The Gurdjieff Movements require an intense process of personal contemplation not only for understanding, but also for assimilation into one’s way of being. It is helpful to outline a few of the essential perspectives which help to open understanding of a Movement.

Body Scan: Movements postures indicate localization of sensation in particular areas of the body through physical tension or force as well as via “pointing” with the fingers or “scanning” with the palms. Extended arms indicate an area around the body in one’s atmosphere to be sensed. In terms of the muscles tensing in the body, this opens the possibility of looking at the movements “structurally” to see, from an anatomical perspective, which muscle groups are being activated. Pointers could then be given to students in the class on better and more effective “active engagement” in any given posture, with clearer sensation. In other words, the raw engagement of the body in the act of moving draws sensation to particular areas, although it is subtle enough the practitioner must sense this effect and intentionally strengthen the movement of sensation. Many of these “indicators of sensation” are abstract in such as way as to be devoid of emotional attitude or intellectual ideas. For instance, an arm posture in which the upper arm is held at the horizontal in a 90 degree relationship to the torso and the elbow is bent such that the foream and upper arm are in a 90 degree relationship forces the practitioner to try and “sense” the relationship of the parts of the body but has little emotional content like the crossing of arms on the chest with a bowed head or the intellectual content of an enneagram traced in the air.

Power Postures: Movements contain emotionally evocative postures and expressions. They evoke attitudes or feelings. Fortitude, humility, despair, joy, and many other qualities are expressed through the body, either as a whole or in some part. The use of postures to evoke specific emotions opens up a connection between the Gurdjieff Movements with “power postures” being explored in cognitive neuroscience recently.

Symbolic: Many Movements postures require interpretation or relate to ideas. Whether it is the drawing of a hexagram with the hand, tracing circles of various sizes in the air, or using the hands to indicate the idea of “inner listening”, the Movements are full of subtle indications. Contemplation of the meaning of Movements postures strengthens the ability to read non-verbal body language as part of self and other observation, allowing one to see the “meaning” behind the manifestation. The requirement to hold long sequences and pull together small pieces spread out over the entirety of a Movement builds the capacity to see baseline and clusters, an important heuristic in body language and nonverbal communication. On the other hand, the symbolism of some Movements convey stories containing epic mythology, personal transformational journeys, teacher/student relationships, group dynamics, or religious ideas which then open the possibility of new emotional landscapes. The symbolism feeds back into the other two in that symbolic pointing to areas of the body or around the body open up areas to “scan” through sensation, and emotionally in that when one correctly interprets and understands the attitude being conveyed one is then able to try and “feel” the relevant state, that is produce the emotion in themselves.  There is an important “symbolism of scales” which invites contemplation of the nature of self and other, inside and outside, in a way that leads to transpersonal understandings.

Combinatorial indications: Movements postures and sequences simultaneously evoke sensations, emotions, and ideas, sometimes synergistically, and other times dissonantly. The dissonance creates strong discriminative contrast between the centers so that synergistic versions may be felt that much more strongly. The overall body posture may create strong overall physical sensation of oneself, while the positioning of the body to suddenly face another dancer evokes a strong emotion. The evocation of strong sensation in one posture may then flow into and suffuse the emotion of the next moment, with the posture the body is still holding serving to anchor the dancer through the experience. The mind may at the same time be occupied with tracking one’s place in the group formation, that is, hovering above the interpersonal dynamic at the level of the group mind. In other words, if one examines the effect of Movements sequences, one finds that the centers are alternately twisted toward and away from eachother in every dynamic possible. This serves to both separate an awareness of the centers (provided one is contemplating the movement and one’s experience of it) as well as discover unique ways of deploying them in an overall relatedness that nonetheless harnesses their unique capacities. Movements open up the possibility of intentionally fostering attitudes and emotions in combination with body scanning and center of gravity of one’s sense of self as well as symoblism, i.e. ideas. For instance, a dancer could be intentionally flustered by a sequence intentionally structured to be impossible, at the same time one aspect of a more stable and easy to follow posture indicates calmness. And so on.

