In his magnum opus, All & Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Gurdjieff, from the beginning, makes it very clear that there are two paths that diverge almost immediately in the Work. Put in the mouth of his dying grandmother, the first path is “In life, never do what others do. and the second, “…do nothing, just go to school.” . As a ‘chubby mite’, Gurdjieff then proceeded to behave strangely and, one might conjecture, continued through the rest of his life. Did Gurdjieff actually make a split here, and one that we, too, should follow? I am saying yes.
In his metaphor, Gurdjieff defines ‘do something nobody else does as acquiring ‘real I’—something no one else has—unique to you. As one learns to apply ‘part of his manifestations according to the providence of great Nature’. Gurdjieff says, in order to this to happen, there needs to be ‘a special corresponding correct education is indispensably necessary for each of these three parts.” . I posit this education consists of the first three Obligolnian Strivings, of the body, the emotional center, where Being resides, and the intellectual center. Gurdjieff calls this ‘real I’ one of the ‘personalities’ and also the result of his ‘preparatory formation.
Gurdjieff obviously foresaw his system as a force to ‘make a new world’ and that an almost oppositional choice was needed to begin. I have written frequently about the decidedly pivotal nature of the Obligolnian Strivings. The first three, including the one about ‘studying’ or ‘school’ have a radical change in the fourth, to ‘”in order AFTERWARDS to be free to lighten as much as possible, the Sorrow of our Common Father” . Again, Gurdjieff establishes a pattern in the ‘philology,’ to use a word or phrase as an indicator, to ‘bury the dog’, so to speak in what appears to be either simple narrative or neologistic pyrotechnics. Afterwards is where one changes from ‘student’ into the one who can ‘do.’
It may be revealing to note, that Gurdjieff bookends his treatise with another example of bifurcation in ‘From the Author.’ He speaks of the two rivers and the droplets from one and the other. And states “A Man who has in his common presence his own ‘I” enters of the stream of the river of life and the man who has not, enters the other.
The techniques of this Work, the sittings, the reading, the exercises, the Movements, are all about this “special corresponding correct education” and are, obviously, as part of the training in the Work, ‘just going to school.” However, Gurdjieff clearly states that there is a point to all this, that (wo)Man without quotation marks has a purpose to serve. How does one go about graduating into the Fourth and then, consequently, the Fifth Obligolninan Striving? A sacrifice of self-interest is needed, even a calling to Conscience or awareness of death, and that ‘calling can be induced with rigorous practices, seeking to open the individual to impressions on another plane. Luckily, I have had a few opportunities to do so.
The first felicitous happening is that I was exposed to real mentors. I was raised in this Work by those who had sat at Gurdjieff’s table and taken away whatever they could digest and were equally inspired to bring it to others. I hesitate to call them ‘teachers’ as that appellation has taken on a nonsensical romantic connotation that any one of us need or egotistically deserve ‘elevated’ individuals, whatever that means to each and all. Gurdjieff’s dictum that we are all ‘zeroes.’ We need to eschew such thinking, or a perception can take root in which there are ‘(T)eachers to be sought out (and paid for). While my individuals are now dead, the teaching itself is alive. Gurdjieff himself becomes the voice.
The second happy hint that came -quite unbidden- was that I was not and never would be a ‘candidate’ for enlightenment, whatever that is. In fact, I gave up even thinking it was a ‘thing’ or that it was obtainable by effort. I saw my own small existence for what it was, fleeting and unimportant, and told myself I would serve whatever and wherever this Work led me rather than think about what could be gained personally—and it improved my work immensely. To be ordinary: this is the sacrifice, to be a zero.
The third factor was the opportunity, no longer available, of being on a ten-month ‘course’. Although the study of techniques was intense, the most intense part was the containment. One committed oneself to stay and not leave but participation was voluntary. The days began at six a.m. and frequently went to ten or eleven at night. The intensity of living with others, combined with hard physical work, meditation, Movements, and lack of physical comfort and outside distraction created a pressure cooker for inner change.
