The highest aim and sense of human life is to strive to attain the welfare of one's
neighbor, and this is possible only by the conscious renunciation of one's own."
Gurdjieff was a fate-changer, a catalyst to self-initiation. Today his teaching still offers a supremely practical, streetwise existential philosophy for independent spirits who cannot quite swallow society's consensual lies. Perceiving men and women virtually in trance using only a fraction of their latent powers and forces, his call was urgent and uncompromising: "Awake! Awake from your unsuspected hypnotic sleep to consciousness and conscience."
Unlike his contemporary, Heidegger, Gurdjieff translated his massive interest in being into an evolutionary psychology. To the purposeful cultivation of I-HERE-NOW (an unmistakable psychic event sometimes involuntarily tasted in moments of danger and crisis) Gurdjieff harnessed a subtle, non-mechanistic methodology centred on mobilised attention and sensory self-awareness. Abjuring lop-sided genius, he promoted the balanced development of head, heart and hand.
Like every major ideology or religion, Gurdjieff's System is a complete and precise critique; nourishingly, if contentiously, explanation on three levels: social and cosmic as well as individual. His key dynamic of "reciprocal feeding" anticipates various Green and holistic paradigms (Schweitzer's "reverence for life", Vernadsky's biosphere, and Arne Naess's "deep ecology"). If Gurdjieff's so-to-say "hubble-telescope vision" or "celestial optics" assigns humanity at large a chasteningly subordinate and involutionary role, it nevertheless reserves for a questing minority a radical, survivalist option of service to Higher Powers.
"Unless the wisdom of the East and the energy of the West could be
harnessed and used harmoniously, the world would be destroyed."
Gurdjieff had seen mankind's future, the impending terror of the planetary situation, and understood that all the old ways were useless to avert the coming man-created catastrophe. It's time to become serious. The state of the planet demands it.
What if everything you had been searching for all your life, all your questions, all your concerns, were to be answered right now, and in a way that went far beyond anything you had come to yourself?
Take a moment. What would be your experience? Go into it deeply. If you allow yourself to experience the wonderment of all your questions being answered, then you would be experiencing something of what P. D. Ouspenski must have felt when he first met G. I. Gurdjieff in that noisy merchant's cafe in Moscow almost 81 years ago.
How is it, you might ask, that this Greek-Armenian, sitting across from you, and speaking Russian with a Caucasian accent rarely associated with the authority and presence he emanates, could know all this?
You, who are heralded in theosophical and literary circles? You, who have lectured before thousands on "The Problems of Death" and "In Search of the Miraculous?" How could it be that you, despite your many gifts and seriousness of search, have not even remotely approached the scale of this strange man's understanding?
The question is there from this first meeting, and will continue all your life, who is this George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff? It is no less a question today than it was in April 1915. Today, it is ours to meet him, not in the flesh, but through the ideas in his magnum opus, "All and Everything", the legominism he hurled into the future.
Many, if not all of us, have shared in Ouspenski's wonderment and his question. So it was with the members of the early St. Petersburg group who often wrestled, as Ouspenski reports, with the question of Gurdjieff's identity.
"What Gurdjieff had been born with," said Ouspenski, "and what had been given him by schools—if he had passed through a school at all—we often spoke, and some of us came to the conclusion that Gurdjieff was a genius in his own domain, that he scarcely had to learn, that what he knew could not be learned, and that none of us could expect or hope to become like him." (This, from Peter Demianovich Ouspenski, a man not given to easy praise.)
Ouspenski's standards were high. His formidable intellect and earnestness of seeking were apparent since his early childhood. At the age of six, young Peter was reading books by difficult authors such as Lermontov and Turgenev. As an adult he had actively searched for the "miraculous", studying, writing and making two journeys to the East in search of what he called "a new or forgotten road...a school of a more rational kind."
