In Movements class we have been working with Multiplication Olbogmek and I had some initial thoughts on the structure of the Movement as it relates to Gurdjieff-theory.

In working with Movements many times the class begins with establishing the positions of the feet or legs first.  Sometimes the class works with the weight over the feet and the rhythm of the steps or knee bends before going on to the actual displacement around the room.  This creates a baseline for the Movements insofar as the tempo establishes an overall feel for the Movement as a whole.  Often Instructors have pointed out the need to maintain awareness of the sensation of weight or the continuity of an even tempo as the core of the Movement out of which the rest of the Movement grows.  I have had the sense at times that the incorporation of the additional movements of the Arms, Head, and Torso are a kind of “testing” or “strengthening” of that core stability of attention centered in the body.

With the Multiplication Olbogmek the function of the legs is simply to move the dancer through a displacement, guided by the pattern of the Multiplication. This is followed by the addition of a complete turn about on the third count.

The turn about on count three is what I am writing about.  It clearly acts as a kind of “distraction” from the main task of moving through the patterns of the Multiplication.  However, it is a necessary distraction: the dancer must incorporate the addition of the turn about without losing the main thread.  It is worthwhile to take a step back and consider how this relates to Gurdjieffian theory.

Gurdjieff spoke from the very beginning of his presentations to students of the inability of human beings to maintain focus on a task or aim without getting lost.  It is a common human experience to engage in a task and lose one’s train of thought, particularly if it is an inner task.  There is an experience of inner bombardment by sensations, feelings, and thoughts that derail the simple process of attention to one thing.  These other thoughts and feelings seem at the time to be necessary or, at the very least, extremely interesting.  In fact, it takes quite a bit of spiritual development to see that these thoughts are not necessary, and, looked at impartially, not interesting or relevant in most cases.

As we noted above, Gurdjieff’s artwork often establishes a primary pattern and then seeks to expose that pattern to various perturbations, making it difficult to continue.  This would appear to simulate the inner tendency to lose one’s train of thought or focus on a particular task due to a distraction.  In the case of the Movements, the “bombardment” of an additional object of attention, in this case a turn about, experientially feels like a bombardment in a way that a stray thought or feeling subjectively does not.  However, looked at more objectively, the “distraction” caused by the turnabout functions in precisely the same way.

One conclusion we can reach is that the ability to incorporate all of the aspects of a Movement without losing the most essential aspect or thread, helps communicate a lesson to the participant about how they may use their attention in ordinary situations.  In ordinary situations the demand, in a way, is not explicit.  We may bumble along, completely lost in thought while still externally performing whatever task we are engaged in or even fail to perform that task until something calls our attention to it.  The external environments we are all embedded contain various stimulations that, perforce, call us back to our tasks.

For instance, I may be cleaning my house and in the middle of sweeping the floor when I bump into a chair that is in the way.  Setting aside the broom what appears to me “temporarily” and leaving a pile of dust and dust bunnies behind, I pick up the chair to move it.  This process brings me in visual proximity of a stack of mail on the side table of my living room.  The sight of mail that may contain a check I was waiting to receive, or a bill I may have to pay, may cause enough of a stir so as to take my attention away from sweeping.  Because of the limited nature of our short term memory, I may, in the course of looking at several pieces of mail, each of which elicits some train of associations, “fill up” my short term memory bank and totally forget about the sweeping I had just been doing.  When sometime later  I turn around and walk right into a pile of dirt and dust bunnies, the external environment brings me back to my initial task and reminds me of several choice cuss words that suddenly seem quite relevant.

This may seem like an entirely innocuous situation, and it truly is.  In the context of our living rooms we can quite easily bumble through a series of tasks, and, provided we are always “cleaning” something, eventually have no more items to stumble into that need doing.

But there are principles that can be extracted from contemplating the nature of such simple daily occurrences which have profound implications for other more important situations.  What is the nature of our supposed central will or “self” in this example?  Who decided to stop sweeping?  Who decided to resume sweeping?  In a way, the environment determined the path of my attention, not some inner central planner or decision maker.  While it is true the environment can only call forth associations already present in me and that a different person may have completely different associational buttons to press, nonetheless there was nothing pre-meditated or intentional about the entire experience. I did not choose to have associations or feelings in response to the environment.

This is perhaps one of Gurdjieff’s central points: that careful attention and contemplation of basic human experience yields a significantly different understanding of reality and the self experiencing that reality than what some of our more popular religious and scientific traditions have told us.  Many basic linguistic structures we habitually use, societal narratives we commonly spin, and assumptions we make in portraying characters in Movies and Television, all subtly frame human beings as being basically self-responsible in a way that is directly refuted by common sense observation.  I won’t go into an analysis of these linguistic structures, social narratives, and character portrayal here, but any observant person waking up to their own experience eventually finds themselves in a world alarmingly out of touch with reality.  If we express very little self control cleaning our own living spaces, how much more control do we display in our political, cultural, or ratiocinative processes?  In emotional conversations with friends, spouses, and loved ones?  Doesn’t this matter?

In the case of Gurdjieff’s Movements, sweeping we could consider the “main line” and the mail the “second line”.  The overlapping of the primary thread, represented by the displacement of the Multiplication, and secondary, represented by moving the chair or sorting through the mail, increases the scope of attention through time.  The participant, in doing the Movement, in a way manages to look at the mail without forgetting about sweeping.  In other words, Movements expands and strengthens the consciousness of the participant in a way that applies to how present they are in their life.  After all, isn’t the continual inner talking to oneself while doing basic outer tasks one of the primary being-dysfunctions we experience?  If one’s mind is on the task that one is physically doing, there is a much greater sense of unity and flow.  Working with the Movements regularly has the capacity to make this kind of presence and attention more enduring.

These kinds of examples I believe greatly clarify some of Gurdjieff’s theoretical formulations, such as his “Law of the Octaves”.  In this Law, there is the description of a given line of causation, called an Octave, being disrupted by other extraneous Octaves.  His description of the Law goes further and gives a sense of the subtlety of these clashing Octaves.  Reading Gurdjieff’s description of this Law it seems clear that Gurdjieff was meditating on his own experience and attempting to connect it to metaphysical principles.  These principles in turn became a basis for constructing participatory works of Art that could teach about life by means of an experience.  It is important to note here, however, the importance Gurdjieff placed on principles and theory.  This is an aspect of the Work that has become lost, even taboo, and as a result has limited our ability to understand the origin of Gurdjieff’s practices.

Gurdjieff’s theoretical formulations come down to us in antiquated modes of thought and archaic language.  The embedding of practical insights inside of a complicated pseudo-theosophical metaphysics served to articulate principles extracted from life and connect those to music, philosophy, art, and religion before then descending back into a manufactured experience such as Movements.  As a result, there is a function for those diagrams even today.  Unfortunately, for most students it is difficult to draw a connection between Gurdjieff’s metaphysical diagrams and their life experience.   Partly this is due to shifts of culture over time: the gradually receding accessibility of those ideas behind a high-sounding esotericism of yester-century.  Partly this is also due to a lack of comparison between Gurdjieff’s practices and theory and updating of the material to correspond to the language and sensibilities of this century, a failure of cross-generational leadership.   Contemplating Movements and extracting principles is essential for putting them into practice outside the Dance Hall, but Gurdjieff’s crib notes (i.e. Beelzebub’s Tales) lay dusty and unused except in rare cases.