G has this idea that knowledge is material. There is only so much knowledge, and if some people gain knowledge, others cannot get it.

Certainly seems like one of the kookier ideas. However, we should remember that this is G’s idea as recorded by Ouspensky. Therefore it completely loses the tonality and context in which G said it. Many of G’s ideas given to Ouspenky and his students were thoroughly “mixed bags”, i.e. they were composed of intentionaly truths, half truths, and falsehoods.

This corresponds with the theme of his magical show in which he demonstrated “tricks, half tricks, and real magic”, and also his concept of the three types of knowledge “Science, Religion, and Moonshine”. Tricks used by magicians are composed of a real knowledge of human psychology and are thus scientific in a certain sense. Religion utilizes the same kind of suggestibility used by magicians, but in a mostly unconscious way, although in the case of faith healers and other stage magicians it is conscious.

In other words, this idea is not found explicitly in G’s writings (his own exposition of his teaching) and only found in Ouspenky’s version. The way this is portrayed in G’s writings gives a much better sense of how G meant this idea, and proves how Ouspensky tended to take G too literally, or at least failed at times to show the kind of discrimination G was looking for.

In G’s writings we find ideas given out through metaphors according to the theosophical addition method. One story, composed of many different metaphors, eventually collapses into a unity in which all the various metaphors, appearing separate at first, turn out to represent one thing, i.e. one core metaphor. The core metaphor may then be elaborated back out into multiple meanings once again. We see this reduction of numbers in theosophical additon back to the base numbers 1-9, which nonetheless contain all possible other mathematical computations based on the decimal system. So the numbers 1-9 are both the core to which everything may be reduced, while at the same time the numbers beyond 9 must be played out in order to show many other mathematical principles which cannot be demonstrated with the numbers 1-9. For instnace, the Fibonnaci sequence cannot be shown with only the numbers 1-9, but requires many more numbers.

In the same way G’s writings contain symbols which, when interpreted, can be reduced to a few core psychological objects, even though the manifestation of those fundamental objects into multifarious outer verisons is nonetheless necessary for the full elaboration of his ideas.

So, Ouspenky’s rendering of G’s idea of “knowledge is material”, and therefore fixed in quantity, is a poor interpretation of the core idea. He did not connect this idea to Laws, Unity, and other realities in the way Gurdjieff does in his writings.

Numerous types of examples need to be made to solidify this idea, and across as many scales as possible.

One important idea of Gurdjieff’s is that of superficial or specious progress. He criticized western “civilization” for having apparently progressed through technology, while at the same time lacking strong connection to Being-technologies like those in the East. For the most part, western civilization seemed to him to have mostly multiplied the ways in which human beings can kill each other. The productions made possible by industry, railways, etc were powerful but distracted from the question of the level of Being human beings had. Gurdjieff lived through countless revolutions and wars throughout his whole life, so he saw the irony of the progress of technology alongside the vast numbers of humans being ground up in war, including his own family members. The World Wars in the second half of his life were a wake up call to many in the era.

Human death through war has dropped significantly since World War II. It is uncertain if this trend will continue with the advent of de-globalization, demographic collapse, water scarcity, environmental issues, and other crisis on the horizon, but at present large scale direct warfare between large nations is rare. On the other hand, we witness the affect of powerful technologies sweeping through societies and drastically altering the information ecology, culture, and personal time management. Everybody has a personal assistant in the form of a smart phone. We are awash in more information, in more knowledge than humans have ever experienced.

And yet we have displayed little ability to assimilate all this information at a macro level. Many Western countries’ political conversations are deteriorating, especially America. The fabric of society seems to be coming apart. Depression and anxiety are on the rise, social media incentivizes and platforms dark-traid traits and views (Machiavelian, narcissistic, and psychopathy). The culture’s Being does not correspond to its level of knowledge in precisely the way Gurdjieff would have predicted would be problematic. This time, it is not so much the presence of weapons in wars which humans tend toward, but the diluting of the individual human psyche through casino-style slot machine social media apps. Almost certainly, humans will make it through, and these technologies will not wipe us out, but whether this is through a growth of Being or other, less desirable outcomes remains unclear.

So the prevelance of free, egalitarian information today, per Gurdjieff’s prediction, has not led to human flourishing of understanding, but due to our lack of Being as a society, has led to more mutual misunderstanding, and even less Being than before.

But this has more to do with the relation of Being and Knowledge, the sum of which Gurdjieff called Understanding. What about his idea that knowledge is material and therefore finite?

I believe this is where a useful distinction can be made to help understand G’s idea. Gurdjieff was not so much speaking of the quantity of knowledge, but its application and deployment in reality. He wasn’t saying that we can only know so much information, or that there is only so much information to be had in reality. This is obviously not true. Knowledge as far as we know is infinite quantitatively. Rather, he was pointing to the fact that knowledge inevitably serves the level of Being of the person who acquires it.

For instance, take any ordinary form of psychological knowledge, such the idea of Projection. The idea of Projection has many different forms it can take, but for our purposes we will define it as assuming other people think the way we do. We each have a unique history, genetic markers, and personality type. I personally use the enneagram personality types as a starting place. The study of personality types demonstrates well the various lenses through which humans interpret situations and events in terms of their own psychodyanimics. If we try to place ourselves in others shoes, we immediately imagine how we would feel, while in fact others would almost certainly experience it quite differently.

So the study of Projection can be taken from the point of view of self development. We can study projection as a way to understand ourselves and others better. This can gradually lead to a conscious use of language, gesture, and other behaviors to communicate our needs and objectively recognize those of others.

On the other hand, marketers understanding Projection cynically devise Ads and market campaigns, to elicit a desired response from viewers. So rather than use words and imagery into which only a few personality types can Project, they will deploy more general imagery and words into which the most number of people can pour their subjectivity.

Foreign governments will create loads of bots and pour them into Western democratic open internet channels to stir up controversy, driving a wedge between groups on every conceivable front, from political to religious to cultural to racial.

So we see that the idea of Projection ultimately as a form of knowledge will be deployed based on the aims and worldview of the entity using it.

But this does not give us the whole idea yet. Really the core of this idea is that knowledge in its essence and what it can mean for a human being’s fundamental feeling of well being is like a rubberband which may stretch but cannot ultimately gain mass.

The primary requirement for human transformation is in the heart. The heart can certainly delight in the acquisition of knowledge, status, or other psychological goods, but this always takes place on top of or removed from the heart. It is ultimately a change in the emotions of a person which brings about a real sense of personal change. This is why for almost all the enneagram personality types there is a core paradox in which something is chased which ultimately undermines the persons ability to fully acquire the object of their desire.

For type four, there is a need, like the others in the heart triad, type 2 and 3, for connection. Unlike the 2, who tries to be needed, or the 3, who tries to be outstanding in their achievements to gain validity and therefore connection with others, the type 4, as a withdrawn type, removes themselves, creating a void, to test if others will seek them out. This is not necessarily through literal physical withdrawal, although this is sometimes also the case (type fours, especially if they have an 8 component, may make a fiery and histrionic withdrawl from the room to make a statement), it is often a more subtle withdrawal from social norms. The wearing of an earing, a piece of clothing, or other dress items, all serve to indicate a kind of withdrawal from certain social norms, as a way of individuating themselves. Often the deviation from norms is subtle and not necessarily noisy, because they want other people to notice, and the harder the item is to notice, the more value the four can give to the noticing.

The need for connection, and the use of withdrawal to elecit it, inevitably backfires. Other types don’t notice the four has withdrawn or don’t understand the significance of it for the four. They don’t see that the gesture of withdrawal is communicating something very specific. If no one pursues the four’s withdrawal, they will need to modify it to make it more overt. They may storm out of the room instead of leaving it more quietly, or their dress may get more extreme and noticeable, shifting from a small earing to a dangling earing.

If the withdrawal is overt enough, other types will pursue the four. This may make the four feel loved momentarily, but very quickly the feeling of inadequacy returns, and the four once again needs to withdraw in order to verify their importance.

All of this creates a paradox and a self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing cycle in the direction of involution. Withdrawl will serve to entice other types for a time, but as it becomes more extreme and histrionic, other types will tend to start avoiding the four, which then pushes the four to become more extreme yet again until they cannot not be noticed. From another aspect, the four experiences a dynamic where they can never fully accept love, and must always paradoxically avoid love and connection as a way to achieve it.

For a person of this type, any acquisition of knowledge, possessions, and status will funnel into this dynamic. All situations will only serve as grist for the wheel of desire for connection, withdrawal, and only small, short-lived experiences of the true connection they are seeking. They will experience this underlying emotional dynamic in high school, their job, their friendships, partnership, and with their children, and it will lurk as the invisible architecture of all the qualities they experience moving through universal human life events.

Only the intentional alteration of the underlying dynamic will produce a genuine felt-sense of transformation for the type four. Because it is not a fundamentally intellectual dyanmic, that is, it is an emotional process which attaches itself to any intellectual object which arises in the minds eye of the type four, it does not matter how much information, status, material wealth, physical appearance, or other outward condition is acheived. Only the inner dynamic in the psychological perception of the four creates the relationship of those psychological objects to each other in order to form a meaninful pattern in their thoughts, emotions, and sensations.

