Gurdjieff-Based Electric Ecclesia

Description

O.G. Rose:

"Luke Behncke is an expert on Gurdjieff, and I had a chance to speak with him on what Gurdjieff might say on our current moment (Ep #238). Here, I wanted to draw attention to Luke’s article “Networks within Networks: The Rise of the Electric Ecclesia and the Future of the Fourth Way,” and suggest that what he is describing is another angle and articulation of what we are seeing emerge online with the SCM. Luke brings Deleuze to mind when he tells us how structures must increasingly move to be like flows, and how “The Work” can be seen as moving to higher dimensionality. From the article:

‘In former times, the true seekers wandered. Not with aimlessness, but with inner guidance. The desert monks, the anchorites, the itinerant mystics — they moved as if by magnetic force, drawn where the need was ripest and the Spirit most alive. They did not belong to a place, but to a current. Their spiritual authority was not institutional, but existential. Their church had no walls — only presence.

‘We are now witnessing a return of this impulse. But this time, it emerges through distributed digital networks — a kind of Web 3.0 Ecclesia. A decentralized, non-hierarchical, radically participatory body of awakened souls. Not a system of control, but a living latticework of relational intelligence. This is not a retreat from the world. It is the reconstitution of the Work in a new dimensional frame.’¹⁶

“The Work” is a phrase we can associate with Gurdjieff, and for our purposes we can think of it as “the work to extend Childhood” (A/B). Luke writes further on how “The Word” is moving ‘into a dynamic, plural, and responsive field — what might be called networks within networks — mirroring the very structure of reality itself, and aligning with emerging patterns in distributed computing, decentralized governance, and quantum connectivity.’¹⁷ It is not just information that flows through the SCM; it is more like spirits."

(https://ogrose.substack.com/p/the-social-coordination-mechanism-5d0)