Division of Attention. Gurdjieff encouraged his students to
cultivate the ability to divide their attention, that is, the
ability to remain fully focussed on two or more things at the
same time. One might, for instance, let half of one’s attention
dwell in one’s little finger, while the other half is devoted to
an intellectual discussion. In the division of attention, it is
not a matter of going back and forth between one thing and
another, but experiencing them both fully simultaneously. Beyond
the division of attention lies “remembering oneself” – a frame
of mind, permanent in the hypothetical perfected person,
fleeting and temporary in the rest of us, in which we see what
is seen without ever losing sight of ourselves seeing.
Ordinarily, when concentrating on something, we lose our sense
of “I,” although we may as it were passively react to the
stimulus we are concentrating on. In self-remembering the “I” is
not lost, and only when we maintain that sense of “I,” according
to Gurdjieff, are we really awake. Like mastery on a musical
instrument, such forms of heightened self-awareness can be
developed only with years of practice.
Hands, Head, and Heart. With many variations and complications
over the years, Gurdjieff’s theoretical picture of the human
organism boils down to a tripartite model consisting of three
“centers”: the moving, the emotional, and the thinking. Becoming
a genuine person involves coordinating the three centers and
becoming capable of conscious labor and intentional suffering.
Abstract Symbolism. Gurdjieff was fond of elaborate theorizing
- the construction of intricate symbolic systems embodying or
representing the relationships between phenomena at all levels
of existence from the atom to the universe. Ouspensky devotes
pages and pages to Gurdjieff’s concept of “octaves” {Thus one
must study the Pythagorean connection with Abaris the Druid.}-
the musical scale do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do taken as a sort of
universal yardstick for determining the measurements and
proportions of all of nature’s parts. (The theory of octaves had
a tremendous impact on pianist Keith Jarrett, who read about
them in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s longest,
most allegorical, and most difficult book.) Some Gurdjieff
students and groups gloss over the octaves or dispense with them
entirely. My own feeling is that the theory of octaves has a lot
in common with medieval Western musical theorists’ preoccupation
with theo-numerological speculation based on interval integer
ratios and their symbolic significance. In point of fact,
Gurdjieff had studied the medieval alchemists and on occasion
was prone to speak of the human organism as a sort of alchemical
factory for the transformation of various material and psychic
substances.
It seems that where there is music, and where there are people
who philosophize about it, there will be some form of numerology
and arcane quasi-mathematics. Since both musical pitch and
musical rhythm are readily represented in numerical forms, the
urge to find primal mathematical significance in music is almost
impossible to resist. A contemporary example of this perennially
seductive train of thought is Peter Michael Hamel’s book
Through Music to the Self.
Another symbolic thought-form Gurdjieff worked with was the
enneagram, a circle with nine points around its circumference.
Said Gurdjieff, ‘The enneagram is a universal symbol. All
knowledge can be included in the enneagram and with the help of
the enneagram it can be interpreted … A man may be quite alone
in the desert and he can trace the enneagram in the sand and in
it read the eternal laws of the universe. And every time he can
learn something new, something he did not know before.’ {The
fabulously successful book The Celestine Prophecy uses the
knowledge of the Enneagram and takes people to the point of
Enlightenment which can include dematerialization.}
Through the elaboration of the law of octaves and the meaning
of the enneagram, Gurdjieff offered his students alternative
means of conceptualizing the world and their place in it. When I
say “alternative,” I am suggesting that Gurdjieff sought
alternatives to rational, linear, language-oriented exposition
and rhetoric (though he was by all accounts also a spellbinding
speaker). In other words, Gurdjieff’s ideas could be only
partially expounded in ordinary words and sentences; to go
beyond language he drew on music (he played several instruments
and Bennett tells of him improvising unearthly melodies on a
small organ late at night), dance, and visual symbols such as
the enneagram.
Furthermore, it is my impression that Gurdjieff was happy to
talk theoretically with students who were theoretically
inclined, but that the theory itself is not an indispensable
part of his overall teaching. Or, to put it slightly
differently, Gurdjieff used, for instance, the complicated
machinery of the law of octaves in order to teach his students
to think. And in some respects the process of thinking was more
important than the theoretical content of what was thought.
