To me the book is of especial interest because, in a limited way, a long time ago, I knew Louise Welch – Mrs. Welch, as she was always called. That was a long time ago – some fifty years ago. Memories sometimes serve as bridge-builders, connecting the past and the present. They do so in this instance.

Before I discuss the contents of this book, I will describe the volume as a physical object. It is a sturdy production, a new book designed to outlast the years, as are so many of the titles issued by Traditional Studies Press, which is the publication wing of The Gurdjieff Foundation: The Society for Traditional Studies. (The organization’s website identifies the organization as The Gurdjieff Foundation of Toronto: Society for Arts and Ideas.)

The publication has no dust jacket but the pages are bound in heavy boards covered in dark green cloth, and the pages are sewn together rather than glued together, so the book may be opened without worry that any of its pages will loosen or fly apart! The volume measures 6 inches by 9 inches, and the pagination goes like this: xxii + 181 + i. It is curious that the first twenty-two pages, which offer the reader an analytic table of contents (like those in P.D. Ouspensky’s “Tertium Organum” and in many of Colin Wilson’s books), appear without page numbers.

The typography is more practical than pictorial; the type is large and the lines are well “leaded” or spaced apart. The text is fairly short (perhaps 60,000 words) and each page is easy on the eyes. There is a frontispiece photograph of Mrs. Welch, taken in Halifax in 1984, which makes her look much older than the women I remember meeting over a period of two years in the second half of the 1950s.

In memory I recall Mrs. Welch as sharing some of the facial features of Maria Ouspenskaya, the Russian-born actress and acting teacher. Here she looks rather more like Marie Dressler, the Canadian-born, Academy Award-winning comic movie actress. I prefer the image in my memory to the portrait in the book!

Louise Welch’s vital years are 1905 and 1999 (so she is not to be confused with the similarly named Louise Welsh, the much younger, English-born, Scotland-based author of psychological thrillers). Mrs. Welch – Louise Michel Blinken Welch, to give her name in full – was born in New York City of Ukrainian background. She was raised in a dysfunctional family setting and received little formal education, but through her own efforts she found work as a journalist and editor. At one time in the 1920s, she wrote the “agony column” for the New York American. (Walter Winchell quipped about her that “Louise Michel went from bad to Hearst.”) Later in her varied career she worked as a director of a writer’s group for the WPA – the Work (or Works) Project Administration, the U.S. federal government’s employment program of the 1930s, now despised by Republications and forgotten by Democrats.

During the Depression she married and bore a son and a daughter. She was abandoned by her husband so she became their sole support. (Her daughter is Patty de Llosa, a writer and leader who is well respected in the circle of the Work, has has written warmly about her mother and her stepfather, Dr. William J. Welch, in a memoir that appears on one of the webpages of the “Gurdjieff International Review.” The information shared here is derived in part from that source.)

In the 1930s, Mrs. Welch worked with Benton & Bowles, the renowned advertising agency, and there she met and was befriended by a somewhat younger co-worker, who later trained to became a medical doctor, qualified as a cardiac specialist, and eventually became her husband. Together the Welches were what later came to be known as “a power couple.”

This is not the place to review her meetings in the 1920s with the English editor A.R. Orage or how through him she met G.I. Gurdjieff, in both Fontainebleau and New York, if only because she accomplished all of this in her finely written, book-length memoir titled Orage with Gurdjieff in America (1982). Offhand I would say her temperament had much in common with that of Orage. The two of them appreciated fine writing, they were practical people and skilled editors, they had an understanding of the emotional problems of other people as well as the social problems of their times, and they were entirely committed to being leaders in the Work.

Hardly any of the above information appears in the pages of “Meetings with Louise Welch in Toronto,” a fact that limits the readership of this volume to readers appreciative of the subtleties of the Work. To all other readers, the book will be seen as a tribute to a well-liked person rather than as a valuable record of transactions and experiences. Traditional Studies Press did what it set out to do; that was its aim. Perhaps a wider perspective might have resulted in a more imposing publication. Yet readers of all persuasions should express gratitude for what has been achieved.

The Toronto group was founded in 1954, the first of the ancillary groups to be recognized by The Gurdjieff Foundation in New York which had then entered its second year of operation. Its seeds were planted by Olga de Hartmann and her husband Thomas, the composer who had worked so closely with Mr. Gurdjieff on those marvellous compositions for the piano. In fact, way back in 1919, it was the de Hartmanns who had introduced Alexandre and Jeanne de Saltzmann to Mr. Gurdjieff. In the same way, while the couple were living in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, anticipating their move to the United States, they introduced the Work to Canadians in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax.

Among the prime movers of the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York were Dr. and Mrs. Welch. The latter was delegated to head the Toronto group, which she did from 1955 on. I met her a year or two later, never guessing that the Toronto group was not “ages old” but “brand new.” On our first meeting, I asked her if I could join the Work, once I had moved to the city and enrolled at the University of Toronto. She delayed answering that question. Instead she asked her own question, “How did you first learn about the this work?” It was a good question because there was very little information available to the public about Gurdjieff, especially in a small city like the one in which I was born and raised. (This was well before the arrival of the so-called New Age.)

I replied that I had borrowed a copy of “In Search of the Miraculous” (published four years earlier) from the local Carnegie library, and read it cover to cover, not once but twice. Etched in my memory is her grim rejoinder: “The Table of Hydrogens is quite difficult, you know.” Then I backtracked and admitted that I had not understood all that I had read! She was happier with that reply. In general, I knew about the Priory at Fontainebleau from Ouspensky’s description, but it was months before I heard anything at all about J.B. Bennett and the foundations, institutes, and societies, not to mention the estate at Mendham. I was nineteen years old at the time.

My first meeting with the Toronto group leader took place in the upstairs bedroom of the home of Mrs. Margot Dustin and her husband Ernest whose nickname was “Dusty,” both former Theosophists, about a mile from where I now live and am keyboarding this account, and I was regular in my attendance at weekly meetings for readings and for Movements held here and there throughout the city, especially at the monthly meetings convened by Mrs. Welch. She would fly into the city from New York to conduct the sessions, on occasion with Dr. Welch, a man of genuine presence and strong voice. Once, in later years, they brought with them a 16 mm, black-and-white print of performances of the Movements in Paris, which was shown to a small group at the Ontario Science Centre.

Sometimes in attendance at the meetings were film producer Tom Daly, teacher Peter Colgrove, Dr. Paul Bura, an engineer, and his wife Sheila, who was adept in Movements, who were “refugees” from a Bennett group in England, not to mention a stunning, exotic couple: an exquisite, half-Burmese, half-French woman of great beauty (named Olga, oddly, and former wife of BBC executive Cecil Lewis) and her tall, stylish architect husband who may have come from Cornwall, where they subsequently settled. Yet in general I found the original members to be drawn from the professional middle-class of the city, almost everyone being older than I was, and it was a somewhat staid gathering of people, certainly not one given to small talk or big pronouncements. There were occasional visits from the very Gallic Alfred Etievant who would lead the Movements with lithe assurance.

Mrs. Welch’s contributions were not limited to oral instruction, for she encouraged the group to break into print. She kindled the publication of “A Journal of Our Time,” a literary and artistic “little magazine” of some deft and delicacy; she wrote a play which the group produced and staged for public performance; she generated publicity for the commercial showing at Cineplex (the world’s first “cineplex” or multi-screen movie theatre) of Peter Brook’s film “Meetings with Remarkable Men”; she served as editor-in-chief of the first edition of “The Guide and Index to G.I. Gurdjieff’s All and Everything,” which remains an invaluable resource to this day.

References to a few of these activities appear in “Meetings with Louise Welch in Toronto,” which is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Dustin, the very woman in whose house I first met Mrs. Welch. According to the editorial note, “This publication is compiled from notes taken at meetings spanning the years 1955-1965 and 1973-1989.” My experiences relate directly to the first period, not at all to the second period, and I have no idea what happened between 1965 and 1973, a span of years that I assume were busy ones for the Toronto group, which eventually acquired valuable real estate both in Toronto and outside the rapidly expanding city.

When I was in attendance, each one of us was encouraged – even required – to ask questions, and to ask them slowly, so that the two note-takers would have time to record them, whether in longhand or shorthand I never knew. Apparently these scripts exist today, and they form the basis of the text of this book. From time to time the questions themselves are recorded here, but in most instances it is only Mrs. Welch’s answers that are given. The text itself begins like this: “My search is your search. We must each have a common wish to find out who we are and the direction in which we can grow to reach the truth.” (For symmetry’s sake, the text proper ends like this: “We have a little help here.”)

Reading these passages I am able to imagine myself in her presence and hear her refined, modulated American speech tones and pronunciations. The content of the presentations brings to my mind the content of the entries that appear in the five volumes of Maurice Nicoll’s “Commentaries.” Dr. Nicoll’s presentations are quite technical, whereas Mrs. Welch’s are conversational, parallelling normal thought processes. Both books are organized topically with long, analytic tables of contents. Mrs. Welch is a communicator of attitudes from Mr. Gurdjieff; Dr. Nicoll is a conveyer of detailed information from Mr. Ouspensky.

Her expositions make good use of “I” and “me,” though they do so with great care so as to generalize about the “I” and the “me” and make the words apply to each and every one of her listeners. For instance, she writes as follows: “The important thing is my inner work. My presence is important. I live without meaning because I am not here.” Imagine hearing these words: the “my” and the “I” are those of you, the listener.

In later years, in an attempt to understand the thrust and direction of the Work, I came to define its essence in a single word, a compound word that is a personal neologism. That word is “psychopraxis.” Here the discipline is psychological even psychical rather than psychiatric, but it is also physiological, for it is concerned with physical expression and practice; it is also blessedly free of religious, theosophical, and psychological terminology. Such ideas would have been regarded as novel at the time. Mrs. Welch avoids such exercises, and the introduction into the text of specific Gurdjieffian terms is minimized. One unexpected exception is this one: “Trogoautoegocrat,” from “All and Everything,” which is defined as “real sacrifice” or “I eat myself.”

Preserved are instances of the common touch: “If you tell me you cannot Work for fifteen minutes a day, I say that you don’t want to …. Five minutes of struggle is better than twenty-four hours of daydreaming.” There is no attempt here to innovate or improvise; the expressions of insight are refreshingly free of argument and cant or special pleading. The result is the exposition is effective and the prose is durable and in no sense dated. There are no potted expressions meant to impress the listener or express the private opinion or reservations of the speaker.

At the time I identified Mrs. Welch’s message with a simple, three-letter word – “aim.” It seemed to me at the time that she was always after us to define our own “aim.” I was surprised to realize how difficult it was to comply, difficult when not impossible! Not much about aim has found its way into the text at hand.

What I took away from the Work, right away, was the notion that what lies at the root of most personal and social problems is mechanicality … in “mentation,” emotion, and action. “Mechanicality” is a word that is instantly meaningful, yet is seldom heard or used in this sense by the outside world. On one occasion, she asked a provoking question: “My pet mechanicality is what irritates you. What is there in me that I am unconscious of, and need to be conscious of and know better?”

If I had more time and space I would compare and contrast the records of these meetings, as fragmentary as they are here, compiled not by an individual but by “The Editors, The Gurdjieff Foundation,” with more elaborate records kept of meetings with Ouspensky, Madame Lannes, Conge, and other group leaders. But there are readers (perhaps those who have been exposed to multiple teachers) who are better equipped to do so than am I.

The beating heart of the book lies in its most extended passage, a veritable lecture, which runs from page 66 to page 97. This passage covers most of the subjects germane to work on self. Unlike the shorter sections, which range in length from one sentence to one paragraph or to one or two pages, some dated, the narrative arc of this passage moves from one aspect of the subject to another aspect of the subject, and it builds, as dramatists like to express it. It begins, “I can be stirred into uneasiness … ” and it ends, “We rejoice in the joy of the possibilities.” The beat of this heart marks the ending of the first section of the book.

The second section, which records exchanges between 1973 and 1987, preserves the question-and-answer format – observation and discussion – so it is somewhat more digressive than the first section, but perhaps more engaging. Its heart beats faster. In many ways it may seem less exciting but it is more experienced, less promising but more polished, yet not having been there I cannot comment on how well it represents the occasions themselves. I would say that they do show a leader who is probing, more deeply than formerly, the content of the Work, perhaps because the members of the group are able to absorb more than they did formerly.

The book ends with a selection of aphorisms. Here are some of the book’s aphoristic expressions or pensées, most of them taken from the text itself and not from the selection devoted to them:

* “Our search is not for miraculous results, not to achieve a result, but to learn a process.”

* “My body knows what it wants, not what I want. I must teach all of my parts what I want.”

* “My Gurdjieff said, ‘I don’t bring you a system of morality, but how to find conscience.’ We must find the outlines of a structure that is more valid.”

* “Only when I have a certain level of being can I be open to a certain level of knowledge.”

