THE GARDEN OF TRUTH The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition:

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The Garden of Truth, from: John Robert Colombo

I was browsing the shelves devoted to New Books in a favourite Toronto public library when chance led me to The Garden of Truth. The title struck me as odd, hardly idiomatic, so I reached for the green-jacketed book and read its subtitle: “The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition.” The byline read: Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Needless to say I borrowed the book from the library, and I now have three weeks to digest its contents. Twenty-one days is hardly enough time.

The dust-jacket describes its author as “one of the world’s leading experts on Islamic thought and spirituality.” He was born in Tehran, raised in the United States, educated at MIT and Harvard, and holds the position of University Professor of Islamic Studies at The George Washington University, an educational institute located (according to its website) in Washington, D.C., “four blocks from the White House.” I heard Dr. Nasr speak at the conference on Traditionalism held in Edmonton two years ago and on that occasion I was much impressed with his presence and with the respect shown to him by the conference organizers, the Ismaili Muslims of Alberta and British Columbia. It was not so much what he said that seemed important but how he said it.

“The present book is the result of over fifty years of both scholarly study of and existential participation in Sufism,” Dr. Nasr begins. Two hundred-odd pages later, he concludes, “It is for those who understand such teachings to transform theoria into actual experience …. ” I am not about to review the book, but I will offer the following bibliographical details:

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. New York: HarperOne / HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. xvi + 256 pages. US$24.95. It includes notes, brief bibliography, and an thoughtful and helpful “Glossary of Technical Terms.”

G.I. Gurdjieff is mentioned once, in passing. The reference occurs on page 109, at the point where Dr. Nasr is describing the shaykh or spiritual master who is a link in a chain of initiation or otherwise a self-initiate: “the function may descend from Heaven upon the person. In both cases there is need of divine investiture.” He explains, “Throughout history many people have pretended to be masters and at no time as much as now, especially in the West.” He notes the increasing “number of so-called Sufi circles in both America and Europe that disassociate [dissociate] Sufism from Islam and that claim as so-called masters some whose attachment to the traditional claim of transmission of esoteric power and authority (silsilah) is either absent, suspect, or mysterious hidden.” Here I will quote him at length:

“A case in point is Gurdjieff, who claimed in the early twentieth century in France to be disseminating Sufi teachings without ever demonstrating his attachment to an authentic Sufi chain. Or one could mention Idries Shaw, who sought to teach Sufism independent of Islam in America and Europe. The authenticity of a master is judged by the quality of his or her disciples for as the proverb states, a tree is judged by its fruit. But there are also some external criteria for determining who is a real master, such as orthodoxy in the deepest sense and not only on the formal plane, familiarity with the doctrine, mastery in being able to cure the ailments of the soul, spiritual authority, and an element of sanctity. The master may be old or young, male or female, Arab, Persian, Turk, or from any other ethnicity but in all cases must exude something of the Muhammadan grace, or barakah, and display knowledge of the path for which he or she is the guide.”

This passage summarizes the traditional objection to the claim that Gurdjieff received Islamic initiation or showed its effects. Dr. Nasr does so deftly and without the pyrotechnics of Whittal Perry in Gurdjieff: In the Light of Tradition (1978).

In passing, let me make an interesting observation about The Garden of Truth. The book’s index has no entries for Traditionalism itself, or for its chief exponent René Guénon, though there are three entries for Frithjof Schuon. Two of the latter’s books are listed in the Bibliography, none of Guénon’s.

John Robert Colombo is a Toronto author and authologist whose latest books are a collection of poems, End Notes, and Gordon Sinclair: A Commentary on His Books. He has two new websites: one personal one and one professional one .

LOST: AN EARLY JOHN ROBERT COLOMBO PIECE ON THE LIGHTHOUSE WEBSITE

Our contributor John Robert Colombo wonders if any reader of this website has by any chance made a copy of his earliest posting. It was a review of an interesting public meeting of the Toronto Gurdjieff Group organized by its leader David Young. The venue was Toronto’s Heliconian Club. The date of the meeting was November 14, 2002. Apparently a collection of these postings is to be published, but this posting seems to have vanished into the ether! Colombo’s email address is jrc@ca.inter.net.

PAN-EURASIANISM - FROM TRADITION TO GENGHIS KHAN

René Guénon 1925

Pan-Eurasianism
Readers of this website and this column are likely to be familiar with the notion of Traditionalism. Indeed, the subject might be as interesting to readers as it is to me. Traditionalism, the metaphysical movement that is identified with the French-born writer and thinker René Guénon and his successors which was founded in the 1920s, is alive and well today.

Indeed, it was the focus of a two-day conference organized by Ismaili Muslims in Edmonton, Alberta, in September 2006, which brought together the world’s leading Traditionalists and Primordialists, led by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, including Huston Smith, William Chittick, Jean-Louis Michon, James S. Cutsinger, Harry Oldmeadow, and even the widow of Frithjof Schuon. The papers presented by these scholars and a dozen others offered insights into a number of aspects of Traditionalist thought. As a member of the audience, I listened carefully to the proceedings. There were no references to Gurdjieff; the single reference to Theosophy was one made in passing and disparaging. Innumerable Arab-language and Farsi-language theologians were mentioned, but nobody referred at all to Israeli metaphysicians.

Also conspicuous by their absence were any references to attempts to translate Traditionalist thought into social practice or political action. I do not recall any mention being made of the Italian fascist Baron Julius Evola who was a torchbearer in this regard. Nor do I recall anyone mentioning Alexander Dugin, the Russian writer and ideologue who is the creator and current leader of the Pan-Eurasian Movement.

Dugin, who was born into a military family in Russia in 1962, has been much influenced by Traditionalist thought. His name is now mentioned in the same breath as that of Vladimir Putin, though not in Edmonton. It is probably wrong to stretch this point, but it is probably true that Dugin has introduced to Putin and his entourage the ideas and ideals of Traditionalism and Pan-Eurasianism in the same way that Philip Sherrard has influenced Prince Charles, the Duke of Windsor. Now and then Dugin’s name crops up in newspaper and magazine articles about Russian politics. But for background information the reader is advised to turn to Mark Sedgwick’s comprehensive study Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004) which offers the reader a chapter titled “Neo-Eurasianism in Russia.”

I want to take a casual look at Dugin and the Eurasian Movement from the vantagepoint of a monograph that came into my hands. It is an eighty-page work titled Eurasian Mission (Program Materials) and its subtitle reads “International Eurasian Movement.” It was published in English in Moscow in 2005. It is very clearly translated from the Russian language (and signs of this are the relative absence of definite and indefinite articles in the syntactically sound sentences). The author is none other than Alexander G. Dugin, who is identified as a Doctor of Political Sciences, leader of the International Eurasian movement, Chairman of the Eurasian Committee, and founder of the Russian School of Geopolitics.

Dugin is one busy fellow, and judging by the photograph of him that appears on the back cover of the monograph, he is an activist: a bearded guy, something of a firebrand. The bee in his bonnet is that there is the need for a new way to order the world, a way that thwarts the current New World Order of George Bush. The present “world order” is unipolar; Dugin wants a multipolar world. The interests and values of the West dominate and hence distort the interests and values of the East. Russia and Asia have borne the brunt of this.

The way to rectify this sad state is to set up a countervailing force: instead of accepting the concept of the one-world market, Dugin is working to divide the world into four “spheres of influence” so there will be at least four marketplaces instead of one big market. The European Union is one small step in the right direction. Dugin wants Russia to take a number of giant steps well beyond the EU toward the end of local sovereignties and the recognition of local autonomies.

The monograph includes a series of coloured maps that illustrate his thinking in regard to power blocs. His Mercator projection of the continents is divided vertically into four zones or spheres of influence which go North-South and which range from East to West in this fashion:

(1) Anglo-American Zone (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Central and South America excluding Greenland but including the United Kingdom and Australia and New Zealand);

(2) Euro-African Zone (Greenland with all of Western Europe plus the addition of the African continent);

(3) Pan-Eurasian Zone (Eastern Europe, Russia and the federated states, Caucasus, Central Asia, and India);

(4) Pacific Far East Zone (China, Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, etc.).

The wholesale rejigging of alliances, trade zones, communal centres, and “great spaces” has been in the minds of Russian ideologues and geographers since about 1900. The idea came to be known as Eurasianism. But it was not until the mid-1980s that, under Dugin’s influence, it became known as Neo-Euasianism or Pan-Eurasianism. Dugin is almost single-handedly responsible for reviving the notion and renaming it. The motives behind this conceptual reorganization of spheres of influence along these lines – geo-social, geo-economic, geo-cultural, geo-political – are many. One of them is as simple as Russian patriotism. Another is the fear of the West.

Dugin lists among the “stages of development” the publication of the first Russian translation of René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World with his own commentaries. (The work first appeared in French in 1927, first appeared in English in 1942, and has seldom been out of print in either language since then.) Dugin also lists as important the first appearance in 1993 of his own work, The Paths of the Absolute, “with the exposition of the foundations of the traditionalist philosophy.” Both works offer thorough-going critiques of the values of the West and strike many readers as being sympathetic to fascism if not to anti-Semitism.

A social or political movement may be highlighted by placing it alongside its opposite movement. Eurasianism’s twin sister is Atlantism. This is Dugin’s term for American-led globalism, globalization, or mondialism. Many of these ideas are explored in detail on Dugin’s English-language website Arctogaia, but here they will be expressed in a somewhat impressionistic fashion.

Eurasianism is opposed to Atlantism in the following ways:

* It is a criticism and a rejection of the values of the West, hand in hand with the search for a global alternative to globalism.

* It favours autonomy over sovereignty, the former being autochthonous and authentic, the latter political and economic.

* It sanctions the land over the sea, the land being the steepland and rootedness, the sea being cosmopolitanism and rootlessness.

* It approves the certainties of the past and the present instead of the present and vagaries of the future.

* It endeavours to assist in the formation of an elite of traditionalists rather than a clique of cosmopolitans.

* It promotes the creation of “demotias,” or dynamic units that permit the “participation of the people in its own destiny.”

* It elevates the thesis of “ideocracy,” with the implication of meaning taking precedence over material.

* It finds sustenance in the philosophy of Traditionalism (Guénon, Evola, Burkhardt, Corbin) versus “the idea of the radical decay of the ‘modern world.”

* It favours “the investigation of the origin of sacredness” (Eliade, Jung, Lévi-Strauss) rather than the privatization and misuse of resources.

* It ennobles “the search for the symbolic paradigms of the space-time matrix,” the idea being that a people should live where they belong.

* It implies a reassessment of the development of geopolitical ideas in the West (H.J. Mackinder of the Heartland Theory and geopolitician Karl Haushofer, etc.).

* It promotes the assimilation of the social criticism of the “New Left” into the “conservative right-wing interpretation,” an intriguing fusion which might account for the movement’s ability to mobilize the language of geopolitics.

* It encourages the development of “Third Way” economics, or the “autarchy of the great spaces.”

Dugin contrasts sovereignty with autonomy. The former is characteristic of the political economics of the farflung Western world; the latter is fundamental to the land-based communities of the evolving Eurasian ideal. Sovereignties are hobbled by legalities and mercantile realities. Autonomies are to be based on nationalities, ethnicities, theocracies, religions, cultural-historical communities, social-industrial efforts, economics, and language-based and communal interests.