Therefore it is not the particular knowledge the four has which produces their transformation or real change, but changing the machinery of perception through which the environment is processed and assimilated. Because much of this machinery is based ultimately in the physiology of the person, only hard work over time to recondition the reflex movements in different parts of the process can create lasting change.

Mathematically this can be expressed through theosophical addition and modular systems like the mod 9 system of the enneagram. One plays out the numbers 1-9, and the second time one goes around the circle, one continues counting (10 where 1 was, 11 where 2 was, etc). Symbolically speaking, the change in number on the second pass around the circle represents outwardness, while the continuation of the inner circle represents the inward fundamentals. In terms of personality types, the dyanmic within the personality type represents the numbers 1-9 with its core emotional impulses and intellectual perceptions, while the outward environment projected onto by the personality type represents numbers beyond 9. The type moves through an infinite numbers of circumstances and outward combinations, but inwardly only ever experiences their own small circle of personal impulses and emotions.

This false progression explains why so many people get caught in fad diets, cults, and various pseudo-transformation techniques and models. Anything that doesn’t fundmentally touch and transform the essence underlying the personality type will have no lasting affects, and give a person the feeling of ending up right back where they started. The flux of outward events, the ever-changing nature of outer life processes, may dazzle us enough to feel a sense of temporary newness, and evoke the start of our personal perceptual cycle, our individual samsara, but the end result will be always the same.

Gurdjieff did not mean that knowledge is literally finite. No, the outward expressions of human technology, the depth of scientific inquiry into any aspect of nature or the universe, is limitless. But the Being of any individual human, as expressed through their underlying interior energetic dynamic, defines the true effect and meaning this outward knowledge may have. It is the experience of pushing one’s limits spiritually, only to end up right back where one started, to end up stuck at the same point once again, that leads to an understanding of the meaninglessness of knowledge and even outer circumstance, and the importance of one’s own state of mind as the fundmental set point of one’s Being.

Taking the set point of an individual human’s Being, defined as the average of all their fluctuating states, and summing this across a society, gives the total Being of the human group. Only a ground-up integrity from the individual human going on up to the macro level can produce the collective cosmogenisis which is needed. Understanding the importance of Being as a fundmental ingredient to be developed and maintained at sufficient levels alongside the ingredient of knowledge gives the wisdom to make collective choices regarding our culture as well as our political and educational systems.

How does this idea show up in G’s writings? Once we have established this, we can then compare the idea to Ouspenky’s version to demonstrate just how misleading it can be.

In Gurdjieff’s writings he has filtered one and the same idea through many different guises. To understand how this works we have to return to basic dynamics of metaphors.

Because a metaphor is the representing of one thing by another, a metaphor can be used to represent more than one thing. Conversely, something may be represented through more than one metaphor.

As a result, one thing can be represented through multiple metaphors, and those metaphors, because they are technically separate from the fundamental object, can then interact as though they were separate.

In the ship systems chapters of BT, there is a metaphorical chain of ship systems. One interpretation of this chain is that of an evolution, a stepwise progression. Saint V’s ship displaces previous ones and is displaced by that of Archangel Hariton. This literal interpretation is as far as most readers get.

However, G gives us the material we need in Ch 3 to interpret the old and new ship systems as representing Ahoon and Hassin, which in turn allows us to connect them to the inner and outer views of the Young Beelzebub. The young beelzebub, in being promoted, believes he has his own will, but in reality, is being played by ENDLESSNESS. Just as King Appolis in the first descent ultimately profits from the overly confident, revolutionary young kinsmen, we are able to infer that ENDLESSNESS did not naively promote Beelzebub only to have a megalocosmic revolution on his hands. Rather, we are led to reinterpret Beelzebub’s promotion and banishment as being two views of one situation. Beelzebub believes he is going to “Sun Absolute” (notice quotation marks), while in reality he is going to solar system Ors (solar system ass?). This explains the contradiction that Beelzebub, on being promoted, finds something wrong in the government of the World.

Ultimately, a picture is painted in which the Young B thinks he “has his own battery”, but in fact is being manipulated “from outside”. His view of himself (Im in control) is represnted by Saint Venoma’s ship system, which has its own central battery and needs nothing from outside (in fact, destroys everything outside). The many contradictions surrounding Saint V’s ship show that inspite of its promise, it in fact does not work at all. Only because it is approved by Archangel Addossia (false, assumed authority) and hailed and extolled does it spread, when in fact it becomes quite obvious it fails to overcome the very thing it was supposed to (the atmospheres of planets are the chief obstacles for it, despite its having been creating specifically because it could destroy those atmospheres). This is a picture of the ego.

The reality is that he is taking impressions in from outside, having automatic and unconscious perceptions which produce force that ultimately expresses itself through unconscious behavior. This is the pressurization of Archangel Hariton’s cylinder barrel, also shown through the young kinsmen’s inability to refrain from expressing his indignation at the government of King Appolis.

So the two ship systems represent, on one side, the self-view as well as the outer reality, of Beelzebub (who is also presented in the guises of Venoma, Hariton, Looisos, the young kinsmen, and other characters).

The initial impression of the reader is to take all of these elements in without much assimilation, and basically conclude Gurdjieff is describing some kind of actual ship system, or, if realizing at least semi-consciously that they are metaphorical, to generally fail to know how to interpret their inner meaning. As a result, the reader leaves with the false impression there has been a linear progression from an original ship system to a new ship system to yet another ship system.

Having really thought about the material, and developed some language harvesting ability (which will help with word harvesting in real life), the reader is gradually forced to interpret these ship systems as different views of one and the same character. Gurdjieff is able to psychologically build out the false self conception of beelzebub (student, reader, etc) alongside an accurate , and not particularly flattering, outward view of the teacher (ENDLESSNESS, King Appolis, the author, Gurdjieff, etc.). This underlying psychological dynamic is developed within an outward appearance of evolution by means of the metaphor of one ship system displacing another. This allows Gurdjieff to simultaneously give the false idea of outward progression alonside the idea of non-development or inward stasis. The outward progression represents Beelzebub’s false sense of his own progression (he thinks hes being promoted from his own planet to Sun Absolute but he is actually heading to Ors, hence his surprise when he arrives on “Sun Absolute” in quotation marks!). The inward version represents the aspects of his psychology that ultimately underpin his behavior and make him predictable enough (mechanical enough) to be manipulated in that way. The two aspects of him (self-perception and outer-reality) are present at each stage.

Going back to our initial theme, we can see that the outer version is that of difference. The story of Beelzebub and ENDLESSNESS in Ch 2 is separate from the stories of Saint V and Hariton. The metaphors have changed, sometimes being different characters, sometimes changing from being a character to a mechanical device. Each metaphorical guise brings out new and useful aspects to understanding the total situation, and are correspondingly adapted to form interconnections amongst themselves as the reader’s integration of the text progresses. But the fundamental subject, Beelzebub, never changes.

Speaking in terms of Theosophical Addition, the lack of inner change represents the numbers 1-9 on the enneagram. No matter how many times one goes around the circle, one will always count 1-9. Outwardly speaking however, each new story Gurdjieff tells evolves a new set of metaphorical trappings. Doing a little legwork, the reader discovers, to their shock, that what they thought were separate ship systems, were in fact nothing other than the original character. The reader’s experience of shock as the metaphors collapse back into a unity parallels Beelzebub shock in discovering he has not in fact been promoted to Sun Absolute, but in fact has arrived in Solar System Ors! This parallel of the reader’s perception and the perception of the characters in the story is brilliant on G’s part.

In sum, it is in the assimilation of the content in G’s book that he tries to impart to the understanding of the reader an experience of scratching down to the base elements underlying a false outer experience. The reader inevitably misperceives the allegory in the text, and must exercise the same muscles of discernment to overcome Gurdjieff’s obstacles which would be used to consider the patterns of one’s own life, to ulitmately arrive at the base impulses, emotions, and self-perceptions that undergird a false sense of self in the world. In reality, we create our own sense of self, afterwards populating our relationships, jobs, and life experiences with people who correspond surprisingly well in their signifance to members of our internal family. Beelzebub’s Tales is uniquely suited to aid the reader (by their own efforts) in developing the insight to see right to the very bottom of things. Part and parcel of this is the gradual realization that one’s knowledge, status, and other outward measures of success feed into a highly personalized dynamic which is fixed in quantity. Only by working with this inner material can it be stretched, made more elasitic, or expanded so as to invite genuinely new aspects of reality into our Being.

The caveat…? The reader must really work for it!

The other place this shows up is in G’s cosmology in regards to the “prime source substance” Etherokrlino, from which everything in the Universe is crystallized. It is in Arch Absurd where he points out that owing to Etherokrilno Objective Science calls everything in the universe material. It is this move to call everything in the Universe material because everything is composed of Ehterokrlino that allows G to say that things are also fixed in quantity. The exploration of the outpouring of crystallizations, even Omnipresent Okidanokh, from this fundamental substance Etherokrilno, what was otherwise known as the Ray of Creation, is explored in other places, but always remains a commentary on the arising of objects in human perception. In this way it corresponds to concepts or experiences like Buddha nature in Buddhism, where reality is felt as a kind of limitless field in which experiences arise.