* “I remember Mr. Orage saying, ‘I love you,’ said the man. ‘Strange that I feel none the better for it,’ said the woman.”

Readers of the book today may find the presentations of procedures of “the work” and the attitudes that are described in these pages less engaging than did listeners at the time. Some of the passages are more than a half century old; others have aged by at least a quarter century. Much water has passed under the bridge since then, and truisms and oral teaching techniques that were once novel are now found in best-selling books and courses on the human potential movement, leadership training, self-motivation, cognitive therapies, mindfulness training, and on the TED Lectures on the Web. Many of the formulations are indebted to Mr. Gurdjieff, who gave gifts of insight to the world, few of them acknowledged. Nevertheless, here are some of Mrs. Welch’s formulations that struck me as still valid, informative, or interesting:

* We want to go on repeating what belongs to another period. “Mr. Gurdjieff said that he wasn’t interested in anyone over five or under fifty-five.”

* “Gurdjiefff said one third of one’s life should be spent in pondering. Why was I born? Who am I? What is meant by waking sleep?” [This statement comes from the second section. I recall no earlier instances of the use of the word “pondering” in the earlier period, or any references to the importance of “sittings,” now staples of the de Saltzmann period.]

* “To me it is such an extraordinary thing that a Way exists in which one does not have to leave one’s life.”

* “In Movements we have enormous help. We have a taste of what it means to be close to attention.”

* “We are all members of the human race in a bigger way. All this is common to us. If you see this enough you can’t even hate Hitler. He was just a biological mutation of the wrong sort.”

* “When I first went to Mr. Gurdjieff’s apartment, I couldn’t bear the thought of where he was living. After I was there for ten minutes it was the whole world.”

* “Madame Ouspensky said we always have time for a love affair. This is the human condition.”

* “Mind is the greatest thing we have – excuse me, we do not have it. It is there. How do we find access to it?”

* “If wish doesn’t exist, the wish to wish does exist.”

I will end this appreciation of “Meetings with Louise Welch in Toronto” with one oft-repeated remark of Mrs. Welch’s. It is a favourite of mine and I distinctly recall her uttering it on at least two occasions.

She said, “Your aim is to find your aim.”

John Robert Colombo is a prolific author and anthologist with a special interest in offbeat Canadiana and traditional studies. His latest publication is the Foreword to Paul Beekman Taylor’s book “The Real Worlds of G.I. Gurdjieff” (Eureka Editions). Colombo was recently honoured as one of the “100 Graduates of Influence” of his alma mater, University College, University of Toronto. He holds the Harbourfront Literary Award, an honorary D.Litt. From York University in Toronto, and Bulgaria’s Order of Cyril and Methodius (first class). His website is . If you wish to be informed of forthcoming reviews and commentaries on this website, send him an email. His email address is jrc@colombo.ca .

o

  Gurdjieff: drawn from life by Kiril Zdanevich in 1920 (*see note below)

n

Real Worlds of G.I.Gurdjieff”n
ins, “About nine months ago.” That one should be retained.n
About nine months ago, out of the blue, I received an email from Paul Beekman Taylor. It came as a surprise because I had never met the scholar and historian of the Work, although in the past I had reviewed a number of his books for this website. In his email Dr. Taylor mentioned that he was completing another book and hence he was writing to inquire whether or not I would consider contributing a Foreword to the work-in-progress.

John
I was, frankly, flattered, as I have long appreciated the man’s knowledge, grasp, and approach to the history of the Work. One learns much from reading his prose. But why me? (I have not been able to answer that question. Some of us are lucky, I guess!) I replied in a positive way and asked to see a few of the chapters of the book. I read them as soon as they arrived, I responded with some editorial reactions, and I agreed to contribute a biographical foreword, as long as the author felt he was free to accept or reject the text or suggest modifications.

Here

Here is that foreword. There were no modifications. I hope it helps to draw readers not only to Dr. Taylor’s current book and also to his past publications. As I write, “Real Worlds of G.I. Gurdjieff: Chapters in the Life of a Master” is about to be issued by Siebold and Patricia Tromp-Guégan, proprietors of Eureka Editions, an ambitious publishing house with an interesting history based in Utrecht.
ohn
Foreword / John Robert Colombo

John
This book is about G.I. Gurdjieff. But this foreword is about Paul Beekman Taylor.

John
In common with the majority of the readers of this book, I have yet to meet its author, if only because he lives and works in Geneva and I live and work in Toronto. Even thought we have not enjoyed a face-to-face meeting, that does not mean that we do not see eye-to-eye. I think we do see eye-to-eye, though he might have some qualms when I resort to the use of a tried-but-true phrase to characterize him. That phrase is “a scholar and a gentleman.”

John
Paul Beekman Taylor is certainly a scholar; there is no questioning that. He is a scholar in a number of fields, in addition to his role as a student and chronicler of the life and work of G.I. Gurdjieff. But let me make a few general points before considering the scholarship and the gentlemanly nature of the man.

John
If I may generalize, readers of this book will be people who belong to one or two groups. One group consists of people who know next to nothing about what has been variously called the “special doctrine,” the “system,” the “Fourth Way,” “the work,” or more explicitly “the Gurdjieff work.” The other group consists of people who are widely and perhaps even deeply read in the “literature” of the work; they may even be members of groups or centres that put into practice its principles. In my own mind, I dub any member of the first group a cheechako or “tenderfoot,” and any member of the second group a sourdough or “old hand.” Here I am employing words that were popular during the Yukon Gold Rush of 1898, words that were popularized in the ballads of the “Bard of the Yukon,” Robert W. Service. What the cheechako and the sourdour have in common is that each person has been drawn to the work by its enchanting features or driven to the work by the disenchanting features of man and his world.

John
Both the “tenderfoot” and the “old hand” will find in the pages of this book fascinating information, little if any of it of public knowledge. It is information that will expand one’s understanding of the everyday life of Mr. G., and extend one’s sympathy for this enigmatic man and the problems he faced on a daily basis. No reader will reach the last pages of this book without evincing an admiration of the man and his mission … the work of self-styled “Teacher of Dancing.”

John
Every reader will then begin to ask for more information about “the scholar and the gentleman” who wrote this study of Mr. G.’s life and times. Some biographical and bibliographical information about Paul Beekman Taylor should certainly help the reader to appreciate the unique qualifications of its author and how it seems he has been “tailor-made” to research and write this book. Here goes ….

John
Taylor was born in London, England, on 31 December 1930. He describes the unusual nature of his upbringing in one of these chapters much better than could anyone else. His childhood in Mr. G.’s extended family is indeed a remarkable biographical fact. In brief, he was raised by a lively mother within an enchanted circle of men and women involved in the work and somewhat later he was raised by a leader of the work in the United States.

John
He earned his bachelor’s degree from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1954; his master’s from Wesleyan University, Middleton, Connecticut, in 1958; and his doctorate from Brown again in 1961. Among his many academic honours is the fact that he has served as a Fulbright Scholar and a Fulbright Lecturer. Thereafter he taught in Departments of English at Brown University, University of New Mexico, and Yale University, as well as at universities in Oslo, Ireland, Tel Aviv, Lausanne, Fribourg, Zürich. He is now an Emeritus Professor of the University of Geneva and retired from teaching but not from searching and writing. He has been thrice married and has seven children. People whom I respect speak very highly of him; indeed, with considerable respect for his personal qualities as well as for his scholarship. He is truly a gentleman.

John
In academic life, Professor Taylor’s speciality is Old Norse; indeed, his 1963 doctoral dissertation bears the title Old Norse Heroic Poetry. Among his many scholar papers and book-length works are three volumes of translations from the Old Norse which he undertook with the great poet W.H. Auden. In addition to Old Norse, he is a specialist in both Old English and Middle English; he has also taught courses on modern American literature and Chicano writing.

John
Taylor has contributed mightily to “the Gurdjieff field.” He is one of the founding members of the All & Everything International Humanities Conference, a group of independent scholars and thinkers who have been meeting annually in various cities since 1996. He has researched and written six studies of interesting and important aspects of the work:

John
* Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer (Weiser Books, 1998)ohn

John
* Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (Weiser Books, 2001)

John

 * Gurdjieff’s America: Mediating the Miraculous (Lighthouse Editions, 2004) reissued as Gurdjieff’s Invention of America (Eureka Editions, 2007)

John
* The Philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff (Eureka Editions, 2007)

John
* G.I. Gurdjieff: A New Life (Eureka Editions, 2008)ohn

John

* Gurdjieff in the Public Eye 1914-1949 (Eureka Editions, 2011)

John
His biography of Gurdjieff takes its place alongside James Moore’s classic Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth (Element Books, 1991). Gurdjieff’s Invention of America is the product of prodigious scholarship. If The Philosophy of G.I. Gurdjieff is a little diffuse, Gurdjieff in the Public Eye is right on the ball! There is no real precedent for the present book, Real Worlds of G.I. Gurdjieff , which consists of the discoveries made following a lifetime of immersion in the work and a half-century of research conducted with primary materials in private hands and public institutions, as well as with the ever-expanding “literature” of the work. The literature is vast for it embraces a multitude of books (patiently annotated by J. Walter Driscoll) and published and unpublished memoirs in the languages of Eastern and Western Europe and the anglophonie. In the process of researching and writing the present book, which is essentially a collection of essay-length studies, he has revealed most surprising and interesting aspects of the social and personal life of Mr. G.

John
For instance, new light is shed on members of his family in the Caucasus and on his meetings with members of the artistic community in Paris, creative people like Ezra Pound and Lincoln Kirstein. Then passages are quoted from the transcripts of secret intelligent reports from the dossiers the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (These are eye openers!) How was Beelzebub’s Tales written? How was its publication financed? Is there a ur text in Russian? The answers appear here in more detail than ever before. Unexpected light is shed on the man’s deep love of children and the way he would tweak them to remember him, his message, and themselves. This relationship resonates with the author – and by extension with the reader – because in his childhood he benefited from the largesse of Mr. G. I could go on. The final chapter is remarkable for its insight into the life that Mr. G. kept secret, and the insight into why he did so. All in all, this is a remarkable book for cheechako and sourdough alike. It gives everyone the flavour of the man and his times.

John
I have no idea where Paul will next “strike” … what part or aspect of the work that he will stake out in order to unearth its termas, its buried treasures. But from the correspondence that we have intermittently conducted, I am led to believe that future forays will take him into archives and personal records that will bring to light further hitherto hidden material – on Gurdjieff’s Caucasian roots, specifically the connection with the Mercourov family in Armenia and Russia, on the Russian years in general, and on the man’s role as a “Teacher of Dancing.”

John
I look forward to rereading the present work, now that it is appearing in print, and to reading forthcoming essays and books written by Paul Beekman Taylor … in the same way that I look forward to meeting the scholar and the gentleman in person.

Jo

hn

John Robert Colombo is a Toronto-based author and anthologist with a special interest in Canadiana, the mysterious, and Sax Rohmer. His latest books are “Jeepers Creepers” (a collection of accounts of psychical experiences) and “Fascinating Canada” (discussions of little-known facts about a very-big country). Earlier this year he was honoured by his alma mater, University College, University of Toronto, as one of “University College’s 100 Graduates of Influence.”

This question and answer, simple, but I think all the more valuable for that, comes from a group meeting of 3 March 1983. The first question to Mrs Adie came from Mitt.

“Mrs Adie, I’ve mentioned before an attitude, particularly at work, of wanting to belong, sort of seeking approval, and wanting to be the centre of activity. And I realised today that I’d been taking this matter too lightly. I’d been brushing it as just an attitude I have. And I believe that I am in fact jealous, and that it is very negative, and it is a serious thing.”

“So what is your approach to that?”

“It’s something I was pondering upon, and at first I couldn’t see any way out. It seemed to be my state when I was at work. But this evening I felt strongly a reminder to remember myself.”

“At what point was that?”

“This evening, when I arrived here. And the moment that I came to myself, I saw for the first time, that this wasn’t really me, this state. It was just another ‘I’, and that gave me a lot of hope as to the importance of self-remembering. It was …”

“Yes, but the difficulty is you get caught, and you go to sleep. Can you tie it down to particular situations where this comes upon you? That kind of thing could be part of your line of work. Everybody has it, to a greater or lesser degree, in their personality. I am sure everyone would agree, unless they’ve not seen it.”

After a pause, Helen continued: “Now the thing is how to approach that? How to use that as material for your work?”

“It is connected with particular people, and there are definite times when I know the pull, that the attraction of the crowd is strongest. When I think of that now, I remember those times.”

“You can’t expect it to stop immediately. It’s been doing this for 20 to 30 years. But you can have an attitude towards it if it’s strong in your mind, if you really care about it, and you think of that as material.”

“There are hundreds of similar things one can think of, but that is something very specific, and that can be material for your work. If you can, choose a person or a time or a situation, where you try just to be present to yourself. You don’t try to change anything directly, externally. You don’t decide to act in this way or that way. Nothing at all will come from that. But you try to be. It’s very difficult of course, but if you can, as specifically as you can, plan at a certain moment that you will be present to yourself when you meet that person. And you let the impressions come in, whatever takes place, you don’t deliberately try and alter something; but you cannot act in the same way if you are present to yourself.”

