Dr. Michael A. Aquino's monograph Black Magic in Theory and Practice (1975-2002) has an important and sometimes overlooked section: 'The Concept of Initiation' (BM, 20-22). Here, Aquino defines the initiatory process, why it is ontological, and how the Temple of Set coceptualises and understands it; summarises the historical impact of religious and magical organisations; and then articulates an epistemological approach based on the Academy of Plato and the Socratic Dialogues.

Below I reflect on this section, its philosophical sources, and offer some brief thoughts on the relationship of Aletheia to the initiatory process.

Several months ago I wrote Don Webb about a documentary I had just seen at the Melbourne Internationa Film Festival: the eco-thriller The Cove. We talked about Arkte, Runa, the scientist John C. Lilly, the media's power to construct and shape social realities, and exchanged anecdotes about dolphins and other cetaceans.

Tonight, The Cove won the Best Documentary Oscar at the 82nd Academy Awards, beating out Food, Inc and Burma VJ, which are also worth seeing. National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and dolphin activist Ric O'Barry attended the Academy Awards ceremony (Psihoyos' acceptance speech was cut short). To learn more, visit the sites for the Oceanic Preservation Society (Psihoyos), and the Earth Island Institute and Save Dolphins Japan (O'Barry).

To iterate Fitz's BM-investment analogy:

LBM: You go ‘short’ on your current job/situation, and simultaneously ‘arbitrage’ a new job, using a short-term event-based strategy and perhaps inter-market correlation. You clean up on the day-traders but 75% of market trades are still either program trades; trades by the high-frequency trading systems of investment banks; or trend-following. Rather than the seminar circuit that takes your money and spoon-feeds you misinformation, you have read investment books by Burton Malkiel, Alice B. Schroeder, Gillian Tett, James B. Stewart, Charles D. Ellis, Connie Bruck, Robert Shiller and especially Peter L. Bernstein from a local library. You also read the finance journalism of Roger Lowenstein and Michael Lewis. You can do a linear regression analysis and know what a Gaussian statistical distribution is. You are mastering Excel spreadsheets for valuation analysis using Aswath Damodaran’s online lectures and textbooks. You watch Million Dollar Traders shot at London’s Cass Business School to decide if you really want to trade full-time. Perhaps you might if Harlan Ellison did the voice-over market commentary for CNBC’s Worldwide Exchange or Jim Cramer’s Mad Money.

MBM: You have a rolling 100-day plan like an asset management shop, and a bootstrap process to leverage the best out of situations that arise. You know what Delta, Gamma and Theta in The Greeks are, and how to use them to hedge a situation. Rather than stock-picking or mutual funds, you have most of your money in a low-cost index fund like Dimension Fund Advisers, Fidelity or Vanguard, with uncorrelated exposure to a diversified set of indexes, careful of home country bias. You have a separate small account for speculative trading capital, and use a mixed-methods screen that you developed from the qualitative knowledge of specific companies, markets and sectors, and quantitative analysis of economic, industry and firm indicators. You built some of this using the research investment process that David Einhorn outlined in his book Fooling Some of the People All The Time (2008). You can run a Monte Carlo simulation using Palisade, and a few custom algorithms with the computer programs Matlab or R. For career advice you read about how the 'quant' Ed Derman left a dead-end job at Bell Labs, and how he got to work with legendary financial engineer Fischer Black at Goldman Sachs on the Black-Litner-Derman model (Derman's bio and Perry Mehrling's biography are good leads). On the weekends, you read The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Barron’s, and Institutional Investor to understand hedge fund language and to talk with recruiters. You watch the sought-after documentary Trader (1987) on Paul Tudor Jones III, and pay attention to his Elliott Wave correlation of the 1929 and 1987 stock market activities. You dream of one day doing a ‘Soros trade’ like George Soros did against the Bank of England on Black Wednesday, 1992, and that Paolo Pellegrini and John Paulson did on the US sub-prime market in 2006-08, noting how long Paulson waited to sell his ‘shorts’.

GBM: You have a 50-to-70-year investment horizon for yourself, and an inter-generational time horizon informed by macrohistorical dynamics. You know why MIT’s Andrew Lo really was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1951-53). Early on, you invested in BeatleBonds not BowieBonds, with an American look-back option for John Lennon. You have a family foundation structure for wealth management and tax minimization, rumored to be in the non-domicile region of Thule, and the possible real-world inspiration for Stark Industries, Thorn Industries, or the Adnan Khashoggi and Michael Milken clips in the Adam Curtis documentary series The Mayfair Set (1999). You impersonate Carl Icahn and Jimmy Goldsmith at free lunchtime seminars on ‘wealth management’, and then expose the presenters for their shoddy securitization products or for being the intermediaries to ‘originate’ customers for real-estate developers. You can see the value in Victor Niederhoffer’s multidisciplinary approach to investment idea generation but don’t want to ‘blow-up’ twice like he did. Instead, you prefer the quantitative, inter-market and algorithmic trading strategies of his son Roy G. Niederhoffer, whose fund integrates several hundred computers in parallel to conduct high-frequency trades. You decoded Maureen O’Hara’s market microstructure work, and tightened the internal security guidelines for Citadel. You can 'port' alpha and run matrix calculations in your sleep, have memorized the Bloomberg terminal commands for ‘global macro’ arbitrage, and prefer extreme value and morphological analyses over Sudoku. Or maybe it’s Richard Grinold’s calculations in Active Portfolio Management (1999). At least, that’s what you told the interviewer for the unreleased third series of Wall Street Warriors. When Yale’s David Swensen calls about that lucrative alternative asset deal, you say you can’t confirm if James Cameron has started to remake Unterzee Kulten with Ridley Scott yet, nor where the GPS coordinates for the location shoot at Kapinga is with the Planet Earth Orchestra.

