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To understand the nature of self, the universe, and the inner meaning of religion, we shall discuss more about " Why are we here? Is there a God? What happens after death? Are there higher levels of being? "
Thomas Paine believed in one God, apparently as a result of pursuing fellow-creatures happiness. Paine however questioned revelation that can only be verified by the individual receivers of the message and is therefore weak evidence for God's existence. He also pointed out that the Christian revelations appear to have altered over time to adjust for changing political circumstances. The Age of Reason challenged institutionalized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible.
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff believed that humans have the animal and spiritual side of nature and humans may transcend to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. He pointed out the Fourth Way of Self-Transformation that the wisdom of the East and the energy of the West should be harnessed and used harmoniously, to avoid the world destroy itself.
Men created illusion of self-determination, of freedom, of wakefulness due to the existence in man of many contradictions; contradictions of opinions, feelings, sympathies, words, and actions. Gurdjieff wrote that We are not free.
Bill
Looking for true and fabulous Theology, Activists like Thomas Paine (1737-1809) presented common deistic arguments; and argues for the existence of a creator-God, and the debate continues beyond The Age of Reason. Thomas Paine lays out his personal belief:
"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.[16]"
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866?-1949) was born in Russian Armenia, probably in 1866, and died in 1949, in Paris, whence he had led his followers to escape the Russian Revolution. He spent decades traveling Asia Minor and the far East seeking real answers to real questions. Why are we here? Is there a God? What happens after death? Are there higher levels of being?
Gurdjieff turned to the Asian civilisation for answers. He eventually gave new life and practical form to ancient teachings of both East and West. For example, the Socratic and Platonic emphasis on "the examined life" recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the practice of self-observation. His teachings about self-discipline and restraint reflect Stoic teachings. The Hindu and Buddhist notion of attachment recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the concept of identification. His descriptions of the "three being-foods" matches that of Ayurveda, and his statement that "time is breath" echoes jyotish, the Vedic system of astrology. Similarly, his cosmology can be "read" against ancient and esoteric sources, respectively Neoplatonic and in such sources as Robert Fludd's treatment of macrocosmic musical structures.
Gurdjieff drew a sharp distinction between knowledge, in the ordinary sense, and understanding. Real understanding, he maintained, requires a significant degree of inner being. A computer cannot process certain things without enough RAM; a man cannot understand certain ideas fully unless he has enough sheer Being.
Gurdjieff bluntly informs us, Under the usual conditions, we cannot know ourselves, for the simple reason that we are asleep. Man is a machine, Gurdjieff tells us, with characteristic unsentimentality, an automaton of reactions and reactions to the reactions. We imagine ourselves building, creating, moving alertly through the world: we are kidding ourselves.
We are, says Gurdjieff, lost in waking dreams and rigorously tracked neurotic fixations; when we think we are "doing" we are simply caught up in complex, fantasy- tinged reacting. We are asleep. We are not free.
There are three traditional paths to awakening. The first Way is the way of the fakir, demanding physical control and excruciating asceticism; the second is the Way of the monk: the way of devotion, faith, the heart; the third is the Way of the yogi: the path of knowledge, of mind. Gurdjieff's own Fourth Way combines elements of the first three, and is further distinct in that it calls its practitioners to work within themselves while functioning in the ordinary, workaday world. It requires no monastic withdrawal from life - ordinary life is its resource, its basic material. "I wish to create," Gurdjieff wrote, "conditions in which a man would be continuously reminded of the sense and aim of his existence by an unavoidable friction between his conscience and the automatic manifestations of his nature."
We are born, according to Gurdjieff, with an Essence, our essential self, a particularity that is determined by heredity and "planetary influences", but which is also full of promise. This promise is largely shackled by the encroachment of personality. Our habitual identification with learned personality traps us in a false self. Or rather, we're caught up in a series of false selves, scores of "parasitic identities", bullying little "I's", each "I" with its own agenda, each of the false personality.
We snuggle into our slumber under the blanket of our cherished, socially-reinforced illusions. The illusion of self-determination, of freedom, of wakefulness, is maintained thanks partly to the presence of what Gurdjieff calls buffers - "They are created," Gurdjieff avers, "not by nature, but by man himself, although involuntarily. The cause of their appearance is the existence in man of many contradictions; contradictions of opinions, feelings, sympathies, words, and actions. If a man throughout the whole of his life were to feel all the contradictions that are within him, he could not live and act as calmly as he lives and acts now. He would have constant friction, constant unrest...If a man were to feel all these contradictions he would feel what he really is.
Giving further definition to Gurdjieff's cosmology is the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. The Law of Three breaks down all events into three forces: active, passive, and neutralizing. The Law of Seven provides a systematization of the course of movements of force through a series of events.
GI Gurdjieff Documentary - Part 1 of 3 - The Origin of Esoteric Knowledge - YouTube
Gurdjieff Work - The Fourth Way, Maurice Nicoll, Spiritual Transformation
Best Regards
Bill
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