This is hearty and heady stuff – which to my mind smacks of first-year junior college conversation – but it should be borne in mind that it is powered by a conception of the land of Russia and the soul of its people as a steepland that is more Asian than European in character, of a country that has lost its way, of continuing traditions that are being eroded by the upstart “civilization” of the West. I suspect that lurking behind the façade of Pan-Eurasianism to the old and familiar notion of the “Third Rome” – the understanding that, following in the wake of Rome itself and its successor Byzantium, Moscow is the third seat of the Holy Roman Empire.

Dugin does not mention it but there is a film that may be used to illustrate his thesis that there will be an apocalyptic encounter (perhaps nuclear in nature) between the principles of Eurasianism and those of Atlantism. Let me call this idea “Storm over Asia.” It is the belief that Russia will foment the World Revolution, specifically an uprising beginning in Asia and directed against the Western world. It is the apocalyptic extension of the notion of Pan-Eurasianism. Dugin describes the idea not as “Storm over Asia” but as “The East in Revolt.” He reasons that the notion is more mainstream than has hitherto been believed. He once noted, “It is the people who do not vote who hold my views and favour them.”

The theme finds vivid expression in a surprisingly nuanced feature-length film known in the West as Storm over Asia (black and white, silent, 1929) directed by V.I. Pudovkin based on the script of futurist writer Osip Brik who in turn based it on an unpublished novel. The action is set a decade earlier than the production and it features the Mongol herdsmen of Central Asia who are Buddhist and Shamanistic in background and belief. Their land is occupied, their resources are being plundered, and they are being badly exploited.

Bair, a Mongol peasant and fur-trapper, cheated once too often by the occupiers, becomes a renegade, then a Bolshevik partisan, then a captive of the occupying English army, and finally a “puppet king,” or so it seems, until “blood wins out.” A High Lama had presented Bair with an amulet which identifies its wearer as “heir to Genghis Khan.” The English generals convince him he has been ordained to serve as the Emperor of the Altai Mongols. Perhaps recalling the theme of John Buchan’s short story “The Lords of Orion,” Bair becomes his own man, which means his own superman, which means that he rises to become the leader of his own people – he “comes into his own,” as the expression goes – with an unanticipated and unsuspected passion in an unexpected and unpredicted direction. (The film is indeed nuanced: Bair had never read the message of the amulet.)

Pudovkin’s film, known in the West as Storm over Asia but in Russia as Heir to Genghis Khan, is strategically situated between two other movies that Pudovkin indicatively titled: Mother and The End of St. Petersburg. The theme of a grand uprising among the Mongols or the Muslims finds many literary and subliterary echoes, and one of these is the once-popular 1932 movie called The Mask of Fu Manchu based on Sax Rohmer’s novel of the same name. In the movie, Fah Loh See (played by Myrna Loy), who is Fu Manchu’s beautiful daughter, has a vision of the up-and-coming apocalypse which is surprisingly close to that proposed by Dugin. Here is the boast of Fah Loh See to her father’s arch-enemy, Sir Denis Nayland Smith:

“I have seen a vision, the prophecy is about to be fulfilled. Genghis Khan, masked in his plate of gold, bearing the scimitar that none but he could ever wield comes back to us. I’ve seen a vision of countless hordes swarming to recapture the world. I’ve seen them victorious. I’ve heard the shouts of the dead and the dying drowned by the victorious cries of our people. Genghis Khan comes back! Genghis Khan leads the East against the world!”

It may seem to be “a stretch” to step from René Guénon to Genghis Khan, but a series of small steps, each taken in stride, may suddenly be recognized to be an army’s advance from an illiberal philosophy to an apocalpyptic scenario.

John Robert Colombo, who reads the demanding works of René Guénon and collects the popular fiction of Sax Rohmer, the creator of the Oriental menace Dr. Fu Manchu, is an author and anthologist who lives in Toronto. Colombo is a regular contributor to this website of reviews and commentaries on consciousness studies. His own website is www.colombo.ca.

THE VIDEO CALLED “GURDJIEFF”

The Video called “Gurdjieff”

A Review by John Robert Colombo

The Paris-based Institute G.I. Gurdjieff authorized the production of a video in DVD format titled, simply, “Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.” It is described as the first video in a projected series of three disks under the general title “Les Chercheurs de Vérité / The Seekers of Truth.” It comes in a tastefully designed, purple-and-black “jewel box.” Its narration may be heard in five languages: French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. It is recorded in both PAL and NTSC version, one version on each side of the single disk, so in this way it is something of an anomaly among single-sided DVDs. However, it is not new; it was copyright 2005. The running time is 72 minutes.

The cover copy reads as follows: “‘The Seekers of Truth’ is a series of three films dedicated to the work of G.I. Gurdjieff. This first film shows his unending search, from early years in the Caucasus to his last days in Paris, accompanied by those who later on carried on his Teaching.” The web address is given: The copy that I have bears two lines in small type. They read as follows: “Edition Privée / For Private Distribution Only.” For this reason, I suppose, I should append here the following “Spoiler Warning” to this blog:

“The producers of this DVD may not wish you to view this video, at least at the present time, unless you are a member of a working group. Indeed, they may not wish you to read a review of this video on a blog like the present one. So it is possible you may not wish to read any further.”

I have the video on loan. It did not come from anyone in Canada or France. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to view it. It is a work of quality but not a very demanding one. Despite any individual reservations, I see no reason why a video like this one – especially this one – should be limited in distribution. Indeed, it should be released commercially, and I have not a single doubt that in the future it will be sold through regular channels, perhaps sooner rather than later, so that people like me, who have a curiosity about the Work, may benefit from it. After all, it was a Canadian author who first said, “Build it and they will come.” I wonder how long will be take to come?

The video is sensitive and unsensational. It tells the quite-familiar odyssey of a child of the Caucasus who grows into a man with a mission to travel to remote places in Central Asia, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other “seeker of truth,” on a quest to find a connection with the wisdom of the past that resides in ancient monasteries or that lies in the heart of man. After that man finds much of what he is seeking, he appears in Moscow, then Tiflis, then Constantinople, then Fontainebleau-on-Avon, then New York, Philadelphia, Boston, then Paris, etc. He leaves behind followers who value his teachings, writings, musical compositions, dance movements, as well as rich memories in the hearts of his followers. In a sense the video covers some of the same ground as Peter Brook’s Meetings with Remarkable Men but in a documentary rather than a dramatic mode.

There is a skillfully constructed narration with two voices: a kindly voiced narrator who speaks for Gurdjieff and the disembodied voice of an unidentified narrator. Gurdjieff’s words are the familiar ones from his memoirs. The visual element is handled deftly. Here are vintage stills, early film clips (some tinted for the occasion, one or two animated), along with generous glimpses of the rhythmical and demanding movements demonstrated on different occasions. Some of the stills and many of the film clips are new to me. Accompanying the narration and the visuals are plangent piano compositions and at one point the voices of a choir are heard.

What follow are some of the features of the video that struck me as effective or interesting. Much attention is paid to Gurdjieff’s father who instilled in his young son “aspirations towards high ideals.” Greek, Russian, and Armenian influences are specifically mentioned. Also noted is the influence of the Dean of the school he attended, and the priesthood and the medical profession are identified as possible careers for the young man, the two being closer to one career at the time than they are today. Instead, he sets out in search of “forgotten knowledge” in Tiflis, Syria, Jerusalem, and Egypt. He meets with “Professor Skridlov” and “Prince Lubovedsky” and they investigate ancient monuments to determine the intention of their builders. Gurdjieff envisions himself devoting the rest of his life to determining “the deep meaning of being and the aim of life.” The three men form the nucleus of the Brotherood of the Seekers of Truth. At Constantinople and elsewhere they study brotherhoods which practise “rituals going back to the creation of Christianity.”

Gurdjieff says he has visited Mecca and Medina but found no answers there, yet in Bokhara he found Islam’s “concentrated doctrines.” Associating with “men of the highest culture,” he determines that “the science of hypnotism” leads him to realize that man has “three types of associations”: thought, feeling, and motor instinct. Eventually the group of Seekers disbands. Some members give up, some are wounded, some have died. Yet he at least finds in Central Asia a “universal brotherhood whose members were united in God’s truth.” He realizes deeply that “all is one” because the same laws pervade all of creation, the structure of which manifests the divine nature.

To support himself he enters the world of business, specifically fisheries and oil wells and he deals in carpets and antiques. Then in 1912 he liquidates his business interests and takes up residence in Moscow where he begins to lecture and teach. As for his teaching, some time is devoted to drawing parallels between the state of man today and the coachman, the horse, and the carriage, specifically the absence of a “permanent I.”

Philosopher and writer P.D. Ouspensky is mentioned at this point and so are future followers, Dr. Leonid Stjoernval and Thomas de Hartmann. This sequence takes place against the backdrop of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, creating a sense of the intense importance of the teaching as society around them is disintegrating. A group that includes the above men and their families follows Gurdjieff to the Caucasus to sit out the revolution. Here he creates conditions that generate friction to work against man’s automatic manifestations. In Tiflis in 1919, the group finds relative calm and sets up an institute dedicated “to “work on oneself.” Its motto is “To Know To Be To Understand.” Alexandre de Salzmann, the painter, husband of dancer Jeanne de Salzmann, work with him on the ballet “The Struggle of the Magicians.” Conditions force them to liquidate their investments and with about thirty people they remove themselves to Constantinople, where they observe the parallels between their movements and the Mevlevi dervish dances, a common feature being mental exercises.

Ultimately Gurdjieff finds France congenial and in 1922 he acquires the Prieuré at Fontainebleau-sur-Avon where his old Russian followers work alongside new English disciples led there by Ouspensky and the editor A.R. Orage. This relatively stable period is explored in some detail, specifically from the vantage-point of manual labour. “The value of work lies not in quantity but quality.” Katharine Mansfield is mentioned and the one aim “to be able to be” free from identification. Lectures, movements, celebrations, all of these take place in the airplane hanger that is shown being erected to serve as the Study House. “The secret is simple: to do things like a man.” Among other things, it requires man to work with all three centres. Self-observation and self-remembering are mentioned, and the stop exercise is illustrated (by stopping the accompanying music, albeit for a second or two): a neat touch.

The reactions of journalists to life and work at the Prieuré are contrasted with the inner work that is underway. Gurdjieff’s mother and sister and other family members join him and take up residence at the nearby Paradou. The movements are exhibited on the Champs-Elysées. The troupe of forty-six members sails for New York City and arrives penniless. Luckily Orage has prepared for their arrival. The movements are demonstrated in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. Work on oneself is emphasized. “We must always start with ourselves.” Inwardly man is one; outwardly man is an actor.

Gurdjieff’s near-fatal automobile accident and the Great Depression will signal the end of the summer of the Prieuré. Yet the work continues. After convalescence, he moves from practice to theory and in 1925 begins to write “Beelzebub’s Tales,” sometimes in the Café de la Paix. In the meantime, scenes are shown of numerous children who have their own vegetable garden and animals to tend. Within months his wife and then his mother die. “The most beautiful roses have thorns.” He collaborates with de Hartmann on three hundred musical compositions over a period of three years. There are regular trips to the United States throughout the 1930s. He begins to work with a circle of American and other women in Paris.

