Gurdjieff was Wrong, part II

 

How can I dare to say that Gurdjieff was wrong? 

There is no daring here. The statement is objectively true. 

Gurdjieff was a human; and humans are fallible. The premise of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson is that everyone, even angel and archangel, is fallible and makes mistakes. 

We don’t, however, need Gurdjieff’s book to tell us that people are wrong and make mistakes. The information is kindergarten-level.

For some peculiar reason, when a human being who acquires a legitimate degree of inner authority comes along, human beings around them invariably begin to make the consistent mistake – as a result of their own inner weaknesses — of believing that that person is in one way or another infallible. We see this in the propagation of political fantasies about various leaders, who are deemed by their followers to be completely infallible, no matter what kind of outrage they indulge in, but the instant that we do this in regard to a spiritual teacher, we forget ourselves and who we are and what we are up to and become blind worms following a scent in the mud. Nothing can dissuade us from the belief that the teacher was always right. Even if they, too, begin to indulge in outrages. Examples are too vulgar to even bother citing.

This would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. Gurdjieff constantly changed and revised his teaching throughout the course of his life; anyone who reads his own books and the reports about how he worked over the various decades will see that there were periods distinctly marked by different approaches. For example, he inveighed against breathing exercises with great vigor in the earlier years of his work; and yet it is abundantly apparent from his 1944 wartime meetings that he was teaching breathing exercises.

This one example alone serves to underscore the danger of believing that anyone "understands" Gurdjieff’s work, or that it had an original pure version that has been violated by later followers (even ones he personally appointed to follow him.) The difficulty here is that if you read enough of Gurdjieff’s original work, and hear enough about what he said to others from original sources, you can draw opposing conclusions with ease, and make up anything you want to about the "pure" version of his work. It's a complex structure with mistakes and inner contradictions in it; it was an evolving entity, and Gurdjieff changed its nature according to the level of his understanding and the nature of his own Being as he brought it to people—as well, mind you, as the people he was brining it to. This is in the nature of every human enterprise. Spiritual teachings are not exempt; and yet human beings insist in placing them on altars and worshiping them instead of examining them critically.

It’s true, there are probably some central tenets to Gurdjieff’s work; for example, he told us to question everything. He directly instructed his pupils throughout the course of their lives to examine even what he told them critically, and to determine what was true about them. It imposes upon every follower of Gurdjieff, then, the obligation to begin by rejecting everything he said, to disbelieve it, to investigate for themselves. That’s a central tenet. Yet this particular baby gets thrown out with the bathwater very early on in people, who become convinced of Gurdjieff’s veracity and then rewrite everything about him to conform to their own version of it.

Gurdjieff made a lot of mistakes. Some of the things he told people were just plain wrong. This doesn’t just apply to the metaphysical cosmologies he brought; and there are even contradictions there. For example, Gurdjieff’s writings are loaded with 40' containerloads of metaphysical philosophy; and in particular, when he was teaching Ouspensky and the earliest groups we know of, it appears just about everything was about that. Any casual reading of In Search of the Miraculous will reveal that the philosophy very nearly overwhelms the practice. 

Yet when we come to the 1944 meetings, some 25+ years later, every time a group member attempts to discuss something philosophical, Gurdjieff dismisses it outright. 

He had changed. That’s all there is to it. If he hadn't changed over all those years, there would have been something wrong with him. he wouldn't have represented the idee fix, the obsession, which in 1944 he repeatedly warns his pupils against.

He also changed his working methods; and once again, any casual reading of meeting records from either 1943 or 44 will reveal how extraordinarily specific his instructions to different individuals were. What was good for one person was bad for another; and so on. He was most certainly wrong on some of his calls, because he wasn’t perfect; and a close reading of the wartime meetings will reveal, to those attuned to more subtle inflections of personality, that he wasn’t even always sure about himself. One catches the whiff of doubt. He understood what another said; he didn’t. Things needed clarification. And so on. One sees the process of uncertainty at work even in the master himself.

Even in the original handwritten Russian drafts of Beelzebub' Tales, he was uneven, fallible, exploratory, and said things that later underwent significant changes. He was human. This is a fact. He made plenty of mistakes, and he was sometimes wrong. 

So the chimera of a pure, unchangeable essence of his work is just that — a mythical beast assembled from the parts of other beasts. Nothing, in sum, is ever always correct; but some things are always wrong. This pasting together of various ideas to create something pure which never existed and never will exist is always wrong, whether we do it with politics or spiritual traditions. Purity emerges from selflessness; and the pasting together of things to create a self-serving version of purity is always wrong, because the enterprise started out with a false premise to begin with. 

It begins rooted in the essence of its own failure; which is perhaps a metaphor for where we must always begin our inner work, doesn't it?

The weakness and failing lies not in the failing itself, but the failure to recognize it.

This assembling of false premises in order to reach a true one is a human habit; we see it around us all the time. What marks it above all other things is the obsessiveness and fanaticism with which people pursue it. It disturbs me that the Gurdjieff Foundation has become a whipping boy appointed to receive punishment for all the sins of the Gurdjieff work, whatever they may be. It isn’t perfect; from within, it well knows that. The difficulty here is that the accusers on this matter don't stop to examine their own conscience.

I was in Paris last January, just under a year from the date this was written, and met with individuals who are deeply inserted in the direct tradition of Gurdjieff’s work. They worked in their whole lives with the people that formed the innermost core of Gurdjieff’s circle in the last 10 years of his life. One of them told me that, "of course," the Gurdjieff work today is nothing like people imagine it in the way they conduct the affairs of the work. 

It was fun. It was casual, it was relaxed, it was warm. People acted like human beings. Gurdjieff argued with people; and they argued back. 

They enjoyed what they were doing.

The unfortunate situation is the way in which some have turned what was once a warm, human, and entirely fallible enterprise into some rigid kind of structure implying punishment for those that don’t conform.

Of course, there are those who want things to be that way; because then their egos can be exercised and they can have control. 

They imagine themselves to be important. 

They think they are on a mission from God. Perhaps so.

But that mission is by its nature a deeply inner and secret mission, that has in the end little or nothing to do with all of the outward trappings of power and control and importance that can be acquired. 

Human beings are obsessed with the idea, in other words, of pursuing an understanding of their own nothingness by becoming something.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.