Gurdjieff

for a Time Between Worlds

hyperpersonal essays on
the grandfather of metamodern spirituality

by a certain
layman pascal
 Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds
Third Edition
© 2024 by Layman Pascal
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
Sky Meadow Press
Stannard, Vermont
www.skymeadowinstitute.org
Cover designed by Jared Morningstar
ISBN 979-8-9903633-1-1
 Series Foreword
Sky Meadow Institute was founded in 2023 as an organization dedicated to advancing
systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. That’s a succinct, tidy way to try and
express a whole bunch of interrelated concerns and efforts. So, what does it really mean? And how
does a phrase like that try to tie together content as seemingly disparate as permaculture, psycho-
social development, big history, metamodernism, and holistic well-being—topics core to the
Institute’s vision?
Systems are dynamic networks that unite many components into an integrated whole—one
with new capacities and capabilities. Many elements working together can produce new powers and
outcomes that transcend the mere sum of their parts. That’s synergy; that’s emergence—when
increasingly complex, energy-unlocking configurations somehow allow for novel forms of depth,
strength, vitality, and flourishing.
But if words like “system” and “complexity” sound too cold and mechanical, just replace them with
something more organic. Think generative relationships and relationality, the context-sensitive, the
holistic. That’s what Nature is all about, after all. The web of life, interconnection, symbiosis, Gaia.
The word “complexity” just means “to weave together,” and that’s what the tapestry of existence
ultimately is: an ever more intricate embroidery revealing an ever more refined image of an ever-
evolving cosmos.
Forging more intricate relationships is what the Universe does—and keeps doing, since out of
those relationships come new entities with entirely new abilities which in turn create the possibility
for even more novel relationships to cohere, and so on. So quarks relate to form atoms, atoms relate
to form molecules, molecules relate to form cells, etc., all the way up to complex, conscious, caring
human beings, who themselves relate to one another to form a vast global society rapidly coming to
increasing knowledge of the cosmos.
Every “thing,” then, is really a process: a dynamic relational event unfolding in relation to all
other dynamic relational events. That’s what the Universe is. That’s what you are—a mind-blowing
moment at the edge of this 14-billion-year process of cosmic complexification and evolution, headed
for still greater complexity…
Beautiful as this perspective is, it can be a hard one to adopt for most people. Complex
systems are, well, complex, not simple, and that makes them difficult to see and make sense of. It’s
no accident that the field of complex systems science only got seriously underway in the last 50 years
with the aid of supercomputers and advanced mathematics. We may intuit complexity, feel it in our
bones and in our hearts, but to engage it conceptually with scientific rigor or apply its models to
different domains of life with methodological clarity is no easy task.
 Indeed, we shouldn’t forget that simply getting comfortable with the basic sort of linear,
analytical thought common to modern industrial cultures itself took centuries and required a vast
reconfiguration of society just to take root. But while that sort of thinking has offered us incredible
new insights into the nature of reality and unlocked the potential of expansive new science and
technology, it’s become painfully obvious that even it is not enough. Modern analysis simply misses
too much of the Bigger Picture, with the result that we’ve become exceedingly skilled at a narrowly
focused, objective-oriented form of thought that isn’t taking into account all the relationships,
interconnections, and complexity required for a proper understanding of impacts and outcomes. We
are, in short, missing what matters most.
The results of this too-simplistic mindset are disturbingly more apparent by the day. The
environment is rapidly degrading, biodiversity is tanking, human health is suffering, and social
systems are crumbling. The old way of making sense of the world simply isn’t cutting it anymore,
and we’ll need to “level up” our thinking yet again if we’re to see ourselves into a flourishing 21st
century.
That’s what Sky Meadow Institute is dedicated to see happen. We need more systems-based
thinking about the things that matter most—things central to our survival and well-being, like food,
Nature, human relationships, governance, culture, and spirituality. Viewed through the lens of
integration (not analysis), complexity (not commodity), systems (not dissection), our understanding
and relationship to all of these shift in a radical and life-enhancing way.
When it does, our meaning-making itself complexifies. Our worldview becomes more
expansive, sensitive, deep. We see more of that Bigger Picture, gain more avenues for connection and
self-expression, and reduce the amount of suffering in the world that’s caused by myopia and short-
sightedness. Less and less can be truly “externalized” as the one relational Whole becomes all in all
—you and me, us and them, everything, together.
Human civilization has never operated from such a perspective, yet likely cannot continue, in
the end, unless some form of it begins to take hold and reshape how we live. Bold as such an aim
may be, we can be heartened that, despite myriad backtracking and (not infrequent) disastrous
relapses, the last 30,000 years of world history can be read as a sort of long-term psycho-social
learning process. As social systems have complexified, bringing more and more of their subsystems
together, they’ve unlocked new capacities and continually expanded people’s worldviews in such a
way as to allow us to appreciate more and more of the complexity of things.
Today, we need a worldview of complexity if we’re to see civilization, if not life itself, to the
end of the 21st century and beyond. Such a worldview sees in the complexification process itself a
spiritually profound narrative. Moving beyond modern utilitarianism and postmodern nihilism, we
must reframe issues of meaning and purpose within a broader cosmic frame of evolution and
productive, care-enhancing integration.
 The emerging metamodern paradigm seems to be speaking to such a shift in perspective. A
truly metamodern spirituality is precisely that which brings a complexity lens to bear on the things
that matter most. Part of that entails looking at the very evolution of worldviews and meaning
structures as a process of complexification—a vital, promising, but (as yet) under-explored field of
study. More broadly, it entails engaging complexification, integration, and emergence as fundamental
dynamics of the self-organizing cosmos—processes in which we ourselves take part through our own
journeys of learning, development, integration, and self-transcendence.
Seeing these deep patterns playing out across the fractal spans of self and Universe, stepping
into a worldview of worldviews, and learning about learning all help expand our perspective and
return a profound sense of meaning to life after epochs of disenchantment and disillusionment. After
the revelations of modern and postmodern thought, we are once more, and at long last, learning to
find ourselves at home in the universe again—not through naïve projection and assimilation, but
through genuine systemic integration into and as a singular, sublime Whole.
Though diverse, all of the books published by the Institute serve to inform and develop this
line of thought in some way or another—whether that be by exploring “surplus cohesion” models of
human spirituality and parts-work, advancing comprehensive unified theories of complexification
and emergence, exploring new mythopoetic avenues for the development of the God-concept in an
open-source and networked culture, etc. As a metamodern worldview of systems, complexity, and
integrative pluralism comes online, Sky Meadow Press is dedicated to promoting and advancing the
emerging discourse by publishing thinkers at the leading edge of this promising new paradigm. In
time, we hope to see this effort blossom into a robust wisdom library for navigating this time between
worlds and helping build bridges into the mist of an uncertain future.
The challenges before us are daunting, to be sure, and the path ahead will be hard if we’re to
see a successful update to the civilizational operating system. Still, despite the urgency and
seriousness of the moment (or, indeed, because of them), we must move forward not just boldly but
joyfully, marching ahead with a post-tragic perspective that sees the darkness but is not overcome by
it. With levity, then, and a sincere irony emblematic of a new cultural sensibility, a new, weird and
wild world is coming into view. I hope the books published here will help chart some of its emerging
landscape and give us all a taste of what wonders lie ahead—if only we can rise to meet the crises of
our time with courage and wisdom enough to greet them.

Brendan Graham Dempsey

Stannard, Vermont
 MENU
APPETIZER

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?

(or: Let the Buyer Beware of Dogs)
1₣

ENTRÉE

A NOTE ON “SINCERE IRONY”

7₣

INTRODUCTION
(or: What Do “Gurdjieff” and “A Time Between Worlds” Signify?)
9₣

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE GURDJIEFF

(or: All Men are in Quotation Marks)
13 ₣

MAIN COURSES

WHAT ON EARTH WAS GURDJIEFF DOING?

23 ₣

THE SOMATIC PRINCIPLE OF “SELF-REMEMBERING“

DURING THE PRACTICE OF READING (THIS BOOK)
27 ₣

PREHISTORIC DHARMA FOR A POSTHISTORIC EPOCH

31 ₣

WHAT IS THE “FOURTH WAY“ IN

A METAMODERN SENSE?
35 ₣
 SPLIT ATTENTION
39 ₣
CONSCIOUSNESS IS OUR LEAST SIGNIFICANT ATTRIBUTE
41 ₣
WHIM FULFILLMENT AS A DEVELOPMENTAL DISCIPLINE
43 ₣
THE MAGNETIC CENTER
49 ₣
A THIRD WAY ON “SOULS”
51 ₣
WHAT IS THE WORK?
55 ₣
COLLECTIVE SAPIENCE, PONDERING
& SAYINGS OF POPULAR WISDOM
59 ₣
PRE-SCHOOL FOR RELIGIONS
65 ₣
NEGATIVE SELF-AWARENESS
69 ₣
PASSIVE SYNCHRONIZATION
OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
73 ₣
ACTIVE SYNCHRONIZATION
OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
75 ₣
THE PRACTICE OF NOT IMPROVING YOURSELF
77 ₣
THE THREE MUSKETEERS:
Logos, Mythos & Pathos
81 ₣
THE ART OF PERCEPTION
85 ₣
THE FOOD OF IMPRESSIONS
91 ₣
THINK MORE
93 ₣
GIVING LIFE THE FINGER:
 An Introductory Exercise
95 ₣
REMORSE AS PRAXIS
97 ₣
HYPNOSIS
101 ₣
THE INTEGRATION SURPLUS MODEL
105 ₣
THE GRANDFATHER OF PARTS WORK
107 ₣
THE DISCOVERY OF PLURALISTIC SPIRIUTALITY
111 ₣
CONSCIENCE
115 ₣
THE ROLES OF MEN AND WOMEN
117 ₣

HUMOUR & CHARACTER

123 ₣
“CRAZY WISDOM”
125 ₣
THE TWO ERRORS OF HISTORICAL BUDDHISM
133 ₣
ANOMALY AS SHAMANIC CURRICULUM
139 ₣
HUNTING FOR CHIEF FEATURES
143 ₣
SURREALISM
147 ₣
THE FIVE INSTINCTIVE OBLIGATIONS
151 ₣
WHAT IS SEX MADE FROM?
155 ₣
SAMBHOGAKAYA VS. DHARMAKAYA:
The So-Called “Higher Being Bodies”
159 ₣
ENLIGHTENMENT BY THIRDS
 163 ₣
THE PERIODIC PROCESS OF RECIPROCAL DESTRUCTION:
A Bi-Partisan War Against Evolutionary Wisdom
165 ₣
THE VERY SAINTLY ASHIATA SHIEMASH
167 ₣
THE PROBLEM OF MISINTERPRETING FUCKED-UP VIBES:
Solioonenius and the Metacrisis
171 ₣
A MYTHIC-ECOLOGICAL FRAMING
FOR HUMAN PSYCHOTECHONLOGIES
175 ₣
ORIGINAL SIN IN A PLANETARY ECO-MYTHOLOGY
179 ₣
WHO ARE BEELZEBUB’S GRANDCHILDREN
For Whom the Book is Written?
183 ₣
GURDJIEFF’S USE OF SEMANTIC PLACEHOLDERS FOR
TRANSRATIONAL STRUCURES:
Hooshoomagoosh and Related Concepts
187 ₣
THE SUPERIOR BRIGAND
191 ₣
DISTINCTION-MAKING IN HIGHER MORAL REASONING
193 ₣
SLEEPING MACHINES & THE ALL-INSULTING ETHIC
199 ₣
GURDJIEFF’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM
205 ₣
PERSPECTIVAL COUNTERPOINT IN THE GROWTH OF PERSONAL
UNDERSTANDING
207 ₣
THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY SIGNIFICANCE
209 ₣
ANTICIPATING DEVIATIONS IN CREATIVE PROCESSES
215 ₣
DENYING THE FLESH
 217 ₣
HUNTING FOR HARNEL-MIATZNELS
219 ₣
ESOTERIC, MESOTERIC & EXOTERIC
221 ₣
STARSHIPS & GRAVITY WAVEES:
The Law of Falling
223 ₣
THREE LINES OF WORK
227 ₣
ONLY OBJECTIVE ART FANS
235 ₣
THE QUESTION OF BEING
239 ₣
THE FINAL PREAMBLE
241 ₣

