Whereas my formal education in psychology at college had left me confused and empty and provided no real understanding of myself, Gurdjieff’s presentation had just the opposite effect. When I came in touch with the Gurdjieff Work, it felt as if I had walked by a gigantic magnet and every part of me — my thoughts, emotions and my body — was magnetized and pulled towards it. I felt for the first time that I was being fed real ideas, concepts, practices, and everything was experiential and not just intellectual. I started to understand myself and what I was experiencing.
Everything that I had learned in college felt purely subjective and liable to change at any moment. The Work was different. It illuminated and made understandable many experiences that I already had, and I sensed that this knowledge and understanding came from a very high level — beyond Gurdjieff as an individual man — from a center of knowledge and understanding that existed outside of any particular time or culture. My reaction to what Gurdjieff presented created in me the need to know more and a craving for personal transformation.
Gurdjieff was a contemporary of Freud and Jung, but is rarely, if ever, mentioned in histories of psychology. He was born in approximately 1877 in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire. A great many biographers have written about his childhood, his search, and his teachings.
By the time he was in his early twenties, Gurdjieff had decided to devote his life to answering the questions of the purpose of life on the earth and the aim of human existence, and the nearly unbridgeable gaps between the vastness of human potential and humanity’s limited development thus far. How was it that people’s great potential had failed to materialize? How did it happen that, time after time, people repeatedly engaged in destroying each other’s existence? War, throughout history, results in the wholesale decimation of all the advances of a particular civilization.
He could not find the answers from intellectual authorities, in the Church, or in books; and thus, he was driven to his own practical research. His search took him to centers of esoteric learning in the Near and Far East. He found schools where the psychological history of the human species had been preserved, along with practices that could restore human beings to their essential humanity. What he learned seemed so crucial that he was compelled to bring these teachings to the West. In the early twentieth century, he began by establishing groups in Russia to disseminate what he had found. Today, his work has spread around the world.
Gurdjieff found answers to his questions about the human predicament. His answers were inner psychological answers, not external ones (economic, social, or biological). He found it was the inner psychological state of people, their state of consciousness, that determines the way people interact with one another and develop cultural behavior, including the periodic need to engage in war. He determined that people’s inner psychological state had become distorted, and in turn, their culture then perpetuated its own distortions, resulting in a unique dilemma. Humans had developed an ambiguous state of consciousness that was neither fully awake nor completely asleep, and they lived in this waking-sleeping state, believing they were fully awake. Gurdjieff created conditions to help people experience and understand the reasons for their “abnormal” state of consciousness and its terrible consequences. He developed methods to enable them to verify their inadequate state of consciousness and to improve it. His system is called the Work.
Gurdjieff ’s Work was made difficult by two facts. First, from the time he began teaching, the world was in turmoil. It began with the Russian Revolution, spanned two World Wars, and the birth of the nuclear age in Hiroshima. Second, the very people he would depend on to disseminate his ideas and methods were themselves not fully awake but were also in the state of waking-sleep.
His attempts to communicate also included the role of creative artist. In Russia, he worked on a ballet which, though never completed, was the possible stimulus for his later compositions in music and dance. He collaborated with Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann on hundreds of pieces for piano used for the unique form of “sacred gymnastics,” now known as the Movements. He let it be known that he would like to be called a “teacher of dancing.” He was also an author. His first book appeared in 1933, but he was displeased with it and it was soon withdrawn.
During the 1920s and 30s Gurdjieff worked on his magnum opus, All and Everything, ten books in three series. The first series was a mythical account of the history and malaise of human life entitled Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. The second was a somewhat allegorical account of his friends and travels called Meetings with Remarkable Men. The third, a kind of “confession,” was Life is Real, then Only When “I Am.”
With the one exception of the book he withdrew, none of Gurdjieff’s writings were published during his lifetime. P.D. Ouspensky, a major pupil of Gurdjieff’s, published an account of the early groups in Russia under the title, In Search of the Miraculous (initially it had the much better title, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching) in 1949. Gurdjieff confirmed that this was an accurate account. In 1950, the year after his death, Gurdjieff’s first series, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson was in print. The two books are in stark contrast. Ouspensky was a journalist and wrote clearly and engagingly. Gurdjieff did almost the opposite, writing a complex, mythological, comic and strenuous critique of the whole of the modern world spanning thousands of years.
Gurdjieff continually experimented with the transmission and application of his transformative practices. This constant evolution can be seen in the accounts of his early work and lectures, then his work at his institute at the Château le Prieuré at Fontainebleau-Avon, and finally in his later group work. His writings also show constant evolution. I surmise that the reasons for his changes in exposition and application were that he was searching to find and refine the most effective means to transmit the teachings he had assembled so that his followers could make correct use of them.
Gurdjieff had noticed that his teachings were often too narrowly interpreted. Different groups, sometimes in different countries, fixated on a particular aspect of the Work to the exclusion of other important parts. For example, a group might fixate on self-observation and make that aspect of Work the centerpiece of their efforts. This is a common fault we all share when we find one method useful and then repeat it while dismissing other methods that might be equally important and effective. This is especially significant if the aim of Gurdjieff’s legacy is the harmonious development of men and women.