Heidegger, Martin (1996/1927) Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit.Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Staumbaugh’s 1996 translation is clearer to read than Macquarrie and Robinson’s 1962 original, although it is helpful to have both for comparison. Sein und Zeit influenced existentialist, phenomenological, deconstruction and hermeneutic philosophy, and spans a bridge to pivotal later work by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method), Alain Badiou (Being and Event; Logic of Worlds), and Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative).

This opens up some potential ‘correspondences’ to compare Heidegger and Gurdjieff’s philosophies worth further exploration. Sein und Zeit may be Heidegger’s ‘legominism’; Heidegger’s hermeneutic method an attempt to recover the ‘I’; Dasein an awareness of Time as Gurdjieff’s ‘Merciless Heropass’; and Heidegger’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ broadly similar to Gurdjieff’s ‘Way of Golgotha’ (during the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution), in that both are death-aware orientations to personal conscience. Heidegger’s perspectives in Sein und Zeit about angst, falling into inauthenticity, and tradition’s role in cultural transmission are similar to Gurdjieff’s arguments. Finally, Sein und Zeit is about Aletheia in the sense of ‘unconcealment’ of being-in-life.

Faye, Emmanuel (2009) Heidegger:The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Faye’s book ignited controversy during its 2005 publication in France. Smith’s translation has done so again, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Faye makes three main arguments. (1) Heidegger embraced N. metaphysics in the late 1920s before he became Rector of Freiburg University, and this influence is clear in his 1933-35 seminars. (2) Heidegger’s Nazism has influenced hermeneutics, postmodernists, and radical ecologists, who may be susceptible to proto-N. ideas. (3) Heidegger’s political beliefs mean that he should be banished as a philosopher from university courses, and censored in libraries.

For many reviewers, Faye’s contribution has been to highlight the archival sources in (1), although others claim Faye has misrepresented Heidegger’s ideas to advance his arguments. (2) and (3) have ignited the debate: Who has Heidegger influenced over time, and to what effect? Under what conditions can knowledge creation be separated from its sociopolitical contexts, particularly when these contexts may change? What should be the fate of philosophers who may be brilliant in one sphere, but taint their reputation in other areas? Is it possible to be influenced subtly by ‘evil’ ideas, and how would we be ethically self-aware enough to know?

Faye’s book is best read as an ‘active exercise’ with these issues in mind, issues that highlight Lethe as the opposite of Aletheia: how knowledge may be de-manifested, fragmented or (willfully) forgotten over time. A comparison of Heiddeger’s period as Rector of Freiburg University with Gurdjieff’s Paris groups raises some intriguing questions about Aletheia and ethical self-awareness in the midst of revolution, war and societal conflict. On the Paris groups, see the Gurdjieff group transcripts in William Patrick Patterson’s Voices in the Dark: Esoteric, Occult, & Secular Voices in N.-Occupied Paris (Fairfax CA: Arete Communications, 2000).

De Salzmann, Jeanne. (2010) The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff. Boston: Shambhala Press.

De Salzmann (1889-1990) was the closest pupil of Gurdjieff’s during his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleu, and during the later Paris period in World War II. She was pivotal to the Gurdjieff Foundation, to the transmission of the Movements, and to Peter Brook’s film adaptation of Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979). Her publicly available writings have a directness of presence that differs from most other sources, the exceptions being Uspenskii’s In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, 1949) and John Pentland’s Exchanges Within (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997). This book compiled from De Salmann’s 40 years of private notes promises to be a watershed moment in the Gurdjieff Work.

Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. (2009) Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Robert Fripp’s DGM diary for 3rd February 2010 alerted me to Tamdgidi’s study, which has an introductory essay by noted Gurdjieff Work scholar J. Walter Driscoll. Tamdgidi contends that Gurdjieff’s expertise as a hypnotist is essential to understand his relationship with students, and the deep structure of his books, especially the ‘legominism’ Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: Harcourt, 1950). In doing so, Tamdgidi demonstrates the methodological value of hermeneutics to interpret Gurdjieff’s texts and to reconstruct the hints and ‘fragments’ into a coherent whole. This book reveals some of the ‘mesoteric’ ideas on the transcultural sources of Gurdjieff’s cosmology, the appropriate use of friction in the teacher-student relationship, and the hypnotic structure of many occult ideas. Tamdgidi’s analysis however has some broader implications about the performative nature of Uttering a Word, and why the Task and Curse of a Magus involves a paradigmatic shift or conceptual distance.