Within the Gurdjieff Work’s secondary literature an important and revealing concept found in the Oragean Version, page 24, are the so-called “Categories of General Knowledge”.

Gurdjieff’s vast proliferation of formulations, imagery, and diagrams left ideas and concepts scattered amongst his pupils.  These should not be taken too literally or without healthy skepticism, but certainly should be taken into account as reflections of Gurdjieff’s own development of understanding.  The diagram pictured [Figure 1], which C Daly King received from Orage, shows Gurdjieff’s approach to knowledge. Understanding these categories greatly clarifies much of the apparently absurd musical, dance, and literary forms he left.  Here, we pay attention particularly to Gurdjieff’s writings.

The diagram reveals a threefold division of knowledge: science, moonshine, and knowledge.  Science here is a generalized notion of science in a purely objective or materialistic sense.  Moonshine refers to myths and superstitions, occult systems or “sciences”, and other spiritual and new age nonsense.  This includes the exoteric aspect of all the major religions as well, which are equally preposterous.  Gurdjieff, speaking about the science and alternative spirituality of his day, lambasts them as false or partials form of knowledge.  The third category he simply called “Knowledge”, inferring its reality over and above the others.  Even this category, however, Gurdjieff conferred a kind of elasticity to,  because the kind of truths Gurdjieff conveyed in his dances and books, rather than being a literal kind of objective knowledge, represented an intimate and immediate contact with reality; a special kind of directness of attention difficult to fathom.  Gurdjieff is at pains in Beelzebub’s Tales to point out that direct subjective experience is much more meaningful and important doorway into reality than knowledge systems, which, like everything else, change and evolve in time.  This is not of course to say that knowledge systems are not important.  Gurdjieff accorded one half of understanding to knowledge.  Being without knowledge led to a “stupid saint”.  What constitutes subjective or objective knowledge according to Gurdjieff is a massively important topic spoken about in the Tales, and should probably be explored in a different article.

What the above diagram helps to explain is an apparent paradox that Ouspensky himself noticed very soon after meeting Gurdjieff.  Going with G to his apartment in Moscow, Ouspensky was introduced to Gurdjieff’s pupils and one of them read a paper in which a meeting with G himself was described.  Here is Ouspensky’s account of his impression of these pupils:

When I asked what was the system they were studying and what were its distinguishing features, I was answered very indefinitely. Then they spoke of “work on oneself,” but in what this work consisted they failed to explain. On the whole my conversation with G.’s pupils did not go very well and I felt something calculated and artificial in them as though they were playing a part learned beforehand. Besides, the pupils did not match with the teacher. They all belonged to that particular layer of Moscow rather poor “intelligentsia” which I knew very well and from which I could not expect anything interesting. I even thought that it was very strange to meet them on the way to the miraculous. At the same time they all seemed to me quite nice and decent people. The stories I had heard from M. obviously did not come from them and did not refer to them. (ISOTM p 10-11)

The contradiction Ouspensky noticed but  failed to understand completely was Gurdjieff’s odd choice of pupil.  Ouspensky, as a well known intellectual, was well acquainted with serious thinkers of his day, absorbed in conventional forms of knowledge, and even though he sensed something important in Gurdjieff himself which related to knowledge, it was strange to find rather unimpressive pupils surrounding him.

So why did Gurdjieff choose to surround himself with such pupils? And, looking back from our current 21st century perspective, why did he couch his teaching, more related as it was to the direct and immediate realization of Zen Buddhism, rooted in direct experience, within absurd forms similar to theosophy and occultism?

To understand this we need to know a little more about the diagram itself.  After that, we can explore its implications for how he “vetted” his pupils.  With this in mind, we can look at Gurdjieff’s own experience and development to further contextualize his approach to teaching.

So a little more description about this diagram in The Oragean Version.  Referring to the different categories of knowledge, Gurdjieff describes how each views itself in relation to the others and then goes on to explain, according to his teaching’s viewpoint, what the actual relation of these categories is to genuine knowledge of reality:

Within this general situation [the field of knowledge with its categories] C knows only C and believes A to be inherent in C; B knows both B and C and mistakes B for A; A knows A, B and C.  Within any general population only a few of its members are within the field of A, by chance….

What comes as a surprise to many persons is the subordinate position accorded to Science in this order of the degrees of knowledge, for it is placed below the status of even credulous cults.  A word of explanation is obviously required.  From the viewpoint of this Version scientific work is a perfectly respectable activity and the general personality balance of most scientists is plainly of a higher order than that of religious fanatics.  The question here, however, is not one of general respectability; it is the question of potential access to a full, genuine and correct knowledge of reality as the latter actually exists. In this matter the religionist, despite all his lopsidedness, possesses a distinct advantage over the scientist, for the former is not antagonistic to the unusual, the bizarre or the wonderful, while the cut-and-dried attitude of the latter is a continual hindrance to him just so soon as he makes contact with any phenomenon not readily to be assimilated into the currently orthodox view.  Although at first it may seem like a paradox, to be sincerely in search of wonders and receptive to their possible recognition is an approach to the profounder aspects of reality more likely to be successful than is the cautious timidity of the scientist, forever fearful of unorthodoxy.  (The Oragean Version, p 24)

In short, Gurdjieff found credulous spiritual seekers to be more receptive, despite being in other ways less connected to reality.  The caveat is that they were more suggestible.

