For persons trying to get free from the tentacles of Fourth Way / or distorted forms of Sufi practice that took a culty turn, doing some overview reading of the history of Hermetic texts, and their historical sources may help de-mystify the stuff used to mess with your heads.
As I suggest, Hermetic material may be the equivalent of a 'mother sauce' - it was a messy but fascinating collection of texts and it slipped into the esoteric societies within Chrisitanity, Judaism, and Islam.
The Hermes Trismagistius texts were mistaken as sources of primordial wisdom, but actually were composed in the second century CE in the late Classical world, alongside early Christianity and diaspora Judaism. They had such a wide diffusion among both the intellectual elite and in more popularized forms that they seem weirdly familiar.
This isnt because they are true but because ideas are highly portable.
If you give yourself a chance to see that this stuff has its own niche in the history of ideas, you'll find that the teachers who imprisoned you and instilled fear were just using bits and pieces from a collection of material that very many others have exploited in the past and will continue to exploit in the future.
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forum.culteducation.com]
Here is an article describing how Hermetic ideas were incorporated into Sufism.
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www.muslimphilosophy.com]
Much later, Mme Blavatsky, who grew up in a Russian family whose male members were members of Masonic lodges, would have learned about Hermetic material as filtered through the Western European Freemason traditions. Blavatsky in turn wrote her own set of texts, and these texts were propagated far and wide by the methods of mass publication made available in the late 19th century. This material was very popular in Tsarist Russia, and it was exploited in turn by Gurdjieff.
What added disastrously to the impact is that this material already has a haunting familiarity because it underlies so much of our culture without most of us being aware of it --
The Secret and
The Da Vinci Code and
The Matrix are variations on gnostic/Hermetic themes.
What made this still more damaging was that Gurdjieff appears to have been proficient in trance induction.
This stuff has its place in the history of ideas and isnt magic at all. Learning all this stuff did not cure Gurdjieff of his own chief feature--greed and a need for attention from an entourage--tastes shared by too many of his successors.