Gurdjieff - Those Curious New Cults 1973

Citation preview

Gurdjieff

Some say that George I. Gurdjieff was a kook. Others believe him to be one of the greatest philoso­ phers of all time. One writer called him “one of the great enigmas of our time.” Another called him “an ac­ tual incarnation of knowledge.” At any rate, he was a remarkable man with a remark­ able mind, and many young people today are discover­ ing him and trying to figure out what he meant. And that isn’t easy. Peter Rowley, in New Gods in America, estimates that there are about five thousand disciples of Gurdjieff in America today. That in itself is a remark­ able figure considering the fact that Gurdjieff’s unusual ideas were supposedly dead and buried when Gurdjieff himself died in 1949. And considering the fact that his followers do their best to make their society secret. The recent occult explosion has not only revived Gurdjieff (figuratively speaking, of course) but has also made him a popular fad on quite a few college cam­ puses. Up until now, his movement was made up of quality and not quantity. Among his devotees were people like Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, P. L. Travers of Mary Poppins fame, Kathryn Hulje, writer of The Nun's Story, Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider, Katherine

219

220

THOSE CURIOUS NEW CULTS

Mansfield, well known short-story writer, and an equal number of outstanding artists. Though dying of tuberculosis, Katherine Mansfield went to Fontainebleau, near Paris, where Gurdjieff had opened an International Study Colony. Her struggles for inner reality are chronicled in her Journal. Today America has its own Gurdjieff Foundation and groups are meeting in most of the major cities of America, as well as on numerous university campuses. But if you haven’t heard of Gurdjieff yet, it’s under­ standable, for his disciples are opposed to evangelizing and proselytizing. In fact, they make a fetish out of being secretive about their religion, if you want to call it a religion, and they don’t. This stands in the way of it becoming a mass movement. Another thing that hinders its expansion is that it is so difficult to under­ stand. The followers are afraid that if a journalist writes about it he might oversimplify it and thus cor­ rupt it, so they tend to be a bit snobbish about discuss­ ing it with others. And finally, once you do begin to understand it, you realize that Gurdjieff’s way is not an easy way. Often the groups are known as “G-O” groups, the “G” for Gurdjieff and the “O” for a mathematician named P. D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky’s book about his years with Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous, is termed “the best systematic presentation of Gurdjieff’s thought.” One reason for that is that there hasn’t been too much competition. The meetings of the G-0 people are filled with discus­ sions, music and Eastern-style sacred dancing. Gurdjieff derived his emphasis on dancing from Asian mystery schools, and the steps require excruciating selfawareness, such as “counting off constantly changing rhythm cycles while waving your arms in opposing cir­ cles. This is supposed to develop your “waking state.”

Gurdjieff

221

It’s important to develop your “waking state.” If you don’t train yourself to be fully awake, you will sleep­ walk your way through life. That’s why exercises are necessary. Another simple exercise is to look at the minute hand of your watch while concentrating deeply on the profound thought: “My name is and I am here right now.” G-O meetings are harder to crash than a Presidential reception. You have to be a “sincere disciple” to at­ tend. And practically the only way to become a sincere disciple is by reading, digesting and assimilating a few of the books by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, “stocky, bald and with a handle-bar moustache,” was even more puzzling than the modern-day groups that bear his name. A good guess is that he was bom in 1877 of Greek-Armenian parentage along Russia’s distant Persian border. The nearest big town was a place called Alexandropol. His father was a local bard and independent thinker who instilled an appreciation for the occult within his son. The local cleric became Gurdjieff’s first tutor, “the founder and creator of my present individuality, and, so to say, the third aspect of my inner God.” He became fascinated with astrology and spiritual­ ism at an early age, and studied all types of supernatu­ ral phenomena. He sought answers in the church and even considered studying for the priesthood, but, influ­ enced by a disgruntled seminarian, was disillusioned with Christianity and began to seek his answers in an­ cient mystical religions. During the following years, he roamed through cen­ tral Asia, salaried as an assistant to a railroad engineer, but much more interested in investigating the exotic Asian mystery schools and chatting with seers trying to get them to divulge their secrets. His fascinating book entitled Meetings with Remarkable Men tells a bit

