Where does Life begin? Part III—spiritual boot camp

After my conversation with my friend, I went out for my 4 mile walk on the pier into the Hudson River this morning. During the walk I contemplated the way that the Gurdjieff work was presented to me when I was young, the way that it reads in the books — especially Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous — and how people approach it in general, whether they are members of the Gurdjieff Foundation or not.

I pointed out in my book Novel, Myth, and Cosmos that it's well-nigh impossible for the modern mind to have any true understanding of the mindset and the social and religious circumstances that surrounded Gurdjieff and the people he worked with the beginning of the 20^th century. We're separated from them by nearly a century of changes, and that century has without any doubt wrought technological changes beyond the capacity of Gurdjieff or his followers to imagine or even conceive of. 

While our spiritual state has remained the same, all of the contexts — the flesh of the fruit — have changed.

To today’s mind, and in some of our own practice, much of the Gurdjieff work comes off as a spiritual boot camp. There is all this talk of how terrible we are, how helpless we are (man cannot do, blah blah blah), and all of these methods of bootstrapping our Being through strenuous psychic exercises of various kinds, including obscure and complicated intellectual exercises regarding enneagrams and hydrogens (the hydrogens, especially, weird holdovers from dubious 19^th century metaphysical models) and all kinds of admonitions, instructions, and strictures. And who doesn’t know and remember the stern, overbearing types who appoint themselves to grimly ”bring the work” to others? 

Cheez. Gimme a break. 

This is a form of elitist metaphysical asceticism, intellectually (and perhaps, no matter how much the perp doth mindfully protest, even deviously) crafted, which places one stupidly impossible demand after another on the practitioner. Lest you feel I rant, some of this has been done to me myself... I know whereof I speak.

Of course Gurdjieff’s own personal practice was, by all reports (and I have heard more than a few of them directly from people who actually knew the man personally) nothing quite like this; and so the literature and the formal practice that have evolved since the books were published and the man himself died are considerable—sometimes outright destructive— deviations from what he intended. 

As much as been said before; the idea is not new. 

Although we owe a debt to Ouspensky for the books he published, we have also to remember him for the way in which it propagated a whole branch of inner work which does not understand the spiritual sensation of Being—one couldn’t even suspect its existence given what he wrote—and doesn’t have the capacity to conceive of it, let alone teach it properly. This type of work produces sophisticated metaphysicists which are nonetheless lacking in the type of compassion that’s truly necessary for this work. 

All this in contrast to the sensation of life, spiritual sensation—which is what inner work is all about. 

This can only be brought through Love; and I'll speak about that in the next installment.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.