Recently I have been rather discouraged with some Online Gurdjieff groups and their efforts to diminish the role of P.D. Ouspensky in his super-efforts with George Gurdjieff in the last century to create this ‘Fourth Way’ system that I have been studying for many years. There seems to be an intentional effort to carry on the century-old feud between Gurdjieff’s groups and Ouspensky’s groups, after they parted ways in the early 1930’s. In my humble opinion, this misses the revelation that occurred, and is described in Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous” during Ouspensky’s initial initiation into Gurdjieff’s system/school. Consequently, I feel that many who are die-hard Gurdjieff disciples completely miss the miracle that was Ouspensky/Gurdjieff’s combined understanding. An understanding that I have always reasoned was Gurdjieff’s purpose on this planet, which was to give a fresh direction towards attaining consciousness in modern life.
These current Gurdjieff students tend to dismiss Ouspensky’s work, and instead focus on Gurdjieff’s “All and Everything” series of writings, including “Beelzabub’s Tales to His Grandson”, which is the pinnacle of George’s writing efforts. My argument is that, while it is a master effort by the master, it lacks the accessibility of Ouspensky’s work. Though it may include secrets that Gurdjieff’s groups claim are the “real” work, as opposed to Ouspensky’s marginal ideas, I think it misses the real mark of disseminating the essence of the system to as many seekers as possible, and therefore is counter to Gurdjieff’s original aim. I do completely disagree with their analysis, and feel that many of these modern Gurdjieff students do not understand basic Fourth Way ideas, like centers of gravity, many ’I’s, etc. In my many conversations on these different sites, I find myself having to explain basics that one at Robert Burton’s school would have been taken to task for not knowing. And, we all know what a lowly experience that place was, right??
My point is that we need to be taking the work of the Masters, and using it to enlarge ourselves, and expand our understanding of the Fourth Way, as a natural course. This idea is echoed in Joseph Azize’s new book on Gurdjieff, “Gurdjieff-Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (Oxford studies in Western Esotericism)”, where he beautifully elaborates on The Work, and Gurdjieff. I highly recommend reading this new work.
He agrees that Ouspensky was Gurdjieff’s best spokesman, and goes into great detail on Gurdjieff’s ego getting in the way of his own success. I happen to love that part of Gurdjieff, the part that worked so hard at being hard to understand, but ultimately I feel it is currently threatening his own system. Thoughts?
The thing about this profession is that as a practitioner you can continue to mature and grow. I am thus running a private practice which is thriving and I do not plan to “retire” until my last breath goes out. I serve mostly children, adolescents and young adults, with a few older adults occasionally included.
Thanks again Robin. My wife is a veteran psychologist, so I have some understanding into what you do, or did for a living. Great use of The Work in the service of others, which is so key for all of us seekers. Thank you for the link as well. I’ll order and read that version.
I hope my enthusiasm for the writing of Mr. Gurdjieff does not create the impression that I am at all against Ouspensky or Nicoll. Both of these great men in the Work continue to influence my understanding of the Work and it was through Maurice Nicoll that the influence of mystical Christianity allowed me to return to the tradition with fresh eyes. I was brought up attending a typical all white American fundamentalist Baptist tradition rooted in the 1950s. By 14 years of age I realized, thanks to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that much of what was being preached in my white conservatIve Baptist church, was dead wrong and I eventually rejected Christianity as just another myth no different from any other religious tradition. I read Joseph Campbell and became something of a doubting Thomas about it all. Thanks to Our Common Father, I was fortunate to encounter someone in the Work who had developed being and my interest was piqued. I read Ouspensky and Nicoll first. Then I read Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and it changed everything.
