Journal of Manifestation #4

Johnny Blue Star – Journal of Manifestation  #4
The Teachers of Gurdjieff
 – Part 4
A New Galaxy Enterprises Blog
By Johnny Blue Star

I did not really believe Mr. D’s contention that the Gurdjieff tradition was very much alive and well in New York City but I was ready to give it a try. Very soon afterwards, I began to meet with them once a week and I was given a very simple exercise to start. Nowadays, we would call this a mindfulness exercise.

Most of the exercises were related to one thing-  staying in the present moment. I really was surprised at this type of exercise for in all my study of meditation, I had never thought of paying attention to the moment.  Remember, this was before Baba Ram Dass wrote his book called “Be Here Now” and the main wave of so-called “spiritual experience” was based on psychedelics with a tiny bit of meditation practices beginning to impinge on things happening throughout the United States.

One day when I was sitting talking to Mr. and Mrs. D., a wave of energy seemed to overtake me and I suddenly realized, sitting in their comfortable apartment in New York, that I was embroiled in a higher level of consciousness. I then started to laugh, perhaps because of the irony of the length of my search and the surprise that I would find it under these rather ordinary circumstances.

I could not believe it after all those years of study and attempting to meditate, I was finally finding a new consciousness without sitting in any pseudo-lotus position, doing pranayama (yogi breathing) or focusing on some object. I was soon to find that my whole understanding of consciousness mostly derived from books would change in some amazing ways.

I have put this little story in my Journal of Manifestation because when I started out on my Quest, I put it before anything and everything else. I was ready to give up everything to find the Path- but once I did, it was different than anything I imagined and its reality continues to amaze me.

So, in a way, I consider this my most profound manifestation- a taste of consciousness and an introduction for a whole new perspective on reality that would constantly shift and change over the years.

I now recall one of my favorite quotations from scripture: Seek Ye first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness and all else will be granted unto You.

I was soon to find the importance of that little caveat of ‘righteousness’ as I began to investigate what all this meant.

In my next blog on Manifestation, I shall do a bit of a fast forward and discuss some of my more recent discoveries since I last wrote something in 2012.

 

 

 

Copyright ©2014 Johnny Blue Star All Rights Reserved

Johnny Blue Star
http://www.newgalaxyenterprises.com
cvnewz@aol.com
Skype: johnny.blue.star

Journal of Manifestation #3

Johnny Blue Star – Journal of Manifestation  #3
The Teachers of Gurdjieff
 – Part 3
A New Galaxy Enterprises Blog
By Johnny Blue Star

After seeking the true heirs of the Gurdjieff teaching, having been inspired by a book called the Teachers of Gurdjieff by Raphael LaForte, I decided to study Persian.  I was
referred to an American couple, Mr. and Mrs. D. D., who claimed that I didn’t have to Iran or the Middle East to find the true teachings of Gurdjieff. They denied that Raphael’s account was accurate. The Gurdjieff tradition was alive and well in New York.

Having been committed for such a long time to my quest, it was hard to believe them. Imagine, I had spent many years, since I was fourteen, trying to get to a new realm of experience through natural means. Finally, I found a route, but now I was told to question it.

Let us look at what happened from the standpoint of “Manifestation.” I had a dream- of being able to reach a higher state of consciousness- but all my knowledge came from books and fruitless hours trying to meditate. And, finally, when I was quite sure of my direction, the rug was pulled from under me.

In my life, there have been many examples of things manifesting related to my dreams, but not manifesting in exactly the same way. Sometimes, this has brought outright failure, but sometimes it has brought great satisfaction and achievement.

In this case, I kept on visiting the Persian teacher with Mr. and Mrs. D. He was an ex-minister of education of Iran under a former regime (before the Shah) and was a very educated man who had memorized volumes of Persian. I found that the Iranians I met often knew a great deal of Persian and the Farsi language- owing to its verb endings- was a great vehicle for poetry.

I had already studied Persian and knew a bit. But under my new teacher and a year or so in Columbia University, studying the language, I began to lose what I had. I just was not driven by the academic methods of language study.

So, while the Persian was going too well, something happened to me when I became more open to Mr. D., a small event that would soon drastically change my life

 To be continued….

Copyright ©2012 Johnny Blue Star All Rights Reserved

Johnny Blue Star
http://www.newgalaxyenterprises.com
cvnewz@aol.com
Skype: johnny.blue.star

Journal of Manifestation #2

Johnny Blue Star – Journal of Manifestation  #2
The Teachers of Gurdjieff
 – Part 2
A New Galaxy Enterprises Blog
By Johnny Blue Star

As I mentioned in my last blog, while still in St. John’s College, I came across a book called the Teachers of Gurdjieff by Raphael LaForte. Having been intrigued by the description of Gurdjieff’s work in In Search of the Miraculous by Ouspensky, but also by an autobiographical book by Gurdjieff called Meetings with Remarkable Men, I had come to the conclusion that this Path, called the Fourth Way, was where I was headed.

Utilizing the language of Ouspensky, one could say I had formed a “magnetic center,” a set of ideas, terminology and passionate interest in Gurdjieff’s ideas, which in In Search, set a person on a course to attract the help he might need to find a ‘school’ whose  teaching were derived from an ‘esoteric center,’ from a real cosmic connection to Source of all things.