Transpersonal: The shifting of the center of gravity of awareness into now one, now another center, or between what one is personally doing versus what the group is doing, or dispersing awareness into various scales of time, gradually opens up new organs of awareness. The sense of self, the sense of being located in the head or the chest, depending on one’s initial starting point, begins to shift and move. This begins as small intuitions or ideas but gradually the sense of self can transfer completely into different areas of one’s own body, other people in the group, or one’s surrounding physical environment. In the same way, the use of sequence in a highly novel way can juggle the sense of one’s position in space and time, opening up insights into how the perception of time arises through our constant moment to moment projections and predictions as we move through space. Unique sequences and “false starts” can give rise to unexpected juxtapositions which reveal previously unnoticed and highly subtle assumptions made right at the heart of the present moment. This is done through an interesting overlapping or “canon” in which many successive moments are felt so acutely that one can no longer see in which moment one is. In other words, if the memory of the past and projection of the future are so strongly visualized that their signature matches that of the present posture taken, one can begin to sense the way in which the present is itself a kind of odd projection which can only arise in the context of a perceived sequence of actions. Impossible to describe.

Many All and Everything reading groups are about as lively as a sack of potatoes. It’s a man number one affair: read 10 pages, discuss without much understanding, rinse and repeat. Rarely or never do groups question this format or look for other ways.

For older folks with a backlog of Work “experience”, passages will stimulate a train of Work ideas and trigger a conversation which quietly but surely drifts away from much of the material which was read. This may perhaps be in a way that seems more “practical” and “related to life.” For folks with no interest in abstract ideas, the experience will be painfully dull, and the ensuing discussions impractical. Newer or younger folks with little or no Work experience will be completely lost, merely enduring the experience in the context of their overall relationship with the group or community.

Whether you’ve been hearing All and Everything read aloud for years or have only been in reading groups for a short time, you may find yourself at a loss for how to deepen the group experience. Reaching a plateau, many groups eventually meander into other material, whether reading from Mdme de Salzmann’s poetical “Reality of Being”, the more classically read and highly logical “In Search of the Miraculous” by Ouspensky, or a host of other secondary Work literature. Most of the secondary literature rehashes assumptions about the teaching, much of which doesn’t align with Gurdjieff’s own writings, or entertains the reader with second hand stories of Gurdjieff’s prowess. 

I would like to present you with some ideas about how to approach Gurdjieff’s writings differently. First of all, begin with the idea that there are many ways to read this material other than having a short bit of reading followed by a discussion. I will outline one approach, examined along the way from several aspects, which flows from beginner to intermediate to advanced. Consider these suggestions to get you thinking about how dynamically these works can be used. I hope you’ll see that a very real progression is available to a group working deliberately and systematically with the material. Although I do believe this to be an objectively useful approach, I must emphasize that this is to help get you thinking creatively about the material rather than to prescriptively define “the only correct method.” 

To begin with, there is an issue with reading a book out loud, and failing to verify reading comprehension in the listeners. This is the first way to use the book as an exercise. Gurdjieff intended for the material to be difficult to hold just at a literal level, even prior to interpretation. The first exercise is to read a bit out loud, and then challenge a member of the group to report, as fully as possible, precisely what was just read. If done correctly, it will quickly become evident that single sentences in the Tales, Meetings, and Life is Real provide plenty of material for this exercise.

To understand something of the meaning of this exercise, think about Movements. In the Gurdjieff Movements, the teacher performs an action, which the dancer must mimic, progressively adding until the dancer can no longer follow. In this case, it becomes clear when the attention has faltered because the Movement “falls apart”. The passages in All and Everything are precisely as complicated to follow as a Movement; inevitably, the reader’s ability to hold the separate threads also “falls apart”. 

However, in the case of the Tales, there is no exterior corollary or manifestation which reveals that this has happened. As a result, an individual member can “hide” in the group; the follow-on discussion can also fail to reveal a lack of comprehension of the passage as a whole, giving the false sense that participants understood the material.

So, practice reading passages of different lengths and different qualities to get a hang of how much is digestible for members in the group. You will quickly find that different areas of the writings are more or less difficult, and have a very different dynamic. Verify comprehension. The goal with this first exercise is to accurately reflect back the literal meaning of what was said in all its parts, without interpretation. 

