As a longtime student of Gurdjieff's work, at one time enthusiastically participating in what I persuaded myself was a real esoteric school of the fourth way with a conscious teacher in place, discovering my mistake was easily the greatest shock in my life since the original shock I received after awakening from my sleep a short while after finding Ouspensky's, The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution. That first shock was understanding the truth about how little truth and reality actually figured in my psychology, a humbling failure to simply stay conscious for a short walk from the bookstore to my dorm at UCSB was all it took. After rejecting outright my upbringing indoctrination into the Lutheran Faith not a moment after being confirmed, there was no easy way to relapse or lose the sense of gravity which that choice was based on. To renounce any of portion of the automatic inculturated programming which our youth absorbs and believes unconsciously and without critical discernment, nevermind such a massively moral code like religious faith requires a level of fearless ferocity in relationship to one's own mechanical need of comfort and approval that without at least some modicum of support from one's guardians or parents the possibility feels altogether imaginary. I happened to be graced by a Mother whose wish for me to be completely free to become my own man and make my own decisions, achieve my own successes and failures, was steadfast in her being my mother. This required some huge suffering of her own to achieve growing up, as she rebelled against the hugely indoctrinated and moral code of her parents by running away from home at as young teen before the age of adulthood with a muscian to live away from the oppression and feeling servitude which she experienced as a result of her brother being a prodigy despite being blind and taking away all the attention and support that she genuinely deserved but didn't feel coming and took this circumstantial situation as the gravest form of suffering any child receives short of actual harmful abuse. Children need to be cared for properly with vital aliveness of the best in us, at least, don't you think. Negligence of children is to cripple the best in them in both their happiness when young and throughout the rest of their life. She ran away from home with a young pianist studying with her brother because he gave her the attention she so badly needed. When his short sabbatical here ended off she went with him back to his home in Mexico City. Her recovery was I suppose at best something one might call civil in terms of relations, but looking back at my her parents and my experience of them growing up I can immediately recognize the undercurrent of negativity which to mom's credit was kept in check through a resurgent dedication as an obedient and grateful adult. With this perspective then one may be able to appreciate just how lenient and careful she was with me to always be there for me and yet do her best not to micro-manage or pass judgement as a parent since she knew first hand the kind of pain that way of being towards a child can create.
Interestingly enough without going into a long story about its arising, this commitment and stand on her part did not prevent her negative programming which her parents unconsciously dumped on her until she completely rebelled and ran away from homed from inciting me to do the very same thing during my senior year in High School. My sojourn was quite short however and not so far as to keep me from finishing school.
The important issue here was that to her credit there was enough conscious work at NOT being oppresive the way her parents were that I actually developed some level of understanding about my role and how it related to her actions in terms of what they made possible as a result. That with a protracted illness my father suffered, dying in my arms shortly before entering the confirmation process, and I was primed and prepped to act out radically in honor of these experiences. Experiencing my father's death so intimately sealed in me the gravity which my mother's wishes for me might not otherwise have made much of a difference. But after he died, not a day has ever passed that I have not contemplated death and life's fragile uncertainty.
So, when I participated in an exercise suggested by Ouspensky in his introduction to fourth way work designed to produce the first shock which has to do with GETTING one's inability to do or remain conscious, I knew that I had found precisely what religious faith, morality, and teaching lacked,. Authentic possibility and experience vs. a story. That first shock was internal in perspective and quite hard to share. Talking about it, and sharing it I've found does not induce in others the same experience that I had back in the beginning, due in my opinion to what I've shared here leading up to this point regarding specific conditions present in my childhood, shaping and influencing my process as it did. The next shock however, is an external one that I had when I realized the lack of integrity and proper care given by the conscious teacher I had adopted for several years. The disappointment was devastating, and my satisfaction in the work has never recovered yet to the point of finding a truly authentic conscious teacher to work with. Having been so taken in only to find my gullability irrevocably established upon the "teacher's" lack of conscious being reflected in his inappropriate and harmful exploitations of and abuses of his students for sexual and thus completely narcissitic and sociopathic gratifications, I have at least been ferocious in my assessments of everyone hence. There have been many teachers and yet none have succeeded in impressing me consciously at least as fourth way teachers of the caliber of Ouspensky or Gurdjieff. I don't deny that history is replete with such masters, but none of them remain beyond their aesthetic appeals and artifacts paying homage to their enlightened state and its capacity to produce higher impressions. It's only necessary to think of the Poetry of Rumi for example or the writings of Lao Tzu, or the Buddha to understand the nature of this higher energetic impression such master's works and remaining arftifacts communicate and create for those able to receive higher influence.
While I haven't actually run across a charismatic false prophet like the one that fooled me in the beginning, everyone since then while at times well versed and even charismatic in their self-expression and passion for the work only get as far as proclaiming and telling the story over, which I've developed a very sensitive "taste" for by its interpretive color and trapped design given by today's culture and way of doing things.
It's nothing short of such sorrow that I almost cannot bare to share, only that I am aware that such thought is unrelated to the reality of listening and response which others will actually have. In a culture of impassioned commitment to looking good, this change of heart and attitude is unexpected except for the fact that I continue to study the master's and fourth way ideas though without disipline or confidence that one would necessarily expect from having an authentic teacher to consult and learn from.
I'm still alive, despite many instances in which I could have easily expired and died, and as long as I'm still alive I will remain grateful if just for my magnetic center and its level of gravity which continues to bring me over and over back to a proper first shock with gratitude and evermore acceptance.
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