Issue #32 July 2024
“Remorse: sorrow for not having acted according to objective conscience.”
~ Orage
Hi
Because of a recent and interesting visit to a monastery in Germany, I decided to try to learn German. Nowadays there are many effective pieces of software that enable you to learn languages much faster than was previously possible – so its not too daunting a task.
My ambition – perhaps one that is a little optimistic – is to read The Tales in German. It could be said that, if one is able to do that, one has probably mastered reading German completely. When studying The Tales in depth a long time ago, I did a rough estimate of how large your English vocabulary needed to be to read the book without the aid of a dictionary. It’s somewhere in the region of 40,000, which is in the top few percent.
The same will probably be true of the Tales in German, that you’ll need a very large German vocabulary to read the book.
Now, you might be thinking, “What’s the point?” Well, I am assured by at least one German reader who is bi-lingual, that the two books are not identical. And that makes sense; Gurdjieff would never have spent many hours supervising the German translation if it was going to be just a direct translation of the English version.
Anyway, if I attempt this reading (it’s at least a few months away) and I discover there’s a reason for it, I’ll author a book that provides notes and comparisons. We’ll see.
RB
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius’ father, Marcus Annius Verus, died when Marcus Aurelius was a young boy, around the age of three. Nevertheless he seems to have made a profound impact on his son, who pays tribute to him in his meditations. No doubt he depended on other people for some of the details of the portrait he paints here – which is, of course, rich in Stoicism.
Nothingness and Infinity
In In Search of the Miraculous by P D Ouspensky, p86, we read: “The next idea which it is necessary to master is the materiality of the universe which is taken in the form of the ray of creation. Everything in this universe can be weighed and measured. The Absolute is as material, as weighable and measurable, as the moon, or as man. If the Absolute is God it means that God can be weighed and measured, resolved into component elements.
Gurdjieff Group Dynamics
It is now over seventy years since George Gurdjieff died, officially leaving the organizational responsibility for the continuation and develop of his teaching to Jeanne de Salzmann. In this period, the question arose, as it does following the death of any teacher, “What do we do now?”
Under Madam de Salzmann, some of Gurdjieff’s disciples chose …
Ahoon: Beelzebub’s Personality
In a study group quite a while ago, one of the groups suggested that Ahoon was actually Beelzebub’s personality. It seemed to be a good suggestion – one which has only seems to get stronger the more you think about and read about Ahoon in The Tales. For example when the “devoted old servant” Ahoon speaks, he preserves the style and even entire expressions of Beelzebub himself.