If this is done correctly, two things will happen: First, people should laugh. There should be a quality of “you just can’t make this stuff up” as one regurgitates a stream of absurdity verging on nonsense. Or, simply the act of trying and failing, “getting caught” not listening, razzing each other about it, building each other up, digging jokingly at each other for failing, all of these things should bring a juicy sense of friendly competition or silliness into the group dynamic.

Second, as you proceed, you will find that you are getting better at accurate listening. Simply by spending time accurately regurgitating ideas as you heard them, you should begin finding yourself listening to others in a new way. You start to appreciate that the act of listening deeply to another person, without interpretation, is a skill in and of itself. You start to notice that there is much more in what other people are saying than you ever heard before. In the past, you were interpreting, judging, and reacting so quickly that you never took in what they were saying as a whole, in and of itself. The skill of accurate comprehension may not manifest in listening per se, but also in a tendency to look into all aspects of anything you put your attention on. Your mind starts to become like a mirror which reflects its surroundings with greater and greater fidelity. 

I have seen practitioners in some spiritual traditions who make a practice of repeating back to others what they hear them saying before offering their own views and opinions, as a check to the tendency to judge and react. In the case of his writings, Gurdjieff delays logical coherence until after a great deal of information has been gathered by the reader. I suggest this is specifically to develop this capacity to take information in, as it is, without immediately forming a personal opinion. He has made the material of such a quality that the process is nonetheless engaging. The fact that the material is composed in such a way as to provoke false initial understanding, false literalness, is his way of artistically pointing to our own judgmentalness, and of teaching us by example what real observation is. None of the stories in All and Everything are literal, I can assure you of that!

As the group moves through enough of the material with accurate comprehension, they will notice that the information they are gathering is fragmented. A second, more intermediate exercise, is to challenge those in the group to read or listen to a passage, and to report back on the allusions mentioned in the material. That is, to challenge group members to be aware of the text as a whole. For instance, Beelzebub often makes mention that he either has already said something before, or will be supplying more information later in connection with some topic. Challenge group members to remember what was said in different areas of the book. In other words, don’t just take in a given passage and report what was said, but be able to form chains of information which occur discontinuously throughout the material. This requires not just conceptualizing the information in a local area, but bringing into view material from around the book. Again, there is no interpretation at this stage, but simply a clear forming of an idea in the way that it is given out partially through time.

The result of this second level of the accurate comprehension exercise is an increasing ability to notice themes in the things other people are saying. Whether we realize it or not, we all unconsciously return to certain emotional themes or recurrent idea structures. Or, we will dribble out at different times and different places small pieces of information relating to our job, our relationship with our partner or family, or any number of other aspects of our lives. By listening carefully to the things people say or do at particular moments, a strong enough impression is left that the next time the same idea, emotion, or quality is expressed, you remember it. Consequently, a connection between those two moments becomes available, and a holistic picture of more global aspects of people’s minds and hearts starts to come into view. There isn’t necessarily an understanding of the meaning of these patterns, although some insight may emerge spontaneously. Rather, you may begin to be struck by a sense of deep karmic currents within yourself and others you hadn’t previously noticed. 

The presence of the quality of light heartedness around trying and failing, trying and succeeding only to fail again, coupled with the development of clear, accurate listening in the ways described prepares the ground for the group to move to the advanced stage of interpretation. 

These preparatory qualities are essential. Often, when discussions move to the interpretive stage, there isn’t sufficient good will or accurate listening for those in the group to truly exchange views about the material, which at an advanced level are extremely complicated and difficult to articulate. Often the accurate listening capacity needs to be so strong that one helps to fill in the miscommunications the other is inadvertently making. If good will and accurate listening is not present, the opposite happens: we jump down others throats the minute we perceive a mistake or simply endure the sharing of others only to eagerly grab the spotlight ourselves. 

This impatience and lack of charity pervades human communication, and is revealed in our impatience to suffer the laborious passages of Gurdjieff’s writings. Their duration, complexity and alternating “boring” or “off-putting” nature was engineered by the author to go beyond what ordinary life requires: if you can understand All and Everything, even just literally and without belief, I promise you will start to understand your own mind and that of others much better.