Conditions. Gurdjieff laid emphasis on the idea that the seeker
must conduct his or her own search – and that the teacher cannot
do the student’s work for the student, but is more of a guide on
the path to self-discovery. As a teacher, Gurdjieff specialized
in creating conditions for students – conditions in which growth
was possible, in which efficient progress could be made by the
willing. To find oneself in a set of conditions a gifted teacher
has arranged has another benefit. As Gurdjieff put it, ‘You must
realize that each man has a definite repertoire of roles which
he plays in ordinary circumstances … but put him into even
only slightly different circumstances and he is unable to find a
suitable role and for a short time he becomes himself.’
In 1918 the turmoil of the Russian revolution forced Gurdjieff
and a small group of devoted followers out of Moscow to
Essentuki in the Caucasus. For the next four years the core
group moved from place to place, from Tiflis in Georgia to
Constantinople to Germany. In 1922 Gurdjieff finally managed to
establish a more or less stable base of operations, which he
dubbed the “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man,” at
the Château de Prieuré in Fontainbleau, near Paris. The
Institute’s varied activities attracted many new people to
Gurdjieff’s ideas, and in 1924 he went on a short visit to
America where he stirred up much interest and started a group in
New York. He returned to France. At this moment of the
beginnings of success on a larger scale, Gurdjieff was nearly
killed in an automobile accident. During his long recuperation
his teaching activities came to an almost complete halt, but
from this time to 1935 he did manage to write his three primary
works, Beelzebub’s Tales, Meetings with Remarkable
Men, and Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am.”
If Beelzebub’s Tales is an elaborate modern mythological
tapestry and Meetings is a spiritual travelogue, then
Life Is Real Only Then is a portrait of the creative process in
fluid motion. Gurdjieff’s most self-revealing book, it takes the
reader into Gurdjieff’s own associative thought-processes, for
instance in those passages where he writes about writing itself,
the trains of thought that led him, when still a young man, to
renounce all use of his exceptional psychic powers, the somewhat
brutal methods he used to whip his New York followers into
shape, and his superhuman, insomniacal efforts to keep his
Institute functioning and together on a sound financial footing
in the Fontainbleau days. Life Is Real was never finished – it
ends poignantly with a colon.
In the 1930s and 1940s Gurdjieff worked with small groups in
Paris, where he lived, and New York. Gurdjieff himself was
ultimately an enigma to Westerners, even to those who knew him
best. It is doubtful that we will ever know the “person” behind
the tremendous force of personality he exerted upon all who
worked with him. In times of the greatest personal crisis, he
would withdraw into the circle of his family. He placed extreme
demands on his students, but seemed to demand infinitely more of
himself. Teacher or prophet, rogue or saint, wily man or
gracious servant of God, Gurdjieff today is gone, and among some
of his followers there lingers an eschatological atmosphere, a
memory-afterglow of a not-so-distant time past when the infinite
was concretely embodied in time.” (1)
“KL: Yes, he was in Paris from the early 20’s. When he began
his work in Moscow (and in St. Petersburg very shortly), things
were going rather well, and then they had a little thing called
the Russian revolution. It was necessary for Gurdjieff and many
of his pupils to leave Russia in a hurry. Many of them were from
a stratum of society that was rather too closely associated with
the Czar, and it in any case conditions had become very bad,
very difficult, for anyone in Russia at that time. So Gurdjieff
escaped with a small group of followers and established the
center of his activities next in Constantinople, following which
there was a brief period in Berlin, and finally he settled just
outside of Paris, at the Chateau de Prieure at Fontainebleau,
and he worked with pupils there very intensively for the next
few years. That period was cut short by an automobile accident
which was very severe; it nearly killed him. Later on, he worked
in Paris itself, with, at any given time, a fairly small circle
of pupils.
Q.: Who was funding him?
KL: That’s a very interesting question. There were certainly
people interested in his work who provided funds.” (2)
There is good reason to believe that people who worked in Mind
Control associated with Tavistock, Yale and Baruch would have
funneled money and clients to Gurdjieff.
About the author:
Author who cares what the future of humanity will be.
Author : Robert Bruce Baird
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