually be.
[00:03:54]  Hanging out there and doing things on their own, having broken away from the mystery schools.
[00:04:01]  In Gurdjieff's case, I think it was a little bit of a mix with both of these.
[00:04:07]  And Gurdjieff certainly comes in as one of the stranger characters in this whole thing with an incredible teaching that is so different from the other mystery school traditions and the ones that went public, like Theosophy, like Anthroposophy.

=== Gurdjieff's Supernatural Professions (09:20) ===

[00:04:23]  Doesn't rely on the masters of wisdom, ascended masters.
[00:04:28]  It does speak of specific mystery schools that you take part in exercises and you develop a technique to evolve.
[00:04:37]  And it does rely, in some sense, on this inner development of humanity.
[00:04:46]  So, that much it has in common, but it's almost like the antidote or the opposite of theosophy or anthroposophy, where you have in anthroposophy and theosophy a real relying on a psychic tradition, reincarnation, Eastern methods, and Now, Gurdjieff called his fourth way teaching esoteric Christianity, but remember, Rudolf Steiner is also esoteric Christianity.
[00:05:11]  And as I study those deeper and deeper, they do come closer to point.
[00:05:14]  But definitely, there's something in the fourth way that is dependent on work on oneself and has less dependence on the cosmology, let's say.
[00:05:27]  So, you know, a good example of this is there were these great intellectuals that came.
[00:05:32]  One of them was.
[00:05:32]  A.R. Araj is the man who coined the term New Age, and he had a magazine called The New Age there around the First World War.
[00:05:40]  And a lot of his work is actually quite fascinating, also.
[00:05:45]  And he came with this group of intellectuals, and included Aldous Huxley and some other people, to the Priory.
[00:05:52]  And this was a place where it was the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man that Gurdjieff had created.
[00:06:00]  And they showed up, and they were looking forward to these meditation exercises and these.
[00:06:06]  Lectures on cosmology, and he literally said, You know, there's a huge kitchen that you're going to repaint.
[00:06:15]  And this was the lesson that they got.
[00:06:17]  And some of them split, and some of them stayed around and painted.
[00:06:20]  And the whole point behind the Gurdjieff work at that juncture was to say to these intellectuals who kept the principles up there in this lofty mental space that you're going to have to deal with this on a very physical level, also.
[00:06:34]  That you can't get away from the physical, but you can transmute the physical.
[00:06:39]  For these higher purposes.
[00:06:40]  And the idea basically was that you have all these lazy built in tendencies and habits physically, and they waste energy, and energy is required for evolution.
[00:06:53]  So if people are given to, let's say, gossip or laziness or daydreaming, things like that, it was wasting all this energy that they needed to evolve.
[00:07:06]  So the first thing in the Gurdjieff system was to deliver a kind of shock.
[00:07:11]  To your outlook to get it working in a different fashion.
[00:07:15]  And this work thing shows up again and again where you see some of the top people in the Gurdjieff groups were mopping floors, painting things.
[00:07:27]  He would do these whole exercises where people would put together these structures of rocks.
[00:07:31]  And then as soon as they were done, he'd say, dismantle them, things like that.
[00:07:35]  So there was a lot of physical activity that was meant to garner these higher states.
[00:07:42]  I can tell you, I want to share this with you, which is that I spent a lot of time working with Gurdjieff groups over the years.
[00:07:51]  It has been a while now, but I remember in working with those groups who were working, some of them were from the Bennett tradition, some of them were from the Gurdjieff tradition, but they all relied very heavily on these movements, which became another aspect, which is this whole Gurdjieff dance aspect.
[00:08:13]  But I can say from personal experience that having spent time with those exercises, they do transform.
[00:08:21]  Your state of mind.
[00:08:23]  I'm not sure exactly how it operates, and I'm sure Gurdjieff is going to give us the answers tonight.
[00:08:29]  But let's go into his history a little bit.
[00:08:31]  I did want to give you a heads up that this is one of those methods, like the Steiner method, where I've spent time with it, and so I've actually, I can give kind of firsthand testimony into the depth of the story.
[00:08:44]  These are no fly by night movements, they're kind of in place to move the culture, and very often they're set up to move the culture later.
[00:08:54]  So, in their own period, they do their work, but they're laying a foundation for what's going to happen for us here in the 21st century.
[00:09:02]  And if we get a handle on it, a hook on it, we can set up the next century.
[00:09:06]  And I think that's the way this chain works.
[00:09:09]  But let's take a look at Gurdjieff's history in context.
[00:09:12]  First of all, let's get a look at Gurdjieff, a very young, kind of charismatic figure.
[00:09:20]  And he's a Greek Armenian.
[00:09:23]  And he.
[00:09:24]  Was really somebody who traveled a great deal in his childhood.
[00:09:28]  And there's a lot of mixed stories about his childhood.
[00:09:32]  But one of the things about where he lived there in Tiflis was that there were large military commands.
[00:09:38]  So he would meet British, he would meet Americans, he would meet all these people.
[00:09:42]  And so he got used to a variety of cultures right off the bat.
[00:09:46]  But one of the things that stuck with him so much when he was younger was that the stories and the legends that his father kept, who was kind of a bard, Of these stories, you know, the Epic of Gilgamesh and things of this nature.
[00:10:04]  They kept his oral traditions and they would use them as songs or whatever.
[00:10:08]  And he was shocked when they actually found the literal Epic of Gilgamesh, how close it was to that oral tradition that his dad had taught as a child.
[00:10:17]  So he was already awakening to these spiritual matters very young, but his curiosity ran incredibly deep and he became obsessed with the idea that there were groups out there and schools out there that taught about the.
[00:10:33]  True, a meaning of life, man's place in the universe, and things of this nature.
[00:10:37]  And he read a great deal about this lineage.
[00:10:40]  And then over time, he decided to seek them out.
[00:10:44]  One of the interesting things that happened to him you know, there's a book which is biographical about Gurdjieff called Meetings with Remarkable Men.
[00:10:51]  And Peter Brook actually directed the movie version, which is quite good.
[00:10:56]  And it's an independent film.
[00:11:00]  And it covers Gurdjieff's life and it really captures his youth more than his later activities in Russia.
[00:11:07]  As a philosopher and starting the Fourth Way series.
[00:11:11]  One of these scenes is Gurdjieff, when he's about 10, he sees these boys heckling a Yazidi child who lives close by.
[00:11:21]  And the Yazidis are this very interesting group who keep a very close kind of supernatural tradition in their work and among their culture.
[00:11:32]  And we've seen them recently show up in the news being persecuted by groups like ISIL.
[00:11:37]  And, you know, they certainly have had this reputation of being scapegoated over and over again.
[00:11:44]  But they're known to have these powers.
[00:11:46]  One of the things that happened with Gurdjieff is he saw these boys taunting this Yazidi child, and they had drawn a circle around him.
[00:11:54]  The Yazidi child had gone into a trance when they drew the circle, and they knew that he couldn't get out, and they were just basically laughing at him.
[00:12:01]  That's a shot of that from the film.
[00:12:05]  And it struck him as very odd.
[00:12:07]  He wanted to know what it was about.
[00:12:10]  The condition of the Yazidi that could put him into this state where they would do this.
[00:12:16]  And he actually assisted in getting the boy out, and it's kind of an interesting chapter in his early childhood.
[00:12:22]  But I would say experiences like this really led him into this search for his higher purpose.
[00:12:30]  He really felt that human beings were living in a very small, kind of mono channel of their lives, and he knew that there was something much bigger.
[00:12:40]  And all of the traditions that he was seeking out.
[00:12:43]  We were pointing back inside.
[00:12:46]  So there was this great struggle where the people that he knew were striving for outward success, but he understood them to be kind of, you know, maybe less than ethical or not really well developed people.
[00:13:01]  And so he set out on this quest to become a very well developed human being.
[00:13:05]  Oddly enough, one of the early things that we know about Gurdjieff's life is that he developed himself into a hypnotist.
[00:13:13]  And he would cure people of addictions to things like cigarettes and alcohol and all that.
[00:13:20]  There's a shot of him from early in his life there doing that process.
[00:13:25]  But I think he learned a great deal about the human psyche when he was embarking on this process.
[00:13:31]  And I would say also that Gurdjieff is someone who seemed to be able to pick up almost any skill, including carpet weaving, by the way, and adopt to it very quickly.

=== The Fascinating Tradition of Bees (03:56) ===

[00:13:46]  I mean, there's something almost supernatural about the way he could adopt these different professions.
[00:13:53]  And later we will see that he had a great deal of supernatural abilities on his own, and where he got them is certainly fascinating.
[00:14:01]  He learned a great deal of them inside the mystery schools, of course.
[00:14:05]  Now, during his quests, he will find a group called the Sarmoon Brotherhood after really.
[00:14:17]  These long quests through Egypt and through Central Asia.
[00:14:22]  And the Sarmon Brotherhood is a term that means beekeeper.
[00:14:25]  It's an interesting tradition of bees that is about keeping the honey, keeping the wisdom for the ages and for future generations.
[00:14:35]  There's a couple of these here.
[00:14:36]  There's a bee tradition that shows up.
[00:14:40]  Elizabeth, is my pen over there?
[00:14:41]  Hold on.
[00:14:42]  Sure.
[00:14:42]  I've got it actually.
[00:14:43]  Beautiful.
[00:14:46]  Excellent.
[00:14:46]  Thank you.
[00:14:47]  I've got this one, but I'll use that one later.
[00:14:50]  So, there's this interesting X that shows up in this tradition of these bees.
[00:14:54]  But just in general, I think this idea of the bee as the wisdom keeper is fascinating.
[00:15:00]  And that's where we got the Saruman Brotherhood name.
[00:15:03]  Earlier in Egypt, you know, at Abydos, of course, there's that fascinating artistic stela.
[00:15:14]  And what's interesting about it is, of course, it's got the very futuristic kind of helicopter stuff here.
[00:15:20]  This is all very legitimate, by the way.
[00:15:22]  It's 100.
[00:15:22]  It's part of a temple there in Abydos.
[00:15:24]  So, even though it looks science fiction, it is.
[00:15:28]  But interestingly enough, as you have these kind of submarines and flying machines and all this stuff, helicopters, we do see this bee hanging out back here.
[00:15:38]  And this is the wisdom that's kept, it's the high technology that's kept, and the honey that the bee makes and that gets preserved by these brotherhoods.
[00:15:48]  So the Sarman Brotherhood is in this tradition of kind of keeping that higher development of man.
[00:15:55]  There are also a number of these kind of bee deities.
[00:15:59]  This is a bee goddess.
[00:16:01]  That comes out of the kind of Crete period.
[00:16:06]  They show up very often with these X's in this development, and the X tie with the bees as the knowledge keepers I think is quite interesting.
[00:16:17]  We're going to see more of that tonight.
[00:16:19]  This is from Turkey.
[00:16:23]  We can just see that the tradition of the bee and the understanding of it is quite fascinating.
[00:16:29]  They show up, of course, in Virgil and a lot of this Roman.
[00:16:33]  Poetry.
[00:16:35]  This is one of those kind of fascinating shots, but the bees are understood and revered.
[00:16:39]  And it's so interesting when we look at this period that we're in where the bee colonies are collapsing, and you can't help but wonder at the kind of iconic joke of it all when you think about the wisdom that's collapsing and the culture along with it.
[00:16:53]  So we're getting symbolism woven into everyday life, just how we'd like it.
[00:17:01]  But yes, that is very disturbing.
[00:17:04]  So, During his time with the Sarmoon Brotherhood, he learns these different ways that human beings are meant to kind of utilize their abilities physically, mentally, psychically, and all the rest.
[00:17:20]  And he spends a great deal of time there.
[00:17:22]  And at a certain point, he leaves and he checks back in.
[00:17:27]  And something happens that we don't quite understand, where he gets the idea that he needs to go out and share this teaching of the fourth way that he develops with the help of the Sarmoon Brotherhood.

=== Living in a Dream World (10:39) ===

[00:17:40]  Which is one of these mystery schools that we've been talking about on the show.
[00:17:47]  But the Sarmun is very interesting because it seems to me that their emphasis is all on knowing your physical body and how your mind interrelates with your physical body, and how it is all of this physical process of integrating the idea that you don't waste any energy physically and require it all for that mental development, which turns into a higher development of higher senses.
[00:18:13]  This is something that there's a great emphasis on in the Gurdjieff work that you don't really find in the other traditions, I would say.
[00:18:21]  That is, the other traditions will encourage you to maybe practice meditation and maybe encourage you in other ways.
[00:18:27]  But this real thing on not wasting physical energy, I think, is a unique trademark of what's going on here.
[00:18:35]  So, along the way, he meets the Russian philosopher P.D. Ospensky.
[00:18:41]  He goes to Moscow and he starts a little group around him.
[00:18:45]  Artists and sculptors, musicians.
[00:18:47]  And there's a strange word out there.
[00:18:49]  There's this presence here of this kind of fascinating Eastern master who is here in Moscow and he's teaching this very odd thing.
[00:18:58]  And he's taking on some very interesting students.
[00:19:01]  But it's all very much in a formative stage.
[00:19:05]  And he, you know, his Russian is, he speaks it unevenly with a Caucasian accent.
[00:19:12]  So it's almost like for us, it's some guy from the Bronx coming in and teaching this high philosophy.
[00:19:18]  With this really kind of New York accent.
[00:19:20]  So, there's a lot of colorful things that happen as he's there.
[00:19:25]  Now, Uspensky, who really becomes his main pupil and the person who comes out and feeds the world his story, because Gurdjieff's own story is not very widely known during his lifetime.
[00:19:36]  And Uspensky has a very unusual background as a journalist, a mathematician, and also somebody who has the same feeling like Gurdjieff.
[00:19:46]  There's something much deeper going on, and that people are living in a kind of a dream world, and he's trying to get at what this is exactly.
[00:19:53]  And he's also seeing the world being plunged into World War I right there in Russia, just previous to the Russian Revolution.
[00:20:00]  And so there's a heightened anxiety, let's say, to this whole period, where Ospensky's work now as a journalist is taking on these stories.
[00:20:11]  They're starting to hear more and more about the war, food shortages, and things of this nature.
[00:20:16]  Ospensky will write several books before Gurdjieff even comes on the scene.
[00:20:21]  One of the books is called Tertium Organum, and it's one of my favorite books, but it's one of those.
[00:20:27]  You know, kind of higher mysteries examinations from a philosophical and esoteric level.
[00:20:34]  And it's very different than the Gurdjieff work, and it leans much more towards what we're traditionally talking about on this program, which is theosophy and anthroposophy.
[00:20:44]  As a matter of fact, there are many quotes from Steiner and Blavatsky in the book to open the chapters.
[00:20:49]  So that's how deep this is where he's going.
[00:20:52]  But what he does is while working at the newspaper, he sees something.
[00:20:58]  Called The Struggle of Magicians.
[00:21:00]  And it's a strange little advertisement about something that's to come about this interesting ballet that will open up all these secrets of the East.
[00:21:09]  Now, he himself has just been to India and he's been looking for schools and he's heard about mystery schools and that they exist and he wants to join one basically and get out of the rat race.
[00:21:18]  But when he goes to India, he has some very unusual experiences and it doesn't pay off for finding a mystery school.
[00:21:28]  It's a very confusing thing.
[00:21:29]  But what he does is he writes a series of articles and those are.
[00:21:33]  Picked up by his newspaper there in Moscow.
[00:21:36]  And apparently, what I've figured out is that Gurdjieff in this group is reading them and thinking, this is a guy who can get our stuff out.
[00:21:43]  So, through one of his friends, they reach out to him and he has this very unusual meeting with Gurdjieff.
[00:21:49]  And Gurdjieff does a lot of things to almost discourage him from getting involved.
[00:21:54]  You know, he meets him in kind of a dive bar and he, you know, he's not trying to kind of recruit him openly.
[00:22:02]  It doesn't seem.
[00:22:04]  But then, before the conversation is over, he turns to him and he says, You know, if I were to understand, if you were to understand everything that's in your book, Tertium Organum, I should bow down before you right now.
[00:22:18]  But you don't understand either what you write or what you read.
[00:22:22]  This is fascinating to Uspensky, who has a great intellect, and he is struck by the whole conversation.
[00:22:28]  And he says he's right on the fence of saying, You know, Gurdjieff with his kind of unusual manner, And it kind of freaks him out at a few points.
[00:22:37]  And also the weird things that he's doing, kind of having him meet in these loud cafes and like shouting answers at him or ignoring him, whatever it is.
[00:22:45]  The strange manner with which he engages Uspensky leaves him right at a point where he's like, either I'm going to be repulsed by this and get away from these people or I'm going to really get into it.
[00:22:54]  And he felt such a kind of a magical mysticism with Gurdjieff that he had to go for it.
[00:23:01]  And it would prove to pay off because his life's work would become absorbed in these years that he worked with.
[00:23:07]  Gurdjieff.
[00:23:08]  And it's how really we know Ospensky, even though he had something of a reputation before he was going kind of walking in the footsteps of a kind of Russian version of a theosophist, really.
[00:23:19]  So, what happens is Gurdjieff starts to teach him this doctrine called the fourth way.
[00:23:24]  I'm going to explain the fourth way briefly, and then we're going to kind of jump ahead to their discovery of the Enneagram.
[00:23:30]  This is something which I think is really at the heart of the fourth way teaching and something that everyone needs to discover a bit more.
[00:23:42]  To really understand how these mystery schools operate.
[00:23:46]  Oddly enough, once in a while with the mystery schools, they can get hijacked just like anybody else.
[00:23:51]  And you might remember about a decade ago or even a little longer when there were all these books about the Enneagram everywhere and it was like, learn your type, the Enneagram, and like you're going to get that job using the Enneagram and all this kind of thing.
[00:24:03]  That's Gerdjeff's Enneagram that he brought up there in 1914 to the Uspensky group in Moscow.
[00:24:09]  And it went through many transformations for people to turn it into a sellable.
[00:24:15]  Item, but hey, there it was.
[00:24:18]  And it is interesting because Helen Palmer, who wrote the most compelling books on the Enneagram from that perspective, was very concerned that it was getting turned into this kind of like, you know, game, you know, it's like the video game of the Enneagram.
[00:24:34]  But anyway, let's take a few more shots of Gurdjieff here.
[00:24:38]  This is Gurdjieff arriving in Moscow.
[00:24:43]  And he's already now in his 40s, he's already been through the mystery schools.
[00:24:48]  And he's coming forward and recruiting Aspensky, ostensibly to help him create this, communicate this teaching.
[00:25:00]  But he's doing it through this idea of this ballet called The Struggle of the Magicians.
[00:25:05]  And it's so funny because, you know, this thing gets abandoned, but the struggle of the magicians becomes this theme throughout their lives.
[00:25:17]  So it's very interesting that both of them kind of tuned into this, Gurdjieff bringing it forward.
[00:25:21]  Running an ad, Spensky picking up the ad years before or at least months before he'd ever even met Gurdjieff.
[00:25:28]  It's quite fascinating.
[00:25:30]  This is Gurdjieff at work.
[00:25:33]  This is somebody who didn't sit cross legged and try to get you to attain higher states or anything.
[00:25:40]  Everything was work painting, sculpture, putting up buildings, tearing down buildings, putting up props, tearing down props, whatever it happened to be.
[00:25:51]  Everything in the fourth way is oriented around work.
[00:25:53]  If you understand the concept of work in the fourth way, that's their spiritual point, which is evolution takes work, and that there's a certain kind of evolution that you and I have as human beings that will happen naturally, but it's not enough.
[00:26:09]  And that in order to work at evolution and truly evolve to what we can be, we need to know how to work.
[00:26:17]  And physically working is one of the first rules.
[00:26:21]  So, you know, this idea of kind of Laying back on it.
[00:26:26]  And he said once when Ospensky said, What's the biggest problem you're having with the students of the fourth way?
[00:26:34]  And he said, The biggest problem is that they all expect roast pheasants to fly into their mouths.
[00:26:43]  Roast pheasant is quite a fancy dish in those times.
[00:26:46]  I think the idea basically is you know, we're looking at something where they don't understand that there's work involved.
[00:26:52]  And we see that so often now in the kind of Gaia flyaway type.
[00:26:59]  Quick clickbait spirituality or clickbait disclosure that we see these groups offer.
[00:27:04]  You know, it's just like your impatience is rewarded because you know you stamp your foot and you want disclosure now, and you know, so you get into these programs and all the rest of it.
[00:27:14]  Or you paid your money for a weekend workshop, and damn it, you're gonna get enlightened from it.
[00:27:19]  48 hours later, you're a disclosure master.
[00:27:24]  But you know, hey, this is the modern culture that we're in, so it's the nature of the beast.
[00:27:29]  But again, work if we want to understand the fourth way we're gonna understand work.
[00:27:33]  By the way, Olivia, how are we doing out there?
[00:27:35]  We're doing great, excellent.
[00:27:37]  I am excited because that's a great crowd.
[00:27:42]  It's a huge crowd.
[00:27:43]  And I'm very excited because the Gurdjieff work, I would say, is one of the most unusual mystery schools, one of the unusual mystery school renegades, one of the most unusual movements that ever came up anywhere.
[00:27:56]  And I think there are some aspects to it that are totally new that even a group like the Rosicrucians or some of these deeper groups never came forward so much.
[00:28:07]  Publicly, and did so much in public.
[00:28:10]  So, we're looking at a real mystery school in action, and then maybe a kind of somebody breaking off and continuing the experiment on their own.

=== The Enneagram and Moving Meditation (14:49) ===

[00:28:20]  So, we're going to get into how that works too, because it gets messy also as he's doing this.
[00:28:25]  But it's the great experiment of the Gurdjieff work.
[00:28:29]  When Gurdjieff is first coming out, let me tell you, people are not getting it.
[00:28:33]  Between the accent and how unusual the teaching is, it's not very rewarding.
[00:28:39]  There's no ascended masters involved.
[00:28:42]  And he's telling you, you have to work.
[00:28:43]  I mean, it's not very pleasant.
[00:28:45]  These are some of the early meetings here.
[00:28:47]  And this was basically the idea of him coming out and doing these teachings.
[00:28:53]  This does change, though, because as it turns out, Uspensky becomes incredibly important in this process because Uspensky is a great speaker.
[00:29:01]  And Uspensky is, you know, he's been in that Russian intelligentsia world for so long.
[00:29:09]  He knows a lot of the right people, he brings it all together.
[00:29:12]  And he really helps launch the Gurdjieff work there in Moscow in that period.
[00:29:18]  This is very interesting, though.
[00:29:20]  I do want to point this out.
[00:29:21]  This is an outing of Gurdjieff, and this is the only picture of Gurdjieff and Uspensky together, ironically enough.
[00:29:27]  But we get a little bit of the body language here.
[00:29:29]  Back there, you've got Uspensky, kind of like he's the journalist, he's hanging back.
[00:29:34]  And look at this is Gurdjieff in his resting pose, right?
[00:29:38]  I mean, it's pretty hardcore.
[00:29:41]  This is a guy who has incredible poise and presence, I would say.
[00:29:45]  Charisma.
[00:29:46]  Yes, he has a ton of charisma.
[00:29:48]  And Aspensky is kind of like, you know, he's a shrinking violet back there, but he's taken it all in.
[00:29:53]  And he's also quite the intellectual genius as we go.
[00:29:58]  But a melancholic who loved cats, right?
[00:30:01]  He was.
[00:30:01]  He was absolutely enamored by cats, and he felt like they were one of the few animals on the planet who were, you know, he studied them and how that.
[00:30:16]  In the idea of his version of going back through the history, he felt that cats had an astral body like human beings did, but that that made them separated from all the rest of the animals.
[00:30:27]  So there's something very unusual about cats in his background.
[00:30:32]  So, again, the idea in the period that we're coming into that is so huge is Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant and the Masters of Wisdom, the Mahatma Letters.
[00:30:49]  The Great White Brotherhood.
[00:30:51]  And this is a shot of Blavatsky with those masters.
[00:30:56]  And this is the incredible period that's going on.
[00:30:59]  But what's happened is theosophy has taken a left turn.
[00:31:04]  There's a lot of court cases around theosophy.
[00:31:06]  There's a lot of hassle.
[00:31:08]  Theosophy is trying to promote Krishnamurti as the next world teacher, and he's a Hindu boy who's only 14.
[00:31:15]  And a lot of people see it as a marketing thing.
[00:31:17]  But in truth, it seems like Basant and the leadership of theosophy is really struggling and impatient with World War I coming up.
[00:31:26]  They really want to change things, and so they're making mistakes.
[00:31:30]  And so people are starting to look around, and what's happening is a lot of people lose faith in theosophy and they start imagining, or are they, that they're communicating with the masters of wisdom.
[00:31:42]  So there's all these kind of mini theosophies popping up all over the place and making it very, very difficult.
[00:31:48]  So the Gurdjieff work comes into this vacuum and it says, no, you know, away with your fantasy life.
[00:31:55]  You know, you have to learn to evolve through a system and you need to kind of apply yourself physically.
[00:32:02]  And you're going to kind of do this from a totally different point of view.
[00:32:05]  You're going to shut off the daydreaming and you're going to be inspired by your inner life.
[00:32:10]  And so, this is a whole different reaction to theosophy.
[00:32:13]  You have to really think of it as the polar opposite to get the feel of what it is.
[00:32:17]  It's almost like if Buddhism came along and it was, you know, this really almost mellow thing about non attachment and meditation and all the rest of it.
[00:32:26]  And then this other thing comes just storming out of the blue and says, you're going to learn, you know, that it's not about.
[00:32:35]  Sitting passively back, you have to be super engaged and you're going to have to go very far, or you're not going to go very far.
[00:32:42]  The fourth way, the name the fourth way, comes from the fact that it is, there are four ways basically to evolve in the system that Gurdjieff has figured out over time.
[00:32:54]  And it's the way of the fakir, who are those people that you see walking on nails and really damaging their bodies or standing on their tiptoes for 48 hours.
[00:33:03]  And he observed them and all the techniques in India for years and wrote about it.
[00:33:09]  So, the way of the fakir is the way of struggle with the physical body, willpower over the body.
[00:33:13]  That's one way to evolve.
[00:33:17]  But it leaves many other things unchecked.
[00:33:19]  That is, the intellectual development doesn't happen and all the rest of it.
[00:33:22]  Then there's the way of the monk.
[00:33:24]  So, the way of the monk would be more devotional.
[00:33:27]  This is about religious feelings, opening yourself up to God, accepting circumstances, accepting sacrifice.
[00:33:38]  So, I think devotion is kind of that's the second way.
[00:33:41]  The way of the monk.
[00:33:42]  The way of the yogi is simple.
[00:33:45]  The way of the yogi is all about intense knowledge.
[00:33:49]  And the way of the mind, it is opening up those doors to higher mind and all the rest of it.
[00:33:56]  But in each of these different cases, you can leave behind one aspect that's crucial.
[00:34:02]  Like with the fakir, you know, the monk might not learn what the fakir knows.
[00:34:05]  The fakir might not know the devotion that the monk knows.
[00:34:08]  And the yogi may not have the devotional aspects as much as he.
[00:34:14]  Goes deep on the mental level and rises to higher mind, he might not have developed the religious feeling.
[00:34:20]  So, there are all these things that are required.
[00:34:23]  What Gurdjieff's saying about the fourth way is it's the way of self remembering.
[00:34:29]  That is, you recognize yourself and you recognize the world.
[00:34:34]  And the great advantage that it has is that you don't have to go away to a monastery to study it, and you can only learn it in the activities of the life that you're in.
[00:34:45]  That is, it has to take place in your public, regular, everyday life.
[00:34:49]  And it's a series of, it's a system for developing a series of responses to the daily life that you're in and acquiring the energy for evolution, just like the monk, the fakir, or the yogi.
[00:35:04]  So self remembering really becomes a core piece of that system.
[00:35:08]  And I'll go deeper into what self remembering is.
[00:35:11]  It seems to be a kind of a moving meditation.
[00:35:13]  That's the way that I always saw it.
[00:35:16]  Now, a crucial piece that Gurdjieff brings out is the Enneagram.
[00:35:22]  Enneagram comes directly out of the Brotherhoods, the Mystery Schools.
[00:35:28]  And it is, in the way that they describe it, the crucial portion of the Fourth Way teaching.
[00:35:35]  Let's take a look at it.
[00:35:37]  And like I said, we all know that it got bandied about by that whole process where they made it into a game of choosing your type.
[00:35:47]  But hey, listen, I always think there's advantages to that because at least people know what it is.
[00:35:51]  I think that that's important, even if it's kind of like, you know, Dilutes the significance a little bit.
[00:36:00]  That's the Enneagram.
[00:36:01]  It's kind of a stained glass version.
[00:36:05]  It's a nine pointed symbol in a circle, and it is portrayed sometimes without the circle.
[00:36:17]  And we're going to talk about what those differences are.
[00:36:20]  I have a version of that here.
[00:36:24]  And I also want to hear about.
[00:36:26]  From everyone, we're in the question section of the things that have happened with people working with the Enneagram because I always find that quite fascinating.
[00:36:35]  That's the Enneagram without its other section, and this is how the Gurdjieff dancers move on it when we get into the movements aspect of the Gurdjieff work.
[00:36:49]  He said you have to think of the Enneagram as a moving symbol or you don't get it, it's not frozen in time, it's basically an electric symbol.
[00:36:59]  Now, over time, I've found ways to kind of compare the full Enneagram with the one that we're looking at.
[00:37:08]  And it seems to me that one is about kind of personal work and the other one is about your work in the world.
[00:37:14]  And if you can combine those two, basically, which is why I think the movements take place on that smaller version.
[00:37:22]  The Enneagram has things that kind of remind me when I look at it of Rosicrucian style effects in it.
[00:37:31]  One of the Rosicrucian X symbols here for humanity in the universe as being at the center of these influences.
[00:37:38]  It seems to me that the Enneagram is this very advanced version of letting this out for humanity.
[00:37:44]  Let's take a look though at this is the original poster that was put together for the Gurdjieff work.
[00:37:57]  And you can see this person got two versions of this.
[00:38:01]  I think this one's showing up okay.
[00:38:06]  Over here, we have a lion and a lamb, and you have the character in the middle.
[00:38:13]  And the character in the middle is learning how to balance the lion and the lamb within themselves.
[00:38:18]  But they're in a version of the Enneagram, but as you can see, it's not the full nine point Enneagram.
[00:38:24]  So I think this is where that personal side comes in.
[00:38:28]  And you can see that looking at it, they've got an angel here on one side and the devil there on the other side.
[00:38:36]  And the language basically says, Know yourself, understand yourself to be.
[00:38:41]  And down here is a picture of Gurdjieff, interestingly enough.
[00:38:46]  But this original poster, I think, says quite a lot about what they were trying to accomplish in terms of the symbolism they were using for getting it across.
[00:38:55]  But right in the heart of it was that outline of the Enneagram.
[00:38:58]  Absolutely fascinating.
[00:39:00]  So I want to go to Gurdjieff's quote on In Search of the Miraculous, which is Uspensky's account of his life working with Gurdjieff before they split.
[00:39:12]  And it's something that Ospensky didn't publish for profit through his whole life.
[00:39:18]  And only when he died was it published, which is fascinating because it was two years before Gurdjieff died.
[00:39:24]  That's when everybody got to know what the system was all about.
[00:39:27]  Before that, forget it, there was very scant information about Gurdjieff except for his own book, Meanings with Remarkable Men, and later Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which is very, very unusual.
[00:39:39]  I mean, this is very, very strange literature.
[00:39:42]  Let's go to where Gurdjieff describes what the Enneagram is.
[00:39:47]  And again, you're watching Dark Journalist.
[00:39:50]  I want to recommend that everyone go to darkjournalist.com right now, just before I go to read this.
[00:39:55]  Sign up for the newsletter.
[00:39:57]  That keeps us in touch.
[00:39:58]  It's a free newsletter, and it's very important as a pipeline back and forth.
[00:40:03]  After you sign up for the newsletter, a quick confirmation email comes in and you're sent.
[00:40:07]  Basically, we'll send you an email about once a week letting you know what shows are coming up.
[00:40:11]  And for August, let me tell you, you're going to want to know because we have some amazing stuff coming.
[00:40:17]  Okay, and checking in with Olivia.
[00:40:21]  Oh, by the way, Olivia, do you see this over here?
[00:40:25]  I'm pointing to it.
[00:40:26]  This?
[00:40:26]  Yeah, it's going to be very important.
[00:40:29]  It's a.
[00:40:30]  Did this just happen?
[00:40:33]  It did.
[00:40:33]  It's something, but remember during the questions, we're going to get into that.
[00:40:36]  There's a very interesting Trump X connection that came up today, and I want everyone to be on board with that.
[00:40:42]  So I didn't want to forget it.
[00:40:43]  So thank you, because let me tell you if you want a human memory system, Olivia's in.
[00:40:49]  Okay, so this is Gurdjieff speaking about the Enneagram.
[00:40:53]  Let's take a quick look at it again.
[00:40:56]  There it is.
[00:40:59]  Nine points with the individual somewhere in the middle.
[00:41:07]  Quote Gurdjieff now The Enneagram is perpetual motion, the same perpetual motion that men have sought since the remotest antiquity and could never find.
[00:41:16]  And it is clear why they could not find perpetual motion.
[00:41:19]  They sought outside themselves.
[00:41:22]  That which was within them, and they attempted to construct perpetual motion as a machine is constructed, whereas real perpetual motion is part of another perpetual motion and cannot be created apart from it.
[00:41:36]  The Enneagram is a schematic diagram of perpetual motion, that is, of a machine of eternal movement.
[00:41:47]  But of course, it's necessary to know how to read this diagram.
[00:41:51]  The understanding of this symbol and the ability to make use of it.
[00:41:55]  Give man very great powers.
[00:41:57]  It is perpetual motion, and it is also the philosopher's stone of the alchemists.
[00:42:03]  Think about that.
[00:42:04]  He's saying it's the philosopher's stone, which is the ultimate quest of the alchemists through centuries.
[00:42:10]  Another quote here from Gurdjieff The knowledge of the Enneagram has for a very long time been preserved in secret, and if it now is, so to speak, made available to all, it is only in an incomplete and theoretical form.
[00:42:26]  Of which nobody could make any practical use of it without instruction from some one who knows.
[00:42:32]  In order to understand the Enneagram, it must be thought of as in motion, as moving.
[00:42:38]  A motionless Enneagram is a dead symbol.
[00:42:41]  A living symbol is in motion.
[00:42:46]  All right, so he's telling us that this Enneagram comes from the mystery schools and that it's been kept in secret for a long time and that it's made available, but you can't really use it because you'd need to go to somebody who knew how to use it and could tell you how to use it.
[00:43:05]  And that it's related to perpetual motion and that.

