Division of Attention. Gurdjieff encouraged his students to cultivate the ability to divide their attention, that is, the ability to remain fully focussed on two or more things at the same time. One might, for instance, let half of one’s attention dwell in one’s little finger, while the other half is devoted to an intellectual discussion. In the division of attention, it is not a matter of going back and forth between one thing and another, but experiencing them both fully simultaneously. Beyond the division of attention lies “remembering oneself” – a frame of mind, permanent in the hypothetical perfected person, fleeting and temporary in the rest of us, in which we see what is seen without ever losing sight of ourselves seeing. Ordinarily, when concentrating on something, we lose our sense of “I,” although we may as it were passively react to the stimulus we are concentrating on. In self-remembering the “I” is not lost, and only when we maintain that sense of “I,” according to Gurdjieff, are we really awake. Like mastery on a musical instrument, such forms of heightened self-awareness can be developed only with years of practice.
Hands, Head, and Heart. With many variations and complications over the years, Gurdjieff’s theoretical picture of the human organism boils down to a tripartite model consisting of three “centers”: the moving, the emotional, and the thinking. Becoming a genuine person involves coordinating the three centers and becoming capable of conscious labor and intentional suffering.
Abstract Symbolism. Gurdjieff was fond of elaborate theorizing – the construction of intricate symbolic systems embodying or representing the relationships between phenomena at all levels of existence from the atom to the universe. Ouspensky devotes pages and pages to Gurdjieff’s concept of “octaves” {Thus one must study the Pythagorean connection with Abaris the Druid.}- the musical scale do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do taken as a sort of universal yardstick for determining the measurements and proportions of all of nature’s parts. (The theory of octaves had a tremendous impact on pianist Keith Jarrett, who read about them in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s longest, most allegorical, and most difficult book.) Some Gurdjieff students and groups gloss over the octaves or dispense with them entirely. My own feeling is that the theory of octaves has a lot in common with medieval Western musical theorists’ preoccupation with theo-numerological speculation based on interval integer ratios and their symbolic significance. In point of fact, Gurdjieff had studied the medieval alchemists and on occasion was prone to speak of the human organism as a sort of alchemical factory for the transformation of various material and psychic substances.
It seems that where there is music, and where there are people who philosophize about it, there will be some form of numerology and arcane quasi-mathematics. Since both musical pitch and musical rhythm are readily represented in numerical forms, the urge to find primal mathematical significance in music is almost impossible to resist. A contemporary example of this perennially seductive train of thought is Peter Michael Hamel’s book Through Music to the Self.
Another symbolic thought-form Gurdjieff worked with was the enneagram, a circle with nine points around its circumference. Said Gurdjieff, ‘The enneagram is a universal symbol. All knowledge can be included in the enneagram and with the help of the enneagram it can be interpreted … A man may be quite alone in the desert and he can trace the enneagram in the sand and in it read the eternal laws of the universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before.’ {The fabulously successful book The Celestine Prophecy uses the knowledge of the Enneagram and takes people to the point of Enlightenment which can include dematerialization.}
Through the elaboration of the law of octaves and the meaning of the enneagram, Gurdjieff offered his students alternative means of conceptualizing the world and their place in it. When I say “alternative,” I am suggesting that Gurdjieff sought alternatives to rational, linear, language-oriented exposition and rhetoric (though he was by all accounts also a spellbinding speaker). In other words, Gurdjieff’s ideas could be only partially expounded in ordinary words and sentences; to go beyond language he drew on music (he played several instruments and Bennett tells of him improvising unearthly melodies on a small organ late at night), dance, and visual symbols such as the enneagram.
Furthermore, it is my impression that Gurdjieff was happy to talk theoretically with students who were theoretically inclined, but that the theory itself is not an indispensable part of his overall teaching. Or, to put it slightly differently, Gurdjieff used, for instance, the complicated machinery of the law of octaves in order to teach his students to think. And in some respects the process of thinking was more important than the theoretical content of what was thought.
