George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949)
Master Magician of Harmonious Development
Gurdjieff was born in Armenia to a Greek/Armenian family, his father being a well-known local bard or storyteller, part of an ancient tradition that Gurdjieff continued in his own fashion. Gurdjieff was a lifelong adventurer, travelling throughout central Asia to discover long-forgotten methods of human transformation. Along the way he became at various times a successful hypnotist, healer, and (for want of a better term) psychologist at a time when that art was still in its infancy. Through his association with what he claimed were "forbidden" monasteries and hidden Sufi teaching centers, with a substantial dose of Theosophy and other occult practices, he eventually became a master of esotericism, sacred dance and music.
Like his contemporary Helena Blavatsky he would often be accused of charlatanism, a reputation he did nothing to prevent, as he saw it as helping to separate the wheat from the chaff among potential students. Though he was probably influenced by Blavatksy and other leaders of the occult fads that were rife among the intelligentsia of pre-Revolutionary Russia, he was too strong a personality to remain an imitator for long, and soon blazed his own path.
He began teaching small groups in Moscow before the Russian Revolution, then escaped with a few devotees through the Caucasus region to Constantinople; later he established a teaching center near Paris called the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in which over a hundred students lived and worked. In 1924, after a serious auto accident, he closed the center and began writing his major works including the hefty and difficult tome popularly known as Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (more accurately, All and Everything, First Series). This book, consisting of over 1200 pages of difficult prose, contains a highly mythologized and allegorized history of the earth and of human civilization's degeneration and fall into delusion, occasionally punctuated by brief visits by messengers from above -- conscious adepts and masters who attempt to awaken mankind to its real plight.
He attracted a small circle of students mainly from the literary and artistic classes and continued to lecture and arrange public demonstrations of his sacred dances all through the German Occupation and until his death in 1949. Gurdjieff visited the U.S. on several occasions, establishing satellite groups in New York City and elsewhere. His influence has extended to this day in many and varied forms, and numerous "schools" or work centers exist attempting to continue his teaching with variable success.
Basic Teachings
Three Centers
Gurdjieff spoke of humans as "three-brained" beings, possessing three separate "centers" -- the physical, emotional, and intellectual centers. In most modern people, these three centers work at odds with each other, disharmoniously, interfering with the individual's possibilities for higher development. For instance, someone may want to alter a particular emotion or habit of thought but find that bodily posture and habits work against it; to alter the inner state requires altering the outer state also (in the Golden Dawn, this is a role fulfilled by ritual.) Each center has its own "food," from ordinary material food on the lowest level on up to subtle perceptions, myth and symbolism which feed our higher centers. Gurdjieff's emphasis was on the whole-being transformation of humans: mental, emotional, and physical -- all three centers working harmoniously in unison.
Three Ways
Gurdjieff described three traditional methods or streams of self development, each one addressed to a different "center" in an individual following it:
1. "The Way of the Fakir" -- Emphasizing physical action, as in most forms of yoga and martial arts.
2. "The Way of the Monk" -- Emphasizing emotional life and devotion, as in popular religious sects.
3. "The Way of the Yogi" -- Emphasizing the development of the mind and intellectual capacities, as in some advanced forms of jnana yoga, Buddhist practice, self-inquiry, and any kind of independent text-based study.
Gurdjieff's path became known as the Fourth Way, which we might call "the Way of the Magician."
Hypnosis vs. Consciousness
An underlying tenet of Gurdjieff's system is that the vast majority of ordinary humans live their lives in a form of waking sleep or hypnosis, operating by conditioned reflexes, manipulated by heredity and societal conditioning and behaving in a merely mechanical fashion totally at the mercy of random external influences. Their internal centers do not work together but merely unwind like clockwork mechanisms, resulting in the individual's inevitable death with no possibility of higher evolution. Gurdjieff made it his lifelong task to awaken or dehypnotize people through various means addressing all of their centers, using a complex and frequently changing program of textual study, music and dance, and physical labor. The intended result was that initiates could, with great effort, become more conscious, free from the law of accident, and eventually come into contact with higher forces which would assist them in their continued evolution.
Self-Observation
The basic practice in the Fourth Way is self-observation, by which an initiate must learn to "divide attention" between outer and inner, watching his own internal states in the midst of everyday life. It is said to be a difficult practice to perform consistently, which is why it is necessary to get all of one's centers to perform it simultaneously. In our own Golden Dawn tradition, ceremonial magick and invocation with all their associated paraphenelia serve to bring the various centers into simultaneous operation and to act as "reminding factors" to help initiates practice self-observation. Gurdjieff also taught that conscious suffering can act as a potent reminding factor for self-observation and growth. In conscious suffering, the initiate deliberately submits to various difficulties and challenges to maintain wakefulness. Gurdjieff taught that one of the easiest and most fundamental forms of conscious suffering on the path was to learn to bear the negative manifestations of others without complaint, using them instead for one's growth.
