Fragmentation and Compartmentalization

The classic, perhaps the most classic, teaching in the Work is that of the lack of unity within human beings. This was referred to in a number of ways, including fragmentation, the Doctrine of I’s, and so on.

Gurdjieff’s writings, especially the Tales, are structured and artistically formed to exemplify this psychological reality. He used a number of techniques to re-create psychological lack of unity, including something very akin to Russel Conjugations. In short, he primarily uses a change of label or change of metaphor, that is, outward representation to distract from a continuity of underlying meaning. He started with a primary person, event, or situation, and, having noticed how people polarize with regard to that object based on their subjectively established point of view, subtly altering their representation of it in order to fit it into their worldview while minimizing the amount of overhead they needed to expend on adjusting all of their existing preconceptions. From a purely evolutionary point of view, this makes perfect sense, as it is much more economical to resist whoelsale changes to one’s mental structures. It requires time and a great deal of effort to adjust one’s values and points of view, all of which are enmeshed across layers of psychological response systems.

By changing the label of a person, Gurdjieff was able to compartmentalize aspects of an idea, and denude the outward representation, the information available to the reader at any given moment, of critical context. As a result, to the degree the reader lacks this contextualizing information, is the extent to which the material looks absurd. There is actually a kind of spectrum of absurdity in his writings in which one can see him turning the dial of absurdity up or down, by adding or subtracting critical context. Thus, in some areas he appears to make a relatively straightforward statement, while in others some parts make sense while others, while making literal semantic sense, appear abstract and difficult to tether to anything practical, and in yet other scenarios even any shred of logiality goes out the window in favor of a complete stream of “nonsense”. This spectrum of understandability functions by means of an underlying, calculated degree of context provided (or not provided) by the text.

In breaking up aspects of an idea and housing them inside of differently “gift wrapped” stories, Gurdjieff is able to re-create the kind of compartmentalization that happens psychologically in human beings. By looking carefully at the manner of this compartmentalization via his unique “labeling” system, one is then able to deduce much of his psychological theory around why one part of the personality doesn’t “talk to” or “confer with” other parts of the personality, and what the consequences of this fragmentation are for one’s inner world, psychologically speaking, and how this then manifests collectively in the interactions between people.