=== Machines, Accumulators, and Centers (05:25) ===

[00:43:09]  Very often, in seeking perpetual motion and things like the inventions of the period of the time and the motors and the different things, and some of the things that we look at now with like nanotechnology, for example, that they're ignoring a principle, which is that there's something else that's already in perpetual motion and that you have to kind of plug into it.
[00:43:30]  This is very important when we consider all the things that we've learned in studying the X steganography about apotheum and about the effects that are created around it.
[00:43:41]  So, keep that in mind as we go along here.
[00:43:44]  I want to touch briefly on the system itself that Gurdjieff taught because I spent a good deal of time observing different factors that were involved with the system.
[00:43:56]  But the idea basically is that you, you know, it's the know thyself thing.
[00:44:02]  But he referred over and over again to the human body as a machine and how you need to learn your machine, every single part of it.
[00:44:10]  And that the problem was, and I'm sure he was using metaphors left and right that are very appropriate now with transhumanism, that.
[00:44:18]  Humanity as a machine is an out of control sleeping machine.
[00:44:23]  And the point is to wake up that machine and to let it know about all of its different parts.
[00:44:29]  But that as a sleeping machine, many other sleeping machines will come together and battle and do all these things in their sleep and blow each other up and all the rest of it.
[00:44:40]  So, this very interesting metaphor about machines is kind of fascinating.
[00:44:47]  And it seems to me that this experiment of the mystery schools.
[00:44:52]  Coming out during World War I and talking about how humanity is a machine and that we need to kind of awaken to fix the machine, basically, is crucial because it's something that's so vital when people are dealing with all these machines and being blown up by all these machines to get that whole machine mentality on something else.
[00:45:16]  So his basic thrust there is that we're living in a kind of sleep and that.
[00:45:22]  Each one of us has lowered our consciousness level.
[00:45:26]  He doesn't refer to things as consciousness very often, but awareness, self remembering, things of this nature.
[00:45:33]  But he talks about these different centers that we have.
[00:45:37]  And the way that he describes them, I'll do it in brief here, because in the beginning, they're simple versions and then they expand.
[00:45:46]  But one of the centers that really caught me, you know, the emotional center and the intellectual center are pretty easy to understand.
[00:45:55]  But the moving center I thought was fascinating.
[00:45:58]  The moving center works differently and is taught.
[00:46:01]  You know how sometimes you see someone, for example, and they can really like chop onions incredibly well?
[00:46:09]  Or they just seem to have this skill where, you know, there's something almost supernatural about their abilities to do a particular physical thing.
[00:46:19]  So they have a great moving center, and very often this is required in sports or athletics.
[00:46:24]  But over and over again in the Gurdjieff work, you will find.
[00:46:28]  That's a lot of the early exercises when people get on board is to get people in touch with that moving center.
[00:46:34]  And it's not strictly about physical activity, but it's about the kind of habitual action that takes place on a physical level and bringing some awareness to it.
[00:46:46]  I can think of a number of examples around this, but very often when they teach people who are doing sports and baseball, they have them focus over and over again on where the ball is going to be.
[00:47:01]  And some of the great sports people have said, I skate to where the puck will be, and all this kind of thing.
[00:47:05]  So there's a lot of Mental preparation in good athletics.
[00:47:11]  So Gertrude is kind of saying that process exists for everyone and that we need to get mastery over that moving center.
[00:47:19]  And he seems to prize this moving center so much.
[00:47:23]  He talks about two accumulators that are in our system.
[00:47:28]  They're energy accumulators.
[00:47:30]  And the main energy accumulator is what keeps us alive, basically.
[00:47:34]  The secondary accumulator is what we do with our day to day energy and activity.
[00:47:40]  And there's a certain point at which they switch over when one is filling up and the other is filling up the other when one gets down.
[00:47:47]  So, when we get tired, whatever it happens to be.
[00:47:50]  So, as it turns out, these centers are quite fascinating because one of the things that he mentioned about these accumulators that I found so interesting is that the accumulator that keeps us alive is the one that yogis use to do all this kind of supernatural work in mystery school type settings.
[00:48:11]  Yogis levitating and all that, it's that they've learned how to use this deeper level of this accumulator.
[00:48:17]  But there's a great danger with it, and it takes years to develop how to do that because if you're working with that main accumulator and it runs down, then that's your life force running down.
[00:48:28]  So in everyday life, we just work with the normal accumulator, and when that goes down, the main accumulator fills us up.

=== Split Personalities and Unity (14:45) ===

[00:48:35]  It's quite a fascinating process.
[00:48:37]  And when people get into the Gurdjieff work, I think looking into the accumulators and the moving centers, Will really give them a deep impression of the level of skill and knowledge that he has about blood flow, about nerves, about the way, almost like NLP type principles and the way that neurons fire.
[00:48:57]  It's quite amazing.
[00:48:59]  And considering the time period that he's talking in, these meetings are taking place in 1914.
[00:49:05]  Let's consider that.
[00:49:05]  I mean, it's quite remarkable.
[00:49:09]  So, what happens as we go along is Gurdjieff's developing these groups.
[00:49:16]  What will happen is really kind of high society people in Moscow want to join this group.
[00:49:22]  You know, people who are conducting symphonies and things like that are really kind of big personalities, political personalities.
[00:49:28]  And as soon as they get involved with the group, Gurdjieff will send them on some kind of errand.
[00:49:34]  And it seems almost like a humiliation style test where they'll have to stand in a corner and beg for money when they're like, you know, the head of the symphony or something.
[00:49:41]  And they're so afraid that someone will see them, you know.
[00:49:43]  But there's a number of these incidents that tell me that.
[00:49:47]  Gurdjieff is engaging in a kind of a shock principle.
[00:49:51]  And the shock principle is to bring them down and out of what they've identified with and the strong identity that they have with the kind of fame or the position that they have.
[00:50:04]  On the other side, he talks about the Wheel of Eyes being the main problem with humanity in general.
[00:50:11]  And the Wheel of Eyes, in short, works something like this.
[00:50:13]  Of course, I recommend that you read and search the miraculous to get a kind of a fuller version of this.
[00:50:19]  And also, meetings with remarkable men.
[00:50:22]  They're both the perfect books for the Gurdjieff and Spensky work.
[00:50:26]  There are other books and there are other authors, and I'll mention a few of those, but really the core work for the Gurdjieff work is In Search and Miraculous and Meetings with Remarkable Men, in my opinion.
[00:50:39]  It's all there.
[00:50:41]  But let's get into this Wheel of Eyes.
[00:50:42]  So basically, he's saying that the main problem that he's learned through the mystery schools in looking at humanity is that we have different series of personalities living within us, a Wheel of Eyes, as he calls it.
[00:50:56]  And each situation randomly calls up a different.
[00:50:59]  And that person gets in there, makes a mess, or does something, and then the other eye has to take over and deal with it and may not even remember the person who came in and did this in the first place.
[00:51:09]  Now, we've seen this over and over again when people say, I don't know what made me do that, or I don't know who I was, or whatever it happened to be.
[00:51:17]  And one of the tests that they did in the Gurdjieff groups, the early groups, was to give the different eyes names so that when you were upset, that person would have a certain name, like you'd call the upset person, like Paul, for example.
[00:51:32]  Or if you were particularly in a mood to spend money or something like that, that person would get a different name.
[00:51:41]  And by identifying these different aspects in the kind of situation that humanity was in, he said the problem is that each of these eyes is kind of king for a day.
[00:51:51]  They take over your entire body, they take over your mind temporarily.
[00:51:59]  So we think about things on a split personality level.
[00:52:02]  You think about Sybil or something like that.
[00:52:05]  And, you know, how she had real, we've heard about DID and things like that, where we get into actual personalities taking over.
[00:52:14]  Well, he's saying that there's basically a process like this.
[00:52:17]  It's more subtle than that.
[00:52:18]  But this is the major problem that there's no unity in the person, and that the unity is spread out among various different eyes.
[00:52:27]  And I know Olivia and I were joking about this because Olivia.
[00:52:32]  Well, I am a moody cancer, and so I'm very self aware, and I can actually.
[00:52:38]  Feel the shift of the eyes sometimes out of nowhere for no particular reason.
[00:52:42]  Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
[00:52:44]  And the more that people observe this, we see that oh my god, everybody's doing this on a non stop basis.
[00:52:50]  The problem, according to Gurdjieff, is that each one of this kind of disunity that's going on creates that sleep function with the machine out of control and wastes a lot of energy that should be used for evolving, you know, in so many different ways.
[00:53:07]  And the spiritual evolution to take place, the Gurdjieff system says basically.
[00:53:12]  You need a lot of energy to do it.
[00:53:14]  And that if you are there exhibiting all these different tendencies and disunity, and he mentions a number of different things like unnecessary talking.
[00:53:26]  How many times have we heard about this?
[00:53:28]  By the way, I love a good conversation.
[00:53:30]  But I think that he's talking about this kind of thing just think about how the mainstream media is such a waste of time and talk.
[00:53:38]  And they're not really saying anything that's useful.
[00:53:40]  And it doesn't need to be 24 70.
[00:53:42]  You get all that in one blurb in an hour.
[00:53:45]  So, there's so many of these things that are set up to waste energy, and this is a kind of a crucial aspect in the Gurdjieff work.
[00:53:52]  As we go deeper, you know, what was happening basically was that Ospensky was developing this intelligentsia around Gurdjieff, and Gurdjieff was kind of offending them a little bit at a time.
[00:54:07]  But the work itself was incredible, and it was like nothing else anyone had ever seen, and anyone who was in his presence felt kind of mesmerized in a sense.
[00:54:14]  There was no question that he came from these schools, but he was always very quiet about.
[00:54:19]  What these mystery schools were.
[00:54:21]  And even in meetings with remarkable men, a lot of people felt it's allegorical, and it may very well be because there are things in that book, for example, Prince Lubavedsky, and it turned out that the word Lubavedsky meant love of knowledge.
[00:54:38]  So, you know, was he using these names to correlate different characters in that story?
[00:54:43]  So, is it quite an autobiographical story, or is he telling us the long and the short of it?
[00:54:49]  Because he was under pretty strict guidance not to reveal.
[00:54:52]  Where the teachings came from, which is why people who've studied it, like J.G. Bennett, figured out well, we know that he studied with Sufis, and we know that he studied with the Naqshbandi Sufis, and we know he studied some Buddhism, and we know he studied deep, deep, deep in the religious traditions of the Christian church.
[00:55:12]  So he kind of was borrowing and working with serious mystery school groups, which is why the work that he came forward with is so unusual.
[00:55:23]  Again, the fact that he turns up.
[00:55:26]  During World War I, tells me that he is sent there by these mystery schools because the mystery schools, as we've learned, had this decision to make earlier in 1840, and they had to look out over the situation and say, We need to let information out because scientific materialism is stifling human development and spiritual development, and it's going to get worse.
[00:55:50]  So, the fact that they had made this decision to come forward, I think Gurdjieff is a very strong and probably the most You know, kind of the third major impulse.
[00:56:06]  I would say that theosophy and anthroposophy being the two major impulses, that stream, that work.
[00:56:12]  Certain individuals, like the Edgar Casey work, set up the Western esoteric tradition further.
[00:56:19]  That is, there's Christianity, but there's also reincarnation.
[00:56:22]  There's that blending of the powerful Eastern concepts with the Western concepts.
[00:56:27]  When we get to Gurdjieff, we're getting to.
[00:56:32]  Their last major foundational piece, in my opinion.
[00:56:36]  People have often asked me, you know, what about some of these other things that came later, like Elizabeth Clare Prophet or Alice Bailey?
[00:56:44]  And I don't mean to put them down, but they don't have the impact or the reach that we can see in theosophy when it starts, anthroposophy when it starts, or the fourth way groups.
[00:56:56]  These are really the foundations of what the mystery schools put out there.
[00:56:59]  And there are offshoots and there are.
[00:57:01]  There are times when these groups sit back and they watch to see how humanity will develop with the concepts they've put out there because so many things are about experimentation and getting that right combination.
[00:57:14]  So we see this pattern over and over again in ancient texts about these incredible gods come and then they retreat for a while and they watch to see what happens.
[00:57:23]  Well, the mystery schools aren't incredible gods, but they certainly are living with a kind of a higher version of reality, a higher knowledge about things.
[00:57:33]  So I definitely believe.
[00:57:36]  That the Gurdjieff work comes into this.
[00:57:39]  Now, I want to speak about Gurdjieff himself and the things that Ospensky, as a journalist, attested to, so we understand that Gurdjieff did come from a mystery school.
[00:57:47]  Because miraculous things happened in his presence.
[00:57:49]  As a matter of fact, one of the most amazing things is that Gurdjieff could project himself.
[00:57:57]  That is, he could show up in different places at once.
[00:58:01]  This is quite a trick.
[00:58:03]  And somebody as sober minded as Ospensky witnessing this.
[00:58:08]  Couldn't help but be totally amazed.
[00:58:11]  I want to get to that story actually, because it is quite miraculous.
[00:58:17]  And I'm going to check in with Miss Olivia right now.
[00:58:21]  I would like to have me ask a quick question.
[00:58:24]  That would be terrific.
[00:58:26]  Okay.
[00:58:26]  All right.
[00:58:26]  Leilani G has been asking this for a few weeks now.
[00:58:29]  Was Casey influenced by the Mystery Schools and did his path cross with Steiner?
[00:58:36]  Well, it's very interesting because he did readings on Steiner's work.
[00:58:40]  And very often people would come to him and say, you know, like Steiner's Cosmic Memory, Atlantis and Lemuria book, Real.
[00:58:48]  And Casey would say, Well, it's real in as much as he's looking at the Akashic record and giving you his best version of what happened back there.
[00:59:00]  I think this is important because a lot of it is how we feed the impression.
[00:59:05]  You know, when you and I listen to a piece of music, we might describe it differently.
[00:59:11]  When Olivia and I see a movie, we might get a different impression of what it was, but we've both seen the movie.
[00:59:18]  So Steiner is, Casey's attesting to the fact that Steiner can.
[00:59:23]  Read these Akashic records, but what he's taking from them is through the filter of Rudolf Steiner.
[00:59:31]  So, in that sense, they had this kind of interrelation, and there certainly were many people who were Casey followers who were aware of Steiner, if you read a lot of the correspondence for sure.
[00:59:44]  Was Casey aware of the mystery schools?
[00:59:45]  It's quite fascinating.
[00:59:46]  Of course, he mentions in his readings the Great White Brotherhood, the Rosicrucians, some of those ascended masters like Saint Germain, and There's quite an interesting set of readings that deal with this.
[01:00:01]  So there's no question.
[01:00:02]  There's also this very fascinating story, briefly, about this figure with a turban who would show up over and over again in crucial aspects of Casey's life when he was under great stress or when he was being influenced in the wrong way.
[01:00:18]  This figure with the turban would just show up and say things like, You're being led by the wrong people, and just disappear, basically.
[01:00:25]  So there was a master working with him.
[01:00:28]  There's no question about it.
[01:00:31]  There was somebody deep in that mystery school tradition, but the esoteric Christian tradition, knowing Casey for sure.
[01:00:41]  But it's so funny when we think of Casey as a Christian because the Christians of his day wanted to boot him out of town because he talked about, you know, ascended masters, reincarnation, meditation.
[01:00:53]  They thought this guy was the devil, straight up.
[01:00:56]  So, you know, it's interesting for us to look at, you know, he was also a Sunday school teacher.
[01:01:01]  So we have to kind of get an idea of.
[01:01:04]  Of Casey's life.
[01:01:05]  It's loaded with these interesting challenges and contradictions.
[01:01:09]  But I do feel that the tradition that we got from Casey is right in line with this mystery school rollout because at a certain point when they decided, well, we're not going to work through Blavatsky, you know, at a certain point they withdrew and it seems to me they moved into this Steiner Casey Western esoteric tradition.
[01:01:30]  Okay, so one of the interesting things, I'll tell you another quite interesting thing, if you study those Casey readings, you will find.
[01:01:38]  A reading where Casey is speaking, talking about different things, and then he will say, This is Uspensky giving this.
[01:01:46]  Uspensky was still alive.
[01:01:48]  So it's the subconscious mind of Uspensky speaking through Casey in one of those readings.
[01:01:54]  In one of the books that Casey recommended, of course, he recommended books in trance for, you know, so somebody came to him and said, What do I need?
[01:02:04]  Basically.
[01:02:04]  And some of the people he recommended are quite interesting, like William James, but he recommended The Secret Doctrine.
[01:02:10]  By Blavatsky, but he recommended Tertium Morganum and he suggested in a reading that Uspensky was a very major player in a past life, working as someone who kept the records in the Temple Mount.
[01:02:26]  And there's all these strange numbers and allusions that come out.
[01:02:30]  So there's no doubt that Gurdjieff and Uspensky were these major players.
[01:02:33]  But let's find out here about the miraculous.
[01:02:37]  This is what, remember, Uspensky was in search of as a journalist when he went to India.
[01:02:42]  He was looking for the miraculous.
[01:02:44]  His actual lectures were called In Search of the Miraculous.
[01:02:47]  Interestingly enough, the publisher named this book In Search of the Miraculous after those lectures, but this book was called something else.
[01:02:55]  His book on Gurdjieff was called Fragments of an Unknown Teaching.
[01:02:59]  That's his impression.
[01:03:02]  Gurdjieff's work is some strange unknown teaching from a very deep mystery school level.
[01:03:08]  And it's a pretty advanced level because it's still.
[01:03:15]  Resonates so much now, but it's still very hard to understand what the core of it is.

=== The Miraculous Encounter with Gurdjieff (15:55) ===

[01:03:21]  But it's incredibly practical at the same time.
[01:03:24]  So, the miraculous happens when Ospensky's had some tension.
[01:03:30]  He's starting to see through his teacher a little bit, it happens inevitably.
[01:03:33]  And he's learned so much from him, but he's starting to see that Gurdjieff's doing things to make it difficult for the group, and it's excessively difficult, and he actually feels that he's playing people off against each other.
[01:03:45]  And he doesn't approve, and he's starting to separate the teaching from the teacher, which is kind of a crucial stage that someone can get into.
[01:03:54]  But during this time, he has this kind of encounter with Gurdjieff, which is quite remarkable.
[01:04:03]  And I have to say that Aspensky, through his whole life, we understand that he's so honest and he's so earnest looking for the truth.
[01:04:09]  But this story, I think we can take lock, stock, and barrel.
[01:04:13]  It's just absolutely true.
[01:04:14]  So I'm going to read it here.
[01:04:16]  He basically calls in one of Uspensky's friends, who Uspensky is sort of vouching for and saying, Well, this guy really wants the truth and all the rest of it.
[01:04:31]  But Gurdjieff's saying, No, your friend is still lost.
[01:04:34]  He's lost in his image.
[01:04:35]  He's identified with being this big political person, and he's not what you think he is.
[01:04:40]  So he invites him in, basically, to dinner, and he kind of makes a fool out of the friend.
[01:04:46]  Because the friend goes off about these things, and the friend is obviously lying to pump up his ego or whatever.
[01:04:51]  But Ospensky felt that Gurdjieff had essentially been insensitive in the matter, and he was starting to see through him.
[01:04:59]  So there's a lot of tension going on there.
[01:05:01]  So during this one weekend, he goes to Gurdjieff, and Gurdjieff is having him work on a very intense level.
[01:05:12]  And he is experiencing a higher state of mind, and Gurdjieff is very aware of what he's laid on him.
[01:05:18]  Gurdjieff decides to deal with the tension between them in a very interesting way.
[01:05:21]  And this is it, right out of In Search of the Miraculous.
[01:05:25]  And again, you're watching Dark Journalist.
[01:05:28]  I want to recommend now that you go and sign up for our newsletter at darkjournalist.com.
[01:05:33]  It's a free newsletter, and it is something important for us to get into.
[01:05:37]  Also, if you're asking questions, Olivia is handling the questions for later.
[01:05:42]  And we're going to do in the second half of the show get into your questions about Gurdjieff, about the ex steganography.
[01:05:48]  Let's stay on.
[01:05:49]  Topic as much as possible tonight and ask the questions all in caps.
[01:05:52]  Does that sound like it?
[01:05:53]  It's all in caps.
[01:05:54]  Okay.
[01:05:57]  So finally, he gets into this very strange state and he says, This went on for one or two hours.
[01:06:04]  Finally, at the moment of what felt like the climax of contradictions and inner turmoil, there flashed through my mind a thought, following which I very quickly came to a clear and right understanding of all that Gurdjieff had said and of my own position.
[01:06:18]  I saw that Gurdjieff was right, speaking about his friend there, and that what I had considered to be firm and reliable in myself and in reality did not exist.
[01:06:28]  But I had found something else.
[01:06:29]  I knew that he would not believe me and that he would laugh at me if I showed him this other thing, but for myself it was indubitable.
[01:06:36]  And what happened later showed that I was right.
[01:06:39]  For a long time, I sat and smoked in some kind of glade.
[01:06:44]  When I returned to the house, it was already dark on the small veranda.
[01:06:48]  So he's gone to visit Gurdjieff, and he's there with a few people.
[01:06:53]  Thinking that everyone had gone to bed, I went to my own room and went to bed myself.
[01:06:58]  As a matter of fact, Gurdjieff and the others were still at that time having supper on the large veranda.
[01:07:05]  A little while after I'd gone to bed, a strange excitement began in me.
[01:07:09]  My pulse began to beat forcibly.
[01:07:11]  And I again heard Gurdjieff's voice in my chest.
[01:07:15]  Now, Gurdjieff is on the other side of the house, but he's speaking through his chest.
[01:07:20]  This is the kind of deep master technique that he's learned in the mystery school, but it gets deeper.
[01:07:27]  So I heard Gurdjieff's voice in my chest.
[01:07:28]  On this occasion, I not only heard, but I replied mentally, and Gurdjieff heard me and answered me.
[01:07:37]  Remember, Lispensky is a journalist.
[01:07:39]  This is his best account.
[01:07:41]  There was something very strange in this conversation.
[01:07:43]  I tried to find something that would confirm it.
[01:07:45]  As a fact, but could find nothing, and after all, it could have been imagination or a waking dream.
[01:07:50]  Because although I tried to ask Gurdjieff something of a concrete nature that would left no doubt the conversation and his participation in it, I could not invent anything weighty enough.
[01:08:02]  And certain questions I asked him and which he answered, I could have asked and answered myself.
[01:08:06]  I even had the impression that he avoided concrete answers, which later might serve as proof.
[01:08:12]  To one or two of my questions, he intentionally gave indefinite answers.
[01:08:15]  Okay, that's very Gurdjieff style.
[01:08:19]  But the feeling that it was a conversation was very strong and entirely new and unlike anything else.
[01:08:25]  After one long pause, Gurdjieff asked me something that at once put me all on alert and then stopped as if waiting for an answer.
[01:08:34]  What he said suddenly put a stop to all my thoughts and feelings.
[01:08:36]  It was not fear, at least not a conscious fear, when one knows that one is afraid, but I was still shivering and something literally paralyzed me so completely that I could not articulate a single word, although I made terrible efforts wishing to give an affirmative reply.
[01:08:52]  I felt that Gurdjieff was waiting and that he would not wait long.
[01:08:57]  Well, you're tired now, he said at last.
[01:08:59]  We will leave it till another time.
[01:09:01]  It's all telepathy, remember.
[01:09:02]  I began to say something, and I thought I asked him to wait, to give me a little time to get accustomed to this thought.
[01:09:08]  Another time, said his voice.
[01:09:10]  Sleep.
[01:09:10]  And then his voice stopped.
[01:09:12]  I could not go to sleep for a long time.
[01:09:14]  In the morning, as I came out onto the little terrace where he had sat the evening before, Gurdjieff was sitting in the garden 20 yards away near a round table, and there were three other people with him.
[01:09:25]  Ask him what happened last night, said Gurdjieff.
[01:09:28]  For some reason, this made me angry, and I turned and walked towards the terrace.
[01:09:32]  As I reached it, I again heard Gurdjieff's voice in my chest.
[01:09:35]  Stop!
[01:09:37]  I stopped and turned towards Gurdjieff.
[01:09:39]  He was smiling.
[01:09:41]  Where are you going?
[01:09:41]  Sit down here, he said in his ordinary voice.
[01:09:45]  I sat with him, but I could say nothing, nor did I want to talk.
[01:09:47]  At the same time, I felt a kind of extraordinary clarity of thought, and I decided to try to concentrate on certain problems which had seemed to me to be particularly difficult.
[01:09:57]  The thought came to my mind that this unusual state I was in might perhaps give me the answers to questions I could not find in the ordinary way.
[01:10:05]  So he's in a totally heightened state from Gurdjieff communicating with him in this fashion.
[01:10:12]  So they go through this whole interaction and it gets stranger and stranger.
[01:10:19]  And the effect, the impact of this conversation lasts for days.
[01:10:23]  He walks around later when he goes back to Moscow and he can see people's dreams as they're walking up.
[01:10:29]  The street.
[01:10:30]  I mean, it's a completely metaphysical breakthrough for Uspensky, but it's also very, very strange.
[01:10:35]  One of the most unusual things in it, and I have a depiction of what happened here, which is Uspensky is on this train going back to Moscow.
[01:10:48]  And while he's in this, according to Uspensky now, straight in search of the miraculous, Gurdjieff appears out of thin air and interacts with him and discusses things with him.
[01:11:03]  Basically, manifesting himself.
[01:11:06]  So, Gurdjieff obviously, with his Mystery School training, has learned all these things which are so far beyond what we can even imagine.
[01:11:15]  But we've talked about things on this program, like Apothea, when we're talking about invisible planes, when we're talking about the hat trick, when we're talking about pulling rabbits out of hats and the symbolism of the disappearing.
[01:11:28]  So, this quality of a deep, deep Mystery School master being able to pop in and out of reality at will is documented now for us in the Gurdjieff work.
[01:11:38]  By the journalist, Ospensky.
[01:11:40]  It's very powerful testimony, and it's in that book, and it relates very strongly to the things that we're talking about.
[01:11:47]  Now, I want to mention someone else who experienced these very unusual qualities and talents of Gurdjieff, and it's J.G. Bennett, who taught the Gurdjieff work for many years, and he was a student of Ospensky's predominantly.
[01:12:03]  But when Ospensky died, he went there and studied with Gurdjieff for a couple years, and then Gurdjieff died.
[01:12:08]  That's him with Frank Lloyd Wright, who Was very acquainted with the Gurdjieff work, and he was a Gurdjieff student, as was Ida Rolf, if you're familiar with Rolfing.
[01:12:19]  And I could list them on and on.
[01:12:21]  There's a lot of incredible people surrounding the Gurdjieff work.
[01:12:28]  One of them is Del Crowes, and Del Crowes is the same person in working with Gurdjieff.
[01:12:37]  He's doing all of this dance and movement stuff.
[01:12:42]  He's the same guy who developed urythmia with Steiner.
[01:12:44]  So we see this mystery school overlap with Gurdjieff and Steiner, again, coming from very different ends of the spectrum.
[01:12:52]  But Bennett goes to the Priory, which is the Harmonious Development of Man house that Gurdjieff has set up in France.
[01:13:05]  And he wants to become a regular student of his.
[01:13:09]  And he says, So Gurdjieff says to him, What do you want to do and what can you do for us, basically?
[01:13:13]  And he says, I want to learn how to astral travel, you know, leave my body out of body.
[01:13:17]  And I've heard so many things about it.
[01:13:20]  One thing I should say and want to point out, because Bennett is an extraordinary character, and so many of the interesting groups that still exist, that study the Gurdjieff work, come out of the fact that Bennett kept the tradition on and really took all of his Gurdjieff teaching.
[01:13:35]  But interestingly enough, before I get into what happened to him, Bennett here in the 1920s is sent to spy on Gurdjieff.
[01:13:47]  Because of his dealings with the prince in Turkey.
[01:13:50]  And this is how he learns who he is because people are very concerned on the British side about this guy interacting with this Turkish prince.
[01:13:58]  So they send Bennett off to study him.
[01:14:00]  Bennett, instead of spying on him, gets fascinated with the things that he's doing.
[01:14:04]  That's how he gets into the Gurdjieff work.
[01:14:06]  It's quite interesting.
[01:14:07]  So Gurdjieff says, okay, look, I'll teach you tonight how to astral travel and how to have an out of body experience.
[01:14:18]  But basically, you have to.
[01:14:23]  Promise me not to get obsessed with these kinds of little things and to go deep and to work on yourself and like to commit the time and be here and all the rest of it.
[01:14:33]  And Bennett says, This is great.
[01:14:34]  I'm just, I'm all ready for it.
[01:14:35]  So he teaches them this exercise.
[01:14:37]  It doesn't say what the exercise is, but in any case, he's sitting there in a chair and he lifts up out of his body.
[01:14:46]  This is Bennett now in his own description in a book called Witness, which is a wonderful book.
[01:14:53]  And so he leaves his body and he's in the corner.
[01:14:56]  And he's looking down at his own body and he's like, Oh my god, I did, I'm astral traveling, I'm out of body.
[01:15:02]  And he looks down, and Gurdjieff comes in the room and looks at him sitting there.
[01:15:07]  And then he looks up at his astral body and smirks at him and then leaves the room, just a little, huh, you know, you got your wish and takes off.
[01:15:16]  So, Gurdjieff, uh, in those mystery schools, not only learned the astral projection part, but he learned to see in a physical state when people were in the astral.
[01:15:26]  This is quite remarkable.
[01:15:28]  Can I hop in with a question?
[01:15:29]  A cult fan was asking Is this Gurdjieff utilizing Apotheum?
[01:15:34]  Well, there's no question that the invisibility aspect of being able to play with matter on that level is an aspect of the Apotheum effect.
[01:15:48]  Because that whole thing about invisibility is one of the big problems that we have when we talk about the UFO file and the incredible things that happen with people when they go through those experiences and missing time and all the rest of it.
[01:16:02]  The mystery schools, one of the things that they know is they understand the principles that elude us on an everyday level.
[01:16:11]  And what's interesting is what I find in the Gurdjieff work is he's saying it's not so much that these things are hidden and out of reach of humanity, it's that humanity, nine times out of ten, proves not ready to take them on.
[01:16:29]  And this is an interesting perspective because, you know, we We think so much about secrecy and things being hidden, and we know that the mystery schools certainly conceal things out of a kind of protection things as opposed to obscure things from the level of like a government program hiding something for an advantage, for example.
[01:16:54]  So, but it is quite fascinating when you think about it because we're getting into a situation where invisibility becomes an aspect of something that the mystery schools can learn.
[01:17:06]  In the mystery schools.
[01:17:07]  So, what ability is that?
[01:17:10]  It's not technological, it's drawing on something else completely.
[01:17:15]  So, it is quite fascinating.
[01:17:17]  There's another interesting thing I want to say about Gurdjieff now that we've talked about his really mystical powers.
[01:17:25]  There's an incident where a group of students in Ospensky are seeing Gurdjieff off.
[01:17:32]  And this is also in In Search the Miraculous.
[01:17:34]  I don't have the page number handy, but it's in there.
[01:17:37]  And as they're seeing him off, they see him transform physically.
[01:17:41]  Into a different looking person.
[01:17:44]  And what happens, oddly enough, and why he did this is he has this incident where this journalist talks to this, what he thinks is this kind of oil tycoon.
[01:17:55]  And he has this whole conversation going back and forth, and some very strange things come out of that conversation.
[01:18:01]  But this shape shifting quality with the ability to pop and manifest into any situation are remarkable.
[01:18:10]  And if you think about it, these are things that are attributed maybe to yogis in the East, but you never hear about it.
[01:18:18]  You know, I mean, you're not going to hear about Bertolf Steiner popping in out of thin air.
[01:18:21]  I'm sure he probably could do it too.
[01:18:23]  But we're talking about people who exist on a totally different level, and their relationship to their physical selves is totally different.
[01:18:29]  I do know of a story when Casey was in a situation when a doctor who wasn't familiar with his readings was giving him a reading, and he had his hand over his body, and he said, Up, up.
[01:18:42]  And he was talking to his secretary or something, and the body started to raise up.
[01:18:46]  So that's how suggestible Casey was.
[01:18:48]  So, there's something about these deeper aspects of our inner life and our inner energies, inner self, which completely scientific materialism has given up on 100% looking into.
[01:19:02]  And that's a huge gap.
[01:19:04]  And this is the gap I believe that the mystery schools were looking at.
[01:19:07]  But wow, yeah, that's a great question.
[01:19:10]  I'll take another question because I'm going to go right into the next one.
[01:19:12]  You know what?
[01:19:12]  We have had so many conversations about Gurdjieff, and I don't know the answer to this one.

=== Quick Decisions and Deep Psyche (02:39) ===

[01:19:16]  JJK is asking, what were Gurdjieff's thoughts on death?
[01:19:21]  Well, you know, it's very interesting.
[01:19:22]  I first discovered Grodjev now, maybe when I was 15 years old.
[01:19:28]  And what I heard about him was that he, one of the things that he did with his students, was he prepared them to have a conscious death when their time came.
[01:19:42]  And I thought, that's such an unusual thing.
[01:19:45]  This is my first introduction to it.
[01:19:47]  So his thoughts on death were basically that you needed to take all the time, that death should be the major motivator.
[01:19:54]  For helping you evolve in this life and that wasting time through unnecessary things, complaining about things.
[01:20:01]  You know, one of those centers, if you go into the centers of the Gurdjieff work, one of the centers is the negative center.
[01:20:07]  And he always said it was artificial.
[01:20:09]  So, that generation machine, when we see so many people fighting it with positive images, tapes, and all the rest of it, it's something that was inherited through years and years of evolution, but it's not a natural center to the human being to be negative.
[01:20:26]  So, it's completely in the Gurdjieff work, you spend all this time suppressing these negative emotions.
[01:20:32]  And a psychologist would say, oh, you know, if you suppressed your negative emotions, you're going to have problems and you should let that out.
[01:20:39]  Well, I think we can all agree there's some truth to that.
[01:20:42]  But also, if we think about it really, how are you ever going to get a handle on the negative emotions?
[01:20:48]  So, what happens is in the Gurdjieff work, you apply almost a series of artificial things to get you into a different pattern because you can change the way.
[01:20:59]  In the Gurdjieff work, your machine works.
[01:21:01]  I also want to say that there's something in the Gurdjieff work called the formatory apparatus.
[01:21:05]  And this is a big problem in daily life because the formatory apparatus is something deep in the psyche and deep in the mind, which is a function of the mind in evolution over time having to make quick decisions about things.
[01:21:20]  So people size up somebody and make a quick decision about them or a situation or call somebody something.
[01:21:27]  And that quick decision making process is kind of a leftover of a A wrong trail of evolution, and it's kind of hijacked the intellectual center.
[01:21:37]  So, we have these people not thinking very deeply about things, you know, especially in the era of the smartphone and all the rest of it.
[01:21:44]  They're just ingesting all this stuff.
[01:21:46]  And there's this very kind of shallow process going on in their intellectual assessment.
[01:21:52]  And so, the workaround formatory apparatus, I think, is very promising, very interesting.