The actual experience of Etherokrilno or Buddha nature is extremely rarified and depend on a high degree of concentration and insight into the nature of Reality. There are more commonplace experiences of life that lead to the intution that there is a limit to one’s personal experience.

For instance, being on one or the other side of a relationship, responsibility, or other major life commtment or entangelement. If one studies one’s subjective round of positive and negative experiences while in a particular relationship or career path, one may notice that at times one likes and other times dislikes that relationship or career path. One may start to question and dream about what life would be like in a different career. The ups and downs in a given job or relationship, if studied deeply, may be sensed or felt as a whole. One can see over time the natural ups and downs associated with one’s perception of the job or relationship. One can also see the nature of one’s dreams about a different state of affairs. If however, the job or relationship is lost, and one finds onself on the other side of that divide, experiencing a lack of relationship or job, for instance, immediately a new round of ups and downs ensues. If at this very moment one has the wherewithall and the curiosity to take in and study one’s perceptions, that is, to compare the totality of one’s perceptions on both sides of a relationship or career, one may notice a certain equality or symmetry. Whether in a relationship or out of a relationship, there are positvies and negatives associated with both conditions. It is this comparison of perceptions across different phases of one’s life that can release a profoundly different sense of the equality of all human experiences, and a realzation that whatever the conditions of one’s life currently, life will always be fundemtanlly undergirded by the same physiological fluctations of happiness and unhappiness. This is not to say some human circumstances are not objectively more or less difficult than others. After all, to grow up in a war zone is objectively more difficult and full of suffering than to grow up during peace. However, we have the false conviction that we can avoid the round of positive and negative states altogether, only experiencing the positive, and as a result avoid negative experiences for which we are physiologically destined by our all too limited hormonal systems.

We have cultural sayings which reflect an awarenes of this. “The grass is always greener on the other side” refers to seeing grass across a fence as greener. When one goes to the other side fo the fence, once again the grass in the field in which one just was now looks greener. This refers precisely to this experience of being in and out of relationships, in and out of jobs, healthy and unheathy physical conditions, and any other states a human being can experience. In terms of relationships: “You can’t live with her and you can’t live without her” refers to this dynamic in relationships.

It is the fundamental elasticity of human emotions, the fluctuation of positve and negative experiences, what Gurdjieff calls the two ends of the stick in his famous Preface to Beelzebubs Tales, and learning to see into the nature of them as they occur in time across the phases of one’s life, that releases a deeper wisdom.

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.

Gurdjieff’s music, composed in collaboration with Thomas De Hartmann, is often seen as minimalistic and associated with artists like Erik Satie from the same time period. Historians laud Satie himself for paving the way to classical minimalism.

However, in his written works he is much more akin to an artist like James Joyce, a maximalist whose works go into excessive, overtly complex detail. There is much to be said about the comparision between Gurdjieff and Joyce, and it seems likely that Joyce’s works, first serialized by Gurdjieff’s students Jane Heap and Margarett Anderson in the Little Review, and the attention that it garnered, probably served as the impetus for Gurdjieff’s decision to use writing as the ultimate form in which he chose to pass his teaching.

Once again we have Gurdjieff pushing the absolute outer boundaries in both directions in a polymathic way, much like many influential Russian thinkers before him. Gurdjieff was not Russian, but the Russian Empire, with its confused cultural blend of Eastern and Western tendencies, was a predominant imperial force acting on the more traditional caucasian culture Gurdjieff grew up in. These are the actual Wetsern/Eastern influences Gurdjieff experienced, not a genearlized “East-West” as usually supposed. Gaining a sense of the importance of Russian culture and the transfusion of knowledge and ideas into the Caucasian region owing to Russian military and economic influence causes one to realize that Gurdjieff’s exposure to Western culture came more so via a Russian filter than directly from the West itself. This explains some of the differences between Gurdjieff and other alternative spiritual influencers with which he is associated such as Rudolf Steiner. In Steiner, the influence of Goethe and other western influences mixed with Theosophism of Blavatsky (a Russian thinker herself) feature much more prominantly in his works, whereas in Gurdjieff, it is a blend of Theosophism with Russian intellectual traditions like Fedorovism, Symbolism as it played out in Russia, and Cosmist ideas.

These are important influences for Western readers to understand in reading gurdjieff’s works, because to a Western reader, Gurdjifef’s cosmic idesas seem utterly unique, whereas to someone familiar with Cosmist ideas prevelant at the time, Gurdjieff was absolutely in lockstop with his Russian contemporaries in his concern with the Earth’s and humanities role as not only a biosphere, but beyond into the solar system. At the same time, there are reasons to believe Gurdjieff did not entirely take these ideas seriously himself (to be explored at a later date).

Therefore, Gurdjieff as one of the early teachers seeking to synthesize the East and the West, was not synthesizing the East and West so much as syntheisizing Russian culture, itself a unique East-West blend, with a teaching about Awakening in a more Eastern style. What perhaps sets Gurdjieff apart from Blavatsky and Steiner is that he was a geniuinely tranformed or Awakened teacher much more in the style of a Sufi or Zen master.

So, Gurdjieff, though not Russian, followed in the footsteps of Russian intellectual culture in its polymathic pursuit of many fields of knowledge and near reckless syntheses of opposites such as science and religion, earthly and comsic, etc. This underlies much of the excessive and syncretistic art and ideas that he created. It is no surprise then, that in his early exposition of ideas in Russia which he chose at the place to originate his institution, and his later written exposition, we find the same tendency. The form his written exposition took corresponded to Western literary works he observed being published by his pupils. So we essentially have a highly Russian, quasi-theosophical cosmist blend with the Eastern Orthodox and Sufi religious impulse of the territory around his home, interlaced with shots of Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu understandings, which is then pumped through a Western literary masterpiece and quasi-manifesto bearing influences from a variety of modernist movements, including surrealism (with its emphasis on the unconscious), dadaism (like surrealism, seeking shock value), cubism, and stream of consciousness writing like Joyce. The motivation of this work is primarily psychological and sociological in terms of understanding, while undergerded with the fundamental task of Awakening. This taken altogether, explains the form Gurdjieff’s writings took. If we put these influences in order:

• Primary, or core: Awakening as contained in Esoteric Christianity, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Hinduism. The description of the path as Fourth Way being from the Hindu idea of Hatha, Bakti, Inana, and Raja (or possibly Krya) Yoga, with morning sittings like Hindu or Tibetan, but bringing these sittings into activity with dances somewhat like Sufism but adapted into a symbolic, theatrical device more influence by Western art movements and theatre trends. Esoteric Christianity forms the feeling world of this blend. All these influences show the core aim of the whole teaching: Awakening.
• Secondary: Psychology. Understanding self and others. Verbal and nonverbal communication skills. Dark psychology and hypnotism. This is where more western psychological influences enter. Much of the psychological understanding here comes from G’s own development in the philosophical realm outlined below, as he went from a fantastical theosophical framework to an actual understanding of Awakening as he discovered it in Tibet.
• Tertiary, theoretical structure: Philosophy. Pseudo-blavatskyism, Pseudo-theosophical worldview. Blending science and religion. These are the false-ideas worn as theatrical masks by Gurdjieff or as symbolic devices to entice the naive into his teaching, the reason for the stunning difference between G and his pupils observed by Ouspensky. He understood this was his doorway into spirituality, so he used false worldviews as exoteric, symbolic garb, for inner teachings on psychology and from there, states of mind produced by attention exercises. This is the worldview which he wishes to “destory” and why he knew it needed to be destroyed from his own experience. Interestingly, the very aim to “mercilessly destory the worldview” of his first series is precisely an aim Blavatsky says is preliminary for engaging in her work. This is interesting because the Blavatskyism which infected Gurdjieff, which he later determined was a false version of a true reality, becomes the very thinking which must itself be destoryed. Gurdjieff “apes” Blavatsky, thus associating knowledgable readers to her at the same time he is saying she must be overcome in their own worldview.
• Quaternary, outer forms: The forms of practice his teaching took, Sittings, Movements, Writings, and music were primarily derived from cultural customs (i.e. dances and music) in the middle east, a blend of middle eastern and western romantic musical styles in a minimalist form so as to be accessible, religious customs (buddhist/hindu sittings, internal christian prayer work, Sufi dancing) and Western art as found in theatre and literature and, to some extent, as noted, music.

Gurdjieff started out in the Teritary, was exposed to all the elements of the quaternary along the way to discovering the primary core in his searches as a youth. In so doing, and in reflecting on his own process, he came to understand his own psychology and that of groups of people, illustrating for him the second level. This totality of experience and understanding informed his use of symbolism and indirect teaching, using elements of the tertiary to create a blended quarternary of outer forms as the primary exercises he gave his students. Unlike all other teachers, he never taught directly, avoiding the use of, as he symboliscally calls them in his writings, “fruit preserves”. This decision has ultimately relegated his teachings to the fringe in academic circles, perfectly demonstrating the tendency, at the group level, to take people and their ideas at face value rather than considering them in any depth, despite the obvious allusions to depth contained in Gurdjieff’s works of art.

