Gurdjieff was Wrong, part I

Jan. 8

 Periodically, I happen to browse the many threads of discussion online, most recently on Facebook, about the Gurdjieff work. 

Some disturbing features of these discussions have come to my attention.

The first of these is that there is an obscure but persistent belief that there is some “pure” version of the Gurdjieff work. That Gurdjieff established some inviolable, immutable version of his work that was whole and intact and perfect, and that his later followers, especially Jeanne de Salzmann — who comes under a good deal of fire for this — somehow contaminated that work with foreign practices, changing it until it no longer resembles his original work.

These ridiculous assertions would be laughable if they weren’t so destructive. Similar remarks have been made in general about Gurdjieff’s work, ever since he died, of multiple individuals and branches of the work; and indeed, the work has never been the same since he died, because the way he brought it was his way. 

This particular work, however, did not belong to him, as he very clearly said from the outset. 

Perhaps the difficulties arise from his unique nature; it’s hard to imagine that another individual vouchsafed the understandings of what we call “the fourth way” would have taught it the exact same way he did. A close reading of what Gurdjieff said in In Search of the Miraculous (should we choose to believe this source) will reveal that that would be impossible, anyway; a true “fourth way” school has a specific aim, works to achieve it, and then disbands once it is over. If the fourth way school had an aim, for example, of making an extraordinary painting about "the work," they wouldn’t be teaching movements; they would be teaching how to mix paint in the right color. And so on. So the idea that there is one way of teaching this work is a functional absurdity from the beginning.

The assertions that the work has one version and that various individuals haven’t remained loyal to it is a self-serving approach to things; above all, it is a product of egos who believe that “they” are the insiders who have the insights necessary to keep the work pure, and that others don’t. I’ve seen this manifest itself in innumerable variations over the years; and every single one of the people who approaches the work in this way, “nice people” though they may be, is completely blind to the way their own ego prompts them to pretend that they have some kind of ownership of the purity that’s necessary. I have seen this in versions that don't just stand at the borderline of arrogance, but rush over it like an invading army.

If we return to one of Gurdjieff’s earliest essays, The Meaning of Life, which was almost certainly a piece of writing and not a lecture that he gave in person — the earliest members of those groups commented on the essay as “originally read to us as “Pure and Impure Emotions” —we can note that he said purity is defined by the presence or absence of self interest.

This brings me to the second disturbing point, which is that when I encounter things written by “outsiders” about the work of the Gurdjieff Foundation, they almost always share two chief features. First of all, they're unerringly incorrect in their understanding of how the Gurdjieff Foundation presents the Work; and while we can excuse them for being wrong — after all, they aren’t in the Foundation and privy to the way it conducts its business — we can’t excuse them for presuming to know things about which they know absolutely nothing. This is a form of unexamined arrogance that should have been nipped in the bud of every mind that produces it; and yet it grows like roses, nothing but roses, in the presence of beings who definitely ought to know better.

Secondly, they tend to lay too much blame at the feet of Gurdjieff’s followers, especially Jeanne de Salzmann. They are happy enough to appropriate the words from her personal notes in “The Reality of Being”; but they then claim that the direction she took the work in wasn’t pure. This is a chief feature in critics of the Gurdjieff Foundation and its inner affairs, all of which are actually none of their business.

We come back on this second point to the question of what the work really is and who has “ownership” of it.

It is objectively accurate to say that both everyone and no one has ownership of the Gurdjieff work. It only exists to the extent that it manifests its influence and the power of its energies in an individual; and yet it is greater than all the individuals, so no individual has even the slightest chance of grasping its scope or depth. This is true, it must be said, of even Gurdjieff himself. 

And more on that in the next installment of this essay.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.