Fellowship Of Friends/Fourth Way School/Living Presence Discussion – Page 198 April 10, 2024
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Fellowship of Friends - Living Presence Discussion 
bad alchemy you’ve got there (#111 on previous page):
You’ve just made another bunch of assertions. That’s fine, but you can’t expect anyone to take you too seriously, can you? You are building a narrative on a foundation of sand…
Also, your narrative is internally inconsistent. You claim that Ouspensky was just having some fun at his secretary’s expense (implying that, in fact, his version of the System actually did work), and then, in your last paragraph, you claim that Ouspensky had realized that nothing much mattered, which would include his System for self–improvement.
You can’t have it both ways.
I’m not attacking you, just your logic.
I’d certainly agree with most of your last paragraph, though I have no idea how you can be so sure of Ouspensky’s thinking. From my POV, you are allowing your imagination free reign.
The first part of your post and the previous one (# 109), IMHO, shows quite a bit of emotional attachment, as if you have some emotional skin in the game and an emotional stake in the outcome of what is a very small corner of a very small area, those that are interested in the Fourth Way and its supposed history . Hey, I have an emotional stake as well as an intellectual interest, that’s why I spend time here (this is the only blog I post to).
Marie Seton spent six years in close contact with Ouspensky. You infer that it was all an act, an act by both parties, for six years.
You specifically claim, without evidence, that later she contacted Gurdjieff’s group and was somehow coerced into writing that manuscript.
I call bullshit, unless you can back it up. Put it this way, I find her manuscript more convincing and more internally consistent than your assertions. But that’s just another worthless opinion, of course.
It’s a fact that Ouspensky died before Gurdjieff. It’s a fact that Mme Ouspensky took the manuscript for “In Search of the Miraculous” and sent it to Gurdjieff. It’s a fact that Gurdjieff approved of the manuscript and gave his blessing to have it published. There certainly was a schism at some point, but that those are not the actions of parties who revile each other, or who feel they have been betrayed by each other.
1. Ames Gilbert
“You claim that Ouspensky was just having some fun at his secretary’s expense (implying that, in fact, his version of the System actually did work)”
I don’t follow the logical process that comes to this conclusion based on what I said. In fact, Ouspensky was telling Seton straight out that the System doesn’t work. I had no intention of implying that the System works. The System doesn’t work.
Either/or, either the System works, or the System doesn’t work–this is your logic. My opinion is that a System can’t help people do anything other than become lunatics.
“Marie Seton spent six years in close contact with Ouspensky. You infer that it was all an act, an act by both parties, for six years.”
Certainly people change over the period of six years. No one could keep up a consistent intentional act for six years. What you suggest is an exaggerated reaction to what you think I intended.
I am doubtful of the veracity of the Seton letter just to begin with. If there is something to it then in a private moment Ouspensky was simply being honest about certain aspects of the situation, such as that his pupils, including her, were fools wasting their time. That couldn’t have been received well by Seton. Seton was a trusted close associate of Ouspensky and his cult for six years, then one day Maire Seton writes a critical and damning letter about him and the Gurdjieff Foundation publishes it.
I also have some inside information from original cult contacts that connects some of the dots which I don’t intend to make available.
“You specifically claim, without evidence, that later she contacted Gurdjieff’s group and was somehow coerced into writing that manuscript.”
I do claim that. It is based on facts that can likely be uncovered separately from my claim if you searched through a dozen obscure books that were published 20 years ago.
Ouspensky’s wife, who originally wanted to stay with Gurdjieff when Ouspensky split off and moved to London (Gurdjieff insisted she stay with Ouspensky and send weekly reports on what Ouspensky was doing), told all of Ouspensky’s cult pupils who had stayed with him for years, like Pentland, to go to France and present themselves to Jeanne de Salzmann and if possible to Gurdjieff himself after Ouspensky’s death. Marie Seton was among those who did so.
Opinion: Ouspensky never broke down in a drunken confession and seriously told Marie Seton that he was a weakened fraud and that he was compelled to go on fooling everyone for the money. It’s ridiculous. If he said something like that he was just messing with her. Also, Ouspensky was a blood Russian who had been drinking daily since he was a teenager like the Russians do. He didn’t get out of control drunk on outings to restaurants regardless how much he drank.
After the New York period Ouspensky returned to London and gave a number of wild lectures. Example: Q. What about self-remembering? Ouspensky. I don’t know. Ask a policeman.
“Ouspensky was amusing himself with his secretary”
LOL, project much?
We’ve butted heads in the past but secretly i’ve always enjoyed your cockamamie bullshit.
