Meetings with Remarkable Men (G.I. Gurdjieff)
Meetings with an Unremarkable Book
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “Meetings with Remarkable Men” by G.I. Gurdjieff.]
I read this book 45 years ago, and I decided to give it another read, to see if time had changed my opinion of it. It hadn’t. It’s a colorful narrative of Gurdjieff’s travels that serves as an autobiography of sorts, which fans of Gurdjieff may enjoy. But I found none of the “remarkable men” in this book to be particularly remarkable. In short, the book is bereft of any profound or esoteric spiritual teachings.
Interestingly enough, neither of Gurdjieff’s two signature texts – this one and “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson” (see my one-star review) -- contains any substantive information about his teachings, which reflects negatively on them. Instead, one must turn to a secondary source, “In Search of the Miraculous” by P.D. Ouspensky (see my two-star review), in order to get a comprehensive presentation of them.
To those who have “cracked the cosmic code” and truly grok “the Master Game,” it couldn’t be clearer that Gurdjieff was not a great spiritual master teeming with demystifying insights, like, say, Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, or Adi Da. Rather, he was charlatan of sorts who cobbled together byzantine Sufi teachings chock-full of cosmological crap, and cleverly packaged them into a mystery school still alive today in the form of Fourth Way schools that will gladly take your money, but offer you little Enlightenment in return.
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “Meetings with Remarkable Men” by G.I. Gurdjieff.]
I read this book 45 years ago, and I decided to give it another read, to see if time had changed my opinion of it. It hadn’t. It’s a colorful narrative of Gurdjieff’s travels that serves as an autobiography of sorts, which fans of Gurdjieff may enjoy. But I found none of the “remarkable men” in this book to be particularly remarkable. In short, the book is bereft of any profound or esoteric spiritual teachings.
Interestingly enough, neither of Gurdjieff’s two signature texts – this one and “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson” (see my one-star review) -- contains any substantive information about his teachings, which reflects negatively on them. Instead, one must turn to a secondary source, “In Search of the Miraculous” by P.D. Ouspensky (see my two-star review), in order to get a comprehensive presentation of them.
To those who have “cracked the cosmic code” and truly grok “the Master Game,” it couldn’t be clearer that Gurdjieff was not a great spiritual master teeming with demystifying insights, like, say, Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, or Adi Da. Rather, he was charlatan of sorts who cobbled together byzantine Sufi teachings chock-full of cosmological crap, and cleverly packaged them into a mystery school still alive today in the form of Fourth Way schools that will gladly take your money, but offer you little Enlightenment in return.