=== Spying on Gurdjieff's Secrets (03:34) ===

[01:21:56]  Okay, what do you got?
[01:21:57]  There's Kate Towers said something really fascinating here.
[01:22:00]  While traveling on a train in 1915, a journalist asked Gurdjieff what business he and his followers ran.
[01:22:05]  He replied that they were in the solar energy business.
[01:22:09]  And is that the conversation where he says, We always make a profit.
[01:22:15]  And later, Spensky would pull that quote out and say, Oh, he's talking about the mystery schools.
[01:22:21]  And this guy is thinking, Oh, this guy, he's kind of an oil tycoon or whatever, and he's talking about making a profit off World War I.
[01:22:28]  But no, it's the mystery schools that always make a profit because whether mankind is going through this incredible expanse and Arthurian style period, or if it's going through World War I, they're still.
[01:22:44]  Working in the heart of humanity.
[01:22:46]  So they're always making a profit in that sense.
[01:22:48]  Absolutely fascinating.
[01:22:49]  That's a great one.
[01:22:50]  I'm going to flash forward to basically what happens after those strange events with Aspensky as he splits off from Gurdjieff, saying, I could not bring myself to work with him anymore.
[01:23:00]  A lot of people have speculated about why.
[01:23:02]  And at one point, there's a book called Talks with a Devil, which are a series of short stories that Aspensky wrote before he met Gurdjieff.
[01:23:11]  But in the opening, there's an opening intro there by J.G. Bennett who said that.
[01:23:18]  Uspensky took him inside and said, You know, because Bennett was like, Why don't you just work with Gurdjieff?
[01:23:23]  Everybody wants to work with him.
[01:23:24]  He's even more popular with your students than you are.
[01:23:27]  You know, what are you going to do?
[01:23:29]  And Uspensky said, Look, if someone you knew ethically did something that was just over the line, then, and it was like a family member, you know, like, can you imagine the emotions and the things you would feel about?
[01:23:42]  So this is the problem in Uspensky's head.
[01:23:45]  And it turns out, probably 90% probability that Uspensky found out.
[01:23:51]  That Gurdjieff was spying and that Gurdjieff was a spy.
[01:23:56]  And this bothered him tremendously because he felt it did not equate with this kind of spiritual work that Gurdjieff was trying to do.
[01:24:03]  Now, we have to remember that Bennett just first discovered Gurdjieff because he was spying on Gurdjieff.
[01:24:08]  So there's something political in all that.
[01:24:10]  But we've seen these kind of intrigues before.
[01:24:13]  Gene Dixon with Richard Nixon, with the Reagans, you know, giving him this kind of spiritual advice.
[01:24:20]  Certainly in that period, Rasputin and the Tsars, you know.
[01:24:25]  This is an incredible thing that happens.
[01:24:28]  And so, Ospensky, though, had a real tight ethical sense, and the fact that Gurdjieff would be spying probably against the British, would be my guess.
[01:24:44]  And they did, in fact, boot him out of England at a certain point.
[01:24:50]  So, it's probably, there's probably some truth to that.
[01:24:53]  So, this is where a lot of their skirmishes came from.
[01:24:56]  But fundamentally, I think.
[01:25:00]  At the end, there's this weird reconciliation because although they didn't reconcile themselves, when Gurdjieff got the book, Insert the Miraculous, which is such a journalistically tight version of Gurdjieff's work from 1914 to 1922, he said, Uspensky is a good journalist.
[01:25:20]  Now, that's such a high compliment from Gurdjieff because Gurdjieff really, really felt that journalists didn't do their job.

=== Transforming the Gurdjieff Movement (12:42) ===

[01:25:30]  And for him to give him that, Kind of thing.
[01:25:35]  He said, Look, that book, he recommended the book.
[01:25:37]  He said, That is exactly what happened.
[01:25:41]  So he felt that the record, the incredible memory that Ospensky gave to that period was stunning.
[01:25:46]  But they had an incredible split there.
[01:25:49]  And Gurdjieff went his way and he developed all these different unusual things.
[01:25:55]  One of the things that he did was he created this whole dancing troupe who would dance the Enneagram.
[01:26:03]  And they would imply, you know, They would apply these movements, which were these higher movements.
[01:26:08]  Remember that perpetual motion thing?
[01:26:11]  We start to wonder, you know, Olivia and I, a little while ago, saw these whirling dervishes over at the Harvard in one of the theaters there.
[01:26:20]  And it was an incredible thing to witness, if you remember that.
[01:26:23]  It was hypnotizing.
[01:26:25]  Very hypnotizing.
[01:26:25]  And they're kind of in an altered state.
[01:26:27]  And it makes you in an altered state.
[01:26:29]  And I remembered even in the work that I did with the Gurdjieff groups, when I worked with them and spent time with them, those movements that I learned around that atmosphere.
[01:26:40]  And there are people who've worked much longer and deeper than I did with them, but um, they did they had this quality of transforming your frame of mind, so that tells us about that mind body connection again.
[01:26:54]  This is a picture of those groups in action, and um, we will see them here in one of these photos also dancing the Enneagram.
[01:27:06]  Let's take a look at that before we move on.
[01:27:09]  This is Gurdjieff directing them here.
[01:27:16]  And now he learned these dances in the mystery schools, and the dances were for that higher state if you learned the dance properly.
[01:27:26]  But also, he said something else quite fascinating, which is that the dances are books.
[01:27:31]  So, remember that oral tradition of the Epic of Gilgamesh that we talked about earlier?
[01:27:36]  Well, he understood that there were many volumes of books in a particular dance if you knew how to read the dance.
[01:27:42]  So, this is how these traditions kept the mystery school teachings alive, and that is them.
[01:27:48]  Dancing, the Enneagram.
[01:27:50]  Remember, he said it's a moving symbol.
[01:27:53]  And so, something that in our time, in our market crazy culture, in our clickbait culture, we turned into a learn your types game to get a better job.
[01:28:03]  Mystery schools gave us for a very, very different reason.
[01:28:06]  We have to keep that in mind.
[01:28:10]  So, there are people who feel that, you know, one of the things that there's so much to his teaching, and I'll be happy to follow it up in another show.
[01:28:19]  But I think we get kind of a feel for that Gurdjieff movement and the teachings.
[01:28:23]  There's so much there that I recommend people really.
[01:28:26]  There's so much value in it, practical value as well, not just theoretical.
[01:28:33]  But there are people who felt that one of the things that Gurdjieff had said that he would kind of rank himself by, which is that in order to kind of move up to another level, the teacher needed to put a student in his place so that he would rise a student up to his level and then he could move on to the next level.
[01:28:54]  And they feel that with all the different people that he worked with, Ospensky had the greatest potential, but that split that they had ruined that possibility.
[01:29:04]  So it is quite fascinating when we think about it.
[01:29:07]  Gurbjev, at the end of his life, he did, you know, he had a series of hardships and his work output suffered.
[01:29:20]  And when Beelzebub's tales to his grandson came out, which, by the way, Beelzebub is a space traveler who takes his son to Earth periodically every few thousand years to observe the three brained beings.
[01:29:31]  It's quite an unusual allegory story, and it's kind of like his James Joyce story.
[01:29:38]  Meetings with Remarkable Men is a lot easier to read, but boy, Beelzebub's tale is really quite remarkable.
[01:29:47]  This is Gurdjieff at the very end.
[01:29:49]  He had accomplished so much.
[01:29:51]  He had brought the Fourth Way to the West, he had brought the Enneagram through, he had given us the great teaching through Ospensky and worked with J.G. Bennett, who would give us so much over the years.
[01:30:04]  But did he accomplish what the mystery schools set him out to do, or did he break off from the mystery schools and do things his own way?
[01:30:11]  And was that the problem?
[01:30:13]  It's hard to say.
[01:30:15]  But he brought from those mystery schools those great teachings, and he spent his last years in France, and in fact, recorded incredible music on his harmonium, which I have those.
[01:30:28]  And let me tell you, the songs are beautiful.
[01:30:31]  They're just recorded simply with him and his harmonium playing.
[01:30:37]  And there's incredible.
[01:30:38]  Music that he composed, he called Objective Music with Thomas De Hartman, which is also quite remarkable.
[01:30:47]  And whenever someone does a good documentary on Gurdjieff, you might hear that piano kind of in the background setting the tone.
[01:30:54]  Quite remarkable.
[01:30:56]  Gurdjieff brought in incredible people like Uspensky and like Bennett.
[01:31:04]  Bennett would go on and in Sherbourne and In Virginia, he would create these intentional communities.
[01:31:14]  And when people would say, you know, it seems like some of these movements from this period, like the Gurdjieff work or like Theosophy, have really fallen by the wayside, are you worried about the information getting lost?
[01:31:27]  And he said, well, Gurdjieff said to me that the movements that come out of the mystery schools are like seeds, and they're not meant to be any kind of institutional structure that goes on over time.
[01:31:40]  They're about small groups of people getting together and making an impulse into the larger society.
[01:31:47]  And so the goal isn't for them to kind of survive in perpetuity.
[01:31:53]  It's more about making the impact when they hit.
[01:31:57]  So, with that, I think we can call Gurdjieff incredibly successful in terms of transforming so many people.
[01:32:06]  And the Bennett work, of course.
[01:32:09]  You know, is a whole kind of more modern chapter considering this work took place at the beginning of the 20th century.
[01:32:18]  Um, and Bennett's work largely in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, really.
[01:32:24]  And people like Robert Fripp, the guitarist, um, worked closely with the Bennett schools learning this technique.
[01:32:32]  Um, one other thing I want to mention that I, you know, I always dig up interesting things when I do my research.
[01:32:39]  This is Gurdjieff's driver's license, the real thing.
[01:32:44]  From France in the late 40s.
[01:32:46]  But wow, there he is.
[01:32:47]  Yes, the master driving car.
[01:32:50]  Go ahead.
[01:32:51]  Everyone's really curious about the music and they want to know how they can hear it.
[01:32:56]  Well, if you come over to my studio, I'll play for tons of it here.
[01:32:59]  No, I would look up Thomas D. Hartman, D E H R T M A N N.
[01:33:06]  And, you know, you can buy him any good music outlet or Amazon or something like that.
[01:33:12]  But yeah, remarkable stuff.
[01:33:13]  It's beautiful music.
[01:33:15]  It is.
[01:33:15]  And for any of you body workers in the audience, it's wonderful for something like massage or yoga or even meditation.
[01:33:24]  It really sets a tone.
[01:33:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:33:26]  Well, and I've had it that way.
[01:33:27]  It really is something really transformative in the music.
[01:33:33]  So I think how I would leave it is this the mystery schools in the work with Gurdjieff, we can look at the fourth way teaching as really saying, look, we let out the work through Annie Besant, we let out the deep teaching through Blavatsky and Besant, and Colonel Olcott is here.
[01:34:01]  People took it so far, but World War I hit, World War II hit.
[01:34:07]  So it seemed like it did cause a lot of people to go off on this ego trip to say, like, I'm in touch with the Ascended Masters or, you know, whatever it happened to be.
[01:34:17]  And I think that the corrective was the Gurdjieff Fourth Way work, which said, yes, you can have, there are these mystery schools that are guiding.
[01:34:29]  Humanity's destiny, and you can have that evolutionary future, but you need to work for it.
[01:34:35]  It's not something that's going to just be given to you because.
[01:34:38]  So, the work was very important.
[01:34:40]  And one of the things that the Gurdjieff work really specifies is that your level of being, your level of knowledge, has to be commensurate with your level of being.
[01:34:52]  So, that your actual knowledge, if you're some scientist who just has a great mind for making atomic bombs, you can still be on the evolutionary scale.
[01:35:02]  Completely undeveloped because your level of being isn't developed.
[01:35:08]  And your level of being obviously is something that's an inner process that you need to work with these kind of principles and laws in order to develop.
[01:35:18]  So, one of the funny stories he talks about is you know, let's take the case of this incredible professor who is doing all these astronomical equations and this great physicist.
[01:35:28]  And then when he gets home and he's lost his slippers, he takes it out on the maid or freaks out and he goes through this whole turmoil.
[01:35:34]  And he said, We can't call somebody like that evolved.
[01:35:39]  It's a kind of a mismatched thing.
[01:35:41]  So, then in their system of the fourth way, he's saying, Look at all these machines developing and using these different centers.
[01:35:49]  And what's really the thing that they've developed?
[01:35:51]  It's the atomic bomb.
[01:35:53]  And so, we have to be very careful how that evolution proceeds.
[01:35:58]  If it's imbalanced, if it's still working with this kind of greed intellect, then that's what you're going to get.
[01:36:05]  And we're going to get.
[01:36:06]  Lots of mad machines fighting each other, and that's not the future that we want.
[01:36:10]  So, the Gurdjieff teaching is very different.
[01:36:13]  It's not a lot of flowery language, but there's incredible value in it for sure.
[01:36:18]  And with that, I'm going to turn the floor over to Miss Olivia.
[01:36:22]  Wow.
[01:36:23]  Okay.
[01:36:25]  First of all, yes.
[01:36:27]  Okay.
[01:36:27]  Should we?
[01:36:27]  I'm going to let's just dive deep right away.
[01:36:31]  I'm with you.
[01:36:31]  Okay.
[01:36:35]  So, Dark Jedi Order says, does this have a relevant effect on humanity's future?
[01:36:41]  What is Dark Jedi Order anyway?
[01:36:45]  Gotta learn about that one.
[01:36:48]  Does it have a what effect?
[01:36:49]  Relevant.
[01:36:51]  Oh my God.
[01:36:53]  Yeah.
[01:36:54]  Yeah.
[01:36:55]  I mean, think about the Enneagram coming out of the mystery schools and into regular circulation.
[01:37:00]  Thinking about ideas like self remembering or the different centers.
[01:37:06]  It's incredibly relevant.
[01:37:08]  You have to work with the material.
[01:37:10]  It's not that the material shows up and it transforms everything and you don't have to do anything.
[01:37:14]  You'd have to work with the material for it to transform you.
[01:37:17]  So, it's available.
[01:37:19]  And it's quite fascinating because I do run into these situations once in a while where, not in relation to this question, but just thinking about this out loud, where people will say to me, like, you know, well, I'd like to do this about that or whatever it happens to be, but I don't have the time, you know, to work on myself or whatever.
[01:37:41]  And, you know, it is a daily choice.
[01:37:44]  But the truth is, without the work on yourself, it's like anything else.
[01:37:48]  It's just not going to grow, you know.
[01:37:51]  When we talk about doing the show, if I don't do the research for the show, then the show isn't going to grow.
[01:37:57]  You're not going to be here.
[01:37:58]  We're not going to have this conversation.
[01:38:00]  It requires that time, that effort, that work.
[01:38:03]  And it's a great thing when you achieve that because what's happening is you're bringing it out, you're expressing a dynamic that wasn't there before.