DESSERT
HOW GURDJIEFF WRITES BOOKS
(or: Barbarous Tongues)
249 ₣

DIGESTIF
Suggested Auxiliary Resources
275 ₣
 PROLOGUE
The following text is payback.
This book is, among other things, a long-overdue and well-earned
repayment to a man in whose cryptic writings I have extravagantly indulged
myself for many years. The transmissions and lore of Georges Ivanovitch
Gurdjieff have been among the primary provocations for my own ideas on
integrative religion, postmetaphysical mysticism & metamodern spirituality.
I also owe him for being a fount of endless entertainment in the otherwise
rather sober, colorless and unimaginative landscape of soulmaking.
I suppose that I am trying to say that this strangely mustachioed figure of
early 20th-century “practical spirituality” has been a delight to my heart and
a constructive goad to my curious mind. He never fails to deliver a
skookum dose of authentic cayenne pepper directly into the nostrils of my
still-mostly-reliable planetary body.
Gurdjieff is also the spiritual philosopher about whom I receive the most
inquiries. People with whom I am associated across many diverse
communities of “leading edge” cultural philosophy have heard his exotic
name and sensed somehow that it may be relevant to a new spiritual style
that is deeply humanizing, regenerative, archaic-futuristic and decisively
oriented toward the cultivation of a planetary wisdom-civilization. Yet
despite this sense, most of them have little experience of the man, his
writings, or his methodology — and what little they may have gleaned is
often submerged into an overly tidy public summary of Gurdjieff‘s work
that conceals as much as it reveals.
So, being ebulliently (ebulliently, I say!) lazy by temperament, I have
decided to kill two of my nearby birds with a single sturdy stone. These
hyperpersonal short essays will simultaneously introduce Gurdjieff to a new
population of intrigued folks while also repaying part of my personal debt
to him.
It should be understood that I am not an official Gurdjieffian (if there even
is such a thing) nor do I intend to communicate my views in accordance
with those remarkable stalwarts who host the famous “work weekends,”
“movement classes,” and “dinners for Mr. G’s birthday.” I adore those
folks, but I will not be privileging mainstream Gurdjieff lineages and
customs. I will, however, be including them idiosyncratically within a
broader and more complex mycelial network of institutions, outliers,
individuals, orthodoxies & heretics who find themselves diversely devoted
to this odd fellow.
I hope to honor Gurdjieff‘s efforts and mingle (or mangle) his insights
together with the emergent ethos of post-postmodern existential human
development while, at the same time, surreptitiously, packaging,
synthesizing, disguising and publicly excreting my own private conclusions
in order thereby to become free of them.
Free for what? Hopefully free to understand a certain slippery something a
little more deeply…
You can already tell by my excessively jaunty tone and cavalier nuances
that I am quite happy to be a wiseacreing charlatan in these matters. That’s
almost a technical term in Gurdjieffian circles.
In fact, I have a great deal of respect for self-advertised charlatans. In an
age of aspirational marketing and persuasive techno-social simulations of
all kinds, there are few things less reputable than a good reputation. It is my
personal rule never to trust an organization that wants to convince me that it
is not a cult and likewise I feel that one should look very critically upon an
author who is careful to distinguish himself from fools.
This book is far from comprehensive. How could it be? That is so obvious
that even pointing it out treats you a bit like an social moron who is not
smart enough to simply assume that universal fact. But what is this book if
not some doomed attempt to be comprehensive? I would like to call it is a
cross-section. A deep cut that passes through several dozen facets of
Gurdjieff’s work that have continued to be among the most salient and life-
giving for me personally. A metamodern transversal of the Fourth Way. That
means I will be curating particular aspects of this living tradition that stand
out to me as particularly useful in my own development and also for the
still-emerging world situation.
Though Gurdjieff may have left no heir, I know at least three
‘disciples’ who are competent to convey the essence of what may be
called his superknowledge. There may be others. Of the three I know,
one was entrusted by Gurdjieff to carry out his work in France. Ever
since, she has done what is too difficult to do. One day she and I were
talking about the too-difficult, and I asked her what she thought I
could do that would be useful. I already had the idea of a book - ‘But
 how’ I asked her, ‘dare I try to write about Gurdjieff when I haven’t the
brain to do it?’
‘You’re for him, not against him, aren’t you?’
Such simplicity staggered me. I could only say ‘As you so well know.’
‘Then try’ she said.
So I am trying.
– Margaret Anderson,
The Unknowable Gurdjieff
Margaret’s quote above indicates that I am not the first woefully
underprepared person to experimentally attempt to communicate the lurid
jungle of Gurdjieffian dharma.
Unlike her, however, my goal is not to write in simple, straight-forward
words that any sensible person can comprehend. It even seems to me that
such an attempt would be mildly insulting to Mr. G. Thus I will instead mix
hints, explanations & mysteries in a manner that is highly idiosyncratic,
ir/reverent, experimental, synthetic and trans-conscious. To some this will
seem like an abomination against the most obvious purposes of introductory
literature, but for others it may provide a seductive playground in which the
most personal and unusual features of my own engagement with Gurdjieff
may trigger something in them which, in the end, counts as communication.
And for still others, this will be primarily understood as a coy treatise on
Metamodern Spirituality in which I disguise my own insights as
commentary on an odd historical character.
In all these cases, however, the potential value to you, the reader, seems
proportional to how deeply you get to know my vibe. My highest ethical
task, in that case, will be to strive to make this vibe available to you.
Thus:
A hoo hoo shickasterin’ wheezeblower. Iconasostacles! You are the sun of
Trimikula 418/256 triangle shotgun keys. Thank you.
Etc.
 A NOTE ON “SINCERE IRONY”

Gurdjieff had a pretty hip habit, at least by the standards of the early 20th-
century, of saying that today we have only “men” in quotation marks. Only
so-called human beings.
His system could in fact be read as a method of remedial humanization.
And its aspiration? To return the ordinary pseudo-people of our
contemporary civilization into authentic human beings. In this case, instead
of proposing a Path to Enlightenment, he suggests a series of efforts leading
toward the humble and surprisingly rare condition of being a normal person
who is capable of even beginning a “Way” of some kind.

However to be hip in the 21st century might require something more.

Perhaps a revaluation of our basic attitude toward quotation marks
themselves?

One cluster of my own theories are grouped under the title of the
Metaphysics of Adjacency. This has often been summarized in the
sentiment that ironic contextualization is not a diminishment of potency.
Quote marks could, instead of diminishing and distancing, be considered as
amplifiers of meaning.

Is a “man” more advanced than a man? Is “God” more profound than God?
Such perverse statements will undoubtedly sound strange to both classical
and modern ears, but they may nonetheless be quite accessible to that odd
both/and mode of cultural cognition in which the so-called metamodernists
take yes/no as a perfectly normal, untroubling and functional way of being.
While we relate very much to Gurdjieff’s claim that most of us are
insufficiently human beings — animals who must regain the promise of our
sapience by traversing the soul-less abnormality of ordinary consciousness
and civilization — we are nevertheless new and good friends of quotation
marks. We have grown a good conscience about intercontextuality and the
fertile places between windows of meaning-making. It even appears to me
that Gurdjieff too brimmed with translinguistic irony and sincere
recontextualizations. The sacred authenticity that he promoted did not ask
us to believe dogmatically in totalized metaphysical claims. He was a fierce
critic of everyday gullibility and a sly, multi-paradigmatic, contextual
translator.
So for his sake (whatever a sake might be), we are going to probe this
teaching through every kind of renormalized contextuality, slippery asides,
interdisciplinary juxtapositions, plural epistemologies & more-than-ironic
perspectivalism. Let us honor this “Gurdjieff” with the luminously self-
transparent quotation marks that rise like the grammatical horns and antlers
of his ever-growing wisdom.
 INTRODUCTION
Gurdjieff & the Time Between Worlds

The notion of a “time between worlds” was popularized by wisdom-

scholar Zak Stein and then exploited by Jonathan Rowson and myself when
we sat down to create, for Perspectiva Press, an anthology of leading-edge
metamodernist thought (Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds, 2021).
This evocative phrase has both a specific meaning and a more nebulous
implication.
Quite specifically, we are in a period of world-history in which our species
has become deeply drawn into an uncanny valley of radical new tech,
disruptive paradigms & the relentless exposure of the fact that modernity’s
underlying tactics cannot solve their own accumulating side-effects. Our
world is now routinely characterized by the convergence of many crises
operating at scales and tempos that are beyond the leverage of our ordinary
habits and insights. We can no longer afford to collectively live as we have
been living — yet no clear and stable future has yet become obvious. We
are between worlds.
More generally, perhaps more poetically, we seem to inhabit an aeon that is
characterized by this very in-betweeness. WE are unmoored, transrational
and omnidirectional as Nietzsche observed in his famous commentaries on
the “death of God.” And it may turn out that this is not a short strange
interval between two worlds but rather the beginning of a world
characterized implicitly by strangeness & betweeness. A chronos (period of
time) and a kairos (mood of time) at once.
So our task is not merely to navigate across to the far shore where
renormalization occurs but also, perhaps, to take up the task of becoming
indigenous to the interstitial itself. Can we learn to live as liminality?
Our world-historical epoch, with its multiple convergent crises and the
almost mystical flavor of its leading-edge scientific worldviews, forces
forth a new cultural spirit that we may, for a while at least, call
metamodern. Other names and different angles are possible. A version of
this zeitgeist announced itself as the Game B movement. There was, and
remains, the Integral Community, the resurgent Scandinavian Bildung
approach to ongoing education, the neo-Hegelians, Whiteheadians,
Transcendental Critical Realists, Transdisciplinary Systems Theorists, and
more. The emerging ethos seeps in places with common sets of signifiers.
Complexity. Regenerative. Neo-Spiritual. Wholistic-Developmental.
Magickal. Metashamanic. Diunital. Post-postmodern. None of these names
are particularly important. What matters is that they point roughly in the
same direction and are compelling to many of the same kinds of people.
They collectively hold open the space in which a response to the “time
between worlds” is sought after and invoked. There is something stirring in
the overlapping portion of this vast web of Venn diagrams. It is something
related to a depth-and-transformation response to the era of the Metacrisis.
Okay, that’s a “time between worlds,” but what about the “Gurdjieff” part
of this introduction? What do I mean by invoking this name?
One reason to put that name in quotation marks is because we are dealing
with my Gurdjieff. Mr. Bruce Alderman (with whom I enact the Integral
Stage Podcast) has joked that no one else has ever encountered the
“Nietzsche” that I appear to have read so deeply. That goes triple for my
Gurdjieff.

I think we grow into, and through, our intellectual companions in ways that
make them unique to our own experience. At least I hope we do. The
Gurdjieff of these short essays must therefore depart from the consensus
view and become at least half myself, or what would be the point of reading
any of this?

So who is my Gurdjieff?
I am only half-joking when I describe him as a cross between Indiana
Jones, the Buddha & Borat. A charming, swashbuckling archaeological
adventurer devoted to the secret shamanic psychotechnologies of truly
ancient civilizations. For me he is a deeply transformational embodiment of
transcendental consciousness. And a very contemporary trickster, ironist
and media critic who deploys the character of an outlandish rural-
patriarchal Easterner to put us off guard (often hilariously). It is a
remarkable blend.
I know him primarily through his writings. They are a highly-praised but
exotic acquired taste like beluga caviar, pungent cheeses or wasabi. I refer
to his voluminous masterpiece Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson as a
psychoactive cross between Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy and the Yoga Sutras of Sri Patanjali.

That vast cosmological critique, along with its two avant-garde sequels,
Meetings With Remarkable Men and Life is Real Only Then When I AM,
form one great book called All & Everything which claims to be subdivided
into “ten books in three series.” And of course there is the dubious status of
his first published — and then retracted — volume, The Herald of Coming
Good.
It is a great deal of writing. It was done very intensively in the years before
his death. He groaned and elaborately bemoaned the circumstances that
forced him to the ignoble and, for him, quite unnatural, job of writing
sacred wisdom texts! A writer? Bah! He was a man of action. A doer. A
hands-on instructor of sacred dances and consciousness transmission. But
now, following his disastrous car accidents, and the looming need to hurl
his teaching into the future before his death, he agreed reluctantly to take up
the paltry and immature task of “being an author.”
This characterization is his own. A charming rant that he repeats often but,
in fact, the writer’s life was not so foreign to his soul. He had always loved
language and, I suspect, took great delight in being an outlandish participant
in the leading-edge literary scene of 1920s Paris. Gurdjieff’s public self-
presentation was famously as exaggerated and countercultural as his
personal relationships were deeply compassionate and radically helpful.
So it goes.

This thing’s turned up to the max!

– Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)
 ALL MEN ARE IN QUOTATION MARKS
A Biography

George Johnson (Grigori Ivanovich) Gurdjieff was an Armenian Greek,

not a Russian, who may have been born in 1866. I say “may have” because
he notoriously gave various dates for his own birth as well as having a
penchant for destroying legal documentation. Plus he was prone to
confusing the issue by using outdated and exotic calendars. Admirable.

As a child, he appears to have had a loving and secure home amidst the
rural frontiers, civil wars & ancient ruins of the late 19th-century Near East.
His father was a failed businessman and part-time “ashokh” (bard
specializing in the memorization of ancient wisdom-songs) who had
acquired some unusual experimental ideas about childhood education.
Young George claims to have periodically found frogs, snakes and worms
in his bed as part of a cunning scheme to help him overcome the deadly sin
of squeamishness. What his mother thought about this approach is not
recorded.
Through his father’s social connections, Gurdjieff got the best possible
local education. Private tutoring supplemented by institutional training in
military, priestly, musical and medical matters. It was in adolescence that he
began to gravitate into his characteristic modes of activity.
Young Gurdjieff had a great zest for setting up temporary business ventures.
Especially when they involved him innovating ways to fix broken machines
and gain new manual skills. Learning new practical structures and
expanding his repertoire of skills was compulsively interesting. He also had
much of the typical set of inclinations found in the shamanic caste of all
epochs. He was obsessed with anomalies, miracles, hidden secrets &
unusual states of consciousness. And in pursuit of personally satisfying
education on these matters he began to fraternize with other thoughtful
adventurers who formed a loose social network (“The Seekers of Truth”)
devoted to the deeply personal exploration of ancient ruins, wisdom
artifacts and archaic monuments.
During this period of early adulthood he appears to have alternated between
ascetic experimentation — breath, diet and meditation — and periods of
wild, playful indulgence.
He became accustomed to traveling in many countries (Tibet, India, Egypt,
Russia, Afghanistan, et al.), learning new languages and confidently talking
his way into secret societies, clubs & monasteries of all kinds. There is
some evidence that he may have worked in a clandestine capacity for the
Tsarist Russian Intelligence Agency. As he matured, Gurdjieff began to
become obsessed with two dominant questions.
His progressively fundamental concern in life was to discover some
personally persuasive explanation about the functional role of the sapient
species (humans) within the biosphere & the biosphere’s function within the
cosmos.
Secondarily, he was insatiably curious about the causes of the mass
suggestibility and contagious agitation that led to wars and other pernicious
outbreaks of violence and polarization that typically set back the unfolding
of civilization. These were deep questions. They might not even have
answers. Certainly, nobody he knew personally or from reading was of
much help to him in clarifying these problems.
In 1892 he entered into retreat in an Islamic monastery with the specific
purpose of pondering all possible solutions to these questions. It became
clear to him that if any answers existed they must not operate at the level of
the socially-conditioned waking personality but must pertain instead to the
pre-socialized and subconscious structures of evolutionary human neuro-
psychology.
The need to probe subconscious intelligence led him to an exhaustive
examination of ancient and contemporary theories of hypnosis. He then
took up the profession of a traveling hypnotherapist which allowed him to
be of public service while also testing out his insights. It had the added
benefit of exposing him to interesting “oracular information” from large
numbers of people placed into altered states of consciousness.
There was one other perk. This job also put him in contact with other
people from many countries who were fascinated by subconscious
phenomena, trance states, unusual mental capacities and altered
consciousness. These people formed the networks of occultists and esoteric
lodges prevalent in the late 19th-century.
Yet all the while his sufferings mounted. He experienced difficult diseases
and war wounds — he claimed to have been shot three times — and long
periods of social isolation on dangerously remote treks. These struggles
blended with his constant intentional pondering, self-critique and relentless
application of traditional & novel psychotechnologies and mixed together
with whatever ephemeral quality is derived from time spent in the company
of saints, sages and yogis from across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