“Of course you can’t maintain it: that is a difficulty. But with exercise, with practice, doing it more often, I don’t fall in the same way. And the point is, if it is material, that is something specific. It’s a manifestation of sleep, it is considering, which, apart from the fact that it is all based on imagination … and dreams … also takes my energy.”

“I have to be satisfied to be as I am, because falling into this imagination doesn’t really change anything at all.”

“You feel your own inner strength”, Helen continued, allowing these last two words a certain weight. “You can feel something strong in you. Try it that way, anyway. Of course, it has to be maintained for a little while, otherwise I’m asleep and it all comes out as usual. It’s a question of practice: the more I do it, the more I can do. The more I try to maintain it, the more I can maintain it, and the more likely I am to be awakened by the thing itself. I feel the taste of this thing appearing. I really realise it now.”

“And it’s very fortunate to see something like that. People often have not the slightest idea. You can describe that, if you like, as one of your weaknesses – it’s a weakness that nearly everyone has – one of your obstacles, something which you can definitely use as material. It will come and go: one minute you’ll believe in it again, but then with practice it loses its power.”

“So try to be practical about that. Do you think that clarifies it?”

Perhaps Mitt signalled a silent assent. After a space Mrs Adie asked: “Does it actually make you behave in a different matter, or does it occupy your dreams alone?”

“It mostly affects my dreaming. One of the main examples of it is when I hear a conversation and I can’t resist going in.”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned that before. Well, in that case you could just not join in. Sometimes I can just go against it in that way. But you must know why you that at the time. You must be present to yourself.”

“That is what is meant by going against the denying part. This is mentioned in Beelzebub quite often. It was in the last reading.”

I find the exchange interesting not only for Mrs Adie simplicity which contains everything one needs, but for the simple observation that there are certain manifestations which one can just stop. Too often, perhaps, we forget that we don’t have to be childish. We may not be able to do in the full sense of the word, but we can do something.

[You might also be interested in two other Helen Adie related posts:

HELEN ADIE: A SORT OF SENSATION STOLEN FROM EMOTIONAL CENTRE

http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/helen-adie-a-sort-of-sensation-stolen-from-emotional-centre/  

and

HELEN ADIE ON FEELING  http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/helen-adie-on-feeling/  ]

Joseph.Azize@gmail.com

29 October 2012

JOSEPH AZIZE has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, ‘George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia’ represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

“Maronites” is pp.279-282 of “The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia” published by Cambridge University Press and edited by James Jupp.

“Maronites” is pp.279-282 of “The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia” published by Cambridge University Press and edited by James Jupp.

P. D. Ouspensky 1878- 1947

Last evening I sat down in the most comfortable armchair in our house in Toronto and read in its entirety the text of “In Search of the Miraculous.” I did it in thirty-five minutes. It was not my first reading of P.D. Ouspensky’s text, nor will it be the last time I expect to read this work, yet it took me only a 1,200 seconds.

It is true I once took a course in speed-reading, but this time I was not using the techniques that I had learned at those sessions. (Indeed, my speed-reading instructor once said, “Speed-reading is good for general reading, but not for “the four P’s” – poems, plays, pornography, printer’s proofs … and I might add philosophical texts.) Nor did I skim or scan the text. I read every word with comprehension. I recommend the practice and the experience to one and all.

You will be forgiven if you have already decided that I am out of my mind! Indeed, how could anyone read with comprehension and with recall every page of Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous”? After all, the tome is 390 pages long, with 570 words per page, a total of 222,300 words. I am referring to the edition that is titled and subtitled “In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching” which appeared on the list of Harcourt, Brace and Company of New York in 1949. This is the first edition.

It was a remarkable text then and it is a remarkable text now. Of course it is impossible for even a graduate speed-reader to embrace its contents in thirty-five minutes. Thirty-five hours might be a better estimate of the time it would take to absorb what the author had to say, and only then after repeated readings.

It was ten years after the tome was first published that I read it for the first time. A woman who was very knowledgeable about the Work privately suggest that I not boast of having read it at so young an age. She added, “The Table of Hydrogens is really very detailed and difficult, you know.” The same applies to all the book’s eighteen chapters, not just to Chapter IX which describes the indeed-difficult Table of Hydrogens.

“In Search of the Miraculous” was not Ouspensky’s first choice of titles for this magnum opus, which appeared two years following his death – the same year as death came to the remarkable man who is identified throughout the text as “G.” – George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. The author planned to give it the title “Fragments of an Unknown Teaching.” That may be a truly descriptive series of words, but it is one that is less saleable than the present one. Instead, “Fragments,” etc., became the volume’s subtitle.

There was always the feeling that had the book appeared as “Fragments of an Unknown Teaching,” it might now be confused with another book by another author – “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten” written in 1900 by the Theosophist and writer G.R.S. Mead. Ouspensky knew about Mead’s book, for he had enjoyed an early association with the Theosophical Society, so that some confusion might have followed.

Ouspensky’s preferred title for his work was “Man and the World in Which He Lives – Fragments of an Unknown Teaching.” He was preparing that work for publication in 1912-1934 while he was working on another of his big books, “A New Model of the Universe,” which was first published in 1931 and revised in 1935; the standard edition is the one issued by Harcourt, Harcourt, Brace and Company in New York in 1950. The earliest known title for “New Model” is “The Wisdom of the Gods.”

In a footnote to “New Model of the Universe,” dated 1912-1934, he states that a new book is “being prepared for publication.” At the same time we also learn from the same source that the author was working on the notion of “different time in different cosmoses … which will be the subject of another book.” He was revising the English version of a novel with the working title “The Wheel of Fortune.” That one had originally been published in St. Petersburg in 1915 as “Kinemadrama.” It eventually appeared in English as “The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.” So it might have had three titles.

Could anyone actually read “In Search of the Miraculous” in thirty-five minutes? That is an obvious impossibility. When I make the claim that I did, I failed to explain that the text that I succeeded in reading so rapidly was Chapter IX of “A New Model of the Universe” which is coincidentally titled “In Search of the Miraculous.” The book’s chapter runs from page 305 to page 342, so it is only 37 pages long, easily read in a little more than half an hour, especially as it about as is far from being technical in orientation as possible. In fact, it highlights the writerly side – indeed, the literary side – of Ouspensky’s otherwise austere temperament.

Readers of “A New Model of the Universe” may or may not recall that Chapter IX is composed of six literary sketches – “feuilletons” in French – which evoke six aspects of “the miraculous.” The sketches are both subjective in emotion and objective in the sense that their subjects are appreciated and evaluated in the contest of what might be called “the real history of the world” instead of what we know as “the history of crime.”

The first sketch evokes the magnificence of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and explores the claim made for it is that, just as modern science has conquered space, esoteric science “has conquered time.” It has done so for “it knows methods of transferring its ideas intact and of establishing communications between schools through hundreds and thousands of years.”

Egypt and the Pyramids are described in the second sketch. It discusses the construction of the three pyramids on the Giza plateau and leaves the reader with the following thought: “In reality the pyramids contain a great enigma.” One of the enigmas is anti-evolutionary in nature. On this basis alone we should conclude the existence of civilized beings prior to ourselves; hence we ourselves are not “the descendants of a monkey.”

Sketch number three is devoted to the Sphinx about which “nothing is known.” The author writes, “The Sphinx is indisputably one of the most remarkable, if not the most remarkable, of the world’s works of art. I know nothing that I would be possible to put side by side with it. It belongs indeed to quite another art than the art we know. Beings such as ourselves could not create a Sphinx.”

“The Buddha with the Sapphire Eyes” is the title of the fourth sketch. Ouspensky’s account of it – his meditation on the reclining figure – has made it among occultists and esotericists the most famous of Ceylon’s giant statues. It is located just outside the Sri Lanka capital of Colombo, and there is a photograph of it reproduced in the Commemorative Issue of “The Bridge,” a journal published by The Study Society, London, in 1977. But the author offers a verbal portrait worth a thousand pictures. This Buddha speaks to us “of a real existence, of another life, and of the existence of men who know something of that life and can transmit it to us by the magic of art.”

The fifth sketch is titled “The Soul of the Empress Mumtaz-i-Mahal” and it paints a rosy and pastel image of the Taj Mahal, a scene that never seems to cloy or lose its fascination. The Taj is a tomb, a burial site, but it is not a gravesite. Here Ouspensky develops a theory that moves into dimensions beyond the fourth, infinity being the fifth: “The soul and the future life are one and the same.”

“The Mevlevi Dervishes” is the sixth and last sketch. In Constantinople he was invited to a tekke at Pera where he had the opportunity to observe the dervishes whirl about like the planets in the heavens. He witnessed the ceremony on at least two occasions at an interval of one dozen years. He concluded that events move more quickly than do the dervishes for all their speed. For instance, in the interval, Russia itself had ceased to exist. Events that had occurred to him during those twelve years had imparted some knowledge to him. “And now I knew more about them. I knew a part of their secret. I know how they did it. I knew in what the mental work connected with the whirling consisted. Not the details of course, because only a man who takes part in the ceremonies or exercises can know the details. But I knew the principle.”

On that note this chapter ends. These synopses of Ouspensky’s sketches are meant to offer the reader a sense of the poetic side of the author’s temperament. It was Colin Wilson’s argument that the world lost a great metaphysician in P.D. Ouspensky when he met G.I. Gurdjieff. Whether this is true or not, all is not lost. We have Ouspensky’s heart and soul in the chapter “In Search of the Miraculous,” and his body and mind in the book “In Search of the Miraculous.”

Perhaps you will agree with me that this is not bad for thirty-five minutes of reading!

John Robert Colombo is a Toronto-based author and anthologist with a special interest in mysteries. His current work is devoted to preserving the hitherto unknown short mystery fiction written by Sax Rohmer, the English author who created the arch-villain preposterous, Dr. Fu Manchu. All this is explained on his website: < http://www.colombo.ca >

Notice of conferences, books, reviews or events of interest to the practitioner or scholar of Gurdjieff’s teaching may be sent to: Sophia Wellbeloved  s.wellbeloved@gmail.com

James Moore

Eminent Gurdjieffians: Lord Pentland, A Polemic by James Moore (2010)

1. Introduction

2. The Real Question

1. Introduction

I will assume that the reader has access to John Robert Colombo’s review of this book at http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/was-lord-pentland-an-eminent-gurdjieffian/

This will save me going through the preliminaries. To a significant extent, I am in agreement with JR’s review. But I do think that the most important point a critic can make about this book is that it is not actually a biography of Lord Pentland in the sense that the genre of biography has been known in English letters: it is, rather, a polemic which takes Pentland as its chief but not its sole target. It is as if Pentland is merely a convenient, and – for Moore – an agreeable because a disdained target.

That the book is a polemic shows itself in two ways: its coverage of Pentland’s achievement is minimal to the point of mockery, and its coverage of other targets is overplayed. Thus, Moore also takes aim at what Pentland’s father, the social class to which he belonged, the Britain in which Pentland flourished, and P.D. Ouspensky. Moore sometimes takes aim at Jeanne de Salzmann and through her and Pentland, what is now clumsily known as the “International Association of the Gurdjieff Foundations”.

The title is, of course, pretentious, referring as it does to Lytton Strachey’s minor classic. But then, the author named his autobiography Gurdjieffian Confessions: A Self Remembered. I doubt that he would see any pretence at all. Moore’s writing continues its steady decline. In my view, Gurdjieff and Mansfield was the best written of his books. Each succeeding volume sees further adventures in grandiloquence to the point where, in this book, Moore’s prose positively obscures his meaning as much as it reveals it. For example, speaking of the “Dunkirk Spirit”, Moore remarks: “By just such a rare and free flowing energy the aridities of Ouspensky’s scholasticism might have been irrigated. But they were not.” (p.53). What does this mean? We can see that he dislikes Ouspensky’s “scholasticism”, but he does not explain what the stated “aridities” are, or how they could have been “irrigated” by the spirit of Dunkirk. The dry four word sentence “But they were not”, seems to suggest that there was some fault of Ouspensky’s part, or that of someone else. However, as so often in this book, Moore does not condescend to explain his meaning, the basis for his opinion, or what his sources were.

Consider this line: “Here as elsewhere Pentland is litmus paper shy of turning red or blue”, (63). I do not know what he means in this context. I know what litmus paper is, and I know what shy means, but what is he saying? Moore aims for effect to the point of losing sight of why one writes.

One of Moore’s techniques in this book is to assume an omniscient voice, a manner of proceeding which allows him to criticise and condemn without needing to do more than demand that we accept his conclusions. Moore has researched many details of the world in which Pentland lived, but how can he possibly know that when he took his seat as President of the Cambridge Union, Pentland had “a sense almost of swooning vertigo”? (32) Does Moore have access to a diary or letter, and if so, why not mention it? Or is it all as much a fiction as the awkward talk between father and son which he invents?

