I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

slumber by all possible means, coming to that state of Awakening, or
Bodhana, which we have already referred to.
The left-hand path insists that awakening runs counter to the natural
order of things, and even breaks the rule of the divine. Gurdjieff often stated
that his Work of awakening was pitted "against nature, against God." Just as
the Vama Marga instructs its initiates that awakening can only be
accomplished through the physical body, rather than through the cerebral
means favored by conventional religion, so did Gurdjieff push his followers,
often effete intellectuals and artists, to exceed their physical limits as a form
of liberation. For Gurdjieff, the Work was a matter of bringing "the seven
centers of man," located in the body, into harmonious adjustment. This
concept be almost certainly borrowed from the Tantric system of seven
chakras, and under further analysis the activation of the "seven centers"
appears to be Gurdjieff's version of Kundalini yoga.
Gurdjieff placed special emphasis on the "sexual center" as the
source of the energy that could eventually be directed toward the freeing
from sleep and the activation of the "higher centers" of the body, which are
dormant in most human beings. Here we encounter a modern reworking of
the left-hand path notion that the powerful sexual energy unleashed in the
lower chakras can pierce the higher chakras, ultimately opening the eye of
Shiva, the symbol for divine consciousness.
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Although he never specifically described this process of creating a
higher body by harmonizing the seven centers of man with the energy and
substance of sex as Kundalini, direct references to the term are not absent in
Gurdjieff's Work. In his simultaneously profound and unreadable gargantuan
novel Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson, Gurdjieff coins the typically
Gurdjieffian term "Kundabuffer", This he describes as a sleep-inducing
force of hypnosis and fantasy that prevents humans from awakening to a
more vivid life in the real world. Of course, this is not completely dissonant
with one left-hand path understanding of the Kundalini force. In its dormant,
coiled serpent manifestation, Kundalini is thought to be the root cause of
human delusion, exercising a spell of enchantment over the mind that can
only be broken by awakening the serpent from slumber.
Gurdjieff also maintained that human consciousness could never
survive physical death unless the aspirant worked at creating a "higher
body", a spiritual organism which appears to he the "subtle" or perhaps
"causal" body of Tantric initiation – "the body of light" known to Gnostic
libertines. The Vama Marga practitioner of Kundalini believes that the more
enduring spiritual body within his or physical vessel is fed and energized by
the sexual currents, and the internal build-up of the ojas, the force emanated
by semen. With this arcane metaphysical physiology Gurdjieff is in accord
on every point, declaring that "the substance with which sex works" is the
fuel for the "higher body", that subtle organism which does not exist until it
is created through the efforts of the awakened man or woman. To his inner
circle of followers, Gurdjieff was more blunt; "the substance with which sex
works," he admitted, "is semen."
It was a substance Gurdjieff had no compunctions about sharing
with his many adoring female disciples. Like a twentieth century
reincarnation of the legendary left-hand path Tibetan "Divine Madman",
Drugpa Kunley, Gurdjieff scandalized sedate esoteric circles of the 20s and
30s by seducing followers by the score, and assuring them that relations with
the Master were beneficial for their spiritual development. One of
Gurdjieff's more astute biographers, James Webb, quotes one disciple as
saying, "Gurdjieff used to take us girls into intimacy with him. It was his
way of helping us."
Considering how closely every other part of Gurdjieff's teaching
resembles sinister current practice, it may be that he privately taught his