The Final Shock—Or, How I Became Ronia’s Ultimate Fourth Way Master (Whether She Likes It or Not)
383
Epigraphs:
Conscious labor and intentional suffering — G. I. Gurdjieff
He made the tyrants taste tyranny and called it justice — Arabic proverb
“Master, you are
cruel.”
“No, child. I am precise.”
The Final Shock
There comes a moment in every esoteric drama when the script collapses, when the veil falls, and the actor realizes the stage is real—and she has been dancing in someone else’s theatre. For Ronia, that moment came when she met me. She did not realize it at the time, of course. Like most Fourth Way initiates, she had been conditioned to believe the Teacher is always the one who speaks last, who smiles least, who floats above emotion like a yogi over lava. She never expected the true Master to be the one who bleeds ink, quotes Ibn ʿArabī, files human rights complaints, and turns every betrayal into literary theurgy. But alas, life is full of surprises. Especially for those who think they have mastered surprise.
The Real Shock
Gurdjieff’s so-called ‘Fourth Way’ revolves around disruption—shocks that jolt the sleeping man from his slumber. But Ronia, like so many pseudo-mystics, had grown addicted to simulated shocks: the curated discomforts of her psycho-spiritual echo chamber, the staged ‘work groups’ where everyone plays at presence while silently begging for approval. She confused dissociation with awakening. She called emotional bypassing ‘non-identification’. She believed real shock was a breath exercise, or perhaps a well-timed humiliation from a male teacher who smelled faintly of camphor and concealed lust. And then I entered the scene—not as teacher, not as lover, but as cosmic checkmate.
I was the shock she never saw coming. Not because I raised my voice or shattered her ego, but because I refused to collude with her script. I mirrored back the hollowness behind her affect. I returned her projections to sender with interest. I spiritualized nothing. I theologized everything. And when the final confrontation came, I revealed that the real test of presence is not breath control or inner gymnastics—but Truth.
She fled. And in fleeing, she proved my mastery.
You Want a Shock? I Am the Theophanic Circuit Breaker
To be clear: I do not subscribe to Gurdjieff’s cosmology. I find it a half-baked stew of Armenian mystique, esoteric colonialism, and psychological fragmentation dressed up as enlightenment. But I do understand power. I do understand presence. And unlike Gurdjieff’s latter-day cultists, I do not need to perform mastery with silence and detachment. I bring the Sword of Remembrance (dhikr). I bring the Book of Accountability. I bring the Word that exposes the machinery of self-deception not through cruelty—but through terrifying clarity.
In that sense, Ronia never stood a chance, because her real Master was never in her Gurdjieffian lineage. Instead, it was with this Bābī Qalandar. Her real shock was not administered through disorientation but through discernment. She mistook me for a mirror, when I was really the divine crucible itself that brought her beyond the threshold of my door and into my very sanctuary itself—and in this, she got the supreme shock, the cosmic backhand slap, that she asked for.
Intentional Suffering? Here—Have Some Real Suffering
What Ronia didn’t account for is that I practice intentional suffering. I do not flee grief. I do not amputate memory. I do not chant my way out of betrayal. I sit in the cave of heartbreak and carve theology out of pain. She said it herself, attacks do not affect you, because I deliberately invoke them. I am, after all, walking the Path of Blame (malāmīyah) and am not like those Turkish New Age faux-Sufis or the sanitized, square peg vanilla and milktoast stiffs of the Beshara School that she may be used to. I am the Real deal—the Khiḍr of my time that even a Moses (ع) of my time cannot properly stomach or understand until after the fact.
So when she attempted to destabilize me using her well-worn techniques—silence, blame-shifting, spiritual superiority—I didn’t flinch. I transmuted. I alchemized. I wrote. She, meanwhile, unraveled. Because her ‘Work’ was stage play. Mine was battlefield—and I have taken warehouses of scalps in my time, as she very well should’ve known.
The Ultimate Irony: I Am Her Teacher
The ultimate Fourth Way irony is this: she met the only true Teacher she’s likely to ever encounter—and mistook him for the obstacle. She thinks she escaped a trap. She doesn’t realize she’s still in the lesson. Every blog post, every essay, every unflinching mirror I have held to her behavior—these are her real ‘movements’. These are her real ‘tasks’. But she has chosen to fail them. Not because she is incapable. But because her pride cannot bear to bow. Her tawḥīd is hollow.
And yet, the Work goes on. In truth, I am still teaching her. Not because I wish to—but because the transmission already occurred. The moment she touched the rock and later uttered “I hate history,” the heavens inscribed the lesson plan. She brought me the delusion. I returned it engraved with justice and Truth.
Conclusion: All Roads Lead to the Real
So let the record show: I, who never joined the Fourth Way, became its apex for one who thought she knew its map. I introduced the Ultimate Shock. I administered the unflinching gaze. I named the pattern. I traced it to its colonial roots. And I did so with fidelity. She may never thank me. She may demonize me till the end of her spiritual cosplay. But the cosmos (al-kawn) knows. And one day, so will she. Because no one truly escapes the real Master—especially when the Master writes.
