An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3

 

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An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3:

Over the last 12 years, I’ve repeatedly returned to Meister Eckhart’s sermons. This practice has become an informal morning discipline. More often than not I'll read a bit of a sermon at the beginning of the day — not all of it, because the sermons are so rich and dense and beautiful that just a bit of one is enough to ponder for a day or two. 

Or even a week, or a year.

Every sermon by Meister Eckhart is an excursion deep into the unknown territory of the soul. 

Individually, each one presents a dauntingly complex and sophisticated set of insights into the human psyche and its action, as well as the nature of the Christian life and human relationships. Collectively, they represent one of the world’s great bodies of insight into religious philosophy and practice: all from a single man, but representative of the very high ground occupied by Medieval monasticism in general. Meister Eckhart did not, after all, work alone; he was the product of a community engaged in efforts the likes and results of which were rare even then. To the present, it is a lost world; but that lost world buried extraordinary treasures in its arts and scriptures.

Beginning tomorrow, I'm publishing an eight-part series in this space commenting on the entire text of Sermon 3. 

My notes on the sermon are intended to lightly touch on various aspects of practice which Meister Eckhart mentions so deftly, and with so many different details, that they may seem difficult to digest. Things said 800 years ago do not always yield their relationship to modern understandings so easily. Yet when they do, we may uncover commonalities of insight that surprise us. 

Meister Eckhart’s sermons cast light on some profound similarities between medieval Christian monastic practice and Buddhism; and of course this has not gone unnoticed among scholars. The relationship between Meister Eckhart’s writings and Gurdjieff’s ideas have been somewhat less investigated; yet here, once again, the territory is rich for exploration, and the commentaries will explore it at as much depth as the vehicle of essays reasonably allows.

The commentary is intended to establish some points of departure for further contemplation, and nothing more.

The Sermon will be reproduced in its entirety during the eight-part series. 

All quotations from Meister Eckhart's Sermons 3 are reprinted with the kind permission of The Sangha Trust, and are taken from The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart.

Lee van Laer

Sparkill, NY

January 2021

Finer Materials

 

Gurdjieff’s discussion of so-called “finer” materials opens with the comments made by P. D. Ouspensky in “In Search of the Miraculous.” Much is made of the subject in these annals; and it comes up elsewhere as well, especially in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, where he speaks about the “coating” of what he calls the “higher being body parts” with finer substances.

An understanding what he means by this involves understanding what the difference is between “coarse” and “fine” particles. Gurdjieff refers to this as a difference in the rate of vibration: “coarse” particles are at a lower rate of vibration.

Taking this strictly from the perspective of physics, we think of this in terms of heat. Particles that are hotter vibrate more intensely. Yet clearly he was alluding to some other property, since we don’t become more spiritually attuned if we live in a warmer climate or drink a cup of coffee.

Practical experience leads us to understand, unerringly, that what is finer has a greater capacity for feeling. That is to say, that which is coarser is admixed with the physical or intellectual properties other things; and that which is finer purifies these qualities in such a way that the feeling becomes more sensitive and more intense. This is a movement away from indifference and towards love. That is to say, finer substances and higher energies always move us away from that which clings to the dense material of being towards the freeing influence of love.

We can know and sense the action of finer materials in us to the extent that they produce feeling qualities. Higher materials produce, first of all, sensation; and sensation is a less developed form of feeling. As materials become finer and are more concentrated in being, so does feeling also deepen. In this way we can know the difference between what is coarse in us and what is finer simply by the effect that it produces in our feelings.

In this, all spiritual work and every effort at the evolution — the true evolution, not an evolutionary complication — of the psyche, the soul, and consciousness itself is an effort aimed at the advent of sacred feeling. Sacred feeling differs entirely from ordinary emotion in that it is organic and unprompted. It does not attach itself to the external or even to the internal. To the extent that a seeker or and adapt the tunes themselves to an understanding of sacred feeling, so may they deepen the question of the development of finer substances.

These substances are the gold of alchemy: gold attracts gold.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

January 26

100%.

I have to give myself 100% to where I am and what I’m doing.

There is a wish to advance. To “get somewhere” in my spiritual work, in my condition. But where is there to go except here?