He had met many teachers and schools but none that suited his independent spirit and discerning intellect. Ouspenski was a seeker of a very high type and not one to be easily won over. And for him to admit that, "Gurdjieff was a genius in his own domain, that he scarcely had to learn, that what he knew could not be learned and that none could expect or hope to become like him", indicates the level of being which he first perceived in Gurdjieff.
He was not alone. The normally reserved Dr. Leonid Stjoernval, one of the Petersburg group's earliest members, had once exclaimed: "Yes! I believe that George Ivanovitch is not less than Christ himself!"
Later in Paris, the actress Georgette Leblanc, who spent the summer of 1923 at the Prieuré and who later was a member of the group known as "The Rope," gave this impression of Gurdjieff:
"The light that came from the little salon illuminated him fully. Instead of avoiding it, he stepped back and leaned against the wall. Then, for the first time, he let me see what he really is. It was as if he had torn off the masks behind which he is obliged to hide himself. His face was stamped with a charity that embraced the whole world. Transfixed, standing before him, I saw him with all my strength and I experienced a sense so deep, so sad, that he felt a need to calm me. With an unforgettable look he said, 'God helps me.'"
Of course, one can easily explain all of the foregoing and many similar reports in terms of suggestibility. But such an explanation is only that, an explanation, not proof. And so we are left with the reports from a highly intelligent and accomplished cadre of people who worked closely with Gurdjieff.
Let us leave the question of Gurdjieff's identity for the moment and ask what brought him to the West. Here, opinion will likely be more unanimous. It is quite clear that Gurdjieff believed he had a mission. That mission was to bring to the West an ancient teaching, formulated and calibrated to the demands of the contemporary world. From his first appearance in Moscow in 1912 until his death in Paris in 1949 never once did Gurdjieff ever refute or contradict himself on this point.
His coming to the West was no wild idea. And he came not as a holy beggar or ethereal saint but as—of all things—a businessman who by his own effort and ingenuity had been able to amass a million rubles and two invaluable collections, one of old and rare carpets, and the other of Chinese cloisonné.
But what brought Gurdjieff to the West? What was the impelling factor, and why at that time? At the Prieuré in the late 1920's Gurdjieff summed it up succinctly:
"Gurdjieff predicted," wrote one young resident of the Prieuré, "that a day would come when the Eastern world would again rise to a position of world importance and become a threat to the momentarily all-powerful, all-influential new culture of the Western world, which was dominated, according to him, by America, a country that was very strong, to be sure, but also very young. Among the purposes of all leaders, messiahs, messengers from the gods, and so forth, there was one fundamental and very important purpose: to find some means by which the two sides of man, and, therefore, the two sides of the Earth, could live together in peace and harmony. He said that the time was very short and that is was necessary to achieve this harmony as soon as possible to avoid complete disaster.If enough individuals could develop themselves, even partially, into genuine, natural men, able to use the real potentialities that were proper to mankind, each such individual would then be able to convince and win over as many as a hundred other men, who would, in each in his turn, upon achieving development, be able to influence another hundred, and so on. History had already proven to us that such tools as politics, religion, and any other organized movements, which treated man 'in the mass' and not as individual beings, were failures. That they would always be failures and that the separate, distinct growth of each individual in the world was the only possible solution."
Gurdjieff came to the West to establish a new teaching, ancient in origin, one that was specifically formulated for individual growth in a world dominated by technology. It was stripped of the past, stripped of all mysticism, philosophy, religious rites and dogma. It was, and is, the great bequeathing. It is a teaching that gives to contemporary man and woman a great gift—the gift of practical knowledge and techniques by which they can, by their own efforts and intention, transform themselves, and, in so doing, free themselves from the abnormal existence that is the "soul-death" of our time.
And this can be achieved without withdrawing to a mountaintop or monastery. In fact, the genius of the teaching is that it uses ordinary life, with all its uncertainty, negativity and suffering, to come to "real life."