From the influences of reading the writings of Gurdjieff himself and also receiving guidance from my teacher, I set my first aim, to serve others through becoming a clinical psychologist. The octave was begun with a strong Do note and I subsequently learned in my bones each note along the way, including the special challenge of transitioning from Si to Do in finishing a doctoral dissertation. Gurdjieff introduces another important teaching about the octave in Beelzebub’s Tales which he did not reveal in the initial teachings he gave to Ouspensky, the importance of the 5th stopinder, Sol, the Harnel Aoot, passing through which three different results may be obtained. One is where the results are internal, a second where they are external and a third in which both internal and external results may be obtained, depending upon the relative influence of each of the three forces. This is quite significant in the unfolding of the process depending upon one’s aim and the conditions one is working within. I saw this clearly as I faced the decision to be a research scientist, a clinician, or something of each. All of this is detailed in chapter 39 of Beelzebub’s Tales, The Holy Planet Purgatory. Thus laying over the partial exposition recoded by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous onto Gurdjieff’s exposition in Beelzebub’s Tales, the former doesn’t reach the subtlety and profundity of Gurdjieff’s later exposition of the law of seven and the law of three. Gurdjieff continued to develop these teachings right up through the end of his life. Interested readers should note that the original 1950 Edition of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson is out of print. The Gurdjieff Foundation released a new translation which “sanitizes” some of Gurdjieff’s language and alters the meaning in the opinion of many of us who read the translation approved by Mr. Gurdjieff himself. The original edition is reprinted by Two Rivers Press and can be found here:
https://www.bythewaybooks.com/pages/books/66/g-i-gurdjieff/beelzebubs-tales-to-his-grandson-1950-facsimile-ed
A large print edition published in three volumes, which preserves the original pagination, can be ordered from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. I am reading through the book again and this is much easier on the eyes. Here is the Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09D33RWD4/
Thank you Robin for your great post here. There is much here to learn from and expand one's understanding of Mr. Gurdjieff's various efforts in his later years, some of which is new to me. The connection with the Paris lectures and Beelzebub's Tales (B.T.) is a reminder to me that there is much to be still learned and digested, even at the young age of 62.
I read B.T. for the first time when I was 22, and was in the throws of being completely enamored with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and everything they had written. I probably finished all three books in about two-and-a-half months, and as I have written previously, although I did not have the advantage of a Gurdjieff group to help disseminate those writings, a surprising amount of practical knowledge from that first reading has stayed with me over these many years.
I actually am in the process of re-reading B.T. again, and trying to get some insights from these sources you have referred to, as to the deeper meanings I may have missed forty years ago. I know that the lower centers are lazy, and asleep, and as a teacher once told me, "It is a dead end if one cannot be what one talks about."
You seem to be content not incorporating Peter Ouspensky into your experience. As we have already discussed in this thread, I would disagree. But, unlike my Gurdjieff-Only friends, I think history shows us that Mr. Ouspensky was quite successful in his attainment of consciousness. I have met many students in the legacy of Ouspensky who I have verified to be of great Being and wisdom, including Ted Nottingham, who is a product of Ouspensky/Gurdjieff tradition. Can re-reading B.T. make me a more conscious being. I hope so. But, I would suggest one also learn about the table of hydrogens, Body Types, Attention thru Self-Observation, and of course Self-Remembering and it's divine ability to awaken one. It's essential work. Of course Gurdjieff coined the term The Fourth Way, because he recognized the truth in acknowledging the possibility of different paths to awakening. I wonder if the Gurdjieff-only folks have forgotten that essential truth.
Correcting a typo in the last sentence of the second paragraph above, it should read:
I do not think this was a subterfuge or a "teaching," he was just stating things exactly as he saw them.
As an offering of something of an apologetic exposition in favor of reading Gurdjieff's own works, All and Everything, I would begin, by way of a brief review of the history of the Gurdjieff teachings, that Mr. Gurdjieff presented the ideas in one way prior to his automobile accident in 1924, in which he suffered a serious, almost fatal, closed-head injury and subsequently reformulated his presentation with the aim of transmitting it to future generations in a form that could not easily become corrupted. Following his automobile accident, It became clear to him that the could no longer transmit the living Work in the way that he had previously attempted. He thus dissolved the institute which he had established, sent many of his close followers away, and began writing his magnum opus, All and Everything. The initial book, it should be noted, is addressed to Beelzebub's Grandson (us). There are no longer any people alive who personally knew Gurdjieff himself. He knew from experience that the teaching would easily become distorted and corrupted. Seeing personally himself just saw how easily the teachings could become corrupted, he thus made every effort he could to put it into form that could not be easily "wiseacred" with, presenting it as a "legominism."
Following his accident, Gurdjieff spent a few years traveling to America, eventually appointing A. R. Orage to lead the American groups. Having incurred too much debt for the Prieure to remain his headquarters, he relocated into a small apartment, 6 Rue des Colonels-Renard in Paris in 1936. During the early years following his accident, he personally taught a small group of entrepreneurial women journalists, calling the group, The Rope," who made copious notes about his method and teaching style at that time, which is published in the book, Gurdjieff and the Women of the Rope https://www.amazon.com/Gurdjieff-Women-Rope-1935-1939-1948-1949/dp/0955909066/ This book is comprised from the notes of Solita Solano and Jane Heap. These teachings were centered on reading of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which represented a new formulation and approach to transmitting the practice of the Work. He later found, to his dismay, that after about a 10 year period of not seeing Orage, the teaching in America had become too intellectual and that the methods he had transmitted, having become corrupted, were actually resulting in damage to practitioners (he documents this in his Third Series, Life is Real Only Then, When "I Am"). He even states that, as being presented, they were resulting in making people who practiced these methods, "candidates for the lunatic asylum." I to not this this was a subterfuge or a "teaching," he was just stating things exactly as he saw them.