So, looping back around, we see the incredible span of G’s art and influences. We return to the question of why he took a minimalist approach to music and a maximalist approach to his writings. There are a few reasons to suppose this happened.

First, and most straightforward, he was minimalist and maximalist based on his own proficiency. He was not a skilled musician, however much he may have understood music, and so the most he could do was composed melodies for de Hartmann to improvise over.

A second practical reason for his minimalism in music relates to his movements. The music forms a background of feeling, focus, and especially rhythmic foundation to accompany the movements. For this reason alone complexity is not particularly useful. Often the rhythm of the hands must match the rhythms of the dancers positions which are necessarily rhyhmically more simple to be accessible to most participants. The harmonies and melodies then need to be just complex enough to create the corresponding feeling of the piece as well as any ideas associated with the symbolism. Additionally, Gurdjieff wanted the music to be simple enough most pianists could play it so that his works could be spread more easily.

However he could have encouraged de Hartmann, who was highly capable, to compose much more complex musical pieces for the pieces that were written for listening only and not to accompany movements, the so-called “concert music”, much of which was published by Schott. Why didnt he? Here, it may have been G’s own musical limitations again at play, or it could have been the influence of minimalistic thinking such as we find in Satie.

In looking at these potential reasons, it seems much more likely that the forms of movements, which are sybmolically extremely complex (as complex as his writings), probably rhythmically constrained the music to be relatively minimalistic and simple. De hartmann, encountering these simple melodies, may have drawn on his knowledge of then-current musical trends such as Bartok and Satie in his harmonization of G’s melodical ideas. In other words, G probably wasn’t being consciously Minimalistic out of a reaction against intellectualism and complexity.

The only hitch is that G did say that what appear to be simple eastern melodies are actually extremely complex in their subtlety. So called minimalism in general is not so much minimalistic as it focuses on complexity at a nanoscopic level of the subtle mastery of volume and other dynamics in the music, many of which are influenced by control over ones inner imaginative and emotional landscape as it effects the nervous system and therefore the instrument being played, as well as conscious control and mastery of motor control of the body in the playing of the instrument. The joints of the body such as the wrist, elbow, shoulder, back, all the way back to the waist, exert a profound influence on the effect of the sounds coming from the instrument and can be consciously trained to that effect. These small differences actually have a large effect on how the music is felt by the listener. Not only is G quoted as speaking about the hidden complexities of “simple” eastern music, but De Hartmann’s favorite exercise apparently was to play one single note and listen very carefully to the differences between notes. This was almost for sure influenced from Gurdjieff.

The reality is that Gurdjieff had a mastery over the very simple and the very complex, but it is likely the minimalism of his music, both for concert and for movements, resulted from practical necessity of rhythm and also deep meditatve attention to subtlety.

On the other side we find his writings to be as complex as Joyce, one of the most towering giants of the 20th century. This goes completely unrecognized in literary circles. The funny thing is that Gurdjieff mostly wrote his masterwork in about 7 years. If one takes account of his “revision” to this work, we can add perhaps another 7 years. In any case, we have him beginning in Jan of 1925, and a relatively finished version by 1932, which was then polished for several years in the thirties. Ultimately it was published in 1950 posthumously after being utilized in private groups for many years. However my point in saying all this is that he wrote his works at a stunning speed considering witing was not his primary life long occupation. James Joyce took 7 years to write Ulysses, at 720 pages, and 17 years to write Finnegans Wake at 688 pages. Joyces total word count for his masterpieces was about 433,000 words at Joycian complexity over a period of about 23 years. Gurdjieff’s total written works probably exceed 500,000 words, written at equal complexity and completed in roughly 10 years, or less than half the time. This can give us a sense of just how massive Gurdjieff’s efforts were when compared with one of the supposed giants of 20th century literature.

And yet he is completely unknown in literary circles.

It seems likely that Gurdjieff maximalism resulted from the breadth of his knowledge and synthesis of the above mentioned influences as instantiated in a storyline spanning so many pages. This also clearly reflects his intellectual competency as heavily predominating over his musical competency.

In the end, we have to say that Gurdjieff dabbled at both ends of the minimalistic and maximalistic spectrum but like many of his Russian cultural predecesors, was fundamentally expansive and wildly syncretic in his activities and thinking and so is much more Maximallistic in nature. The tendency for the lineage traditions of his teaching has been to tend toward the minimalistic simply becuase this is what most practitioners can handle. The result has been to think of Gurdjieff as relatively miniamalistic, emphasizing supposed quotes like “when it rains, the pavement gets wet”, eschewing a deep and thoughtful exploration of his writings, and failing to recognize the complex symbolism of his movements in addition to failing to pass on the full, complex movements forms in many lineages. The movements forms have been transmitted (those that were recorded), but most students today are not trained with an emphasis on learning the full form. As a result, they are unable to knit together the various fragmented aspects of the Movements symbolism which is nearly as complex as Gurdjieff writings. This enables folks to approach movements as an amorphous, “intuitive expeirence” that “cant be put into words”, and essentially fail to increase in understanding of them.

In sum, the minimalism Gurdijeff did enact was primarily due to his own lack of proficiency, the musical needs of Movements forms more so than a Zen Buddhist-like aesthetic emphasis on simplicity and silence. Rather, Gurdjieff was in the world, loud, noisy, a flaming comet trailing endless “noxious” fumes, ringing the town bell at all times of night and cursing in as many languages as possible and with the greatest Maximallism imaginable.

The simplest way to begin making immediate progress with Beelzebub’s Tales is to understand the concept of Objects and Modifiers.

Objects are any person, place, thing, or event.  In an allegory, Objects are symbols which can be interpreted by the reader.  The ability to interpret what any character, place, thing, or event represents accurately amounts to an ability to understand the meaning Gurdjieff wished to transmit.  In general, objects correspond to the grammatical unit of nouns.

Let’s explore examples of Objects.  

First, we have characters.  It is useful to distinguish primary, secondary, and minor characters.  Primary characters are those which are referenced or appear throughout the book regularly: Beelzebub, ENDLESSNESS, Ashiata Shiemash, Hassein, Ahoon fall into this category.  Secondary characters appear as protagonists or antagonists in individual Tales only, and are relatively well defined.  Examples of these include the Angel Looisos, Gornahoor Harharkh, King Konuzion, Belcultassi, Hamolinadir, the priest Abdil, and Markary Kronburkzion to name a few.  Minor characters appear in stories with very little to no description, often not being named, but generally contain peculiarly specific features as to indicate they form some important function within the story.  Examples with the Tales they show up in: the old dotard (Perpetual Motion), Menitkel’s childless Aunt (Four Descent), the Adjutant (Russia), the squeaky-voiced tour guide (France), the fat necked cook (America).

One suggestion of the importance of questioning into the meaning of these characters is that insight into them represents a process of insight into the nature of Self and Other. A related fundamental question is that of “Who am I?” or “What is my true nature?”

Second, places.  These become very important to keep track of when the reader begins to reconfigure them use the book’s modifiers.  Again with places Gurdjieff evokes a sense of different scales.  He speaks of the Universe, galaxies, solar systems, planets, centers of culture, cities, parts of cities, towns, streets, and cafe’s.  In chapter 2, Karatas, Sun Absolute, and Solar System Ors become primary metaphorical places.  In a more cosmically local sense, metaphors such as the comet Kondoor, the satelite Anulios, and various planets in our solar system such as Saturn and Mars become scenes within the narrative.  On the planet Earth, we have Centers of Culture such as Tikliamish, Maralplecie, and Pearl Land.  Cities include Samlios, the City Gob, and France.  The Cafe de la Paix and the Rue des Colonels in the chapter France come to have symbolic meaning.

Modifiers are a series of literary techniques developed by Gurdjieff to indicate in what sense to take a given Object under consideration.  This is particularly useful to understand because the characteristic most obfuscating about Gurdjieff use of metaphor is the fact that his symbolism is dynamic.

Gurdjieff engineered objects in his allegory to intentionally represent different meanings depending on what they are thought of in relation to.  For instance, the most obvious interpretation of the character Beelzebub is that he represents the author Gurdjieff.  This is because he is the mouthpiece through which most of Gurdjieff’s allegory unfolds.  However, his revolt against ENDLESSNESS, described in Chapter 2, when thought about in relation to the description of Djartklom in Chapter 18, The Arch Absurd, causes us to think about him as representing one part of a person revolting and criticizing another part.  That is, in the first interpretation, Beelzebub represents a whole person, while in the second, one part of a person.  This is a shift of meaning indicated by thinking of the character in a different context.

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!