All this was slowly changing (or unfolding) something in him. Revolutions
were underway in his psychology and his lived sense of presence. He began
to feel differently. Perhaps as though new bodies had grown in himself or
been revealed.
On the basis of some obscure inner “success” he began to devise a plan. It
went something like this:
 THE PLAN

1. Reformulate the principles of ancient psychotechnologies in the modern

phraseology of mechanism, productivity, innovation, energy and skepticism
— symbolized by Euro-American progress.
2. Acquire enough personal wealth to be materially self-sufficient so that
the project will not be hijacked by deprivation, sponsorship concerns or the
need to monetize developmental practices.
3. Go to the large cosmopolitan centers of current civilization. Seek out
people who exhibit natural shamanic temperaments and who have evidence
in their lives of some real success in self-developmental and self-
overcoming practices. These people may be found within existing “new
age” communities or as uniquely prominent personalities within philosophy,
music, art, dance, espionage, etc. Form special relationships with these
people. Begin training them in two things (a) how to activate the
subconscious roots of accelerated self-transformation, (b) how to exert
direct and indirect influence over others.
4. Build a team of teachers able to start their own authentic developmental
centers. Train them to be able to continue spiritually developing on their
own, using the material of their personal lives, and to be able to establish
hubs where they can train new teams of teachers.
5. Organize this expanding network of hubs not as religion but as “social
clubs” where people can join, according to interest and capacity, in three
different rungs: (a) they may simply be interested in the theories; (b) they
may be interested in practicing generic methods of self-observation, sanity
and humanization; or (c) they may be compelled to become esoteric adept-
teachers.
6. Take advantage of these settings to establish special tasks and subtle
energetic “fields” in order to accomplish esoteric forms of participation in
complex biospheric and cosmic functions.
7. Secure the integrity and legitimacy of the whole project by soliciting
advice and blessings from elder sages from various monasteries and Middle
Eastern spiritual networks that he had previously encountered.
Audaciously practical.
Thus in 1912 Gurdjieff appears to have burned all his personal
identification and entered the Russian Empire with a small personal fortune.
Thereafter he began to appear in the major cities, under a variety of
pseudonyms, befriending members of the imperial court, aristocratic
families, hermetic fraternities, parapsychological organizations, as well as
notable open-minded philosophers and artists.
At first, despite being somewhat limited by the type of modern people who
tend to join “spiritual” communities, things went pretty well. Growing
networks of excellent people formed under his direction in Moscow and St.
Petersburg. Unfortunately, this ran directly into the Russian Revolution, the
Russian Civil War, the emergence of a Fascist Government from within the
Communist Party — and finally the outbreak of the First World War. Chaos.
Stress. Expenses. Danger for his students and relatives.
He fled from Russia and temporarily established revived training centers (c.
1919) in Georgia and Turkey. These were named the Institute for the
Harmonious Development of Man and featured an increasing focus on
sacred dances and gymnastic training. Despite the official end of WWI, the
general anarchy, violence and social mistrust continued to spread across
dysregulated and devastated regions of the world.
Gurdjieff’s most famous pupil, the Russian occult-philosopher,
mathematician & novelist Peter Ouspensky moved to England where a
translation of one of his books had become unexpectedly popular. He
attempted to compile and clarify his own understanding of Gurdjieff’s
“System” and make it available through large public talks. Many of
Britain’s leading intellectuals and artists were drawn to these meetings.
However, Ouspensky was also increasingly critical of Gurdjieff’s odd
behaviors, indirect teaching style, surrealistic communication & confusing
public antics. Privately he spent a great deal of time writing and rewriting
his memories and interpretations of what G. had told him in Russia.
Meanwhile, Gurdjieff was busy trying to keep a large number of relatives
and students, most of them with little practical survival experience, alive in
an impoverished, war-torn landscape. His band of refugees slowly made
their way toward Europe and finally settled in France (c. 1922). Gurdjieff
leased a former monastery and converted it into an experimental commune
(and housing for Russian war refugees) known as Le Prieurie. He also took
a private apartment in Paris and divided his time between teaching,
renovation projects and business interests to keep the community solvent.
On official French documents he is now listed as a “teacher of dancing.”
The community became briefly notorious in the public newspapers after the
tuberculosis death, on their premises, of internationally famous writer
Katherine Mansfield.
An automobile accident (c. 1924) almost killed Gurdjieff and took him out
of commission. Without his energy and business instincts this became a
very serious fund-raising issue for the community. Gurdjieff healed
remarkably well but, as he regained capacities, he formally disbanded the
Institute. In its place, although he continued to work with many students, he
vowed to undertake a massive project to encode his teachings in a series of
texts designed to bypass ordinary consciousness.
His mother and his wife died in quick succession of liver failure and cancer,
respectively. He blamed himself. His own poor health after the car accident,
in his mind, prevented him from being able to direct his energy to their
well-being and healing. During this period the community only survived
because of money coming in from the American hub which was under the
direction of the famous literary critic, bon vivant & leading-edge magazine
publisher A. R. Orage. In response to this — and focusing increasingly on
the future — Gurdjieff pivoted toward the Americans. They were regularly
singled out for special correction and blessing.
During his several subsequent tours to the “new world,” he made a famous
appearance at Carnegie Hall — presenting sacred dances, psychic
experiments and provocative theories to the cosmopolitan elites of New
York City. When Orage died, Gurdjieff was notably disturbed and began to
refer to him as “my brother.”
Back in France, Gurdjieff founded a special esoteric circle of mostly lesbian
avant-garde artists & writers known as The Rope. He began to devote much
of his time to training and promoting this group and a few other small
cabals who joined him for a specialized program of ritual meals and
outlandish automobile trips around France. Gurdjieff was deeply interested
in ancient monuments, specific natural locations & the newly discovered
paleolithic cave art in the French mountains. Then WWII erupted. Although
he encouraged his pupils to leave France, he remained behind in Nazi-
occupied Paris where he held elaborate teaching-dinners in his cramped
apartment, performed holistic medical treatments & subsidized certain
impoverished, and possibly mentally ill, street artists who exhibited
particular sets of qualities that he wished to encourage.
After the war (1945) and the death of Ouspensky (1947), many pupils from
around the world reconverged in France for special instructions and to
spend time in his final presence. After suffering and recovering from a
second near-fatal car accident (1948), he began making preparations for
death. He finalized his sacred texts and set up different “teacher-helpers” to
head official and unofficial hubs of his work in various parts of the world.
Then he died.
Time passed.
I am writing this book in the year 2023 C.E.
 WHAT ON EARTH WAS GURDJIEFF
DOING?

So this Armenian kid in the 19th-century slowly realizes that he has one
dominating question in his soul. He’s addicted to a particular inquiry. And
without placing this dominant query at the very beginning of our meal, we
might easily misframe Gurdjieff’s entire life’s work. The question is this:

“What is the sense and significance of life on Earth and human life in
particular?”
That is something like asking: What is the biosphere for in general? And
what is the human species for in particular? These are hard questions. We
cannot even be sure that it is fair to ask for such a “for.” Questions of
purpose have become hard for human beings.

The existentialist philosophies of the modern and postmodern world helped

guide us in a sober shift from naive mythic teleology toward the more clear-
eyed and difficult under-standing that we are not preceded by a God-given
purpose. Our role in life is not inherited. We have to create it or else suffer
its absence. Instead of heroically servicing our metaphysical destiny we are
asked to heroically tolerate an open-ended universe with no guidebook. We
must have the courage to occupy that treacherous space between the void of
meaninglessness and the endless chore of inventing a culturally
contextualized purpose for our lives.
But perhaps that story is hasty.
Human interpretations of reality, while being partly creative and social, are
not necessarily arbitrary. Ideas about purpose may fit more or less well with
the dynamics of our evolutionary history which, in turn, is a subset of the
energetic and informational structures of the cosmos. It is plausible that
organisms — at least as much as organs — may be adapted to perform
some function. Has our existentialism hitherto been too parochial,
depressive and anthropocentric?
It may be solipsistic to think that the universe was organized to give us a
meaning but it could be equally narcissistic to assume that all meaning is
derived only from creatures like ourselves.
While we are no longer the mythic children who can say, ‘Noses were made
for smelling,’ that does not preclude the notion that science and
imagination, instincts and education, biology and consciousness, might
provide a set of tools that collectively imply a special range of meaningful
activities toward which we would be wise to align ourselves. Especially if
those activities tended toward a regenerative, participatory and co-thriving
biological and cultural ecosystem.
So while Gurdjieff’s dominant question might seem odd when examined
through the philosophical lens of the 20th-century, it might be that the
pragmatics of thriving tomorrow (and the day after) depend on people
becoming much more interested in a paradigm that includes a sense, a
significance & a functional purpose for both biological and sapient life on
this planet.
Can we join Gurdjieff in questions of this kind? The analogy of the body
helps me. It seems quite reasonable to ask about the sense and significance
of our organs — and of the brain in particular. Doctors and anatomists
speak this metaphorical language all the time. And while we might
cautiously hesitate to imagine an all-knowing mythic architect who
perfectly designed our body system at the beginning of time, we can
nonetheless appreciate that the functions of our internal organs are not
arbitrary. They have evolved together in a complex and symbiotic shared
ecology. They have collectively and adaptively negotiated between their
own independent urges for growth, power and the perpetuation of genetic
information, and, on the other hand, constraints imposed by the rest of the
community of organs.
We do not need pre-rational metaphysics to understand that the complex
energy dynamics of an ecology of organs may result, over time, in
collaborative specializations that approximate our common notion of a
“purpose.” The invisible hand of this marketplace results in emergent sub-
functions of the whole system. These subfunctions are then regenerated in
lineages that make use of electrochemical constraints (Michael Levin, et al.)
that determine the forms that the genes are attempting to produce. This
metaphor could be elaborated considerably but its main outlines are enough
to give us some justification in discussing the functions and purposes of
living forms that evolve in a common ecology. It is not merely superstitious
to think in such terms about species within a biosphere — including our
own species.
All the organisms fit their material, energetic and informational niche. They
all transform materials into other materials that are used by other parts of
the system. There is a shared context and a mutual evolutionary history.
Today we might call this the “Gaia hypothesis.”
So now that we have talked ourselves down off the ledge, can we begin to
ask ourselves the imaginatively spiritual, existential and ethical question:
What is the special role of the human species as an organ within this
system?
What should human beings be doing, both physically and psychologically,
to fulfill their obligatory transformations and circulations within the greater
body? There is obviously a poetry to this kind of vision but poetry is not
necessarily the enemy of reason. They often seem to need and energize each
other.
Regardless of the weight that you personally give to speculations of this
kind, it is important in reading Gurdjieff, and considering the mission and
teaching that he took up, to keep in mind that he is working from this kind
of quasi-shamanic context. His psychosocial and existential interventions
are entirely instantiated within the governing frame of a transmodern
cosmocentric and ecological vision.
That vision asserts that the purpose of individual existential development
and collective human wisdom-cultivation is to serve a particular set of
functions within our multidimensional ecology and to help that ecology
fulfill its natural role within the complex living cosmos.
 THE SOMATIC PRINCIPLE OF “SELF-
REMEMBERING” DURING THE
PRACTICE OF READING (THIS BOOK)

The intriguing and meandering introduction to Gurdjieff’s odd

masterpiece, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, features the tragicomic
tale of the “Transcaucasian Kurd.” The story is proposed as an allegorical
example of the reader’s predicament.
A poor but good-natured, country rube spends his last few bucks to buy a
delicious, sexy-looking fruit. He sits down to eat it while enjoying a
beautiful natural vista. A gorgeous biospherically-contextualized meal of
impressions — but alas! These firm, shiny and well-shaped fruits turn out to
be powerfully hot peppers.

The hot peppers activate his whole body with an unusual tingling intensity.
A social acquaintance discovers him in this condition and tries to intervene.
What are doing? Stop! Stop! But this idiotic Kurdish fellow continues — on
principle! I paid my last dollar for these, he explains, so I’m going to get my
money’s worth.

Gurdjieff states that this is the nature of people. We commit in the degree to
which we pay for things. And, knowing this tragic flaw in the human
character, he has, he claims, arranged it such that readers of the introductory
chapter of his book should, if they find it disastrously distasteful, not have
to keep going merely because they have purchased the volume. You can
take it back after the first chapter. That’s his promise to you.

Yet this is all presented in the declarative surface content of the chapter by a
man who is constantly warning us to make efforts to find other meanings.
So why does he include this cartoonish anecdote? Here’s the warning that
strikes my own third ear:
If you want to get your money’s worth from this written bounty of complex
impressions then you must be sure to eat some “hot peppers.” Be sure, that
is, to enjoy this book in a state of strong & unusual whole-body sensation.
This might be what Gurdjieff means by self-remembering but,
unsurprisingly, that term is hotly debated.
Self-remembering (an etymological cousin to Buddhist mindfulness) is a
prominent feature of standard Fourth Way teachings, but it has been
problematized in various ways. Notably in the pedantic-but-suggestive
online critiques of M.G. Readshaw. Mr. Readshaw never tires of pointing
out the discrepancy between the normative emphasis on Self-remembering
that characterizes Ouspensky’s “system” and its far less frequent and much
more flexible usage in Gurdjieff’s own remarks.

What Ouspensky emphasizes are moments of mental apperception in which

attention is split between our direct experience and the fact of witnessing
our experience. The sense of self (the “I”) is deliberately remembered
during our other activities in a dynamic variant of the self-inquiry practice
of Jnana Yoga.
This is a very interesting experience. One should indeed experiment with
the attempt to constantly remember the observational self during life-
activities. However, this approach can also be critiqued. Is it not simply a
distraction that inhibits our full participation by holding us back in a mode
of quasi-neurotic monitoring of our personal psychology?