By the late 1930s he leads a Paris circle that includes Madame de Salzmann, Henri Tracol, Henriette Lannes, René Daumal, and Luc Dietrich. They meet at his apartment on rue des Colonels-Renard. Throughout the German occupation of Paris, movements are held at the Salle Playel. their work accounting for moments of sanity during turbulent and tragic times. After the war, clips show him writing at Child’s restaurant in New York. He is shown as a trencherman, handlebar moustache and all, eating with gusto, “with all my attention.” There is a last motor trip in the summer of 1949 to view the cave paintings at Lascaux, evidence of early life. He dies knowing “Beelzebub’s Tales” will soon be published. “Then I will go far away where I will be able to rest.”

The production credits scroll by swiftly. The director is Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, the Paris chief and also a recognized documentary film-maker. The names of perhaps two dozen men and women are given; I recognized a number of them, notably those of Michel de Salzmann, Tom Daly, Peter Brook, and James Moore.

Taste and tact are characteristic of the video. Since it was not conceived to break new ground, it is perhaps a mistake to be critical of it on that account. It is a fine if limited tribute that keeps this side of hagiography. How it quite accomplishes that, I am not quite sure. But it does display a surety of step, a balance, which is a little too … balanced, perhaps … for the film biography of a man who could exhibit a fierce temper and used words like “mercilessly” and “uncompromising.”

I understand that there will be three videos, maybe four. Part One focuses on G.I.G. The subject of Part Two will be Mr. G.’s followers. Part Three will review the Work internationally. In the planning stage, it seems, is Part Four, which will distill the essences of the mind, heart, and body of these three videos and render them accessible to the general public.

If the present video is so traditional in approach and such a responsible presentation of the teachings, why is its distribution limited? I am able to entertain four reasons for the “restricted” label. Here they are.

The first reason is that as long as the distribution is limited, copies may be sold at higher prices than if there is general distribution. The fact that it is not widely available becomes its USF (unique selling feature). The profits from the sales will then be earmarked towards the costs of production of Part II and Part III. Once the costs have been recovered, the videos may go into general distribution. I am not impressed with this argument, as more revenue will be generated through general sale than through private distribution.

The second reason is that secrecy generates interest. People (like myself) may take the video more seriously if it is passed from hand to hand rather than displayed on the shelves of the local video outlet. There is some truth to this, but restriction does “preach to the converted.” It also raises false hopes that something new will be said.

The third reason is “membership premium value.” The leadership of every group knows that the group needs to reserve something of value for its members. Otherwise, why join a group? Perhaps the video is regarded as one of the “perks” of membership. Freemasonry faces this problem today, as it wishes to acquire new and younger members, but secrecy and anonymous charitable giving have little appeal to the younger generation of potential members. Perhaps the Institute faces a similar problem.

The fourth reason is excess caution, exquisite circumspection. I have been hearing for the last forty years that the Institute has for more than half a century been squatting on its treasures – preserving its treasures might be a more understanding way to express it – so that a sense of hesitancy has now become a hereditary factor, like rickets.

Yet times are changing, though the nature of man remains constant. There is a Traditionalist saying that at the time of the Prophet – an age of faith – it was necessary to observe ninety per cent of the law, whereas in our day and age – parlous times indeed – it is required that only ten per cent of the law be observed.

John Robert Colombo is known across Canada as the “Master Gatherer”
for his curiosity and his ability to find and comment on little-known aspects of Canadian social and cultural life. He is the host of the six-part television series “Unexplained Canada” shown on the SPACE Channel. The National Film Board of Canada released two short animated films based on his poems. He is currently working on an expanded edition of his earlier book called “Walt Whitman’s Canada.”

ESALEN WITH A PASSING REFERENCE TO GURDJIEFF

ESALEN INSTITUTE BIG SUR

John Robert Colombo looks at a new book about the Esalen Institute

I am about half a year behind in my reading so it has taken me six months to catch up with the appearance of a mammoth book about the Esalen Institute titled, simply and inevitably, “Esalen.” The title may be one word long but the subtitle is seven words in length: “America and the Religion of No Religion.” The book itself weighs in at 575 pages (roughly 300,000 words, plus notes, bibliography, and index). It is the handiwork of Jeffrey J. Kripal who is identified as J. Newton Rayzor Professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University.

At least that is what the jacket flap says. I checked Rice’s website and learned a few curious facts: the university’s slogan seems to be “Unconventional Wisdom”; it is located in Houston, Texas; it hosts a Space Institute (that seems reasonable given that nearby there is a rocket command centre); it also hosts a Tibetan / Bonpo Textual Collection; it may or may not have Jeffrey J. Kripal as the J. Newton Rayzor Professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies – I could find no reference to him on Rice’s website and a query to its information officer went unanswered (as of this writing). What happened to Professor Kripal?

The University of Chicago Press issued “Esalen” as it did Kripal’s two previous books: “Kali’s Children: Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom” and “The Serpent’s Gift.” In time I will “catch up” with these titles. The author identifies himself as an American who was raised as a Roman Catholic, but it seems he holds a torch for Buddhist studies of the Tantric variety. Buried in a footnote is an acknowledgement of the influence of Bubba Free John (now known as Adi Da). He excels as a researcher-writer and is able to handle masses of information and to conduct in-depth interviews with people like Michael Murphy, one of Esalen’s two founders, and extract from his subjects all the information that is relevant to his purposes without the strain of show or effort.

The problem I have is that Kripal’s name keeps reminding me of the semi-sound-alike Kripalu Centre of Yoga and Health set amid the Berkshires of Massachusetts, near Tanglewood, where two decades ago my wife Ruth and I once spent an intriguing weekend. The Kripalu Centre is housed in an imposing structure, once a Jesuit seminary and hospital, which now serves as a residential centre for Hindu practices and studies. So given its Catholic background and its Hindu foreground, perhaps Professor Kripal is appropriately named.

I am not going to review Esalen. Any review, by my estimate, would require at least 5,000 words. Instead I will go to the heart and core of the book and identify what I take to be four main ideas plus some allied thoughts: Esalen as an institution and movement; Esalen as the centre of “the religion of no religion”; Esalen as the focal point of Tantric yoga; Esalen as the root of the “human potential movement.” The author does not pluralize Esalen, but there are many Esalens, certainly more than four, perhaps as many as nine. But here goes … by way of the book’s sole reference to Gurdjieff.

This passing reference occurs in connection with Ida Rolf (of Rolfing fame) and it runs in its entirety alluding to yogi Pierre Bernard as follows: “The tantric yogi from Nyack, however, was hardly Rolf’s only influence. She also studied with F. Matthias Alexander and imbibed the esoteric teachings of the ‘rascal’ mystic Gurdjieff with a small group in London. In New York she met Greta Garbo and Georgia O’Keeffe, both of whom she would later take on as clients. But it was Fritz Perls who finally got her to Esalen.”

This passage gives you a good idea of Kripal’s prose which is stylish and studded with names and clever classifications. It never occurred to me that Gurdjieff was a “rascal” or a “mystic,” but I am somewhat sympathetic to the author’s attempt to characterize if not categorize him. The author writes with verve and occasional excess, but he seems omniscient when it comes to tracking and tracing to their roots the origins of American exceptionalism in religious and spiritual matters. This exceptionalism refers to the unique blend of transcendentalism and individualism identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Richard Maurice Bucke (a special interest of mine). It also extends to the commercialization of everyday life and thought, what might be called the shopping-cart or supermarket version of “mystical materialism” (a line of thought largely unexplored by the author).

1. Esalen as an institution and movement. The author documents the early history of the Esalen Institute which began informally in the early 1950s but formally only in 1962 on the site of a resort hotel with hot springs on a breath-taking promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean off U.S. Route 101, El Camino Real, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This region, so primordial and elemental, has attracted its share of seekers, for instance the founders of Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, and other retreat centres.

Esalen, named after the local native tribe, owes its past eminence and present reputation to Michael Murphy and Richard Price, two highly educated and sophisticated spiritual seekers who turned their property into a centre that would attract seekers of similar natures and backgrounds. This has taken the form not of a seminary or monastery but of a centre for conferences, seminars, and workshops. From its early days, it has combined the openness of an off-campus college with the concentration of a quasi-religious retreat. Early on it attracted free-thinking academics, largely psychologists, and then religious teachers, mainly Hindus and Buddhists. Its ripples continue to spread outward, so that today it has influenced pretty well every countercultural thinker in North America.

Esalen’s speakers are a who’s who of ground-breaking writers and thinkers and inspirational speakers, one dozen of them being Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, Claudio Naranjo, George Leonard, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, John Heider, Will Shutz, Don Hanlon Johnson, Stanislav Grof … I could go on and name a second dozen. Esalen’s salad days of influence were the 1960s and 1970s when it gave impetus to the New Age movement, a designation despised by founders Murphy and Price.

In the anglosphere, but not elsewhere, developments are chronicled by decade, so I will attempt just such a calendar/catalogue here: 1950s – Huxley’s perennialism, psychedelia, “human potential movement,” interpretation-free centre for contemplation and study influenced by Vedanta; 1960s – Maslow and Perls and “bodywork”; 1970s – Stanislav and Christina Grof, Cold War activism, ufology, Tantra and Tao; 1980s – “the religion of no religion,” “the transformation project,” “the future of the body”; 1990s – regrouping, “the future of the past,” “the Mystical Idea of ‘America,’” etc.

Esalen continues to operate in the 2000s, mainly through “invitational conferences.” References to its activities are more likely to appear in the footnotes of scholarly texts than in the headlines of daily newspapers. Up to 150 people are employed at any one time to run the place, from maintaining its fabled hot springs to programming. It has become a popular centre for executive retreats. Part of its role has been assumed by the Internet, perhaps, but its influence in the past has been substantial. From Kripal’s book I learned, for instance, Esalen organized the visits to the United States of Soviet leaders Yeltsin and Gorbachev.

2. Esalen as the centre of “the religion of no religion.” The author sees this one of Esalen’s principal contributions; indeed, as its “final philosophy.” The fact that this notion is expressed in a cliché – “being spiritual without being religious” – is no doubt a tip of the hat to Esalen.

3. Esalen as the focal point of Tantric yoga. This is another of the author’s main themes, though I search in vain for any real articulation or elucidation of what constitutes Tantra. His point seems to be, simply, that there is no spirit-matter dualism, or mind-body opposition, but that everything takes place in the human body and the vital spark is kundalini, or sexual energies. There is the philosophical opposition – “consciousness, awareness, and spirit” versus “energy, emotion, and body” – that is somehow overcome in practice, perhaps through bodywork. From the first the hot springs attracted lovers and gave it its early reputation as a place of sexual experimentation. There are repeated references to the influence of Sri Aurobindo through Murphy in particular. A column and a half of references to Tantra appear in the book’s index.

4. Esalen as the root of the “human potential movement.” The movement’s birth here is eloquently expressed and well documented, as it grows out of an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s insightful phrase “human potentiality.” It too became a cliché of the New Age movement and has become the kit and caboodle of innumerable motivational speakers. The author sees it as the contemporary expression of siddhis, psychic powers, or today’s “enhanced facilities,” subliminal powers of the mind so described by British psychical researcher Frederic Myers whose general contribution to consciousness studies is currently undergoing a revival of interest.