The Buddha said, "Life is suffering." Gurdjieff said, "Let's use it, but intentionally." Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor." Gurdjieff said, "Yes, but first see that, as you are, you cannot love."
The teaching that Gurdjieff brought, the "Fourth Way", as he called it, and like all real teachings, has been plundered and leveled and explained away. New Age psychologists and other spiritual predators among us make unattributed wholesale 'borrowings' to spice up their own self-styled eclectic brands of 'bon-ton' teaching. They attempt to legitimize what they've done by proclaiming that this "Fourth Way" teaching is, after all, nothing new, just a modern repackaging of many teachings.
Critics point to elements of the Fourth Way as being found in other teachings. But, cannot the same be said of all teachings? That one can find in the Fourth Way elements of other teachings does not mean, let alone prove, that the teaching is simply a synthesis. One could turn the argument just as easily, arguing that the elements found in, say, Christianity are the remains of the ancient Fourth Way teaching as it was wholly given. Gurdjieff is quite clear that the teaching he brings is different and in no way a derivative.
He speaks of the four principal lines, Egyptian, Hebraic, Persian and Hindu, and two mixtures of these lines, theosophy and occultism. "Both of these mixed lines," he said, "bear in themselves grains of truth, but neither of them possesses full knowledge and therefore, attempts to bring them to practical realization, give only negative results." He then declares, "The teaching whose theory is here being set out is completely self-supporting and independent of other lines and it has been completely unknown up to the present time."
Could Gurdjieff have been any more emphatic? Still, whenever the subject of Gurdjieff's teaching is mentioned, one invariably hears contemporary exponents and propagandists of these principal teachings and their derivatives pointing to this likeness or that. But Gurdjieff has been quite clear on this point. "In order to understand the interrelation of these teachings," he said, "it must always be remembered that the ways which lead to the cognition of unity approach it like the radii of a circle moving towards the center; the closer they come to the center, the closer they approach one another."
Many of these teachings have had their day in the sun and, alas, great as they were, have all but spent their seed. No longer are they the potent historical forces they once were. Which is not to say that for the individual or small groups they cannot be effective, but as "teachings to move masses", their voices no longer galvanize. True, fundamentalist movements rage everywhere. And the fact of their emergence—is it a sign of renewal, or that of a desperate last stand?
As there has been a concerted attempt to cast the Fourth Way as simply a derivative of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Let's examine this contention more closely. Proponents of this view point to the uses of attention in the Philokalia, the writings of the early Church Fathers. But attention is the basis of spiritual work of all traditions; it is the 'gas' without which no engine runs.
After Ouspenski left Gurdjieff, he devoted much time to studying the New Testament and the writings of St. Simeon and others. But Ouspenski left because, as he said, "I ceased to understand Gurdjieff and what he was teaching." One can easily argue that Ouspenski, in trying to find the origin of the Fourth Way in the Eastern Church, was unconsciously trying to justify his break with Gurdjieff.
Whatever the case, the Fourth Way is a way in ordinary life. It is not the monastic way of Mt. Athos. The Fourth Way is not a withdrawal from life. Orthodox proponents also point to when Gurdjieff was asked about the origin of the teaching and he replied, "If you like, this is Esoteric Christianity."
If you like, that is, if you must have a familiar category (Russia at that time was heavily Christianized) Gurdjieff was simply speaking to Ouspenski in a way that would not at that time arouse his imagination. He would later tell him that the origin was prehistoric Egyptian.
Many years later in Paris Gurdjieff was again asked about the link between Christianity and the teaching.
"I find the system at the base of Christian doctrine," declared one curious man, the Russian intellectual, Boris Mouravieff. "What do you say to this subject?"
Gurdjieff replied, "It's the ABC. But they didn't understand at all."
"Is the system yours?"
"No."
"Where did you find it and from where did you take it?"
"Perhaps," said Gurdjieff, "I stole it."