“History’s access to their verbatim conversation is decently barred by the study door” (15) Moore speaks here, as often, as if he were the voice of history, and the tone supports him when he adds: “Yet this caveat does not entirely forbid the authorial imagination an intelligent extrapolation from circumstantial evidence. Like most fathers His Lordship hardly knew how to begin.” Where is the intelligence here? What are the pieces of evidence he uses? Maybe if we knew the facts, we would find that Pentland’s father was different from how Moore imagines him. All I can see here is the operation of thoroughgoing prejudice, and that is a very different thing.

Similarly, in speaking of Franklin Farms, he mocks how “Society women with compressed lips earnestly bottling peas and beans were in a profounder sense, bottling spiritual merit.” (67). How does he know what their attitude was? Were they really so self-righteous as that? Maybe the women would have surprised him. But by filling this slim volume with “intelligent extrapolations”, and speaking as if all-knowing, Moore creates a consistent picture of pretentious and deluded wealthy folks, and then pleads its very consistency in aid of its veracity. This is not valid biography, and is cheap even as polemic.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the book is primed with irrelevancies which create an illusion of research, while bare of many matters which are far more important. For example, we learn that tickets to the premier of Gone with the Wind were hard to procure (51), but Moore does even try to tell us in what Pentland’s approach to the Gurdjieff teaching and methodology consisted. Yet, after the publication of Exchanges Within and several of his talks, this would have been as easy as it is desirable.

Again, Moore tells us that at one time a certain piece of news “would have imparted to Pentland’s stiff mind and body the artificial agility bestowed on a dead frog’s hind-quarters when juxtaposed to an electric coil …” (72). It is ponderously written, and not, to my mind, at all witty. But more profoundly, Moore assumes and has assumed all throughout that Pentland had a “stiff” mind”.

Moore is content to construct a paper tiger and ignore, in the published group meetings, what made Pentland the teacher he was – whatever type of teacher that may have been.

It is necessary to state that I am sure that Moore has a certain point: but he does not demonstrate it. I remember that in several meetings with “senior” people from the New York Foundation, they would gently push you into agreeing with them: it was obscene, the number of times one woman in particular would put words into people’s mouths by asking, “Wouldn’t you say …?” I had a sense, even then, that she was imitating, and my guess was that she was imitating Pentland.

I recall one chap who had met Pentland would come quote statements such as: “Don’t write that down! Remember it! Lord Pentland said: Why do we write? We write it order to forget!” How absurd. We don’t write in order to forget, but so that if we do forget, as experience shows us we often do, we will have a record. When I was in New York, about eight years after Pentland’s death, I was with Jim Wyckoff’s group. We had to remove all the items from a series of cupboards. I started to make a sketch of what was where. They got stuck into me: that was not the Work! I had to remember not use a crutch. They would remember. And so on. They really made a point out of it: they were unctuous and self-righteous.

But when, a week later, they had to restore the items, they were searching high and low for the sketch. Not one said a word to me. I started to form the opinion then that Wyckoff was a New York hippie, and before he died, I informed him that I no longer wished to “work” with him. I am gratified that to remember that I did. Because, like Pentland, he was an authority figure. But to give Pentland his due, Pentland could run a business and did establish the Foundation on the West Coast.

Still, the picture of the NY Foundation I then formed, as conceited while operating at a level lower than ordinary life, does seem to go back to Pentland. But I also felt that there was more than just that to Pentland. And I feel that the X quality which Moore has missed must have been something to do with the presence of Lord Pentland. Only by appealing to the presence of Lord Pentland can I explain why the text of Exchanges Within, which seems to me to be good but not excellent, sends those who knew him into raptures: they make a connection to what they experienced when they met him

Interestingly, Mr Adie did not consider Pentland to be anything but formidable. He did say that Pentland would go all cryptic and mystificatory or change the topic when he did not know something or felt inadequate. He also said that Pentland could play a double game, and for reasons I won’t go into now, I think that Adie may well have been right. I think that Pentland did relish the idea of taking over the Adie group in Australia, but – probably on instructions from Jeanne de Salzmann – was content to wait until Adie would die. And to give them credit, the strategy did work, but by the time it bore fruit, the groups had reduced from well over a hundred and forty persons to about a third of that number.

I should also note here that there are some very interesting stories of Pentland being bested by Mrs Staveley in verbal duels. Once he asked her, in front of others, to give an impromptu talk on the importance of obedience. It was obvious to those present that his point was that she was disobedient to either Jeanne de Salzmann or himself or both. She turned the tables on him: “Yes, obedience is important. But obedience to what?” Discomfited, he changed the topic.

So it should be obvious that I have no problem with a book which is critical of Pentland and the Foundation: but it needs reasons and grounds. This book is filled with tricks: “How far away, suddenly, seemed the hors d’oeuvre table at Claridges,” (73). Moore had referred to Claridges a little earlier, but it had nothing to do with this section, and neither is there any reason to think that anyone thought of Claridges, wistfully or otherwise. It is just a way of inserting a supposedly clever line and making Pentland look like an upper class twit. Similarly, and there are other examples, Moore mentions that pencil sharpeners were made scarce in England during the war, and then speaks of Pentland going to the USA where “the staff were … never short of … pencil sharpeners,” (62). Is that humorous? Does it have a point? It was Moore, not Pentland, who cared about such matters.

I could continue like this, but in the end, the very cynicism of Moore’s approach takes me to what I consider to be the real question.

2. The Real Question

The real question, to my mind, is about the Gurdjieff Work. If Pentland – the leader of the Foundation in the USA – was indeed, as Moore paints him, then what is the point of the Gurdjieff Work?

Jospeph Azize

September 2012

=============

See related posts:

Andrew Rawlinson’s review of this book

http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/?s=Pentland+Rawlinson

+

John Robert Colombo’s reviews this at: http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/was-lord-pentland-an-eminent-gurdjieffian/

&

he reviews Ashala Gabriel’s Remembering Lord Pentland

http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/john-robert-colombo-reviews-a-new-book-by-ashala-gabriel/

=============

Joseph.Azize@gmail.com

JOSEPH AZIZE has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, ‘George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia’ represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

“Maronites” is pp.279-282 of “The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia” published by Cambridge University Press and edited by James Jupp.

0

Ashala Gabriel

Remembering Lord Pentland

Not too long ago there was an uproar over James Moore’s biography of Lord Pentland, with Moore expressing exasperation with the man he had met on one or two occasions, and with readers (and non-readers) of his biography who rushed to the defence of the man who was their teacher. For those who missed the catcalls and the catfight, here is some background information.

Henry John Sinclair (1907-1984), 2nd Baron Pentland, was appointed by G.I. Gurdjieff to lead the Work in North America. He became the first head of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, leading that centre from its establishment in 1953 to the time of his death. As well, he oversaw the founding of the Gurdjieff organization in San Francisco, and over the decades he addressed countless study groups and met innumerable students throughout the United States. I am not aware that he ever ventured across the Canadian border.

He was said to be selfless in his devotion to the Work. A rule of thumb – my thumb – is that those people who knew the Baron personally, whether colleagues or students, were quite attached to the man and most protective of him – he does look frail in photographs, almost cadaverous – whereas those who knew him impersonally or peripherally, or not at all, were less disposed to be appreciative or even generous about him and the role he played.

A wake-up call was James Moore’s book “Eminent Gurdjieffians: Lord Pentland” which gave the man and the leader no quarter. I reviewed this stylishly written biography upon publication for this website, and it remains the sole biographical inquiry of any length devoted to the man and his work. On another occasion I summarized some of Lord Pentland’s published talks. I will not repeat here what I wrote there. I think readers may view the present publication “Remembering: Being with My Teacher” as an attempt to re-right the wrong, to re-balance of scales, to set the record straight, by offering at least one former student’s emotional tribute and appreciation of Lord Pentland at work and at play. On that level the publication succeeds.

Now that Lord Pentland and James Moore have been identified, the only other person to describe is Ashala Gabriel, the author of the publication. She is a woman in her early seventies, who has for many years worked in New York as an independent literary agent, copywriter, and psychic (or mystic, as she prefers). Ms. Gabriel is a graduate of Brown University, with a Master’s degree in TESOL (teaching English as a second language) from Hunter College, and a Doctor of Divinity degree or certificate from The College of Divine Metaphysics.

In 2002, Simon & Schuster published her illustrated book for young children, Night Night Toes. Ms. Gabriel has her own website, HeartReadings, where she writes, “I am a natural mystic. Even in my crib days, I was a frequent flier to far-off worlds – worlds as clear and close as the nose on my face.” (This detail brings to my mind the Ontario-born “natural medium” named Dorothy Maclean who with her “green thumb” grew those giant cabbages at Findhorn in Northern Scotland. In passing, Ms. Maclean’s own volume of memoirs, “To Hear the Angels Sing,” is well worth reading. I think Ms. Gabriel and Ms. Maclean are kindred souls.)

Never before have I heard of anyone who bore the name Ashala, so I checked the website Quick Baby Names where I learned the following bits of information. The website states that the name is a variant of Ashley which was popularized in the movie “Gone with the Wind.” The website continues: “As a baby girl name, Ashala is currently not a popular baby name in the USA.” The website concludes, interesting, that the name describes “a professional woman with good tastes and values, but is quite shy.” Whether or not this is true of the author Ashala Gabriel, I do not know, never having met her. But reading her prose, I do not judge her to be particularly shy, though, yes, she is somewhat tentative and certainly a sensitive woman.

Ms. Gabriel is the author of “Remembering: Being with My Teacher” published by CreateSpace in New York and her book is available through Amazon and Indigo. The trade paperback measures 6″ x 9″ and is 154 pages in length. One unusual feature of the publication is the pagination. Printers customarily reserve the number 1 for the first page, the one on the right. In this publication, the number 1 appears on the left-hand page (which means there should be a page 0)!

The text is set in a sans-serif typeface, though the typeface is generally reserved for headings, as they slow the reader down, lacking as they do readily recognizable serifs, thick and thin shapes, etc. However, the lines are well “leaded,” i.e., spread apart, so each page is quite spacious and easy to read. There are about 40,000 words here, divided into 44 chapters, so each chapter is in extent under 1,000 words long. Each chapter is a self-contained reminiscence which describes an interaction with Lord Pentland (who is referred to as “LP”). The author calls these chapters “stories,” and so does Barbara Wright George who supplies a friendly foreword in the form of a letter in which she notes, rightly, that “these stories” reveal “a teacher in action.”

A curious point about the 44 chapter headings is that they appear in lower case and systematically hyphenated – “the-invisible-cloak,” “unconditional-invitation,” “st.-george-of-the-jigsaw,” “death-and-breath,” etc. This creates a sense of breathlessness which is also characteristic of the text itself, as Ms. Gabriel enjoys hyphenating words, perhaps influenced by the neologisms of “All and Everything.” In one story, she describes how she elaborately packaged some baked goods for Lord Pentland. He observes this and draws this feature to her attention as a teaching lesson: “I was able to take in a strong impression of my tendency to always embellish everything I was asked to do.”

LP is described as “my teacher for all times” and as “a tall, stately, bushy-eyebrowed man” who is always asking “those question-less questions I’d learned to listen for but was rarely in the sort of state I was prepared to hear.” The episodes involving the two of them take place in California and New York State. Some of the encounters are entirely anecdotal, like the one called “elevator-antics.” An elevator operator responds to LP’s question about how life was treating him by saying that life has been taking him “up and down … up and down.”

The chapter “bookmark-re-marks” demonstrates how LP could be very direct in dealing with situations like the one created by the “bookmark people” who were always entering bookstores and inserting their own bookmarks in books by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. He had his followers continue to remove the bookmarks and bring them to him, and in his own handwriting he replaced the printed telephone numbers with his own phone number. “Now, don’t get caught … and don’t let any of the others at the Foundation know what we’re doing.”

The story I liked the most – because it tells us as much about Ms. Gabriel as about LP – is “cans-and-cabs.” It describes how LP set Ms. Gabriel a number of tasks to be completed in record time in downtown Manhattan a few hours before they were ticketed to fly from New York to San Francisco. Suitcases had to be claimed, delivered, etc., and she was ordered to arrive by cab outside the Waldorf Astoria to pick up LP: “Now be exactly on time, and not a minute too early.” The author describes how she conscientiously and breathlessly accomplished all of this, at one point trusting the good will of a New York taxi driver to safeguard a trunk full of reels of films of the Movements. As the cab pulls up with her and the trunk with its valuable consignment, LP descends the hotel’s steps. She had arrived at the hotel precisely on time. “Well done,” LP smiled, rather like the Cheshire cat.