=== Daily Choices and Involuntary Manifestation (15:31) ===

[01:38:13]  And this is what great artists understand because it's always in the process of creation, whether it's music or whether it's making a movie or video, what it happens to be, a great piece of art.
[01:38:25]  Or, like that incredible torsion fountain that we saw in the last episode, which I'm still kind of wild about.
[01:38:34]  By the way, I showed the Greek version of this poster earlier, and this is Alexander Salzman, 1923 design for the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.
[01:38:45]  It says to know, to understand, to be.
[01:38:49]  That's the English version of that.
[01:38:53]  Promise to that one.
[01:38:56]  But, yeah, great question.
[01:38:56]  We're on.
[01:38:57]  Okay.
[01:38:57]  Charlotte Cowell.
[01:38:59]  What does DJ think of Gurdjieff's discovery of the Gospel of Judas?
[01:39:06]  Well, the Gospel of Judas was discovered much, much later.
[01:39:11]  So he did say things about Judas that Judas' role was predetermined by Christ and that we can't think of Judas as this villain.
[01:39:20]  He was.
[01:39:22]  There's a very interesting story about Bennett, and, you know, these strange abilities that Gurdjieff had come to me over and over again.
[01:39:29]  But.
[01:39:31]  Bennett was talking with Gurdjieff about this and trying to absorb this idea that Judas was meant to do exactly what he did, and it had to kind of play out this way.
[01:39:41]  And as he was doing it, Gurdjieff put his arm around him as he was talking about it and really kind of gave him the sense of it.
[01:39:47]  And he said, Suddenly, I had this incredible roller coaster sensation that I was floating back through time to the time of Christ, and the whole thing made sense to me.
[01:39:55]  And then in a minute, like in a second, like that, I was back in the room.
[01:40:01]  It seems like when you achieve this level of working in those mystery schools, time also, you know, we talk about Apotheum, you know, destroying this sense of time with people and the whole concept of missing time and the UFO file phenomena.
[01:40:16]  This is the type of thing that's happening with people who are around Gurdjieff when he talks about these things.
[01:40:21]  But quite interesting, yeah, and the story of Judas, of course, we know so little about it.
[01:40:26]  But the Dead Sea Scrolls and the recent discoveries around that, we're starting to learn more.
[01:40:31]  Okay.
[01:40:32]  Kate Tower, did Gurdjieff have any contact with Madame Blavatsky, Tesla, or Annie Besant?
[01:40:40]  Well, what's interesting is that Ospensky now, there are these levels in Theosophy where this is another interesting thing they did.
[01:40:47]  They had three levels.
[01:40:48]  The bottom level was just anyone who wanted to come in and learn about it.
[01:40:52]  So when they would have these events, you'd have the bottom level with all these regular people hanging out.
[01:40:56]  The second level is people who maybe had written something about it, who were journalists, were covering it, or, you know, different guests.
[01:41:05]  Who had some higher affiliation with it.
[01:41:07]  But the top level was reserved for people who really understood it and were part of the theosophical thing.
[01:41:15]  And Ospensky was part of that top circle with Theosophy before Gurdjieff sort of came along and really took, because Ospensky taught the system without Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff's fourth way system, without him, all the way to the end of his life.
[01:41:33]  And he felt that in the system, the way to get to the higher emotional system, aspects of the system, in the centers, because they had all these centers set up, as you'll find out when you read the Gurdjieff work.
[01:41:51]  That there are these two centers, the higher intellectual and the higher emotional, and the higher emotional and higher intellectual function in a symbolic language.
[01:42:01]  Regular language is gone.
[01:42:03]  He felt at the end of his life, and he said to his students, that the piece that's missing that Gurdjieff didn't give me is how to get to the higher emotional, to the higher intellectual centers.
[01:42:18]  That's where the breakthrough for humanity comes.
[01:42:21]  And that's the key I wasn't given.
[01:42:22]  I developed the system as best I could.
[01:42:24]  But before that, before this whole period, Uspensky had written Tertium Organum, which really, in many ways, sounds like a philosophical version of Theosophy.
[01:42:37]  And later, in a new model of the universe, we can see him doing all kinds of experiments with astral travel and writing a book on tarot.
[01:42:45]  So, yes, it's quite fascinating.
[01:42:49]  But Gurdjieff, now, Gurdjieff did not meet Blavatsky.
[01:42:53]  The timing is not right there because she died in 1893, so he would have been quite young.
[01:42:58]  But Gurdjieff used to tell a very funny story about Blavatsky.
[01:43:02]  It was completely not true.
[01:43:04]  But he used to say, Oh, yes, she met me when I was 18, when she was traveling and she fell in love with me.
[01:43:12]  So he had fun with it.
[01:43:13]  He regarded theosophy, it's interesting because there's kind of disdain around theosophy, but so does Zospensky kind of develop a disdain.
[01:43:23]  And it's not with what it started out to be, but it's with the kind of fantasy occult, occult fantasy that it became, where In Steiner's words, it became the plaything for a number of different occult forces.
[01:43:38]  So it lost after that great period when Blavatsky died and then Besant took over for a decade and it seemed to really flower.
[01:43:47]  And then with the world teacher of things and the court cases, it really floundered.
[01:43:54]  Okay, John Kay, why is it called the fourth way?
[01:43:57]  Because the other three ways to immortality, immortality, and evolution on a spiritual level, Physical and mental level are the way of the fakir, the way of the yogi, and the way of the monk.
[01:44:11]  And that is the way of devotion, the way of knowledge, mental mastery, and the way of self mastery.
[01:44:23]  So, mind over matter physically.
[01:44:24]  So, the fakir, we don't understand fakirs very well.
[01:44:27]  I don't think we have any good.
[01:44:28]  Occasionally, you know, we have these things about mind over matter, walk on hot coals.
[01:44:32]  And I remember when Tony Robbins used to do that, and people would sign up for the workshop.
[01:44:36]  And they had to stop doing that because some people just could not.
[01:44:39]  Do it, and so they end up burning themselves.
[01:44:42]  But the mind over matter thing is very important, and we don't think very much about suffering in society.
[01:44:49]  Everything is to make you comfortable so that I can sell you more products and all the rest of it.
[01:44:54]  And there's nothing wrong with being comfortable, but I feel that we have to be careful about the kind of pampering of society.
[01:45:00]  That's never a good thing.
[01:45:02]  And so, you know, it's interesting because when we look at it, fakirs.
[01:45:10]  There's a whole kind of tradition of them, and what they do is the more pain they put their body through, the more that they're overcoming the body.
[01:45:19]  And this is a tradition that's been going on thousands of years in India.
[01:45:22]  So, what do we, with a couple of hundred years here in America, really understand about that tradition?
[01:45:30]  But in the Gurdjieff work, it's one of those ways to immortality.
[01:45:35]  So, quite fascinating.
[01:45:36]  But yeah, great question.
[01:45:37]  Okay, the cult priestess, please ask DJ about the Kunda buffer.
[01:45:42]  The Kunda buffer.
[01:45:43]  Well, that is fascinating.
[01:45:46]  There's a lot in the Gurdjieff work about buffers, first of all.
[01:45:51]  And it's very interesting because, you know, we do encounter people who use things like they tell themselves a certain story.
[01:46:00]  And, you know, when something happens, they can't really access the reality of it, they can't deal with it, they employ a buffer.
[01:46:09]  And we've all done this, we all have it.
[01:46:11]  As a matter of fact, Gurdjieff said that.
[01:46:13]  We have to become aware of buffers, but we never want to dissolve them completely because if we do that without the person being prepared for it, it can completely dissolve the personality structure, which is a disaster.
[01:46:24]  So we don't want that to happen.
[01:46:27]  But what I think is interesting is the Kunda buffer is this very unusual quality, which is tricky because, in a sense, it makes us see everything upside down.
[01:46:41]  And there's no question that.
[01:46:45]  What Gurdjieff was doing, employing the term kunda, was he was drawing on the kundalini craze that's going on with theosophy.
[01:46:52]  He's saying, hey, you know, here's my version of theosophy.
[01:46:55]  Try this.
[01:46:56]  The kunda buffer will make you see everything backwards because it's kind of a humanity, it's one of the defects of humanity, basically.
[01:47:05]  So, you know, we see things as we want to see them and not as they are.
[01:47:11]  And this is a very interesting piece of the Gurdjieff teaching, which is that.
[01:47:17]  Most of the problem that resides in our human evolution is the mental relationship to the physical relationship, and that the mental is off doing its own thing.
[01:47:27]  So, there's this fabulous story that comes from the East, which is the situation of humanity is this that there's a driver who is asleep, and there's a horse.
[01:47:40]  There are these horses in this carriage.
[01:47:41]  So, it's the horse and carriage metaphor.
[01:47:43]  The driver's asleep, and the horses have blinkers on.
[01:47:49]  And that the person in the back, who is the master, he's yelling to the driver saying, Hey, wake up.
[01:47:56]  And so the whole thing is kind of swerving out of control.
[01:47:59]  That is the state of humanity according to the Kurdish system.
[01:48:03]  And in some of the examples that he gave of that, actually the master is bound and gagged in the back seat.
[01:48:09]  So it's quite interesting.
[01:48:11]  But a great question.
[01:48:12]  And of course, there's a lot that there's so much we could talk about with buffers and the Kunda buffer.
[01:48:17]  I can tell that we're going to come back and talk more about the Kurdish.
[01:48:20]  Part two, but give me more questions.
[01:48:22]  Okay.
[01:48:23]  48 Tom W. says, The way of the monk is asceticism, which is passive, which leaves one vulnerable to the forces of the moon.
[01:48:31]  Could you go into the moon and Gurdjieff?
[01:48:34]  Well, it's interesting.
[01:48:35]  In the Gurdjieff work, it's fascinating because you're under a series of laws, and this is the nature of the problem.
[01:48:41]  There are too many laws in your normal state of kind of sleepy, you know, unspiritual, unawakened quality.
[01:48:49]  And I don't mean politically awakened.
[01:48:50]  I mean, in a spiritual sense, because politics always changes, and you're awake one minute and asleep the next.
[01:48:57]  So, in the ordinary conditions of life, if you're not aware, if you're not aware of your machine and the way that it works and the way that your evolutionary possibilities are, then you are under excessive amounts of laws.
[01:49:12]  And the more that you study yourself and the more you get sort of free of those different laws, the easier it is for you to have control over your.
[01:49:21]  Own expression.
[01:49:22]  So very often they talked about, you know, well, the Gurdjieff system seems to you to want to not express your emotions.
[01:49:30]  And what Gurdjieff had to say about that was that no, it's not that.
[01:49:33]  It's that basically you want to stop their involuntary manifestation.
[01:49:41]  So you want to be able to exercise certain things, you know, like anger, like sadness, or whatever it happens to be.
[01:49:47]  But their involuntary manifestation is something that goes again to what you're able to choose.
[01:49:53]  So rather than The emotion choosing you, you choose the emotion.
[01:49:57]  That would be the good way to sum it up.
[01:49:58]  Something very specific about the moon that he put forward, though, which I think is amazing, is that the moon, when we're in that sleepy state, he said humanity becomes food for the moon.
[01:50:11]  And when they were talking about World War I, it was fascinating because he said basically the moon is cleaning up because the moon, in our interaction with it, has us functioning under excessive laws because of its power here on Earth.
[01:50:24]  So one of the things in the Gurdjieff work is.
[01:50:27]  You need to get beyond this influence that the moon has.
[01:50:31]  It's quite remarkable and it's deep.
[01:50:33]  It's a deep teaching.
[01:50:34]  Let me tell you, you won't find it.
[01:50:36]  It's not in anthroposophy, it's not in theosophy.
[01:50:39]  It's totally unique.
[01:50:41]  And over and over again, we find that in the fourth way.
[01:50:43]  Food for the moon, just keep that in mind, especially with this eclipse and green moon going on.
[01:50:49]  That's quite an appropriate question.
[01:50:50]  Okay, Olivia.
[01:50:52]  Okay, so Troubadour 2 says about the fourth way, Gurdjieff said, I don't know what you know about Christianity.
[01:50:59]  But for the benefit of those who know already, I will say that this is esoteric Christianity.
[01:51:04]  Yes, he did.
[01:51:06]  Go ahead.
[01:51:07]  And Tricky Vicky says I'm studying esoteric Christianity, and it's very involved in numerology and astrology.
[01:51:12]  And regular Christians have no idea how many ancient truths have been purposely withheld from them.
[01:51:18]  No question.
[01:51:19]  Well, let's take Origen and writing out in, I think it's the third century, writing reincarnation out of the entire Christian theology.
[01:51:29]  That's the problem.
[01:51:32]  And You know, it's interesting because one of the things that Ospensky studied before Gurdjieff came along was recurrence, which is something that Frederick Nietzsche came up with, which is that you're going to have this recurrence of your life over and over again.
[01:51:49]  The same life, not reincarnation, but recurrence, like Groundhog Day, basically.
[01:51:54]  So Ospensky wrote a book called The Strange Life of Ivan Ossikin, which, by the way, if you've ever read that book, it has an incredible power to it.
[01:52:02]  It's just very unusual.
[01:52:04]  But it's this person who, by the way, This is really autobiographical because over and over again, Ospensky was having deja vu in his life and even for people and situations.
[01:52:15]  And he would dream about people who were missing from that scenario.
[01:52:20]  So, this whole theory of eternal recurrence was very near and dear to him, but it's not part of the Gurdjieff work.
[01:52:26]  It's just something that he studied.
[01:52:27]  So, one time he came to Gurdjieff and he said, Well, is this true?
[01:52:32]  And Gurdjieff said, Yeah, it's true.
[01:52:34]  And then, about a minute later, he said, Look, you know, The minute I tell you it's true, how happy you become that your theory is true.
[01:52:42]  And so, but he felt that the way that Gurdjieff had said it, that it was true.
[01:52:46]  And they said, Why would this be the kind of thing that the mystery schools would hold back from humanity?
[01:52:52]  Or why would you hold it back in the system?
[01:52:54]  Why wouldn't it be in the fourth way system?
[01:52:56]  For that matter, why wouldn't reincarnation be in the fourth way system?
[01:53:00]  And Gurdjieff said, Look, even if I admitted to you that these things are true, what would be the point of including them in the system?
[01:53:07]  We already have people procrastinating on developing themselves in this life.
[01:53:11]  If they're thinking, Well, I have other lives or I have recurrences to do all this in, what's the rush?
[01:53:17]  And that would kill all of the.
[01:53:18]  Incredible kind of important focus that happens when somebody realizes, oh my God, I have to work on myself and it has to be now because the time, the window of opportunity is here and I need to apply myself in this situation.
[01:53:32]  Quite fascinating.
[01:53:33]  Okay, keep going.
[01:53:34]  Okay, Glenn Hunt, is the concept of self the biggest single diversion from truth?
[01:53:43]  Well, I mean, it's interesting.

=== Volatile Healing Energy and Sabood (09:39) ===

[01:53:45]  I think, see, the thing is, you need a healthy ego structure, but you need to.
[01:53:50]  Know how to give it up.
[01:53:52]  So there's a lot of different ways to look at that question that you just asked.
[01:53:58]  I think the way to look at self is it's pretty easy, the way that I've figured it out is yourself really relates so much to your personality.
[01:54:08]  So when you get even a little bit beyond your personality, you start to get into the kind of zone where you can see things true.
[01:54:17]  One of the things that Edgar Cayce said about why he was able to lift up out of himself.
[01:54:22]  And go and do these readings and come back with this incredible information and take these kind of spiritual journeys that you'd expect someone like, you know, an ayahuasca or something like that to put himself in this trance level.
[01:54:35]  And he said, I can do this because I can lay myself aside totally for periods of time and then come back and pick it up.
[01:54:44]  So that's kind of how I would view your question, which is the self part is tied in with the personality.
[01:54:49]  If we can learn to put it down like a book and not be so identified.
[01:54:54]  With it, then I think we're probably better off.
[01:54:57]  Uh, JJK is asking about the law of seven.
[01:55:00]  Can you talk about that?
[01:55:02]  Yeah, well, the law of seven and law of three require kind of greater dissertation than I can give on this program.
[01:55:10]  But, um, the law of seven and law of three are core elements to the Gurdjieff work, and I do think you know it's so interesting because Gurdjieff takes the Pythagoras work and he goes to the musical scale and he says, you know what.
[01:55:26]  Really, what they understood and what they preserved in the musical scale is the law of three and the law of seven and the law of octaves.
[01:55:34]  And Bennett in particular tuned in on this, and there's no skip.
[01:55:43]  There's a half step, there's no full step between E and F and B and C in the musical scale.
[01:55:50]  And it is in that area that Gurdjieff calls them shocks.
[01:55:59]  In the entire setup of the cosmos in terms of the energy system.
[01:56:05]  And that the musical scale there is recording this shock between E and F and B and C.
[01:56:12]  And that what's happening there is they're giving us an idea of what happens basically in the development and creation process of anything.
[01:56:21]  And that studying that will understand basically what scientists are studying with the Big Bang is preserved by the mystery schools in the musical tone scale.
[01:56:31]  And the law of octaves is a piece of that, also.
[01:56:34]  I could do a whole, remember, music is the core of the Gurdjieff work, by the way.
[01:56:41]  He felt that the dance component and the music component, he could just as easily teach it.
[01:56:47]  In fact, he preferred those as teaching tools to doing the books and doing the lectures and things like that.
[01:56:55]  So there's no question about it.
[01:56:56]  Wow.
[01:56:57]  Absolutely amazing work, though, if you think about it.
[01:57:00]  So, a cult priestess was likening the Wonder Woman spin to the Whirling Dervishes.
[01:57:06]  And VV said, Has DJ seen David Bowie's Black Star music video?
[01:57:12]  And were the odd dancing motions in it possibly communicating a method of reaching a higher state that Bowie knew of?
[01:57:19]  Well, anyone who has any kind of esoteric training will tell you that the Black Star video is incredible in that regard.
[01:57:27]  First of all, he's wearing at the end the outfit that he wore during that Kether to Malkuth Tree of Life period, 75, 76, of the work that he was doing.
[01:57:41]  Bowie is somebody who had an incredible grasp of mysticism.
[01:57:44]  And he had an incredible grasp and interrelated with these things like Buddhism and also occult things.
[01:57:54]  He was very into Alistair Crowley's work at one point, but then said, you know, it's Crux, I've forgotten.
[01:58:00]  But at a certain point, it really had him in there, and he was really going through a paranoid phase with it.
[01:58:06]  But I will say this about Black Star, which is Bowie did incredible things artistically that I think he brought things into the artistic realm that we just don't see in terms of.
[01:58:17]  Popular music, especially.
[01:58:19]  But the things going on in that video about life and death, so close to his own death, are absolutely fascinating, as is the concept of Black Star, which, by the way, Black Star has very deep esoteric significance.
[01:58:35]  And for him to use it, I think, is kind of revealing that deep esoteric side at the end of his life.
[01:58:41]  So, yeah, a remarkable, remarkable artist.
[01:58:44]  And I had the incredible good fortune to meet him not once, but twice.
[01:58:48]  And That, you know, that was quite an experience.
[01:58:53]  I can tell you that.
[01:58:54]  Okay.
[01:58:54]  Okay.
[01:58:54]  Jay Gray Sweater, significance of Crowley visiting the Priory.
[01:58:59]  Hey, well, there's somebody out there who knows the legend of Crowley visiting the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which is at the Priory in France.
[01:59:12]  And he shows up and he hangs out for a while and he's there to kind of like, I guess, detox from all his heroin use.
[01:59:19]  But what happens is that Gurdjieff sees him.
[01:59:23]  Talking to one of the servant boys, I want to say servant boys, but they're boys who work there.
[01:59:29]  And he's saying, You'll make a nice demon, you know, or something like that.
[01:59:33]  And Gurdjieff says, You know, you're really in the wrong place.
[01:59:37]  Like, basically, get out.
[01:59:39]  And Crowley stands up.
[01:59:41]  There's a weird standoff between Mystery School Master One and Strange Black Magician Two.
[01:59:47]  And basically, Gurdjieff says, You know, on the grounds that you're unclean, you shouldn't be in this environment.
[01:59:56]  And Crowley said, Well, you know, I don't have to stand for this.
[01:59:58]  Basically, you know, I've been in Masonic rites, I've been in deep this, I've been in deep that.
[02:00:03]  So they have kind of a shouting match, and Crowley leaves.
[02:00:06]  It was quite wild.
[02:00:07]  Also, by the way, there's a very interesting rumor, which I believe is true, that FDR, before he was president, went to Gurdjieff at the Priory to get treatments to see if he could heal this crippling condition that he had.
[02:00:20]  Okay.
[02:00:21]  Great question.
[02:00:23]  Tillargoon, what is your take on J.G. Bennett's experience with Sabood?
[02:00:28]  Well, It's really fascinating, and Sabood is kind of the precursor to Reiki, but certainly a hell of a lot more volatile.
[02:00:38]  And Subud is really this incredible energy.
[02:00:43]  And Pak Suba was the teacher of this.
[02:00:46]  And interestingly enough, when Gurdjieff talked to Bennett at the end of his life, there's a very touching scene where Bennett goes to visit him in the hotel, hospital.
[02:00:59]  And, you know, he's seen Gurdjieff come back from amazing things like car accidents.
[02:01:04]  And then the next day he's fine.
[02:01:05]  And it's very strange recuperative abilities that he had.
[02:01:09]  So he's there with them.
[02:01:11]  With him in the hospital, and Gurdjieff is saying to him, You know, when I leave, basically look to the east for the succession of the work.
[02:01:23]  He gives him this idea to look to the east, not the west, oddly enough.
[02:01:28]  And he's looking at him and he's thinking to himself, Wow, you know, Gurdjieff finally, like he's looking like an older man who's dying now.
[02:01:37]  And so he leaves and he goes to kind of get coffee or something.
[02:01:40]  And he says, Going back, he encounters Gurdjieff.
[02:01:43]  In the hallway, he bumps into him and he looks at him, and Gurdjieff looks young and normal.
[02:01:49]  So, the powers of Gurdjieff in this regard, you know, something incredible about what he learned in those schools.
[02:01:59]  But anyway, going to Paxuba, this is why Bennett was looking to the East and ran across Paxuba's work.
[02:02:07]  And Subud was this process where people would kind of go into these states of healing and.
[02:02:14]  Energizing the things kind of that happened with Reiki, but what was happening was if it became too incredible, you know, it would be overpowering.
[02:02:25]  So, these people would be great for 30 days, they'd be hanging out with Paxuba, they'd be charged, their lives were transformed.
[02:02:31]  It was like being in Christ's presence or something.
[02:02:34]  And then, 30 days later, they'd have you know, they'd commit suicide or something.
[02:02:38]  So, it was this volatile healing energy that was meant to be a good thing, but too often spiraled out into this other thing.
[02:02:48]  And there's a lot of teachings in relation to Kundalini that come up around this.
[02:02:55]  And I've spent a lot of time speaking with people who are good at that kind of meditation of handling Kundalini.
[02:03:02]  And it seems to me that there's a fire in the Kundalini force, which, if you bring it out too suddenly, or if through like breathing exercises or whatever it happens to be, If it's going into centers and you're not ready for it, it causes all kinds of emotional and physical problems.

