Meetings with remarkable men

What Hacker News says

1. klik99Jul 2024
   It's weird to me that Gurdjieff is never mentioned when people talk about enneagram. I guess the personality stuff is inspired by Gurdjieff but deviates from it. But I would bet a lot of HN readers would dig Gurdjieff. If you're into absurdist new age stuff, it's a precursor to things like Discordianism, but def with more woo.

   Meetings with Remarkable Men is a great book, though I doubt much of it is true it paints a really colorful picture of the time period.

   In Search of the Miraculous is also a great book, but I think the author was jaded and a bit cynical about Gurdjieff so should also be taken with a grain of salt.

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2. unlmtdMar 2017
   - Character analysis (W. Reich)

   - Meetings with Remarkable Men (Gurdjieff)

   - Courage to Stand Alone (UG Krishnamurti)

   thread
3. nograpesDec 2025
   Okay, so I don't really understand what you're saying, but let me take a stab at it.

   Somebody named GI Gurdjieff wrote a book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" in 1923, and in that book there was a kind of story in the introduction. That story attempted to distnguish between two different ways of life: a Western, "knowing" way and an Eastern "being" way.

   The story basically involves a young sparrow eating cork which he thought was leftover thrown-out porridge and gets sick. Then an old sparrow says that in the old days, whenever a horse pooped you could always be sure to get undigested oats from it, but now when a car lets anything out, there is nothing to be had.

   I guess the symbolism is that Gurdjieff was saying that the modern culture is deceptive in the sense that the "new" cork is not the same as the "old" porridge. So modern (Western) culture is poison, old (Eastern) culture provides sustenance.

   And the connection to the posted article is that the "cork" is like the textbook definitions that Feynman described, while the "porridge" is like "true understanding/incorporation" of knowledge.

   Is that what you were getting at?

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4. coldteaNov 2019
   Some that come to mind:

   Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-Las-Vegas-American/dp/0...

   Under the Volcano https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/05/100-best-novel...

   All the kinds horses https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/all-kings-horses

   The Sorrows of Young Werther https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther

   The Catcher in the Rye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye

   The Outsider https://www.amazon.com/Outsider-Colin-Wilson/dp/0874772060

   Meetings With Remarkable Men https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3064956-meetings-with-re...

   On the road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road

   Fight Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club

   Naked Lunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch

   Ham on Rye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_on_Rye

   Jonathan Livingston Seagull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Livingston_Seagull

   Another Roadside Attraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Roadside_Attraction

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