Gurdjieff continued working with small groups in his apartment throughout the rest of his life, during the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, and following the end of the war until his death on October 29, 1949. He presented the final draft of Beelzebub's Tales to the publisher 3 days before his death, noting that he could thus die in peace, having completed his aim. Although people say that the Third Series is "incomplete," this is not at all the case. He placed in that book everything necessary for continuing the practice of coating the "higher being body." He also had copious notes taken documenting the Paris meetings, some of which have been published in three volumes. In these notes, he states that they are considered a continuation of the Third Series. One volume has been translated into English, Gurdjieff, Paris Meetings Notes 1943, https://www.amazon.com/G-I-Gurdjieff-Paris-Meetings-1943/dp/0978066146/ and another two volumes currently only available in French, Groupes de Paris: Tome I, https://www.bythewaybooks.com/pages/books/26361/g-i-gurdjieff/groupes-de-paris-tome-i-1943, and and Groupes de Paris: Tome II, https://www.bythewaybooks.com/pages/books/26280/g-i-gurdjieff/groupes-de-paris-tome-ii-1944. I have a friend in the Work who is currently working on translating the French volumes and is publishing them privately as the Gurdjieff Foundation holds the copyright and will not let them be released to the public since they are working on their own translation. In the Paris meetings, Gurdjieff splits the groups into Exoteric (Tuesday), Mesoteric (Thursday) and Esoteric (Saturday) meetings. The exercises and practices presented there are correspondingly applied in an individual manner. An attentive reading shows the manner of his teaching in his later years. This set of teachings was based on All and Everything and is far less intellectual and more based on working with attention (Piandjoëhary in Beelzebub's Tales). There are three initiations, the first is separating the higher part of the mind, attention (Piandjoëhary), from the lower, the flow of associations or thoughts. This requires first cultivating the practice of "sensing" the body to free attention from identification with the flow of mental associations. Then it becomes possible to "observe" the associations without falling back into them. The second initiation is placing attention in the body (sensing) and observing the motor/instinctive center and the emotional centers. The goal is to enter a state of "three-brained being balanced perceptiveness," which is the first stage of self-remembering, separating "I" from "it." The Work thus proceeds in a careful, step-wise manner, allowing the practitioner to learn and progress through the awakening process in his or her individual manner. In this formulation, the planetary body serves as the denying or passive force, the head brain as the active force and the emotional center as the neutralizing force. Cultivating this state creates the conditions necessary for the "I" to be grown through the formation of "higher being bodies." Gurdjieff would insist that the soul is not ready made but must be grown through work on ourselves or "being Partkdolg duty." To the informed reader, many of these ideas are preserved in the writings of Plato, who presented the "tripartite theory of the soul." This undoubtedly derives from Pythagorean teachings and traces back to the 30 years Pythagorus spent living in Egypt studying there with the priests.
Gurdjieff's formulation and transmission of the teachings thus changed significantly in contrast to his earlier formulation. Ouspensky was an intellectual and thus spent a great deal of time refining and reformulating what he received in Russia. Orage continued this practice in America. When Gurdjieff arrived in American and personally observed the result of this teaching he was deeply concerned that he had been completely misunderstood and so dissolved the entire thing. This also cost him dearly financially as much of his support was from his American followers. One negative reaction to this decision by Gurfjieff to dissolve the Oragean group can be found in a book written by a devoted follower of Orage , Dr. C. Daly King, "The Oragean Version." In his introduction, he recounts his personal distaste for Gurdjieff himself following the public humiliation of Orage, noting that he did not see why Gurdjieff's "silly exercises"and his "heavy gravitas" appealed to anyone, though he also noted that Gurdjieff possessed a level of "being" that he had never felt in anyone else.
Thus, in All and Everything, Gurdjieff reformulated the Fourth Way teaching into a literary format that could not be easily misinterpreted and "wiseacred" by making it necessary to place a great deal of effort into assimilating the essential ideas. He did this intentionally and with precisely with that purpose in mind. The practice of reading Beelzebub's Tales is thus an initiatory exercise. It requires cultivation of attention, patience, facilitates humility, and creates the opportunity for "intentional suffering," as reading it will inevitably activate "features," or as he calls them in the Paris meeting notes, "inner dogs," that, with the right guidance, will be seen and even, potentially, transformed through "conscious labor and intentional suffering." At age 20, I intuitively recognized that Chapter 39, The Holy Planet Purgatory, is a transmission of secret teachings on the transformation of energies in the Macrocosmos and the Microcosmos that were derived from a very ancient source and, if rightly understood, would facilitate a deep understanding of the very mechanics of the process of growing a soul. A soul that is capable of being of service to "lighten the sorrow of Our Common Father, His Endlessness." I have found that continued study of this material has born the fruit I intuited 47 years ago when I was but an idealistic lad of 20. To the attentive reader, Gurdjieff is precise in presenting the steps of the process of growing a soul in a step-by-step manner, which becomes more readily grasped and assimilated according to one's level of being and the amount of effort one is willing and able to put forth.
