Johanna Petsche rightly points out the Exotic elements within Gurdjieff’s music in her book Gurdjieff and Music.  Exoticism uses musical dynamics to create an atmosphere or impression of distant lands.  In Gurdjieff’s case, this was the use of middle eastern and perhaps far eastern musical elements.  This goes beyond his works of music into his dances and writings.  For instance, many of his movements use dervish rhythms and scales.  When his group performed movements publicly, they worked furiously to produce elaborate costumes as part of the setting.  As a result, stunned european audiences and a wave of newspaper articles followed in the wake of the few shows Gurdjieff orchestrated with his pupils.  This has been well documented in Gert-Jan Blom’s Oriental Suite.

The charm and allure of Gurdjieff’s teaching and the practices he left rely on a certain mystique created by precisely the exotic flair Johanna Petsche noticed.  This is due in part to the beauty of eastern and middle eastern cultural products. Gurdjieff himself, despite a thorough fluency in western intellectualism, spirituality, and Judeau-Christian religion, reveals a core affinity with traditional eastern mystical understandings.  Much of his teaching career and life became a mission to bring a message to the developed western world that the East purportedly retained.  As such, he become one of the first eastern non-dual teachers to bring an authentic transmission to the West, only to die around 1950, just before scores of Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Middle Eastern, and Indian gurus would begin to migrate to Europe and the Americas.

Of concern for understanding his works today, however, is the real authenticity of his “Orientalism”.   A close study of his works shows a careful and studied imitation of eastern exotic elements rather than an authentic external reproduction.  At the very least, little of what Gurdjieff created can be found in any complete form in Eastern countries.  For instance, none of his so called “Tibetan” movements look anything like Tibetan dances, something Europeans at the time could not have known.  No other sufi group that Im aware of has developed dances anywhere near as complicated or imbued with metaphysical symbolism as his movements.  A stylistic similarity in the overall shape of some of the postures in his dances has been noticed and correlated with the postures of figures in Egyptian heiroglyphics, but this is far from definitive and proves nothing.  In other words, there is little if any evidence to date that he actually received dances in Central Asia that looked anything like his Movements.  Rather it appears they are creations of his own.

This is not really any surprise because we find in his writings no attempt to portray this image in any seriousness.  His autobiography Meeting with Remarkable Men can hardly be taken literally.   He brags about the secret brotherhood to which he had been initiated.  At the most, Gurdjieff probably did visit the localities he speaks of. The lack of  evidence coupled with the intentional outlandishness of many of his descriptions, are meant to give the reader an opportunity to reject the surface level literal interpretation.  In the process, the reader exercises basic mental restraint and sanity, instead seeing his descriptions as a metaphor for a deeper and more profound truth regarding an inner initiation.

In his series All and Everything, Meetings comes after Beelzebub’s Tales, and Gurdjieff recommends to read them in order.  Therefore, he would have assumed the reader, before moving to his autobiography, would have read his massive sci-fi space epic.  If the reader had, they would have encountered dozens of ridiculous stories about far off brotherhoods (such as the brotherhood for making butter from air), in which Gurdjieff implicitly ridiculed the European conception of Eastern spiritual groups.

So why the sarcasm?  Why didnt he just openly state that the predominate theosophical ideas about far-off brotherhoods with which telepathic communication could supposedly be established were naive and childish fantasies?  The answer to this question contains one of the key elements of Gurdjieff’s teaching style, and gives a hint to what Gurdjieff referred to with his claims about Objective Art.

In Gurdjieff’s approach, rather than attacking the beliefs and views of his students directly, he would set up caricatured versions of those beliefs for his students.  Carefully constructed to not bat the eye, the intention was to nudge the student to tear down these ideas themselves. In doing so, they would have taken a hand in the dismantling their own worldview, rather than simply substituting another.  Any belief system not personally dismantled becomes a hindrance, and Gurdjieff did not look to substitute any of the old belief systems of his pupils with new ones.  In other words, he wanted them to see the ridiculousness of their ideas on their own.  At the same time, he could see they needed some form of outside help, and constructed his writings to serve this purpose.  Certainly there is ample proof Gurdjieff was charismatic and powerful enough of a personality to convince the rather naieve intelligentisa of early 20th century Europe who came under his tutelage of almost anything.  Fortunately for them, he used his persuasive capacity to help.

