I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
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slumber by all possible means, coming to that state of Awakening, or<br />
Bodhana, which we have already referred to.<br />
<strong>The</strong> left-hand path insists that awakening runs counter to the natural<br />
order of things, and even breaks the rule of the divine. Gurdjieff often stated<br />
that his Work of awakening was pitted "against nature, against God." Just as<br />
the Vama Marga instructs its initiates that awakening can only be<br />
accomplished through the physical body, rather than through the cerebral<br />
means favored by conventional religion, so did Gurdjieff push his followers,<br />
often effete intellectuals and artists, to exceed their physical limits as a form<br />
of liberation. For Gurdjieff, the Work was a matter of bringing "the seven<br />
centers of man," located in the body, into harmonious adjustment. This<br />
concept be almost certainly borrowed from the Tantric system of seven<br />
chakras, and under further analysis the activation of the "seven centers"<br />
appears to be Gurdjieff's version of Kundalini yoga.<br />
Gurdjieff placed special emphasis on the "sexual center" as the<br />
source of the energy that could eventually be directed toward the freeing<br />
from sleep and the activation of the "higher centers" of the body, which are<br />
dormant in most human beings. Here we encounter a modern reworking of<br />
the left-hand path notion that the powerful sexual energy unleashed in the<br />
lower chakras can pierce the higher chakras, ultimately opening the eye of<br />
Shiva, the symbol for divine consciousness.<br />
220<br />
Although he never specifically described this process of creating a<br />
higher body by harmonizing the seven centers of man with the energy and<br />
substance of sex as Kundalini, direct references to the term are not absent in<br />
Gurdjieff's Work. In his simultaneously profound and unreadable gargantuan<br />
novel Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson, Gurdjieff coins the typically<br />
Gurdjieffian term "Kundabuffer", This he describes as a sleep-inducing<br />
force of hypnosis and fantasy that prevents humans from awakening to a<br />
more vivid life in the real world. <strong>Of</strong> course, this is not completely dissonant<br />
with one left-hand path understanding of the Kundalini force. In its dormant,<br />
coiled serpent manifestation, Kundalini is thought to be the root cause of<br />
human delusion, exercising a spell of enchantment over the mind that can<br />
only be broken by awakening the serpent from slumber.<br />
Gurdjieff also maintained that human consciousness could never<br />
survive physical death unless the aspirant worked at creating a "higher<br />
body", a spiritual organism which appears to he the "subtle" or perhaps<br />
"causal" body of Tantric initiation – "the body of light" known to Gnostic<br />
libertines. <strong>The</strong> Vama Marga practitioner of Kundalini believes that the more<br />
enduring spiritual body within his or physical vessel is fed and energized by<br />
the sexual currents, and the internal build-up of the ojas, the force emanated<br />
by semen. With this arcane metaphysical physiology Gurdjieff is in accord<br />
on every point, declaring that "the substance with which sex works" is the<br />
fuel for the "higher body", that subtle organism which does not exist until it<br />
is created through the efforts of the awakened man or woman. To his inner<br />
circle of followers, Gurdjieff was more blunt; "the substance with which sex<br />
works," he admitted, "is semen."<br />
It was a substance Gurdjieff had no compunctions about sharing<br />
with his many adoring female disciples. Like a twentieth century<br />
reincarnation of the legendary left-hand path Tibetan "Divine Madman",<br />
Drugpa Kunley, Gurdjieff scandalized sedate esoteric circles of the 20s and<br />
30s by seducing followers by the score, and assuring them that relations with<br />
the Master were beneficial for their spiritual development. One of<br />
Gurdjieff's more astute biographers, James Webb, quotes one disciple as<br />
saying, "Gurdjieff used to take us girls into intimacy with him. It was his<br />
way of helping us."<br />
Considering how closely every other part of Gurdjieff's teaching<br />
resembles sinister current practice, it may be that he privately taught his