Increasing Demands
Gurdjieff once said that, on the path of conscious evolution, "ordinary effort is not enough, only super-effort counts." One will also find that as one progresses on the path, greater and greater demands are made of one in order to continue one's evolution. The Way of the Magician is a stairway on which every initiate is dependent on those ahead of him for help (teachers and masters) and responsible for bringing others up behind him.
Understanding of the underlying principles of the Way of the Magician is necessary for the fullest experience of any Initiatory school, including the Order of the Golden Dawn.
Gurdjieff Quotations: on the Search for Truth
This briefly is the state of things in the realm of self-knowledge: in order to do you must know; but to know you must find out how to know. We cannot find this out by ourselves.
Besides self-knowledge, there is another aspect of the search—self-development. Let us see how things stand there. It is clear that a man left to his own devices cannot wring out of his little finger the knowledge of how to develop and, still less, exactly what to develop in himself.
Gradually, by meeting people who are searching, by talking to them and by reading relevant books, a man becomes drawn into the sphere of questions concerning self-development.
But what may he meet here? First of all an abyss of the most unpardonable charlatanism, based entirely on the greed for making money by hoaxing gullible people who are seeking a way out of their spiritual impotence. But before a man learns to divide the wheat from the tares, a long time must elapse and perhaps the urge itself to find the truth will flicker and go out in him, or will become morbidly perverted and his blunted flair may lead him into such a labyrinth that the path out of it, figuratively speaking, will lead straight to the devil.
The more a man studies the obstacles and deceptions which lie in wait for him at every step in this realm, the more convinced he becomes that it is impossible to travel the path of self-development on the chance instructions of chance people, or the kind of information culled from reading and casual talk.
The beginnings of initiation are lost in the darkness of time, where the long chain of epochs unfolds. Great cultures and civilizations loom up, dimly arising from cults and mysteries, ever changing, disappearing and reappearing.
The Great Knowledge is handed on in succession from age to age, from people to people, from race to race. The great centers of initiation in India, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, illumine the world with a bright light. The revered names of the great initiates, the living bearers of the truth, are handed on reverently from generation to generation. Truth is fixed by means of symbolical writings and legends and is transmitted to the mass of people for preservation in the form of customs and ceremonies, in oral traditions, in memorials, in sacred art through the invisible quality in dance, music, sculpture and various rituals. It is communicated openly after a definite trial to those who seek it and is preserved by oral transmission in the chain of those who know. After a certain time has elapsed, the centers of initiation die out one after another, and the ancient knowledge departs through underground channels into the deep, hiding from the eyes of the seekers.
The bearers of this knowledge also hide, becoming unknown to those around them, but they do not cease to exist. From time to time separate streams break through to the surface, showing that somewhere deep down in the interior, even in our day, there flows the powerful ancient stream of true knowledge of being.
To break through to this stream, to find it—this is the task and the aim of the search; for, having found it, a man can entrust himself boldly to the way by which he intends to go; then there only remains “to know” in order “to be” and “to do.” On this way a man will not be entirely alone; at difficult moments he will receive support and guidance, for all who follow this way are connected by an uninterrupted chain.
Go out one clear starlit night to some open space and look up at the sky, at those millions of worlds over your head. Remember that perhaps on each of them swarm billions of beings, similar to you or perhaps superior to you in their organization. Look at the Milky Way. The earth cannot even be called a grain of sand in this infinity. It dissolves and vanishes, and with it, you. Where are you? And is what you want simply madness? Before all these worlds ask yourself what are your aims and hopes, your intentions and means of fulfilling them, the demands that may be made upon you and your preparedness to meet them.
A long and difficult journey is before you; you are preparing for a strange and unknown land. The way is infinitely long. You do not know if rest will be possible on the way nor where it will be possible. You should be prepared for the worst. Take all the necessities for the journey with you.
Do not be overcurious nor waste time on things that attract your attention but are not worth it. Time is precious and should not be wasted on things which have no direct relation to your aim.
Remember where you are and why you are here.
Do not protect yourselves and remember that no effort is made in vain.
-- from Views from the Real World, pp. 57-59 (selected paragraphs)