Can I get here?

As to concerns about drifting off, going away from myself and then coming back. This is going to happen no matter what I do. Even Gurdjieff had problems with it. The whole point is to bring the different parts, the feelings, the mind, into alignment with the anchor of the body. If the mind and the feelings are well trained, if the body is also obedient, each one of them is like a dog. If a dog is well-trained, I can let it go away and know that it will come home. I can trust it. 

There's a mutual trust available in the service. So if the mind wanders, and it has been well trained, it will come back to me. It may even bring something home for me.

I'm ruled by the impulses that say to me, “I’ve gotta do this. I’ve gotta do that.” These imperatives turned me into a victim of my external circumstances. 

A small change in my attitude makes everything different: “I will do this. I will do that.” Already, now, the center of gravity is different. The experience of mind is a little more objective.

I make a choice between morbidity and brilliance. One goes down, the other goes up.

We so often use descriptions that are tactile and involve the hands when we speak of the self and its action.

Get a grip. Get a handle. Hold it. I’ve lost touch with myself. I can’t handle it.

All of these phrases are subtle reminders that the contact with my psyche and my soul are intimate, that they don’t just involve thinking, but a physical contact with something real, something I can feel. 

The famous refrain from The Who’s Tommy is “see me, feel me, touch me, heal me.” Seeing is of the mind; feeling is emotional; touching is physical: the three actions together heal, that is, they help to make me whole.

It's reported that Gurdjieff once said, "If a man knows how to make a good cup of coffee, I can talk to him."

What he meant is that 99% of us is BS. We are full of all kinds of garbage. It is the difference between an endless pile of bullshit and a cup of coffee. Making the cup of coffee is a simple, tactile act that involves doing something with the attention and the hands. It simplifies everything. One need not put one’s attention or concern anywhere other than that task. Then something real has happened. Almost everything else is in the imagination.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

 

January 21, 2021

Questions about ambition have come up lately. 

People want to be something. They want results. 

"How do I maximize the opportunity to be here?"

I fear these questions come from the world of things. It reminds me of Popeye. The cartoon character says, “I yam what I yam.” 

"I am what I am" makes me a thing. 

But I am not a thing. 

I am a human being. 

I am as I am.

I am as I am. How is that? Is it about results? I don’t think so. 

The question of possession comes in here; because in a cosmological sense it is about results, and “I” am a result; yet I am not my result. 

When I am as I am, the result does not belong to me. I simply inhabit it and see it. Paradoxically, this doesn’t really subtract from I; it adds to it. 

Yet it adds to it by stripping it. Think about that for a while.

The difficulty here is that I want the effort to be something, rather than being something within myself. 

I make an effort. I don’t make an effort. The effort should be like this or it should be like that. It was good, it was bad, and so on. Now all of a sudden it’s currency that I hoard or spend. Maybe I’ll be able to buy myself something really wonderful with it.

The exercise is a thing. The result is a thing. The effort is a thing. Every object, event, circumstance, and condition is somehow turned into a thing, like a piece of metal that can be forged or hammered. Then I have control over it. I can do something. Not only can I do something; I must do something. Gurdjieff told me this. The work told me this. Jesus said it to me. Or whatever. The point is that I don’t want to be as I am; I want to make things happen, don’t I?

I’m here to evaluate without judging, not judge without evaluating. Yet what I always do is judge without evaluating. 

To be here is to evaluate: to perceive, to receive, to appreciate value. Here I am… here I am… here I am. 

Evaluation.

I've pointed out before that the mind lives in the past, the body lives in the present, and the feeling lives in the future. Expanding on this, the mind feeds on the past, the body feeds on the present, and the feeling feeds on the future. Yet the only force that can bring the mind and the feeling into the present is the body, because it is the master of the present. The master of the past and the master of the future need to come here to the present to work together properly. If that happens, if I discover myself within the authority of the body; when I observe, when I evaluate, I can relax and enjoy it. It’s not a chore.

***

By now, over the course of a lifetime, I’ve attended hundreds upon hundreds of Gurdjieff meetings. I jotted down some notes to myself about suggestions for how to conduct oneself in a meeting. How to bring yourself to a group. The list is by no means complete, but it’s a starting place.