Gurdjieff is famous for his improvisational creativity and the numbers of ideas and forms of practice he generated. It is in part the vast number of ideas, movements, and other paraphanelia in his legacy which give him a certain mystery. They mystery, along with his use of Exoticism, his experience as a magician and stage hypnotist and raconteur, elevated him to the stature in some people’s minds of a incarnate god.

In fact, it would seem, upon examination of many of his works, that a combinatorial play lay at the bottom of his creativity. One finds in many stories in his book Beelzebub’s Tales, for instance, a repetition of elements which indicate the recombination of a relatively small number of elements. Many of his movements appear to be highly patterned, with the group of often six dancers moving through multiplication series and other group patterns. How, why, and to what end is a long discussion, but for the purposes of this post we may simply say that a combinatorial process lurks behind these patterns seen in the primary works left behind as part of his legacy.

Gurdjieff is particularly well known for the emblem of his school, the enneagram. Although much has been made of the ancient origins of the enneagram, with references to Athanasius Kircher, Raymon Lull, Pythagorus, and supposed Sufi schools, nonethless I have seen no evidence for the existence of the enneagram prior to Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff himself appears to have said almost nothing about the symbol or its importance in his system other than to describe an octave of transformation of various “foods” through the three centers of body (food), emotion (air), and mind (impressions). The food diagram that resulted is a sufficiently precise bit of pseudo-science to provoke a kind of gullible respect from those emotionally invested in his teaching at the same time they fail to justify its importance through any examples of its practical value. In any case, Gurdjieff himself said almost nothing of the enneagram despite making it the emblem of his School.

Gurdjieff did, however, make comments about symbolism, theosophical addition, and other mathematically related topics that, along with the patterned nature of his writings and movements, allow us to infer how he used the enneagram and its importance to him.

The first use of the enneagram was as a point of contemplation. In contemplating the enneagram, the view naturally begins to associate its circle, triangle, hexagram, points and lines metaphorically with whatever ideas or thoughts are present at the time. Gurdjieff seems likely to have hit upon prevalent esoteric ideas of his time which associated geometric forms with various philosphical ideas, a long tradition in the Western world, some of whose proponents we mentioned above. Philosophically, Gurdjieff seemed to associate the circle with time, the triangle with unity and multiplicty, and the hexagram with process. But at a more practical, human level, Gurdjieff applied the movement around the circle (through an “octave”) to the successful completion of a thread of attention as part of accomplishing an aim. The triangle, in representing the three centers, then came to relate to the completion of an aim as involving the participation of the whole person. The philosphical and practical modes of Gurdjieff’s use of the enneagram became the theoretical foundations for his thought and teaching.

This thought and teaching, which consisted of harmonizing the three centers through a process in time to maintain attention on an aim despite obstacles, and resulted in a movement from fragmentation to unity, then naturally led to a search for practical solutions. This gave rise to his development of practices based on these principles, and his second use of the enneagram as a combinatorial generator to develop attention exercises.

Part of Gurdjieff’s early teaching describes the need for alarm clocks: the idea that the human nervous system, constantly seeking equilibrium, requires shocks to “stay awake.” The moment a pattern has been perceived and fully cognized by the system, a portion of the mind goes back onto a kind of default mode of detached association, while some other part auomatically continues to perform the outward function being required. Thus, most humans learn how to drive a car, learn a particular trade or job, and finally, after years of gradually falling asleep while still outwardly performing their functions, ultimately die while still appearing alive inside the accumulated habits of their life pattern. For Gurdjieff, switching things up, changing circumstances constantly, producing shocks, became a means of insuring the continuity of a living force inside a human being. The need to constantly invent “alarm clocks” and wind them up became the task of a teacher or a group working together for the aim of his teaching.

No surprise then, we see Gurdjieff creating many methods. Primary among these seem to have been histrionic emotional scenes, hard physical labor or lack of sleep, and counting exercises.

The counting exercises are especially helpful in understanding the relationship between number, attention exercise, and the enneagram in the formation of his practices. Orage, who led groups in New York which Gurdjieff shattered in one of his emotional tirades, and who eventually Gurdjieff forced away from himself through his treatment of his new wife Jesse, left a very useful record of some of “psychological exercises”. Although many of these are of his own creation, he was clearly influenced by Gurdjieff, and one can see how they are essentially the “alarm clocks” Gurdjieff spoke of. Additionally, we know from records of the early Prieure period (1922-1933) Gurdjieff had his students performed counting exercises while doing physical labor. Counting exercises remain a part of many Gurdjieff groups to this day.

Counting exercises then show up determining patterns in the Gurdjieff Movements and Sittings. In sittings, there are cycles of sensation wherein the limbs are sensed in canon. This is precisely the exercise of counting 1-2-3-4, 2-3-4-1, 3-4-1-2, 4-1-2-3 except with each number applied to a limb of the body. The mind tends to wander within a few seconds, and the limiting of the count to a four count cycle which is reformulated at the end of the cycle, prevents the mind from wandering precisely at the point it normally would. Here we are reminded of the overaching theory of his teaching that the attention has diffulty attending to a process for a sufficiently lengthy enough period of time.

Another example, also of canon, from the Movements: a line of five dancers are formed. Each dancer must hop up into the air in place, and, upon landing, assume a full body posture. There are six postures in all. Rather than simply a canon, this count goes up and back down, varying the total number from four to five to six, then back to five, and four again. At the same time, the count, beginning again, starts over at the next file in the row. Since there are only five files (dancers), and because the count may either be to a number greater than five, or may begin from files 3-5, thereby causing the number to pass beyond the last dancer, it must skip back to the first file, who acts as the next number in the sequence. In each case, the individual dancer must visualize the entire row’s sequence to derive the moment they must hop and take the next position.

The example above is the application of a number sequence to a group of dancers such that each dancer maintains a continuity of awareness onto the group as a whole. The Movements also contain series of postures taken individually in which the dancer must visualize their total personal sequence, deriving the posture of any given moment from an awareness of the total sequence in time. This develops awareness of the total process one is engaging in personally. The combination of awareness of one’s personal process as well as the group’s process is certainly one of the more advance aspects of the Movements.

We can see in the Movements and Sittings the presence of patterns of number used to corral the mind which tends to default into a kind of wandering state the moment a pattern is recognized enough for the body to perform the task by itself without consciousness. In each case, there is a precise and intionanal focusing of the attention onto a particular area of experience. We have poined out a few: sensation of the limbs, awareness of the group, awareness of one’s momentary task or process in time.

What has been much less recognized is the use of and intention behind pattern as we find it in the Tales. To begin with, the anti-intellectualism suffusing Gurdjieffian culture, along with a dogmatic belief system in the Tales ineffability, has caused many, if not most, to fail to notice that there are in fact patterns in Gurdjieff’s writings. Any patterns which are found by one brave thinker, rather than being recognized as attention exercises like in the Movements or Sittings, are generally frowned upon by others. Further, most of these “Brave thinkers” are themselves only the types of people who delight in pattern-seeking esoterica of the sort that prevents them from accurately intuiting the deeper wisdom contained enfolded within the symbolism. In fact, each pattern its itself a momentary phase in a sequential unfolding series of configurations just as in the Movements. Its as though, when a pattern in the Tales is found, one had found one of the multiplications in the Movements, but did not realize that it was in fact one in a series. Beyond, there lay, unbeknownst to us, a complete cycle of such configurations forming a large attention exercise.

Just as in the Movements and Sittings, the purpose is not the pattern itself, but its ability to act as an “alarm clock”, that is, a way of temporarily galvanizing a quantity of attention, which may then be directed upon some area of experience so as to develop insight into the nature of one or another aspect of reality. So in the Tales, we find words evoking images which may themselves mean a number of different things. Gurdjieff developed a number of indicators, which he at one time called “indications of relativity”, which alternate which meaning must be applied to the given word. As a result, the reader must always consciously bear in mind which particular meaning they are ascribing to the word. This goes completely against the common tendency to associate subjectively and uncocnsciouly and fail to understand the meanings placed into a word by onself and other people. There are a great many other examples from the texts, with specific intent with regard to where consciousness is being on the one hand directed, and, on the other hand, made continuous despite shifting contexts.

The point in all of these examples is the use of number to generate novelty. Gurdjieff began with simple number patterns done inwardly to occupy the mind while some other task was performed, and gradually shifted to developing more sophisticated applications, ascribing numbers to limbs, energetic centers, feelings, thoughts and ideas, among others. Above all these practices hovers Gurdjieff’s singular emblem, the enneagram, silently communicating their origins.

It would be foolish to try to cram all of Gurdjieff’s exercises inside of the enneagram, and that would be to miss the point. Rather, Gurdjieff took inspiration from the Enneagram, but was never confined to any limitations. For instance, the pattern of a canon, found commonly in his Movements or early counting exercises, is not specifically enneagramatic. Movements like the Great Prayer contain measures which constantly vary anywhere from 2 to 7 or 8 beats in a measure.

Here we find in reality one of the great secrets of Gurdjieff’s genius: the enneagram as conceptual tool. People wondered their entire lives how he kept coming up with so many novel forms, but any amount of time working with ideas and the enneagram quickly reveals its ability to spin out new permutations from previously existing material. In the Tales, the creation of new phenomena from already existing phenomena is one of the favorites hobbies of a character who from one perspective represents Gurdjieff himself (see Ch 4: Law of Falling; here I refer to Saint Venoma).

