Am I missing something? Why don’t the practical instructions lead up to the final stage of “enlightenment” and instead stop at “partial enlightenment”? Is there a further stage after #4 that might be even more dangerous than #3 and that you don’t think is safe to describe to anyone who isn’t already at #4?
Unrelated question:
Does this “enlightenment” include any experience/realization of the sort described in Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” as the “many ‘I’s”? That hypothesis seems very plausible to me given the structure of the brain as subdivided into lobes that subdivide into circuits that subdivide into neurons. At my current level of understanding, I like to think of the “ego” as the locus of the majority of your neural activation potentials, continuously flowing around from circuit to circuit (according to the rules imposed by the particular structure of your brain at a given time), with some circuits able to take control of your body and others not. This would mean that what you call “I” is actually various things, successively: “I am John’s hurt feelings”, “I am John’s desire for revenge”, “I am John’s intention to put revenge into practice”, “I am John’s action plan manager” etc. Sometimes the “many ’I’s” could even be concurrently active, which in common terms might be experienced as being conflicted about something, or being “of two minds”.
Am I missing something? Why don’t the practical instructions lead up to the final
stage of “enlightenment” and instead stop at “partial enlightenment”? Is there a
further stage after #4 that might be even more dangerous than #3 and that you
don’t think is safe to describe to anyone who isn’t already at #4?
The practical instructions don’t go further because the issue of going further is complicated, and trying to describe it in a reasonable and useful way would have made this post much too long.
If you can handle stage three, I would have no worries about your ability to handle anything afterwards.
I’ve never read Gurdjieff, so I don’t really know. Terminology is tricky and I wouldn’t venture to guess unless I was more familiar with what “many I’s” means.
I think there’s an even better description of my concept of “many-I’s-consciousness” in the first part of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o than in Gurdjieff’s rather religious writings. I was pleasantly surprised tonight to finally find my suspicions about how consciousness really works confirmed by someone who claims to have done their scientific homework.
Am I missing something? Why don’t the practical instructions lead up to the final stage of “enlightenment” and instead stop at “partial enlightenment”? Is there a further stage after #4 that might be even more dangerous than #3 and that you don’t think is safe to describe to anyone who isn’t already at #4?
Unrelated question: Does this “enlightenment” include any experience/realization of the sort described in Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” as the “many ‘I’s”? That hypothesis seems very plausible to me given the structure of the brain as subdivided into lobes that subdivide into circuits that subdivide into neurons. At my current level of understanding, I like to think of the “ego” as the locus of the majority of your neural activation potentials, continuously flowing around from circuit to circuit (according to the rules imposed by the particular structure of your brain at a given time), with some circuits able to take control of your body and others not. This would mean that what you call “I” is actually various things, successively: “I am John’s hurt feelings”, “I am John’s desire for revenge”, “I am John’s intention to put revenge into practice”, “I am John’s action plan manager” etc. Sometimes the “many ’I’s” could even be concurrently active, which in common terms might be experienced as being conflicted about something, or being “of two minds”.
The practical instructions don’t go further because the issue of going further is complicated, and trying to describe it in a reasonable and useful way would have made this post much too long.
If you can handle stage three, I would have no worries about your ability to handle anything afterwards.
I’ve never read Gurdjieff, so I don’t really know. Terminology is tricky and I wouldn’t venture to guess unless I was more familiar with what “many I’s” means.
I think there’s an even better description of my concept of “many-I’s-consciousness” in the first part of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o than in Gurdjieff’s rather religious writings. I was pleasantly surprised tonight to finally find my suspicions about how consciousness really works confirmed by someone who claims to have done their scientific homework.