Jnana

If you want to know what jnana is, ask him:

Interesting Articles on Gurdjieff

A couple of recent articles on Gurdjieff and his teaching that I have found really interesting:

Gurdjieff and Ecology: The Astral Ecosphere in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson
by Richard Smoley (formerly of the wonderful magazine, Gnosis)

Gurdjieff as Magus Omissions and Redefinitions of The Work
no author was identified but it was posted by user ccwe at the blog: books, news, reviews

I have also had the good fortune to read Fritz Peters second book about his relationship with Gurdjieff entitled Gurdjieff Remembered. His first book, Boyhood with Gurdjieff, is his account of his adolescent years spent with Gurdjieff at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. His books are fascinating because they give a look at Gurdjieff from the perspective of someone who wasn't really one of his followers and who was not even an adult when they met. The two books have also been combined under the title My Journeys with a Mystic. I highly recommend both books for anyone interested in Gurdjieff. In fact if I were to make a Gurdjieff reading list it would start with Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous and Fritz Peters book's would be next on the list. If you have a taste for more Gurdjieff after that you can dive into his own books.

JK Rowling's Harvard Commencement Address

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

Harvard University Commencement Address

By JK Rowling, Harvard Gazette Online (2008)

Really a great speech. I found it courtesy of Catherine Austin Fitts' blog at Solari.com

There is YouTube video of it in two parts that you can see below:

Another Communique

Just after my previous post I read this quote from the Sufi poet Hafez:

Just sit there right now.

Don't do a thing.

Just rest.

For your separation from God is the hardest work in the world.

This is from a very good Sufi blog: Inspirations and Creative Thoughts

Inner Vision Calls

I had been getting urges to pick up a certain book in my library for several days. The book is called "Wild Awakening" by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. It is a book that I have never read (I own quite a few of these) and I actually had very little desire to read it. The urging kept coming back and last night it hit me out of the blue and I knew I had to look at it. I opened it up to p. 174 and read the following:

That is the complete realization of Mahamudra mind and of enlightenment. From the point of view of Essence Mahamudra, it is really quite simple. Ultimately speaking, there is nothing on which to meditate because ordinary mind is stainless, luminous emptiness from the beginning. With the blessings of the lineage master, the student awakens to that realization. That is Essence Mahamudra.

Interesting the similarity with the realization and teaching of Adyashanti which has effected me greatly in recent weeks.

As Above, So Below

Great stuff courtesy of Reality Carnival, via Strange Attractor.

Of course the title is drawn from the Emerald Tables of Hermes Trismegistos.

This should all come as no surprise to anyone familiar with self-similarity in complex systems or to students of the cosmology of Gurdjieff.