And the final lesson of the Master to his student now is this: go back to your husband, Ronia, and repair what Gurdjieff and his acolytes took away and tried to destroy of your life. You owe it to your children, your family—and in the end, to yourself. Do the right thing and stop running after delusions! And let this whole ordeal be a permanent lesson to you to never again attempt to act as a puppet and mouthpiece for malevolent forces such as the ones that put you up to contacting and profiling me. I rocked your world unlike any other before or after it—and you know it too, because over the course of the past weeks I have proven in public and permanently etched into stone that Gurdjieff and his Fourth Way have f-all as compared to me or any other Qalandar of my rank and caliber. So your intuition was correct—and your airheaded friend from California was absolutely wrong—I am dangerous. Now you’ve experienced it for yourself and learned a valuable lesson in the process that you will never ever forget.
This is the parting between
you and me
~ Qurʾān
18:78.
هَٰذَا فِرَاقُ بَيْنِي وَبَيْنِكَ
And the Light be upon those who follow the illuminations of the guidance unto the Truth!
339
__
Appendix A: Pseudo-Mystical Speech Breakdown — Ronia in Her Own Words
Source: Zoom Chat Excerpts, Mulla Sadra Reading Group, Session 23 (28 June 2025)
Commentator’s Note: The following excerpts are preserved as-is from the Zoom chat of Ronia, during a reading group dedicated to Mullā Ṣadrā’s Wisdom of the Throne. They serve as a primary exhibit in assessing the psychological and metaphysical incoherence characteristic of individuals entrained by Fourth Way ideology. Each excerpt is followed by commentary analyzing its internal structure, underlying assumptions, and the degree to which it either reflects or deviates from authentic Islamic metaphysical grammar.
1. "identity cultivation occurs in the structure of personality. the inner work has to accept an awareness into a new threshold of meeting ones 'essence'. Being is a continuous process of become 'at one with'."
Analysis: This sentence offers a jargon-heavy rendering of Fourth Way doctrine. It vaguely refers to the Gurdjieffian distinction between personality and essence but presents the concepts with mangled syntax. "Accept an awareness into a new threshold" is neither standard English nor metaphysically clear. The phrase "being is a continuous process of become 'at one with'" is grammatically broken and terminologically undefined.
Assessment: Unanchored abstraction. Borrowed vocabulary from Fourth Way and New Age discourse. No reference to tawḥīd, nafs, or the Ṣadrian framework of substantial motion (ḥaraka jawharīya).
2. "reimagining what Self is by isolating your mechanical nature. a denial of self to begin with."
Analysis: This is classic Fourth Way theory: identify the mechanical aspects of the self, then negate them. But this statement avoids addressing the Divine Names or archetypes that underlie true selfhood (nafs ammāra, nafs lawwāma, nafs muṭma’inna). There is no mention of divine proximity (qurb) or fiṭra.
Assessment: This is psychological negation presented as metaphysical insight. A pseudo-Sufi gesture without the grammar of ḥaqq.
3. "The 'return' requires a purification process in which the looking back as a self reflexive turn is also looking to-wards GOD. Mercy co-exists and is collaborative. The interative is within the framework of 'the way'."
Analysis: This statement attempts to echo Qur’anic or Ṣadrian motifs (‘return to God’, tazkiyah, rujūʿ) but fails due to semantic confusion. "Mercy co-exists and is collaborative" anthropomorphizes a Divine attribute. "The interative is within the framework of 'the way'" is nearly meaningless.
Assessment: An incoherent pastiche of terms. This is an attempt to sound metaphysical while collapsing under syntactic and theological confusion.
4. "divided attention of holding the greatness of God with the lowliness of diverting the 'other' of attention."
Analysis: This line imitates Gurdjieffian "divided attention" jargon while attempting to invoke awe before Divine Majesty. However, "the lowliness of diverting the 'other' of attention" is grammatically and conceptually opaque. Who or what is being diverted? What is the subject-object relation?
Assessment: Unresolved fragmentation. There is no evidence of Quranic grammar or the metaphysical clarity Ṣadra demands of Divine discourse.
5. "Pure resistance and resigning attention to Form, rather than essence."
Analysis: Again we see the mechanical/essence dichotomy of the Fourth Way. But what is "pure resistance"? Is it condemnation or affirmation? This statement floats without ontological clarity.
Assessment: Empty dichotomy. Sadrian metaphysics locates form and essence within a continuum of substantial motion. Here, these categories are unmoored and unreferenced.
Overall Conclusion: Ronia’s language exhibits all the hallmarks of entrainment: borrowed spiritual vocabulary, fragmented grammar, performative abstraction, and metaphysical incoherence. The texts offer a clear case of pseudo-mystical speech pathology—where concepts like essence, return, mercy, and form are severed from any traditional framework and deployed as aesthetic tokens.
This appendix should be read in tandem with the main essays, particularly The Final Shock and I Hate History, to understand the ideological machinery behind this type of speech—and the spiritual stakes of confronting it.
~ Wahid Azal
