This post briefly discusses some lessons that LHP and Rune-Gild practitioners can learn from the Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff and the orthodox Gurdjieff Foundation, based in New York.
This personal interpretation remanifests a series of email dialogues with Vesa Itti, and with Petri Laakso in late 1997-early 1998 around the time of his IV* Recognition in the Temple of Set. In a follow-up entry I will discuss some of the limitations and criticisms.
I don’t speak for the Foundation, the Temple, or the Gild, just myself.
1. A Transcultural Mission from Syncretic Cultural and Religious Sources. Gurdjieff’s advice to ‘Take the ‘wisdom’ of the East and the ‘energy’ of the West and then seek’ foreshadows Eranos, Esalen, the Integral Institute, and the current interest in integrative, holistic frameworks. Part of the recent growth in academic Gurdjieff Studies such as Jacob Needleman and J. Walter Driscoll is a renewed attention to reconstructing and synthesizing the diverse sources that Gurdjieff tapped in the Caucasus, the Hindu Kush, Tibet, Egypt, India, and elsewhere, in pursuit of the Akhaldan Society and the Sarmoung Brotherhood. Graham Hancock fans, take note.
2. Embodied Forms of Initiatory Practice. The reading sessions for the legominism Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950), the ‘Teacher of Dances’ guise and Movement performances, the ‘Toast of Idiots’ dinners, the ‘Stop!’ exercises, and the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann piano collaborations all point to a practice-based cultivation of ’embodied’ awareness. This experience is central to an effective group and is not always emphasised in the various books on Gurdjieff and his followers.
3. Stark Methodologies. What is also clear is the starkness of the methodologies and practices in the Gurdjieff ‘Work’ in contrast to the Theosophical-inspired occult groups that G. viewed with contempt. No adornment – emphasize only what is necessary, the rest is baggage. One of the reasons for this is Gurdjieff’s experiences in the Caucasus, Turkey, Greece and Russia during periods of civil war, political instability, and revolution. Rather than Aleister Crowley this aspect of Gurdjieff — his experience of human conflict and violence — is perhaps closer to the contemporary experiences of New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, King’s College strategist Patrick Porter, author William Vollmann‘s distilled ‘Moral Calculus’; in his study Rising Up and Rising Down (2004) or University of Notre Dame professor and anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom.
4. Heuristics to Understand LHP Methodologies. Contemporary books on Gurdjieff often focus on his self-described methodology of the ‘Fourth Way’: the fusion of fakir, monk and yogic methods of self-initiatory knowledge in everyday life. Whilst important, many of Gurdjieff’s other heuristics — the Law of Three, the Law of Seven, and the Law of Accident in particular — might be frames to test, contextualize and evaluate the appropriateness, effectiveness and unforseen effects of LHP methodologies. These heuristics refer to causal relationships, the flow of time and change, and unexpected forces that any practitioner or methodologist will face.
5. The School as Initiatory Laboratory. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleu, France, is an oft-emulated model for groupwork. LHP practitioners also often cite Pyotr Uspenskii’s comments attributed to Gurdjieff about the role of the School and the ‘third line of work’ for the School’s growth and survival. If only they looked at what happened and why the Institute failed (and perhaps read some organizational dynamics literature by Barry Oshry or Gareth Morgan). These days Fontainebleu is more well-known for the MBA business school INSEAD.
6. A Model of the Psychecentric Consciousness. Pyotr Uspenskii has emphasized Gurdjieff’s model in his description of seven types of man, various centers, the psychology of initiatory experience, the Enneagram symbol, humanity as ‘food for the moon’, and the Ray of Creation cosmology. Uspenskii’s language was proto-scientific and anticipated the cybernetic models popularised by Timothy Leary, John Lilly and Robert Anton Wilson in the 1970s. Thus, some interpret Gurdjieff as a modernist rather than a traditionalist who drew on syncretic cultural and religious sources.
7. Aletheia. Over a decade ago, I sat in on an email debate between Petri Laakso and Vesa Itti on if Gurdjieff’s ‘Work’ could fit into Setian philosophy, the Farr/Crowley aeonic model, and what his Word might be. Itti and Laakso eventually settled on Aletheia as the Greek word for Truth-as-Unconcealment. In retrospect this poses several issues for orthodox Gurdjieffians. It is perhaps closer to Uspenskii’s idee-fixe on ‘self-remembering’ rather than Gurdjieff’s emphasis on observing one’s mechanical life and then trying to Do. It is identified with German philosopher Martin Heidegger‘s phenomenological hermenutics, and his Remanifestation of Aletheia. Trying to put Gurdjieff or any other person into these frames is difficult: whatever clarity is gained, something may also be ‘lost’, ‘fragmented’ or remain ‘unknown’ (with a nod to a certain Uspenskii book). Words will be Understood in different ways, different contexts, at different times, and by different people. Finally, this can be ‘wiseacring’ or self-hypnotic speculation: we don’t Know, we weren’t with Gurdjieff during his Oath on 13th September 1911, and in many cases, only have secondary sources.
Despite these limits and concerns, the Itti-Laakso proposition that Gurdjieff’s Word could be Aletheia raises some intriguing possibilities and directions that I will explore further in future posts.