As far as I can tell, the article by Marie Seton was first published in Quest (Calcutta) No. 34, July/Sept. 1962. pp. 36–44.
The PDF I linked to looks typewritten, but I’m old enough to remember the days before photocopiers. The technology of that day was called the mimeograph, and I actually made them myself. To make one, a special sheet was inserted into a typewriter instead of paper. The normal carbon ribbon was removed. The type head physically cut through the waxy layer. When done, the sheet was fed into the mimeograph, together with a sheet of paper. When you rolled the handle, the ink was pushed through the cuts made by each letter, so exactly duplicating the original. Each roll of the handle produced one copy. The reason I mention this is, this Quest journal or magazine probably had a quite limited circulation, and mimeographs were the cheapest method of duplicating small numbers. Printing was much more expensive per copy, until you needed thousands of imprints.
I obviously haven’t been to the Yale archives, so can’t tell whether they have the original or a mimeographed copy. But if Seton’s article was published there in Calcutta, it is possible that she was there in Calcutta at the time, isn’t it? I mean, if she was still in the States or in Europe, sending a manuscript to some obscure publication in Calcutta, India, for publication seems a bit far fetched.
Anyway, if any of you internet sleuths can find out more, please share.
Asaf Braverman is at it again. Actually, he never stops, but his latest free ‘teaching’ stands out and invites comment.
Here, read it for yourself:
https://tinyurl.com/5n8np579
I want to make two points, for anyone who might be interested.
The first is: the headline shows where this ‘teaching’ is going. “OUR OPPONENT KEEPS UP WITH US”, referring to what is known in the Fourth Way as ‘False Personality’. Asaf learned the value of fabricating an internal battle that can never be won from his ‘teacher’, Robert Earl Burton.
Braverman spent two decades in the Fellowship of Friends, and this battle against ‘The Lower Self’ played a prime role in the theology of the organization. It was rather clever of Burton to re–interpret the value of attempting to observe the mechanical aspects of the human psyche as espoused by the Fourth Way, and then promote and expand this observation into an existential internal war. A war that cannot be won. And why is that? Because if one is in a fight that cannot be won, yet one is in contact with the sole exception, Robert Earl Burton, then one must rely on his guidance for the rest of one’s existence. Decade after decade after decade. And, if one is persuaded to try to divide one’s psyche into two incompatible parts, then one is permanently wounded, and rendered even more helpless, even more dependent on the instigator of this war for comfort and assistance.
That is the gist of Asaf Braverman’s latest message. Of course, he implies that he is also an exception, that he, like Burton, also has ‘won’ this battle, and therefore is also qualified to Show the Way™. I don’t know if the example he gives, wherein someone who has been in this battle for decades shares her experience, is actually true or not, but he is obviously referring to a type commonly found in the Fellowship of Friends. If that meeting actually took place, that is obviously where it took place. And if such words were actually uttered, that is where they were spoken.
O.K., on to the second point. The speaker expands on her decades of work, and that of her compatriots. Decades!
Yet somehow, neither she, or her comrades, or Asaf himself make the obvious conclusion. Which is, they have spent these decades in a blind alley. Up the creek, and their ‘teacher’ told them to throw away the paddle!
Hey, dumbass, this method DOES NOT WORK! That is the correct conclusion after (way too many) years of trying. The teacher and the method are false. They have wasted decades, and they are running out of time. Bashing your head against a brick wall does not produce positive results, it only produces a headache and a lot of confusion.
The woman he quotes sounds superficially intelligent, sounds sincere on the face of it, but the fact is, she and the rest of them are indoctrinated dullards. And Asaf, IF he believes what she says is true, is just as dimwitted. IF he has been sincerely engaging in this same battle for decades, and yet cannot reach the obvious conclusion, then he is not only venial and cunning, but really, really thick.
Penlonally, I think Asaf Braverman is a born grifter, like Dorian Mattei, and actually, at some point, had a pretty good idea of what was going on, and an excellent sense of how he could profit from the situation. Now he is following in Burton’s footsteps. Burton came to believe his bullshit, and Asaf is well on the way, if he has not already arrived.
Either way, his latest offering shows he is ethically deficient or very dumb.
And for those with strong stomachs, Asaf has kindly shared his observations about the “Looking Exercise’ with his followers here:
https://tinyurl.com/47mremv6
P.S., Asaf, you may donate the equivalent value of this free advertising to your local dog shelter, there in your new home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, if you feel so inclined.
Renaissance Winery is also listed as a defendant. Does that mean that all the BS that went on there will also be investigated?
