I know Red Hawk well. He’s a good friend. He does bring a unique intensity to his work.
It’s important for each individual to do this as best they can according to their understanding. In regard to force, my own teacher said to me, “use it or lose it.”
Pauline de Dampierre once told me that Guenon 'voulait la mort au Travail' - He wanted the Work to die.'
I do remember Ricard giving a positive review to a book related to the Gurdjieff work by Red Hawk: 'Self Remembering'. I remember you saying you had met him and he was 'intense' :)
I know Red Hawk well. He’s a good friend. He does bring a unique intensity to his work.
It’s important for each individual to do this as best they can according to their understanding. In regard to force, my own teacher said to me, “use it or lose it.”
Enlightened Vagabond is on Audible and I recommend listening to it.
Happy Birthday!
'Nothing is said in Ricard’s official biography of her influence on her
son’s decision to become a Buddhist monk, although she became a practitioner under
Kangyur Rinpoche’s direction (picture ) in 1968, just a few years before Matthieu Ricard
went to Darjeeling and became his disciple too.
Yahne Le Toumelin [Ricard's mother) had been a
‘spiritual seeker’ since her teenage years, and this spiritual search included a painful
experience in Gurdjieff’s Parisian circles in the 1940s. Important episodes of her life are
described by Revel in his very first book, a short novel published in 1957, entitled
Histoire de Flore (“Flore’s Story”). In this book, the reader can follow the spiritual
evolution of a young exalted Catholic child, who grows up to be a tormented and fragile
teenager, and then becomes, in her twenties, Gurdjieff’s obedient student – so obedient
that she obeyed her master when the latter asked her to have sex with him, telling her it
was ‘a test’. The part dedicated to the Gurdjieff experience is very telling of Yahn Le
Toumelin’s expectations and of her socialization into ‘spiritual circles’ – which, at least
in the case of Gurdjieff’s group, included absolute devotion, improvised forms of
‘psychology’, esoteric teachings, secrets and manipulations. Like many young
Europeans and Americans in the 1960s, Matthieu Ricard’s mother was part of a Western
esoteric society before joining Tibetan Buddhism. That is only a confirmation of Donald
Lopez’s work, notably Prisoners of Shangri La, in which he contends that the cultural
background mostly responsible for the reception of Tibetan Buddhism in the West was
Western Esotericism. It is then possible that Yahne Le Toumelin influenced her son,
introducing western esoteric ideas into his conception of Buddhism. Matthieu Ricard
himself writes in The Monk and the Philosopher that he started his journey to Buddhism
through the work of René Guénon, introduced to him by his uncle (on his mother’s
side), the Navigator Jacques-Yves Le Toumelin.'
https://www.academia.edu/30227532/What_It_Means_to_be_a_Scientific_Monk_Matthieu_Ricard_and_the_Influence_of_Western_Esotericism_on_the_Mind_and_Life_Institute
Pauline de Dampierre once told me that Guenon 'voulait la mort au Travail' - He wanted the Work to die.'
I do remember Ricard giving a positive review to a book related to the Gurdjieff work by Red Hawk: 'Self Remembering'. I remember you saying you had met him and he was 'intense' :)