Gurdjieff himself critiques many of his students who, being obsessed with
their attempts at self-observation, are what he calls “candidates for the
madhouse.” But what’s the alternative? We could perhaps anchor self-
remembering in the fact that we are inherently embodied beings. Then it
begins to sound like a consciousness-of-Self that rooted in generalized
somatic sensing.
This broaches the problem of the “I.” Is it simply a social symbol by which
we mentally refer to an abstract concept of self-identity & awareness? Or
could it be a more visceral phenomenon associated with the organism?
Have you considered what inner sensation you ought to feel when you say
the word “I” to yourself? Has the question even come up? Usually not. We
are seldom encouraged to inspect the sensational correlates of selfhood and
consciousness. Armed with this additional experiential data, we might
conclude that the “mental concept of the self” is empty to the point of
meaninglessness.
(Ir)regardless, while you are reading this current book I would recommend
— if you are capable of it — that you inflame yourself with a generalized
heat, tingling, or “organic somatic intensity” throughout your whole body
(as if you had been very purposefully eating some red hot chili peppers). If I
knew you were really going to do it then I could, perhaps, even die happily
with the knowledge that I had infected at least one other person with my
own lifelong obsession for making the inner body tingle during the
performance of regular activities.

ADDENDUM
Speaking of reading books, here’s what Gurdjieff said at the beginning of
his own writings:
I find it necessary on the first page of this book, quite ready for
publication, to give the following advice: “Read each of my written
expositions thrice: Firstly — as you have already become mechanized
to read all your contemporary books and newspapers. Secondly — as
if you were reading aloud to another person. And only thirdly — try
and fathom the gist of my writings.” Only then will you be able to
count upon forming your own impartial judgment, proper to yourself
alone, on my writings. And only then can my hope be actualized that
according to your understanding you will obtain the specific benefit
for yourself which I anticipate, and which I wish for you with all my
being.
– Gurdjieff’s “Friendly Advice” for reading

In addition to intensified somatic self-sensing during the act of reading this

or any book, also make sure to re-read (a more powerful psychotechnology
than mere “additional new readings”) with an emphasis on doing so in
different modalities.
Read with the body. Re-read. Read differently. Otherwise, why even
bother?
 PREHISTORIC DHARMA FOR A
POSTHISTORIC EPOCH

Terence McKenna’s famous phrase “the archaic revival” has delighted my

soul since I first read about it as a teenager. It speaks not only to the
ubiquitous human longing to contact the vital secrets of our wisest ancestors
but also addresses the ongoing role of retroactive temporics in network
civilization. Wait — what?

Our digital sense of Time seems to loop back on itself. We are a deeply
“retro” culture. Our electrified children toy with the stylistic residue of past
decades (apparently the 1980s are back for the umpteenth time) and our
physicists are debating whether or not “retrocausality” literally applies to
virtual particles traveling backwards through time. That kind of nonsense
has become a serious discussion about physical reality.

In everything from politics to philosophy to mass entertainment, we could

say: the Past is Back. And if we do not wish to fully sully ourselves with
ultraphilosophical wiseacreing about Time being an inherently self-
referential retroactive loop, we must nonetheless take heed of the fact that
we stand culturally and technologically within an emerging set of
“posthistorical” futures that rhyme with prehistory. There is some reason
why the archaic revival is so closely allied with the neo-futurists. As we
start to stray beyond the very specific Progress narrative of the last several
thousand years of linear, urban, mechanical, nationalistic and written
culture, we may need to turn our hearts back toward those dawn peoples
who witnessed the radical ecological and technological shifts with which
that story of recorded history began.
So we definitely “get it” when Gurdjieff speaks about the Retro story that
gripped his own youthful heart. He grew up very well-disposed to the
legends of an ancient teaching that survives in fragments distributed across
the wisdom-lineages of Egypt, Tibet, India, China, Sumer & the Americas.

Ideas like this were formerly considered to be the gullible pablum of

ignorant fantasists but today the richness of our understanding of the
historical record continues to expand and deepen. New history is on the
march. Since the discovery of the buried Tepe cultures of Anatolia in
Turkey, we have confirmed that a sophisticated astronomical, megalithic &
religious proto-civilization existed thousands of years prior to 19th and
20th-century academic consensus about the “first cities” and “the invention
of agriculture.” We may be discussing a pre-Babylonian shamanic and
integrative wisdom-teaching that is concerned with how human beings can
use their inner struggles to serve Nature, “grow souls,” follow the true Sun,
invent the art of civilization and ultimately join with the celestial network
that appears in the starry night sky.

It is a powerful dream. And while we do not need to strip off our refined
archeological sensibility (and go slumming with dirty tales of Atlantean
rockets and Ice Age cataclysms), we must certainly get better at
appreciating that the human project is hundreds of thousands of years old.
Most of history occurred before recorded history and contained so many
variations, revolutions, geniuses and emergent outbursts of collective
intelligence that we cannot justify believing the superstitious modern fable
of a straightforward uphill trek from savagery to commercial electronics.

Even the many fascinating proposals from experts in cognitive

developmental theory must acknowledge that the complexity of adaptation
to contemporary technology is not necessarily the apex sweet spot for the
fullest and deepest flourishing of human psychobiological nuances. We
could be more likely to become deep, integrative & coherent beings when
living in fortunate natural environments with a less disparate set of cultural
complications. Especially if we had a habit of recognizing, training and
socially promoting our shamans (rather than ignoring, disparaging,
commercializing or institutionalizing them).
Could archaic networks of gnostic intermediaries, specializing in full-
spectrum, embodied, ecologically-embedded, poly-epistemic personal &
social psychotechnologies incorporating complex nonhuman intelligence
systems — whilst also inventing writing, art, pottery, cities, the idea of the
future, stellar cartography, regenerative horticulture, shipbuilding, religion,
etc. — have also collectively unfolded a powerful, deeply humanizing,
pragmatic and maturational approach to wisdom-cultivation that survives
today only in fragments found across the various indigenous, yogic,
philosophic and magickal traditions of premodern civilization? Sure,
maybe.
And if so, the most likely type of person to be able to piece it back together
would be a sensitive, antifragile, intrepid and transcultural explorer with a
strong motive and the ability to access ancient sites and existing esoteric
lineages of all kinds. Something like a Gurdjieff.

ADDENDUM
The ancient wise ones were subtle and penetrated into all mysteries.
Today they are forgotten and their depth eludes our knowledge, so I
will try to describe them. They were like people crossing a frozen river
in the winter without knowing its thickness. They were alert and
reverential. They paid attention to every tiny signal. Their minds were
as ephemeral ice about to melt….
Tao Te Ching, I:XV
Whom did the ancient Saint Lao-Tse look back upon, from his tie, as the
forgotten ancient wise ones?
 WHAT IS THE “FOURTH WAY” IN A
METAMODERN SENSE?
Putting Civilization’s Untutored Shamans
Back to Work

The origins of the so-called Fourth Way are shrouded in the mists of
mystery. Worse! The shroud itself may be an illusion! Yet this ambiguity
poses no insurmountable barrier to those intrepid new souls who breathe the
air of sincere irony and who possess an attractively insouciant flair for
somatic-affective intelligence as well as a penchant for uptaking multiple
perspectives seriously with breakfast. Does that describe you? I’m sure the
answer is “Yes and no.”

Anyway, the phrase “fourth way” — used frequently to designate a line of

wisdom-teachings descending from G. I. Gurdjieff — was popularized by
Peter Ouspensky and his students. They based that phrasing on some
remarks made by Mr. Gurdjieff in Russia prior to the period of terrible
violence that he called “Madame Russian Revolution” (1917-23). Interested
parties should read the comments recorded in Ouspensky’s posthumous
journalistic account, In Search of the Miraculous.
But why is the way “fourth?”
There are said to be three commonly-occurring generic currents of
transcultural esoteric practice. This normal trinity is the downstream result
of human psyches having three major “lines” of intelligence that dominate
our inner strategies. Each line is more emphasized by (and attractive to)
subsets of the population who are thus inclined to participate in wisdom-
development networks on that basis. These three intelligences are
colloquially called heart, mind and body. We might more lavishly refer to
them as:
 (a) a complex bio-information system specializing in producing a
witnessing-organizing intellect linked to distributed neural networks
that have a special concentration in the prefrontal cortex of the skull
(b) a complex bio-information system specializing in generating an
affective-relational-significance system that has special connection to
the various neural networks interwoven with organs of the torso such
as heart, lungs, gut, etc.
(c) a complex bio-information system specializing in a distributed
neuromuscular-and-sensory intelligence routed through the spinal
column and brain stem and distributed across the limbs and surfaces of
the body.
Although there is clearly much heuristic simplification involved in this
analysis, we can profitably (although what do you think that profit might
be?) think in terms of three basic “yogas” that evolve out of these bio-
information systems:
(a) praxis & ethos oriented toward psychotechnologies such as mental
concentration, pure witnessing, deep study of sacred texts,
psychological investigation of the “self,” etc. Sages, concentrators,
jnanis, philosophers, psychoanalysts.
(b) praxis & ethos oriented toward psychotechnologies such as prayer,
surrender, heartwork, emotional archaeology, intentional gratitude,
transcendental love, etc. Lovers, devotional monks, artists, performers.
(c) praxis & ethos oriented toward psychotechnologies such as hatha
yoga, breathing, bodywork, physical ordeals, pain conversion,
persistence in elemental intensities, tai chi, martial arts, dietary
upgrade, etc. Healers, fakirs, warriors, builders.
Taking this all for granted, then, the additional Gurdjieffian mythopoetic
claim is that these three styles of practice are complemented by an
additional Fourth Way. This other approach is more rare and tends to
emerge periodically. Often in response to peculiar historical stresses or
novel conditions. It has the characteristic features of (a) operating within or
depth-inhabiting the biological and social patterns of ordinary life; (b)
pursuing simultaneous work on all three major lines of intelligence; (c)
emphasizing the unique development of each participant apart from their
socialized personality; (d) utilizing the idiosyncratic temperament,
background and particular skill sets of the teacher; (e) having certain world-
historical missions that are fulfilled by a network of individuals linked into
temporary “teaching fields”; (f) heavily emphasizing indirect
communication; and (g) treating inner friction as a form of special fuel.
I would argue that this is very close to saying that the Fourth Way is
resurrected shamanism under the conditions of civilization. It is an
ecologically-oriented practice of soulmaking involving initiatory ordeals,
altered states, and subconscious capacities — and it operates outside the
standard spiritual and religious institutions of urban societies. The
Gurdjieffian work is not often phrased in precisely this manner, but almost
all versions of the Fourth Way pay special attention to the notion that we
must evolve forward into a sacred society that draws from very ancient
sources.
Now — are we to believe Mr. Gurdjieff’s tales about the specific ways in
which he accessed secret lineages who have kept the archaic wisdom flame
alive? Is there really a Fourth Way illuminati, or perhaps half-a-dozen
brotherhoods and sisterhoods, hiding in fringe monasteries, or parasitizing
other religions from within, who have kept versions of this “full spectrum”
shamanic dharma alive over the last several thousand years? A distributed
mycelial web of wisdom that only occasionally sprouts a mushroom body in
response to a great world-historical necessity (such as the Metacrisis)?
Maybe.
Do we need such a myth? Probably. Would we be surprised how much
actual reality such a myth incorporates? Quite possibly.
And as for whether a 5th, 6th or 19th Way is also necessary? Let us leave
that piquant question to be answered by personal experiences—provided, of
course, that they are in fact personally experienced.
 SPLIT ATTENTION

“The wine of the sages,” it is said, “is made by splitting and spreading the
vine.” A cryptic quote in a small book on Sufism that I read at 14. Later I
began to imagine that the vine was a metaphor for human attention. Still
later I encountered the role of split attention in the Gurdjieffian approach.
Modulating multiple modalities of cognitive investment in parallel is
something I consider to be a core proto-skill in the development of wisdom.
“Multiple modalities” covers a lot of territory. It could be a wide-angle lens
combined with a close-up focus on a particular detail. Maybe it means
tracking your emotional response to the words of this sentence with equal
force to the intellectual awareness of the meanings of the words. Perhaps it
involves right-brain and left-brain modes. There are many different styles of
attention, perception and sensemaking.
Our human ability to follow separate attention streams simultaneously is, of
course, quite limited. We get overloaded and distracted. There are real
limits to our ability to multitask (no matter how much pride we take in it),
but within those limits we can cultivate a stronger tolerance for the
uncomfortable bilateral sensation of having our attention torn between
different thematic strands of incoming information. Splitting and spreading
the vine.
Engaging in exercise for this capacity, we first decide which two (or three)
things to focus upon. Then we must try. Then we will definitely fail.

Initially we oscillate between different focal points or different types of

cognitive processing. We struggle simply not to forget our decision.
Conventional attention habits keep taking over. Yet persistence may lead to
moments in which our different information streams “lock together.” A new
sense of strength appears. Our brain seems to simulgrasp the distinct forms
of content. There is a rush of empowerment and a curious intensification of
our sense of being.
This work has the ability to accelerate the production of metacognitive
capacity. The simplest form of metacognition is self-watching. Just be
mindfully aware of what is arising. Do not interfere. Such efforts are better
than nothing and provide a low-stress alternative to ordinary mental
activity. However they may be significantly less potent — in terms of
provoking the emergence of metacognitive intelligence — than what can be
cultivated by the concerted attempt to stay with several competing types of
meaning.

Especially if — as Gurdjieff suggests — we are concerned with the nuanced

fine-tuning and complex self-regulatory task of paying equal attention to
these different streams.
 CONSCIOUSNESS IS OUR LEAST
SIGNIFICANT ATTRIBUTE

One of the most brief and intriguing of Gurdjieff’s many triadic

formulations is found in his first (later withdrawn, denounced & therefore
also suggestively praised by virtue of its very denigration) piece of public
writing, entitled: The Herald of Coming Good (1933). In that text, he
postulates three separate biographies related to three different modes of
agency and perception. Interestingly, this contains an implicit critique of
ordinary consciousness.

Here are the three lives:

(a) An immediate and responsive life consisting of all the experiences
that we have merely perceived and to which we have responded with
our various combinations of action, feeling and thought. The life that
simply strikes us.
(b) A purposeful life consisting of all the experiences in which we have
intentionally sought out understanding of some situation that puzzles
us and all the exercises of intentional self-regulation that we have
undertaken.
(c) A transcendental life consisting of all the experiences in which our
various parts were harmonized and blended with each other, and the
world, so as to produce a coherent numinous excess and epiphany.
Each of these lives is more significant than the previous one. The
implication being that the least significant way of being-in-the-world is the
“natural consciousness” that automatically perceives the straightforward
experience of the present moment.