As to the latter point, that is, his stealing the teaching, one must remember how Gurdjieff taught. Mouravieff, as his writings show, was negatively fixated on Gurdjieff. He believed the worst of him. Gurdjieff's answer to Mouravieff was merely mirroring what was in Mouravieff's mind.
About the teaching's origin, what Gurdjieff is saying is that the teaching passed through Christianity but they did not understand it; that is how to properly use it. Not only did the Church Fathers not understand this but they were also confused about their own origins. Ouspenski reports that Gurdjieff said, "...Christianity was not invented by the Fathers of the Church. It was all taken in a ready-made form from Egypt, only not from the Egypt that we know but from one that we do not know. This Egypt was in the same place as the other but it existed much earlier. Prehistoric Egypt was Christian many thousands of years before the birth of Christ."
Which is not to say that Gurdjieff did not hold Christianity in the highest regard. His first tutors were Dean Borsch and Father Evlissi of the Kars Military Cathedral, the latter eventually becoming an Essene. Many years later in writing about Christianity, he declared:
"In none of the ancient religious teachings were so many good regulations for ordinary everyday life laid down as in just that teaching on which this same Christian religion was founded. However, and into this teaching, Christianity, of truth and verity, they began also to mix—for various egoistic and political reasons, fragments taken from other religious teachings already existing there, but fragments such as had not only nothing in common with the teaching of Jesus, but which sometimes even flatly contradicted the truths this divine teacher taught."
And because of what Gurdjieff calls "criminal wiseacring," the "genuine faith in all this divine and uniquely accomplished teaching of salvation of the all-loving Jesus Christ was totally destroyed."
Gurdjieff realized that Christianity's reign as a powerful historic force, had, collectively speaking, eroded.
Gurdjieff understood that to yoke a new formulation of an ancient teaching to a Christianity that had lost its force would have neutered the teaching. Gurdjieff was looking forward, not backward. Stymied in his own time from establishing the teaching, he sent his legominism into the future, into our time, to us.
Speaking of All and Everything, A. R. Orage said, "It is a sort of Bible; the anomalies that seem to us incongruous and absurd may be a text within a text, which, when rooted out, may comprise an alphabet of the doctrine. Gurdjieff's book, perhaps, is a kind of Bible for the future."
Gurdjieff himself said, "I not wish people identified with me. I wish them identified with my ideas. Many who never will meet me, will understand my book. Time come perhaps when they read All and Everything in churches."
Neither Gurdjieff nor the ideas are to be worshipped, but rather worked with and understood. He was not bringing a religion but a teaching of self-transformation to be practiced in ordinary life.
Finally, the 'charge' that it is not really new, is meaningless. Gurdjieff has said the same himself:
"All the great genuine religions that have existed down to the present time, created, as history itself testifies, by men of equal attainment in regard to the perfecting of their pure reason, are always based on the same truths—the saying is fully justified which has existed among people from of old—'there is nothing new under the sun.'"
Given the foregoing, there cannot be any doubt from Gurdjieff's point of view that:
1) He had a mission to bring the teaching to the West.
2) The Fourth Way is whole and independent of other lines.
3) "All and Everything" is a legominism.
As empathic as Gurdjieff was with the human condition, he didn't come to the West to save any individual person. His mission was not personal, but planetary. Gurdjieff came to save the world from destruction. Others may have come to save people. Gurdjieff came to save the planet—save it through the awakening of the aforementioned 100 people. Consequently, he was in search not of students, but of those he might quickly prepare to help to establish the teaching. He was in search of what he called "helper-instructors."
A final point: what has befallen Christianity and other great teachings is the mixing of various extraneous elements and wiseacrings, which can only result in a loss of force. And do we not see the same thing happening with The Work today? To speak of an Ouspenski 'line', or Bennett or Nicoll 'line', to say nothing of all the other latter day 'lines' that have arisen, is absurd. Does anyone seriously consider that any of these men, great seekers though they were, were on the level of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff? There can only be one authentic line.
