Entertainment value

Including the Postage

Photo: The world’s largest known ammonite, and me. Museum of Natural History, Paris, France 2022.

Unleash the dogs.

I'm just going to be a bad person for a few minutes now and pen a few snarky words about entertainment value in spiritual work.

Human beings are fickle creatures. We generally don't want to do anything unless it's fun.

It takes a particular kind of perverse wrong work of sex center to want to do things, outwardly, that aren't fun. Think of Puritans. Think of Calvinists, extremists, whatever you want to. These people aren't fun. They think that spiritual life consists of self punishment. Little does anyone know that that is the opposite of spiritual life; or that we already punish ourselves as we are… without even trying to… which somehow makes it worse.

In any event, because we have no right instincts about such things to speak of, one needs to attract people to spiritual work—mostly by making it appealing, not appalling. The monks, for example, at the monastery in Conques (download the monograph below for free) knew this and did all kinds of utterly crazy things to get people interested in what they were up to: they burgled other monasteries and stole the remains of saints. They carved a whacky, colorful tympanum for their church in Conques which to this day confounds, amazes, and delights. (It's not colorful anymore except in terms of its iconography, because all of the crazy bright paint that it was painted with originally has long worn off.)

The Abbey Church Of St

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The Gurdjieff work, however, forgot how to entertain people sometime after Gurdjieff died. Apparently maybe about five minutes after he died. Could have been less.

I bring this up because Gurdjieff knew all about crazy entertainment. He took lesbians to visit whorehouses, for God’s sake… can you imagine? The nerve of the man.