‘The Movement Towards Inner Freedom’

     
Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of the death of George Gurdjieff, the founder of the Fourth Way, whose teachings are kept alive today by inspired followers such as the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. The Foundation will host another introductory lesson next week. From the publicity:

The Movement Towards

Inner Freedom

Gurdjieff Foundation of New York

Friday, November 9 at 6:30

240 East 53rd Street, Manhattan

(Quest Bookshop)

RSVP here

“Liberation leads to liberation.”
G.I. Gurdjieff

The evening will include presentations, readings, practical exercises in movement, the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music, conversation, and refreshments.


If you are a thinking Freemason, you may find these studies worthwhile.


The other day, Parabola magazine published online an excerpt from a book to be released in February. Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy by Roger Lipsey will be published by Shambhala Publications. Lipsey’s other books include a biography of Dag Hammarskjöld.

One sample paragraph:

G.I. Gurdjieff

The Rue des Colonels Renard is centrally located. Today you might want to stop in a café at the intersection of Avenue Mac-Mahon and the Rue des Acacias, where Gurdjieff often had his coffee, and surely looked from time to time past a receding row of street lamps toward a flank of the Arc de Triomphe not far off. At some point he turned that view into a parable about the distant aim toward which one might well be toiling and the many smaller aims and thresholds, requiring meticulous attention, that precede it. His apartment was nearby in a street like any other. Yet it was là-bas, as one of his pupils put it—there yet far off, another world. “Here in my house,” Gurdjieff stipulated, “all must be quintessence. Rest you do at home.” There was a further rule, captured by another of his pupils: “Here there are no spectators.”


Check out the excerpt here.
     

‘The Work for Awakened Attention’

     
The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York will offer another of its introductory events next month to explain a bit about its mystical teachings. This session, titled “The Work for Awakened Attention,” will be hosted Friday, October 7 at 6:30 p.m. inside the lecture hall of Quest Bookshop (240 East 53rd Street, between Second and Third, in Manhattan). If you want to check it out, do them a big favor and reserve your seat by e-mailing the organizers here.

After attending an introductory event, like this one, you have the option of delving a little further into the matter. On the following weekend, on Saturday, October 15, the group will host another event, including a screening of a Ken Burns film. The talk will be “A Way of Life,” and the film is Vézelay, made by Burns in 1995, and this will take place in The Sheen Center (Studio A), located at 18 Bleecker Street, from 4 to 5:30. RSVP here.

Click to enlarge.

‘What Calls Us to Search?’

     
The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York City will host an event Monday night at the Theosophical Society to introduce us to the concepts of the Gurdjieff Work.

Click to enlarge.

The Search

for Meaning

in the Midst
of Life:
What Calls Us
to Search?

September 21

6:30 p.m.

Quest Bookshop

240 E. 53rd Street

Manhattan
RSVP here

After attending one of the Foundation’s introductory events, one may attend Ongoing Readings. Send a note to that same e-mail address for more information and to reserve your seat at the Readings if you have attended an introductory event first.
     

‘Cultivating an Enlightened Mind’

     
New York Theosophical Society will host a national lecturer Sunday at its headquarters in Manhattan. From the publicity:

Cultivating an Enlightened Mind

Presented by Pablo Sender

Sunday, November 23 at 2 p.m.
New York Theosophical Society

240 East 53rd Street in Manhattan

(Enter through Quest Bookshop)

In some of her writings Mme. Blavatsky described a state of mind (manas) that is illumined by the spiritual wisdom (buddhi). She called this the radiant mind (manas taijasa). In this program we will explore the philosophical foundations of the subject as well as some practices geared towards stimulating the union of our mind and the principle of divine wisdom in us.

Pablo Sender, Ph.D., became a member of the Theosophical Society in his native Argentina in 1996. He has worked at the International Headquarters of the Society in India, and currently is a staff member at the National Center of the Theosophical Society in America, in Wheaton, Illinois. He has presented Theosophical lectures, workshops, and classes in India, several countries in Europe, and the Americas.
     

‘Gurdjieff: The Search for Meaning’

     
The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York City will host an event next month at the Theosophical Society to introduce us to the concepts of the Gurdjieff Work.

Toward Awakening:

The Search
for Meaning

in the Midst of Life

Friday, November 14

6 p.m.