Gurdjieff brought a teaching with a set of practices completely of his own devising, while at the same time borrowing unabashedly from numerous and wildly eclectic sources, that conveyed, truly, a nondual understanding he had gained in his travels and experiences.  Having grown up exposed to both european and eastern cultures, he was in a perfect position to understand how to bring eastern understandings to the west.  In europe he found orientalism and romanticized notions about the east, which served as very real barriers for embodying the truths certain eastern traditions had long before put into practice.  In order to overcome this “rubbish” (Gurdjieff’s own words), he created works of art in which it was caricatured, while still burying true ideas within the facade of the metaphor for the student to find and understand.

To give an example of exoticism within Gurdjieff’s works.  Many of his movements are only superficially inspired by actual sufi dances.  For instance, wim van dulleman points out an eastern ritual march in which a hand beating the chest was taken by gurdjieff and inserted into his movement Shadze Vadze.  This is the only element taken from the march, and the rest of the movement is either of Gurdjieff own making or, one could speculate, taken from other dances elsewhere.  Of course, there are no other dances with the odd “pat your head, rub your belly” character that Gurdjieff’s movement contain, so this seems unlikely.  Gurdjieff himself bragged to de hartmann at one point that some of his music for his movements was stolen from a guitar practice music book.  For a european student, and for students of the Gurdjieff Movements even today, participating in the movements is a beautiful experience.  Even a skeptical person, with no allegience to the literalness of gurdjieff’s claim about the origins of his exercises, experiencing his works physically and emotionally, will experience exquisite states of attention, with a precision and clarity their everyday activities rarely produce.  For myself, a carpenter by trade, the closest thing to it were the moments of incredible flow produced by certain repetitive and fast paced labor functions, such as framing buildings, in which one works with a group at a furious pace that allows no distraction from the activity.

Surely the base of Gurdjieff’s movements and music are based in middle eastern and eastern culture.  The rhythms of the movements use dervish rythms, there are foot patterns that can be found in ritualistic sufi dances, and the music, played on the western piano, uses some eastern scales and melodic elements.  However, the music and movements contain so much material that can be found nowhere in sufi, tibetan, indian, or other dances, that to claim they were taken in a whole farm is utterly ridiculous.  Rather, Gurdjieff used these elements to convey a sense of mystery, and play on the orientalism of Europeans at the time.

And what about Beelzebubs Tales?  Are there examples of Exocitism in Beelzebub’s Tales?

The answer is yes.  Beelzebub’s Tales as a whole has absolutely no precedent anywhere in literature.  At the same time, in writing his magnum opus, Gurdjieff brazenly took ideas from anywhere he wished.  He hints at a similarity to the Thousand and One Nights through repeated references to it, a famous work that also uses a frame story structure to allow for an innumerable number of tales.  The narrator of Gurdjieff’s book is Beelzebub, a story-telling devil, can be seen as the story weaving ego of the asleep reader, and the effort to overcome his riddles about space, time, and cause and effect expresses the capacity for the reader to overcome the automaticity of his or her own limiting views and opinions and transcend the lower mind.  In this way also, Beelzebub’s capricious verbal meanderings represent the fickle stream of consciousness which James Joyce and other contemporary writers of Gurdjieff tried to present in works like Ulysses.  Gurdjieff likens his book to a New Gospel more suitable to contemporary humanity, making it a sort of New Bible (chapter 12).  He is recorded as saying in conversation he wished to bring man a new conception of God.  Further, he makes repeated reference to the Decameron (also a frame story), bringing out more of his intention in writing Beelzebub’s Tales.