With good will and a light hearted atmosphere, coupled with accurate listening, the group will be prepared to actually start exchanging ideas about what the material may mean in a way that can actually get somewhere. The intellectual strength required to conceptualize different perspectives is a vital component for a mature process of dialogue between real adults.

It should be noted that the accurate listening and interpretation phases are not discrete chunks. As patterns within the book come into clear view in the accurate listening phase, implications embedded in the material will naturally unfold in the mind of the reader, and the interpretation phase will naturally begin to take part in fits and starts. 

Imagine you wished for someone to hang a picture, but you wanted them to arrive at the conclusion of your wishes themselves without any words. You look them meaningfully in the eye, and then ostentatiously place a nail, a hammer, and a picture on the table before walking over to the wall and clearly marking an “x” at a place of your choosing. Turning to the other person, you wink, and exit the room. The presence of a nail, a hammer, a picture, and an x, in and of themselves mean nothing. But taken as a whole, and with your affectations, anybody would quickly see what you were asking of them, despite no verbal communication.

In the same way, Gurdjieff, with great affectation highlights the importance of pieces of information without ever explaining their meaning or purpose. He simply points and leaves it at that. Even without clearly realizing this, most readers are left with a sense of Gurdjieff’s intentionality, but at a loss of how to really understand it. 

The long work of accurate listening without literal understanding is a rite of passage very few readers make it through. However, having collected enough of the pieces together (the hammer, the nail, the picture, and the “x”, so to speak) the student will naturally and spontaneously understand what Gurdjieff wished to convey, bit by bit, until a functioning understanding begins to emerge as a whole. 

The perspectives I am offering about accurate listening, interpretive flexibility, and mature dialogue are examples of life skills and wisdom which emerge from this holistic understanding. You begin to see what is required of you and the qualities which would enable a well-functioning Work group.

Once enough material is operationally present in the group’s conceptual space, ideas will begin to emerge as to Gurdjieff’s meaning, which may be shared with other group members. Accurate listening and the ability to entertain long chains of thought across different areas of the book will have prepared group members to really listen to each other’s perspectives, whether they are right or wrong. The power of this ability within a group of people cannot be understated. The sharing of perspectives will reveal multiple interpretations. 

If done accurately, it will become clear that this is not a reflection of the subjectivity of individual members in relation to the material, but that Gurdjieff intentionally implies more than one meaning simultaneously in one and the same metaphor. In fact, the completion of meaning along any one line of thought requires, for logical completion, material which is only made available in another, contradictory line of thought. Examples can be given… but ultimately they must be earned. Anyone who looks deeply into Gurdjieff’s writings will discover this eventually.

The ability to hold more than one view and to see that each view “works,” that is, to see something of the confabulatory nature of the mind, becomes apparent. In your accurate listening to other people you will begin to notice and track the disagreements between yourself and other people in various real life contexts. You have accurately observed and understood the perceptions of each participant. This can not but reveal just how little we seek to understand one another. You see the inaccuracy in our perceptions of each other. And yet, you can also see how each of our views has explanatory power in the situation. We are able to explain the situation to ourselves in such a way that everything “makes sense.” Of course, the only thing that doesn’t make sense is the “irrational” behavior of the others. It should really stand out to us that everything in a situation looks clear except for the other disagreeing person! 

Accurate listening and observation as well as the ability to perceive situations as a whole leads gradually to an ability to reconstruct that same whole based on the understanding of the individuals involved to the degree this is possible. At this stage, an All and Everything reading group is developing a collective ability to conceptualize multifaceted scenarios in the writings, and gradually reflect also on events happening in their lives in light of the evolving clarity that arises from working with the text. It is in this way that Gurdjieff’s writings can give rise to a real, working Gurdjieff group. It does so not through direct “telling” but by “showing”. 

At this point something may be said about All and Everything and its curriculum. There are various points of contemplation and inquiry which Gurdjieff has left like so many breadcrumbs, some of which become salient only after enough knowledge has been developed. Taken as a whole, these “bits and pieces” form a coherent line of Work. The reading group at this point may start engaging with these tasks intentionally and based on their current level of development, with some level of genuine understanding. 