A word that recurs throughout the book is “integral” and it may well be what Esalen is remembered for being integral to a mending of (or at least a recognition of) the body-mind dichotomy. An idea that recurs is “the future of the past,” the notion that by imaginatively keeping the past alive in the present one gains greater strength, the strength of one’s ancestors. Islam and kabbala, as well as Western occultism, or “mystical realism,” have been the subject of conferences, but Esalen has less in common with these subjects than one might assume.

Schematically, it may be surmised that Esalen began as a centre for the study and experiments inspired by perennialism but that half a century later it finds itself the centre for pluralist studies. Its countercultural and advanced thinkers, for all their pronounced personalist and historicist views, seem to have been as much taken by surprise as the rest of us, what with the emergence (and not the convergence) of religious principles and practices, in the form of the rise of militant Islam and religious fundamentalism generally. The divergence leads me to believe that Esalen is an object lesson in how ideas turn into their opposites: the philosophy that what was once on the cutting edge – perennialism – is now passé, having been replaced by its opposite – pluralism. If religion is a puzzle, there are pieces that will not fit together. If spirituality is a mystery, there are pieces that are missing.

The author returns to the phrase “no one captures the flag” to refer to the fact that Esalen as an institution and as a movement, as an inspiration and as a value-free model for inquiries into human and non-human values, remains free of dogma. It is something of a forum for advanced thinking. It is what in the long run Kripal defines as “a place of gnosis,” “a gnostic community,” where one acquires “a learned pantheism or nature religion.”

P.S. The information officer at Rice University subsequently replied to my query that that Prof. Kripal is indeed Professor and Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice. I wonder why he is not, then, listed as being among faculty staff.

John Robert Colombo’s single visit to the Esalen Institute was as a tourist who found the grounds and buildings to resemble a summer camp, albeit impressively sited and one for intelligent and inquisitive men and women. His latest book is “The New Consciousness” (Battered Silicon Dispatch Box), a collection of R.M. Bucke’s papers on Walt Whitman and consciousness studies.

THE TALKS OF LORD PENTLAND

photo Rockefeller Centre

A Take on the Talks of Lord Pentland by John Robert Colombo

Resting on my desk, on the right side of the keyboard of my computer, there are three thin booklets in uniform format but with card covers of different colours. One colour is green, one is blue, and one is red. The booklets have the same format (5.5″x 8″) and are close to the same in length: respectively, 24 pages, 32 pages, and 36 pages. The green one was issued in 2005, the blue one in 2006, and the red one in 2007. I wonder, “Will there will be a booklet for 2008? What colour will be chosen for that cover?”
There is a general series title: “Introducing the Ideas of G.I. Gurdjieff.” The author is identified as John Pentland. The work is copyright in the name of Mary Rothenberg. The publisher is given as the J.P. Society, an operation new to me. I suspect that Ms. Rothenberg controls the copyright of the works of the late John Pentland aka Henry John Sinclair aka Lord Pentland, and that in the works are plans to issue the texts of his many talks, speeches, and addresses, these three booklets being the trailblazers for the series.

John Pentland, who inherited the baronetcy from his father, the first Lord Pentland, a Scottish politician, is the last bearer of the title. He was born in Britain and his vital years are 1907 and 1984. He studied with Ouspensky, and later Madame de Saltzman having met Gurdjieff during the last years of Gurdjieff’s life. During the Second World War, from his office in Rockefeller Centre, he engaged in liaison work for the British and American governments. He served as the president of the Gurdjieff Foundation from its inception in 1953 until his death some thirty years later. He oversaw the founding of the Gurdjieff organization in San Francisco and over the decades addressed study groups throughout the United States.

I do not know if in his travels he ever visited Canada, but since its appearance I have owned a copy of his book “Exchange Within: Questions from Everyday Life Selected from Gurdjieff Group Meetings with John Pentland in California 1955-1984″ (published by Continuum in 1997). I found his writing style to be opaque, if somewhat misted over, but then I was reading in print what had been delivered orally in person. Had I heard him speak, I might have found his thought processes more enlivening and enlightening. Yet there is a subtle quality in his prose, an inherent humility and restraint, that I have come to identify with the French commentators Tracol, Vaysse, and Conge.

To judge by photographs, John Pentland was a cadaverous figure of a man, toweringly tall, with skeletal skull, bushy eyebrows, and beady eyes. He resembles an ascetic, say a Cistercian monk, but let me add that I never met the man and if any readers have accurate impressions of him, I would be pleased to hear from them. Enough about the man and the format of these booklets. What about their texts?

The green booklet is titled “Impressions of Truth in the Human Mass.” This is an oddly unidiomatic phrase for an English speaker to use, and as such it captures the sense of the opacity that I found in the prose of “Exchanges Within.” In the present instance, we have the text of a short speech he delivered in Los Angeles in 1960, followed by a record of the questions and answers that it generated. Here he addresses the question of how “to understand ourselves as a whole” and this requires that we experience impressions or perceptions (he uses the words almost interchangeably) of Being and Conscience.

He writes, “We have this incurable weakness for thinking about inner values on much too small a scale, giving up too soon and paying too little. Ouspensky called this inner search for reality a search for the miraculous. We always forget that what we are looking for is a miracle.” He mentions impressions, attention, self-observation, and understanding, and returns to these words later in the discussion. Asked about art, he makes the interesting statement that art is produced by “high machines in the artist” and not by “something that occurs in the artist himself.” Such is argument of the green booklet.

The blue booklet is the text of two talks that took place at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York City, in 1983. The first talk is really an address to precede the showing of the movie “Meetings with Remarkable Men.” Here he urges his audience to capture “a little taste of what Gurdjieff’s vision of man” is like. It is done by becoming aware of “levels of truth.” He argues that Marx, Freud, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and even “Star Wars” offer views of the state of man that are state-dependent: “but the vision is too simplistic, at too low a level to affect us and change us for long.”

The speaker notes that the younger generation is turning away from Darwin and Newton to the earlier visions of Augustine, Jesus, and Buddha. The earliest known vision is that of Zarathustra, the first teacher in a succession of spiritual teachers of mankind, who counselled men and women “that their inner life and inner attitude is just as important as their external behaviour.” A modern vision comes from Gurdjieff. The speaker then offers four characteristics for a spiritual teacher for our time:

First: “His thinking should be a service to the highest.” Here is a recognition of levels and Gurdjieff “restores to humanity an order of rank with an intelligent aristocracy at the top which is open to anyone who can learn to differentiate the different levels and the action of the energies on each other at each level.” Second: “A man with vision should think dangerously … truth must be his only ethic.” There must be no fear here. Gurdjieff stresses this. Third: “The thinking of a man of vision is from the heart as well as the head.” Referring to Gurdjieff, he says, “He used to say that we are like automobiles stalled on the highway of our search, and his ideas are like a repair car that comes along and give[s] us some gas to get started again.” Fourth: “We ask of a man of vision that his teaching should be complete and consistent in itself with no compromises, no exceptions and no self-contradictions.” This too is true of Gurdjieff’s teaching.

Language is considered and Gurdjieff is compared to William Blake (perhaps for the first and last time) for his neologisms and for giving new meanings to old words. The word “search” is one of these. “The search begins more from a part of myself that I don’t know, it begins in spite of myself as I know myself, more than from the part I do know.”

The word “consciousness” is another concept to consider, but as the word has become voguish, the author prefers another word. “I’d rather use the more modest word, awareness, or simply seeing.” He writes, “Seeing is taken as the energy aspect of material, not the forms aspect.” In Gurdjieff’s theory and practice, psychology, cosmology, metaphysics, ontology, etc., come together in man all at once. “Either I’m seeing myself or not.” Self-observation leads us “to work for more and more of these moments, recognizing them and verifying them by their taste, which is a strange taste of like and dislike, at the same time, of freedom and mechanicalness, good and evil of going upstream and going downstream together.” The right work of the three centres is necessary “to open the possibility for a higher conscious energy to enter my presence and allow a new conscious level of vision.”

The author asks, “What is a real question?” and then responds with eight questions of his own, to prime the pump. These are ignored. His listeners, instead, ask twenty-six questions of their own. Here they are in summary form: The first one is knowing which “school” is for any one person. The answer is that you will know. The second one concerns the discontinuous nature of the work: “Things start to go down as soon as they stop.” The third one has to do with “octaves” and recognizing their “laws.” The fourth one has to do with “one of the very first liberating experiences, which we can each have, is being able to differentiate between the direction from the highest downwards and the direction from below to return to oneself.”

The fifth one concerns “sleeping man” and “awake man” and their differing expectations. The sixth one permits the speaker to contrast “getting stuck” with recognizing how we “change the direction” without recognizing it. The seventh one concerns the realization that “there is no ‘I’.” The eighth one leads to an elaboration which concerns inability to do but how we “simply begin to see” and ponder the possibility of control. The ninth one focuses on “free will” and “some choice.” Do we have “the choice to break a law”? The tenth one examines “this little bit of free attention that I have” and how “these new experiences come at first just in glimpses.”

The eleventh one examines decision-making, how we attach ourselves to one decision instead of another, and how we can “stay quiet in front of this question of whether to go right or left.” He says, “And our work of study is to free myself all the time from this kind of attachment.” It seems “the taste of the ego” expresses itself, now one way, now another. If a person is able to remain awake, he may engage a “conscious struggle, that means a struggle of which I’m conscious,” and the problem disappears. The twelfth question concerns what to do when “you find yourself in front of something,” so “the question is whether you stop living and decide, or whether you just go on living.” Since choice is a concern for the future, a person should eschew it because “I wish to live in the present moment.”

The thirteenth question leads to “the power of suggestion.” A questioner asks, “What distinguishes Gurdjieff from, let’s say, Krishnamurti?” The speaker answers, “In this particular sense, not very much.” The speaker points out how bodily sensations keep one within oneself and one’s basic physical energy, whereas one’s thoughts lead one away and astray. The answer to the question, “Who am I?” is “I am.” This works “like a purge” of the ill winds that blow from “the pressures around, in business, in politics, international politics.” The fourteenth one asks how to remain “in the present.” The answer is, “We study how we lose it.” Observation of impressions is essential, and new impressions are necessary, but we must not become attached emotionally to them. “Sleeping Man wants permanence … Awake Man wants impressions.”

The fifteenth question concerns how “shocks” produce “hydrogen.” “Our whole work is the work of study, of consciousness. It’s not a work of doing.” The sixteenth question concerns the nature of shocks, first from plants and animals. The seventeenth question concerns the baleful influence of the moon and how “part of us when we die goes to feed the moon.” Taking a space craft to another planet changes nothing. Everything costs. The eighteenth question inquires about the nature of evil. “Evil was originally part of God.” Then it became separated and “becomes unhealthy. There has to be mechanicalness, evil. People are so made that to a large extent they have to serve the mechanical ends of Nature.” Then the gap between consciousness and mechanicalness becomes too great to be bridged, so “a wise man had to be sent in order to show people how to bring the evil mechanicalness more inside and work with it.” “It is through the negative, the affirmative appears, through the evil, the good appears.”

