Huh, that's where the enneagram, which I am aware is currently popular in many western progressive Christian circles, comes to our culture through...
More interestingly, I have probably at some point read a book or an excerpt that this man, with a background in fourth way before a conversion to Orthodoxy, translated.
And Robin Amis claimed the Enneagram comes from Mount Athos...? I didn't expect that claim.
EDIT: This is a deeper rabbit hole than I thought. Gurdjieff also reportedly had an impact on Timothy Leary (prominent early psilocybin researcher) and Alan Watts (a former teacher of Fr. Seraphim Rose), among dozens of others...
The occult/new thought movements of the 1800s and 1900s is an absolute cat's cradle of interesting ideas mixed in with cartoonish chicanery and sheer lunacy. I can't afford to simply ignore it because people who went through that pipeline were fed directly into influential roles in translation and instruction in the english speaking Orthodox world, which I dwell in. Just how many similar connections am I going to discover in the next year?
...To some extent this could just be an example of the whole "6 degrees of separation" thing. That, and St. Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean neophyte and there's other examples out there. Maybe there's something about former seekers of the occult that naturally leads them to places of influence if they end up in the church...
The idea that humans are (in general) machines and all our reactions are stimuli/response. With occasional glimpses of real consciousness that have potential to be developed. That is interesting to me anyway.
However, a lot of it appears hooey. The numerology type stuff for instance.
Huh, that's where the enneagram, which I am aware is currently popular in many western progressive Christian circles, comes to our culture through...
More interestingly, I have probably at some point read a book or an excerpt that this man, with a background in fourth way before a conversion to Orthodoxy, translated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Amis#Mount_Athos
And Robin Amis claimed the Enneagram comes from Mount Athos...? I didn't expect that claim.
EDIT: This is a deeper rabbit hole than I thought. Gurdjieff also reportedly had an impact on Timothy Leary (prominent early psilocybin researcher) and Alan Watts (a former teacher of Fr. Seraphim Rose), among dozens of others...
The occult/new thought movements of the 1800s and 1900s is an absolute cat's cradle of interesting ideas mixed in with cartoonish chicanery and sheer lunacy. I can't afford to simply ignore it because people who went through that pipeline were fed directly into influential roles in translation and instruction in the english speaking Orthodox world, which I dwell in. Just how many similar connections am I going to discover in the next year?
...To some extent this could just be an example of the whole "6 degrees of separation" thing. That, and St. Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean neophyte and there's other examples out there. Maybe there's something about former seekers of the occult that naturally leads them to places of influence if they end up in the church...