http://www.bennettbooks.org/

Basically, “don Juan” teaches him that your awareness is consumed by its source (The Eagle) upon your death, but sorcerers, by a practice of discipline, create a substitute to feed The Eagle, thereby freeing themselves/attaining sovereignty.

For those not familiar w/C.C., a great intro is at
http://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/

Jesus teaches the same thing in the Gospel of Thomas ( when you make a hand to replace a hand, and an eye to replace an eye, and a body to replace a body…)

Interesting that I was just leafing through your archived comments while eating lunch, and happened on post about the examples of the fake humans and other soulless entities. Can the organically soulless entity struggle spiritually to become ensouled?

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

I like this connection better though: In PKD novels, some of his heroes are just trying to remain sane or become sane (I just posted about this on my site BTW). I think this is the really interesting struggle, and for me, it’s pretty much equivalent to earning a soul.

If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.

Whoa, kinda like those spells you have to cast beforehand in a Nintendo RPG battle to revive your guy if he gets killed.

Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?

Another fascinating aspect of this teaching of Gurdjieff’s you might find interesting is the reason why we don’t have souls. In his cosmology (at least at the time of the Russian groups) the energy of all earthly life was used on death to ‘feed the moon’ - ie when the moon absorbed enough of this ’soul energy’ it would progress to the next stage and become like the earth. The earth would become like the sun and on and on in a chain….

the idea is also found in blavatsky’s ’secret doctrine;’ once all the souls here ‘evolved’ to the next ‘plane’ of existence, we’d basically migrate to the next planet and so on.

great discussion– all kinds of awesome correspondences are flying around in my lil’ synapses!

I think the concept is from Sufism - Gurdjieff drew a lot of his teaching from the Sufis, specifically Naqshbandis (who are also called the ‘Fourth Way’).

and of course, to bring us full circle, a similar concept is found in kazantzakis’ the saviours of god. kazantzakis’ concern was always the struggle between soul and body, and for him the spiritual path was the laborious struggle of incomplete soul ever upwards through constant questioning.

kazantzakis hung out with sufis a lot on crete, since it was a part of the ottoman empire for so long, & i believe in his autobiography he even talks about some time he spent with some dervishes.

A Sufi woke one night and said to himself “It seems to me that the world is like a chest in which we are all put and the lid is shut down, and we give ourselves up to foolishness. When death lifts the lid, he who has acquired wings, soars away to eternity, but he who has not, stays in the chest a prey to a thousand tribulations. Make sure then that the bird of ambition acquires wings of aspiration, and give to your heart and reason the ecstasy of the soul. Before the lid of the chest is opened become a bird of the spirit, ready to spread your wings.”

This refers to this doctrine I think. Another fascinating aspect of this teaching of Gurdjieff’s you might find interesting is the reason why we don’t have souls. In his cosmology (at least at the time of the Russian groups) the energy of all earthly life was used on death to ‘feed the moon’ - ie when the moon absorbed enough of this ’soul energy’ it would progress to the next stage and become like the earth. The earth would become like the sun and on and on in a chain….

Humans were therefore merely ‘food’ and this is the natural order of things. God made it this way. It is possible to gain a soul and to escape this fate (which equates to hell) but to do so is essentially, in Gurdjieff’s words, “a way against nature, against God’. That is why it is difficult and there are barriers.

Re sites, I suppose Gurdjieff.org is the best for research material but it is hardly objective. I’d go the traditional book route with Ouspensky, Nott and Gurdjieff himself if you can spare the reading time.

Joyce

As for Gurdjieff, I don’t know about his ideas, but two great books about his practice are Waking Up and Living the Mindful Life by Charles Tart.

(What isn’t there something written on these days, though? Doesn’t it feel as though sometimes all we’re doing is sieving through massive amounts of data just trying to find the pieces of info that fit for us? Not solving anything, really, just looking for the needle in the haystack.)

I was curious as to whether you (or anyone) have read The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. It’s described as the seminal work on alienation, creativity, and the modern mind-set. “An exhaustive, luminously intelligent study… a real contribution to our understanding of our deepest predicament.”

It also introduced me to one of my own personal more-contemplated quotes, from Willian James’s Varieties of Religious Experience:—

Recent psychology … speaks of the threshold of man’s consciousness in general to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. … And so we might speak of a ‘pain threshold,’ a ‘fear threshold,’ a ‘misery threshold,’ and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy minded habitually live on the sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.

Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?

It also mimics Saint John of the Cross’s writings on the human “Dark Night of the Soul,” which is itself mimicked in the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell, as the Underworld which we must all triumph over in order to return wiser the Hero.

I think I am also starting to tackle the whole concept of suffering as necessity, however from a design point of view I wonder how we can ease the process for those willing to push through in order to obtain their personal metamorphoses. I find myself going through my own little Dark Nights of the Soul every so often, but because I am aware of it symbolically and in that context, I manage to “strap in” and prepare for bumpy waters. But I fear not because I understand the process of change and willingly give myself up to it…