The nineteenth one elaborates and suggests “you wouldn’t need the good unless the evil came up.” The speaker points out: “Growth is growth of the mind. Evolution is evolution of understanding. So evolution depends on understanding the two together.” “We’re all the time trying to have a less negative view of the negative. And in that way our lives can be normal, which means positive.” The twentieth one turns on how to not “let the evil bog you down.” The twenty-first question is about beginning. “You have to begin now. There’s no other way. In five minutes you’ll be thinking of something else.” Another point: “Of course we each need to make our own experiences. There’s absolutely nothing that anybody can experience for me.”

The twenty-second one discusses “the experience of oneself” and “the outward pull and the inward pull.” The twenty-second one looks at “free energy” and “automatism” and how they morph into a consideration of how when consciousness and “the automatic parts” work together so that “my Self, an intelligence not in words, begins to work.” The twenty-third one is about the nature of this “intelligence”: “It’s the kind of thought that can choose associations.” The twenty-fourth one alludes to “intentional suffering” which is described as “intentionally putting yourself in situations in which you know you will suffer in order to have the observation of how this affects your energy of attention.” The twenty-fifth one alludes to simple exercises (like using the left hand instead of the right) to increase one’s sense of working. The twenty-sixth one turns on attachment. There is a brief reference to the relationship between the book and the movie “Remarkable Men.”

That question also elicits the answer that one may become free of attachment one of two ways: “by austerity” (”the energy is not available for being attached, so one can have glimpses of a higher level of looking”); “by self-observation” (”by coming in touch with a more desirable energy and this is the energy with which I see … the more I wish to see, the less energy there is to be attached”).

The speaker alludes to “a very little known procedure … I can’t demonstrate here” to bring this about, one that is mentioned by Jean Vaysse in “Toward Awakening.” The speaker than introduces the topic of “negative emotions” and adds, “Looking at an emotion throws light on it and changes it. And little by little I can wish to throw more light, and that’s all the time taking away the attachment to the emotion.” Enough is enough! “I think we can stop here,” he says, “but this is very important.” “It’s simply a question of looking, the quality of my looking. And that way one doesn’t cut oneself off stupidly from all the suffering there is, but one suffers much more consciously, much more intentionally.” So ends the blue book.

The red booklet consists of two talks, the first delivered at San Francisco in 1976, the second at New York University in 1980. The first talk examines “the possibility or the study of human growth,” and it is a difficult possibility, “even in California.” The opportunity exists but the ideal of growth is difficult to measure. How to measure growth is to ask, “Is he or she more unified?” What is meant is the following consideration: a unity of the senses, head, heart, and purpose. Starting is difficult. The work is both an art and a science. Gurdjieff: “He’s a trailblazer in giving self-knowledge scientific clothing.”

There is a brief discussion of behaviourism with its rewards and reinforcements and threats and punishments. We need “a lasting wish to grow.” Our progress must be evolutionary, not involutionary. “We put much less emphasis on the method and technique than on establishing a contact with the essence or with the parts of myself that naturally wish to grow.” Also, “The idea that we are interested in is the formation of a will, which would be in correspondence with what happens, which would not be fighting all the time the central impulses in myself.” The will is “the awareness of who all this is happening to.” And also, “The point is now, the point is what can we do now, what can we exchange now.”

A slew of general questions followed this short presentation. One question had to do with whether the inquirer was passionate or not passionate and how passion is generated not by belief but by desire, “something irrational.” Another question turned on finding assistance: “Look around until you find somebody who is growing. You know you can tell with people …. ” There is a discussion of the nature of “a reliability that is true.” The speaker notes, “A thought is brought to paper-over the vision of my own dividedness.”

Then there is an interesting consideration of the role of fear in life. “We need to be open, to be vulnerable …. We need to have a strong taste for the truth.” Fear and paranoia are discussed in light of the text of “The Life of Milarepa.” “To be hollow – to have no contact at all with the ground of my existence – this is the state of affairs for almost all of us most of the time.” The manifestation of this may be put to good use. The roles of discipline and respect are considered, as well as finding what inspires one so that a transformation is possible. A frequent refrain is the author’s question, “Do you follow me?”

The second talk introduces Gurdjieff as “a Master who dealt in his own particular way with all the myriad aspects of human existence, life and death.” The speaker confesses that this is the first time that he has introduced the Work to people unacquainted with it, so he begins with generalizations and some biographical details absent elsewhere. The speaker suggests of Gurdjieff that “he was able to bring some kind of reconciliation between the oriental teachings like Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam – that have been popular in the last fifteen years – and the western religions and western science and western psychiatry.”
John Pentland was a young engineer in London in 1936 when he began working with Ouspensky. “The first thing that struck me was the certainty with which Mr. Ouspensky spoke about ideas, the wholeness, sureness and certainty with which he formulated for us one by one, in a particular order, the ideas of Gurdjieff.” He found parallels between Ouspensky and himself. He did not meet Gurdjieff for another twelve years.

He speaks about approaching the work not as an object of study, like philosophy, but as “a teaching for the keeping of a community together and for understanding relationships between people …. But I think the best approach is the approach from this angle of self-study, self-observation, investigating all the facts that come to one’s attention …. ” He moves on to note “the word ‘secret’ comes from the same root as ‘sacred.’” Then he offers his listeners an overview of the different levels or qualities of knowledge. There is understanding or wisdom, which is superior to “the knowledge which can be written down, put into words, held in the memory, in the head, and printed, distributed in different languages in books.” Understanding how to make a cup of excellent coffee is instanced.

“Gurdjieff held that this unconditioned knowledge is a substance, and only a limited amount of it exists in the world at one time …. ” It is necessarily handed down from generation to generation, from mouth to mouth, from teacher to student. This is oral transmission and it is used to relate “a kind of secret about bringing my attention onto myself.” “It cannot be given indiscriminately or democratically without risk.”

Some time is given over to self-observation. The listener is advised to listen to hear the words he is speaking but also to overheard his own thoughts “to see how part of your attention is toying with something else besides listening to what I’m saying …. ” The aim is “a more continuous self-awareness or consciousness.” Some simple exercises are imparted to bring about a realization of “the first of Gurdjieff’s ideas, which is that we live in a state of sleep.” We live between two levels. “And so I, not very often, emerge from this kind of subaqueous sleep in which we live into the plain and healthy air of being awake.” He adds, “In other words, the only possible change is in a small way to go against the mechanicalness of my sleep.”

A brief description of Gurdjieff in his late years follows. “He wore a red tarboush, a red fez, and a welcoming smile which had in it also a certain amount of irony, a certain amount of disillusionment and a compassion which enabled one to look directly in his eyes and feel at once no fear, some kind of common ancestry, some kind of common humanity.” Some biographical details follow. The speaker quotes Colin Wilson’s description of the Work as”the greatest single-handed attempt in the history of human thought to make us aware of the potential of human consciousness.” The speaker adds, however: “It’s ambitious, but I’d like to make a more sophisticated judgment of his ideas than the one I just quoted from Colin Wilson. His ideas are formulations of some indestructible wisdom which is mercifully available to human beings on this planet at all times and which exists since ancient times in other formulations.” Then he adds, uncharacteristically because poetically, “These ideas are like the shadows of birds above us that leave traces on the emptiness and enable us to know how to go on.”

Some interesting comments follow on such human ideals as mercy, truth, humility, etc., and the compromises man makes with them. A passage from the last chapter of “Beelzebub” follows. Then there is a scattering of questions. The first one comes from a Professor Carse who introduced the speaker and he wants to know if the oral transmission is knowledge shared by esoteric communications in other traditions, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. The speaker answers this by distinguishing between “orders of knowledge” and “orders of being.” He adds, “Maybe one can have a little inkling of that if one sees some great master in India or in America or in South America; these people must exist somewhere. And there must be some kind of attraction between them, and so on at lower levels.”

In answer to a question about self-observation, the speaker discusses “the momentary experience, the gift of suddenly seeing oneself caught in the middle of a complete lie, for instance …. ” “It’s as if I were between two different stories of a house, or between two different levels in a big department store. And there’s an escalator going up and an escalator going down, and in a sort of vague way all this is going on and suddenly I see it, and there I am getting angry with somebody and at the same time there’s something telling me more and more I ought to stop, and I feel I’m like a field in which all this drama is going on and I’m entirely helpless; it’s all going on involuntarily. Do you understand?” The talk ends with the speaker agreeing “to stay for a few minutes to answer individual questions.” Thus ends the red booklet.

These three booklets, which fall under the rubric “Introducing the Ideas of G.I. Gurdjieff,” may or may not be available through regular commercial channels; if not, they should be. They offer the reader, whether novice or veteran, a view of John Pentland, a formative influence on the Work in the United States. The view is an impressionistic sketch rather than an elaborate, full portrait.
Pentland himself offers the reader a good sense of how a sensitive and intellectual man has absorbed Work impressions or perceptions and in turn interpreted them for Americans, centring on a sense of presence and the need to strive for awareness not tomorrow but right now. He repeatedly asked his listeners, “Do you understand?” I am sure that they did understand.

John Robert Colombo has taken an interest in Ouspensky and Gurdjieff since the late 1950s. He is an Associate of the Northrop Frye Centre, Victoria College, University of Toronto. His latest books are a study of the Canadian broadcaster and globetrotter Gordon Sinclair and a book of poems called “End Notes: Poems with Effects.

A NOTE ON CROWLEY & GURDJIEFF

Ronald Hutton

A NOTE ON CROWLEY & GURDJIEFF
By John Robert Colombo

I spent the hectic days between Christmas and New Year’s immersed in an all-engrossing book. That book may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if I may compare it to a pot of tea, the comparison is to vintage Earl Grey, the favourite beverage of such discerning characters as Jean-Luc Picard, Sir Leigh Teabing, Ellie Arroway, and Bruce Wayne. The book in question is The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and the author, or tea-pourer, is Ronald Hutton, the Bristol historian who has previously written academic studies of “Merry England” and the “ritual year” in Britain.

Hutton’s work is close to five hundred pages in length and it examines in great and scholarly detail the Early Modern Period and in greater details the period between 1800 and 1940 in Britain and to some extent in Europe and America, where there was a revival of the practice of “pagan witchcraft.” That, in turn, requires an analysis of the paganism of Classical Antiquity, which might be termed High Magic, and the paganism of the English countryside, which might be termed Low Magic: priests and maguses on one hand, cunning folk and witches on the other.

The analysis turns into an investigation of what can be known about the past with certainty (perhaps “uncertainty” is a better word here) and whether continuity with the past is at all possible. Are there “pagan survivals”? Do “mysteries” pass from one generation to another? Let me introduce a “spoiler warning” here because Hutton dismisses the notion of transmission, but rather than lament that fact, he finds numerous occasions to celebrate the spirit of revival, recreation, and renewal. He concludes that the flower of “wicca,” the name for contemporary witchcraft, does not grow from the roots of “pagan witchcraft”; it is better to regard it as “the belated offspring of the Romantic Movement.” More generally he categorizes it as a “revived religion.” His analysis covers some 200,000 words, all of them smoothly functional, studded with apt quotations, argued without rhetoric, and above all else informative. All this is in the service of showcasing wicca, the only religion Britain ever produced.