Quest Bookshop

240 East 53rd Street

Manhattan

RSVP to gurdjieffevent(at)gmail(dot)com

After attending one of the Foundation’s introductory events, one may attend Ongoing Readings, such as those scheduled for November 21 and December 5. Each session will consider an aspect of this Gurdjieff quotation:

“The point is to re-establish what has been lost, not to acquire anything new.
 This is the purpose of development.”

Send a note to that same e-mail address for more information and to reserve your seat at the Readings if you have attended an introductory event first.
     

‘Esoteric Grand Central’

     
Obscura Society New York wants you to take a walk. With author Mitch Horowitz. Through Grand Central Terminal to see the esoteric clues in its design and décor.

Magpie file photo

Mercury atop Grand Central Terminal.

The New York chapter of the Atlas Obscura Society, a group that unites those who are curious enough about cultural oddities and occult landmarks to actually visit and tour them, has a 90-minute walking tour of Grand Central Terminal planned for next month. From the publicity:

Occult Grand Central

Friday, October 10

Noon to 1:30

$60 per person

Meet at 11:50 on the southeast corner

of Park Avenue and East 41st Street

Every day thousands of travelers gaze in wonder at Grand Central Terminal’s vast zodiac ceiling and the figure of Mercury towering over Park Avenue, but few ever grasp their true significance.

After this tour you’ll understand the real meaning behind these and other cornerstones of Grand Central’s design. Indeed, this crowning edifice of the Beaux-Arts architectural movement can only be fully understood by appreciating the occult themes encrypted within its appearance.

In this lively and intellectually substantive journey, writer and historian Mitch Horowitz, whose occult walking tours have been called a “can’t-miss event” by Time Out, reveals the esoteric imagery and backstory of Grand Central’s design, including the station’s colossal exterior monuments, its interior symbols and insignias, and how its appearance shaped the gothic look and feel of midtown Manhattan. The tour also features wonderful stories of the Vanderbilt family, who oversaw the making of Grand Central, and explores the occult atmosphere of the late Victorian and Edwardian age.

Magpie file photo

Mitch Horowitz at Quest,
January 2014.

Horowitz, a modern day, nonfiction Rod Serling, has a passion for mysteries surpassed only by his desire to uncover the truth. Mitch is a PEN Award-winning historian and an acclaimed writer and speaker on alternative spirituality. The Washington Post says Mitch “treats esoteric ideas and movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness that is too often lost in today’s raised-voice discussions.” Mitch has written on everything from the war on witches to the secret life of Ronald Reagan for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Salon, CNN.com, Time.com, and Boing Boing. He has discussed esoteric spirituality on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, NPR’s All Things Considered, The Montel Williams Show, Coast to Coast AM, and virtually every cable network. Mitch is the author of Occult America and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life, and is vice president and editor-in-chief at Tarcher/Penguin.
     

‘Hidden Wisdom’ rendered in plain sight

  

He’s still on the road, in Canada now. Bro. Tim Wallace-Murphy is on a speaking tour, promoting his new book titled Hidden Wisdom: Secrets of the Western Esoteric Tradition. He had been in New Jersey and New York these past few days, drawing more than 100 Masons to Atlas-Pythagoras Lodge Friday night, and following that triumph the next day with an intimate afternoon at the Theosophical Society’s Quest Bookshop in Manhattan, and his final stop in the area at the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library at the Grand Lodge of New York last night. You’d never guess he’s 80 years old.


It’s the prolific author’s 12th book, and while it covers material quite familiar to his regular readers, what I take to be the point of Hidden Wisdom is not ancient Egypt or the Israel of antiquity or medieval Europe or any point in history, but is the future. Our future.


To be sure, the author writes for new fans, and indeed leads a tour beginning... well, at the beginning of esoteric thought, namely the cave paintings in France depicting shamanistic ritual believed to be more than 10,000 years old. From there, hidden wisdom evolves. Neolithic spirituality, Egyptian temples, Israelite covenant, the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Grail, the Templars, the Renaissance, the Masons, and many more points of interest are made.


But it is the book’s conclusion that gives us pause because it could be understood as an urgent warning from one who has lived long and seen much. Wallace-Murphy exhorts us to “live our beliefs and turn our world around. For if our world cannot be transformed into a global, just and equitable society, stripped of violence, greed and poverty, why should it survive? We have the spiritual answers to our problems in the hidden wisdom of the ancient sages and mystics. The real question is: Have we the wit, the humility and the courage to apply them?”