Ironically, Gurdjieff is not unique in this respect. As alluded to above, he is one in a line of Western esotercists who used math and combination for the purpose of creativity. Ryamon Lull, who famously predated computation and combinatorics, had his Ars Magna:

The Art was intended as a debating tool for winning Muslims to the Christian faith through logic and reason. Through his detailed analytical efforts, Llull built an in-depth theosophic reference by which a reader could enter any argument or question (necessarily reduced to Christian beliefs, which Llull identified as being held in common with other monotheistic religions). The reader then used visual aids and a book of charts to combine various ideas, generating statements which came together to form an answer.

Wikipeda

Following in Lull’s footsteps was Anathasius Kircher:

The Arca Musarithmica (also Arca Musurgia or Musical Ark) is an information device that was invented by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century. Its purpose was to enable non musicians to compose church music. Through simple combinatoric techniques it is capable of producing millions of pieces of 4-part polyphonic music. Like other calculating aids of the period, the Arca prefigures modern computing technology. It is among the earliest examples of “Artificial Creativity”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arca_Musarithmica

We can see the amazing amount of music which could be created through the Arca Musarithmica which is only “articial creativity.” If one did not know a person was using a machine to produce the music, one might be tempted, as humans with an already-available belief system are want, to ascribe other-wordly origins to that music, saying the person “channelled it”, etc.

Lull, who predated Kircher, apparently took his inspiration from the Arabs, and a device they had called a “Zairja”:

A zairja (Arabic: زايرجة‎; also transcribed as zairjah, zairajah, zairdja, zairadja, and zayirga) was a device used by medieval Arab astrologers to generate ideas by mechanical means.
Ibn Khaldun described zairja as: “a branch of the science of letter magic, practiced among the authorities on letter magic, is the technique of finding out answers from questions by means of connections existing between the letters of the expressions used in the question. They imagine that these connections can form the basis for knowing the future happenings they want to know.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zairja

So we see that combinatorial devices, typically containing a geometric component in which a group of points may be variously connected by means of lines, have been used for centuries. The use in each case was unique to the purpose of the individual employing it. For the arabs, to predict the future in the heavens, for Lull, to debate the Arbas into becoming Christian, for Kircher, to produce church music, and for Gurdjieff, to create meditation exercises for the three centers as part of his overall theoretical framework.

It is no surprise a device like the enneagram might be co-opted for use by others. The now famous Enneagram typology system has become ubiquitous. It began when Oscar Ichazo placing the seven deadly sins around the enneagram circle, and, finding himself two short (the enneagram has nine points, i.e. “ennea” means nine) invented two additional “sins.” He used this is a kind of typology, saying humans have a tendency toward one or another sin. His student, Claudio Naranjo, a psychologist, then simply filled in these types with the most relevant psycholigical data from the DSM IV that corresponded to each. The resulting types had both a moral dimension which stemmed from the religious influence of the sins and a psychological dimension resulting from the DSM IV. Claudio’s students, among others, went on to fine tune and polish these descriptions, ultimately packaging them up into portable self-help volumes written in accessible language, selling hundreds of thousands of books.

There is no doubt as to the usefulness of the enneagram typologies. They are highly descriptive with great explanatory power, since most people will in some way demonstrate the motivational and behavior patterns found there. The typology system of the enneagram types demonstrates the ability for a geometrical symbol to compress knowledge to a surprising degree and proves that theoretical frameworks can form an incredibly powereful basis for developing practical modalities. One wonders what would result from a typology system based on a different geometrical symbol, or one which combined, rather than Christianity teachings on sin, Gurdjieffian ideas about personal evolution, and psychology, a different concatenation. For instance, what if instead of the Christian sins, a moral framework from Buddhism had been inserted? Would the resultant mixture have been any less useful, given a few decades and the lifelong blood and sweat of individuals to turn out all its implications?

Turning now back to Gurdjieff, we have a more grounded understanding of his genius. Though genius he was, he was neverthless no superhuman. It is precisely the belief system of most Gurdjieffians in his power to “channel” or influence the subconscious in a mysterious way using archetype (and here they are inserting Jungian ideas developed by Joseph Campbel post hoc), coupled with the typical human cognitive bias of simple attribution which allows them to see Gurdjieff’s “articificial creativity” as somehow indicative of him being superhuman. In reality, along every other metric, he was completely normal. A genius, but normal. He got fat, developed diabetis, and died the same as everyone else.

Finally, we see that the enneagram, which lay behind the prolific output of Gurdjieff as a generator of ideas, lay also behind the generation of unique number patterns in the service of creating an “alarm clock” for the various parts of a human being. This understanding allows us to take another look at Gurdjieff’s legacy of practices to intuit their real intent. Rather than performing Movements without understanding, we may see that they generate awareness in a quite practical way. Similarly, the Tales, completely misunderstood and nearly forgotten, have a practical intent and purpose. We are then in a position to use the practices to their fullest extent possible.

Time to dust off the old space Occasion and take it for a ride, all-centers-balanced.

Red herrings in the Tales are intended to delay a premature conclusion about a many-sided idea. The final thought which is to be conveyed has been broken into its constituent pieces much like in a mystery novel. Each piece is embedded in an adjacent, related line of thought. These secondary lines are themselves configured in such a way as to be mutually depenant, or mutually completing. Thus, the pieces of the primary idea are connected only by means of holding relevant context. The process ensures that when things “click”, the idea is perceived accurately, with consciousness of unspoken background. The deployment of ideas in this way ensures a proper perception in the final analysis.

The typical idea has been that the barrier to understand things in the Tales is meant for it to bypass the “formatory apparatus” and go directly into the subconscious, where Conscience is ostensibly buried. This is nothing other than fancy, pretzel-twisting justification of ignorance. In reality, Gurdjieff harped on the mathematical exactitude of ideas in Objective Art. They were so exact, ordinary language couldn’t hold them. As a result, he invented an exact language which could organize thought in a new way.

The idea of the Tales and the unconscious manner of imbibing is the result of a collective dreaming process which unconsciously patches together partial ideas from Gurdjieff’s writings, Ouspensky’s version of the Work, Joseph Campbell, and others. Gurdjieff made statements about the unconscious in his Preface, included a short passage about bards and myths in Meetings with Remarkable Men, and thats about it. Ouspenky recorded him as saying more about the use of myth to convey Symbols to the Higher Intellectual.

The first problem is that Ouspensky hadn’t fully understood Gurdjieff, but simply tried to record what he had said. He inadvertently imparted a form of abstraction, and high sounding intellectualism. This is not to say Gurdjieff was not abstract, high-sounding, or intellectual himself. However, it can be seen when reviewing Ouspenkies works although he grasped the concepts Gurdjieff gave he had not actually seen it in practice. This more than anything imparts a removed flavor to his verision, even though it is relatively accurate. In fact, it is amazing Ouspenky grasped as much as he did in the few years he worked with Gurdjieff. In the end, it is significant that Ouspensky never read Beelzebub’s Tales, which demonstrates everything he taught in his early groups in Russia to Ouspensky and others. Therefore Ouspensky forms a very important and useful record, but contains unuseful connotations. This is proven by the fact Gurdjieffians in general view the Higher Centers, Myth, Unity and Multiplicity, as so far away that these never enter into their personal Work.

The abstract idea that myths trasnmit knowledge to higher centers is something Gurdjieffians found very interesting. So interesting, in fact, they joined Gurdjieff groups. However, there was always a tension between the emphasis on the practical and the theoretical. Groupd leaders could too easily be embarrased if asked directly if they had a “higher being body”. A kind of war of attrition between the ideas of the work and the emphasis on practicality gradually led to the setting aside of the more rarified ideas associated with profound states of Awakening. Awakening came to be more of a kind of psychological awakening to one’s inadequacies, over-reactions, or partial shift of state during retreats. But the tension has always remained there, and Gurdjieff’s text, as well as others like that of Ouspensky, hover above the Work like spectres, an embarrasment when explaining the Work to people of other traditions or simply outside the Work.

The result of this kind of tension was a tendency to seize on anything that might justify these absurd beliefs. As implied in this article, these beliefs are not actually quite so absurd when one actually seems them in practice in Gurdjieff’s written exercises. However, when Joseph Campbell started to turn CJ Jung’s work on the mythology and the Collective Unconscious into forms digestible by average people, Gurdjieffians immediately seized on this as an opportunity to justify these strange Work ideas about higher centers, the unconscious, and Gurdjieff’s monstrous mythology in the Tales. The Tales was just like the traditional myths of many of the ancient cultures: it transmitted something to a deeper part of ourselves. Archetypal images deep in the subconscious responded, whether we knew it or not (for they were unconscious) to the material. We just have to “get out of the way” to let these influences enter. The shift from execises requiring extremely active attention to something passive curiously dances around any kind of rigorous reality testing. Anyone questioning this set of assumptions could simply be scapeogated as “trying to figure it out” too much, “being in their head”, etc.