I want to mention two points of personal interest. I am writing this in Canada but the country does not figure in the story of the development of the modern wiccan movement, except in one peculiar way. In the second half of the book, Hutton makes frequent reference to “the Toronto collection,” sometimes “the Toronto Collection,” which is probably the single most significant trove of documents that shed light on how the movement took form in the late 1940s. The manuscripts are those of Gerald Gardner and among them is the original “Ye Bok of ye Art Magical,” which is the precursor of the famed “Book of Shadows,” the collection of spells and liturgies that every ordained or initiated witch is bidden to copy in his or her own handwriting.

Hutton does not tell the story of how these papers ended up in a strongbox in Toronto, but I have it on some authority that it came about in the following way. Upon Gardner’s death in 1964 his belongings, which included the implements of witchery from the witch museum that he operated on the Isle of Man, were purchased by the Jim Pattison Group, a Vancouver-based conglomerate that also owned Ripley’s Believe It or Not! which was then operated out of Toronto, now out of Orlando, Florida. So all the artifacts and manuscripts came to Toronto. The former were put on display as attractions at the dozens of Ripley’s “odditoriums,” but the manuscripts were judged to be of antiquarian and sholarly interest. So they were sold to an interested party, Richard and Tamarra James, founders of the Wiccan Church of Canada. That is how “the Toronto collection” ended up here, so far from the action.

Another point of personal interest is Aleister Crowley, who was known before his death in 1947 as “the great beast” and “the wickedest man in the world.” I happen to own a small cache of Crowley’s unpublished letters, as well as one of his original oil paintings (which is so ugly it might have been painted by Bacon or Kokoshka), so I was intrigued with Hutton’s attempt (in the main successful) to trace Crowley’s influence on Gardner and on rituals like those in “Ye Bok of ye Art magical.” References to Crowley are plentiful, and one of them sheds some light (or at least expels some darkness) on G.I. Gurdjieff.

In Hutton’s book there is but a single reference to Gurdjieff. It appears on page 220 and it occurs in connection with Crowley. I assume most readers of this commentary will have heard that Crowley was Gurdjieff’s guest at the Prieuré in 1925, how the Teacher of Dance extended the Black Magician traditional Caucasian courtesy, and then at the conclusion of the weekend, how Crowley was summarily dismissed with an insult. The incident has been retold three or four times in books and on videos.

It seems the tale is first recorded by James Webb in The Harmonious Circle (1980), a careful and comprehensive work, to say the least. Then it was immediately repeated by Gerald Suster in The Legacy of the Beast (1981). The problem is that Webb offered no source for the incident. Did it take place? Hutton considers that question:

” … none of Crowley’s works mention his humiliation by the famous mystic Georgei Gurdjieff, who berated him and threw him out of Gurdjieff’s community at Fontainbleau in 1925, as related in a well-known book by James Webb. This particular example backfires, however, because Webb never provided a reference for the anecdote and it seems to have been a piece of gossip. Suspicion that it was a false one, inspired by Crowley’s generally bad reputation, is strengthened by the statement of Gerald Yorke to his namesake Gerald Suster, that he was the sole witness of Crowley’s only actual meeting with Gurdjieff and that the latter was a total non-event; the two men just ‘sniffed around one another’.”

So the incident may or may not have taken place. In an earlier commentary I raised the question of a possible relationship between Gurdjieff and Joseph Stalin. Here I am asking questions about a possible interaction between Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley. A lot of peculiar things happened at the Prieuré, despite its short period of operation, including the editing on the premises of The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett (1926), one of the bulwarks of the Theosophical movement. Perhaps a reader of this commentary has further information about any meeting or meetings between Gurdjieff and Crowley.

John Robert Colombo is an author and anthologist based in Toronto whose special interests include Canadiana and consciousness studies.
Shortly to appear are two of his new books. The first is Footloose: A Commentary on the Books of Gordon Sinclair. The second is End Notes, a collection of poems.

INNER OCTAVES 1

Michel Conge

In Search of Inner Octaves

John Robert Colombo’s
Commentary on an Important Book by Michel Conge

Students of the Fourth Way are no doubt familiar with the name and reputation of Michel Conge (1912-1984), the French physician and senior student of the Work.

Following the death of Mr. Gurdjieff in 1949, Madame de Salzmann appointed a small number of followers to assist her in carrying on with the Work. Among these men and women were Pauline de Dampierre, Michel de Salzmann, Henri Tracol, Lord John Pentland, William Segal, Margaret (Peggy) Flinsch, and Michel Conge. Even in this group, Dr. Conge stood out, at least in the affections of his followers who heard him speak in many cities throughout France. He visited Israel in 1965 where he started the first Israeli group. His talks to followers in Paris and Reims and other cities were well attended and well remembered.

Not many of Dr. Conge’s words have appeared in English. Ricardo Guillon has good things to say about Dr. Conge in his memoir “Record of a Search: Working with Michel Conge in France” (2004). Excerpts from some of Conge’s talks on individual and group effort have appeared as articles in at least two back issues of the “Gurdjieff International Review,” and these have led me to conclude that his sensibility is subtle and discriminating like that of Henri Tracol. That is saying a lot!

It is worth pondering whatever it he says and particularly how he says it. No doubt it is a coincidence that the French noun “congé” (with an acute accent) means “leave” or “holiday” or “respite.” Maybe it is not a coincidence because to read his prose is to experience a respite from clichés and conundrums, for the reason that he speaks from the depths of the heart and not chiefly from the head.

So it came to me as something of a surprise to learn that the pupils of Dr. Conge had compiled and published a collection of his talks and reminiscences. I learned about this publication via the grapevine and confirmed it via the Chinese whisper. The seminal work bears the title “Sur le chemin de l’octave de l’homme: Témoignage d’un élève de G.I. Gurdjieff.” The book was published in January 2004 by a group known as Set, which consists of pupils who met with Dr. Conge. Three years following his death they legally constituted their association and gave it its present name. I have no idea why the group is called Set, though the word brings to mind the mathematician’s “set theory,” the Egyptian deity Seth, and even a class of roots in Sanskrit. No doubt there is another reason for the name.

What is at hand are some details about Sur le chemin (which may be translated “On the Path to the Octave of Man: Testimony of a Student of G.I. Gurdjieff”). Even in France the publication is not well known because its distribution has been restricted. The trade paperback is 200 pages in length; its International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is 2-9519513-0-2. It was printed by Groupe Corlet Imprimeur, SA - 14110 Condé-sur-Noireau, France. The printer’s number is 75920 and the legal deposit of two copies of the book was made to the Bibliothèque nationale in February 2004, where it may be examined. It seems the book has never been offered for general sale, though it is known that copies have been sold to individual members of groups.

The book consists of thirty sections, twenty-nine of which are talks devoted to the teaching as Mr. Gurdjieff presented it in Paris from 1944 to 1949, plus one more section of a biographical and anecdotal nature. That final chapter succeeds in capturing Mr. Gurdjieff in action, the occasion being his last motor trip, the one to Vichy, and the learning experiences that it entailed!

Dr. Conge’s transcripts of talks, exchanges, minutes of meetings, letters, and essays were written or delivered in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus some of the sections of the book are more than forty years old, but the prose has hardly aged at all. I understand from people who are in a position to evaluate it that the French text is quite remarkable. In fact, men and women whose opinions I trust prize the work and have shelved it alongside P.D. Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous.” That is high praise indeed!

I am now in a position to agree with these readers. After some effort I located a copy of the French edition and it lives up to its underground reputation. It is tempting to say that Conge’s book continues where Ouspensky’s book leaves off. Ouspensky conducts a symphony orchestra; Conge, a chamber ensemble. The Russian offers the reader and the student “the big picture,” the outer octaves; the Frenchman “the snapshot,” the inner octaves. In a modest, intimate, and disarming fashion, Conge focuses on man’s needs and especially on the almost inhuman effort required to discover “the motionless in motion,” all the while keeping the aims of the Work in their rightful place in a vast overview of the cosmos. Throughout the work, the “inner octaves” reflect the “outer octaves” – or is it the other way round? It is a work of inner transformation.

It is a shame that there has been no English translation of this important book, but I understand that one is in the works, scheduled to appear in the not too distant future. It will be titled “Inner Octaves” and will be the second publication of Dolmen Meadow Books in my hometown of Toronto. It is unlikely that I will be able to review the English translation, at least in the immediate future, for the reason that its distribution, too, will be limited.

In the meantime, to satisfy the curious or inquisitive among us, here are some notes that I made and others that I had made on a single reading of “Sur le chemin.” This is not a full-fledged review of the book, merely a fly-by-night commentary on those parts of the work that are readily summarizable (and not all are). It should be understood that the use of quotation marks is provisional in the sense that French work terminology is not all that accessible and the sole aim here has been to catch the drift of Conge’s thought and feeling, meaning and taste. It would take an inventive and sensitive translator like A.R. Orage to do the job properly.

As a teacher and a scientist, Conge explored the balance and the connection that exists between the “inner octaves” of man and the “outer octaves” of creation. After his meeting with René Daumal and Jeanne de Salzmann, he encountered G.I. Gurdjieff and studied with him from 1944 to 1949. Faithful to this wake-up call, he pursued the quest for reality behind appearances with his study groups until his own death in 1984.

“Foreword.” The foreword is written in the third person. Conge was a man who sought after truth, the reality behind appearances. This book contains answers to the questions he asked of himself and of the members of his study groups. His teachings are a blend of Gurdjieff’s ideas and his own inner searching wherein the wisdom of the heart is awakened. His way of teaching was not without humour for he mistrusted any teacher who could not elicit laughter. One question he loved to ask his study groups was the following: “There are cooked potatoes and raw potatoes. What are you?” and then he would answer the question: “You are raw potatoes.” (Here he seems to follow the lead of P.D. Ouspensky, who talked about raw and cooked eggs, and the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who built an entire system on a similar distinction.)

“My Life and My Death.” This section amounts to a mission statement that Conge shared with his students: He was not a man to take a permanent stand on something and hold onto it as if it was the absolute truth. Instead, he was a work in progress, in constant process. He saw the connection between his life and his death, between freedom and being lost. Neither the head nor the feelings lead to truth, and if he believed that his vision of things was the only right one, then he would be lost. He approached others without pretending that he alone had understanding. He taught that there must be a hierarchy of understanding that involves both parties to make a true connection. That way little by little relationships are created.

“The Idea of Evolution.” In this section, Conge looks at the problem of evolution with his study group. He begins by saying that no one can make headway in his inner development without taking into account simultaneously both approaches, the psychological and the cosmological. The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, his will, and his power to act. To avoid limitations in discussing this problem of evolution, which he insists is universal, Conge draws a diagram of the parallels of the Ray of Creation, the lateral octave and the achievements of Man. What Conge says at the end of this section is indicative of the complexity of pursuing the process of awakening-awareness-will-action: “To perceive the substance of all the inner worlds and all the laws that order them, to discover the motionless in motion and the unique in the multiple, then I could speak to you of evolution. But because I am still so far from this, I can only prepare the groundwork.”