LP’s remarks are hardly quotable but they are thoughtful and hence memorable. When Ms. Gabriel went grocery shopping for a group function, she returned with the exact change from the purchases. LP was pleased. “Always remember, the Work is in the details.”
On other occasions he offered these remarks: “Real doing is on the inside.” “It’s not just what you’re looking at, it’s where you’re looking from.” “Sooner or later you have to decide if you want to be visible or invisible.” He took the long view of life: “Try to look at your life in seven year increments. Then perhaps you’ll be able to see something about the larger patterns behind the events which have occurred.”

On occasion I have found that the first and last words of a book may be used to summarize its theme or content. This is so with the present book. Its first word is “my,” and its last word is “legacy.” Indeed, “Remembering: Being with My Teacher” is the author’s legacy, a tribute to Lord Pentland.

John Robert Colombo, author and anthologist, contributes the occasional book review to this website. He is known across Canada as “the Master Gatherer” for his compilations of lore and literature. He is currently collecting for publication the non-fiction writing of Sax Rohmer (the creator of Dr. Fu Manchu). The text of Colombo’s speech titled “Fantastic Elements in the Fiction of Sax Rohmer” appears on his website < http://www.colombo.ca >>.

Above are some of the many images of Gurdjieff. It is interesting to see how one of these is often chosen, for blogs or publications about him, so as to express an opinion or judgement of him, to define him according to the writer’s own views.

o

How Gurdjieff’s Four Books relate to each other

& to his Law of Three

A while ago I wrote a review of Herald of Coming Good which I have extended here. My initial impulse to write the review came after going to a conference in which someone told me they hadn’t read Herald, ‘because our teacher told us not to.’

This advice was probably in response and obedience to Gurdjieff’s own withdrawing of his text. However, I will show below that it is important to read Herald, as it is an essential text, it completes Gurdjieff’s teaching and in doing so the text itself draws attention to what the pupil should reject.

It also, according to James Webb, revealed three of Gurdjieff’s techniques of manipulation that he

‘consistently employed: for one man the carrot, for another the stick, for the third hidden persuasion.’

Webb goes on to suggest that Gurdjieff’s pupils:

‘might have found the keys to a dozen puzzling experiences. If they had chosen to look’, but most of them did not. (Webb, James, The Harmonious Circle, London: Thames & Hudson, 1980 p. 428).

In Herald of Coming GoodGurdjieff portrays himself as a black magician in contrast to his role a white magician in Life is real only then, when “I am”’.

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Gurdjieff’s Law of Three

In terms of Gurdjieff’s Law of Three:

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1. Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson - represents a negative or destructive 2nd force

2. Meetings With Remarkable Men – represents a positive or creative force 1st force

3. Herald of Coming Good represents a negative reconciling 3rd force

4. Life is real only then, when “I am” represents a positive reconciling 3rd force

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So, seen in this context, although he ‘exiled’ Herald, echoing Beelzebub’s exile from the Sun Absolute, readers may ignore Gurdjieff’s instructions not to read it and like the committee who restored Beelzebub’s horns, may pardon the ill results of his teaching that Gurdjieff claims for himself in Herald. The text can now be re-embraced back into the sequence of Gurdjieff’s writings where it belongs, just as Beelzebub was himself pardoned and allowed to return to the Sun Absolute

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Time

All four of Gurdjieff’s books have themes related to time. The Tales shows a continuing devolution from past to present, while Meetings shows Gurdjieff and the Seekers ‘reversing time’ by returning to the past sources of ancient wisdom via teachings in texts and monasteries. The title of Life is Real Only Then When ‘I am‘, emphasises the eternal present while the Herald Of Coming Good suggests the unreality of the future.

If we look at Gurdjieff’s books in this way it makes sense to follow his instructions to read three of them in the order he prescribes, and also to disobey his instruction not to read Herald.

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‘Vectors of the Counter-Initiation’

The Wikipedia entry for the author Charles Upton identifies him (somewhat starkly but no doubt truthfully) as “a poet and metaphysician.” He was born in San Francisco in 1948 and raised a Roman Catholic. Apparently he attended the University of California at Davis “for four days.” He enjoyed a period of association with the Beat writers of the city, and he had a collection of poems published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, no mean achievement.

Like many another war resister, he immigrated to Canada, to the wild interior of British Columbia, where he had a series of jolting, counter-cultural experiences, before he returned to the United States. The entry notes: “In 1988 he joined a traditional Sufi order. Under his wife’s influence, Upton became interested in the metaphysics of the Traditionalist or Perennialist School … He continues to be partly identified with this school,” where his teacher or “pir” was presumably the psychiatrist and author Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh. Later he wrote, “Traditionalism has given me a way to distance myself from the errors and excesses of the Left without polarizing with it.” Upton and his wife Jennifer Doane now live in Lexington, Kentucky.

What they do there, I do not know. On the off chance that Upton is employed as an academic, I searched the directories of the University of Kentucky and Transylvania University, but his name does not appear on their faculty rosters. (Note: “Transylvania University” is indeed the name of a small liberal arts college in Lexington, founded in 1780, a century before Bram Stoker began to write about the vampire-infested region around Borgo Pass and Bistritz.)

Upton is a prolific writer. Sixteen of his twenty or so books have been issued by Sophia Perennis, including the current book, which is titled and subtitled “Vectors of the Counter-Initiation: The Course and Destiny of Inverted Spirituality” (2012). The title sounds a little odd, as does the subtitle: What precisely is a “vector”? Whatever is “counter-initiation” and “inverted spirituality”? A curious note is that on the author’s Wikipedia site, the subtitle of the present book reads “The Shape and Destiny of Inverted Spirituality,” but on the cover of the book reads: “The Course …. ” This may be an insignificant detail, but it is details of this nature that catch the author’s eye. It seems the current book is a sequel to an earlier one, “The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age,” a book of metaphysics and social criticism, published by the same house way back in 2001.

Sophia Perennis, the publishing house, is an imprint that has an informative website. From the site one learns nothing at all about the people who operate the press – the publishers and editors seem to be a self-effacing lot, but they are very able group, and they produce a fine product (one that I will describe a little later). But from the site one may acquire basic information about the movers and shakers of Traditionalism and Perennialism. It appears in the institution’s mission statement, which discusses the main metaphysicians who identify with this school of lexis and praxis.

“Sophia Perennis is dedicated to publishing the best contemporary writing on the world’s wisdom traditions, largely from a Traditionalist or ‘Perennialist’ perspective, as well as reprinting recognized classics. We have tried to remain faithful to Traditionalist core principles – notably the Transcendent Unity of Religions – while exploring new applications of these principles, as well as returning to the great Revelations themselves for fresh insight.”

I have yet to read other books by Upton, so I approached “Vectors” cold-turkey. Well, not quite. Well before I discovered the literature of the Fourth Way, about the time that I learned about the “powers latent in man” identified with The Theosophical Society, which was then an institution only seventy-five years old, I found a copy in a second-hand bookstore of René Guénon’s “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.” I read it from cover to cover with a modicum of understanding and a quantum of fascination, so much so that I thereafter sought out publications of the Primordialist, Traditionalist, or Perennialist persuasion. I have yet to encounter any other soul so interested or inclined.

For some years I subscribed to that excellent, semi-annual journal called “Sacred Web,” not because it is published from Vancouver, British Columbia; not because its honourary patron is HRH the Prince of Wales; not because it is close to appearing to be a scholarly publication in a highly polemical and disputatious field; but because it did and does offer valuable insights – issue after issue, again and again. Eventually I found that its content was becoming repetitious and its tone increasingly peremptory … but because I am not reviewing “Sacred Web,” I will offer no telling instances, though one of them has to do with the bitchiest book review that I have ever read – the anathema invoked against Mark Sedgwick’s “Against the Modern World” (Oxford University Press) which bears the subtitle “Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century.”

Instead, I will mention in passing a few of the impressions that my wife Ruth and I had of the Traditionalists in action at the two-day colloquium “Tradition in the Modern World” sponsored by members of the Ismaili communities of Edmonton and Vancouver and held on the campus of the University of Alberta at Edmonton in September 2006. It was a joy to hear Jean-Louis Michou and Huston Smith and realize they were carrying their years with grace. Harry Oldmeadow was given to hectoring (in the manner of Nietzsche). James S. Cutsinger presented a somewhat brilliant paper called “The Noble Lie” that went well over the heads of most of the people in the audience, including my wife and myself.

My biggest disappointment was listening to the keynote address of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. I did not say my disappointment was hearing the speech of Dr. Nasr, for he does speak with surpassing fluency, authority, and scholarly acumen. My disappointment was listening to what he had to say because he took a number of pot-shots at easy targets, like the one on Pope Benedict XVI’s speech in Regensburg, Germany. I expected more equanimity; my fault, I guess. (Query: Can someone be a former Sufi?) I found fellow members of the audience to be warm and appreciative, especially as Ruth and I were among the few non-Muslims present, whereas most of the academic presenters were aloof and edgy if not chilly.

For what they are worth, my impressions are recorded in a long and detailed account of the proceedings in “Fohat,” the journal of the Edmonton Theosophical Society, X, 4, Winter 2006. For present purposes, let me add that “the perennial philosophy” that was celebrated by Aldous Huxley in his notable book of that title published in 1946 has nothing at all to say about Guénon and Traditionalism proper, though three of the French metaphysician’s books are listed in the bibliography. So it is misleading and mistaken to identify the so-called the “philosophia perennis” or perennial philosophy itself with Traditionalism per se, especially as the former implies eclecticism, ecumenicism, syncreticism, interfaith initiatives, “one world religion,” “new age,” etc., whereas metaphysicians of the latter camp abhor such movements and despise them as heretical and diabolical if not satanic.

Now to the book at hand. “Vectors” is a handsome and sturdily manufactured trade paperback, 6″ x 9″ with viii+336+ii pages. There is an informative introduction, then twelve interesting though densely written chapters, followed by five appendices of related material. There is no index but the footnotes and endnotes are quite detailed. The text must exceed 140,000 words in length.

There is not a page of the text that is badly written; there is not a page of the text that is easy to read. Upton has a rigorous prose style, in common with that of Guénon, as well as the spirit of “parti pris.” I managed to understand much of Guénon’s “Reign of Quantity” before I chose philosophy as my college major, so I assumed that all philosophy was written in this steely fashion. Then I discovered one could write philosophy in other styles – with the ease of R.G. Collingwood, the apocalyptic energy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the disdain for “bad faith” of Jean-Paul Sartre.

What had animated Guénon’s prose was a contempt for the false values of the Western world. The position that he took is what distinguished his writing from philosophy per se, and it also led to his prose being characterized as metaphysics. In his Weltanschauung, there is a “hierarchy” of values – accompanied by the “lowerarchy” (an amusing coinage of C.S. Lewis used by Upton) of deceptions – so his metaphysics is indistinguishable from theology – in this instance, Islamic theology. There is no more thorough-going critique of the values of the Western world in the twenty-first century than the writing of the Guénonian school. Upton follows in Guénon’s footsteps; Upton’s book is worthy of the master’s. There is a cultural jihad being waged in the pages of these books.

When I review a book, I try to refrain from reprinting the copy that appears on the back cover of that book, on the principle that I should be able to summarize its arguments at least as well as any publicist. But in this instance, the copy on the back cover of “Vectors” is so pertinent, I will reprint part of it here in a slightly shortened form:

“French philosopher René Guénon, who spent many years searching for a true esoteric Way, crossed paths with many false and subversive spiritualities before arriving at the threshold of Islamic Sufism. In his prophetic masterpiece “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times,” he classed the worst of these spiritualities as examples of the Counter-Initiation. Anti-Tradition – secularism and materialism – opposes religion; Counter-Tradition inverts it; and the esoteric essence of Counter-Tradition is the Counter-Initiation. The author expands on this concept, recognizing the action of the Counter-Initiation in such areas as the politicizing of the interfaith movement, the anti-human tendencies in the environmental movement, the growing interest in magic and sorcery, the involvement of the intelligence communities in the fields of UFO investigation and psychedelic research, the history of Templarism and Freemasonry, and the de-Islamicization of the famous Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi.”

“The Counter-Initiation has six main features: syncretism; inverted hierarchy; deviated esoterism; the granting of the temporal transmission of spiritual lore precedent over the vertical descent of Revelation; the reduction of religion to utilitarianism (magic) and esoterism to a purely technical knowledge (Promethean spirituality); and the misapplication of the norms of the individual spiritual Path to the supposed spiritual evolution of the collective.”

“This book brings together two schools of thought: the Traditionalists or Perennialists (writers on comparative religion and traditional metaphysics) and the conspiracy theorists who are investigating the origin, nature, and plans of the New World Order. The NWO researchers can throw a penetrating light on the social and political dangers presently threatening the Perennialists, who the Perennialists can provide these researchers with a deeper and wider spiritual context for their vision of human evil.”

Those three paragraphs excellently summarize the convoluted arguments of the book, better than any that I could supply. What follows are some responses and reactions to the text chapter by chapter.