In reality, we have hear a conflation of ignorance, one of the three Buddhist poisions, and true not knowing. Not knowing, in its real form, allows a person to learn new information, because they are always able to become a beginner. To use the ancient Indian metaphor, if a rope hanging from a tree looks like a snake such that the mind can believe it is, they are open to changing to thinking of the rope as a rope. Ignorance is the state of adhering to a point of view which is false: that the rope is a snake. It is the fact that the mind can form representations of reality which are false, and then become attached to those views, and then subsequently fight with others over those views, which caused spiritual traditions to warn about the mind. Not knowing allows all information in, and is able to amend itself with new views. This necessarily requires thinking. The thought that the rope is a snake must be replaced with a new thought: that the rope is a rope. The issue is not that thinking is present per se, but that thought may be misinformed. In the case of the snake and the rope, it may be afraid of something. In reality, the rope can be used to climb the tree to get away from some other wild animal. It leads to safety and away from fear rather than being something to fear sa a danger to one’s safety. Not knowing includes; ignorance excludes. Not knowing integrates; ignorance disintegrates.

The deficiency in the metaphor of the rope and snake lies in the fact that many ideas about reality are interdependent with others. Most aspects of reality which inform our decision making are based on extremely complicated interactions between categories of knowledge. Beelzebub’s Tales contends with ideas which are many-sided, as reality itself is. Gurdjieff, in struggling to convey his understanding, realized in using language that it stimulated other ideas and presuppositions in his students. Ultimately he decided to create an Exact Language in an attempt to convey a wholeness of thought never previously seen. The red herrings and absurdities are not to completely box out the analytical mind in favor of a subconsicous mind, but a delaying of premature conclusions to ensure proper and mature perception of a complicated idea or truth. What we see in the Work’s perception of Beelzebub’s Tales is precisely the kind of premature conclusion he was avoiding. In fact, we can see that Beelzebub’s Tales demonstrates this, using so-called students of the Work as unconscious, robotic demonstrators of precisely these principles.

People’s involvement with the Tales can be divided into a series of categories. For illustrative purposes, I break these up into ‘reader’. ‘student’, ‘practitioner’, ‘teacher.’

There is one type of “reader” who is exposed to the book temporarily or by the way. If the reader does not generally dabble in western esotericism they will find it as a kind of striking curiosity, or, more likely, reject it as out and out nonsense. For intsance, a person interested in philosphy and spirituality generally will at some point happen upon Gurdjieff’s name mentioned somewhere in some other context. If, however the reader is specifically interested in esoteric topics, particularly with a historical interest in early 20th century esotericism, they will have a vaguely positive stance toward the book, if not with any kind of apriori belief in its truth or falseness. Gurdjieff has a kind of legendary reputation within occult circles, though for most he is just one in a cast of characters from the time period, and doesn’t generate enough interest to actually buy and read his writings.

Then there are readers who are exposed to Gurdjieff’s writings regularly. These are folks in Gurdjieff Groups. Here again, there is a somewhat polarizing effect. Many in Gurdjieff groups have a kind of blank attitude toward the writings. The writings come up intermittently but are not a central object of attention for Work for most groups. Long time Gurdjieffians may tout the book, referring to this or that statement of Orage. Gurdjieff’s first generation pupils almost to a person emphasize the centrality of Beelzebub’s Tales, and many spent long years either working on what they considered a useful revision, as in the case of Jeanne De Salzmann, or starting publishing house to continue printing of the original, as in the case of Annie Lou Stavely, or, utilizing their group members like a colony of ants, compile a lengthy and involved compendium of dictionary terms, as with Willem Nyland. These teachers typically left group leaders behind who continue to read the book and to expose their pupils to it without understanding. Tyipcally, they have a series of mental content from the Oral Tradition which they understand to be the Work or the Gurdjieff Tradition by which they measure the Tales content. When something in the Tales seems to correspond to something in that mental conent, they seize upon it. Archangel Hariton’s system represents the Work idea that “anything can be useful for Work on myself.” When something in the Tales lands absolutely nowhere in this field of previous knowledge, these folks typically shrug and gloss over it, offer a lame excuse of some kind, or, if one of their students shows enough common sense to try to sort out what it might mean, they resort to the idea that the Tales is not for the “little mind” but is destined for some deeper, unconscious mind. This fickle and dishonest flitting from the notion that a metaphor can have an idea accurately applied to the idea one cannot apply any idea and that is the point is part and parcel of the so-called Oral Tradition of the Gurdjieff Work. Other members of Work groups find the Tales distasteful, especially many women, and generally hold their tongue and “wait it out” respectfully. Still other members of groups just kind of sniff at it and ignore it, waiting for someone else to take the lead, if lead they take. Usually there will be at least one member interested in esoteric topics generally, who finds things such as Gurdjieff’s “korkaptilnian thought tapes” correspond with the Akashic Records they have read about, or his angels and demons corresponds with their belief in angels, or that, like Edgar Cayce, Gurdjieff “channeled” knowledge, even of the future, he could not have known about. They take everything in positively. In general there is either a positive inclincation to affirm where things seem obvious or connect to the known, ignore when incomprehnsible, hold one’s tongue when offended, or simply remain blank. In all cases, these are “readers” or “listeners”, but not actual students of the book.

A student of the book, while not necessarily much better than the reader category, is a person who takes some level of personal interest in actually exploring something in the text. Nothing practical will come of simply studying the book because the exercises, which actually transform some cognitive toolkit present as a function in the brain, in a way similar to work with Meditation and Affirmations, are not yet discovered. However, they are in a phase of “preparation” with gurdjieff’s system of Symbolism. Gurdjieff was recorded by Ouspenksy as saying preparation was needed to understand Symbolism used to transmit objective conscioussness unit and multiplicity. The student is precisely someone in this phase. There will be no personal transformation, but they are undergoing a preparation to receive.

This phase, that of being a student, particularly throws people off. In our fast paced, consumeritic and business oriented world, people are taught for look for streamlined, efficient processes. Advertisers focus on carefully structure “Why” to inform buyers pricesely what they are going to get out of something. This has invaded spirituality also. While practicalism is important, it isn’t particularly helpful if a process has multiple epi-cycles as part of the overall journey. Anything with great depth has many side avenues which must be explored prior to assimilating them into a larger, more meaningful pattern. One can never foresee the end of a truly deep practice. The idea that one can “know” beforehand what the end of a process will be implies that, in some sense, the end of that process is already present in their cognition. For something truly new to enter, it must in fact be something completely unknown, baffling, and incongruent with the present pattern of perceptions, feelings, and sensations. The loss of attending to the unknown, the mysterious, and the esoteric is the cheapening of things generally.

Those within the Gurdjieff Work who do not become students of Beelzebub’s Tales through an entrenched anti-intellectualism regard the phase of Studenthood as empty intellectual practice. This is accurate in the sense that the process of preparation itself probably produces no visible results. This is wrongheaded for several reasons. First, they fail to recognize the invisible results. Just the act of attending to something outside of the box, despite the admonitions of traditionalists who believe the book is channeling something into the unconscious, is already preparing the students individuality, developing their persistence, and in general demonstrating their Wish to know. And any way, didnt Gurdjieff say not to expect results? That a great deal of preparation first was required? It is ironic precisely those unconcerned with results become extremely “practical” the moment an effort is required of them with regards to Gurdjieff’s writings. All the same, they continue to engage in Tasks derived from the Oral Tradition which are considered practical despite their affirmation they will not produce results. Second, they fail to see the longer view of how the preparation relates to future exercises. Just as in Hatha Yoga, it is wrong to immediately take complex or extreme postures without preliminary work on simpler ones, in the Tales there is are many preparatory characteristics required in the student before they may become a practitioner. Some of these, such as individuality, persistence, thoughtfulness, Wish, self-learning we have described, but there are others.

The phase of Student is potentially long and tedious. For most, there is little or no guidance, or, more commonly, precisely the wrong guidance is given in the books they read or in the culture surround Gurdjieff’s writings in the groups of which they are a part. For this reason, longstanding relationship with the book is rare. Most communities contain one or two idividuals reputed to be serious students of the Tales. In most cases, these individuals take the book literally, connect it with Moonshine from other esoteric lore, and in general are extremely poor represntations of the Tales possibilities.

The real purpose of the Student phase is to spend time forming the Postures and Gestures of the Tales. In a Movements class, time is spent without music taking the arms, or the legs, or the entire body position sequence, giving the dancer a chance to cognize what is being asked of them prior to taking it at speed with the piano music. Taking the positions in time with the music is the real exercise. In precisely the same way, it takes time for a student to collect all of the various pieces of the general puzzle in Beelzebub’s Tales. Only when much of the material is present in the cognizance of the Student are the proper allusions present in the reading of any given sentence. The result, ultimately, is that the Student begins to sense, feel, and understand the exercise present in the passage under observation. At this point, the Tales may be read at full speed and the exercise thus engaged. The Student is now a Practitioner.