Let us now return to what the crux of the matter is in determining why Ouspenski, Orage, Bennett and so many nameless others left Gurdjieff. Answers on a certain level are specific to the person. But, more deeply, what is the common factor that Ouspenski, Orage and Bennett share? To approach this let us first return to the question: Who was George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff?
How we relate to the teaching, its usefulness to us, depends on how we answer this question. If we take him as simply another spiritual teacher—say a crazy wisdom master—to borrow a category from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, then, of course, all is well. There are more than a few whose pure reason is developed to that level. Putting Gurdjieff among them makes no trouble for us.
But if we move the level to that of a 'messenger from above', to use Gurdjieff's terminology, then are we not forced to live in total question? For what is our criteria, what are our referents? Are we so confident in our own impartiality and level of spiritual development that we can really decide who Gurdjieff was? Can we really judge the understanding, composed of knowledge and being, of a man the "size" of Gurdjieff?
Many do, of course, but then this is a time when there is a scarcity of many qualities, self-love and vanity, unfortunately, not among them. Lacking revelation or recognition we cannot say with good conscience who Gurdjieff was. But we can recognize who he took himself to be. We can agree that he saw his mission as bringing a teaching to save the world from destroying itself. He lived accordingly. His actions matched his aim.
He voluntarily put himself into the swirl of abnormal conditions that make up contemporary life and was largely misunderstood, vilified, and he suffered accordingly.
What an individual or a thing is is directly related to the function they perform. A screwdriver cannot perform like a hammer, call it what we will. Let us recognize that our conceptions of the great spiritual messengers to mankind, such as Jesus Christ, Moses and Buddha, are idealized in the extreme. They are portrayed as perfect in a way no incarnation taking human form could be perfect. Therefore, since our picture of them is essentially unreal, any who come afterward, whether his mission is to speak to all or a part of mankind, will fail greatly in comparison. So, the simple fact is, can any of us truly define, let along discern or judge, a 'messenger from above'? The experience lies outside all ordinary categories.
As Gurdjieff uses the phrase, let him define it:
"Genuine 'messengers from above' sent for the purpose of aiding the three-brained beings in destroying in their presences the crystallized consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer. And having destroyed the crystallized consequences, then the three-brained beings would be open to the impressions of, what for them, would be a new world but is in actuality the world that has always existed." Gurdjieff wrote his legominism, divided into three series, to help provide the solution to what he saw as three cardinal problems.
"To destroy mercilessly, in the thoughts and feelings of the reader,
the beliefs and views he has about everything existing in the world."
"To provide the material required for a new creation."
"To assist the arising in the thoughts and feelings of the reader the world existing in reality'."
So Gurdjieff, in accord with his own definition of 'messengers from above', has come to destroy illusion and to help three-brained beings (man: intellectual, emotional and moving/instinctive body) regulate their being-existence, that is, make it more harmonious.
As he said in the Third Series: "...my being is necessary not only for my personal egoism but also the common welfare of all humanity. My being is indeed necessary to all people; even more necessary to them than their felicity and their happiness of today."
Less formally, Gurdjieff once was asked what his whim was. He said, "It was to live and teach so that there should be a new conception of God in the world, a change in the very meaning of the word."
Of all his pupils, perhaps Frank Pinder, a no-nonsense British mining engineer and a longtime student, summed up why Gurdjieff came: "Gurdjieff came to strike a big Do," Pinder said, "to help the up flow of the Law of Seven against the current mechanical life. Gurdjieff came to give us a 'New World', a new idea of God, of the purpose of life, of sex, of war."
But then Pinder asked a very potent question, Who are 'us'?
"'Us' are those," he declared, "who accept Gurdjieff and his teaching and help to carry out The Work. This world of ours cannot be saved in our measure of time. Had it been possible it would have been 'saved' long ago by prophets and teachers who have been sent. Those who look for the world to be saved by a single teacher in a given time are shirking their own responsibility. They wait in hope of a 'second coming' with no effort on their part, indulging in the 'disease of tomorrow'.