One of the primary aims of the literal surface of Beelzebub’s Tales is to induce discernment in the reader.  A story initially appears as a description of a secret pill, a far away brotherhood, an ancient king, a higher being body.  These images will stand out to the credulous and are meant to pull the attention of the reader.  At first, the naive occultist will hit upon those images they would like to be true and confirm their dreams of amazing possibilities and miraculous realities.  Having arrested the attention in this way, certain also apparent but less obvious suggestions are embedded in the surrounding text.  These take the form of quotation marks, “what are called’s…”, and other conventional devices (see the article Conventional Devices in Beelzebub’s Tales).  These embedded suggestions give rise to a different direction of thought opposite to the first.  In general, these new directions imply a non-literal dimension, pertaining, for instance, to psychological knowledge, particularly of the action of mental and emotional associations.   The stimulation of these associations in an unusual sequence or combination creates discriminative contrast in the reader’s internal experience, the holding of opposing views and feelings.

In short, Gurdjieff’s stories pull a sort of psychological Aikido on the naive reader, using the momentum of their own fantastic associations to produce an action which is then contradicted.  Proffering the same sorts of dreams and imagery existing in New Age circles, the Tales at the same time causes the literal interpretation of the metaphors to wilt and dissolve before the readers eyes as they witness indications to the contrary.  This of course depends on the intellectual honesty of the reader.  Readers can (and many do for years) listen politely as Beelzebub spews nonsense for 1200 pages.

Referring again to the diagram, we can see that no such process can take place for a materialistic scientist.  The materialistic scientist would, apparently rightly, reject anything like The Tales.  The scientific worldview prefers to consider objective, physical processes, and until fairly recently had no room for the subjective experience of Awakening.  This is beginning to change in in the early 21st century as decades of Zen, Vedanta, Vajrayana, and other eastern methods for Awakening reach maturity in Western culture, aided by hundreds of books articulating that process in a Western psychologized form.  However, in speaking about Gurdjieff and the context in which he was teaching, we are referring to a time prior to the influx of eastern teachers into the West beginning in the late 50’s and early 60’s.  Consequently, the Science of our diagram is referring to a vastly different Science than we refer to today.

The point is that because Awakening and the notion of direct realization does not enter into the mental and emotional imagery and understanding of members of category C, the worldview of the early 20th century scientist Gurdjieff refers to contained a symbolism less hypnotically expedient compared to the occultist.

Returning to Ouspensky’s conundrum, we see one reason why Gurdjieff surrounded himself with apparently dull students.  They were not the cream of the crop by societies standards at the time, but at least they were open to new ideas and points of view.

However, Gurdjieff’s diagram doesn’t just describe early 20th century society, but it also describes his own growth.  He was recorded speaking about how Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine led to his desire to visit the East in search of occult knowledge (see the early portion of the chapter in Beelzebub’s Tales “Beelzebub visits India for the first time”).  He himself was led by “moonshine” to seek “real knowledge”.  What he found in practice was, of course, quite different from his initial assumptions.  He found an authentic lineage transmitting Realization. At the same time, his path towards reaching a group transmitting Awakening came about only because of his naivety.  He found understanding through misunderstanding.  Gurdjieff was recorded saying that nothing of what he found in the East corresponded to what Blavatsky had said; and yet, he found something of great value.

We can say that his reflection on his own process of understanding is reflected in the Diagram about different forms of knowledge.  He understood that to galvanize effort required an activation of a persons imagination despite the fact that the end result may not correspond to one’s preconceptions.

This is actually quite normal and practical and ordinary examples can be found of this. For instance, what medical student, having signed up for several hundred thousand dollars of school debt, knows through personal experience what is will be like to be a practicing doctor?  Not a single one.  And yet, the imagined expectation of being a doctor is exactly the pivotal ingredient that propels someone into medical school.  There is really no case in which humans make significant long term choices, whether it be career, marriage, or any other major life decision, in which they can possibly represent to themselves mentally, emotionally, or by sensation what they will see, understand, feel, and sense ten years after that decision was made. Any thorough comparison of a past expectation with a currently experienced reality can only confirm the complete ignorance with which we human beings make the most pivotal decisions of their lives.

In Gurdjieff’s case, he understood the need to engage his students where they were at, while still leaving all the raw material necessary to generate the next level of understanding.

This is truly the domain of the teacher.  Anyone can learn any skill, but it requires a particular metacognitive capacity to reflect on one’s own learning process enough to be able to become a guide to another along any particular path of growth or discovery.

The diagram describing the three kinds of knowledge reflects Gurdjieff’s own path of development, and, by extension, all human learning through experience.  It shows his understanding that although in the beginning he may have been naive and perhaps even more misguided in some ways than the educated scientist, nonetheless that naivety left him open to radically different cultures like those of the East.  And it was precisely in the traditions of the East that he found the highest knowledge available, the direct knowledge of the Real.  It was his process of personal discovery and his reflection on what its implications were for others that allowed him to be a pivotal guide for so many people he met.