Chapter 1 has the title “What is the Counter-Initiation?” The author restates his thesis any number of times, changing the emphasis to match the contexts. I take it that his thesis is as follows: “Anyone who bases his critique of the Darkness of This World on the orthodox doctrines of a single God-given revelation, if he has sufficient courage and insight, will see far; the solid fulcrum of that orthodoxy will allow him to lift a great weight of error into the light. But this perspective will _not_ allow him to see how the other religions are menaced by the same Counter-Initiatory forces that threaten his own.”

Sceptics are anti-traditional and likely secularists or materialists. Among people who accept the notion of religious or spiritual initiation are the following: deluded people and gullible adherents to the principles of the New Age who are misled by the spread of Pseudo-Initiation; people intent on attaining or wielding power who embrace the anti-principles of Counter-Tradition and Counter-Initiation; people desirous of embracing and expressing spiritual values who attain one form or another of genuine Initiation. “Falsifications of the Transcendent Unity of Religions and the Primordial Tradition include syncretism; inverted hierarchy; deviated esoterism; dominance of history over Revelation; Promethean magic; and spiritual evolutionism – the six-fold falsification of the Transcendent Unity of Religions and the Primordial Tradition.”

Upton gives numerous instances and examples of how the élites of the world over the centuries and particularly in our own time have sought and to a great degree have undermined the integrity of the world’s great religions, especially their esoteric hearts, notably Kabbalah, Catholic monasticism, and Sufism. He does not hesitate to brand these people “satanists.” The satanists sabotage structures regardless of the orthodoxy or the heterodoxy of the doctrines of these religions, establishing their own Counter-Initiations, their own competing cults and sects. About True-Initiations, little is said, and nothing is revealed. So it is understandable in the absence of details that readers are inclined to imagine a succession or transmission through the ages of grace or of superstitious practices.

Perhaps I can help here. About a decade ago, introduced to the subject of “pretenders” to thrones and “false popes,” I latched onto the word “sedevacantism.” Its literal meaning is “the seat is empty,” suggesting that it is vacant in the sense that the occupant is unqualified for the position or that the occupant acquired the position of power through illegal or immoral means. Is there a person in a position of power in the world today who has not been accused of being a usurper, an illegitimate power-wielder? (Think about the “birther movement” and U.S. President Obama, etc.) There is a Traditionalist truism that runs like this: “A bad king is preferable to a good president.”

Chapter 2 is called “Vigilance in the Interfaith Arena” and it examines diverse subjects including the characteristics of Neo-Paganism, how Annie Besant (a Fabian Socialist) was granted control of the Theosophical Society, and the nature of “social control systems.” I have always been queasy about the notion that one should support the convergence of the world’s religions, viewing the movement itself as destructive of the integrity of each of those faiths as well as harmful to the individual and to society as a whole. Upton condemns these social forces: the movement towards “global governance”; the movement toward One World Religion, United Religions Initiative, and New World Order; the movement towards secular control of the world’s religions. Upton is not beyond making ridiculous statement like “Mikhail Gorbachev … is an avowed atheist who claims to worship the earth” but he generally sticks to the subject at hand.

This chapter is a mass – close to a mess – of detail; as such it is difficult to summarize. So here is part of an interesting footnote concerning The King Abdullah Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue to be based in Vienna: “King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – not to be confused with the King of Jordan – may nonetheless see the Center named after him as a way of slowly introducing religious freedom into his kingdom ‘from outside.’ Before he took the throne, he was reputed to have said that he wanted to get rid of both the Wahhabis and the Americans.” Notice the scorn.

Chapter 3’s title is a mouthful, as befits a lengthy chapter: “Traditional vs. Counter-Traditional Perspectives on The Divine Feminine & The Sacredness of Nature.” The chapter begins well: “Wars inevitably produce three things: profiteering, domination, and a curtailment of human rights – and the war to save the Earth from environmental catastrophe is no exception.” It focuses on the “Divine Feminine” and the earth and the environment, first from the perspective of the Traditionalists and the Perennialists, second from the perspective of the Greens and the Neo-Pagans.

The “shadow-side” of environmentalism is “nature worship” which leads to human sacrifice “when overpopulation is seen as threatening the integrity of the environment.” Interesting insights follow on Abraham and his son Isaac and on “the anti-Islamic crimes of the Wahhabi terrorists.” There are basic conflicts: “Gaia vs. Kali” and “naturalistic vs. supernaturalistic nature-worship.” Technology is embraced by the worshipers of nature. There is an intriguing footnote about what drives serial killers: “The elites have the power to destroy whole nations and economies and ecosystems, but the sociopaths are out to rival the ruling class by proving that the ‘little guy’ can also contribute his share to the general destruction.” Serial killers and mass murderers are only doing on a micro scale what one-worlders and globalizers are doing on a macro scale.

Numerous pages are devoted to quotations about the earth from the Noble Qur’an. The basic position is as follows: “If there were no Divine Transcendence, all entities would be purely material, sealed into themselves, totally cut off from living participation in anything ontologically superior to them – like the parts of a machine.” There are intriguing insights: “Sleep during the night is life in death; sleep during the day is death in life.”

One would have to have a hard heart to read these pages without being charmed by the insights of the Qur’an into “the sacredness of nature,” but the reader wonders how much of this is shamanstvo, for notions coterminous with these may be found in the songs, stories, and beliefs of the Inuit of the Polar World. Indeed, Alan Dundes wrote one book about folklore in the Qur’an, and another book about the Holy Bible as folklore.

Chapter 4 is titled “Magic and _Tasawwuf_” and it brings into play the ideas and expressions of Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, and Baron Julius Evola, to name four founders of Perennialism. The performance of magical practices is not limited to magicians or illusionists, for theurgy and thaumaturgy are present as practices in all the world’s religions, from Bön to Scientology. Upton is uneasy with this fact. Aleister Crowley used to describe magic, whether black or white, as practices that cause “change in conformity with will,” whether malign or benign. There is no discussion of terms like these in this chapter.

Instead, the author writes as follows: “Tasawwuf” is identified as “the essence of the spiritual Path in every tradition. Everything else, every political strategy, every psychological manipulation or evasion, every buy or sell order on the stock market, every twisting of, or letting yourself be twisted by, occult forces, is in some sense magic. That’s why must I reiterate, and insist: Sufism and magic are poles apart. Where there is Sufism, there is no magic. Where there is magic, there is no Sufism.”

That may be true, but saying it is does not make it so. Elsewhere the author identifies the six major or “fixed” religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. He finds exclusivity in Hinduism (one must be born a Hindu) and Taoism he finds “closed” (for unstated reasons). Earlier he noted that Buddhism is inherently atheistic (even Guénon was initially uneasy with it as a vehicle), so that leaves Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is debatable to include Judaism (after all, one needs to be born Jewish). The first two religions certainly have aspects that are thaumaturgical. Is Islam the only one of them that is untainted by such entrapments or encroachments? Or is it only Islamic Sufism itself that is free – or is it merely Islamic Sufism’s Perennialism that attains this goal? These are questions the reader is likely to ask – if only to himself or herself.

Chapter 5 is titled “The Fall of the Jinn” and it tries to make sense of the jinn, leftovers from “The Arabian Nights” one would assume, who are mentioned in the Noble Qur’an. The jinn are equated with angels, fairies, demons, spirits, ghosts, and “the psychic powers of man.” They are discussed in light of philosophy, folklore, legend, myth, scripture, and psychic and telluric powers. These creatures or creations are long-lived, but are mortal only in the sense of not being immortal. Some of them believe themselves to be gods of some sort or other. All of this is quite lively though how much of it should be taken seriously is another matter entirely.

Chapter 6 has the intriguing title “UFOs, Mass Mind-Control, and the Awilya al-Shaytan.” I find it the least effective part of the book, but in one way it is the book’s most interesting section. It is the least effective chapter because in it the author, while widely read in the literature of ufology, seems to have sidestepped entirely reading the literature that critically considers the available evidence for such aerial phenomena. It is the most interesting chapter because in it he takes pains to embrace no end of contradictory conspiracy theories, paying no heed to such matters as social and psychological expectation and fantasy-prone personalities.

Nothing at all is known about the nature of Flying Saucers and Unidentified Flying Objects, or even about their existence, so it is easy to philosophize (or perhaps metaphilosophize) about them at great length. (Circular reasoning: If there is no evidence for the existence such vehicles, there must be conspiracies to suppress the knowledge of such devices.) For instance, Carl Jung described the aerial craft as objects of contemplation, which he called “flying mandalas.” Early in his career the Swiss psychologist argued they were entirely subjective in nature, whereas later in his career he decided they had in some instances the powers of exteriorization. Jung is wavering, but not Upton: “Demonic manipulation,” “social engineering,” “saints of satan” (Awilya al-Shaytan of the subtitle) … here we are in the realm of X-Files and Matrix.

Chapter 7 is called “The Real Rumi” and is deals with the fact that the immense popularity of the Persian poet and his works in the West – the “Rumi industry” – occurs at the expense of the man’s true beliefs, Islamic and Sufic. Upton writes, “He was a contemplative, saint and spiritual master first, and only secondarily an artist.” I agree with the author, as I too find the denatured verses attributed to him that appear in English translations to be about as authentic as poetry as the standard version of “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” (which at least has the merit of being lively and quotable verse). The author says that Rumi’s “only peers in the West” are Dante, Blake, and Shakespeare. (Despite their many differences, I would opt for likening the works of Rumi to those of Walt Whitman.)

Chapter 8 has a long title “A Chink in the Perennialist Armor – Uncertainty as to the Principal Unity of Knowledge and Love.” Is it true that “Intelligence emits straight rays, whereas love sends forth wavy or flaming rays”? What about “The synthesis of Love and Knowledge is, in fact, Wisdom, without which love must remain sentimental, knowledge theoretical … “? Whoever has an interest in the Courtly Love tradition of poetry and song will find the author’s ruminations here to be both thoughtful and heart-felt.

Chapter 9 consists of an interview with the author conducted by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos. (The interviewer, otherwise unidentified, serves as a mental health clinician who writes book reviews for “Studies in Comparative Religion.” ) The chapter is titled “Drug Induced Mysticism Revisited.” Here the author is hard-pressed, despite the fact that an argument proceeds on a conversational level, to distinguish between the transpersonal experiences that are the product of psychedelics and those that are the fruit of religious devotion and discipline.

The term “entheogen” is noted, possibly to suggest that psychedelic substances need not be ingested because the body in the right circumstances is able to produce these on its own. Anyway, it is difficult for Upton to distinguish between the differences in causation, whether molecular or eremitic, but this fact should not be held against him, for it was equally difficult for William James to do the same in his landmark study “The Psychology of Religious Experience” published more than a century ago.

In passing, Upton notes that it may have been the occultist Aleister Crowley who introduced mescaline to Aldous Huxley, not Dr. Humphry Osmond of the Weyburn psychiatric hospital in Saskatchewan. Also in passing, Upton finds an odd parallel – in the first half of the 1960s there was a psychedelic “explosion” of psychic content among the youth of America; at the same time there was a rationing of it resulting from reformers of the Second Vatican Council. The author refers to Vatican II a number of times; in this chapter he characterizes it as “the Masonic coup within the Catholic church” – the ill-effects of which are being felt to this day.

Chapter 10 looks at the Templars and the Freemasons as instances of Counter-Initiations intent on the restoration of brotherhoods, crafts, secret societies, gnosticism, etc. These forces assume such forms as Vatican II, Wicca, the Club of Rome, and the “global élites.” (Ted Turner, Maurice Strong, and George Soros are three named members of the élites. (I must admit to a smidgen of superbia that the middle one is a Torontonian! Who says Canada is a dull country?)

Masonry is denounced as a “parody” of the true initiatic way. In this chapter, as well as in other chapters, it is difficult to separate conspiracy theory from conspiracy fact, if indeed the word “conspiracy” in the sense of “cabal” is the appropriate one to employ. A substitute might be “prevailing ideology,” particularly views that are liberal, permissive, progressive, etc.

Chapters 11 and 12 are titled “The Fall of Lucifer” and “Luciferian Transhumanism.” These chapters consist of expositions of themes already discussed. These short chapters could best be summarized in the following sentence: There is “the metaphysical truth that limitation is necessary for divine manifestation.” Limitation is seen in the sense of respecting natural and spiritual boundaries and traditional, time-honoured initiations. “No salvation outside the church” is a familiar form of this traditionalist principle.

The five appendices are interesting in their own right, but as they add little to the sum and substance of the argument of the book, I will overlook them here. Over all, I had three unexpected responses to reading this work. Despite the fact these responses may be dismissed as shallow, or beside the point, they are my own and I offer them for consideration.

