a chain of esoteric schools

Alfred R. Orage

The flowering of Greek culture was an indirect product of the contact of the philosophers with Egyptian schools. Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Solon, among others, went to Egypt to study.

Plato was the philosopher, while Socrates was the teacher of a method, as well as a philosopher.

Yet in Greece there existed true esoteric groups, which were responsible for the flowering of her culture. Socrates was a member of one.

This method, in various forms, was taught by all the great teachers. Plato had learnt the method from Socrates and studied the system with the priests in Egypt.

Pythagoras taught this system and method, but no record of his teaching remains except some fragments from perhaps one of his subsidiary groups. The books written about him are almost all supposition. But his teaching had an enormous influence. Plato´s Timaeus contains the cosmogony of Pythagoras. Some of Gurdjieff´s dances and movements are based on the fragments of Pythagoras teaching.

Buddha, like Pythagoras and Jesus, was a practical workman, not merely a talker.

The Sphinx is a copy of the original which existed in ancient Chaldea. In the original figure three parts were connected, a fourth was insulated by amber.

Gurdjieff says that there has existed from Atlantean times a chain of esoteric schools, custodians of secret knowledge, which from time to time, is interpreted and taught by teachers who are sent out from these schools.

The Troubadours were emissaries of an esoteric school.

In architecture we have examples of objective art in Chartres and Notre Dame, and the Taj Mahal, which is the product of a Sufi esoteric school.

A.R. Orage´s Commentaries on "Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson"