Course: The Hard way (with Luke Behncke)
Our Schedule
3 Zoom Classes/1 one on one session
Begins January 6th/2024
Times Saturday 3pm EST (New York), Saturday 9pm CET (Paris), Sunday 7am AEDT (Melbourne)
January 6• Sleep and Awakening
January 13• Sex and Soul
January 20 • God and Service
Session 4 • One-on-One meetings - to be arranged with individual participants.
Price: €260/200€/100€ Tiers
In the early 20th Century, Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff brought an ancient system of personal transformation to the western world known as the ‘Fourth Way’ or the ‘Work’. He claimed that this system was the source of all spiritual traditions and now adapted for the modern world. Its focus is on the individual and community to understand the energies and forces of their nature through direct experience. In doing so, it would become possible to contact a different order of reality that can deepen the experience of life. Gurdjieff was clear that it is the most difficult work that anyone can undertake, but also the most productive. It calls for relentless authentic questioning and a discipline of special efforts that can enable a quality of relationship that nothing else can give. Gurdjieff affirmed that a sustained work of this kind would accelerate the necessary transformation of men and women to meet the demands of a responsible life while fulfilling their essential purpose.
Join Luke Behncke in practically exploring some of the tenets of the Work on Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way - THE HARD WAY - from the Parallax Academy. Live sessions will be recorded, and participants will have access to a video of each recorded class. Participants will have one-on-one interviews with the instructor. Sign up here for this one time exclusive, never to be repeated experience:
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
What you will learn is up to you. Do nothing, expect nothing. You have to be responsible for yourself.
The hope is that you will learn to appreciate, at a deeper and practical level, the immense difficulties faced in individual and communal transformation, and also those precious and rare attributes of human potential that make true transformation possible.
It is also hoped that you will gain a greater discernment of all the prevailing, spiritual “clap-trap” promoted, either consciously or unconsciously, by all the modern intellectuals saturating YouTube and other social media platforms.
The evil they promulgate is in convincing everyone (particularly young people) that by “simply and easily” thinking and talking a lot about transformation that it will allow anyone to achieve it. This is a hollow substitute for the realities of difficult struggle and long suffering required to come to the realization of the “nullity” of one’s own presence of Being that can exclusively give rise to such transformation. For it is only when I truly understand that I AM nothing that I can BE something.
Course Content
Session 1 - Sleep and Awakening
Saturday 6 January 2024 (3pm EST (New York), Saturday 9pm CET (Paris), Sunday 7am AEDT (Melbourne) - - Lecture and Q&A.
Gurdjieff was emphatic that people are asleep within themselves but believe that they are awake. Everyone lives a mostly unconscious, somnambulistic and mechanical existence, endlessly engaged in reactive “think-talk”. This is especially true of the modern intellectual culture that fuels social media.
Sleep leads to all sorts of unhelpful outcomes for individuals and communities, and is the source of true evil. What is sleep? How can I recognise and understand it in myself, in others, in the world?
Conversely, what does it mean, practically, to awaken from the hypnotic sleep of life - individually and communally? What are the conditions for its fulfillment? And how to begin to awaken in the midst of life? The solutions may surprise you.
Reference material:
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/preparation-exercise
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/sleep-and-awakening-attention-and-consciousness
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/attention-the-true-cosmic-currency
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/four-states-of-consciousness
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/the-purposes-of-spiritual-exercises-progressive-verification
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/four-phases-of-group-work
Session 11 - Sex and Soul
Saturday 13 January 2024 (3pm EST (New York), Saturday 9pm CET (Paris), Sunday 7am AEDT (Melbourne)) - Lecture and Q&A.
Gurdjieff was insistent that sex energy was the key to liberation and the creation of a Soul, and also the key to our sleep and ruinous destruction. It is the most misunderstood part of human existence in modern culture.
What is sex energy? How can we recognise it? What are the dangers along the way, and the conditions for it to function healthily - both individually and communally? It may not be what you think.
What is the physiology of the Soul? What are the Soul’s nutritional and elimination needs for its creation? Soul creation must be taken practically and ‘matter-of-fact’, devoid of all the fantastical nonsense associated with it today.
Reference material:
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/a-study-aid-the-physiology-of-digestion-for-soul-creation
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/sex-and-soul-creation
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/phases-in-soul-creation-conception-to-completion
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/spiritual-energy-nutrition-for-soul-creation
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/spiritual-energy-elimination-for-soul-creation
Session III– God and Service
Saturday 20 January 2024 (3pm EST (New York), Saturday 9pm CET (Paris), Sunday 7am AEDT (Melbourne) - Lecture and Q&A.
Gurdjieff repeats again and again that the practice and understanding of ‘conscious labours and intentional suffering’ is the path to personal and communal transformation, Soul creation, healthy societal function and, ultimately, service to God.
What is God? What are conscious labours and intentional suffering, and how to practically use it in life? It may be the ‘not-so-secret’ of secrets.
Reference material:
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/four-dimensions-of-spiritual-work
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/the-third-sign-of-soul-formation-impartial-suffering
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/what-is-suffering
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/seven-categories-of-human-in-soul-creation
https://www.faithmadeflesh.com/post/measuring-being-gurdjieff-s-categories-of-man-in-soul-creation
Session IV: ‘One-on-One’ meetings -
To be arranged with individual participants.
About your facilitator
Raised in Christian communities in rural and outback Australia, Luke’s background in biomedical science and physical education, with diverse interests in philosophy, religion and art - ultimately drew him to Gurdjieff’s system where he has been a practitioner working with groups and individuals from around the world since 2000. Explorations related to Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way and Christianity can be found on his blogsite at 'Faith made Flesh’.