What is this curriculum? It has many facets. It incorporates verbal and non-verbal communication, participant observation, psychology, energy work, and emotional purification. References to the Movements are important here, which are critical in completing the picture. The entire teaching as most people in the Work understand it is there, although many things have been unconsciously changed about the Work over time. In addition, there is a great deal of material which Gurdjieff never gave directly to anyone. 

After developing deep listening and careful observation, it becomes clear why Gurdjieff went to such pains to ensure students of his Work had sufficient patience, charity, impartiality, persistence, and other qualities before entrusting them with certain forms of psychological knowledge, some of which would fall under the category of “Dark Psychology” if used today. In some cases, psychological knowledge will not actually be understood without the above qualities and in other cases it will be misapplied or used selfishly. In either case, it will ultimately be useless to the person and to others around them, or worse, cause harm.

At this point two streams of development begin to merge. First, countless efforts at exceedingly careful listening have developed a certain amount of being-ness. If the concentration is refined enough, states of presence or being may be felt. Just the act of listening or observing carefully will create a flow state which is palpable. Second, the work of interpretation applied to the metaphors will start to create simultaneity, in part because Gurdjieff has engineered the metaphors to have more than one meaning, and for those meanings to depend on one another, and in part because the reader must actively track more than one thread at a time in the text.

Deep listening was the first stage in the student developing Being, but it may not be powerful enough to create a state of mind, or a physiological change in the nervous system. The level of simultaneity likewise depends on the degree of the concentration of attention. Humans are compound beings with more than one attentional stream. This is necessarily so, because we need to be able to perform activities and simultaneously respond to other stimuli. If we are holding a cup of coffee with one hand and drop a book with the other, we need to be able to expend a certain amount of attention continuing to stabilize the coffee in order not to spill, while still responding to the dropped book, either trying to catch it, or pick it up while still holding the coffee. The power of simultaneity in the Gurdjieff exercises lies in its intentional use to produce increasingly absorptive states of concentrated attention. In the Movements and Tales, Gurdjieff uses simultaneity to bring the different parts of the attention into present moment relatedness. They are on the one hand separate lines of attention, while at the same time related in the overall form.

This takes a bit of explaining. If one has done simple meditation exercises, such as counting the breath or counting numbers, one will appreciate the difficulty of keeping the mind on the task. If one persists and expends significant energy holding the attention in place, one will notice how even though one part of the mind is still counting the breath, there are actually other layers of the attention which begin to wander. The counting goes on, but perhaps, for instance, one is also semi-consciously appreciating one’s meditative prowess. This other ongoing stream of attention may be happening primarily in the feelings. Or, part of one’s attention will be moving around inside the experience of the body breathing even though the mind is still counting the breath. The first example is one of an often difficult-to-examine deeper layer of mind wandering while the second begins to show ways in which multiple attentions can generate deeper awareness of aspects of the object of concentration. In any case, in order for concentration to deepen beyond a superficial layer, these subtler currents in consciousness must also be brought into alignment with the object of attention.

Now bring in Gurdjieff’s exercises of simultaneity. By having more than one stream of attention, i.e. simultaneity of attention, the practitioner is able to corral more and more subtle aspects of awareness into present moment relatedness. It is not so much a matter of complexity (we are not trying to evolve up to twenty lines of attention) but rather of inner-integration of all the ongoing parts of oneself with the object of attention. Simultaneity produces absorptive concentration, and absorptive concentration produces states of being.

So the level of interpretation begins to include not only psychological insights, philosophical questioning, and the band of human cognition which embraces practical inquiry into those domains of life relevant to decision making, interpersonal understanding, and collective sensemaking, but gradually a sense of being begins to enter into and support one’s sense of those questions. As the center of gravity drops more and more into this underlying sense of being, you experience changes in the nature of your questioning and insights. The presence of being has the power to transform one’s insight into the problem under consideration, and you gradually begin to relinquish your need to understand the problem with the mind only, realizing there is another organ of intelligence within and around you. Quite literally understanding begins to emanate from your physical presence.

As mystical as this sounds, it is a natural unfoldment of human potential in the process of deepening practice with Gurdjieff’s writings and Movements, and every human being, every living creature, has direct access to a level of knowing that operates independently of the individual body-mind.