4. Ames Gilbert
The place and time of the reappearance of the essay is unimportant, along with how it made a showing. The quoted sentence below assuring the reader that poor ‘lost integrity’ Ouspensky had at last recovered and “corrected himself” and had even salvaged his system lets slip that always perfectly correct Marie, judge of all that is not wholly on the up and up, was continuously in touch with a “person who had first introduced me to Ouspensky’s books and the System”. She was under the influence of one side or the other of the warring factions between the Ouspensky relic groups and the Gurdjieff relic groups. She was obviously under the influence of the Gurdjieff camp given the backstab of an essay toward someone who “no one was ever kinder to me in a human sense than P. D. Ouspensky.” Even so, she slipped a sharp knife in the back of the dead man’s integrity after all those long nightclub nights where she was held prisoner.
Seton: “It was only after Ouspensky died that I was told by the person who had first introduced me to Ouspensky’s books and the System, that towards the end of his life he found his direction again and had made a great effort to correct himself and his own system.”
The main Gurdjieff relic groups were headed by Jeanne de Salzmann and Lord Pentland. Jeanne de Salzmann was the wife of the composer de Salzmann, and she was Gurdjieff’s main bang. Eventually she birthed a son by Gurdjieff, Michel de Salzmann. Gurdjieff bestowed leadership on her and as such she was militantly anti-Ouspensky and against his relic groups as “not the Real Work”. Pentland (real name Henry Sinclair) “worked” with Ouspensky for a dozen years and when his leader died, he raced over to meet Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff died two weeks after Pentland got there but nevertheless Gurdjieff picked the Lord to lead groups in America. Immediately Pentland began bad mouthing Ouspensky and the Ouspensky relic groups who refused to come under the control of Jeanne de Salzmann.
Here is another try at posting what did not appear on the prior page:
197/102. Ames Gilbert – April 6, 2024 wrote:
I do not have answers to your questions, however, I can say that some 40, or so, years ago, I was an FoF (Fellowship of Friends) member that was not a ‘researcher’ for FoF in any official capacity, and, while living on the northeast east coast of the U.S., I visited the P. D. Ouspensky Memorial Collection at Yale Library many times as I travelled through, or near, New Haven.
It was not an easy visitation back then. The collection was fairly new there then. There were many boxes (50+) of material. (Now far greater.) It was best to notify them in advance of your visit, and what you wanted to access, because it had to come out of the catacombs (storage facilities) by box number, and only a certain number of boxes were allowed per visit. There were security procedures to pass through and you could not take most personal belongings in. (I may vaguely remember that you had to get identified on entering, and leaving, by giving them your driver’s license, and getting it back on the way out.) Paper tablets and pencils were provided. (I do not remember any copying capability being provided; had to be done with the paper and pencil provided.) I do not know current procedures, but, can you imagine going in with a smart phone and taking pictures of everything, if you could! Leaving had other security checks to make sure you did not take anything inappropriate.
I did not take notes but wanted to see, touch, and feel, the materials that were actually handled by Ouspensky, in particular, for example, the original manuscript of In Search of the Miraculous. These items would have his emanations, or spiritual imprintations, in them, that went beyond the words, pictures, drawings and diagrams. They showed the works in progress with rough drafts, corrections, annotations, etc., from Ouspensky’s own hand. The above did not apply to The Fourth Way, which came later, after his death; but is in the collection.
There were worthwhile things conveyed to my inner being from making this effort.
As I remember, this was around the time of the 1982 letter from some eight older students and the 1984 Samuel Sanders letter to the FoF Board of Directors, where it became more widely known the Robert Earl Burton (REB – the sole leader of FoF) was not celibate (sexually abstinent), like he had claimed that he was.
Neither those revelations about REB, nor my visitations to the Ouspensky archives, (whether searching for Fourth Way truths, or not) changed my FoF membership for years to come.
The Case of P. D. Ouspensky
by Marie Seton is
Copyright © 1962 in Yale archive.
I cannot get any of my posts with links (URLs) to show up here, in any ordinary expectation way, so here I have to get creative and expect you to copy, edit (the [dot] to a “.”), paste, and use what I provide:
Access to P. D. Ouspensky Memorial Collection at Yale:
tiny[dot]cc/3fwrxz
PDF Guide to P. D. Ouspensky Memorial Collection:
tiny[dot]cc/lfwrxz
bad alchemy YOU’VE got there, I concede. Obviously I can’t compete with your secret knowledge, I have none.
“It’s a fact that Mme Ouspensky took the manuscript for ‘In Search of the Miraculous’ and sent it to Gurdjieff. It’s a fact that Gurdjieff approved of the manuscript and gave his blessing to have it published.”
