Esoteric Warriors - Alex Kozma

This is a book about the author meeting a number of masters in the martial, spiritual and Taoist arts and contained within are interviews with them. I bought this book as the author may live near me so I thought about the possibility of training with him so I thought i'd try to get a flavour of what he teaches.

There is no doubt that Alex Kozma has met a lot of genuine masters in his travels and in this book are some very interesting interviews with many who talk about systems of development and martial practices I had never heard of, so it is always nice to get something unexpected and new. I like that it is not completely martial arts focused and has interviews with people who had gone beyond the martial into the more spiritual or religious areas, one had even become a fully blown Christian through his martial arts training, and fans of the Wu Tang Clan will like the interview about the Wu Tang Chuan martial system. But on the negative the book didn't flow that well and it is really just a load of interviews cobbled together without much linkage between them, so it isn't a properly structured book really with quite brief introductions and conclusions setting the scene of the book and the interviews, but still without people like the author writing about masters like these most of us would never even know their systems exist so my respect goes out to the author for putting the book together and also for actually going out and seeking these guys out in person rather than just searching google for them like most of the rest of us.

The Reality Of Being - Jeanne De Salzmann

I am putting this one here early as I believe it may be one of the most important books I will read, I first bought it a while ago but I was pretty amazed when I started reading it at the high level of wisdom I was trying to digest, my first reaction was that it was a bit above my level of understanding so I was just reading it in fits and starts. It is a publishing of Jeanne de Salzmann's personal notebooks so it doesn't flow like a proper book should, which could be one reason why I have taken so long to read it, but strangely I always found myself falling asleep when trying to read it, but I don't mean it is boring rather for some reason I couldn't get my mind involved in it like there was some sort of resistance for a reason I don't know or understand, even though the content I think is very important, so I am about half way through at the moment.

I think many of the ideas within the book would be very hard to understand without a good understanding of the Gurdjieff system so I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner, but for someone in the Fourth Way or interested in that area I think it is a must read as it opens up so much of the teaching, or at least the teaching as it now being presented. But amazingly I saw it in my local Heffers bookshop recently which I didn't expect.

After doing a bit of digging myself there is a bit of controversy over this book as some say that that Jeanne wouldn't have wanted it published, others say it is too high level so people will misunderstand it and distort the teachings. Others say that it is a deviation from Gurdjieff so is a new teaching in itself and isn't the real Fourth Way, as de Salzmann seems to emphasise the meditative practises over almost everything else except maybe the dances, but Gurdjieff didn't include much of this meditative emphasis in his own books.

I was always surprised at the lack of meditation in Gurdjieff's teachings seeing as just about every other esoteric teaching regards it so highly so why not include meditation along with all the other teachings? there were certain sensing exercises within his third series of writings to do with sensing the fingers and trying to distinguish between sensing and feeling, plus there is an exercise to do with saying "I AM" while sensing the solar plexus then imagining it vibrating, but there was no formal sitting like Zazen or Buddhist type meditation. I recall in 'Beelzebubs Tales' a story about "deep sea diving" which I later found out was a reference to diving into the subconscious ie meditation, he was in some sort of experimental contraption wearing a diving suit but through some linkage he could observe how his essence was reacting to such diving and he said it was like watching a puppy desperately trying to stay afloat in water, so my understanding of this is that this is a critique of doing meditation without first developing your essence to a mature level otherwise it will panic like a puppy trying to swim. I will have to look up this story again when I have time for a quote.

I feel the Gurdjieff meditation presented in The Reality of Being may be easier on your essence than Buddhist meditation because it revolves around sensing the body, so you are sensing your arms and legs while repeating affirmations such as "I AM" or "Lord have mercy" alternating between feeling and sensing, or sensing the whole body in this way, and my subjective experience of this is that through contact with your body on this level you are grounding yourself as you are connecting with your body even down to the level of bone which is very grounding to the emotional/energetic level of your being bringing it to the level of the earth, so your essence will not be panicked by it, so this level of exercise is more about integration rather than "deep sea diving".

Gurdjieff's third series is meant to be the instruction book of his teaching but many say it was unfinished, which I find strange as 'Beelzebub's Tales' is such an epic book I doubt he wouldn't have made any mistakes with his book 'Life is only real then when I AM', so maybe he felt that people weren't ready for the later teachings, so maybe this book is a continuation of sorts of Gurdjieff's third book as people are more ready now to receive it. I don't really have any answers as I am not involved in the official Fourth Way society and the book was not published by de Salzmann herself, but personally I am glad it was published as it clarifies many questions I had and shows that Gurdjieff had at least one disciple who gained great development from his system.

tbc

The Master Game - Robert.S. De Ropp

I bought this book from Watkins because I was intrigued by a few reviews I had read about the author who had apparently managed to fuse a lot of wisdom from many different traditions such as Zen and the Fourth Way into his daily life, including his business and economic life, and here he writes down what he has learned from his own journey.

My first impression is that I think when this book was first published it may have been considered a classic but that may be because of the time it was published, before a lot of the content had entered more mainstream public consciousness so it may have been a groundbreaker in its day, but maybe not so much now as many more books about consciousness have been published especially from the Fourth Way perspective, but I will have to wait and see as I have only read the first chapter, so more to come later on this one.