And Now for Some Real Heretics, Part 4

Continued from Part 3.

There are two questions we left off with in the last installment I would like to address. First, why was early Christianity considered an “abomination?” Second, why is Gnosis so difficult? Freke and Gandy make it seem easy. Let’s look at the second question first: Why is it so hard?

In Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, Georges Gurdjieff says:

He who wants knowledge must himself make the initial efforts to find the source of knowledge and to approach it, taking advantage of the help and indications which are given to all, but which people, as a rule, do not want to see or recognize. Knowledge cannot come to people without effort on their own part. And yet there are theories which affirm that knowledge can come to people without any effort on their part, that they can acquire it even in sleep. The very existence of such theories constitutes an additional explanation of why knowledge cannot come to people.

A simple answer to the question would be that we are in a fallen state. We have suffered a “fall” from a previous state where achieving Gnosis would be easy. That begs the question: what is the Fall? We have already discussed why Genesis is not a satisfactory answer (see this). Gurdjieff, quoted in P. D. Ouspensky’s The Fourth Way, put it this way:

[W]e have in us a large house full of beautiful furniture, with a library and many other rooms, but we live in the basement and the kitchen and cannot get out of them. If people tell us about what this house has upstairs we do not believe them, or we laugh at them, or we call it superstition or fairy tales or fables. (p. 2)

Why does it take so much effort? According to the Fourth Way tradition of Gurdjieff and his followers (including Ouspensky and Boris Mouravieff) one of our worst misconceptions is the idea that we can DO anything at all. By DOING they mean acting freely and consciously with intent. Normally, we never DO anything, we just react mechanically to various stimuli. One of the reasons for this is that there is no single subject that could act, just different-sized bundles of little ‘I’s that often work at cross-purposes:

If we begin to study ourselves we first of all come up against one word which we use more than any other and that is the word ‘I’. We say “I am doing’, ‘I am sitting’, ‘I feel’, ‘I like’, ‘I dislike’ and so on. This is our chief illusion, for the principal mistake we make about ourselves is that we consider ourselves one; we always speak about ourselves as ‘I’ and we suppose that we refer to the same thing all the time when in reality we are divided into hundreds and hundreds of different ‘I’s. At one moment when I say ‘I’, one part of me is speaking, and at another moment when I say ‘I’, it is quite another ‘I’ speaking. We do not know that we have not one ‘I’, but many different ‘I’s connected with our feelings and desires, and we have no controlling ‘I’. These ‘I’s change all the time; one suppresses another, one replaces another, and all this struggle makes up our inner life. (Ouspensky, The Fourth Way, p. 3)

As an example, Gurdjieff mentioned how we often say to ourselves when we are at work and tired, “Tonight I will go to bed early,” but when the early bedtime comes around a different ‘I’ wants to stay up later. The first ‘I’ wasn’t lying, it was just not the ‘I’ in charge of making the decision to go to bed. (The Fourth Way, p. 6)

According to Gurdjieff, not only is there not a single ‘I’ that can act, but we are hardly ever truly conscious. Gurdjieff asked his students to try to “self-remember,” to hold the awareness that “I am.” The exercise will show the student that those periods of true conscious self-awareness are few and short. Gurdjieff likens our selves to machines that don’t function well. One of his students, Boris Mouravieff, uses the analogy of a horse-drawn coach whose driver is asleep:

The physical body is represented by the coach itself; the horses represent sensations, feelings and passions; the coachman is the ensemble of the intellectual faculties, including reason; the person sitting in the coach is the master.

In the normal state, the whole system is in a perfect state of operation: the coachman helds the reins firmly in his hands and drives the horses in the direction indicated by the master. This, however, is not how things happen in the immense majority of cases. First of all, the master is absent. The coach must go and find him, and must then await his pleasure. All is in a bad state: the axles are not greased and they grate; the wheels are badly fixed; the shaft dangles dangerously; the horses, although of noble race, are dirty and ill-fed; the harness is worn and the reins are not strong. The coachman is asleep: his hands have slipped to his knees and hardly hold the reins, which can fall from them at any moment.

The coach nevertheless continues to move forward, but does so in a way which presages no happiness. Abandoning the road, it is rolling down the slope in such a way that the coach is now pushing the horses, which are unable to hold it back. The coachman, fallen into a deep sleep, is swaying in his seat at risk of falling off. Obviously a sad fate awaits such a coach. (Mouravieff, Gnosis, vol. 1, pp. 6-7)

Here is where centuries of humanism have led us astray. We think we are such marvellous beings but those marvels are only potential. In reality we are wrecks heading off a cliff. What hope is there? Mouravieff offers this:

Salvation may however present itself. Another coachman, this one quite awake, may pass by the same route and observe the coach in its sad situation. If he is not in much of a hurry, he may perhaps stop to help the coach that is in distress. He will first help the horses hold back the coach from slipping down the slope. Then he will awaken the sleeping driver and together with him will try to bring the coach back to the road. He will lend fodder and money. He might also give advice on the care of the horses, the address of an inn and a coach repairer, and indicate the proper route to follow.

It will be up to the assisted coachman afterward to profit, by his own efforts, from the help and the information received. It will be incumbent on him from this point on to put all things in order and, open eyed, to follow the path he had abandoned.

He will above all fight against sleep, for if he falls asleep again, and if the coach leaves the road again and again finds himself in the same danger, he cannot hope that chance will smile upon him a second time; that another coachman will pass at that moment and at that place and come to his aid once again. (Mouravieff, p. 7)

Another analogy Gurdjieff uses is that of a prison. Like the Gnostics, Gurdjieff claims that we are in prison. Since we are in prison, what is the next step, what can we wish for?

If he is a more or less sensible man, he can wish for only one thing—to escape. But even before he can formulate this desire, that he wants to escape, he must become aware that he is in prison. (The Fourth Way, p. 13)

That illuminates one of the diabolical ruses of capitalist society in general and particularly that of the United States: never have so many people been so enslaved who thought themselves to be so free (http://thedailyheretic.blogspot.com/2005/02/freest-slaves-in-history.html). We are asleep and think we are awake.

This prison means really that we sit in the kitchen and basement of our house and cannot get out. One can get out, but not by oneself… [and] all cannot escape. There are many laws against it. To put it simply, it would be too noticeable, and that would immediately produce a reaction from mechanical forces. (The Fourth Way, p. 14)

That passage refers directly to things alluded to in many Gnostic texts. There are forces aligned against anyone who tries to awake. Paul, for example, mentioned “principalities” or archons, as for example in this passage (Ephesians 6:12): “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

To be continued...