At 20 years of age, I was initiated into the Work by my teachers in the Gurdjieff Foundation, which initially included reading through Maurice Nicoll's formulation, which is largely Ouspeskian. I benefitted immensely from that stream and still value it very highly. It nonetheless puzzled me that most, if not all, of the individuals in this stream struggled with reading All and Everything, especially Beelzebub's Tales, which had resonated deeply with me as a truly initiatory text. I eventually found a stream from the J. G. Bennett group that had preserved the oral teachings of Gurdjieff based upon All and Everything, including the tradition of the "Toasts to the Idiots," which is a superb formulation of the stages of the transformative process. Although I continue to learn a great deal through Gurdjieff's later approach, which is more direct and addresses development of all three centers, I find a great deal of beauty and joy in the Nicoll stream, particularly with its focus on esoteric or mystical Christianity.
In the course of further pursuing mystical Christianity, I also eventually came upon the writings of the 19th century Scottish Christian Mystic, George MacDonald, who deeply influenced C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. He wrote both fantasy (or imaginal) works and novels about "character development" set in rural Scotland and England. The novels based in Scotland require learning about 80 words of Scots in order to follow the dialogues. To assist modern readers, David Jack, a Scotsman who was raised and lives in modern Huntly, where MacDonald was born almost 2 centuries ago, and who speaks Doric Scots, has recently provided us with new "translations"of MacDonald's Scots novels, one of which I would highly recommend, Donal Grant https://www.amazon.com/Donal-Grant-Scots-English-George-MacDonald/dp/1090552661/. It presents the essence of the Christian mystical path, lived in ordinary daily life, and, in a parallel manner, lays forth much of the same essential teachings that are also presented in Beelzebub's Tales, in a format that is more easily grasped and assimilated. It still requires a good measure of attention to read, but MacDonald is a great story teller and quickly pulls the reader right into the imaginal realm, where all the things that are important in our lives reside. Although you can find digitized version of this book online, they are all based on American "knock-off" versions that were edited down by the American publishers to make them more "palatable" to the average reader and thus remove much of its essential teachings.
It is my hope this admittedly long-winded post will serve to pique a little interest in reading Beelzebub's Tales, the magnum opus and last formulation of the Fourth Way teachings by the master himself. I would encourage folks not to minimize the purpose of this formulation. There is true gold buried in the depths of this tome that is well worth the effort to mine. When reading it, don't try to "fathom the gist" in one reading, or even three. It can be read as a meditative practice and, when prompted by an inner voice, may lead to discovery of things previously inconceivable to the intellect alone. Gurdjieff himself insisted that these teachings were previously unknown and only being revealed for the first time by him. He traced them back to the antediluvian civilization, Atlantis, and being continued by the descendants of the survivors of the collapse of the Atlantean civilization, one group of which constituted the priestly caste of the Egyptians. Following the fall of the Kingdom of Egypt, the teachings were eventually concretized and fixed in the historical continuum as the myth of Jesus of Nazareth (who is Osiris) and later further fixed into an authoritarian based theocratic political system by the Romans (outside the Church there is no salvation; divine right of Kings). Gurdjieff claimed he had cracked the code and had connected with a stream of the teaching that he attempted to transmit to his early Moscow group. Seeing this attempt as having failed, he later reformulated them into the Ashiata Shiemash teachings in Beelzebub's Tales. In the Paris Meeting Notes, much of this material is presented more directly and clearly.
The Work is a living teaching. It takes root and grows and does what it was designed to do, grow souls capable of serving the purposes of Our Common Father. It is so alive that it easily utilizes multiple lines of teaching to achieve its intended result. I see this teaching alive and thriving here and am happy to be part of this community.