The fourth factor, for seven years, was my indispensable group of like-minded people who wished, as did I, to work on what it we presumed to be the ‘afterwards’ in the Strivings, to test certain manifestations in real time, to work on projects that we saw as ‘natural in a perfect world’—and watch where we got caught in ego and how we could free ourselves thereof. Gurdjieff has much to say about the importance of ‘manifestation. Part of this practice was to remember our own death, that we all are ephemeral beings and that maybe, by contemplating our demise, as Gurdjieff suggests, and all upon whom our eyes alight, that we (and I) may be called to manifest, not by what I do but by how I do it, in every moment that we all are given on earth, to direct myself into the ‘becoming path’. Only by having doing in a manner nobody else does, can one find a manifestation that is yours.
To continuously pursue Gurdjieff’s grandmother’s first suggested path to just ‘go to school” is doing nothing. We all (as have I) have had the urge to “know ever more and more” and to act in concert with others, more reading, more Movements, another seminar and yet I should know, from Gurdjieff’s own words, that this is part of the schooling and not part of the afterwards. Not that such disappear but they take a back seat, must do so, because I have my death before me and to be a ‘particle’ of the drama of ‘making a new world,’ and being of a certain age, I cannot say that it has been as ‘quickly as possible.’
To reiterate the material in the first three strivings may produce temporary energy in myself but there are dangers which are present in all pursuits but it seems more likely in ‘Spiritual’ ones, when I still seek something for myself. Consider the “Kashireitleer.” The baubles of soi-disant spirituality are frequently advanced as a reason to pursue new ‘teachers’ or to feel one needs a (fill in the blank) Kesdjan body, enlightenment, or any other rewards for the self at all. However, here is the end of the Ashiatan World “Listen, and all of you be aware that we, the representatives of terrestrial beings assembled here who have, thanks to our great learning already attained independent individuality, have the happiness to be the first to behold with. Our own eyes the creation of a Messiah of Divine consciousness sent from Above to reveal World-truths to us.”
“Thereupon began the usual maleficent what is called ‘mutual inflation,’ which had already long been practice among the learned beings of new formation and chiefly on account of which no true knowledge which has chanced to reach them ever evolves there as it does everywhere else in the Universe, even merely from the passage of time itself; but on the contrary, even the knowledge once already attained there is destroyed, and its possessors always become shallower and shallower.
“And the rest of the learned beings then began shouting and pushing each other in order to get near Lentrohamsanin; and addressing him as their ‘long-awaited-Messiah’ they conveyed to him by their admiring glances what are called their “high-titillations.”
And so it goes. I have never reached the end of Gurdjieff’s system of Work, not felt that I am anything other than a zero. Again, I would return also, to the certainty that death is real and final and I would like my ‘particlehood’ to have good use in an evolving Cosmos.
“…I decided to carry out the said task at all costs, and to be worthy, if only by this explicit aid to our UNIQUE-BURDEN-BEARING-ENDLESSNESS, of becoming a particle, though an independent one, of everything existing in the Great Universe.”
As I write this piece, I have become concerned that it is short on ‘Hope’-an objective feeling and then looked at why I still feel hopeful after all these decades. Even with the bifurcation indicating a two-pronged path, a divergence, there is still a third force to be sought. That reconciling force, to be, lies in the word “Aspiration.”
In the beginning, coming to the Gurdjieff teaching as a youngster, I had aspiration. Aspiration is defined as seeking something higher for oneself and comes from two Latin source, ‘Spirare’ (to inhale) and Spiritus (spirit or life force)-It is what we breathe; live, to do in our time on earth. Many young people have aspirations to help the world, peace, environmental action, education equality and other external ideals. But Gurdjieff, when he speaks of Ideals, has another meaning. The Ideal in Gurdjieff’ lexicon, is an Aim for one self, to become ‘becoming.”
I wish to dedicate this piece of writing to Dr. Bruce Gage, a former group member, now deceased. Recently I attended a one-year memorial and the expressions of grief, still present, were stunning. Those whom he had overseen at work, psychiatry in a prison setting, still had not recovered from his death. As one after another spoke, they recounted his patience, kindness, attention, the gentleness of direction and his compassion for themselves and their incarcerated patients, sobbing as they spoke. His Work, inner and outer, will persist, and be perfected by others. Many others have found real ‘I’ and a setting in which to manifest, to bring a becoming presence into a suffering world. In the words of F. Thomas Keating, ‘some are destined to be mighty Cedars of Lebanon and some small weeds, under whose leaves a tiny sparrow might shelter from the rain.”