Being aware of the experiential flow of your waking state is not profound.
To just be present, witnessing and receiving, is not a way of drawing close
to the existential truth of reality but rather it is a refined recapitulation of an
insignificant form of awareness that we mistakenly over-value.

Ordinary civilized society praises the common transparent faculty of

knowing and perceiving as the uniquely mysterious jewel of consciousness
that sets our species apart. Our most commercially successful and popularly
endorsed sages seem to suggest that our spiritual life should merely be a
concentrated intensification of this faculty. Ultimately, the same kind of
passive receptivity that takes in the daily news is heightened when we try to
really listen or when we propose that true meditation involves thoughtlessly
witnessing whatever is arising.
Most people have tremendous difficulty devising, implementing and
carrying out an intention that spans days, months or years. We do not
usually set ourselves tasks, attempt to solve the conundrums that puzzle us,
commit energy to passion projects or put purposeful effort into living a
unique life to our own satisfaction. Instead, we take action in response to
the perceptions, ideas and feelings that automatically occur to us and then
we extend that type of consciousness by entering into so-called spiritual
training systems that simply ask us to relax into the process of allowing life
to happen involuntarily.
From Gurdjieff’s point of view, the type of consciousness that wakes up in
the morning and perceives the immediacy of life is not the most spiritual
part of ourselves — it is possibly the least.
 WHIM FULFILLMENT AS A
DEVELOPMENTAL DISCIPLINE

It is not uncommon for spiritual teachers to assign their students various

“tasks” for which there may or may not exist good explanations.

Although such assignments provide a fertile terrain for all kinds of potential
indulgences and power asymmetries, there nonetheless remains a great deal
of respect within developmental communities for the use of these
illuminating temporary disciplines received from compelling adept-
instructors and spiritual friends. It is even considered a mark of one’s
subtlety and spiritual seriousness to be able to recognize that a seemingly
casual remark or peculiar suggestion might be a potent opportunity for
deepening your practice.
The specific content of tasks is usually a secondary issue. In the school of
Karma Yoga in classical India, it was taught that human development could
proceed by undertaking good deeds. It would be quite nice if there was a
simple objective standard (such as obvious goodness) for activities that
cultivate qualities of depth, potency and existential contentment. However it
is not quite that straightforward. Although the emotional chemistry of
goodness is easy to recognize in human organisms, it remains quite murky,
in most cases, as to what actually constitutes virtuous action. Giving a child
an ice-cream generates the chemistry of the Good but also presents that
child with an addictive carcinogen that hijacks their neurological reward
system and may contribute to diabetes. It is tricky.

To be objective, we must consider that cultural context, complex systems,

time scales & inner pluralities can all alter our naive assumptions about
what is self-evidently good. Maybe that is okay. Maybe the developmental
utility of undertaking the discipline of a Good Deed is not anchored
primarily in the comprehensive external calculus of effects but rather in the
psychophysiological mode that is elicited within the person who volunteers
for the deed. Perhaps many acts of benevolence have a developmental
utility that is largely independent of their unknown external effects.
I would describe that utility as two-fold. Firstly, such acts allow us to
simultaneously track (or simultrack?) both our actions and our values. The
degree to which, in the physical performance of a plausibly virtuous action,
we maintain definite consciousness of the virtue itself and thereby forge a
more deeply embodied connection between our values & actions, suggests
itself to me as a significant benefit of good deeds.

And secondly there is the question of intentionality. If we cannot, in fact,

know perfectly whether or not our action is good, we might nonetheless
derive some emergent personal benefit from simply committing ourselves
to carry out an abstract plan that is not inflicted upon us by animality or the
pressures of circumstance.
It is interesting how the concept of a particular good deed, whether it arises
unbidden into your own mind or descends from your guru’s suggestion, is a
very abstract, ephemeral & delicate thing. It is not like those visceral fears,
hungers or lusts that drive an animal into unusual behaviors. Nor is it like
the force of habit and social necessity that make us go to work or visit a
relative. A good deed or a spiritual task often goes against our emotional
routines and immediate personal advantage. It may even be quite unnatural
and unnecessary.
Why would anyone volunteer to pick up trash or look after lepers or speak
only the truth? These sorts of activities have less in common with our bio-
social desires and more in common with games that children play by
imposing a set of imaginary rules upon themselves. You cannot step on a
crack in the pavement! You cannot touch the floor — for it is lava! Is it
merely coincidence that children so frequently engage in such arbitrary
exercises to build-up their force of enacted intentionality AND that they are
also the segment of the population that grows and matures fastest?
Gurdjieff’s developmental work camps (sic) kept this kind of activity alive
for adults under expert supervision. They often emphasized the whimsical
and unnecessary nature of the tasks. People were set to dig ditches one day
and fill them back in the next day. Diana Faidy, in Reminiscences of My
Work with Gurdjieff, describes how he sent her on an urgent mission, whilst
he waited for his imminent train to arrive at the station. She MUST acquire
essential herbs needed for dinner. Desperately she did her best and
managed, with no time to spare, to return with a meagre collection of mixed
dry herbs from a small shop in Chicago. Later she discovered that he was
already traveling with a large assortment of all the fresh herbs one could
possibly need. Her herbs were objectively unnecessary. Was there a point to
the exercise beyond mere manipulation?
Among spiritual philosophers it is debated whether disidentified action
(“delivered from lust of result” as the infamous Aleister Crowley once
wrote) is best achieved by seemingly meaningless, or very meaningful,
projects. Both may have their value, but there is something special that gets
highlighted by the arbitrary quality. Unnecessary tasks not only ask you to
temporarily release the limitations of your conventional justification system
but they also offers you the chance to feel as though you are in service to a
different kind of prompt altogether. An impulse that comes from above or
beyond. A suggestion spoken out from the whirlwind complexity and
delicacy of the cosmos.
Whether the impetus for the temporary discipline appears to come from a
wise Other Person, a peculiar part of the Self or even from the Randomness
of the external world (or all three), the volunteers are compelling
themselves to complete a task that will strengthen the force of their
intentionality and reveal, by the provocation of resistance, a great deal of
information about their ordinary habits and evaluations.
In the world of immersive multiplayer digital games, there is the concept of
an instance or dungeon. This is a special zone of sub-tasks that allows you
to accumulate merit within the gameworld. These are challenges,
opportunities and disciplines all rolled into one. Completing a special
instance is not strictly necessary in the greater game but, if you take up the
side-quest, and conform yourself to its parameters, you have a unique
opportunity to gain bonuses.
An alert player of spiritual games may also wish to gain bonus points.
Discipline in this sense is not about your willingness to live on the basis of
someone else’s ideas but, rather, it is a chance to gain strength, capacity and
insight. It offers a context for encountering your own weaknesses in a
manner that is considerably more powerful than what may be revealed
while introspecting quietly on the meditation cushion.
A task (given & taken), especially if it comes from someone with an instinct
for correctly identifying and pushing on your central subconscious patterns
of self-limitation, provides a through-line of precision against which you
may more saliently recognize your typical styles of insufficiency. Yay but
yuck. Or is that the other way around?
Yet self-revealing is not its only function. It is also an exercise in building
the Self. The most remarkable human beings have been characterized by
their ability to extend their unique intentions over longer ranges of time. To
decide, to keep deciding, to discipline yourself in the fulfilling of an
impulse that no one but your own nascent soul requires from you, is a
peculiarly human form of weirdness that allows our lives to unfold as a
great story, a character arc, distinct from merely reacting to our passing
circumstances and moods. This is perhaps the primary form of spiritual
development found among great artists. No one is required by law to carve
a ponderously profound statue or compose a remarkable book. There are
other ways to get money besides painting the Mona Lisa. And perhaps your
entire peer group tells you NOT to build a replica of Stonehenge out of old
crushed automobiles on your front lawn! Yet (some) people feel compelled
to do these very things.
Ordinarily, our force of intention is substituted by external incentives but
this is reversed when we attempt to make a real effort to fulfill a prompt
that seems to come to us from another realm of meaning-making altogether.
Initially this may be represented to us by a teacher or teaching but, over
time, we develop a knack for selecting our own assignments. And perhaps
casually suggesting them to others?
One very interesting feature of the Doctrine of Tasks is how frequently it
turns out that the smallest things are the most difficult. A spiritual dilettante
might be eager for the thrill of being forced to walk naked through the town
square with shorn hair, or to fast for forty days, or to dare an heroic
psychedelic dose — but what happens if you ask them to stop tipping
waitresses? Or not touch their face absentmindedly? Or go a single month
without mentioning the weather, the sports results or the gas prices?
The development of our individual capacity for intentional action — for
which Gurdjieff still used the charming 19th-century terms “will” and
“magnetism” — is sabotaged by the almost fetishistic fantasy of great
dramatic acts of discipline (which allow us to dodge efforts in those smaller
and more mundane areas of life in which we refuse to be proactive).
Yet another reason why the Fourth Way is called the “way in ordinary life”
is because it critiques the impulse, common in other spiritual paths, to
idealistically evade our recurrent daily weaknesses by pursuing the more
elaborate but also artificial challenges found in monasteries, ashrams,
zendos & communes. Stop bullshitting yourself about your inherent,
socially radical, super-capacity and try to get even one degree stronger at
one regular thing! Etc.
That said, we should be careful not to view disciplines and tasks as merely
an endless spiritual war against every little weakness in our lives. You will
never become that perfectly improved, all-powerful individual, and neither
is your life of development meant to be merely a miserable slog of
resistances.

Creative delight is the core of the event. And I have often found it delightful
to speak in terms of whim fulfillment. Take up an utterly unnecessary
possibility whose realization would strike you (and perhaps you alone) as
being wonderful and then commit yourself to that task. Put other things
aside & when you pause to question your own motive, simply say to
yourself, “Because I already decided.”
 THE MAGNETIC CENTER

Shall we establish a Periphery for Self-Awareness? I think we should.

There are already far too many Centers for Self-Awareness. In fact, after
this short essay I pledge never to speak of “centers” again. And if I fail to
keep that promise, may I be forced, in front of my peers, to eat only the
crispiest portions of the roast chicken skin. For now, however, it may
behoove us to explore a common concept in Fourth Way communities: this
business about the magnetic center.
Imagine that human culture is full of memes originating from many
different sources. Fiction, news, political propaganda, pop science,
marketing, the art industry, quasi-intelligent algorithms, etc. These memes
compete for your attention and for their share of your brain. However,
mixed into this memetic ocean are fragments that come from other sources.
They emerge from genuine peak experiences, individual spiritual efforts
and ancient networks of developmental sages. Moral messages. Hints about
consciousness. Tricks about attention. Strange symbols. Whispers of odd
energies. These memes also enter in the general mix.
Now imagine that each one of these special memetic fragments is a tiny
sliver of magnet. An itsy-bitsy piece of evocative wisdom with an
electromagnetic field around it. When I was a young boy I had a very
strange feeling when I saw Luke Skywalker “try” to move his lightsaber
with a combination of concentration and sensitivity to subtle energy. I had a
similar reaction when Paul Atreides, in Dune, struggled to keep his hand in
the Bene Gesserit pain box. Or when the Navi in Avatar plugged the backs
of their heads into the Great Tree that gives voice to the biosphere. I got that
same feeling when I heard Terence McKenna speak about the self-
transforming machine elves. Or when I read in the writings of Colin Wilson
about how the ballet dancer Nijinsky confessed to feeling like God when he
put enough emotion into the physical efforts of his dances.
These little magnetised bits start to build up. They stick to each other. They
become a larger, motley lump of magnetism. And as it gets stronger and
stronger, it starts to act like one medium-sized magnet. The collective force
of attraction starts to feel the pull of even larger nearby magnets.
So I was drawn toward certain teachings, certain teachers, certain places.
Without this accumulated attraction how could I even have begun?
 A THIRD WAY ON “SOULS”

Do all human beings have souls — or not?Are we all born with a special,
God-given inner duplicate of our bodies that can thrive or languish in an
astral afterlife? Or, on the contrary, are we merely meat-machines who
pathetically fantasize about souls in order to assuage the mortal anxiety of
our implacable finitude?

This thorny question has been asked for at least several thousand years. We
still pose it to innocent philosophy students as if it was the very profound
contemplation whose quintessence divides “secularity” from “religiosity.”
What we seldom notice is how limited we are by these two predictable
choices.

One of the most remarkable contributions of the Gurdjieffian oeuvre, in my

unmanicured opinion, is the manner in which it suggestively sidesteps and
complicates the sticky, tired and perennial dichotomy found in learnéd
discussions of the soul. It does this especially well in one particular regard:
de-homogenization.
Homogenization (which I will hereafter refer to as “being a homo”) is the
process of flattening a large field of diverse forms into a single
monoculture. Everyone is basically the same. Homos. This pernicious
attitude has gone largely un-critiqued in philosophical discussions about the
human soul. Both contemporary and classical interlocutors are accustomed
to the endless and pointless (i.e. people are generally not convinced by each
other’s arguments) discussions as to whether ALL humans have the same
special inner soul or whether, on the contrary, they ALL EQUALLY are
merely complex accretions of meat that emotionally secure themselves with
transmortal phantasies in order to avoid an unbearable Reality.
But why should we suppose that the situation is the same for everyone?
Gilles Deleuze suggested that philosophy must pivot from asking “what is
it?” to asking “which one is it?” Gurdjieff undertakes this progressive
diversifying labor in the matter of souls.
Just which human beings are we referring to? Who might have a soul &
who might not? Perhaps souls exist in varying degrees or they might grow
only under certain conditions?
Regardless of one’s personal conclusions on this topic, it is refreshing to
encounter a spiritual philosophy that dares to explore such complexity and
diversity without sliding into relativistic nihilism. Gurdjieff, like an esoteric
Marxist, asserts that souls might be luxury items. They belong to a class of
people who control the means of spiritual production. Certain attitudes,
inner efforts, peer support (and circumstantial luck) cause the human bio-
psychological factory to produce the surplus that is necessary for generating
a limited trans-mortal enactment. Everyone else merely believes (or not) in
souls in order to assuage their sense of inner lack and ensure the social
order of their participation in the organization of material resources. Is
Gurdjieff correct?
Personally, I am a terrible coward who always hedges his bets. That’s called
Integralism. Thus I am tempted into a description that says YES to “some,”
“none,” & “all” of us having souls.
My vision is that we are all born with a seed of soul-potential but sadly
most of us are not good gardeners. We end up effectively soulless because
we do not ensure that the seed grows into a seedling and eventually a
mature plant. Most seeds in nature get squandered upon the Earth and do
not grow into mighty trees or beautiful flowers. I think this kind idea could
make us very kind to people in general. The little glimmering glamor of
unrealized soul-potential deep within everyone’s eyes is a prompt for both
deep respect & pity. The possibility and the tragedy should both register in
our hearts. And that goes double for the eyes we see in the mirror. With
adequate honor and sympathy for ourselves, we may need urgently to begin
a life that works to integrate the various subtle facets of our being into a
more reliable and more coherent wholeness.
Such wholeness, whether in this life or some imaginal beyond, may then
afford certain additional opportunities for agency…
 WHAT IS THE WORK?