No single teacher in any given time can save the world. But each teacher who comes can speak to those who are his to speak to. It is up to those who are attracted to him to listen and to practice the teaching and to help to carry it forward."
At this point, do I register in myself a resistance to an impartial consideration of the possibility that Gurdjieff is actually who he says he is? That this new formulation of an ancient teaching is whole? To be sure, there is a certain danger in even pondering who Gurdjieff was and what his teaching was meant for because the answers, if affirmative, impose a responsibility so serious that no one wishes to face them. If answered in the negative, then, of course, we are free to do as we like. But isn't continuing to think of ourselves as connected with Mr. Gurdjieff in any serious way simply to indulge in the very beliefs and views he came to destroy?
In my book, Struggle of the Magicians, I show at great length the many factors involved in why Ouspenski, Orage and Bennett left Gurdjieff. In sum, what it came down to was that each man would not intentionally suffer his chief feature. Ouspenski would not give up, as he characterized himself, his "extreme individualism." He would not work on his emotional center to the depth Gurdjieff demanded. Orage would not give up his need to love and be loved. Bennett was simply too enthralled with himself, his opportunities, abilities, and his need to be 'free.'
Each, of course, left Gurdjieff for his own reasons. But what is crucial to understand is that Ouspenski, Orage, and Bennett left on a deeper level because, one, they refused to see him as he saw himself, and, two, did not truly comprehend the relationship between the teaching and the impending planetary catastrophe.
Of Ouspenski, Orage, and Bennett, Alfred Richard Orage was the student closest to Gurdjieff. It was he who saw deepest into the dilemma Gurdjieff posed. For several years, and more, Orage found himself in the middle between his young wife and Gurdjieff, each of them pulling in opposite directions. Gurdjieff finally forced a choice in 1930. Orage chose family life. In a letter of explanation to a student of his, Orage admits that he left Gurdjieff because, as he termed it, he did not have "the absolute faith."Orage then wrote:
"What I pray for is that my own friends, the best I have on earth, the New York group, may not only not suffer on my account, but that, through me, like another Moses, they may find themselves led to the Jordan and transported across by Joshua Gurdjieff!"
Four years later Orage suddenly died. Learning of Orage's death, Gurdjieff wiped a tear from his eye with his fist, and declared: "This man my brother."
Peter Demianovich Ouspenski was never that close or clear. His aim had been to penetrate "the labyrinth of contradictions" of ordinary life to the "unknown reality" beyond. This, he called the "miraculous". He was in search of this miraculous and understood there was no escape from "the thin film of false reality" except by, as he said, "an entirely new [or forgotten] road, unlike anything hitherto known or used."
Ouspenski found that new or forgotten road and walked a good ways down it before becoming confused. This brave, questing, earnest soul thought he could keep the message but throw out the messenger. Ouspenski died in 1947 without comprehending that the messenger who came to him in that noisy Moscow merchant's café was a living embodiment of the message!
A very young John Godolphin Bennett had spent six weeks at the Prieuré and, by his own lights, had amazing experiences, yet he left, promising to shortly return. Twenty-five years would pass before Bennett would see Gurdjieff again. It was to him that Gurdjieff whispered, only a few months before his death in 1949, "For a long time now, I can write a check with 7 zeros, even your king cannot do that."
To understand that to which Gurdjieff alludes we must recall that the ancient teaching he brought postulates there seven different possible degrees of men, the highest being man number seven, he who is immortal within our solar system.
Who is George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff? For Gurdjieff it was not a question. He told us who he was and why he had come. We do not have to believe him. In fact, he would certainly not want us to do so. But how is it that we miss the mark so often in discussing him and the teaching he brought?
Might it have something to do with self-calming? If so, it's time to become serious. The state of the planet demands it.