Rediscover yourself in the middle of everything and say only half of what you were going to say. Better yet, start from there.

Don’t engage in soliloquy about the wonder of it all.

Cancel the excursions. No rambling.

Don’t qualify what you say. Don’t end by saying, for example, “if that makes any sense.” Do so doesn't make any sense. 

Avoid beginning with those phrases that everyone else is using. Don't use them in the middle, either. If a word is becoming too commonplace in the exchanges, vow never to use it. Stop instead and find a different way of saying it. 

Always different. Always a little effort. 

Be aware of repetitiveness and avoid it. See how the emotion of fear interferes with what you are trying to say and inserts tropes and defensive mechanisms. They aren’t needed.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Friday Jan. 15 

I’m in the stillness this morning, pondering value, tradition, and effort.

I need to value life and what it is as it is. Life extends itself into time at great depth when I'm present to it. To the extent that I am present to it. Each day is a whole life.

Life comes from a tradition. It's not just the tradition of biology and evolution, although that is important. It's the tradition of thought, being, of family and society, of relationship and trust. We can't break biology and evolution; they belong to a world larger than the world man. But these other traditions, the ones that belong to our world, those, we can break all too easily. If we don’t begin with the value of life, we'll mishandle them and drop them and they'll break like a china teacup.

Life requires effort. Effort is the engagement with this material world. That engagement extends into the spiritual, but it begins here in the material. Effort is physical. Only after it's physical can it reach towards the spiritual. We need to struggle with what we are, the way we behave, with our ideas of ourselves.

In this sense, value represents feeling. Tradition represents intellect. Effort represents the body.

There’s another thing that struck me earlier this week. 

There’s always an end — here, there, and everywhere. Things always have an end. 

But where do they begin?

I can see ends all around me. Every result, every consequence is an end of one kind or other. Those things are fairly easy to perceive. Yet it’s much more difficult to perceive the beginning of anything, because one can only know when something which ends began after the end is here. Very often — almost always, in fact, unless one is predicting some physical result in science — things begin and the end of them is nowhere in sight. It can't even be imagined. Later, after a thing most extraordinary (sometimes, disastrous) takes place, everyone says, “who would have thought that could happen?” 

The beginning wasn’t identifiable; it didn’t make its results visible.

Yet if we don’t penetrate to the beginning of our question, we can’t really know where we are. It reminds me of Gurdjieff’s story of the Karapet of Tiflis; he got there first. As I’ve mentioned before, Peggy Flinsch, who knew Gurdjieff well, tells us that he put that story in the book at the very end of the process, after the whole book was written and deemed complete. It was, in other words, an addition to this vast work. One could call it, so to speak, Gurdjieff’s final word — a second final word that came after Beelzebub’s final advice that mankind would need to grow organ that made him perpetually aware of his death if anything were to be done on the order of healing.

I’m also reminded of a friend’s story. He was present when someone in the room asked Lord Pentland, “What do you know that I don't know?”

Lord Pentland answered, “I know to begin again.”

Pentland wasn’t searching for the result. 

He wasn’t searching for why there was a result. 

He was searching for the beginning. 

There are questions here about the role of intention.

Our question forever lies in the beginning of things where we are; not in what takes place later. The ordinary mind is accustomed to seeking its answers in the past and deriving its anxieties and pleasures from the future; but it all takes place in a now that it forgets.

The ordinary mind needs to be trained to be here, now, in the beginning, and to open itself to the beginning without prejudice. 

This is where time flows in and slows itself to match the tempo of one’s contemplation; and that is where the stillness begins.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Movement of Being

Jan. 10, 2021

Reading the Gurdjieff wartime meeting from Thursday, June 20, 1944.

My first reaction to this text was a summary, in some senses, of all the texts in this book, still available as I write this in French only.

That impression is one of so many exercises being given, very specific exercises person by person, according to who they are and what they say. 

It’s certain that this particular practice has died out in the Gurdjieff work; in fact, perhaps only Gurdjieff himself could have done it. 

One begins to wonder whether the heart of what he was trying to do with people died with him in this respect.