Conditions. Gurdjieff laid emphasis on the idea that the seeker must conduct his or her own search – and that the teacher cannot do the student’s work for the student, but is more of a guide on the path to self-discovery. As a teacher, Gurdjieff specialized in creating conditions for students – conditions in which growth was possible, in which efficient progress could be made by the willing. To find oneself in a set of conditions a gifted teacher has arranged has another benefit. As Gurdjieff put it, ‘You must realize that each man has a definite repertoire of roles which he plays in ordinary circumstances … but put him into even only slightly different circumstances and he is unable to find a suitable role and for a short time he becomes himself.’
In 1918 the turmoil of the Russian revolution forced Gurdjieff and a small group of devoted followers out of Moscow to Essentuki in the Caucasus. For the next four years the core group moved from place to place, from Tiflis in Georgia to Constantinople to Germany. In 1922 Gurdjieff finally managed to establish a more or less stable base of operations, which he dubbed the “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man,” at the Chteau de Prieuré in Fontainbleau, near Paris. The Institute’s varied activities attracted many new people to Gurdjieff’s ideas, and in 1924 he went on a short visit to America where he stirred up much interest and started a group in New York. He returned to France. At this moment of the beginnings of success on a larger scale, Gurdjieff was nearly killed in an automobile accident. During his long recuperation his teaching activities came to an almost complete halt, but from this time to 1935 he did manage to write his three primary works, Beelzebub’s Tales, Meetings with Remarkable Men, and Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am.”
If Beelzebub’s Tales is an elaborate modern mythological tapestry and Meetings is a spiritual travelogue, then Life Is Real Only Then is a portrait of the creative process in fluid motion. Gurdjieff’s most self-revealing book, it takes the reader into Gurdjieff’s own associative thought-processes, for instance in those passages where he writes about writing itself, the trains of thought that led him, when still a young man, to renounce all use of his exceptional psychic powers, the somewhat brutal methods he used to whip his New York followers into shape, and his superhuman, insomniacal efforts to keep his Institute functioning and together on a sound financial footing in the Fontainbleau days. Life Is Real was never finished – it ends poignantly with a colon.
In the 1930s and 1940s Gurdjieff worked with small groups in Paris, where he lived, and New York. Gurdjieff himself was ultimately an enigma to Westerners, even to those who knew him best. It is doubtful that we will ever know the “person” behind the tremendous force of personality he exerted upon all who worked with him. In times of the greatest personal crisis, he would withdraw into the circle of his family. He placed extreme demands on his students, but seemed to demand infinitely more of himself. Teacher or prophet, rogue or saint, wily man or gracious servant of God, Gurdjieff today is gone, and among some of his followers there lingers an eschatological atmosphere, a memory-afterglow of a not-so-distant time past when the infinite was concretely embodied in time.” (1)
“KL: Yes, he was in Paris from the early 20’s. When he began his work in Moscow (and in St. Petersburg very shortly), things were going rather well, and then they had a little thing called the Russian revolution. It was necessary for Gurdjieff and many of his pupils to leave Russia in a hurry. Many of them were from a stratum of society that was rather too closely associated with the Czar, and it in any case conditions had become very bad, very difficult, for anyone in Russia at that time. So Gurdjieff escaped with a small group of followers and established the center of his activities next in Constantinople, following which there was a brief period in Berlin, and finally he settled just outside of Paris, at the Chateau de Prieure at Fontainebleau, and he worked with pupils there very intensively for the next few years. That period was cut short by an automobile accident which was very severe; it nearly killed him. Later on, he worked in Paris itself, with, at any given time, a fairly small circle of pupils.
Q.: Who was funding him?
KL: That’s a very interesting question. There were certainly people interested in his work who provided funds.” (2)
There is good reason to believe that people who worked in Mind Control associated with Tavistock, Yale and Baruch would have funneled money and clients to Gurdjieff.
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