Introduction to the Ideas and Practice of the Gurdjieff Teaching

Spiritual Community: Hints from Long Past and Nearby

This session will explore the larger world of spiritual communities from Pythagoras, the Desert Fathers, early monastic codes, and St. Benedict to Dogen Zenji, Sufi codes of conduct, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Suzuki Roshi, and Thich Nhat Hahn.

All were wrestling with the same issues--the goodness and potential buried in human beings, the tendency to narrow self-serving and triviality, the need for an axis of truth and, revolving around… Show more it, a sensible, encouraging discipline. We will be looking for principles, practices, and tales. And in the end returning to Gurdjieff. The measure of success here is not to know everything, but to engage with the question of spiritual community as a living thing, slightly alien, slightly promising.

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