=== Esoteric Teachings Left Out (03:29) ===

[02:03:24]  So, we don't understand Kundalini very well.
[02:03:26]  We need a much deeper understanding of it.
[02:03:28]  But let me tell you, when I understood and read about Subud, it sounds amazing, but it seems like it unleashes that Kundalini and it's a very volatile kind of energy.
[02:03:41]  But, great question.
[02:03:42]  Well, somebody made a great comment there and it was abandon the system.
[02:03:47]  They are quoting.
[02:03:49]  I forget who that is.
[02:03:50]  Can you go back and find out who that was?
[02:03:52]  It was just recently.
[02:03:54]  It was Jay Gray Sweater again.
[02:03:55]  Yeah, great, great point.
[02:03:57]  This is what Uspensky said at the end of his life after teaching the Gurdjieff system since 1914 to 1947.
[02:04:06]  That's 33 years of involvement.
[02:04:09]  And by the way, after 1925, completely solo.
[02:04:13]  So, really, 22 years on his own teaching it and forbidding his students to say the name of Gurdjieff, by the way.
[02:04:19]  Which is also quite interesting, thinking he could separate the teaching from the teacher.
[02:04:24]  But at the end, he said he confided to his closest students Gurdjieff left something out.
[02:04:31]  He didn't tell me how to get to the higher emotional, higher intellectual center, which, by the way, are two aces in the deck of cards.
[02:04:44]  So, two out of the four.
[02:04:48]  Quite remarkable that he left this thing out.
[02:04:51]  And so, before Ospensky died, he went to his own students and he said, You know what?
[02:04:57]  Abandon the system, find some other way.
[02:05:01]  That's quite remarkable.
[02:05:06]  He'd learned so much, but he felt that Gurdjieff had left something vital out.
[02:05:13]  Or was it that the mystery schools had given Gurdjieff everything but the keys to open that up?
[02:05:20]  It's a fascinating question.
[02:05:21]  And for people who study the fourth way work, wow.
[02:05:24]  I mean, that is the question.
[02:05:26]  Why did Ospensky say abandon at the end?
[02:05:29]  Amazing.
[02:05:32]  Okay.
[02:05:32]  John Kay, if the mystery schools release tools like the Enneagram for human development, how do they prevent these tools from being commodified and trivialized, like I think happens often with the Enneagram?
[02:05:43]  Well, this is the way Gurdjieff described it.
[02:05:45]  He said that there's the esoteric circle and there's the exoteric circle.
[02:05:52]  And that what happens at certain crucial times, just like what Rudolf Steiner said in relation to this 1840 incident and C.G. Harrison, The mystery schools decide they have to let something out into that esoteric, from the esoteric into the exoteric.
[02:06:09]  So basically, from the secret kept world into that everyday influence world.
[02:06:15]  Now, what happens is these things, which are not mechanical when they're in the exoteric, esoteric circle, when they go into the exoteric, everyday life circle, even though they're the high principles, it's like when Christ says, Love your enemy.
[02:06:31]  This is a very, very advanced.
[02:06:41]  What's happening is when you go into that, after a certain point, you have these preachers saying, Love your enemy, or whatever, you know, and it becomes just something that's said.

=== Turning the Other Cheek (14:20) ===

[02:06:53]  It doesn't have the power anymore because it becomes that everyday phrase that we know, turn the other cheek, or whatever it is.
[02:07:00]  Of course, there's the crucial thing that Gurdjieff says in In Search of the Miraculous, which is that the what to do is always out there.
[02:07:10]  Exoteric public world, but the how to do it is kept hidden in the esoteric world because the how to do it is always persecuted and always sought after and always sought for exploitation.
[02:07:20]  So there's what to do and how to do it.
[02:07:22]  So, if I say to you, as Christ said to his followers, turn the other cheek, your ability to do it, you may want to do it, but Gurdjieff's point is the how to do it is kept hidden.
[02:07:41]  How can you turn the other cheek?
[02:07:42]  How do you develop enough physical?
[02:07:45]  Willpower over your physical reactions to prevent yourself from striking out at somebody who strikes at you.
[02:07:52]  So there is a way to do that, but that way is kept hidden.
[02:07:56]  That is the sacred doctrine, as it were.
[02:07:58]  Fascinating stuff.
[02:08:00]  Okay, a cult fan, ask what bees' dances have to do with spiritual dance and what the ritual of the bee dance has to do with magic slash higher mind techniques.
[02:08:09]  These dances or bee dances?
[02:08:11]  Bee dances.
[02:08:13]  You mean the dance of the bees?
[02:08:14]  The dance of the bees.
[02:08:15]  Well, When I was showing the bees earlier, they're the symbol for the Sarmoon Brotherhood.
[02:08:21]  But one of the things that Bennett talked about with the Naqshbandi, who were the Sufi group that he had determined from his own study that Gurdjieff had taken certain key elements of his teachings from by working with them, you know, not by ripping them off.
[02:08:43]  He had determined that they also were about keeping, you know, it's like the Noah's Ark thing.
[02:08:50]  We keep the knowledge.
[02:08:52]  The Sarmoon Brotherhoods.
[02:08:54]  They're the bees that keep the honey.
[02:08:56]  That's the knowledge that will guide humanity in the future.
[02:08:59]  So it is quite fascinating.
[02:09:01]  When I think of what Gurdjieff was saying about the dance part, first of all, the dances lift you into a higher state of mind.
[02:09:10]  That's the first thing that's crucial.
[02:09:12]  The dancers doing the actual playing it out, they're in a higher state because they're utilizing the sacred moves.
[02:09:22]  So the whole thing, the kind of whirling dervish type thing that Gurdjieff.
[02:09:27]  Put out there is quite remarkable because, with him saying that there are many books in the dances, then we're starting to understand where these native traditions come from.
[02:09:38]  We think so much about, like, oh, you know, oral traditions, they pass things down word for word of a particular legend.
[02:09:44]  But now we understand the dances are books, so we have to be able to read the dances.
[02:09:49]  This makes a lot more sense.
[02:09:50]  This is how the traditions are passed down.
[02:09:53]  Now, one thing I do want to point out is something that was brought over from the Gurdjieff work.
[02:09:58]  To the west, which never appeared here, is something called the stop exercise, which he could have his dancers do.
[02:10:05]  Now, uh, when he brought it over from Moscow to New York, he would, uh, Orage, who was the person who published the New Age Journal, set up these dance performances for Gurdjieff and his troupe.
[02:10:20]  And Gurdjieff would have these dancers do this whole routine and then leap at the audience, kind of like slam dancing or what is that, crowd surfing.
[02:10:31]  Leap at them, and then he would yell, Stop.
[02:10:34]  And the command for stop was to let every single impulse in your physical body stop.
[02:10:42]  So, you know, sometime we do one of these shows, I'll have Olivia yell, Stop, and we'll all just stop what we're doing for about 10 seconds till she says, Continue.
[02:10:53]  But the stop exercise is very crucial because apparently it represents that real control over the physical body.
[02:11:00]  And that's in the dance that Gurdjieff taught.
[02:11:04]  Okay.
[02:11:05]  Okay, HP, what is the story about Gurdjieff knowing and teaching Stalin and also giving the Nazis the swastika?
[02:11:13]  Yeah, they're both rumors that I don't believe.
[02:11:17]  You know, there's no good proof that he knew Stalin.
[02:11:21]  And they say that there was a school that Stalin went to that was close to where he grew up in Tiflis, but I've never seen anything solid about that.
[02:11:32]  And in terms of Hitler, well, Gurdjieff lived in occupied France.
[02:11:39]  And the Nazis didn't really harass him much.
[02:11:45]  But then again, by that point, he was kind of a low profile figure.
[02:11:49]  So I've never made too much of that either.
[02:11:51]  And he certainly never expressed anything remotely supportive of Nazism or Stalin, for that matter.
[02:11:59]  Okay.
[02:11:59]  Morpheus 622 says Gurdjieff was a direct spiritual descendant of a European master who lived for hundreds of years.
[02:12:05]  Can't recall his name.
[02:12:06]  Do you know his name?
[02:12:07]  Is this true?
[02:12:08]  Well, see, this is tricky because if you're referring to the book by.
[02:12:13]  Idris Shah, which is about the teachers of Gurdjieff.
[02:12:18]  There's a lot of holes in that book.
[02:12:20]  And Shah also pulled some very sketchy things on Bennett because after Gurdjieff had died, Shah showed up.
[02:12:30]  And Shah wrote an incredible book called The Sufis.
[02:12:33]  So he certainly had some value.
[02:12:37]  But when he came forward to Bennett after Gurdjieff died, and he said, Bennett had set up Sherbourne House, which was in England, which was a fabulous place to continue the teaching.
[02:12:49]  And basically, Shaw showed up to Bennett and said, You know, sign Sherborne over to me because I'm connected to the mystery schools that Gurdjieff was a part of and all the rest of it.
[02:13:00]  And then Bennett, as an act of incredible non attachment, signed it over.
[02:13:06]  And the first rule that Shaw made was that Bennett wasn't allowed on the grounds.
[02:13:11]  So we could see where he was coming from.
[02:13:13]  So I've never really trusted his work, but yeah, it certainly is interesting.
[02:13:18]  Okay.
[02:13:19]  What else you got?
[02:13:19]  Okay, Brandy, Steiner is dead, Gurdjieff is dead, all the great masters are dead.
[02:13:23]  So, what do you think is the most authentic modern connection to the history schools that is accessible to ordinary people?
[02:13:30]  Well, I want you to go deeper because, of course, these people are, they come and they give us a teaching and they live in their period of time.
[02:13:41]  They make an impulse for something.
[02:13:43]  But in all of these schools that we're talking about, theosophy, anthroposophy, and the Gurdjieff work, they've all identified this period that we're in.
[02:13:53]  As an opportunity to work with the ideas and the ideals they brought forward.
[02:13:57]  As a matter of fact, one of the things that Gurdjieff said was that we should train small groups for societal collapse, like 100 at a time, to work with these higher principles.
[02:14:08]  So he wasn't looking for this worldwide organization that was going to save everything.
[02:14:12]  He was looking at small groups and the way that they could raise their awareness and basically develop things.
[02:14:23]  Like systems for understanding higher knowledge, but also on the other level, maybe organic farming, things like that.
[02:14:30]  So we have to go deeper.
[02:14:32]  It's that thing where people say, well, this movement rose up or theosophy was there, but what's going on now?
[02:14:38]  They laid a foundation, and it's up to us to look at the work that the mystery schools have led out into the world.
[02:14:44]  We have that information now.
[02:14:45]  I mean, it's undeniable, and I have studied it.
[02:14:49]  And it's a matter of a choice on our side, which is do we pick up the work that they've given us and continue the foundation?
[02:14:58]  Because very often, a lot of the things that we've seen in the vacuum of those incredible groups like Theosophy and Gurdjieff, the Casey work, and Steiner, in the absence of these incredible teachers coming forward, there's been this vacuum where a lot of junk has gotten a lot of traction.
[02:15:20]  And, you know, that's why on this program I'm very, you know, very focused on bringing the mystery school knowledge to the fore.
[02:15:28]  I think it's very important.
[02:15:30]  So, my answer would be.
[02:15:33]  Work and use the foundation that the mystery schools gave us.
[02:15:36]  That's the best kind of modern, most modern thing we can do.
[02:15:41]  Yeah, the other thing is, I mean, God, we have libraries and libraries of wise books.
[02:15:46]  We don't have to reinvent the wheel.
[02:15:47]  We just have to start applying what we've been told.
[02:15:52]  Isn't there somebody mentioned Peter Murphy earlier, right?
[02:15:54]  So there's the song where he says, Libraries full of keys.
[02:16:00]  So, yeah, I mean, you've got, you know, Sit down and read Socrates.
[02:16:04]  I mean, that's a start.
[02:16:07]  It is quite fascinating, though, because the period that they've identified is the window that we're in.
[02:16:12]  And the window on the anthroposophical side was 2016 to 2036.
[02:16:18]  Well, you're two years into it.
[02:16:21]  So here we are.
[02:16:23]  Cryptos Chaos.
[02:16:24]  What came later for Bennett?
[02:16:27]  He continued, actually, after I do Shah pulled this kind of technique on him.
[02:16:34]  He wrote a book called Transformation.
[02:16:36]  He wrote Witness, which was his time with Gurdjieff and Ospensky.
[02:16:40]  And by the way, 20 years as Ospensky's pupil.
[02:16:43]  And.
[02:16:45]  You know, he said the difference between Gurdjieff and Uspensky is quite interesting.
[02:16:48]  It's that Uspensky had this kind of cold, dour outlook on life that, you know, we can't, I know that there's a higher understanding, there's a higher mind, but we can't get at it.
[02:16:58]  We have to work ourselves hardcore with the Gurdjieff stuff to hopefully get an opportunity to do it.
[02:17:03]  And he actually said that Gurdjieff was totally different.
[02:17:06]  Gurdjieff was always cooking, he always had like a big kind of group around talking.
[02:17:12]  You know, he did the Toast of the Idiots, where he would toast to somebody's particular.
[02:17:17]  Quality.
[02:17:18]  Oh, I'm glad you mentioned this because there's something very crucial in the Gurdjieff work I want people to pay attention to, and it's called the chief feature.
[02:17:28]  And he felt it was the most important thing for helping a student break through to a higher level, which is understanding and identifying their chief feature, whatever that feature happened to be.
[02:17:39]  I mean, I could think of some superficial things off the top of my head, like bossiness, unreliability, insecurity.
[02:17:48]  It's a chief feature, sometimes called the chief fault.
[02:17:50]  Around which all your other features or faults orbit.
[02:17:55]  So it's a very crucial thing, and you have to be in a group setting because it's incredibly difficult in the Gurdjieff work, according to him, to see your own chief feature.
[02:18:07]  So the chief feature is this kind of key, this identifier, for you to be able to do this self improvement work.
[02:18:16]  So, do you know your chief feature?
[02:18:19]  I've been given indications over the years, but I'm still working on it.
[02:18:24]  Inquiring Mind, Daniel, what is the most important thing that you took from Gurdjieff's work?
[02:18:29]  Your chief feature is you're great at everything.
[02:18:31]  I don't know how you do that.
[02:18:35]  Well, I take from Gurdjieff's work that there's information that's vouchsafed for us, it's left there.
[02:18:42]  And it's life changing, life altering, and that we can be better versions of who we are.
[02:18:52]  And the way to do that is to discover.
[02:18:55]  More of our abilities and to bring them forward.
[02:18:58]  And that there's a program of kind of mechanical dullness that operates in the public life in the 21st century.
[02:19:09]  And that in order to get out of its influence, it's more important than ever to take the things that the mystery schools have brought forward and given us.
[02:19:20]  The Gurdjieff work is very unusual, I'll tell you.
[02:19:22]  And I've looked at a lot of these schools and looked at a lot of the different teachings.
[02:19:28]  But Gurdjieff's work is quite remarkable, which tells me it's very much an inside job.
[02:19:33]  It's an inside game.
[02:19:34]  It's deep, deep in the mystery schools.
[02:19:36]  One time when Gurdjieff sat down with this person who was very acquainted with the Christian masters and the really deep, deep priests in the traditions from the Orthodox Christianity schools, and he said, How did you learn?
[02:19:56]  How did you develop the system?
[02:19:59]  And, you know, he said, because it's so much, seems to me, you know, it's so much like that Christian system, but that's a deep doctrine that they never let out.
[02:20:10]  And Gurdjieff said, well, it's the ABC.
[02:20:16]  So somewhere along his travels, Gurdjieff ran into that deep, deep teaching.
[02:20:22]  And he says, oh, the centers part, the thing about the chief features, you know, the law of three, the law of seven, it's the ABC.
[02:20:33]  When you get into those deeper mystery schools.
[02:20:36]  So that's the way that he described it.
[02:20:37]  And then when the guy pressed him about how he got it, he said, Maybe I stole it.
[02:20:45]  Which is interesting because the fourth way is called the way of the sly man, which I find that very unique too.
[02:20:53]  One other thing I want to mention is that Bennett, when he studied Gurdjieff's work from the perspective of this master tradition in Sufism, he figured out that Gurdjieff, who, by the way, really took a lot of heat for the things that he did.
[02:21:07]  Um, you know, just trying to bring this teaching out, he said that Gurdjieff had taken on something called the way of blame.

