Looks like Tim Boucher is getting into Gurdjieff and there are what potentially promise to be some great discussions developing over there on Gurdjieff’s ideas.
I tend to waffle on about Gurdjieff quite a bit but it occurred to me that his thou…

Make Ready the Way

All this talk of being ready to finally begin has called to mind a Bible passage. It appears in the Gospels [...]

Ordinary knowing will fill your head with garbage; knowing how to know, or epistemology, is the key to real knowledge. The process of knowledge is also given nicely in the Gurdjieff qoute. You must find someone who knows, and they can help you because they know the process of knowing transcendental things.

As a young spiritual student I read very widely; Gurdjieff was my first contact with a real esoteric school, something I call the Esoteric Teaching, and when I encountered him I realized that I hadn’t really understood a bit of all I had read. I didn’t know how to know; I thought reading some books was knowledge. This encounter helped focus my search for a real spiritual teacher. Hopefully it will push you in that direction as well.

The prologue of this book spends a lot of time talking about ‘inclusion and exclusion’ and the idea that we sometimes think we can only progress by adding or ‘including’ things whereas in reality we can also progress by ‘excluding’ certain things.

Wisdom, in this model, is knowing what to include and what to exclude. Maybe this is what you have been finding out by trial and error and have finally cleared the underbrush.

there’s a whole lot of this idea in sufism. like, people think they’re well along down the sufi path and then realize that they’ve just been getting ready the whole time. a good reference might be ‘learning how to learn’ by idries shah.