Will Be, part I

My friend Philip occasionally tells a story that he heard directly from Louise March, Gurdjieff’s personal secretary. While Louise’s daughter is a close friend of mine, I never knew Louise herself; but Philip did, and his memory of this one story is vivid.

Louise recounted a moment in time at the Prieure, when Gurdjieff was deeply involved in writing the chapters about the very saintly Ashiata Shiemash from Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. She remembered it as intensive work, very concentrated, which took great effort on both their parts. At a certain point, when they were very close to finishing up the work on the chapters, Gurdjieff looked at her one afternoon and said, “you believe was?”

Louise paused for a moment and pondered the question. “Yes, I believe that he must have existed,”she replied.

Gurdjieff looked at her intently and said, “not was.”

 “Will be.”

This particular tale is an extremely important one, because it casts the entire story of Ashiata Shiemash in a new and different light. 

In order to understand what Gurdjieff meant by this arch remark, we need to move beyond the idea of the tale as something with any intention of having an actual historical context.

In the first place, Gurdjieff set the story in the past, when the city of Babylon was still a living entity. Superficially, one might interpret this as a record of an actual historical event, one of Gurdjieff’s legominisms (a special word denoting a story about something that actually happened.) Yet as we know, there is absolutely no record of any such personage in any known history from that era: the character appears, on the surface of things, to be wholly invented. 

We must also consider the fact that the name Ashiata Shiemash is an amalgam of various regional words which mean, literally, ”A ray of light from the sun.”As such, the character represents not so much a person as an event or a force. Both of these point strongly towards an allegorical assignation to the entire story.

Yet even more compelling is the fact that Gurdjieff told his personal secretary that the story was not about an event from the ancient past, as we all assume it must be when we read the book. This beguiling interpretation invokes romance, mystery, ancient cultures, secret wisdom, and so on; it pushes every button a student of esotericism wants to have pushed. But it’s entirely false; the story is not about the distant past, but about something that will happen in the future. 

Gurdjieff conceived of this, in other words, as a story to conceal a teaching that could bring a change in society about. Yet he set it in impossible circumstances; its matrix is firmly ancient, and no society or culture we can conceive of in today’s times — or, for that matter, future ones – can possibly produce the kind of conditions he describes. 

It is not, in other words, a story about any external set of circumstances, past, present, or future. 

It is, instead, an allegory about inner spiritual events. 

In this sense, it has a firm and unerring relationship to at least two other vitally important works in this tradition. The first is Plato’s Republic; there is no doubt Gurdjieff would have read this. The second is Ibn Arabi’s Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom. These works are the products of two major streams of philosophy: Plato’s Republic, arguably the most important philosophical document of Western classicism, and Ibn Arabi’s dissertations on Sufism, perhaps some of the most important philosophical dissertations on Islam in the world.

Each of these texts describes, using elaborate allegory, the nature of the inner organization of man and the proper way to approach a realignment of inner conditions in order to produce a more ordered state of Being. While the circumstances, events, and characters are laid out as though all of the action was taking place in the outer world, every single one of them is actually an inner condition of one kind or another. 

Understanding Gurdjieff’s Ashiata Shiemash from this perspective casts everything that is said about him and his work in a new light. It’s necessary to reread the chapters understanding the entire process and each detail of Ashiata Shiemash’s influence as the influence of inner work on the rearrangement of one’s being.

Regards,

Lee