I was, indeed, passionate about my quest because I was willing to put my writing and political interests on hold, everything on hold, to find the answers I was looking for.

The LaForte book was a kind of autobiography of a seeker on a quest to find Gurdjieff’s teachers, claiming that Gurdjieff was part of a system of Sufi Orders whose primary home was in the Middle East and described a visit to various Sufi Masters who spoke Arabic and Persian, but primarily seemed to quoting Sufi works like Khayyam, Attar or Rumi, who wrote in Persian. In preparation for my explorations, I decided that I had to know Persian.

As you will see, my  girlfriend’s  little description in the book she gave me in high school, “To add to your confusion,” was right on target.

So I left St. John’s, dropping out in my senior year to try to find the Teachers of Gurdjieff. To prepare myself, I decided to visit my friend, S. N., at Yale. S. N. lived on a floor of Morse College, where I visited for quite a few months, studying Persian there with a local college student, originally from Iran. Although I made progress in my study of Persian, I was restless to move on and continue my search so I decided to move to New York to launch my expedition to the Middle East.

To this end, I knew I needed to continue my study of Persian so I called the Iranian Embassy and was given the name of an American named D. D., who apparently was studying with someone who knew Persian.

I remember distinctly meeting D.D. and his wife, W. D., and driving with them to New Jersey to meet their teacher. On the way, while driving over the George Washington Bridge, I believe, they asked me why I wanted to study Persian.

I then related to them how I had found this book that told about the teachers of Gurdjieff and how the Gurdjieff Foundation that existed in the West had lost contact with the true ‘esoteric center’ and the source of the teachings.

Mr. D. then said a very peculiar thing, which was echoed by his wife.  He said, “The Gurdjieff work is not dead. We know this for a fact because we have been members of the Gurdjieff Foundation for many years.”

To me, this was a great shock since I had now been preparing to go to the Middle East and give up everything in order to further this goal.

I don’t think I ever used the word, ‘Manifestation,’ back then, but I did know about synchronicity and, in my quest for finding the teachings of Raphael LaForte, I had stumbled on people who not only denied the truth of his book, but claimed to be heirs to the true teaching.

I never knew what a long and winding road I had stumbled on… so I went on to my first formal lesson in Persian by a new teachers, staggered by the possibilities of finding the Truth in my own backyard.

 To be continued….

Copyright ©2012 Johnny Blue Star All Rights Reserved

Johnny Blue Star
http://www.newgalaxyenterprises.com
cvnewz@aol.com
Skype: johnny.blue.star

Journal of Manifestation #1

Johnny Blue Star – Journal of Manifestation  #1
The Teachers of Gurdjieff – Part 1
A New Galaxy Enterprises Blog
By Johnny Blue Star

I have decided to keep a kind of journal about Manifestation-  by which I mean the physicalization or making reality in the physical world or the world of human consciousness of preconceived goals or desires.

Although this is going to be a day-by-day journal, it is not so much as a record of what goals I manifest in my life, as a record of my ideas and insights about the process as well as some backward reflection of what led me into this curious project about understanding the concept of manifestation.   Join me here only if the subject passionately interests you- not just how things flower into reality, but why they flower- and if there is any reality to the idea that there is some legitimate way human consciousness can and/or should co-operate in the process. Join me with your comments and your sincere desire to partake of this process of understanding.

Can I say in the outset that I am not any kind of Master of Manifestation nor to I have a specific axe to grind- in terms of a pre-existing methodology or philosophy to draw exactly from?

I still have more questions than answers- and I am still experimenting with ideas after decades of trying to understand this process.

I suppose you could say that my interest in Manifestation goes back to years after I had studied with people associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation, people whose lives and experience- and insights into consciousness- had a profound effect on my own consciousness and experience.

As I mention in another blog, Straight On Until Morning – Regenesis– at one point I gave up my lifelong interest in writing to strictly pursue my spiritual interests.

My girlfriend in high school had given me a book called, In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky, which she inscribed with the seductive inscription,  “To Add to Your Confusion” – and it was this book, which I probably read in high school, but did not take super seriously, that I took to college with me.

In St. John’s College, where I would spend three and a half years, I met an older student named S. G. who tremendously interested me with his sophisticated focus on consciousness.  He was several years ahead of me but had actually been involved with something called the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York, which he told me was in a book called, New York Unexpurgated. S.G.’s field of interest was biology but his passion was the realization tangible truth via consciousness.

I began to take another look at Ouspensky- and I found a friend, A. A., who was also interested in consciousness but closer to my grade level and we used to go out on the lawn and talk about such matters and try to meditate, an effort I had been making unsuccessfully since I was fourteen.

At some point, I came across a book called The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Raphael LaForte.

By the time I read it, I had already become fascinated with Gurdjieff- and believed that somewhere in the mesh of the obviously scientifically fallacious use of elements like Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen, there was some kind of precise alchemical science, intentionally using biochemical symbols to mean something else.

Having been hooked on Gurdjieff, I was ready to be bought into LaForte’s story. Perhaps that’s a poor way of saying it, because what happened is very complex….

…and very much connected to the idea of Manifestation.

 To be continued….

Copyright ©2012 Johnny Blue Star All Rights Reserved
A New Galaxy Enterprises Blog

Johnny Blue Star
http://www.newgalaxyenterprises.com
cvnewz@aol.com
Skype: johnny.blue.star