One worries, equally, about how every Tom, Dick, and Harry adopts one or another exercise for themselves or gives it to others, thinking it will “help” them, in the face of the incontrovertible evidence that no one really knows what they are doing in this regard. The fact that Gurdjieff frequently warns his followers that what is good for one person in terms of an exercise could be dangerous for the next underscores the folly of this approach; and yet it continues. Those who propagate such practices do so on a foundation of self-justification that withers in the light of plain facts. 

It raises the question of whether reading this book will help people at all if they believe that somehow this or that applies directly to them. One needs to be quite careful with that idea.

Caveat emptor.

A second impression. Gurdjieff’s methods had changed considerably by this time. The intense pressure of the war, the crucible of oppression and fear that surrounded everything, transformed him into a deeper and deeper and more and more humanitarian creature, one more than ever focused on the inner well-being of those who came to him for help. Underneath his gruff behavior and his curses, his outright dismissal of questions, a loving heart.

The third impression. Gurdjieff repeatedly tells people not to work too much. One third of the time. That’s all. Anything more, one exposes oneself to the danger of the idee fix, the obsession. One should learn to let go of this work as well as hold onto it. That requires a deft touch and an active intelligence.

And this fourth impression. 

We are very confused inside. The outer world isn’t going to give us answers for this. There aren’t any there. The July 20, 1944 meeting is in some senses a signature meeting for this question. 

I translated it last night and was somehow removed from what it said. My personal reaction was, “it isn’t interesting.” I critiqued his attitude towards those who questioned him and felt a generalized lack of connection with the proceedings. Admittedly, I was a bit tired and did the translation toward the end of the day, and I'm a morning person who tends to concentrate their attention and experience of Being in the earlier part of the day and let it relax later. 

This morning I woke up and came back to the meeting because I was looking for a piece from the translations to share with some others for a discussion group later in the week.

The fourth impression, of how Gurdjieff keeps turning people back towards the repair of their own inner car, was now a much stronger and more compelling one. I saw at once how absolutely right he was in everything he said. The text is important not because of the minutia of his exchanges and exactly what he says to others, but in the gist of his message, which is that we keep looking outside ourselves for answers—where there aren’t any. 

We aren’t even prepared to receive answers; if a real one came to us, we’d mistake it for something else, trip over it and then pick ourselves up and carry on as though nothing had happened. One has to prepare a ground from within to receive something true; and yet we all definitely want to have everything true without a prepared ground to rest it on.

This is directly related to Christ’s admonitions about those who build their houses on sand. (Matthew 7:24) If my own inward being isn’t in order, if I don’t manage to bring my relationship with the personal under some kind of control and into some kind of order, everything from outside that comes into me is instantly transformed into subjective material, and no matter how true or untrue it may be, what is certain is that it will make me more, not less, subjective. A subjective mechanism can only give subjective results.

This is the critical issue regarding Gurdjieff’s methodology. If we do not ruthlessly examine how we are from within, and constantly question our attitudes, opinions, behavior, everything we do, in a healthy — not destructive — way, we are doomed to a collapse into the selfishness of our personality, we are slaves to what has been created in us from without. 

The house of "I am" is destroyed by the rain, floods, and wind.

I live in a world where I am watching people collapse in exactly this way. I am watching friends I have known for many years collapse into bizarre forms of subjectivity in which they believe objective untruths with a zeal I never could have imagined. Their belief that these things, which they seize on as intensely as Gollum clutched the one ring, are true is nothing short of incredible. 

Yet there it is.

I have pondered this for some months. There's no way to fix the damage that this kind of subjectivity does. Observing it, I note that most of it comes from a beginning root that says “I am this. I am that.” 

It never, ever, comes from the root of my own premise for life, which is, “What am I?”

To this, the simple statement, “I am.” 

Between the polarity of “I am this” and “what am I?” we find “I am.” So the formulation becomes: 

I am this.

What am I?

I am. 

Holy affirming, holy denying, holy reconciling.

This is a deeply inner process, which we must take responsibility for ourselves. No one part of it can be ignored. It is what creates the movement of Being.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

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.

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.