Through serendipity and perhaps divine accident, I live near the grave of a hero of mine, the rascal saint George Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff started his ‘Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’ in Avon, France, in 1922 in Chateau Le Prieuré, which is now a bunch of apartment buildings next to Fountainbleau forest—even if his old run-down house remains. Fountainbleau/Avon is the home of the ancient french kings and has some of the oldest forests in Europe. It is also where parkour and bouldering were invented, and people come here from all over Europe to climb large boulders, which were washed up in some primeval age.
Gurdjieff was a man of immense stature. His writing, teaching, and underrated music are worth looking at today because of their weight and density and as a remedy to the rather bland version of Buddhist mindfulness sold in today's spiritual marketplace. Gurdjieff should be considered an important historical figure. If ‘the dance teacher’—as he called himself—had been an Indian Guru, Avon would be a place of pilgrimage, and he would have been considered a saint. However, his grave is modest and obscure and only different from the other graves in that it is shaped like an obelisk. Occasionally I visit, do a bit of weeding, and offer a little white flower. It’s a quiet but powerful spot.
About ten years ago, before I moved here, I read a fantastic biography of Gurdjieff entitled ‘Anatomy of a myth’. It is the adventure story of a larger-than-life figure, complete with duels, black magic, escape from sandstorms on stilts in the Kalahari desert, a trip to Tibet, escape from the Bolsheviks, a ‘pre-sands’ map of Egypt, and course, Gurdieff’s ideas, provocations, and practices. And stories are just window dressing to his ideas and practices that are influential to people in cutting-edge spiritual circles more than they know. Gurdeiff’s genius was to transmit a new way of seeing the world, which was at the same time a form of ancient knowledge, as he claimed. He was ahead of his time, and all the modern movements of east-west spirituality owe something to his vision. But buyer beware: Alain Watts, which, I think, puts this well:
"Gurdjieff was a magnificent old rascal, who lived a joyous life, and most of his disciples live extremely restricted, rigid, and serious lives -- because the object of Gurdjieff's method was to weed out those who understood from those who do not, and those who understood went away and those who did not understand remained.
Gurdjieff laid a trap for people who think that the purpose of life is power, that is to say, to control everything, and he beguiled them with the idea that they were all asleep and not fully in control of their own processes and their own organisms, and he assigned them the impossible task of being the Lord God Jehova each for one's self. He set them to doing this with great rigour and added to this the discipline of dances in which you could exercise every limb working on a different rhythm to give yourself the illusion of omnipotence. But if you persevered in these exercises hard enough, you would discover they were all nonsense, at which point you would have attained Gurdjieff's stage of illumination.”
I like this quote because it warns us against approaching Gurdjieff's work with a certain joylessness. Gurdjieff does give us quite a grim teaching, speaking of a ‘mechanical man’ trapped in ‘idiotism’. He describes humans as ‘unfortunates’—fragmented creatures bound in illusion and what he calls ‘the Organ Kundabuffer’. He gives us a shocking and colourful description of Buddha’s first noble truth of suffering—the suffering of conceptual, emotional, and bodily entrapment. His insistence on looking at our ‘conscious suffering’ is probably why people prefer more colourful and consoling versions of spirituality and why he is not universally known. Gurdjieff teaches us to observe the hellish mechanism of persona and ego but gives us the work of becoming ensouled.
Gurdjieff’s ‘work’ is a remedy to fashionable forms of non-dual spirituality, Advaita, and mindfulness. These new-age spiritualities tell us to ‘be zen’, ‘do nothing’, to ‘live in the moment’. We don’t want to do the spiritual work; we seek the ultimate vacation from reality through non-dual platitudes. Gurdjieff was more like a tantric teacher in that he wanted to address the tensions of life.
Another reason to approach Gurdieff’s 4th way—which, in my view, is indistinguishable from the Tantric path—is the severe and shocking nature of our times. Some of us have fallen out of churchgoing and traditional religion—which Gurdjieff respected—and need a bigger shock to thrust us into the real. We don’t have time for what he called ‘The way of the Fakir’—to master the physical body; ‘The Way of the Monk’, the mastery of feeling; or ‘the Way of the Yogi’, the mastery of the mind. The fourth way means working on all three aspects (Gurdieff’s three brains) simultaneously.
The other reason to read Gurdieff today is that his basic ‘self-remembrance’ practices can be applied to any tradition. I’m a Tantric Buddhist, and I find his teachings harmonious with Vajrayana—I also know Christian and Hindu mystics who work with ‘The 4th Way’. Gurdjieff lived for some years in Tibet and studied with Sufi or Orthodox Christian masters: he had cosmopolitan scope. Gurdjieff's work uniquely suits people outside of exoteric religious tradition—those heretics who cannot find a church or the temple but need more direct, hands-on spiritual work.
Note:
I have recently started an online study group to look at Gurdieff’s central axioms. We have begun by slowly reading Jeanne de De Salzmann’s book ‘The Reality of Being’, which exemplifies the essence of Gurdieff’s teaching. It has to be read slowly, like all good spiritual texts, in the style of Lectio Divine. It is poetic, yet concise—and has a psycho-active quality, like all of Gurdieff’s work. It is reminiscent of ‘Zen Mind, Beginner mind’, which was created by Suzuki Roshi’s female students.‘The Reality of Being’ is an excellent bridge to the wilder works of the master, which aren’t for everybody. If you would like to join us, please get in touch. Or, at the very least, come to Avon, pull out some weeds, and put a little white flower on Gurdieff’s grave.
To join the reading group, write to me at andrewpgsweeny@gmail.com.
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