According to George Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher and philosopher, the time for spirituality is when one has a genuine desire for change and is willing to turn inward to seek its meaning. The best times for this to happen is in a period of wars, political and social uncertainty when attention of the majority is distracted by problems and trivialities of the world.
Only a few are interested in spirituality.
Those who declare themselves "spiritual but not religious" follow different concepts, teachers and they do various practices from hearth healing and soul searching all the way to kundalini awakening. They talk a lot about God, spirituality, healthy food, mindfulness, higher consciousness, 5th dimension etc... they talk just about anything except how and by what we know ourselves.
Those who think that the purpose of life is power and a control of everything are fully emerged in a asleep living their lives like zombies.
The time of world's political and economic turbulences perfectly blends the New Age spirituality that is telling us to be zen, do nothing and live in the moment. The New Age is the ultimate spiritual vacation wrapped up in a foolish positive thinking.
That's completely fine, the false teachers preach to false followers. I don't see any contradiction there but here I write about a magnificent old rascal Gurdjieff.
He was a mystic who lived a joyous, care-free life while most of his disciples live extremely restricted, rigid, and serious. His method was to weed out those who understood from those who do not. Those who understood went away and those who did not understand remained.
If you observe your life as well as the life of others, long enough, you would discover that all your efforts to control things around and inside you are all nonsense. Reaching this point of understanding, according to Gurdjieff is a stage of illumination.
Gurdjieff gives quite a grim warning to humanity, speaking of a "mechanical man" trapped in "idiotism" of his beliefs. He describes humans as unfortunates fragmented creatures bound in delusions. He describes a shocking and colorful description of Buddha’s first noble truth of suffering — the conceptual, emotional worries.
Gurdjieff delivers a spiritual truth very hard to swallow, the teaching that personality or simply persona, ego does not ensouled a human being.
Step by step, from self-observation to self-remembrance he makes disciple ready for authentic non-dual spirituality, Advaita, and mindfulness meditation.
Gurdjieff was a devilish teacher for a fact that he wanted us to do self-observation and see the tensions of life and our grandiose structure of our persona which is built on nothing but lies, wishful thinking and imagination.
He understood how people are made to conform and lose their true self. His lessons are perfectly applicable in today’s time and age too.
In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis. It is absurd to think that this can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis.... One thing alone is certain, that man’s slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.~ George Gurdjieff
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