“The Lateral Octave and Its Influences.” Evolution starts with a change of direction from mechanical involution to conscious evolution – in stages – through a whole gamut of surprises, changes in direction. We move along this lateral octave without much understanding – we are organic, terrestrial, living a life that does not correspond to latent possibilities within us. So we go along the scale of evolution affected by earth-bound influences until our essential self hungers for something more. Until we are well disposed to certain influences on a higher scale, as in a musical scale, then and only then can we evolve.

The next three sections – “The Scale of Man,” “This Stranger, the Self” “To Be There between Worlds” – deal with exactly what they imply. Even angels must descend into incarnations to evolve. This explains the following: “I come from the world of stars and I am called to return.” In the meantime there is the struggle with duty undone, eating beyond hunger, and making oneself sick with guilt and remorse. We move in the cosmic scale of things, attached to what is One, to what is independent, and embraced by everything at the same time.

Conge goes on to say, “The lateral octave is just that – an octave. It’s not a note. It’s eight notes, and in some way that note is me. It’s also all of humanity, and many other things as well. My centre of gravity is between the notes, and I am stuck here on this planet as if I have feet of clay. But if I open to that stranger within me, that Self, I discover that my Self exists also in the upside of the interval between notes and I am in contact with a greater force that comes from On High. I see that I have to die to my illusions, to my memories. All these words are so clear and simple when we begin to live them.”

Then Conge asks, “What do we have to do to attain awareness? We have to depend on precise knowledge and at the same time on precise but limited experience.” Someone in the study group claims that he is at the threshold of one of the lateral intervals and cannot get past it. Conge suggests that he who speaks of a threshold speaks of an interval; he who speaks of an interval speaks of an octave; he who speaks of an octave speaks of notes. Notes are like facts, tangible realities within you. You are the octave. You have to accept that you are filled with a knowing, that you receive impressions, emanations from the other side of the interval. Then, as Gurdjieff would say, you will accept the labour you have to do. The work is the plough unused in the field, the half-hour of exercise you did not do. This is for us the whole problem – the problem of faith. We must learn not to doubt.

Our inner life contains the good and the bad. It is how we take it and when we get attached to it. You will never get past the interval if you remain “raw.” You must get “cooked” and digested to move on, like a potato. You are a raw potato.

“Awareness and Mechanicality.” Conge discusses the difference between man as awareness and man as machine, and shows how they are connected in the process of transformation and evolution. He finds it difficult to admit that he is a machine but if he were not a machine he would not have the means to organize his transformation. The Universe is a machine formed by a Creator who is pure Awareness, who desired to create such an organism as man.

“I don’t like to be called a machine,” says Conge. “I don’t like to admit it. But something extraordinary is evident: I am an organism that can transform substance because the possibility of evolution is built into the machine that I am. Of all the machines, only man has this in-built capacity for change. Is it not clear that awareness and mechanical functions work together in that immense cosmic game where an organism allows the transfer and transformation of energies? I am a machine but I am also awareness, and my body – that machine – allows me to live a life of awareness. So it is not an insult to be called a machine, for I am also awareness.” Conge expresses his gratitude to Gurdjieff for bringing him to this understanding of Man the machine, Man the Awareness.

“What Is It that Evolves?” The study group in Reims pursues the subject of evolution and ends with the understanding that “I am not obliged to stay locked into myself.”

“Can I See Myself as Awareness?” This is an excerpt from a discussion to be found in “Fragments” (presumably “In Search of the Miraculous”) in the form of questions and answers. Conge answers questions by raising related questions. The following are the questions he is asked: “Could evolution be only awareness and will?” “From the moment of my creation what happens to the Creator? He seems to distance himself from his creature.” “What does it mean that man is a product of what he has learned in school?” “But how does a man who possesses higher knowledge lose it? And how can he lose it without losing his soul?” “If evolution doesn’t occur, will humanity be destroyed?” “What compensations does this (evolved) life bring to us?” Conge’s final reply: “The raison d’être for evolution is an immense maintenance program – the law of reciprocal feeding. I eat therefore I must be eaten.”

“What Is Man?” This section’s title is again a question and within the section other questions are asked of Conge who answers with still more questions. One of the chief questions he asks is the following: “Why are we so blind that we cannot see that man does not end where his skin ends?” Here are some of the questions put to Conge: “What is life?” “You said that you are a grain of wheat. Does a man who appears less gifted have within him the potential to become a more gifted man?”

Conge’s answer: “If I remain a potential, a dormant grain of wheat, without understanding the innate impulse to grow, then I shall never awaken to my fullness, to my totality. We have to hit bottom, the very bottom of the barrel to rise to the notion of a higher level. There is no hardship, no injustice. It’s absolutely extraordinary that I could ever have completed the work that awaited me had I not been forced into that descent …. You have to understand that had I been created in one shot, then I would never have known self-awareness. One is tempted to ask why man was created in this way.”

“What Is the ‘Work’? An Overview.” There is “the way, the idea of liberation” and there is “the idea of working with an awareness of a life with the Work,” and it cannot be considered in any other way but from a perspective so vast that it breaks with our egocentric vision. What is the Work? It cannot be seen with the part of me that understands nothing about the life with the Work.”

“There is a place, a space between the Beginning and the End, that starts and ends with the Absolute, where there is shift, some sort of rhythmical change as you hop about in one spot. You feel this and you go with the shift and it is the way that the Work begins. It is where you realize that the Work is not made for me, but I am made for It. We cannot take for granted, that the Work will happen to us. How often we can pass by it and miss it. And once we go through the essential shift away from egocentricity we have begun to take part in the Work which is to understand, to obey, and to serve.

“The direction of the Work is Descent – Achievement – Return, or if you like, Incarnation – Passion – Resurrection – Redemption. It is difficult to penetrate the secret of the origin of the Work or to understand its progression.” There are three levels of progression in the Work: to work on oneself, to work with others and for others, and to work for the school.

“To Understand.” “Understanding is usually based on everyday functions. To make the shift to higher understanding, so that you can proceed with the Work, you must learn to free yourself from the constant slavish preoccupation with mundane functions. When you begin to live with the union of your mind, your body, and your awareness, then you will begin to understand the Work This work is painful but you must do it to begin the Work.”

“To Obey.” Man was born to serve nothing greater than himself, but the only way that he can even suspect that there is something else is to see himself in a cosmic context. Every other form of existence – suns, planets, satellites, angels or archangels – obeys unconditionally. It is in their nature to do this and they are unable to do otherwise. They are all part of the Ray of Creation that displays the harmony in the Universe. But Man is not on that Ray. He resonates in the octave of Organic Life. Man is the only creature and cosmic creation that has the free will to obey or not to obey. And this is his problem. What is the secret to shifting his understanding? Conge says it is “to obey like a loving friend and not like a servant from fear. It is with love, with desire and will that the shift to unconditional obeying begins … I must renounce my life for Life. I must give up my illusions of myself and my dreams for myself … I must renounce my freedom to disobey, to exist totally.”

“To Serve.” “We are conduits of energy, and like the machines that we are, we transmit it elsewhere, and in this way the need to feel, the need to understand the magnitude of this energy, is lessened within us. This energy should return to its source but we have not accepted that it is a double current. It is a gift and we have forgotten how to return it to its source. To enlarge our outlook we have to ‘die’ to our ignorance and to our conditioning. We have to see self-serving as a calamity, as an abomination. We have to recognize the error of our ways. How do we reconcile these opposing needs to serve ourselves and to serve others? When we do, a flood of well being and joy is returned to us.”

“The Struggle Has to Take Place in the Middle-World of the Soul.” It is not in the calm and the silence, not in the spiritual Himalayas, where we learn awareness in our ordinary lives. This would disconcert the hopes that were held for the seeds that were sown for us On High.”

“When you feel the void within you, feel it, taste it. The void is not emptiness. It is alive! Look within and you will find reality and subtlety at the same time – real thought and feeling and awakened intelligence. You will engage in your mundane life in a new way. You will begin to understand the sensation of seeing yourself, with all your painful destructive faults, at last, and you will live with self-awareness. You will feel as if you are living two lives at the same time, that you have two natures struggling in the Great Combat. Eventually you will see that this struggle takes place in your soul.”

“Functions Put to Good Use.” A machine-man functions without awareness. What is the purpose of these functions? They have a double objective: To take one through life; to curry favour or influence, nurture them, and transform them. There are two directions to go in life: downwards mechanically; upwards with awareness.

“The Graduate of Inner Work.” Conge starts work with one study group by saying that if they think he is a graduate of the inner work, they delude themselves, trusting him when he does not give a fig about that. An exchange follows:

Student: I feel that I’m turning around in circles exhausting myself –

M.C. (interrupts; ironically): Oh, so if you’re really exhausted, then the earth will split in two for you and you’ll be free!

Student: Yes! But I’ve totally exhausted myself and not been true with myself.

M.C.: But you haven’t entirely exhausted yourself because then you would be exsanguinated!

Student: I know that I have one step to get through this … but I can’t.

M.C.: It’s not life or nature stopping you from being free – it’s this “coco” (nut) that is looking at me terrified.

Student: I don’t have the subtlety to understand.

M.C.: Well, now, I ask myself if we have a super “coco” here. When we try to unravel him he is still muddled. This is why we have to work on our emotions … not be annoyed by everything, not get upset, not say that time is running out. When we tell you it takes time, that bothers you even more. Are you a seeker or a player?

Student: A player? I don’t understand.

M.C.: You have to play out the game. All your cards are on the table so you have to win.

“As Stubborn as a Mule.” When we get stuck in our inner work and are aware of this, then this is the beginning of change. We have to desire the change. We have to have the will to make it happen.

Student: If one day I feel the need for some peace between my desire for awareness and this crass laziness within me, don’t I need to beat myself up about this?”

Conge tells the student the story about the man who had a mule but fell asleep and allowed the mule to wander off its course. And then it stopped, exhausted. The man tried everything to get it going again – pulling, pushing, tempting it with goodies. Nothing worked. Finally he decided that if he wanted to get where he was going, he would have to carry the mule. But he could not do that for long and had to rest.

M.C.: Isn’t it better to do the work on yourself in stages, admitting that at times you need to give it a rest?

Two sections follow: “The Devil … a Very Very Important Personage” and “The Freshness of Innocence.” A student bemoans the fact that in a movements class he lost control of his body. Conge explains that this was because he has lost his innocence by killing it or allowing it to be killed. “Could it be the devil at work whispering to the mountain climber, ‘It is so high and far away, and you have been walking for hours.’ And you begin to think that you can go down again. Was it really the devil? G. says that the devil is a good trooper, always in a hurry, and that he knows everybody’s business. Get back your innocence? You can always say that you have lots of time. It will come back. But you can also say that it’s still there and I aim to keep it. But it needs your constant attention. It depends on you.”

“Learn to Accept a New Impression of Yourself.” Gurdjieff said: “Let the angels help you. Let the devil help you … and in between, may God help you.” “With an inner shift you need both polarities – the plus and the minus. Stars move in a complex way that is not visible to the naked eye. It is the same for our inward shifts. We do not see ourselves as others see us when we have changed. As you shed your old skin, learn to see yourself in a new light.”

“A Self-impression: I Exist, I Have Always Existed.” “Life gives us hard knocks. Sometimes we give off a dull sound – other times a crystalline sound. You exist but you can’t leave it at that. You react. You can’t simply accept that you exist, that you always have.
You think this is presumptuous, but as soon as you say or think this, impressions change. Finally you have to dare to say, ‘I exist.’ This fact seems so simple, understanding it within your grasp, yet it is so distant. So where do you go from here?”