=== The Way of the Sly Man (02:45) ===

[02:21:13]  So, you are basically there as a punching bag for criticism by bringing this out.
[02:21:20]  You sign up for the role and you don't complain when you get into it.
[02:21:25]  Uh, so the way of blame, okay.
[02:21:27]  Okay, so we have a couple fun questions.
[02:21:30]  Erica McLaughlin, yes, okay.
[02:21:32]  So, if you could pick three people for dinner, dead or alive, who would you invite?
[02:21:41]  Well, that's fascinating.
[02:21:43]  I mean, there's a lot of different choices there.
[02:21:46]  I mean, like, obviously, Bowie.
[02:21:50]  Well, I think, yeah.
[02:21:51]  Jesus, probably.
[02:21:52]  Jesus.
[02:21:56]  Why not?
[02:21:57]  Because Jesus is operating on a totally other level, I'll leave that one.
[02:22:02]  No, just in terms of it, it's a great question.
[02:22:04]  I think it would probably be living, it would probably have to be.
[02:22:09]  Maybe David Lynch would be in there.
[02:22:11]  He'd be a great guest.
[02:22:13]  Fantastic.
[02:22:14]  Bowie would be a great person to sit down and spend real time with.
[02:22:18]  I did have the pleasure of meeting him, and he was a fascinating guy.
[02:22:23]  But there are so many fascinating people.
[02:22:26]  I mean, Annie Besant is somebody who has really made a huge impression on me through her work.
[02:22:31]  So she's somebody who I would love to have spent some time with.
[02:22:35]  Of course, Tesla and Rudolph Steiner.
[02:22:38]  My God, you know, there's this picture that I found.
[02:22:41]  I forget if I even showed it, but it's a Steiner giving a lecture, which is so rare that we have those.
[02:22:47]  And it's an electric picture, even captured almost 100 years ago.
[02:22:52]  So, yeah, so many great people.
[02:22:54]  But I'll think about that and give you an even better answer.
[02:22:57]  But those are some great ones.
[02:22:59]  Holy Cannabis Oil says if you could only take five books onto a deserted island, what would they be?
[02:23:05]  This one's a little bit easier, maybe.
[02:23:10]  I think Knowledge of Higher Worlds, which is Steiner's book.
[02:23:16]  And Search the Miraculous would certainly be a top contender there.
[02:23:23]  I think that, you know, probably I'd have to think about a Casey book.
[02:23:30]  I think Casey's readings on Atlantis, so Edgar Casey and Atlantis would probably be three.
[02:23:39]  But I'm thinking of esoteric books just because that's the top.
[02:23:41]  I mean, there's a lot of fiction style books I can think about.
[02:23:44]  And okay, but those are three I can think of right off the top of my head.
[02:23:48]  Okay.
[02:23:49]  Just sweet pressed is reminding us to actually deal with this.
[02:23:54]  Well, you know, all things come around in a fantastic circle.

=== Fictional Books and Full Circles (03:07) ===

[02:23:59]  And here we are in part 20, which is the second part of part 20 of the X series.
[02:24:06]  And here, fascinatingly enough, today, missed connection Donald Trump Jr. and Robert Mueller crossed paths at Washington Airport.
[02:24:15]  Okay, they're at Reagan National Airport, but what gate are they at?
[02:24:19]  35X.
[02:24:21]  Of course, the X 35 is what the whole invisible plane issue is all about.
[02:24:25]  And here they are.
[02:24:26]  What are the chances?
[02:24:27]  There's Mueller and Donald Trump Jr.
[02:24:30]  I guess Mueller's milling about over here, and Donald Trump Jr. is hanging out over there.
[02:24:35]  But everything comes just a little bit full circle.
[02:24:39]  And, you know, that's just a little bit eighth spherish if you really get right down to it.
[02:24:47]  Great questions.
[02:24:48]  Fantastic show.
[02:24:49]  Love, love having everyone here.
[02:24:51]  What an incredible group.
[02:24:53]  And we will be coming back.
[02:24:57]  You know, we have great things coming up for August.
[02:25:00]  I want to mention I have a three part series with Catherine Austin Fitz that is going to come out next week.
[02:25:06]  And, you know, basically that'll come out probably on Friday.
[02:25:12]  And then this month coming up, we have episodes with Joseph Farrell, Susan Manowich from New Energy Movement will be joining us, Alexandra Bruce, Gigi Young.
[02:25:25]  My God, August, the dance card of August looks fantastic.
[02:25:28]  And Olivia, incredible.
[02:25:30]  Can I just ask you a couple more questions that I saved?
[02:25:33]  Yeah, sure.
[02:25:33]  Okay, all right.
[02:25:34]  So, everybody wants a book list.
[02:25:38]  Can we set one up with our newsletter?
[02:25:41]  Well, I'm working on two things.
[02:25:44]  I'm working on a book list, and I'm just about to release a glossary of terms for the X series in particular.
[02:25:51]  You can imagine with cranking out the series every week, those things always seem like, hey, we're doing another show, we're going to add more terms, so we might as well wait until we get to episode 20 to do some of them.
[02:26:02]  But we'll definitely be doing more of that.
[02:26:04]  And there is a book.
[02:26:07]  Well, basically, we're going to have something set up specifically for people who subscribe for the X series where they can go deeper and have more access to materials relating to it.
[02:26:17]  Because, you know, it takes a lot to put together the shows and all the rest of it.
[02:26:20]  And I love, love doing it.
[02:26:22]  And, you know, that's why supporting the show is so important to get behind us.
[02:26:26]  We can do more with the research that's involved.
[02:26:29]  And the best way to do that is just to subscribe at the site.
[02:26:34]  That's kind of like.
[02:26:35]  The way to guarantee the best results.
[02:26:37]  And so don't be shy.
[02:26:39]  I mean, go ahead and do it.
[02:26:40]  You're going to get great results in August.
[02:26:42]  You're going to be particularly pleased and into the fall because we're doing great things for subscribers there.
[02:26:48]  And also remember, if you're just watching this, to go to darkjournalist.com to sign up for the free newsletter because that keeps us in touch and you'll always know what the next show is all about, what's happening.
[02:26:58]  Generally, it's Fridays at 7 p.m. that we're doing the show.
[02:27:02]  Once in a while, there's an exception if we have a good pre recorded interview.

=== CIA Connections and Invisibility (04:10) ===

[02:27:06]  But Yeah, that's pretty much it.
[02:27:08]  Okay, ask your last question, Miss Olivia.
[02:27:12]  For tonight.
[02:27:12]  So, Rick Knight.
[02:27:13]  Before dinner kicks in.
[02:27:14]  Okay, Rick Knight is asking about the Ace of Spades solution.
[02:27:20]  So, you want to address that?
[02:27:22]  There's so many good things pouring in about people who have looked at the Ace of Spades.
[02:27:26]  By the way, the Flatwoods monster case has, and I have some great images from that, but whatever it was that landed there, the head on it had like an Ace of Spades head, and it was like a half.
[02:27:38]  Creature, half machine.
[02:27:41]  But that case has always struck me as incredibly powerful.
[02:27:44]  And Stanton Friedman told me so many details about that case that I took it very seriously.
[02:27:50]  So that's where my mind immediately went to.
[02:27:54]  But at this stage, people are sending in very interesting references to the Ace of Spades in relation to invisibility and what it represents in terms of the hat trick from the F 35 coming from the X 35.
[02:28:10]  Because remember, it's the X 35 that has the hat trick, and it's the F 35 that Trump flubbed up and was talking about invisibility.
[02:28:19]  All that stuff kind of connects into one whole for me because I'm seeing him talking about invisibility.
[02:28:25]  And I'm looking at the weird hat trick, which is the rabbit out of the hat.
[02:28:28]  All right, I'm going to end on this one.
[02:28:30]  So, Tim F., so what's Danielle's feeling on Elizondo finally participating in the MUFON symposium this weekend?
[02:28:38]  Well, finally, you know, they set him up there.
[02:28:41]  It's not finally.
[02:28:43]  This guy's been in the queue.
[02:28:44]  They just announced, I mean, he just came out and did his dance for the CIA stuff in October.
[02:28:50]  So, this is his first opportunity to do MUFON.
[02:28:54]  No, I mean, it's very simple.
[02:28:55]  Look.
[02:28:57]  Elizondo worked for the CIA in counterintelligence.
[02:29:00]  Counterintelligence is a very unique wing where you have to create cover stories for things that you're doing so the enemy doesn't find out what you're about, i.e., you have to be imaginative and good at lying.
[02:29:11]  So I don't want, for me and for the general group of people that I know who are looking into the UFO file, the CIA over and over again has lied in relation to the UFO file.
[02:29:26]  And they're hiding something in relation to the assassination of.
[02:29:31]  Important leaders like President Kennedy, even 50 years later, you really think you're going to get transparency from the CIA on counterintelligence?
[02:29:38]  So, the people who handle the UFO file and the reporting around it, and we have some of the popular people kind of cozying up to Elizondo, this big CIA guy, and you have CIA disclosure around the TTSA.
[02:29:55]  So, that's not the way to go.
[02:29:56]  It really isn't.
[02:29:57]  Keep the CIA out of UFO disclosure, and you'll get A much better shot at the truth, no question.
[02:30:03]  But yeah, I think if anything, it's disappointing.
[02:30:06]  So Tim F says, I meant finally having a public appearance in general to speak openly.
[02:30:10]  Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right.
[02:30:11]  You're right.
[02:30:11]  That's right.
[02:30:12]  Because he kept, I misunderstood that, but he kept himself like, you know, oh, here's my pre recorded this and here's my pre recorded that.
[02:30:21]  And the only interviews he would do is he would sort of cozy up to George Knapp, who would ask him a bunch of softball questions.
[02:30:27]  It's weird.
[02:30:28]  It's almost surreal for me because, you know, I've told people before I have great respect for George Knapp.
[02:30:33]  Absolutely terrible job interviewing Elizondo.
[02:30:35]  It's like, so what are you going to release next, Elizondo?
[02:30:38]  Here's some good questions.
[02:30:39]  I'm going to feed you questions.
[02:30:42]  So, to the master journalist, here's the good question.
[02:30:45]  First, do you still have any kind of contractual relationship still with the Central Intelligence Agency?
[02:30:51]  How about that for one?
[02:30:53]  Two, are you still bound by CIA rules not to release certain things relating to your work at AATIP?
[02:30:59]  Three, why is there a picture of you in 2010 with your partner in a shipping business when you're supposedly running?
[02:31:06]  The AA tip secret program of UFOs with Harry Reid.
[02:31:10]  So it's not adding up.
[02:31:11]  How about good journalism around that?
[02:31:14]  Let's start with that.
[02:31:15]  Okay.

=== Wired Magazine Picks Up X Series (05:41) ===

[02:31:16]  And now the final question back to our theme.
[02:31:19]  All right.
[02:31:19]  Well, this is fun.
[02:31:20]  Okay.
[02:31:21]  Eliphas Levi, can you please do a whole show on reincarnation?
[02:31:26]  A lot of people support that idea.
[02:31:28]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:31:28]  It's a great idea.
[02:31:31]  Well, we could do a show on Eliphas Levi because let me tell you, that is a fascinating subject for your namesake.
[02:31:38]  Reincarnation is very important.
[02:31:39]  It was left out of Christian doctrine, and it's kind of leaving that out has really messed a lot of things up.
[02:31:46]  Of course, Jesus, when he was speaking to the disciples after John the Baptist died, he said, Well, you know, they got their hands on John and they did with him whatever they wanted to do.
[02:32:02]  And he said a few things in relation to it that they realized in the New Testament that he was speaking of Elijah.
[02:32:13]  So he was saying basically that John the Baptist was Elijah reincarnated.
[02:32:18]  That's in the Bible.
[02:32:19]  And so it is in there.
[02:32:23]  It's a fundamental doctrine in the Bible.
[02:32:24]  They took it out and they figured it out.
[02:32:28]  I think things and studies around the Gnostic Gospels are also highly underrated, and we need to understand exactly the things that were vouchsafed for us there by groups like the Essenes.
[02:32:41]  So there's a whole web there.
[02:32:43]  But let me tell you something in the X series, in the next 10 episodes, we're going very deep, and a lot of it is ancient.
[02:32:49]  So The next round of X series episodes, the next 10 episodes, certainly going to include a lot around that ancient aspect.
[02:32:58]  And I hope at least tonight with the bees part, we got a little bit into that, what's going on with the Egyptians on this.
[02:33:05]  But the Gurdjieff work was exciting to cover that tonight.
[02:33:09]  It's very near and dear to anyone who's interested in esoteric work and the work of the mystery schools.
[02:33:15]  Incredible stuff.
[02:33:16]  And I'm in awe of the people who brought that forward after, you know, including Gurdjieff and Uspensky.
[02:33:22]  But All the people associated with it.
[02:33:26]  And so I definitely hope that more people discover that incredible stuff.
[02:33:33]  And it's great to be here with everyone tonight.
[02:33:38]  It's incredible.
[02:33:39]  We have a great audience with us.
[02:33:41]  And I'm just going to reiterate that we have great shows coming up for you in August.
[02:33:47]  And we will see you coming up next week.
[02:33:51]  And we'll be doing the X series, starting that up again sometime.
[02:33:58]  Later in August.
[02:33:59]  And it's very exciting to have done this two days with you.
[02:34:03]  I think we learned a lot in doing this and came forward with a lot of new information.
[02:34:08]  And I'm very excited about where we're going with the X steganography.
[02:34:11]  Someone did send to me an article in Wired Magazine relating to X, and sort of we're starting to see that this X thing is being picked up everywhere from MSNBC to Wired Magazine.
[02:34:24]  And we have to keep on with our track on it because the Eventually, they're going to try to distort it and say that it's something else, the way they did with the time capsule and our friends at, I forget the name of it, Snopes.
[02:34:38]  That's it.
[02:34:40]  So, we have to stay on the track and definitely be wise to what's going on on that front.
[02:34:46]  Do you want to say hi to Carly and to Pigtails?
[02:34:49]  Pigtails was in the chat.
[02:34:50]  Hey, fantastic.
[02:34:51]  I don't know if she's still with us.
[02:34:52]  Listen, The Pursuit of Happiness is a fantastic channel on YouTube.
[02:34:58]  And Pigtails is an amazingly insightful woman, and it's always great to have her out there.
[02:35:05]  So, fantastic.
[02:35:07]  Great people out there tonight.
[02:35:08]  A cult fan, you asked some really great questions.
[02:35:10]  Giovanni Delgado, and everyone else who's out there and asks great questions, thank you.
[02:35:18]  And Carly, I know you just had some great travels.
[02:35:21]  We can't wait to hear all about them and all the interesting places that you went to.
[02:35:27]  But her show is Dimensions and Beyond, and she does a great podcast as well.
[02:35:31]  We will see you all next week.
[02:35:35]  And it's been great doing the two parts episode with you.
[02:35:39]  And we look forward to seeing you at darkjournalist.com and with the newsletter so we have that really tight communication with each other.
[02:35:47]  And, Olivia, what can I say?
[02:35:49]  This was great.
[02:35:49]  And, you know, I have to say that I love doing two shows a week.
[02:35:54]  So I hope we get to do.
[02:35:56]  Are you trying to tell me something?
[02:35:58]  I'm trying to tell the audience, actually.
[02:36:00]  If you'd like to have us do two shows a week, please let us know.
[02:36:04]  We will try to make that happen.
[02:36:07]  Yeah, we will try to make that happen.
[02:36:10]  No, no.
[02:36:11]  We're doing a great schedule, and we always want to hear about what you guys are looking forward to and what you can handle.
[02:36:18]  What's interesting is we get the ability to do the show per week, and really that's like bringing it out.
[02:36:25]  And if we do two shows a week, we probably would start them maybe in the fall, but that's all pretty up in the air right now.
[02:36:32]  But we're going to keep on doing one show a week for sure.
[02:36:35]  And it's great to have you here.
[02:36:37]  Gee, Olivia, you're really knocking him dead with that.
[02:36:42]  Excellent, really excellent and on point tonight.
[02:36:45]  So, thank you so much.
[02:36:46]  Couldn't do it without you.
[02:36:48]  And we will see you all next week.
[02:36:51]  Have a fantastic green moon and hopefully have a great Sunday as well.

=== Knocking Him Dead Tonight (00:22) ===

[02:36:58]  Talk to you soon.
[02:36:58]  Okay.
[02:36:59]  Good night, everybody.
[02:37:00]  And Saturday night.
[02:37:01]  Let's not forget that.
[02:37:04]  But what's for dinner?
[02:37:05]  I don't know.
[02:37:07]  We had the tequila and the pizza last night, so I'm not sure what's up for tonight.
[02:37:12]  I have an idea.
[02:37:14]  I have an idea.
[02:37:15]  Maybe salad.
[02:37:18]  Lighten up a bit.
[02:37:19]  Absolutely.
[02:37:20]  Thanks, everyone.