In everything I’ve written about cults, it is important to note that I am writing especially about the inner circle members of the cults, which lead the structure of what all are supposed to become. In Cults like the FOF that function with centers world wide, there are myriad possibilities to how people actually connected to the cult, how they developed their relation to it economically, politically and religiously. I am concentrating on the inner circle members who are in the most critical condition and who serve as models for the submission of the rest.
Researching this morning I’ve come across very interesting material. I was wishing to deepen the research on Luther’s Doctrine of Justificationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justification_(theology) and came across the Ten Commandments.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments and in that article, another one on the debate in the USA.
Looking at the article on the Ten Commandments it was clear how close The System, Gurdjieff’s System, is to The Ten Commandments. It simply puts man at the center of the picture and instead of believing in an external God, the Fourth Way replaces the external God for the practice of continued presence. While “religion” in western culture becomes an external practice based on the hierarchic authority of the Church, which is essentially how a cult functions as we’ve been understanding cults, the Fourth Way according to Gurdieff, is an inner practice and experience. It specifically avoided in its “fragments” talking about society.
Looking at the article on the Ten Commandments it was clear how close The System, Gurdjieff’s System, is to The Ten Commandments. It simply puts man at the center of the picture and instead of believing in an external God, the Fourth Way replaces the external God for the practice of continued presence. While “religion” in western culture becomes an external practice based on the hierarchic authority of the Church, which is essentially how a cult functions as we’ve been understanding cults, the Fourth Way according to Gurdieff, is an inner practice and experience. It specifically avoided in its “fragments” talking about society.
This makes sense! If we understand that the way religion has been “conceived” in the literal sense, at least in the West, (I talk about the West for I am still an ignorant on the East), and in the “conceptions” people have practiced it since they separated God from Man and gave the Church and God the “privilege” of “grace”, redemption, salvation or consciousness, we, the people, “live” or “survive” in a “valley of suffering” justified by our “sins” and carried out with strict precision by those in power who make sure that the masses of people continue to “serve” the “authority”. The “authority” in power. This is no different to what happens in cults: the guru establishes his self as the authority who must be obeyed blindly in the economic and political sphere within the cult but on top of it adds his authority as a divine being and appropriates the religious sphere.
In the economic sphere he does it by dictating how the members are to make money and what that money is to be used for, he is the only one that decides WHAT the money is spent on; in the political sphere he does it by organizing how the members are to act towards each other and him as the authority. He organizes the hierarchical structure of the cult and he is the only one who decides who plays what role, who works on what and where. In the religious sphere he appropriates “love”. He becomes the sole legitimate recipient of “love”. The member must give up everyone outside of the cult as the “living dead” including friends, family, nation and and all social “emotional” connections and inside the cult, the husband or wife, the children are second to the guru and discardable if they don’t submit to the guru. EVERYONE must be given up and “love” be completely surrendered to the guru in idolatry.
In surrendering economically, the member loses his connection with his own “physicalness” and places it at the service of the guru and the cult. The Cult uses “humanist” ideals to promote the member’s willingness to submit. In the FOF Cult it is the Arc: working for the preservation of culture for humanity and at the other end of that spectrum; the Apocalypsis: the end of culture through the fall of California and with it the advent of a third world war initiated by the Chinese!! This economic surrender acts not only internally in the member but externally in society. Internally they begin to make their physical being an “instrument of “effort”” for the accomplishment of definite goals: making money for the Arc. The Arc is not only the institution that will “save humanity and its culture” it is also the community in which that “culture” is practiced, specifically in the learning of the classics in music, painting and construction. “ONLY” the classics to the point that people do not speak about themselves or from themselves but quote quotes from the classics in the formal events and increasingly in the informal ones too where the FORM of the “classics” has become mandatory and the control of speech and free expression the consistent practice.
Members are “invited” to work for salaries below the legal standards in the country as an aspect of “third line work” or “work for humanity”! The monthly payment to the majority of employees is minimal and to the inner circle employees way below the standard in comparison to other institutions for the same job, always justified with “third line work” or “work for humanity”. This places the members in an instinctive, physical condition in which they have practically no self-economy for anything besides their basic needs, directing all their income to the betterment of the cult that is “educating” them culturally and “buying” objects to be preserved from destruction. The more the member gives up, the more he complies with the traditional ideals of working “selflessly” for the acquisition of “salvation” which the cult strongly adheres to but in the FOF specifically, salvation is replaced by “consciousness” and humanity’s culture matters a lot less in practice than “personal” awakening, for “individualism” is strongly practiced in the cult, while everything “human” is “demeanored” in the sense of taken meaning away from, and “jumped over” to sublimize even more powerfully the “personal” divinity and consciousness of the guru and the cult’s agenda.
In the political sphere: organizing the roles members play within the cult and the relationships between them according to the structures of authority, determining with it how people behave “lawfully” within the cult, members have no vote! The cult is a dictatorship in which only the guru establishes who, what, where and how. Simple!
In the religious sphere, idolatry prevails and justifies with such absolutism everything the guru and the cult do.
I’ll look at the political and religious spheres more deeply later, I am tired now. I’ve been trying to set a basic structure for a connection and understanding of the many aspects to be dealt with, but I am myself understanding it as I go along.
No comments:
Post a Comment