“Making Sense of the Question.” The question is: What is this world we live in? The question cannot be answered with the intellect. It has to resonate within you. Is it a question without an answer? Can you stay with it until you see that all our problems are simpler than we imagine? Conge explains, “We like to find quick solutions but the earth has to tilled to bring forth a harvest. One quick pass with the plough is not enough. You have to stir the soil deeply.”

“The Role of Attention in the Process of Deliverance.” Conge gives a talk in Santiago, Chile. He repeats material on how we behave mechanically; how nothing can be done if not by ourselves; how when we think we act freely, we are dependent on things and people outside ourselves; how we allow functions to control us, distract us; how we are divided within ourselves; how we can become whole by learning from others who have achieved unity within themselves.

The solution to the dilemma of the division within each of us is the ability to be aware. We need to become the focus of awareness. Where that focus is, you are. If it is weak, you are weak. If it is mechanical, you are mechanical. If it is free, you are free. Wherever you direct your awareness, there you will be, high or low. As you learn to free yourself from the grip of tyrannical functions, your focus has new power, and you sense a new quality of thought. From there you become more vigilant. Conge adds, “I must attempt to live this, to hold it secretly in my heart, and to protect it from everything that could destroy it.”

“Management.” To know management is to know our needs. “To know my needs is to know that I am. To know that I am is to know I am focused. What else do you need to know? If you live this way everything falls into place, absolutely everything.”

“Prayer.” Conge begins this segment with something like a prayer or an invocation: “God Saint. God Strong. God Immortal. / God All. God Nothing. / Light unthinkable. Darkness unthinkable. / The entire Universe is prayer./ That is to say a call in response to a call.” “Real prayer is not of this world. The entire universe is a response to prayer. In the silence I perceive the life that is restorative. This is grace. Prayer is submission, recognition, abandoning trust in my thoughts, my feelings, my attachment to my body, to go into the silence, not for the silence in itself, but because in the silence comes one question: Who, me?”

“Presence and Prayer.” There is a divine presence that is alive within us and it is through prayer that we can maintain that divine spark within us. It gives us the get-up-and-go to attempt and achieve in life, and we are always sustained by that divine presence.

The final chapter of the book is the longest and it offers a precious glimpse of Gurdjieff in action. It is titled “Michel Conge Reminiscences about Monsieur Gurdjieff.” On each January 13, Gurdjieff’s traditional birthday, Conge assembles his students and recounts anecdotes that have appeared in an lesser-known publication titled “Les Dossiers H ‘G.I.Gurdjieff.’” Conge stresses that for him Gurdjieff is a bridge that the teacher erects between himself and his students so they will not be able to build a new religion on his teachings with Gurdjieff as its evangelist.

From this section it would be pleasant to quote some brilliant remarks of Gurdjieff’s, but brilliance is lacking and the French he speaks is best described as broken. It is what he does not say that is brilliant, and how through spontaneous responses to students’ quandaries he ushers them into processes that seem so simple but yet are so profound. It might be described as metaphysical shock-treatment. This is his particular genius. To quote Conge: “He gives you the most awful knocks that seem to have no effect and he says: ‘Ah! Ah!’ What extraordinary moments! Then we know he will let us rest because we need to gather our energy for the next onslaught. And how we loved him at that moment, and how grateful we were.”

“First dinners at Monsieur Gurdjeff’s.” Conge arrives at G.’s on St. Michael’s Day for the first time with other beginners. Although he is a doctor with a full practice, he feels like a schoolboy. Madame de Salzmann is there and she warns everyone to be prepared for the worst and the unexpected. “Be vigilant,” she says. “He’s your master now. He’s going to test you.” And test them he did. Conge has to wait a long time for the answer to his first question. He thinks it an important question but it is ignored by G. He endures this without being annoyed and passes his first test this way. There are more tests to come.

“The Forgotten Briefcase – the Turkey Neck.” G. makes spontaneous use of very ordinary and mundane events as they occur as occasions for major lessons. Conge passes two more tests. The first, when he fits his schedule into G.’s to retrieve a briefcase he has forgotten, a briefcase that holds important secret research documents. The second, when he stubbornly refuses to eat the turkey necks simmering on G.’s stove because he does not care for them. Conge describes the scene in G’s kitchen:

“Oh! Doctor, you like turkey necks?’

“No!”

“What! You don’t like? This best piece. Special treat to honour you. Take!”

“No, monsieur, I don’t want any.”

“What! You, idiot!”

“Perhaps I am. Idiot who doesn’t like.”

“Yes, yes! Take to please me.”

“I assure you that I don’t want any.”

“Want! That, mechanical thing. You must experience new treat.”

“No, monsieur.”

G. got angry and insulted Conge. Conge stood firm and the dispute and G.’s efforts to humble him through humiliation continued on through the dinner with others present. No one spoke. Only for the toasts. When G. insisted Conge stand and defer to an elderly doctor, something rebelled in Conge, but at the same time he realized how far he had to go in his inner work with G.

After dinner. alone with Madame de Salzmann, she says, “You have had a great victory. G. just put you through your second difficult test, and you have behaved well. It was important for the rest of your work.”

Conge is rewarded with an invitation from G. to accompany him on a motor trip to Vichy. After enduring every possible obstruction in the planning of the trip, while on the road, and arriving at their destination, Conge is amazed to see that “in the end, everything fell into place as if by pure enchantment.”

On this happy note ends “Sur le chemin de l’octave de l’homme.” And so ends this commentary.

John Robert Colombo is interested in the writings of Gurdjieff and
Ouspensky and has written and compiled numerous books about
supernatural and paranormal activity in Canada. His latest titles are
“The Midnight Hour,” “Terrors of the Night,” and “Strange but True.”
With Dr. Cyril Greenland, he compiled the published and unpublished
writings of Richard Maurice Bucke in a book titled “The New
Consciousness.”

THE VIDEO CALLED “GURDJIEFF”

The Video called “Gurdjieff”

A Review by John Robert Colombo

The Paris-based Institut G.I. Gurdjieff authorized the production of a video in DVD format titled, simply, “Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.” It is described as the first video in a projected series of three disks under the general title “Les Chercheurs de Vérité / The Seekers of Truth.” It comes in a tastefully designed, purple-and-black “jewel box.” Its narration may be heard in five languages: French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. It is recorded in both PAL and NTSC version, one version on each side of the single disk, so in this way it is something of an anomaly among single-sided DVDs. However, it is not new; it was copyright 2005. The running time is 72 minutes.

The cover copy reads as follows: “‘The Seekers of Truth’ is a series of three films dedicated to the work of G.I. Gurdjieff. This first film shows his unending search, from early years in the Caucasus to his last days in Paris, accompanied by those who later on carried on his Teaching.” The web address is given: The copy that I have bears two lines in small type. They read as follows: “Edition Privée / For Private Distribution Only.” For this reason, I suppose, I should append here the following “Spoiler Warning” to this blog:

“The producers of this DVD may not wish you to view this video, at least at the present time, unless you are a member of a working group. Indeed, they may not wish you to read a review of this video on a blog like the present one. So it is possible you may not wish to read any further.”

I have the video on loan. It did not come from anyone in Canada or France. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to view it. It is a work of quality but not a very demanding one. Despite any individual reservations, I see no reason why a video like this one – especially this one – should be limited in distribution. Indeed, it should be released commercially, and I have not a single doubt that in the future it will be sold through regular channels, perhaps sooner rather than later, so that people like me, who have a curiosity about the Work, may benefit from it. After all, it was a Canadian author who first said, “Build it and they will come.” I wonder how long will be take to come?

The video is sensitive and unsensational. It tells the quite-familiar odyssey of a child of the Caucasus who grows into a man with a mission to travel to remote places in Central Asia, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other “seeker of truth,” on a quest to find a connection with the wisdom of the past that resides in ancient monasteries or that lies in the heart of man. After that man finds much of what he is seeking, he appears in Moscow, then Tiflis, then Constantinople, then Fontainebleau-on-Avon, then New York, Philadelphia, Boston, then Paris, etc. He leaves behind followers who value his teachings, writings, musical compositions, dance movements, as well as rich memories in the hearts of his followers. In a sense the video covers some of the same ground as Peter Brook’s Meetings with Remarkable Men but in a documentary rather than a dramatic mode.

There is a skillfully constructed narration with two voices: a kindly voiced narrator who speaks for Gurdjieff and the disembodied voice of an unidentified narrator. Gurdjieff’s words are the familiar ones from his memoirs. The visual element is handled deftly. Here are vintage stills, early film clips (some tinted for the occasion, one or two animated), along with generous glimpses of the rhythmical and demanding movements demonstrated on different occasions. Some of the stills and many of the film clips are new to me. Accompanying the narration and the visuals are plangent piano compositions and at one point the voices of a choir are heard.

What follow are some of the features of the video that struck me as effective or interesting. Much attention is paid to Gurdjieff’s father who instilled in his young son “aspirations towards high ideals.” Greek, Russian, and Armenian influences are specifically mentioned. Also noted is the influence of the Dean of the school he attended, and the priesthood and the medical profession are identified as possible careers for the young man, the two being closer to one career at the time than they are today. Instead, he sets out in search of “forgotten knowledge” in Tiflis, Syria, Jerusalem, and Egypt. He meets with “Professor Skridlov” and “Prince Lubovedsky” and they investigate ancient monuments to determine the intention of their builders. Gurdjieff envisions himself devoting the rest of his life to determining “the deep meaning of being and the aim of life.” The three men form the nucleus of the Brotherood of the Seekers of Truth. At Constantinople and elsewhere they study brotherhoods which practise “rituals going back to the creation of Christianity.”

Gurdjieff says he has visited Mecca and Medina but found no answers there, yet in Bokhara he found Islam’s “concentrated doctrines.” Associating with “men of the highest culture,” he determines that “the science of hypnotism” leads him to realize that man has “three types of associations”: thought, feeling, and motor instinct. Eventually the group of Seekers disbands. Some members give up, some are wounded, some have died. Yet he at least finds in Central Asia a “universal brotherhood whose members were united in God’s truth.” He realizes deeply that “all is one” because the same laws pervade all of creation, the structure of which manifests the divine nature.

To support himself he enters the world of business, specifically fisheries and oil wells and he deals in carpets and antiques. Then in 1912 he liquidates his business interests and takes up residence in Moscow where he begins to lecture and teach. As for his teaching, some time is devoted to drawing parallels between the state of man today and the coachman, the horse, and the carriage, specifically the absence of a “permanent I.”

Philosopher and writer P.D. Ouspensky is mentioned at this point and so are future followers, Dr. Leonid Stjoernval and Thomas de Hartmann. This sequence takes place against the backdrop of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, creating a sense of the intense importance of the teaching as society around them is disintegrating. A group that includes the above men and their families follows Gurdjieff to the Caucasus to sit out the revolution. Here he creates conditions that generate friction to work against man’s automatic manifestations. In Tiflis in 1919, the group finds relative calm and sets up an institute dedicated “to “work on oneself.” Its motto is “To Know To Be To U