Sublime

Among many others, I draw on the ideas of two spiritual teachers I should mention. One is my friend Douglas Harding, whose unique and inimitable approach sheds light on the Self as Consciousness, which is pure Kashmir Shaivism. The other is the enigmatic 20th-century teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. I met his teachings in my earliest days as a spiritual se

G. I. Gurdjieff, that marvelous rascal-sage, wrote in his All and Everything:

Gurdjieff’s teachings portrayed humankind as living in a kind of waking sleep. His “Fourth Way” approach held out the possibility of finding a path out of mechanical functioning through self-knowledge:

George Gurdjieff—mystic, philosopher, and composer who brought the symbol of the Enneagram to the West in 1916—is quoted as saying that the deep understanding of the Enneagram makes all written knowledge superfluous.1

In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky,