Θεο-μερτμα-λόγος

Είναι πλέον ευρέως γνωστό ότι το βιβλίο αυτό δεν είναι του Γκουρτζίεφ, αλλά του Eugene Jeffrey Gold, ο οποίος έχει παραδεχτεί εδώ και δεκαετίες ότι το έγραψε (το 1978) "για πλάκα" και για να παρακινήσει το Ίδρυμα Γκουρτζίεφ να εκδώσει το Η ΖΩΗ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΙΚΗ ΜΟΝΟΝ ΟΤΑΝ 'ΕΙΜΑΙ'. Το συγκεκριμένο όμως βιβλίο του Γκουρτζίεφ είχε εκδοθεί τρία χρόνια πριν το ψευδεπίγραφο βιβλίο του Gold, οπότε έχει κατηγορηθεί ότι το έγραψε απλώς για να τραβήξει κόσμο στις ομάδες του.

βλ. και άρθρο All that Glitters στο Gurdjieff Legacy (https://gurdjiefflegacy.org/40articles/glitters.htm)

E. J. GOLD PUBLISHED HIS SECRET TALKS with Mr. G. in 1978. It was a blatant hoax, as was a film on the same subject and another book. Gold explained in a recent interview in Gnosis magazine, "I don't believe that prank hurt anybody. It was just intended to prod some people into doing the right thing." The right thing in Gold's estimation was to make Gurdjieff's Third Series of writings public. But as anyone familiar with the subject knows, the Third Series had been published three years before Gold's pseudepigraphic rip-off. More to the point: Gold's interest was mercantile—as J. Walter Driscoll the compiler of Gurdjieff: An Annotated Bibliography, pointed out in a letter to Gnosis. "Gold's bogus Secret Talks was used," he wrote, "to attract people into his groups and was there proffered as authentic teaching material that superseded Gurdjieff's writings. He followed this with a privately circulated second volume of Secret Talks (1979) and an eighteen-volume series of Related Workbooks (1980) that were distributed to his followers; some 'joke prod.'