Repair the past; prepare the future.

– Gurdjieff.

The theory and practice of Gurdjieffian philosophy is known in-house as

“the Work.” While this concept can get heavy and serious in a manner that
attracts dry, quasi-neurotic & pseudo-masochistic seekers who are incapable
of Gurdjieff’s characteristic ribald humor and serious play, it is also a very
good description of the dynamics of human development.
Work is an effort, an activity, something you do. It is an energy expenditure
aimed at preparing the future. Work is a sacrifice today that makes
tomorrow easier for you and your loved ones. Behavioral investments are
transferred from the short-term window of our immediate feelings toward
the longer time-frame of weeks, months or years. Perhaps even our entire
life? I make money so we can eat later. I till the soil so that plants come up
in the spring. This is a completely obvious fact but perhaps to realize its
truth is a praiseworthy sign of human maturation.

However, it goes beyond money and plants. It also applies to inner work &
interpersonal work. If you wish to have more insight, contentment and
Beingness tomorrow, you will have to do something “on purpose” today.
This utterly obvious attitude has been confounded by the Western
commercial popularization of Buddhism and Taoism. The naturalistic
wisdom of developmental flow-states has merged with modern consumer
culture & stoner laziness to produce the narcissistic fantasy that effort itself
is problematic. How dare you even mention goal-oriented behaviors!
Efforts are a faux-pas. Trying is clearly the opposite of advanced spiritual
wisdom!
Such nihilistic attitudes toward spirituality are nothing new. Eat less.
Breathe less. Sleep less. Don’t disturb Nature. Don’t fight back. Let
anything and everything just happen. Each of these principles, obviously,
has a healthy positive variant, but collectively they hint at a recurrent
human tendency to sway into ascetic territories of self-neutralization and
mass relinquishment. There is something within us that persistently reads
negation and passivity into the wisdom-teachings of our ancestors.

Yet those ancestors were not passive or self-neutralizing. They killed, ate,
loved & built. They invented civilization, change and progress. Wu wei, the
famous art of doing-by-not-doing, was used by great military leaders to
defeat their enemies. And Tai Chi is not a non-activity. It is a super-activity
that aims to achieve a quality of effortlessness through a skillful balance of
efforts.

Even “accepting” and “just witnessing” are unnatural efforts undertaken up

in the service of superior values and transformations. The adherents of
evolutionary spirituality, among whom I would count many of the
Gurdjieffians, must appreciate that the bicycle will stop moving if we stop
pedaling.

The contingent historical forces that have produced the valuable condition
of human sapience will not necessarily keep going in the same direction all
by themselves. That is up to us. No one is neutral on a slope.
So the phraseology of spiritual “work” provides a much needed antidote to
the mood of self-calming and self-congratulatory ease that is endemic to
postmodern spirituality. It is quite understandable, given the unnatural
living conditions of a contemporary civilization whose ongoing low-level
stresses accumulate into chronic physical and mental disease, that we
should turn to spirituality for stress-relieving ease. We are goaded into
artificial motion and so we seek stillness as a remedy. Our minds are
sooooooo crammed with social, verbal and technical signals that our bodies
yearn for healthy mental vacuity. We are not even entirely sure how we
might interpret spirituality if we were already physically healthy, socially
supported and mentally untroubled. What would we then expect it to do for
us?
However, all of this may be changing. Wim Hoffery, athletic neuroscience,
ice baths & resurgent Stoicism all begin to re-appreciate the deep, ancient
value of inner efforts and struggles. Staying at your edge is essential for
growth. Periodic fasting is advocated. Short bursts of intense stress keep the
body regulated. Feel the burn — unless you want your body, heart and
mind to lose their functional “tone” and “tensegrity.” In this manner we can
better understand why Gurdjieff so frequently speaks of our “inner evil god
Self-Calming.” Health, growth & depth are sabotaged if we habitually
reject higher intensities of experience. Ambiguity, contradiction, arousal,
effort and friction are all needed for spiritual life. Otherwise we will remain
disconnected, in general, from the insights and vigor that are accessed in
our peak experiences. Metamodern spiritual antifragility.
Gurdjieff’s simple 19th-century metaphor was that of an unusual horse-
drawn carriage. This “special vehicle” is built in such a way that it self-
lubricates when it goes over bumps. These little shocks and distresses,
assimilated into the structure, keep it moving along its journey. However, if
we confine it to smoothly paved roads and parking lots, it begins to
degenerate into fragility and dysfunction. So a metamodern spirituality
needs to be periodically perturbed, jostled, confused — but sensitively and
safely.
 COLLECTIVE SAPIENCE, PONDERING &
SAYINGS OF POPULAR WISDOM

They say that “haste makes waste.” They also say that “he who hesitates is
lost.” We will have to do some work to resolve the contradictions in these
alternatively valenced sayings of popular wisdom — but wait! Before going
any further: Who is this wise They to whom these sage aphorisms are
attributed? Surely it must be that same illustrious Saint They who wrote all
the knock-knock jokes and invented the 4-way stop. He famously figured
out that discarded automobile tires can be used to protectively buffer the
sides of boats when they are docked in choppy waters. This intersubjective
genius of the folk, who goes by various names in different historical
cultures, provides a primary example of collective sapience — the
imaginally-augmented wisdom of crowds.

While, obviously, we must guard ourselves vigilantly against the regressive

flocking behavior of commercial fads, mob violence, political mass
formations & superficial holiday celebrations, we cannot deny that the
shared body of culture has been generating, vetting and remembering wise
memes for longer than there has been recorded history. That is a They
whose intelligence deserves honor and attention from us — just as it
received from Gurdjieff.
He was a great advocate of popular sayings. From childhood onward, he
reports making a considerable intentional (and often playful) attempt to
elicit the ancient, time-tested hints encoded in seemingly innocuous
colloquial phrases that are passed from generation to generation. Perhaps
this was a habit unique to him but it is equally plausible that such interests
are common among traditional esoteric sects. The practice of gathering,
preserving and studying the sayings of popular wisdom might be the
venerable origin of what we today call Bibles & Sacred Texts. Such groups
might even engage in the “creative activity” of cultivating a local,
ethnically-specific character to whom these many wise sayings can be
attributed. Uncle Sam. Til Eulenspegeil. The Nazarene.
No. Surely not the Christ? Well, who can say? “Sayings Gospels,” such as
the Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi Library, have fueled
scholarly speculation about a so-called Q text — a collection of statements
much older than any references to the narrative of Christ. In any case, it
would not be out of character for esoteric sects in barely literate
civilizations to use astrology, archetypes and shared imagination to produce
public narratives about the embodiment of the local, racialized articulation
of the preserved dictums of our wise ancestors.

St. They has always had his secret champions. And perhaps such creative
looseness was common in oral, pre-literate society just as, according to
media theorist Marshall McLuhan, it may become again in digital, post-
literate society? It may be time to return again, with renewed interest and
vigor, to those otherwise easily discarded and all-too-familiar phrases. The
squeaky wheel gets the grease. But, on the other hand, the nail that sticks up
gets hammered down. Are these memetic fragments actually collective
dharma hiding in plain sight? While you probably think that you understand
their simple meanings, do you not also sense that your appreciation of these
formulations could go much deeper?
Any depraved user of psychedelic drugs can tell you about the very odd
experience of suddenly discovering that some banal advertising slogan,
book title or casual joke just embodies it all, man.
As a Greco-Armenian adventurer in the 19th-century Middle East, Gurdjieff
frequently encountered the teachings of St. They compiled into the local
form of legendary Sufi saint Mulla Nasruddin. I have heard, or perhaps read
on bathroom walls, that it was the prolific Nasruddin who famously sought
for his keys where the light was good — rather than looking spatially where
he lost them. And I have it on good authority that he once arranged to have
three blind men attempt to identify an elephant.
Gurdjieff was very involved in the memetic fragments of inherited
collective sapience. He even invented his own peculiar aphorisms and often
attributed them to Nasruddin. There is a certain practicality in that. He
believed in attempting to capture and integrate higher insights and altered
states through encoding them in strange verbal and imaginative
formulations which could then be reflected upon and slowly assimilated.
The wisdom of St. They is always newly emerging from those who
participate in the work of unpacking and personally exploring the sayings
that we inherit. But of what does that work consist? What is the activity of
decoding? It is pondering.
This archaic word was already long abandoned by modern civilization
when Gurdjieff tried to “bring it back” in the 1920s. It refers to an internal
sensemaking process that reveals the actionable meaningfulness of a
complex situation. The situation could be an ancient verbal wisdom-meme
or it could be a very straightforward life decision. Should I move? Shall I
breed? Change my profession? It could also be an omen — an encounter
with an animal, physical location or odd structure that seems to be fringed
with an aura of incompletely processed significance. These are all prompts
for pondering which reveal themselves through the flavor of opacity and
vexation. There is little need to ponder a public STOP sign. Such symbols
typically lack ambiguity and portentiousness. They do not reverberate in
our subconscious or hint at patterns beyond the pre-loaded capacity of the
left-brain to quickly assign a category and utility to our perceptions. So you
must locate pregnant material and then engage in a persistent intentional
attempt to weigh, taste, deconstruct, reconstruct and (in a novel fashion)
rename the experience. Chew it up. Make it personal. Connect it to
something surprising.
Pondering, said A. R. Orage in his talks on Beelzebub’s Tales (quoted in
C.S. Nott’s Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupil’s Journey), is the “resolving
force of impressions.” He also said, “Pondering is essential thinking.” And
“Pondering is establishing values by weighing.” And “What is weighed in
pondering is inclination and disinclination as opposed to thinking — in
which ideas and concepts are weighed. The contents of the emotional center
are weighed in relation to the criterion of more or less Being. It can think
but I alone can ponder.”
These pithy quips propose that pondering is a specific method for
assimilating the embodied and enactive relevance within significant,
undecided and/or peculiar situations. One takes in impressions — one is
impressed by situations — that can provide a kind of developmental food.
Then a metacognitive effort deploys the inner capacity for somatic affect to
“weigh out” one’s inclinations. This happy activity results in both an
increase of metacognitive capacity in general and, if carried through to
fulfillment, an implicit decision that you can no longer second guess. It is
simply your real decision. A hybrid product that can operate as if it were
primordial.
The metamodernist must exceed the postmodernists in their ability to digest
and make sense from what is found in the pluralistic interperspectival sea of
contextual situations and communications. We must increase metacognitive
capacity and follow a life path that is authentic enough that, regardless of
outcome, we feel we must have made the right decision. A decision that is a
nuanced convergence of many behavioral possibilities and inclinations.
The Father of America, Benjamin Franklin, famously formalized a form of
pondering in his 1772 letter to Joseph Priestly in which he proposed a
“moral or prudential algebra” of factors in favor & against a given idea.
Today we simply call this a pro/con list. And while the potential
meaningfulness of aphorisms, ancient monuments, cryptic symbols &
peculiar omens are often not as tidy as a simple behavioral choice, we can
nonetheless go a long way toward assimilation to the point of self-consistent
action if we gather together, and sensitively weigh, the various inclinations
by which we relate to a topic.
 PRE-SCHOOL FOR RELIGIONS

Should I become a Christian? someone once asked Gurdjieff. How about a

Buddhist? Shinto? These questions drew scoffs & scorn from that curious
man whom the famous Russian occultist, journalist and novelist Peter
Ouspensky initially described as giving the “strange, unexpected and
almost alarming impression of a man poorly disguised.”
Gurdjieff scoffed because his perspective on religion was based in quite
different assumptions than those that make contemporary people feel as
though they are competent to select a religion. Today we associate religion
with mythic-membership “believer cults” that are characterized by a public
announcement of their fidelity to the cosmological, ethical & social
proclamations of a Magic Book. We even call these groups traditional
despite the fact that they are merely a few thousand years old.
Modernist culture is quite happy to treat religion as a pre-rational lifestyle
choice (which it then either tolerates or critiques). Religion is treated as a
kind of fan club or aesthetic game with, at best, some emotional and
communitarian value. In popular discourse today it stands forth as a
personal and political choice that one is asked to inscribe on the dotted line
where the questionnaire asks, “What is your religion?”
It is, if you will forgive me for saying so, a very print-based attitude toward
a phenomenon that is itself predominantly sourced in pre-literate, oral and
acoustic communities.
There is a good deal of lively debate about whether people ought to be able
to designate their own gender identities and pronouns, but scant skepticism
as to whether we should accept people’s verbalized religious self-
identification. Voluntary symbolic membership in a recognized organization
is usually taken as the unquestioned format for human religion, but this
whole framework makes the issue seem oddly trivial. Certainly no zoologist
would take, at face value, a rhinoceros’ claim to be a camel. Scientific
designations must be based on demonstrable differences of structure and
function. Not symbolic self-selection. This problem has bedeviled religion
for many years. Søren Kierkegaard famously lambasted European
Christendom for accepting its citizens as Christians regardless of whether
their behavior, attitudes and stage of inner development was in any way
aligned with the instructions of the Gospels.
So Gurdjieff’s counter-question to “Should I be a Christian?” is very
pragmatic: “Are you ABLE to be a Christian?”
Do you have what it takes to be a Muslim in more than just a nominal and
aspirational sense? Have you integrated the experiences necessary to
operate as a Buddhist? Have you even the skills and insights needed for
Paganism?
If the religious life has any real value then it must surely have at least as
many sensible preliminaries as being a chef, archer, cobbler or violinist.
Functions have prerequisites. Even ordinary citizens are expected to have
mastered the basic colonialist capacities of reading, writing & arithmetic
prior to entering a university or trade school. What is the spiritual and
religious equivalent? We seldom think in these terms, but Gurdjieff did.