I first read Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson at the age of 20 years old, in 1974, at the behest of my preceptor in the Work, who was affiliated with the Gurdjieff Foundation and had worked with Christopher Fremantle. Reading this book at that age was especially challenging and much of it I could not fully grasp. As an effort in trying to better grasp its meaning, under the supervision of my teacher, I made my own index to the neologisms so that I could better understand the ideas on each subsequent reading. In those days, this was done using a typewriter over the course of one of my subsequent readings. What I was capable of understanding very quickly was that Gurdjieff saw the state of humanity with greater clarity than anyone else I had ever encountered. His disdain for Western civilization and war matched my own youthful alienation, fueled by the damage caused by the Vietnam war on my community and our society at large. Far from driving me away, I sensed that the abstruse neologisms and expositions hid something of great worth and they only served to fuel my desire to better understand his message. Reading Beelzebub's Tales, I would say, literally saved my life. Mr. Gurdjieff's writings awoke within my the desire to make every effort that I could to better understand the mystery of the path of awakening he wrote so passionately about. I truly love this book and it has remained a lifelong companion. These days, I can feel Gurdjieff's humor and compassionate presence whenever I open the book and take up reading it. Remember one of his last statement to his students as he was being transported to the hospital where he achieved the "sacred Rascooarno," "Gurdjieff not die."
I also was introduced by my preceptor to the writings of Maurice Nicoll and Ouspensky, which served to make the ideas more accessible to my intellect, but I have always returned to Beelzebub's Tales as the touchstone for developing a deeper understanding of the practices necessary for growing into the higher life (being-Partkdolg-duty). Gurdjieff's later years were a time of intense creativity and his magnum opus, All and Everything, was written to serve as a core method for learning the practices of the Work he brought to us. Having read it the requisite three times at age 20, which was extremely difficult and, at first, required me to "do what it did not want to do," eventually resulted in the accumulation of enough "hanbledzoin" that I subsequently found that could I read literally anything else and quickly understand it. It thus served as a mainspring in assisting me to achieve my first real aim, to earn a PhD in clinical psychology, so that I could find a "right livelihood" to fully support myself and not remain a "parasite," to better serve others as they grappled with the insanity created by the "abnormal conditions of being existence established by them themselves," free myself from the "crystallized consequences of the organ Kundabuffer" and to overcome the tendency to "wiseacre."
Now, at age 66, re-reading Beelzebub's Tales, I have developed a far deeper understanding of the material than I had at age 20. I see it as a necessary component of the Work designed by Mr. Gurdjieff himself as the chief means of transmitting the Fourth Way. Among one of its many functions is to serve as a means for practicing the "third being-obligalnian-striving" which is "the conscious striving to know ever more and more concerning the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance." Chapter 39, The Holy Planet Purgatory" is an amazing exposition on the structure and dynamics of the Universe, an amplification on the law of seven (for example, the Harnel-Aoot, or disharmonization of the fifth stupider, is not covered by Ouspensky) and the specific practices and processes by which we grow into the higher life. Joseph Azize is presenting the contemplative exercises in his recent book based upon the core teaching in Beelzebub's Tales and grounded in the oral tradition he received from Mr. and Mrs. Adie. I think Father Azize encourages everyone to read Mr. Gurdjieff's books as a necessary part of the Work. It seems to me that if you really want to understand Mr. Gurdjieff, that it is advisable to actually read what he himself has to say, especially if it is extremely difficult. That, after all, is the point, to make being efforts. The effort itself yields far more results than mere intellectual grasp of concepts, which can even result in creating an illusion of understanding.
I would encourage people not to be daunted by the difficulty of reading Gurdjieff himself, but to view it as a part of the practice of "doing what it does not want to do." This inner struggle results in the accumulation of the energy necessary for work on oneself, "hanbledzoin," and forms an essential first step in the practice. View the study of Beelzebub's Tales as planting seeds of understanding that takes years, even decades, to sprout and grow. I can assure you that there is so much packed into Beelzebub's Tales that it is well worth the effort it takes to read and to "try and fathom the gist" of Mr. Gurdjieff's writings.
You are quite right that Ouspensky was crucial to communicating Gurdjieff's ideas. When Gurdjieff read the manuscript of "In Search of the Miraculous" (which Ouspensky had titled "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching"), he stated "First I hate that man, now I love that man." I would add that the teachings were shared in even clearly form, focusing on the process of inner work, by Maurice Nicoll who was authorized by both his teachers to become a teacher himself. The current schools that have idolized Gurdjieff and limited themselves to the reading of his books have crystallized themselves in a moment in time that Gurdjieff himself passed by. Both he and Ouspensky pointed to the connection with ancient eastern Orthodox Christianity near the end of their lives, in particular the teachings on the watch of the heart, the Jesus Prayer, and Hesychia. To compartmentalize the Fourth Way in such a way that it fails to connect with its origins and its universal connections is to reduce it to a sect and destroy its life-giving potential.