These are just several of the obvious influences on Gurdjieff’s main book. But we were speaking about Exoticism.  I brought up some of these connections because it helps root his work firmly Western culture.  Even the Thousand and One nights was widely available in Europe at the time.  Showing that the main ideational content and form of his work is grounded in European precedents allows us to show how references to ancient middle eastern and eastern culture are tailored not to realities of eastern culture and living but 20th century Western orientalist perceptions of them.

One of the most prevelant motifs of the book is brotherhoods.  Already I spoke about the “Brotherhood of the “Originators of Making Butter from Air””, from Gurdjieff’s preface.  There is also the Brotherhood Olbogmek, a brotherhood of whom there is no evidence other than Gurdjieffs reference to it.  There is the brotherhood Tchaftantouri, meaning, “To be or not to be at all”, in which there is clearly a profound and a silly connotation at one and the same time.  He refers Benedictine, Essene, and dervish brotherhoods, which of course did in reality exist.  However, in his descriptions of them there is very little that can be taken seriously, and these metaphors act more as  recognizable elements to draw the readers attention, who must subsequently discern and master unrecognizable elements intentionally connected to them.

For instance, in speaking in the chapter America about an alchemical brotherhood which sought to eliminate the need to spend time on preparing and eating actual food, the reader is told this brotherhood created a certain pill which could do away with this time-consuming and bothersome ‘chore’ (my quotations ).  Here there is no reason to think Gurdjieff is refering to any actual alchemical brotherhood.  The story begins describing the brotherhood in a way that grabs the readers attention, referring to their “conscious investigations”, and subtly painting a rather positive view of this group; at least, positive from the point of view of a 20th century occultist who would believe in such things.  The story ends with the fact that the pill created by this brotherhood is quite harmful for them.  This story shows how Gurdjieff would arouse some association in his reader (secret brotherhoods discovering incredible methods; in this instance, for avoiding eating altogether!) and then contradict that notion with an opposite and practical idea. Gurdjieff himself emphasized the importance and sacredness of daily food consumption to his pupils.  One of them, reading his book, would have understood that such a pill would have been entirely not in keeping with his advice.  Therefore, the story, by evoking one fantastic idea his readership would have bought, would end with actually a practical idea that would do away with such nonsense, or at least indicate an opposite idea the reader could hold up alongside the first.

In all of Gurdjieff’s stories about brotherhoods one finds the same thing.  The arousal of a silly idea many occultists and theosophists would truly buy into, and the intentional production of another idea that, with the readers active involvement, might overcome such silliness.  After all, Gurdjieff himself had traveled and had seen, with his own eyes, many eastern countries which Europeans were only dreaming about.  In one sense, their dreams were true, and Gurdjieff had discovered lineages of genuine awakening and embodiment practices. However, the European psyche had been so sullied with absurd stories about enlightened, omniscient masters they could not grasp the first practical steps Gurdjieff brought, preferring to live in their imaginations rather than beginning from where they were.

This brings up an important point for the Gurdjieff Work today.  By Gurdjieff Work, I refer to groups (“brotherhoods”) that purport to carry on and transmit Gurdjieff’s teaching. Many of these groups show a peculiar duality with regard to the works Gurdjieff left behind.  This shows up quite strongly in the third generation of pupil’s ideas about Beelzebub’s Tales.  On the one hand, their is an emphasis on “practicality”, “a work in life”, and “starting from where one is”.  This is constantly referred to in discussions, particularly if any philosophical, theoretical, or intellectual considerations arise.  However, when it comes to Gurdjieff’s book, much of what he said is either taken wholesale, or the obvious portions are paid attention to at the expense of the ambiguous.

