Raju,
I will edit the URL of the image.
========
Blavtsky, and many decades after her, Gurdjieff. The prime similarity is
- the yearning for the knowledge that was traditional, lost and, hidden for survival
- mentions of remarkable, masters of the past.
difference was, while Blavtsky came to India and made her home at Prayag, contributed through writings, and rejected Christianism - Gurdjieff never visited India never directly mentions it, though if you read a bit of his works traditional India's influence is very obvious, and also he did not 'reject' christianism - just ignored it or even little bit tried to salvage it from ignorance.
more on him:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Gurdjieff was born probably in 1866 of a Greek father and an Armenian mother in Alexandropol (now Gumri), Armenia, a region where Eastern and Western cultures mixed and often clashed. The environment of his childhood and early adolescence, while suggesting a near-biblical patriarchal culture, is also marked by elements not usually associated with these cultural traditions. The portrait Gurdjieff draws of his father, a well-known ashokh, or bard, suggests some form of participation in an oral tradition stretching back to mankindâs distant past. At the same time, Gurdjieff speaks of having been exposed to all the forms of modern knowledge, especially experimental science, which he explored with an impassioned diligence. The influence of his father and certain of his early teachers contrasts very sharply with the forces of modernity that he experienced as a child. This contrast, however, is not easily describable. The difference is not simply that of ancient versus modern worldviews or patterns of behavior, though it certainly includes that. The impression, rather, is that these âremarkable menâ of his early years manifested a certain quality of personal presence or being. That the vital difference between human beings is a matter of their level of being became one of the fundamental elements in Gurdjieffâs teaching and is not reducible to conventional psychological, behavioral, or cultural typologies.
<i>Meetings with Remarkable Men</i> shows us the youthful Gurdjieff journeying to monasteries and schools of awakening in remote parts of Central Asia and the Middle East, searching for knowledge about man that neither traditional religion nor modern science by itself could offer him. The clues to what Gurdjieff actually found on these journeys are subtly distributed throughout the narrative, rather than laid out in doctrinal form. Discursive statements of ideas are relatively rare in the book, and where they are given it is with a deceptive simplicity that serves to turn the reader back to the teachings woven in the narrative portions of the text. Repeated readings of Meetings with Remarkable Men yield the realization that Gurdjieff meant to draw our attention to the search itself and that what he intended to bring to the West was not only a new statement of what has been called âthe primordial tradition,â but the knowledge of how modern man might conduct his own search within the conditions of twentieth-century life. For Gurdjieff, as we shall see, the search itself, when rightly conducted, emerges as the principal spiritualizing force in human life, what one observer has termed âa transforming search,â rather than âa search for transformation.â
http://r.hodges.home.comcast.net/~r.hodges...tml/School.html
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I will edit the URL of the image.
========
Blavtsky, and many decades after her, Gurdjieff. The prime similarity is
- the yearning for the knowledge that was traditional, lost and, hidden for survival
- mentions of remarkable, masters of the past.
difference was, while Blavtsky came to India and made her home at Prayag, contributed through writings, and rejected Christianism - Gurdjieff never visited India never directly mentions it, though if you read a bit of his works traditional India's influence is very obvious, and also he did not 'reject' christianism - just ignored it or even little bit tried to salvage it from ignorance.
more on him:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Gurdjieff was born probably in 1866 of a Greek father and an Armenian mother in Alexandropol (now Gumri), Armenia, a region where Eastern and Western cultures mixed and often clashed. The environment of his childhood and early adolescence, while suggesting a near-biblical patriarchal culture, is also marked by elements not usually associated with these cultural traditions. The portrait Gurdjieff draws of his father, a well-known ashokh, or bard, suggests some form of participation in an oral tradition stretching back to mankindâs distant past. At the same time, Gurdjieff speaks of having been exposed to all the forms of modern knowledge, especially experimental science, which he explored with an impassioned diligence. The influence of his father and certain of his early teachers contrasts very sharply with the forces of modernity that he experienced as a child. This contrast, however, is not easily describable. The difference is not simply that of ancient versus modern worldviews or patterns of behavior, though it certainly includes that. The impression, rather, is that these âremarkable menâ of his early years manifested a certain quality of personal presence or being. That the vital difference between human beings is a matter of their level of being became one of the fundamental elements in Gurdjieffâs teaching and is not reducible to conventional psychological, behavioral, or cultural typologies.
<i>Meetings with Remarkable Men</i> shows us the youthful Gurdjieff journeying to monasteries and schools of awakening in remote parts of Central Asia and the Middle East, searching for knowledge about man that neither traditional religion nor modern science by itself could offer him. The clues to what Gurdjieff actually found on these journeys are subtly distributed throughout the narrative, rather than laid out in doctrinal form. Discursive statements of ideas are relatively rare in the book, and where they are given it is with a deceptive simplicity that serves to turn the reader back to the teachings woven in the narrative portions of the text. Repeated readings of Meetings with Remarkable Men yield the realization that Gurdjieff meant to draw our attention to the search itself and that what he intended to bring to the West was not only a new statement of what has been called âthe primordial tradition,â but the knowledge of how modern man might conduct his own search within the conditions of twentieth-century life. For Gurdjieff, as we shall see, the search itself, when rightly conducted, emerges as the principal spiritualizing force in human life, what one observer has termed âa transforming search,â rather than âa search for transformation.â
http://r.hodges.home.comcast.net/~r.hodges...tml/School.html
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->