And what we can say of a Practitioner or Teacher? Generally, a teacher is just someone who has done enough work with exercises to be able to help others form the postures and positions necessary to carry the Work out. Just as a cabinet maker must understand the phases necessary to build cabinets prior to teaching a class on cabinet making, a Movements demonstrator or Tales teacher must have actually engaged in the exercises of their “trade” enough to understand how it is put together. They must break it down into cognizable steps and understand how to help bring it up to speed. With the Tales, there is the added difficulty that thye must understand also the process of transitino from general public to readership, and from readership to actual Studenthood. In actuality, there is a distinction between Leadership and Teachership here. The act from Leading the Work, that is, definiing the Work in the present cultural moment of one’s society, means not only having carred out the practices of the tradition, but understanding them within the larger context of the world. From that understanding, a Work Leader can position the Work to be of use to other traditions or to augment the Work with the offerings present in the world in which they live. Certainly the neurological understands of the early 21st century and the explosion of research on meditation is relevant to Work sittings. The deep mystical experience teachings of other spiritual teachers should be taken into account as well. There is no reason to assume the Work is reality, but rather is a path to reality, a tool used a means which should be updated with the Times. Therfore a Work Leader must subsume all previous roles and have the wisdom to see how they interrelate.

A Teacher, on the other hand, need only understand the practices themselves and transmit them. The word transmit is rather lofty. In reality, a Teacher is someone who helps the Student learn how to form the Postures and Positions of the Sittings, Moveemnts, or Tales so they may become a Practitioner, and assits in creating an environment where Practitioner’s may continue to Work. If in the process they find they must creatively amend the way things are done for the benefit of their fellow practitioenrs or students, they naturally slide into the position of a Leader. As one can see, there is a natural flow along this continuum, the buildup of energy and insight from one phase leading organically to the next. It is only when a person prefers to ignore the problems and dilemmas of one phases, contenting themselves to circular perambulations at a given level, that they cease evolving to the next. In some cases, this is from a lack of integrity within the personality structure of the person, a failure of personal strength, and in others the misinformation of the active Leadership, who rather than being a true Leadership, really engages in protecting their own shortcomings along the path. One can see this in the cases where Leaders did not understand Beelzebub’s Tales and instead seized upon the idea it was for the subconscious at the expense of recognizes all the places where intentional thinking was required.

The small present moment is a tunnel vision view in which we only see what is right in front of us. This is related to bad habits and instant gratification, simpy appeasing the bill collector when they are knocking. The larger view brings in examining past experience to produce wisdom about acting in the future. Here, we see what is currently happening in its relationship to how it is preparing future present moments. We set money aside for the bill collector and never have to wince at the sound of them banging on the door.

So how to understand this in the context of the “present moment” touted in spiritual circles? The view that we should live in the present is a justifiable center of gravity for a life philosphy since human beings spend so much time dwelling in regret about the past, rehashing a conversation where one could have inserted the perfect quip to disarm an opponent, or in anxiety of the future, fearing whether people will admire one’s makeup and skirt at the gathering. Setting up contexts in which all worries may be eschewed in exchange for the simpicity of only drinking a cup of tea or walking through a forest forms an important balance to the heroin-like addiction of daily life anxieties.

The real issue comes when it is time to bring whatever equanimity was garnered in solitude, whether in retreat or in an early morning preparation, into daily life requirements of 21st century living. Threading being back into the fabric of life is akin to passing a camel through the eye of a needle for most. It is preceisely here that Gurdjieff’s philosphical system and being-practices are uniquely calibrated to help.

There is a larger present moment than the pseudo present moment of enjoying a beach vacation. The happiness of a trip to some sunny island has all the longevity of a soap bubble. A kind of false equivalence between various forms of exercise and meditation (running is my meditation) or between vacations afforded only to first world citizens exploiting the differences of exchange rate, inhabiting a mansion in a sunny resort when they can hardly afford a bungalow in their own country. These temporary experiences are not the nature of reality, and the basic happiness afforded through a connection to genuine reality.

In other words, for many, being in the moment really equates to one or another consumerist hobby. Of course one feels good after a vacation, or at least thinks one was happy while there (remembering self versus experiencing self). The instant back in life, however, they are back to being late on a job, resorting to blaming someone else for it, and so the web of lies and anxiety grows. In other words, the temporary reductino of mental activity made possible through retreats, while healthy, does not lead to genuine self-actualization and full human maturity.

The real question is how can one’s life responsbiilites themselves elicit the same being and sense of presence as activities sepcifically engaged in to move away from those responsibilities? This is where the larger present moment comes in.

There is a small present moment. This is the moment of a child. It becomes possible when engaing in activites which are simple enough in their composition that very little overhead and consideration is required to carry them out. As a result, the mind becomes less active, energy can settle, and one can freely flow from one thing to the next. This feels veyr freeing because ones natural instincts and impusles are allowed to simply flow out without any conscious mediation. It is the meditating of our moement to moment impusles and feelings which causes most of our pent up stress. This is why dogs seem so happy. There is no delay between their physical impulse or emotion and the action they take. Everything manifestation is in complete accord with their nervous system, with no break in the free flow of energy in and out of the system.

But humans, uniquely, live in time. As a result, humans have accumulated abundance in the form of stockpiles of goods. We thought in time and created crops. We learned to grow different types of crops through time thinking. We grew the poppy. The poppy, however, is addictive even though it gives a short term benefit. Due to this abundance we now see that we have powerful concentrations of highly addictive substances, pulling us into shrot term benefit cycles with long term detractions. These addiction cycles have the character of bad habits

good and bad habits. Good habits feel bad now, but are good overall and in long term. Bad habits feel good now but are bad overall and in long term. So our good habits agriculturally produce, in another sphere of life, bad habits, addictions, etc for others. This is the small present moment gone awry. If we truly corral our attention to the samll present moment, we d onot think of the consequences. Why select a displeasurable experience over a pleasurable experience in the present moment? There is no reason to.

Therefore in human life we can see that we need to think in time. Wisdom is produced by seeing the full circle, the full round of implications for a given activity. This is going beyond the small present moment and seeing every action in terms of the whole. The enneagram speaks brilliantly to this in the Gurdjieff work. Thinking in Time is the inevitable result of suffering the consequences of living in the small present moment which inevitably leads to hardship.

But there is a larger present moment. The larger present moment is seeing that Time itself, in the way we actually see and experience it, lies in the present. Our memory of the past is a present moment projection of the mind, and so is the projection of the future. All of these are present moment imagery perceived in the mind, with consequneces in our nervous system in its present physical states. In ones mind, one is in the past, ut in reality, there is simply a movie screen playing right now, and a set of reactions to that movie screen playing underneath. The realization that the mind can be watched and attended to as an object itself is an important stage in spiritual maturity. Learning to turn on and off the movie screen, or to play useful movies when they are needed is part of the training of the mind.

Octaves: Gurdjieff used the metaphor of musical octaves. This is helpful because we see that there is a holographic aspect to our thinking on these subjects. In octaves, we see recurrent notes that occur on different levels. Do plays again, but in a different octave. In ideas, we see a way in which similar concepts “rhyme”, although they dont exactly repeat.

In the case of the small present (false timeless)–>Time–> Larger Present (true timeless), we find this pattern. There is often an ignorance of practical realties in the spiritual person who believes they will find real Presence in pursuit of pleasurable temoprary experiences. This type of person will never be able to integrate this into their daily life. The development of wisdom in Time itself leads one inevtiably to the knowledge that the past and future are equally unknow. More and more one can focus one’s energies on what is actually known about the past and the future, which is to say, not as much as previously supposed, while letting go of what cannot be known in a way that is effective. The contemplation of one’s own perceptions of time in practical activities leads onto a larger unknown, what I have called the Larger Present. Gradually one realizes most of what oneself and others speak about does not in fact exist, or at the very least is subsumed in some vast picture far beyond the reach of human cognition.

This method is particularly powerfully integrative. Oddly, at the smae time one becomes highly effective practically, one’s deep contemplation of daily life activities leads one to the conclusion there is no Time. It is simply a present moment set of imagery which be utilized or not utilized as a mode of Being. The Time function of the mind is another piece of information to be used or not as needed. Time perceptions may form or not form in a given moment, but they are felt for what they are: just whisps of mental imagery forming and dissipating.

The fact that the timeless arises out of working deeply with activities in Time means the it has deeply woven itself into every aspect of ones life. This avoids the tragedy seen when meditators go into deep states which render them almost useless in any other setting than as obelisks of purity for lay people to go to for a bit of soothing from time to time. The division into the clergy and the laity forms a nearly insuperable barrier in most existing traditions, and the clergies Being, quite real and direct, nonethless remains context dependant and hardly manifests in any truly banal circumstances.

But in any case, these type of people will never help the general population reach a higher level. Rather, the culture itself, in its education system, in its art, in every sphere of activity, must gradually evolve as a totality, and this can only happen if the products of that culture partake in the socieities collective realizatino of larger time. Moreover, the structure of the society must take into account the process of awakening of individual human beings.