The beautiful and unique characteristic of Gurdjieff’s path lay in the fact that all of the psychological knowledge gained in the previous phase is retained as the possession of the individual, but is now held inside of a much larger and more expansive space of intuitional awareness. It is the defect of existing religious and academic institutions that we have bifurcated the intuitional, spiritual process from intellectual and scientific inquiry. The fully developed human being should have access to all levels of themselves. It is tragic that Gurdjieff set up a path of three-centered development, and yet people become either anti-intellectual, or spend years drifting inside the dot-connecting esoterica of alternative spirituality without ever allowing the question to drop into their heart and gut.

I haven’t described how a Tales group might interact at this level, because I have never seen a group whose members are operating at this level. The above is based on my personal experience working with the writings, Movements, and sitting practices, but I’ve never seen a Tales group which was beyond the accurate listening phase and most early parts of the interpretive phase. The possibilities are incredible.

Now that we’ve reached the deeper levels of engagement with the writings, it’s worth saying a word about traditional approaches to group reading. Gurdjieff seems to have brought a feeling of Being to the reading aloud of his writings. For reasons too complicated to explain here, he never explained these levels, and actually intended for his contemporaries not to understand his writings, or at any rate to let them flounder without any help from himself. He most definitely understood the first generation would not grasp his writings; though I am not quoting the passages here, writings by him and his students say as much.

This sense of gravity, alongside a complete lack of explanation from the author himself left his students in a real bind. They understood something of grave importance lay buried in his book, and sensed something about that deeper nature, but lacked any help in traversing the many steps that lay in between. As a result, despite the fact that Gurdjieff also laughed at apparent inside jokes when the book was read aloud, a culture of seriousness grew up around reading of the text in an effort to maintain a certain level of group atmosphere. 

At Two Rivers Farm, a wonderful community which had a very positive impact on me as a person, there were nonetheless “trainings” in “how to read”, while at the same time no real help was given about how to comprehend what was being read, other than to let it fall on one’s subconscious. The practical effect of an approach which attempts to cut out thought is a failure to make substantial gains in understanding over time. In many Work communities I’ve seen, a shell of seriousness crusts over the text in a way that stifles genuinely open exploration of ideas. In cases where there is openness, In the effort to maintain purity, the practice was cut at its root. The ridiculousness of groups reading a text ritualistically without understanding seems completely lost on all involved. The inevitable end of this is that most groups and members gradually begin reading other texts which they can actually get something out of which will help them in their lives. This is despite the fact these other readings contain only a smidgeon of the possibilities and help given in All and Everything.  After all, why is it called “All and Everything”. 

For this reason I offer the above sequence of phases a perspective to get you thinking. Over-seriousness creates a situation of fake-being. Its real nature is exposed when one goes to the interpretive phase. There is so little accurate listening and light heartedness, the conversation quickly devolves into dogma and impatience. This is why I have emphasized practices around accurate listening with light heartedness (accurately reporting the material should be funny!) as a preliminary to having extended discussions around meaning, i.e. the work of interpretation.

So, in sum, begin by focusing on comprehension at a literal level. Tackle of the difficulties Gurdjieff left in the text. If he mentions he will tell you something later, or enjoins you to remember something from before, take it seriously and keep track of all of those things. If you read a sentence, make sure you are conceptualizing all of the pieces present in what you are reading. If you do the above, you will immediately realize how much effort is going to be required from you.

From there, start to ask simple and direct questions about the metaphors. Who does Beelzebub represent? Ashiata? How about Pearl land, Tikliamish, and Maralplecie? Why is Looisos called an “physicist chemist angel”? Don’t cop out by saying you are “in question”, but challenge yourself to provide plausible answers. Keep track of your work, and make sure you progress and don’t get stuck in one answer. Gurdjieff didnt say to know “ever less and less about the laws of World Creation and World Maintenance”, but rather to “know ever more and more”. 

As you engage in this process of inquiry, reflect actively about what functions you are using. Where are these functions used in your life? I’ve provided a few examples, but what are some others? Don’t read other people’s opinions, but develop your own. Stand on your own two feet.

And most importantly, have fun!