222

THOSE CURIOUS NEW CULTS

about this segment of his life, but you are never sure in reading it how strictly historical it is. A jack-of-all-trades, Gurdjieff was also a very keen businessman and made money in everything he did. As he explains it: “I carried out private and government contracts for the supply and construction of railways and roads; I opened a number of stores, restaurants and cinemas and sold them when I got them going well; I organized various rural enterprises and the driv­ ing of cattle into Russia from several countries, chiefly from Kashgar; I participated in oilwells and fisheries; and sometimes I carried on several of these enterprises simultaneously. But the business I preferred above all others, which never required my specially devoting to it any definite time or needed any fixed place of res­ idence, and which moreover was very profitable, was the trade in carpets and antiques of all kinds.” Some of his business dealings were what Gurdjieff would call “sly”; no doubt others would call them downright dishonest. But while hunting esoteric secrets, Gurdjieff was also making a fortune. All of this was before he was thirty-five years old. Then he moved to Moscow to share his philosophical ideas with the world. The problem was that Gurdjieff didn’t seem to have a good sense of political timing. It was just before World War I and just before the Bol­ shevik Revolution. Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow with a million rubles, two valuable collections—one of carpets and the other of porcelain—and a fresh philosophy: “I wished to create around myself conditions in which a man would be continually reminded of the sense and aim of his existence by an unavoidable friction be­ tween his conscience and the automatic manifestations of his nature.” Despite the fact that Muscovites must have had other things on their minds in those turbulent years,

Gurdjieff

223

somehow this zany man attracted a considerable fol­ lowing. In The Occult Explosion, Nat Freeland re­ ports, “Since his whole teaching method was based on the mind's being kept in a continuous state of imbal­ ance, he often seemed to be—or perhaps really was— acting erratically.” But between Moscow and St. Petersburg (now Len­ ingrad), his lectures attracted an impressive assortment of philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals. One of them was Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, a man about the same age as Gurdjieff, who had just returned from a trek that had taken him from Egypt to India searching for the “ultimate truths he sensed were hid­ den behind the symbols of occult tradition.” Ouspen­ sky, a precise, bespectacled man, had already achieved fame for his book, The Fourth Dimension, which es­ tablished him as an expert in the field of abstract math­ ematical theory. Ouspensky valued Gurdjieff’s ideas highly, though at times his personality rubbed him the wrong way. Gurdjieff was intuitively unpredictable; Ouspensky was logical and systematic. As Gurdjieff was working on his plans to develop his new organization, the Revolution broke out and he left for his home territory in the Caucasian Mountains. Soon some of his disciples clustered around him and begged him to instruct them. But the obscure Cau­ casian village of Essentuki wasn’t obscure enough for Gurdjieff. How could you teach philosophy in the middle of a civil war? “Towns passed from hand to hand,” Guardjieff reported, “one day to the Bolsheviks, the next day to the Cossacks, and the day after to the White Army, or to some newly formed party. Some­ times on getting up in the morning we would not know under which government we were that day and

224

THOSE CURIOUS NEW CULTS

only on going out into the street would discover what politics had to be professed.” Remembering a proverb from a wise old Muslim Mullah, “In every circumstance of life always strive to combine the useful with the agreeable,” Gurdjieff de­ cided overnight to organize a scientific expedition. The next morning, he received permission from the govern­ ment that happened to be in power and he conscripted several young disciples of his to join him. Three years later they arrived in Istanbul, almost destitute, and from there they eventually went to France, where Gurdjieff bought his Fontainebleau estate and de­ veloped his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Only a couple of years later, however, when Gurdjieff was nearly killed in an automobile accident, he cut back his rather ambitious program at Fontaine­ bleau and spent more time in writing. Because of the esoteric nature of his teachings (meant to be understood by the select few) his writ­ ings were shared only with his ardent followers until 1959, ten years after his death. The first book to be re­ leased was All and Everything, or Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, which Gurdjieff says was written “to destroy mercilessly the beliefs and views rooted for centuries in the mind and feelings of man” by arousing in the mind of the reader a stream of unfamiliar thoughts. The second book, Meetings with Remarkable Men, was first published in English in 1963. A third book, entitled Life Is Real Only When I am, is still slated for publication and is the object of much speculation. His purpose in the third book, he said, was “to assist the arising in a man’s thought and feeling of a true representation of the real world, instead of the illusory world he now perceives.”