First response. While I admire the author’s erudition and concern for humanity, I find his range of sympathy and understanding to be – while deep – narrow. I suppose if someone is intent on digging a circular trench to secern or separate the circle of the temenos from all the rest of creation, one has to dig ditches that are deep but narrow. The result is that the argument of the book is expressed in such a perfervid fashion that it “preaches to the converted.” It is unlikely to win many if any uncommitted readers, though it may sharpen and strengthen the convictions of those readers already intent on conversion or yearnings of Muslims anxious to return to their origins. Yet I recall St. Augustine’s assertion that all of creation is greater than merely the best parts of creation.

Second response. The structure of this work, like the structure of other perennialist books that I have read, is not so much an inquiry or an argument as it is a collection homilies – in point of fact, twelve homilies, each chapter being its own homily. I know nothing about the order of service in a masjid, but in a Christian church the Reading of the Gospel is followed by the sermon, otherwise known as the homily. The homily applies the principles of the biblical text to the intrigues of the world and to the perversities of man’s nature, and it informs congregants “what must be thought, felt, and done.” In this book the biblical text is a verse chosen from the Noble Qur’an – or in some instances a passage from “The Reign of Quantity” – followed by an elucidation of the consequences of the application or non-application of the principle.

Third response. I expect the value of “Vectors” lies in the vast amount of information and insight that the author supplies and offers. The form it takes is that of the “anatomy,” the literary term for a work that schematically organizes knowledge in a practical way. The “anatomy” is not to be confused with the “encyclopedia.” The encyclopedia presents knowledge alphabetically, in a non-literary way, making no connections, whereas the anatomy does so through conventional and cultural categories with loose-knit or tightly-knit connectives to illustrate diversity or depth.

“The Anatomy of Melancholy,” compiled and written by the 17th-century Oxford don Robert Burton, is the best-known anatomy in English. Another instance, in our own day, is “Anatomy of Criticism” by the 20th-century professor Northrop Frye of Victoria College, University of Toronto. Both of these “anatomies” are – like “Vectors” – well-organized repositories of recherché information, valued as much for their insights as for their overviews or surveys.

It seems to me best to regard “Vectors” as a member of “anatomy” class of books. Its structure implies that there is, inarguably, a divine order and that there is a divinity that “shapes our ends,” ignore it as we may. That is the assumption, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” and based on that assumption, Upton’s tome orders the world of fact and fancy as best to approximate that design.

John Robert Colombo, an author and anthologist of many books about the lore and literature of Canada, lives in Toronto. He has a special interest in arcane subjects. He contributes occasional reviews to this blog. His website is  www.colombo.ca

I Should Have Sent Roses

Sublime, poignant, elegiac: the first words to spring to mind when I think of this melody from the album The Union, by Elton John and Leon Russell. In Gurdjieff influenced terms, I would say that the person who wrote this had to be in a heightened state of emotional self-consciousness. He had to be present to the workings of his feeling centre to allow this lyrical and sensitive melody to emerge without constricting it. Some melodies owe more to moving centre, others owe more to emotional or intellectual centre, and some, such as this, are products of the higher emotional centre. But you can tell straight away that this was written from somewhere essential. (For an explanation of the centres, see Sophia Wellbeloved, Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts, 133-5; and for “essence”, see 71-3.)

Leon Russell, who has produced some of the most lyrical melodies of the last fifty years (e.g. “This Masquerade” and “Superstar”), reaches new heights with this masterpiece. I would place it almost on a par with the melody of Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”. And yet Leon Russell did not create it: no one but God can create. However, it is to Leon Russell’s credit that he could arrange the melody which arose from somewhere within his “common presence”. What happens in such work, and how we can recognize the operation  are matters I shall address on another occasion.

While my response is, and must be subjective, I feel that the melody perfectly matches the lyrics by Bernie Taupin, which tell the story of a lost love from the point of view of the man who has lost. The boy knows that the girl has gone, and that he bears responsibility. When he was with her, he took her for granted. Ambivalently, he goes on to say both that he would treat her better now, and that she deserves someone more thoughtful. He addresses her with understanding and self-deprecation:

Are you standing outside?

Looking up at the sky, cursing a wandering star?

Well, if I were you, I’d throw rocks at the moon

And I’d say, “Damn you wherever you are!”

This is so apt that it’s almost humorous. A “wandering star” because, perhaps, he did not fit into his place in the order of things. Throwing stones at the moon, maybe because the moon is for lovers and lunatics: she being the lover and he the lunatic.

I don’t know where to start,

This cage round my heart locked up what I meant to say,

What I felt all along the way,

Just wondering how come I couldn’t take your breath away.

At various times we all feel something like this expression of mixed confidence, self-doubt and exasperation – at the same time that he believes she should have been overwhelmed by him, he confesses that he is confounded that she was not. Like Russell, we often feel that we have long wished to express something but that we could not, just could not, because of a sort of emotional tightness. It is as if we would choke were we to try and say it.

‘Cause I never sent roses. I never did enough.

I didn’t know how to love you, though I loved you so much.

And I should have sent roses when you crossed my mind,

For no other reason than the fact you were mine.

This is strange but true: we often feel that we love but do not know how to put that love into action. And of course, there are two errors: to think that an overt action is always needed, and to forget that actions are often needed. It is only people who are thinking philosophically who imagine that no action is needed. If you have read In Search of the Miraculous, it is fatal to take the idea that we “cannot do” in a formatory way to mean that we cannot therefore do anything at all.

Looking back on my life,

If fate should decide to let me do it all over again,

I’d build no more walls.

I’d stay true and recall the fragrance of you on the wind

This is the paradox which Ouspensky paints in unforgettable terms in The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. We make a mistake, we forget ourselves and our higher aims. Then we believe that if we had the opportunity again we would not fall into the same trap. But should the occasion arise again, we would make exactly the same error: we would forget at exactly the same place. And yet, there is a way to escape from the curse, and that is to remember oneself, hence the importance of Gurdjieff’s ideas and method to religions and religious systems.

The reference to fate is especially interesting to me, because it is a topic which is exercising me at the moment. Fate acts only upon essence, and this song, as I have said, is an essence-song. It is only when we are closer to essence that we can start to have any sense at all of what our destiny or fate is: that is, what it is that we are called to above and beyond the vicissitudes of life. If there is a “law of accident”, there is also a “law of destiny” which works itself out despite whatever other causal connections and chains may be playing themselves out and, I would suggest a “law of miracles” (see “Fate” at 80, “Law of Accident” at 115-6 and “miracle” at 144).

You’ll do better than me.

Someone who can see,

Right from the start give you all that you need

And I’ll slip away, knowing I’m half the man I should be.

There is genuine love here: for love seeks what is best for the beloved irrespective of the cost to oneself. Also, love brings impartiality, and the statement, “knowing I’m half the man I should be”, is a good impartial description of each one of us.

The topic of “lost loves” is a significant one: a person who never wonders about past friendships and romances and why they ended, to use a neutral term, is quite possibly incapable of reflection. I have published on this blog one of the most important pieces I ever transcribed from Mr Adie’s diaries, just on that topic. Bernie Taupin is also responsible for one of the most touching songs Elton John ever wrote, the much under-appreciated “I Feel like a Bullet in the Gun of Robert Ford”. And in each case, “Robert Ford” and “I Should Have Sent Roses”, Taupin was working with one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, and each result has been a masterpiece.

And that brings me, briefly, to the topic of Leon Russell. There is no doubt of his uncanny talent at playing the piano and song writing. As I have already said, I feel that he produced some of the greatest songs of our time. For my money, his piano playing is better even than that of Elton John, and I am an Elton John fan. I remember, in the 70s, thinking that Leon Russell would go on to conquer the world, as they say. But then something happened. What? To an extent, perhaps, he sabotaged his own career. It was never the same with him after the 1975 album Will O’The Wisp. Then, Elton John enticed him to The Union in 2010 (Elton did not have to seduce very hard, it would appear), and Russell’s own account of the production of that album is found on “In the Hands of Angels”.

I have carefully praised the melody and the lyrics rather than the track. I feel that the production is too heavy. Very often, a beautiful melody is obscured by too much backing. If you do listen to this track, try and imaginatively screen out the brass. My own guess is that T-Bone Burnett sensed the beauty of the melody, and tried to raise it to prominence with the trumpets and trombones. But I don’t think it’s worked.

Still, while the arrangement is rather more heavy than I would like, it is extraordinary that after so long out of the public eye, this artist of astounding abilities would return and reveal so much about himself. I think that took strength: the sort of strength which this remarkable song reveals.

Joseph.Azize@gmail.com

8 July 2012

JOSEPH AZIZE has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, ‘George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia’ represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

“Maronites” is pp.279-282 of “The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia” published by Cambridge University Press and edited by James Jupp.

Filed under: JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE, Joseph Azize: on Elton John and Leon Russell's 'I Should Have Sent Roses' Tagged: Bernie Taupin, Elton John, emotional self-consciousness, Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts, heightened state, Leo Russell, Lost Loves, music, n Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky, Sophia Wellbeloved, The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, The Union ]]> http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/joseph-azize-on-elton-john-and-leon-russells-i-should-have-sent-roses/feed/ 0 ccwe Elton-John-and-Leon-Russell joseph-azize http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/john-robert-colombo-reviews-reflections-on-gurdjieffs-whim/ http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/john-robert-colombo-reviews-reflections-on-gurdjieffs-whim/#comments Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:13:46 +0000 SOPHIA WELLBELOVED http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/?p=2952 ]]>

John Robert Colombo reviews Keith A. Buzzell’s latest publication

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These days the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is much in the news, at least in the American news, occasioned by the candidacy for the leadership of the Republican Party of the person of Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Senator and Presidential hopeful. The man who has his eye set on occupying the Oval Office of the White House is a fifth-generation Mormon, and while he has lived a squeaky clean life to date, he apparently holds as gospel truths some of the bizarre beliefs and strange practices of the Mormon church.

Recently a researcher drew the attention of the reading public to the fact that in the eyes of Mormons, God is not the creator of the world. He is not the creator of the universe either, though it seems God resides “in” the universe and not “beyond” it. This is peculiarity that should be of interest to both theologian and geophysicist. Who then did create the heavens and the earth? Genesis 1:1 of the King James Version of the Bible states that God accomplished the deed “in the beginning.” Here is the standard Christian belief in the wording of the Apostle’s Creed: “God the Father Almighty … Creator of Heaven and Earth.”

The Mormon belief, formulated over eighteen decades ago, is that God, while in no way the architect of creation, nevertheless is a dweller in it as well as its superintendent. Indeed, the location of “divine throne” is known, for it is “near” Kolob, which is a celestial body in some distant sector of the cosmos, unsuspected by astrologer and unknown to astronomer. Is Kolob a planet or a star? The Mormon writings are obscure on this point, rather like the traditional beliefs of the Inuit of the Arctic whose cosmology conflates planets and stars. It does seem that the Mormon God is more akin to mankind than to spirit-kind.

Are the Mormons Christians? It seems that they are Christians in the same way that members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community are Muslims. Their membership in greater Islam is denied by Sunni and Shite alike, especially in Pakistan where the Parliament passed a statute declaring the Ahmadiyyas to be non-Muslims: So there! In the same way, fundamentalist Christian denominations and sects in the U.S. heartland refuse to extend the term “Christian” to include Mormonism: Take that! Yet the Ahmadiyyas consider themselves to be good Muslims, just as the Mormons consider themselves to be good Christians.

I am not sure why it is so, but I find all of this reassuring. Perhaps it reassures me because it is so human – to cling to peculiar beliefs, in lieu of any evidence at all, and to withhold validation to designated groups on account of their differing beliefs. It reminds me of the subterfuge and euphemism employed by Palestinians and other Muslims who insist on referring to the State of Israel as “the Jewish entity.” All too human!

With respect to the LDS tradition, it is enlightening that there should be a god or demiurge who lives on a celestial body named Kolob, for it seems the divinity is a being who – or which – has some sort of physical or corporeal existence. There is no reference to Kolob in “The Book of Mormon,” but it makes its appearance in the quasi-scriptural text “Pearl of Great Price.” The subject is of interest in that one may be a good Mormon without worrying much about the nature of divinity, whether architect or superintendent of the universe. In a sense, then, belief is a matter of degree and the responsibility of the individual and hence changeable.

I could continue with a discussion of bizarre beliefs held by many Christians – such as the rise and fall of the concept of Purgatory, not to mention the existence of states of Heaven and Hell, veneration of angels and saints, prayers for the posthumous rehabilitation of the death, the physical resurrection at the End of Days, etc. All of these fall into the province of Theology, the “queen of the sciences.” The list of endless. As the cartoonist Robert L. Ripley of “Believe It or Not!” fame once wrote, “Strange indeed is man seeking after his gods.”

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What does all of this have to do with what appears below, or with the new book that I am about to review? (I use the verb “to review” with some reluctance because the book in question is a weighty one, and the arguments it presents are complex, indeed too complex to encapsulate in a relatively short review article.) The answer to the question is “not much,” except that there is little evidence for what is being described in the book’s pages. If the descriptions are taken seriously, the deductions and extensions truly follow. So the book is a disciplined work, a work of scholarly analysis. It is titled “Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim,” and I will describe the physical appearance of the volume before I turn my attention to its author, Keith A. Buzzell and to his previous publications, and only then to the general argument of the new book.

“Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim” is published in 2012 by Fifth Press, an imprint based in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Mormon headquarters (as it happens!), which has issued earlier titles by Dr. Buzzell. It is a handsome trade paperback, 266 pages of text, plus preliminary and postliminary matter, including a glossary of scientific (but not Gurdjieffian) terms and a bibliography that includes books and articles on philosophy, neurology, cosmology, mathematics, etc. There is no index, but the text is well organized in fourteen chapters, and there are four instructive prefaces (contributed by the book’s editors, John Amaral, Marlena Buzzell, Bonnie Phillips, and Toddy Smyth). There are also innumerable diagrams, many of them in lovely pastel colours. A rough approximation of the word count is 145,000 words. Although I found a couple of minor misprints (footnotes on page viii and page 7, for instance), the text is well edited and the argument is clearly expressed.

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Now let me turn to Dr. Buzzell and his publications, paraphrasing what I wrote for this blog on September 28, 2011. (It is still archived here.) At the time I wrote: “It is apparent that there are many scientifically minded and technologically trained people like Dr. Buzzell who are ‘in the Work’ and are making sizeable efforts ‘to square’ what Mr. Gurdjieff wrote in ‘Beelzebub’s Tales’ with contemporary scientific and technological theories and practices. This is one way to ‘make relevant’ what the author wrote between 1924 and 1927, the text of which was translated into English and published in 1950 and subsequently reissued in a revised (and controversial) edition in 1992.”

“Dr. A. Keith Buzzell was born in 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied music at Bowdoin College and Boston University, and received his medical doctorate in 1960 at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. For the past thirty-five years, he has been a rural family physician in Fryeburg, Maine, a staff member of Bridgton Hospital and currently holds the position of medical director at the Fryeburg Health Care Center.”

“Dr. Buzzell has also served as a professor of osteopathic medicine, a hospital medical director and a founder of a local hospice program. He has lectured widely on the neurophysiologic influences of television on the developing human brain and on the evolution of man’s triune brain. In 1971 Keith, and his wife Marlena, met Irmis Popoff, a student of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and the founder of the Pinnacle Group in Sea Cliff, Long Island, New York. From then until the mid-1980s they formed work groups under her supervision. Since 1988, Dr. Buzzell and Annie Lou Staveley, founder of the Two Rivers Farm in Oregon, maintained a Work relationship up to her death in 1996. Keith continues group Work in Bridgton, Maine.”

This information is also reprinted in the current book. As for the earlier volumes, these are the three volumes that I reviewed: “Perspectives on Beelzebub’s Tales and Other of Gurdjieff’s Writings” (2005). “A Child’s Odyssey: Explorations in Active Mentation: Re-Membering Gurdjieff’s Teaching” (2006). “Man – A Three-brained Being: Resonant Aspects of Modern Science and the Gurdjieff Teaching” (2007, 2^nd edition, 2011).

I have found these books to be among the most serious publications about the physics, physiology, neurology, and psychology of G.I. Gurdjieff’s thought – and also the most demanding to read. In their comprehensiveness, they remind me of Maurice Nicoll’s five-volume series of “Psychological Commentaries,” but whereas Dr. Nicoll generally limited himself to the psychological aspects of the system, Dr. Buzzell does not so limit his inquiry but attempts to relate metaphysical concepts with chemical and physical reality. The present title is no exception.

The title of the book struck me as odd for the reason that I was unfamiliar with the expression “Gurdjieff’s whim.” I assumed I was missing something – I quite often have this feeling, and with some justification! (Indeed, the phrase brought to my mind the not-unrelated, traditional Islamic words “Mohammed’s wont.”) I checked Sophia Wellbeloved’s indispensable volume ‘Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts’ (2003) but found no references there to “whim.” Nowhere else in the literature of the Work have I encountered any discussion of “whim,” so I conclude it is a synonym for “aim.”

I checked the “Guide and Index” and located “whim” (in the singular) in “All & Everything,” where it appears in the original edition on page 688 of the section on “France.” The author wrote as follows: “ … they occupy themselves out of idleness, in order to satisfy their whims, with devising ‘new-forms-of-manifestations-of-their-Hasnamussianing,’ or as is said there, with ‘new fashions,’ and spread them from there over the whole of the planet.” There the word is used in the plural and it refers to things of passing interest. I reluctantly returned to the notion of “one’s personal aim” in life and in Work. Perhaps it was related to the three aims of Group Work.

I was still uncertain about this, even after reading, on page 1, the words attributed to Gurdjieff: “to live and teach so that there should be a new conception of God in the world, a change in the very meaning of the word.”  This is equated with Gurdjieff’s personal aim. Indeed, even earlier, on page ii, in the first of the prefaces, Toddy Smyth writes as follows: “In a rare moment of divulgence, Gurdjieff revealed his own whim: to bring to mankind a new understanding of God.”

There we have it. Smyth continues: “Keith Buzzell’s work is a verification of this whim – an aspect of a new understanding of God is to recognize and to gain the capacity to actualize one’s own whim. A portion of Dr. Buzzell’s whim could be summarized as the striving to understand how self-transformation – a process that requires the action of an independent will – can be possible within a Universe governed by unyielding, automatic law.”

Smyth goes on to describe the present book as “a dynamic synthesis of the indications found in ‘The Tales’ and ‘In Search’ with recent discoveries in quantum and cosmological science.” Indeed, as Dr. Buzzell has written elsewhere, “Gurdjieff’s conception of Okidanokh represents a major aspect of his effort to reconcile science and spirituality. As such, it plays a powerful role in his new conception of God in the world. The manner in which he accomplishes this reconciliation is quite ‘oblique’ or indirect and one has to read his complex elaboration with considerable care and attention to see how thoroughly he has blended the ‘way’ of science and of potential transformation with the ‘way’ of the spirit.”

He takes pains to place Gurdjieff’s exposition alongside those concerned with quantum physics and the theory of relativity. He could have added alongside as well of photographic proof of the expansion of the universe which was discovered by Hubble and Humason during the same period.

But perhaps the key passage appears in Philip Mairet’s memoir of A.R. Orage: “Whilst they were talking in this vein, someone asked Gurdjieff if he would disclose his own ‘whim,’ and he said it was to live and teach so that there should be a new conception of God in the world, a change in the very meaning of the word.” This passage is cited a number of times, and its source seems to be an unpublished lecture of J.G. Bennett’s. Bennett quotes Orage as saying his “whim” is to publish “the best literary journal in England,” an aim he achieved. Apparently the word “whim” in Armenian and Russian expresses not merely fantasy, as it does in English, in the sense of whimsy, but determination, intent, and wish. The reader will decide whether or not Gurdjieff realized his “whim.”

In some way this “new conception” is connected with those unwieldly terms Okidanokh and Triamazikamno, the former term representing the “reconciliation” of man’s inner world of three brains with the outer world that expresses the familiar Law of Three, and the latter term the all- encompassing Ray of Creation – our individual and collective place in the world.

Each of the fourteen chapters of Dr. Buzzell’s book is composed of sections a few pages in length, and any one section would lend itself to study and analysis, as it is immersed in the vocabularies of “The Tales” (as he refers to “Beelzebub’s Tales”) and “In Search of the Miraculous.” In this sense “Reflections” could be regarded as an organized gloss on central concepts presented in allegorical and other forms in “The Tales.”

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The sheer amount of information and analysis in the book would overwhelm the casual reader (as it does the ordinary reviewer!) who has but a general understanding of and a passing interest in the mechanics of the work’s dynamics. So what I will do is parasail from chapter to chapter, suggesting some insights to be found therein. The author has made this easy to do because, in effect, each chapter examines a specific aspect of the system – indeed, each key word unlocks a portion of the whole. Here are the topics of the chapters:

(1) Whim as aim. (2) Evils old and new. (3) Generations, notably sons and grandson. (4) Conscience, reason. (5) Wiseacre, know-it-all. (6) Laws of the universe. (7) Suggestibility, including hypnotism. (8) Okidanokh, or reconciliation of science and spirituality. (9) Essence which has mellowed. (10) Organic life. (11) Individual and group place and presence. (12) Foods and the Ray of Creation. (13) Reconciliation that allows for self-perfection in a structured universe. (14) Quantum considerations as approaches to “the non-mass and mass-based worlds.”

Some of the chapters come in two parts. I noticed that the earlier chapters are highly specific and analytic, whereas the later chapters are somewhat speculative, historical, and once in a while personal. (The early explorations bring to hazy recall the detailed discussions, chemical largely, mentioned by Dr. James Carruthers Young and others at the Priory in the mid-1920s.)

There is a shift of perspective in this book from impersonal to personal, and it could be said to occur around Chapter 10. The theory comes first, thereafter its application. Indeed, in that chapter, “The Life Force,” Dr. Buzzell describes two instances of awareness and intention that occurred to him, the first stemming from an encounter with a disliked hardware clerk, the second stemming from his habit of leaving his socks on the floor of his bedroom!

Here is a brief summary of the contents of Chapter 10, which may act as a guide to how the author proceeds. Synonyms for “life force” is mentioned: Qui, Chi, prana, Shakti, pneuma, Great Spirit, Godhead (Jehovah, God, Allah). These are Eastern conceptions and there is no “action from below” and it is all “action from above.” It is Western conceptions that offer “action from below,” and these are sometimes called vitalism, will to live, élan vital, life force, formative drive, entelechy, orgone, etc. For a balance of “actions,” turn to Taoism. Newton and Darwin and Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Relativity have begun to “bridge” reduce the gap between spirit and matter (to use basic terms).

Here is what Gurdjieff brings to this notion: “There is no intimation that life of any type (non-brained and brained) was a unique or separate creation of HIS ENDLESSNESS.” Life is a universal phenomenon, the Ilnosoparnian process, with Earth as special because of the collision of the comet Kondoor. Earth, Moon, and Anulios and what they represent are “imbalanced” and hence requires special consideration.  There is much discussion of the nature of the “imbalance” based on passages from “The Tales.” “Gurdjieff carefully emphasizes the participation of the Divine Will Power _only_ at the onset of the Creation and yet has HIS ENDLESSNESS very active, via HIS Reason, _within_ the Creation.”

Everything proceeds lawfully. “The end result of the _actualizations_ of HIS ENDLESSNESS creates the possibility for the transformation and crystallization of ‘active elements’ …. ” As well: “Applying this Will, each of us three-brained begins can participate – be an active agent – in our own self-transformation. One becomes an active participant in the creation of the Higher Bodies. Efforts in this regard are _one’s own_ ; they are initiated from lower worlds and move upward. This is _evolution_ in the Gurdjieffian sense.”

The possible success of such effort leads to a discussion of “later octaves” in the Great Ray. (I would like to have known more about “coating bodies” vs. “crystallization.”) There is a section about: “All of life, therefore, is required and fulfills a cosmic need while, simultaneously, the actualizations of HIS ENDLESSNESS make it possible for certain of the three-brained begins to coat High Being-bodies.” This action is symbolically represented with respect to what looks like a multi-coloured cosmic pyramid. Movement (instinctive centre), eating (moving and instinctive), and survival (instinctive and moving and sex centre) are discussed. The role of H12, “the power of paying attention,” is discussed interestingly and importantly. Also discussed are characteristics and comparisons of first, second, and third brains.

Pages here resemble a textbook on neuro-anatomy. There is much discussion of the “location of attention” and the question is asked, “Where does ‘carbon 6’ come from?” The octaves of Food, Air, and Impressions are discussed. The subject is complicated, yet the exposition is clear, so the author deserves top marks for his hard work. In an ideal world – rather than on a planet like ours that falls under 48 laws – I would be able to summarize in greater detail the contents of all the chapters.

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The quality of any work that is serious may be judged by the influence that it has on serious-minded people. The Gurdjieff Work was introduced to the West in 1915, so it nearly one century old, perhaps a lot older in fragmentary form in the East. Texts that were written in the 1920s and published as late as the 1940s are still able to beget serious discussion and engender new thoughts and feelings. Proof of the seriousness of the Work is that it inspires Dr. Buzzell and other scholars and scientists to “dig deeper.” Yet for all its length and depth, it seems that “Reflections” is but the first half of Dr. Buzzell’s analysis. For it is promised that there will be a second volume in this series to be titled “Further Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim.” So stay tuned ….

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Lurking in the back of my mind, as I read these fourteen chapters, was the planet or star named Kolob and the lonely God of the Mormons, who lives in our cosmos, distant from us but not apart from existence. I must admit that this image brought to my mind Mr. Gurdjieff.

John Robert Colombo is an author and anthologist based in Toronto who is interested in esoteric ideas, Canadian lore and literature, jokes and anecdotes, and contemporary poetry. His latest collection of aphorisms is called “A Strange and Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore.” Check his website:  jrc@colombo.ca