Ohhh, there is lots of overlap between Gurdjieff/Fourth Way stuff/Buddhism/Sufism/Esoteric Christianity/etc/etc...
This morning it occurred to me Gurdjieff's "identification" is perhaps a specific case of Buddhism's "attachment", i.e. to the "notion tree" nested beneath the notion of an individual "self".
Lots of other thoughts re: Christianity stories/tenets/tales as metaphors of Buddhist-y notions.
Ohhh, there is lots of overlap between Gurdjieff/Fourth Way stuff/Buddhism/Sufism/Esoteric Christianity/etc/etc...
me needs explaining
I'll try!
First off, the title has nothing to do with the content. It was just a sentence I liked that came to mind in the warm glow of the context of the text elixir of yesterday's
~tffbposts.
The content itself? Well, it's kind of a "you had to be there" kind of thing... by which I really mean "repeatedly exposed" (no.. not in THAT way... <coughs>).
(Or maybe not. Maybe I've just been particularly slow along such lines.)
I'll say it the way it makes sense to me, and hopefully the meanings you'd naturally assign to my words winds up painting a similar inner picture:
Are you familiar with the notion of "attachment" in Buddhism? I've read many definitions, but to me it's come to mean a sort of inability to let go of things going what's usually called "one's way" - complete with builtin burdens like "fear of it not going that way", "fear of it going some worst possible way", the need to engineer others and/or events falling in line with one's way, the loss of some/most/all attention on matters other than that particular "one's way things gotta go"... and, finally, experiencing either brief (or let's just say "temporal") satisfaction if things go your way, and a whole range of negative emotions - complete with blaming others, blaming "God", etc. - if things don't go your way.
Do you feel the potential weight of all that ongoing burden versus, um... let's call it "rolling with the punches" aka "being utterly fine regardless the outcome"?
Next up: identification.
That's a term often associated with G.I. Gurdjieff (and his most famous student, P.D. Ouspensky), which to me basically indicates attachment to the notion of an individual, "free-willed" self - aka subjective entity. Said attachment implies a collection of attributes of said bastion of isolated loneliness, which to me form a tree structure (software sense). The intensity of said identification (perhaps spelling it i-dentification makes it clearer?) determines how much "one believes in one's self", and how insistent one is that all the rest (i.e. all "not (said) self") conforms to the attributes (especially its "free will"), which implies how great the (per the aforementioned) burdens associated with insisting not-self conform to self('s will/wishes/attributes).
And it gets kind of weird to think about rather quickly.
For example, did you note the self-referentiality to the phrase "one believes in one's self"?
And, well, if said "self" is merely a notion (re-peated quickly enough in "notion space" to seem re-al...), WHAT is doing said i-dentification? What gets lost in what is essentially a model of Itself such that it comes to believe it's so much less, i.e. an individual instantiation of subjectively so utterly separate from all the seeming rest?
Well... I believe that can't be said, because words/notions are the building blocks of the modeling thereof - the "thereof" thus being no mere model, but... I'll represent it with the symbol "<ineffable>"....
Finally: "Christianity stories/tenets/tales as metaphors of Buddhist-y notions".
That's kind of a big topic, there being so many such stories/tenets/tales: the Bible, doctrines others have decided derive from such, various filterings thereof called sects/denominations/etc.
But let's take what is probably the biggest as an example: Jesus dying on a cross so that his Father can "forgive the sins of the word".
Well, I've no idea whether that really happened. People are typically such lying sacks a shit... just look at the media, "social media", blah blah... and imagine stretching such murmuring out over the course of a few millennia... well, something's bound to get lost, altered, etc.
BUT it kind of makes sense to me as a metaphor for the notion of one's seeming individual self DYING, i.e. ceasing to be fueled as a notion by no longer being attached to such a notion... by living care/burden-free of that monster and its ridiculous will/demands upon both it"self" and all else going "it's way" ("MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY, DAMMIT!")
Something like that....
One of the biggest realizations/insights/whatchamacallits coming from doing Douglas Harding's experiments was that I could finally reconcile some of Christianity's teachings with my experience/thought process, in particular the exact example you gave of one's seemingly individual self dying as an ego and being reborn as all-that-is.... which then leads straight down the path to Advaita Vedanta :)
And Bingo was his name-o! :-)
The same teacher who told me that stuff about the questions changing and the need for answers becoming less important is a big fan of Ramana Maharshi, who I've not personally read yet, but would like to someday...
I used to be a seminarian, a Roman Catholic one. As such, I had to do my bit of meditation and also reading about such things, mostly from Spanish traditions (St Juan de la Cruz, St Ignacio..), Polish and even Russian (via The Way of the Pilgrim)
It struck me how similar the means of spirituality are everywhere, even though the Theology or Faith, times and countries can be so different.
Personally, the Lectio Divina, (i.e. the reading of the Bible as a monk reads it) was my "thing". But still I needed to quiet my mind, in that I would not have been much different from any, young, untrained, wild, Buddhist monk.
Oh, wow, how interesting. Never even heard of the "Lectio Divina" before.
I agree there's much similarity, especially in what I've come to believe matters most.
Now that I think about it, the degree of similarity of a tenet to one in one or - preferably - more other "ways" has become a litmus test for my considering something of spiritual value.