Gurdjieff

225

Gurdjieff’s disciples don’t want to tell too much to the outside world. They would prefer tantalizing with bits and pieces of information and knowledge so that only those who are serious about pursuing what Gurdjieff sometimes called the Universal Brotherhood will enter it. Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men ends with the fascinating sentence: ‘"From then on there gradually arose in me that ‘something’ which has brought the whole of me to the unshakeable convic­ tion that apart from the vanities of life, there exists a ‘something else’ which must be the aim and ideal of every more or less thinking man, and that it is only this ‘something else’ which may make a man really happy and give him real values, instead of the illusory goods with which in ordinary life he is always and in everything full.” Writer Peter Rowley presumes that the secrets of this “something else” will be revealed in Gurdjieff’s third book if his disciples ever get around to publish­ ing it. But part of the intriguing thing about Gurdjieff’s system is that there is something secretive about it. So why should anyone be in a hurry to publicize Gurdjieff? Gurdjieff himself was something of an anomaly. He had a difficult time trying to live by his own teachings. He violated his own stress on secret esotericism by publicly staging ballets in Russia. It was this inconsist­ ency that aggravated the methodical Mr. Ouspensky. Ouspensky stated at one point: “There began to take place in me a separation between G. himself and his ideas.” At times, Gurdjieff seemed little more than a sly pragmatist, a shrewd and brilliant Armenian business-

226

THOSE CURIOUS NEW CULTS

man. It was Ouspensky who took the fragments from Gurdjieff and pieced them together into a system. Ouspensky wrote in The Fourth Way: “In the be­ ginning in Russia, Mr. Gurdjieff always insisted that it was not a system; it was just fragments and one had to make a system out of them. And he insisted that it should be given in this way. Now I make it more of a system, because we have more people. But when it was only a small group it was just conversations and not lectures.” Almost like a Zen Master, Gurdjieff frightened most people he met. A translator, A. R. Orage, wrote ‘ To meet him was always a test. In his presence every atti­ tude seemed artificial. Whether too deferential, or on the contrary pretentious, from the first moment it was shattered; and nothing remained but a human creature stripped of his mask and revealed for an instant as he truly was. This was a merciless experience—and for some impossible to bear.” To many of his followers, Gurdjieff was the founder of a world philosophy, not the initiator of a new reli­ gion. Once, in Leningrad, when he was asked the rela­ tionship of his teaching to Christianity, he hedged at first and then responded, “If you like, this is esoteric Christianity.” But what is unique about Gurdjieff’s philosophy is that it is full-blown. Orage states, “He calls us to open our eyes. He asks us why we are here, what we wish for, what forces we obey. He asks us, above all, if we understand what we are. He wants us to bring every­ thing back into question.” According to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, there are four levels of human consciousness and most people live in only two of them. They are either awake or they are asleep. But Gurdjieff urges his disciples to ex-