There a hitch in the perception-record here. What Gurdjieff said was: “Before I hate Ouspensky; now I love him. This very exact, he tell what I say.” But Ouspensky did not “tell what I say”. For instance, look at that phrase “tell what I say”. In Search of the Miraculous was written in English. Do you see any phrasing such as “tell what I say” anywhere in the book when Gurdjieff is being quoted? Yet this is how Gurdjieff spoke. He did not speak like a hyper-coherent college professor instructing people on an alternative version of reality. Gurdjieff spoke like a Greek-Armenian hick from Gyumri, Armenia where he was born the son of a sheep and cattle herder. Gurdjieff likely spoke a poor quality of Russian to Ouspensky and dished out his “system” in a broken and scattered fashion.
“He spoke Russian incorrectly with a strong Caucasian accent; and this accent, with which we are accustomed to associate anything apart from philosophical ideas, strengthened still further the strangeness and the unexpectedness of this impression.” -In Search
When Gurdjieff was confronted with a complex, highly organized and well-spoken version of his teaching he was startled and delighted. Ouspensky, who had worked on the manuscript for years along with his students as a massive project, had fabricated a full-blown system of esoteric psychology and handed it over in history to Gurdjieff as the mostly fictitious author.
Well, we can see what Gurdjieff comes up with when he speaks for himself, Beelzebub’s Tales and the rest of the mess. The version of the character Gurdjieff in the book ‘In Search’ and the elaborate version of the “System” had maybe something to do with the actual Gurdjieff, but it was never “tell what I say”. Not by a longshot.
Gurdjieff eventually came into possession of the manuscript that Ouspensky’s traitorous wife ended up owning. She gladly handed it over to the man that Ouspensky himself had forbidden his followers to even mention. Gurdjieff then put his students to work changing it to what extent we will never know.
Fact check on #11 Bad Alchemy aka “a response to Bad’s further blabberings”:
G’s quote on “In Search”. I can’t find it (without making more effort than its worth) but the full quote was something like: “This very exact. He tell what I say but [? it lacks weight. My book is better.”?]
G approved of the book being published on the condition that it would be published after Beelzebub’s Tales. It was published by O’s students two years after O’s death (before Beelzebub’s Tales was published in 1950). G’s students had nothing to do with the publication of the book.
At least two-thirds (some say 75%) of “In Search” consists of direct quotes from G. O did a good job transcribing G’s words into English but the ideas are all G’s and O acknowledged that.
Beelzebub’s Tales was basically written by 1933 but G continued to edit it until shortly before his death in 1949. Orage and others assisted G in writing the book. Although G spoke in broken English, it is obvious from a cursory reading of the book that he had an excellent command of the written English language. The book is very difficult to read (less so as you take the time and trouble to become familiar with the style and literary devices he uses). G wrote it that way by design – it takes a high level of attention and persistent effort (aka “conscious labour and intentional suffering”) to “fathom the gist” of the book. That serves well to keep the merely curious away and prevent the uninitiated from accessing the knowledge contained in the book.
I also have some inside information from original cult contacts that connects some of the dots which I don’t intend to make available.
This is equivalent to, Unnamed sources within the Pentagon have said... In other words, lies, self-aggrandizement or propaganda.
One repeating success the Fellowship achieves is installing and finely tuning, in almost everybody who leaves, a magnificent bullshit detector.
What are you trying to accomplish here? It appears you may be trying to portray Ouspensky as a real teacher, who probably had real students who awakened, who eventually produced….
By the way, my machine has gold alchemy, so people need to listen to me.
Ruh Roh
Initially, with the fall of Paris imminent, Gurdjieff‘s anxious and fearful students induced him to leave. Four-fifths of Paris’ 2.8 million citizens, despite Stuka dive bombers strafing the roads, were streaming westward and southward in an attempt to elude the oncoming Panzer divisions. Gurdjieff left as well, but as night closed in and the aging Gurdjieff’s legs were giving out, and there being no food or water, he turned back, returning to his apartment at 6 rue des Colonels-Renard.
When the Nazis moved into Paris the “conscious” old Gurdjieff, like many thousands of other sleeping machines, ran for his life out into the countryside where it was soon apparent that there was nowhere to go. Faced with the prospect of sleeping on the ground for the night the man who walked out of Russia, as legend would have it, made his guardian followers guide him back to his bed.
This was the highly psychically developed, the spiritually ‘higher conscious’ and the nonidentified Monsieur Gurdjieff in the face of the German blitzkrieg.
198/6 YearoftheDragon:
What “BS” at RVW you talk about? Lawsuits are about Robert Earl Burton (REB)’s sexual exploitation and the use of the corporations to support and facilitate that activity.