Thus saith Ronia, “I Hate History”: The Gurdjieffian Gospel of Amnesia and the Machinery of Spiritual Bypassing
Also, here.
Do not inveigh against time, for verily, time—It is God ~ hadith qudsi
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them — James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)
There are few declarations as starkly revealing—indeed, as ideologically charged—as the phrase: “I hate history.” On its surface, it may appear a simple, even flippant personal sentiment. But within certain esoteric currents—especially those shaped by the psychological machinery of the so-called ‘Fourth Way’ of G. I. Gurdjieff (d. 1949 CE)—this utterance takes on a far more sinister, and far more telling, valence. It is not simply a rejection of dates, wars, and timelines. It is the symbolic assassination of memory. It is the ritual severance of the self from lineage, narrative, trauma, and time. And in the mouth of one spiritually entrained by Gurdjieffian systems, this phrase becomes a cipher for total psychic disintegration masquerading as liberation.
A Rejection of Temporal Accountability
Gurdjieff’s cosmology treats the average human as a sleepwalker—mechanical, unconscious, endlessly identified with the contents of memory and future fantasy. Within this framework, history becomes pathology: a sedimented structure of identification, a prison of cause and effect that binds the aspirant to sleep. The Work promises a radical break from this sleep—a present-centered state of self-remembering where the past dissolves into non-importance. So when someone shaped by this milieu says, “I hate history,” what they often mean is: I refuse to be defined by the narrative arc of time—personal, cultural, or collective. I will not be held hostage by memory.
But the cost of this rejection is the annihilation of accountability. No past means no guilt. No guilt means no reckoning. No reckoning means no ethics. What remains is a flattened, presentist metaphysics devoid of context—where atrocities can be erased, betrayals minimized, and ancestral wounds dismissed as psychological indulgence. This is not awakening. It is spiritual sociopathy in the optics of sacred clothing.
The Erasure of Collective Memory
“I hate history” is not just a personal posture. It is a political one. To hate history is to participate in the erasure of the oppressed. It is to deny the continuity of struggle, to sever the body from its scars, to silence the stories that give pain its moral arc. The colonized, the dispossessed, the survivors of genocide—they remember. And that memory is dangerous to empires. Thus, to “hate history” is to internalize the logic of the colonizer. It is to become, consciously or not, a collaborator with power. The one who hates history is often the one who has failed to integrate it, or worse—who has benefited from forgetting. This hatred of the historical is often an aesthetic choice of the privileged, a kind of spiritualized whitewashing.
Within such a framework, the disavowal of history becomes not a spiritual detachment but a metaphysical betrayal. It echoes the language of fascism, which always seeks to dissolve historical complexity into myth, to collapse memory into ideology, and to reduce suffering to ‘sentimentality’.
Spiritual Bypassing Par Excellence
What then, is this hatred of history if not the pinnacle of spiritual bypassing? Spiritual bypassing refers to the use of spiritual ideas or practices to avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, or developmental tasks. Within Gurdjieffian circles, this often takes the form of:
- Refusing to ‘identify’ with trauma
- Collapsing all narratives into ‘mechanical sleep’
- Framing ancestral memory as a distraction from ‘presence’
- Treating grief, political resistance, or even cultural identity as forms of unconsciousness
In this system, the Work becomes an excuse to never mourn, to never rage, to never remember—because all such acts are viewed as signs of being ‘asleep’. But who is really asleep? The one who eschews moral accountability, as the Gurdjieffian Work encourages, or the one who embraces it? Our position is that the former is within a slumber unlike any other. Thus, the hatred of history is the hatred of pain. It is the hatred of memory as a demand for justice. It is the hatred of the wound as holy. And it is the fast-track to complicity. And here is where the Christianity of most Gurdjieffians becomes a complete farce.
The Gurdjieffian Trap Itself
The Fourth Way promises a ‘school’ for the soul—but schools can become prisons. Gurdjieff’s method, especially as systematized by his successors, includes intentional psychic destabilization: the deliberate scrambling of identity, the erasure of biography, the erosion of emotional continuity. Students are taught to mistrust memory, to doubt their stories, to question every motive until they are emptied—and into that emptiness, a ‘Teacher’ may insert a new pattern. We believe this to be the story of Ronia and the reason for the collapse of her family and marriage as a pattern inserted and engineered by her Gurdjieffian Teacher.
Many such ‘teachers’ are benign. Others are predatory manipulators who use the language of presence to construct psychological dependence. In this context, “I hate history” becomes a sacrament: the public burning of the self’s past in devotion to a guru’s arbitrary authority—and this may explain Ronia’s positive views about Frithjof Schuon (d. 1998 CE) as expressed to us. Yet those who say such nonsense often believe themselves free. But they are not free. They are amnesiac slaves, cut off from the moral coordinates of time. In short, they are sociopaths by any other definition.
Psychological Implications: Fragmentation and Shame
At the psychic level, such hatred of history often reveals a deep split in the self. Those who hate history usually hate their own story—because it is unresolved, traumatic, or shameful. Rather than integrate that pain, they amputate it. They adopt metaphysical frameworks that bless the severing. They spiritualize dissociation. This is not self-transcendence. It is a refusal of self-repair.
When someone says they hate history, they are often saying: I cannot bear the truth of what was done to me, or what I did. And in that hatred, they license themselves to continue doing harm. They become unaccountable. They become dangerous. They become criminals. They can be recruited.
Memory as Resistance
In contrast to this amnesia stands the radical act of remembrance. To remember is not to be trapped by the past—it is to hold a line against erasure. It is to stand in fidelity to the dead. It is to refuse the cult of presence when that presence is built on lies.
There is power in memory. There is mourning that becomes metamorphosis. There is grief that purifies. Those who reject history often call this weakness. But in truth, it is their hatred of history that reveals the ultimate weakness: the inability to face time without collapsing. This is why memory work is resistance. This is why testimony matters. This is why the work of remembering—and speaking—is revolutionary. And this is why the Qur’ān proclaims, remember Me and I will remember you (2:152) thereby making of remembrance and memory-work in fact godwork, theurgy—with its decriers, such as the Gurdjieffians, being nothing more than kuffār (coverers, infidels) whatever else be their state.
Conclusion: To Remember is to Reclaim
In the end, the statement “I hate history” is not innocent. It is an ideological declaration. A litmus test. A red flag. In Gurdjieffian thought, it may pass for insight. In empire, it passes for obedience. In the soul, it registers as rupture and infidelity to the Real.
To hate history is to sever oneself from the thread of meaning, from the obligations of justice, from the accountability of story. But to remember—painfully, fiercely, ritually—is to live. And so to resist the forces that demand forgetting, especially when cloaked in spiritual garb, is to reclaim the soul’s place in the arc of liberation—and so thereby to thwart the devil’s ruse. So let them hate history. But we will write and reclaim it at every step. We will remember. And in that remembering, we will be free while they deeply slumber pretending to be awake.