Gurdjieff

227

plore higher levels of consciousness, levels which he calls self-consciousness and objective consciousness. While most people assume they have a degree of self-consciousness, Gurdjieff is convinced that we don’t know ourselves at all. Our sense of I-ness must be present in the whole of our being. Ouspensky in true mathematical fashion outlines nu­ merous other lists. There are seven categories of man, four kinds of energy, four degrees of schools, the Law of Three and the Law of Seven, Three octaves of Food (a fantastic conglomeration of music theory and nutrition), Seven forces of the Universe (which takes you into astronomy) and sundry other enumerations of ideas. Many people live in the first three categories of man, they say, but the teachings of Gurdjieff help peo­ ple to move into the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh categories of man. You make the move up the ladder, not by adding log­ ical knowledge to your mind, but by adding psycholog­ ical wisdom. As Ouspensky would say, most people live in the basement of their house without ever realiz­ ing there is an upstairs. “If people tell us about what this house has upstairs we do not believe them, or we laugh at them, or we call it superstition or fairy tales or fables.” When Gurdjieff and Ouspensky speak of psychol­ ogy, they are not referring to Freud and Jung, but merely to the study of oneself, “I.” That “I” is ex­ tremely prominent in their teaching. As progress is made, it comes through self-study, self-awareness and self-remembering. The problem with people is that they do not really know themselves; they have no aim. Sin, they say, is being aimless, or missing your goal. Because the “I” of most people is constantly changing (in other words, your “I” today may be different from

228

THOSE CURIOUS NEW CULTS

your “I” yesterday), people have no permanent “I” and this causes personal confusion. In a sense, salva­ tion to a follower of Gurdjieff is finding your perma­ nent “I”. What complicates the whole system is that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky often make words mean what they want them to mean. Yet despite Gurdjieff’s obfus­ cation and farfetched hypotheses, there is some truth to what he says. Man’s “I” is out of kilter, and man does live in the basement of his being, little realizing the glories of the mansion in which he resides. More­ over, most people go through life learning about a great deal, but always as interested bystanders and specta­ tors, and hardly ever as participants. Life is to be ex­ perienced. Some of what Gurdjieff says reminds you of what Jesus said, “I am come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.” While Scripture is sometimes quoted or alluded to, you soon realize that Gurdjieff’s esoteric Christianity is not Christianity at all. Gurdjieff’s thinking has been culled from a variety of sources: Christian, Sufi, Bud­ dhist and occult are all mixed together. But the emphasis is all man-centered. And it is for an exclusive type of man, the elite man, the man who considers himself able to understand the meandering of Gurdjieff. At best, certain men are able to be helped by it; others are either beyond help or will find help in some other way. One of the first heresies that struck the Christian Church in the first century was embryonic Gnosticism which was an esoteric Christianity. The Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Colossian Christians warning them against the elaborate philosophical system that only initiates could possibly understand. Like

Gurdjieff

229

Gurdjieff’s teachings, it contained complicated lists and demanded utter concentration and work. Paul emphasized to these Christians that Jesus Christ was the eternal Son of God as well as the suf­ fering Savior. ‘By him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principali­ ties or powers—all things were created by him, and for him; and he is before all things, and by him all things consist . . . For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell.” Later in the same letter, Paul tells the Colossians, who were flirting with the secret philosophies of Gnos­ ticism, “God’s secret plan, now at last made known, is Christ Himself. In Him lie hidden all the mighty un­ tapped treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I am saying this because I am afraid that someone may fool you with smooth talk....” (Colossians 2:2-4, Living Bible). Then the Apostle moves in harder: “Don’t let oth­ ers spoil your faith and joy with their philosophies, their wrong and shallow answers built on men’s thoughts and ideas, instead of on what Christ has said” (Col. 2:8). Nor is the Christian gospel available only to the elite, Paul says. “In this new life one’s nationality or race or education or social position is unimportant; such things mean nothing. Whether a person has Christ is what matters, and He is equally available to all” (Col. 3:11, Living Bible). Granted, there is a mystical awareness that Chris­ tians need to discover to lift them out of their materi­ alistic morass, but the key to Christian mysticism is Jesus Christ and the framework is the Word of God. Jesus taught his disciples to seek knowledge in Scrip­ ture, not in any secret mystical revelation.

230

THOSE CURIOUS NEW CULTS

If there is no vertical dimension, esoteric thinking soon degenerates into self-centeredness and egocentric­ ity. And this may be the basic difference between Gurdjieff and Jesus Christ. Gurdjieff taught that the most important of all was to know yourself, to have self-knowledge. Jesus Christ taught that the most im­ portant of all was to know God, to have God-knowl­ edge. With God-knowledge, you have an entirely new perspective in looking at life. Only with God-knowl­ edge can you have true self-knowledge.