For instance, if reading Gurdjieff’s descriptions of the Buddha and his teaching in the chapter “Beelzebub’s First Time in India”, discussion will general stay at the level of believing Gurdjieff is actually speaking about Buddhism.  This is absolutely tragic and does not speak well for the Work’s ability to help make its students less suggestible.  If one were to study actual evidence of what is suggested about the Buddha, the subsequent history of his lineages, what he actually said and taught, one would of course find that nothing Gurdjieff says has any semblance of reality (nor did he intend it to).  At most one could suppose Gurdjieff did feel the Buddha’s teaching lost authenticity after three generations.  However, I yet to read any books about Beelzebub’s Tales or participate in any discussions that examined the words supposedly attributed to the Buddha. When you isolate the portions in quotes (supposedly direct words of the Buddha), it is entirely a description of Gurdjieff’s own mythology of the Earth’s genesis and the history of the development of conscioussness in human beings.  In other words, it is Gurdjieff-speak.  If one were to compare this to passages from the Pali Canon (earliest known records of the Buddha’s words, preserved in repetitious chanting for nearly 300 years before being recorded in writing), one would notice nothing similar.  There is no description of the four nobles truths, the three poisons, the three jewels, the skhandas, the seven factors of enlightenment, the practice of the four abhodes, and on and on.  Not even the remotest similarity. If one were to examine this obvious fact it would be clear the buddha is nothing more than a thinly disguised mouthpiece of Gurdjieffs.

If one realizes this fact, and then participates in a gurdjieff group reading Beelzebub’s Tales, and one reading the chapter on India, one is struck by the utter lack of reality testing.  The conversation rarely penetrates the most surface level of the book.  And all of this from a culture emphasizing “groundedness”, “real life”, “practicality”, etc.  Is not something missing?  After all, Gurdjieff describes the property “most terrible for them personally” as suggestibility.  Fortunately, or unfortunately for Gurdjieffian traditionalists, the cultural stream of transmission through organizations and group work is high-lighted in all its ugliness by Gurdjieff’s very own writings, which serve as a kind of observatory for this kind of intellectual shallowness and lack of discrimination.  Is it not strange, that a book most beginners immediately recognize as requiring an effort (which is consistent with gurdjieff’s personal descriptions), is now approahced by most gurdjieffians as exerting an unconscious influence on their psyche, their participation only requiring becoming mentally passive?

What is so sad, is that the general culture of the Western world since Gurdijeff’s death, in its exposure to eastern culture and understanding, and in the integration of western science and eastern practices (think of brain studies on meditative practicitioners), has far outdistanced the understanding produced in the second two generations who form the membership of the Gurdjieff work.  What began as a kind of brotherhood in a true sense, based in an understanding outside views and opinions, thoroughly skeptical but rooted in purificatory embodiment practices, desperately seeking fertile soil in a war torn European landscape of un-integrated religious and scientific impulses, a brotherhood and teaching that had the potential to do what 50 years of East-West integration later accomplished, ended in a false tradition of hero worship and false psychological self-flagellation.

So we come back to Exoticism.  The Exoticism of Gurjdieff’s works was designed for early 20th century Europeans, and blended such far reaching impulses as the Bible, scientific skepticism, social psychology and engineering, and mystical meditative practices.  Gurdjieff himself constantly renewed his practices through complete obliteration and reformation, never repeating the same forms throughout his life.  He recognized the short life span of intellectual and artistic products and their quick descent into dogma and repetition.  The question is, tailored, as it apparently was, to the psyche of european intelligentsia back in the 1920’s, can Beelzebub’s Tales still be useful?  In my view, it can, and it is the responsibility of those studying Gurdjieff’s works to understand the psychological truths it demonstrates, and intentionally think through the book for themselves rather than idly wondering at it or shirking their intellectual duties.  After all, Gurdjieff created a three-centered teaching, and the avoidance of mind training, emphasized by many eastern teachings, is a prerequisite for not being taken by “any old story”.  Grounded skepticism (not the same as cynicism) and critical thinking forms the beginnings for mature spiritual practice, which goes far beyond mere intellectualism, as so many Wisdom traditions have pointed out.  How tiring does mere arguing about facts become in the face of life’s deeper mysteries and the mystery of our connection with others?  This is the level of Beelzebub’s Tales I wish to share with a real community of brothers and sisters, and not the ‘actors’ one usually finds crowded into groups, supposedly studying G’s teaching, and having almost no grasp of the most salient features of his writings, let alone the mystical and transcendant.