He was focused on the basic proto-skills needed in order to make progress

as an authentic participant in any Path, Faith or Tradition. And although he
regarded it as an unnecessary act of cultural violence to attempt to convert
anyone from the language of their religious upbringing, he seems very
much to have considered the Fourth Way as a kind of spiritual pre-school. A
generic way. A necessary preparation for being the kind of human beings
who are able to be religious or non-religious with actual depth and integrity.
Because although ritual and community membership have their advantages,
you do not fundamentally change by joining a group and professing an
ideology.
 NEGATIVE SELF-AWARENESS

We are correct to be skeptical of patriarchal authority figures who

dismissively describe other people as empty non-entities. This could be a
worrying sign of sociopathic tendencies. Or at least of a standard cultic
maneuver to narcissistically promote your own magical status by putting
everyone else down.

The English slang term negging refers to making people susceptible to

control by subtly undermining their status and self-worth in comparison to
others. Yet in Gurdjieff’s case there was some plausible theory, based in his
own sense of growing from a non-entity into an actual entity, that
converged with his jocular disparagement of other people’s existential self-
worth. The truly post-conventional developmental journey, he believed,
could begin only when we have accepted the uncomfortable sensations of
our private sense of inner lack.

Modern civilization, with its self-esteem movements & customer-is-always-

right ethos, has tended to propose that you can be straightforwardly
authentic merely by speaking your truth, thinking positively and purchasing
self-defining commodities. The implication is that you can somehow move
purely from victory to victory. Already perfect and just getting more
authentic all the time — without confronting any unflattering facts about
your lurking existential poverty. This is a nice vision but it is also very
fragile. And what is worse, it may even inhibit our necessary, and deeply
motivating, encounter with our own feelings of inner insignificance.
Gurdjieff’s position was that we all carry the “meaning crisis” inside
ourselves. Widespread superficiality, depression & addiction actually have
the same basic cause as the widespread atheistic belief that humans have no
souls. The shared source of both phenomena is simply that most people in
fact DO have nothing inside.
That does not mean that you cannot have a flourishing subjective being
with valid inner riches and something distinctly soul-like about your way of
being-in-the-world. It does mean, however, that such rewards are derived
from a journey that begins with the courage to confront our current
existential insufficiency. Are you actually living your best life? Are you
truly unique? Do you have an actual purpose?

Do not decide these questions quickly. Instead try to allow the hollow
feelings and to risk the failure of your socially enshrined self-ideal. In his
classic 1945 pamphlet Listen, Little Man! Dr. Wilhelm Reich proposed that
people who cannot tolerate feeling small inside tend to remain small inside.
And, who knows, perhaps with a little practice you could even learn to
enjoy your fundamental moral inadequacy?
The first step, in any case, would be to take the inner crisis seriously. You
need not necessarily feel insulted if someone says you are hollow, small,
robotic, asleep, predictable, empty, soulless and insignificant. The
appropriate response might be to say: “Yes! True! And thus I begin the
Great Way!” This almost Hegelian embrace of the Negative is typical of
Gurdjieff (although it is also found in the Sufi Way-of-Blame and in many
great Zen teachers among others).
Staying with insufficiency is a powerful psychotechnology. It is especially
pertinent for the kind of plural psychology that is proposed in the
Gurdjieffian lineage. How do you start to bring different parts and
intelligences together in better teamwork? Stay with their disharmony.
Undergo the dissonance. Become better friends with your failure to
synchronize your parts into a higher harmonic. And this is not just a general
philosophical proposal. You can actually sit down right now and start
paying attention to the lack of equal balance between your emotional,
mental and somatic-proprioceptive intelligences.
 PASSIVE SYNCHRONIZATION OF
HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS

This accord between my centers of energy and their functioning cannot

be brought about by forcing. There must be a quieting, a letting go of
their movement, in order for a balance of energy to appear between
them.

– Jeanne de Salzmann,
A Moment of Availability

The quintessential text for working “passively” with all three centers is
Jeanne de Salzmann’s set of beautifully written phenomenological
notebooks published as The Reality of Being.

Passivity (as modern & masculinist readers might need to be reminded)

need not be an insult. Receptivity & relaxation are necessary in all parts of
all beings. Gurdjieff used to speak obliquely of “fasting” simultaneously in
all major psycho-physiological systems.
There is a process of bringing our primary parts together very naturally by
allowing each of them to sense, settle and sit still. This takes both intention
and patience. Your parts must be acknowledged, experienced and given
time to effortlessly rest. When they are all resting then they will be aligned.
Sometimes we feel this unforced confident energy in the first split second
after waking in the morning.
Let the mind relax, empty and settle.
Let the feelings relax, empty and settle.
Let the body relax, empty and settle.
In each of these three main areas, gently observe what is happening. Allow
all tensions to be felt and released. Witness without encouraging. The three
systems are trying to be active but we are merely allowing. And slowly, by
this simple act of allowing, they will collectively start to settle down into a
common firmament. In their relatively inactive & recharging condition,
they can begin to blend with each other.
ADDENDUM
I have a difficult time getting massages or other relaxation treatments. It
goes fine for the first few minutes but then I start to fill with energy which
makes my body want to activate. And as the casual sexual harassment of
masseuses & masseurs is now socially “frowned upon,” I need to find some
other method of being active while continuing to receive the treatment.
So I try to pro-actively fight against my inner impulses themselves. I use
my impulse to take action in order to take the action of resisting my impulse
to take action. It passes the time and makes me seem like a well-behaved
client. There are lots of little schemes we can devise for working with
passivity and receptivity. For working with three centers, I have devised an
inner game that I call Toggling.

It involves constant alternation of attention between the three major

intelligence systems. First I check what is going on in the general region of
my head and in the abstract inner space where I do my thinking. All I do is
check. Sense into it and let it be. Then I switch to the general feeling
possibilities associated with my chest. Let them be. Now my extended
body, weight, muscles and sensations. Back to the heart. Back to head.
Down to heart. Down to body. Etc. Up and down. I am being active but
each action is to just check and move on. Serial passivity. Receive, receive
& receive again. And you know, sometimes, after a little while, these three
regions seem to spontaneously blur into each other in a very, very
interesting way…
 ACTIVE SYNCHRONIZATION OF
HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS

John Henderson’s highly suggestive and often preposterous book A Field

Guide to Gurdjieff’s Buried Dog takes a strong critical stance against
Madame de Salzmann. It would be an exaggeration to call John a
misogynist but there is a definite YANG emphasis in his approach. He
favors a more active style of the harmonization of inner systems which he
connects (through an impressive dive into Gurdjieff’s indirect and
fragmentary communication style) to a particular “martial arts exercise.”
Pun intended. Wait — what?

Active strategies for balancing and integrating our intelligence systems are
very important. Instead of allowing them each to just be open, surrendered
and deeply felt, they are instead put into a condition of simultaneous effort.
You have to pre-choose these efforts. The art resides in the metacognitive
attempt to establish approximately equal amounts of effort in each system.
Suppose you are doing push-ups. That takes some physical effort. What if
you also made the unusual mental effort to count your repetitions by threes?
1, 4, 7, 10, 13. And what if, all the while, you also made an effort in your
heart to feel only gratitude?
This basic principle is quite simple but (interestingly enough) even the
people who know about it will almost never do it. Ordinary effort seems
like such a hassle that we seldom want to add any additional attention task
into the mix.
Go outside and the mow the lawn while also trying to follow a very
intellectual podcast. That is a good start. Now, with no less attention,
constantly feel “What a beautiful day it is!”
Making a fire? That’s a physical task. Why not simultaneously think about
the physics and chemistry of how fire occurs while also trying to connect
your heart to all the ancient human feeling about the spooky Power of Fire.
You get the idea.
And if you persist in these efforts (constantly failing, re-starting,
readjusting), there will come moments in the process when you feel
yourself simultaneously grasping all three systems in a singular gesture.
The curious sense of strength that arises in such moments is worth
exploring and so, if we are ready to track it, is the way that it may alter our
sense of Self in the hours to come.
 THE PRACTICE OF NOT IMPROVING
YOURSELF
We wish to be conscious. It doesn’t mean to be different. It means to be
able to be what we are.
– Lord John Pentland,
Exchanges Within

The Gurdjieff work is riddled with admonitions to avoid hastily improving

yourself. It reminds me of that famous conservative principle known as
Chesterton’s Fence. The idea — from a short story by G. K. Chesterton —
is that you should never change something unless you can think of a good
reason why it was originally arranged that way in the first place.

Complex systems exhibit many features that are indirect emergent solutions
to problems that are not immediately obvious. And because the world is
complex, we always need conservative instincts in the mix because our old
structures may turn out to be smarter than we immediately realize. This idea
is usually taken as a way to chastise social progressives whose hasty
sympathies want to get rid of monarchy, church, traditional linguistic
customs, gender rules or literal old fences without first considering that they
might be doing something useful that we simply have not realized. The
same heuristic rule can be taken as a cautionary principle about our inner
lives. Are you sure that switching to robust belly-breathing won’t slowly
start to disrupt the way that your brain processes oxygen? Are some people
actually in danger if they quit their bad habits? Could positive self-talk
trigger your brain to assume and regenerate a state of deep depression? And
what if our psychological equivalent of the appendix turns out to have some
important utility after all?
Our human “biopsychosocial” organism is a complex adaptive system that
self-regulates by coordinating vast numbers of subsystems that are mostly
hidden from the view of waking-state consciousness. So the first problem
with self-improvement strategies is that they are probably too narrow. They
are targeted responses to partial glimpses of what is almost certainly a more
deeply interconnected and carefully counterbalanced ecology of the deep
psyche. This does not mean you should not make efforts to adapt to
common sense ideas about diet, exercise, civility, etc., but it does suggest an
attitude of caution in the face of complex systems.
One frequent bit of advice found in Fourth Way lineages is that one should
refrain from significant lifestyle changes, and from the use of powerful
psychotechnologies, unless it is temporary, experimental and advised by a
wise elder or peer. Figuring out exactly who is a wise elder sounds tricky,
but in practice, and in lived communities, assuming they aren’t merely
culturopathic whorls of ideological entrapment, it probably is not that
difficult. Who is trusted by smart people you already trust? Who has lived
out many different kinds of human complexities? Who has demonstrated a
capacity for insight? Who strikes you as feeling different from ordinary
humans even after you’ve pondered it for a while? So plausible guidance is
probably achievable and safe-to-fail experiments are the order of the day.
Interestingly, however, despite these cautions, Gurdjieff does suggest one
exercise that he says almost anyone can undertake profitably without the
risk of unexpected side-effects. It is — as he tells Ouspensky — to “try to
struggle with the expression of unpleasant emotions.” Put that in your pipe
and tell no one about it!
The other serious issue involved in self-improvement tactics is the very real
danger that we will bypass our self-awareness in the attempt to quickly
correct ourselves. Gurdjieff’s shamanic vision, if I can call it that, was an
organic developmental process built into the human organism which is
viewed as a functional subcomponent of the multidimensional biosphere
which, in turn, has its role to play in stepping up and stepping down the
flows of objective and subjective energy, information and entropy around
which the cosmos is organized. The key point here is that the
developmental process is organic. Natural. And an optimal natural course
of existential spirituality might seem slow or indirect in comparison to a
conscious, socially-strategic and top-down process of changing oneself
through new moral rules, breathing methods, habits of mental focus,
posture, etc. Our anxious tendency is to bypass the deep process in order to
attempt to get quick results.
In nature you can disturb many processes by undertaking them too quickly
or too soon. A correct tempo for self-unfolding is regulated, in Gurdjieff’s
view, by the process of self-understanding. To understand ourselves we
must observe our entangled somatic, emotional, postural & mental patterns
with a special emphasis on sensitivity to any inner contradictions or rejected
intensities. These special impressions of our foolishness need to be explored
and digested.
This is easy to disrupt. Our process of adaptive navigation in life could be
short-circuited or avoided by a hasty reactivity, however well-intentioned,
that attempts to immediately ignore, marginalize or correct for our
impressions of our own inadequacies. Suppose I catch myself using a
particular unpleasant tone in conversation with someone whom I care about.
It strikes me as subtly arrogant. A little bit ugly. The instant I see this I want
to change it — both for the benefit of the other person and also to move
away from my foolishness. But in that quick shift I minimize the amount of
information being processed about the situation. I reject the data of my
suffering and ignore possibilities of increased authenticity in favor of a
superficially enforced self-modification.
Again, this does not mean we should never use discipline to be more
healthy, vigilant, clean, safe and productive. We should do those things.
However, it does mean that the life we really want — a natural, stable &
high-integrity way of productively being in the world and relationships —
might evolve from different methods than those that attempt to quickly
enforce improvement in one particular part of ourselves. It may, instead, be
cultivated by inhabiting our existing structures more deeply.
“Self-improvement,” said A. R. Orage in his commentaries on Beelzebub’s
Tales, “is different from self-perfecting. The former is merely a
rearrangement of our existing parts while the latter is the cultivation of a
new selfhood from out of our latent potentials.”
 THE THREE MUSKETEERS: Logos,
Mythos & Pathos

French psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian takes this triadic

thinking to a head when he in The Mimetic Brain (2013) claims that
Man actually is endowed with three completely different brains: the
rational brain corresponding to logos, the mimetic brain corresponding
to mythos, and the emotional brain corresponding to pathos.
—Bard & Soderqvist.
Process and Event

Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844) is a swashbuckling socio-critical

adventure novel by the great French mulatto author Alexandre Dumas
starring the good friends Athos, Porthos & Aramis.
Like you, presumably, I always think of this early modern novel when I
have cause to ponder the “narratological triad” in the works of the Syntheist
philosophers Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist.
The three convivial adventurers Logos, Mythos and Pathos have apparently
been at work since the earliest human tribal cultures. And we adaptively
regenerate these three types of sensemaking under the neurological and
cultural modifications engendered by each new technologically-driven
phase of human history. These styles of sensemaking generate, and are
generated by, the three typical territories of communication that are
indicated by ancient archaeological remains.
Humans beings engaged in sensemaking together on battlefields and in
hunting grounds, in campfires and domestic situations, and in ritual
religious spaces. Different types of people and different neural systems
were favored in each of these interpersonal arenas. And that led to the
ongoing anthropological division between logistical, pathic and mythic
types of narratives.
So we have (a) discussions about what things are named, how they are
constructed & how they can be efficiently deployed — which range from
casual know-how to abstract scientific elaboration of the great encyclopedia
of the universe, (b) discussions about mystery, direct experience, the
nameless, altered states, sexuality, subconsciousness, pure intensities,
nonlinear understandings, and (c) discussions about repeated cartoonish
stories in which the tension between the unnameable encounters and our
everyday pragmatic experiences is somehow resolved.
Is this a Gurdjeffian triad?
It is certainly possible to view the shamans as pathic — working with the
non-symbolic emotional capacity until it is refined into a “kesdjan body.”
Subtle moods and the vulnerably radiant solar heart are key features of
esoteric life. The intellect is logistical. And the body might be associated
with the mimetic capacities of the mirror neurons and the neuromuscular
intelligence. It is the body that wiggles when music plays. It samples the
world by duplication and this produces a set of postures which become the
basic words in the hieroglyphic language of the mythic soap operas that we
tell each other in order to create a shared social world that can productively
use (rather than be broken upon) the dialectic between sensible & insensible
modes of sensemaking.
However, if we associate Logos with the left-brain “personality” and Pathos
with the right-brain “essence,” then we get a different set of Gurdjieffian
correspondences. We might add to that approach by speculating that
mimetic sociological cartoonery is the default function that tries to run
interference between these two systems until, and unless, an imaginal
hybridization (and what is Beelzebub’s Tales if not that?) is able to take over
and ensure the constructive interplay of what Gurdjieff calls the two-system
zoostat.
These correspondences are imperfect. Gurdjieff is not working in the field
of narratology and his interest, in the descriptions he gives, always center
around how the various internal systems can be exercised to create
integration or higher harmonics.
He would be asking:
What mode of Logos exceeds ordinary analysis and makes it available for
more intense cooperation with Pathos & Mythos? Seemingly, it is strong
intentional attention and novel thinking that demands new terminology. A
logic that controls itself, doubles itself and “sees” higher coherent
structures.
Which mode of Pathos exceeds the world of ordinary feelings and moods,
entering into higher coordination with Mythos and Logos? Probably intense
contradictory feeling states occurring in the spaces between motivations and
perspectives. Also a pathos that is more intentional and can be directed to
intensify the vividness of any aspect of life, mind or society.
And what kind of Mythos can go beyond itself to reconcile with the other
two sensemaking styles? We might find Gurdjieff’s doctrines of “playing a
role,” and his use of surrealistic-mechanistic trans-genre tales of deliberate
inversion to be part of his proposal for the future myth. We could also draw
upon his situating of psychotechnologies within ecological narratives of
imperfect multidimensional beings who are evolving and involving
simultaneously.
 THE ART OF PERCEPTION
Only thanks to this factor, in the process of the blending of newly
perceived impressions of every kind in the presences of three-brained
beings, are there crystallized, on the basis of the Sacred
Triamazikamno, data for one’s own cognizance and the understanding
proper to the being alone; and likewise exclusively only during such
processes of the crystallization of the data for consciousness in the
presences of three-brained beings does there proceed what is called
‘Zernofookalnian-friction’ thanks to which the sacred substances
Abrustdonis and Helkdonis are chiefly formed in them for the coating
and perfecting of their higher parts.
—G. I. Gurdjieff
Form & Sequence

Only! Chiefly! That sounds important. Right? Near the end of The Tales of
Beelzebub to his Grandchild — almost where we would expect the
punchline — is a little chapter called Form & Sequence. At the heart of this
little chapter is a discussion about the important difference between
knowing & understanding. Gurdjieff defines their difference and he flatly
asserts that “understanding” is the primary or privileged strategy for
developing all of the energies that feed our “higher bodies.” Anyone
involved in Gurdjieffian philosophy or practice should pay special attention
to the intense emphasis he is bringing into this description.
What is the difference between knowing and understanding?

Well, firstly, knowledge is contextual and temporary. It consists of a set of

reminders that are established within embedded situations. State-dependent
associations. Very often we think we “know” what we are talking about but
actually we are just being reminded of our past conditioning. An external
prompt triggered a piece of associative data that exists within an internal
and thematic information silo.

Conversely, Gurdjieff presents “understanding” as more deeply assimilated

and generalized intelligence. It mixes with other data from other
information silos. It gives rise to new personal perspectives through the
cross pollination between diverse flavors of data. It becomes something we
can act upon — whether we are reminded of it or not.
Modern people often succumb to the idea that they can make the world a
better place by “getting the message out.” If people only knew the truth! Yet
repeated psychological studies demonstrate that false understandings are
often intensified when a person is presented with data that contradicts their
beliefs.
We all know that smoking is bad. The government places images of
depraved, cancer-ridden lungs and abhorrent birth defects onto the
packaging of cigarettes—but does that stop people? Maybe a few, sure, but
most smokers are already well aware that it is a bad habit. This is not news.
They can agree with you about this. Yet it does not change their behavior.
We could say they know it but nonetheless do not “get it.”

Knowledge has not metabolized into understanding.

New perceptions are routed by our nervous system toward a cache of
thematically similar memes or modular and behavioral data-blocs. I place
the “association” into a particular category of information along with
previously stored data patterns. Most of my memories about bacon are
stored in one particular associative web. All the things I usually say about
Muslims are in another web. These information silos minimize my
cognitive effort but they also risk minimizing my personal understanding of
the situation. Depth requires effort.
Look at that red-throated woodpecker! You are a bird-watcher and so you
can mentally categorize it. However what is the feeling? What is the
appropriate emotion for seeing red-throated woodpeckers? It is not
immediately obvious. A certain kind of metacognitive self-manipulation
would be needed in order to form a new informational connection between
this specific kind of bird and some particular emotional quality. This
process of active connecting is closer to what Gurdjieff means by
understanding.
Moments of understanding (Gurdjieff says that Beelzebub says) occur when
our ability for purposeful self-regulation (built-up by previous exercises of
conscious labor & intentional suffering) is deployed to connect a new
perception with resonant matching data from some additional internal
intelligence system that is not automatically activated by the perception.

You hear about an election in your so-called “nation.” Your heart sinks. You
re-experience that special form of boredom and despair that is reserved for
the predictable high-stakes bipartisan travesty of sensemaking that is about
to happen. What bodily gesture appropriately expresses that particular
feeling? A particular kind of metacognitive effort would most likely be
requried to discover this data about yourself.
In this model we have two different sets of memories. One set consists of
perceptions that are quickly categorized by social concepts and retrieved in
a low-effort manner. These allow us to “know” what to say, feel or do about
incoming types of data. The other set consists of perceptions that are
explored intentionally in ways that resolve contradictions and make
connections across different categories of response. These memories require
more effort to produce but they allow us to uniquely “understand” external
prompts in a more wholistic manner. And Gurdjieff goes out of his way to
emphasize that this manner of assimilating perceptions is the primary
method for deepening wisdom and generating additional ranges of
embodied consciousness (“extra bodies”).

ADDENDUM
The proper metabolization of perceptions is very concerning to a fellow that
I call “the Irishman” (M.G. Readshaw). He is adamant that the Fourth Way
traditions conflate Ouspensky with Gurdjieff and thereby become habitually
blind to the preeminence of perception in Gurdjieff’s thinking. He
associates the former man with the idea that by self-remembering and
refusing negative emotions we can become capable of true perceptions
while, on the contrary, he associates the latter man with the idea that by
correct perception we can feed our subconscious intelligence which has
“self-remembering” as one of its inherent attributes.
Readshaw believes that we ordinarily lack the energy for a spiritual self-
unfolding that would happen automatically if we could just inhibit our habit
of automatic perception. He frequently quotes Gurdjieff from the
introduction to Beelzebub’s Tales saying that the problem with
contemporary humans is
perhaps chiefly due to the fact that while still in childhood, there was
implanted in you and has now become ideally well harmonized with
your general psyche, an excellently working automatism for
perceiving all kinds of new impressions, thanks to which “blessing”
you have now, during your responsible life, no need of making any
individual effort whatsoever.
This view, as far as I can tell, is not entirely dismissible as the paranoid
raving of a decadent Gaelic rock climber (Readshaw) for it also corresponds
to some of my own experiences. I have found that consuming several good
perceptions (more or less in a row) results, with a small time delay, in a
strong visceral shift in my embodied sense-of-self. Good perceptions? We
have been talking in this chapter about how to consume perceptions but we
have not yet explored what constitutes a good perception. If perception is a
kind of food then what is nutritious food? Gurdjieff describes it as “newly
perceived” which suggests a certain freshness and novelty. Glancing around
myself at this very moment, I notice that most of my perceptions are very
familiar. They are recognized but not necessarily newly perceived. I might
need to call upon a skilled intuitive artist to show me the hitherto only half-
inspected peculiarities in my current visual field.
The nourishing quality of perceptions is a very interesting philosophical
topic. We know that anxious, puritanical busybodies are always worried that
people (especially the children!) are receiving bad impressions. Nudity.
Violence. Paganism. Ambiguity. Skeptical attitudes. They would like to
replace all these dubious perceptions with well-behaved aspirational
blandness and family-friendly moral lessons that avoid any disturbing
language and reinforce the ideology of an in-group. Of course anyone with
any humor, artistry or complex human experience knows that such a person
is usually the opposite of an expert on high-quality impressions. Yet perhaps
they nonetheless exhibit a dim intuition of the under-explored fact that not
all perceptions are equal.
Personally, I would expect that nourishing food resembles carrots, walnuts
or the flesh of salmon fish. It should be assumed to be complex, nuanced,
organic, visually enticing, possibly strange and certainly in need of rigorous
cleaning & chewing. A nutritious treasure from the garden or the wilderness
is typically fresh and mysterious but not overly sweet. You might have to
climb to get it or evade some thorns. What kind of perceptual food would
be like this?
While you are answering that question (and thank you for that — I dread
having to do it myself), I will suggest one place that I often look for the elk
meat, caviar & wheatgrass of the perceptual system.
I like to check for impressions that evoke the “zen mind, beginner’s mind”
quality. These are things that seem like you have never seen them before —
even if you have.

Unfamiliarized.

Like a word whose meaning suddenly escapes you. There is a dislocation

and de-contextualization of perceptual data in which the familiar becomes
incongruous again as if you were a small child or a depraved entheogenic
psychonaut. Think how a tree would look if you realized it was actually a
giant insect! Imagine how an ordinary automobile would seem if it was
hovering upside down in the desert. Same structure, different vibe. The way
David Lynch sees everything.

Are there any objective things, people or juxtapositions in your current

situation that seem to slip uncannily past the guard rails of your brain’s
normal categorization and familiarization routines? Anything that the
artistic gaze, scientific gaze & mystical gaze have in common is probably
nourishing for human beings? Things, to quote C+C Music Factory, that
make you go hmmmmmm?
 THE FOOD OF IMPRESSIONS

A simplified presentation of Gurdjieffian theory usually includes the idea

of “three foods.” It seems straightforward. Look at a human being from the
side. You will see that solid food and water go down to the lower stomach,
all enlivening atmospheric material (“air”) is received into the lungs &
meaningful sensory perceptions are digested by the head.
It is somewhat fanciful but not entirely inaccurate to describe the human
organism as a three-storied alchemical refinery. A factory that receives and
processes three kinds of food.
But let us zoom in on that top story. Gurdjieff described the set of functions
symbolized by the neurosensory networks of the head as consuming the
food of impressions. Have we thought about what constitutes an
impression? Does anything distinguish it from a mere perception?

In the simplest possible terms we could say that an impression impresses us.
It is not only noticed but also conveys a subtle impact that goes beyond
casual observation.
Your daughter might tell you some details of what happened in the park
today but it requires an additional step, an extra effort, to inquire about her
impression of one of those facts. Somehow an assemblage of perceptions is
combined, mixed with pre-existing subjective data and then distilled into an
informative, personalized registration of the event which can be
communicated.

A poor reporter, for example, only gathers the facts. A more gifted journalist
also develops a personal “take” on the situation.
Something important is taken in a take.
Multiple overlapping perceptions are drawn together into a generalized
affect that gets codified and clarified in a way that both matches previous
understanding and generates new understanding.
It is hardly worth watching the daily news about a “war” because the best
possible outcome of that activity is likely to be just repetitive exposure to a
set of temporary data points with relatively little manipulation by the
dominant social narratives. On the other hand, it might be very informative
to listen to a long-form interview with someone who has been embedded in
the actual situation long enough to develop a personal take. Long enough to
have eaten an impression.

Prosecuting Attorney: Doctor can you give the court your impression
of Mr Striker.
Dr. Stone: I’m sorry I don’t do impressions, my training is in
psychiatry.
Prosecuting Attorney: Of course.
– Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)
 THINK MORE

Spirituality and religion have often been accused of opposing the human
intellect. This anti-thinking stance may appear, benevolently, as an
advocacy of silent and spacious no-mind. Perhaps this is a necessary
antidote to the neurotic overthinking found in literate civilizations.

Less benevolently, this trend may appear as an insidious social scheme to

undermine individual reasoning in favor of cultic obedience. Yet despite all
this we find that precisely the contrary implication also haunts religious
history. From Jesuit universities to Buddhist analytics and throughout the
geometry-obsessed philosopher-sages of the ancient Mediterranean, there is
this odd suggestion that certain cults, and particular patterns of spiritual life,
might help us become better thinkers.
There are many ways to approach the improvement of human cognition, but
one strategy is repeatedly invoked through the corpus of Gurdjieff’s
remarks to students. He appears to have personally practiced and
recommended, in numerous variants, a habit of using structured inquiry to
rapidly extend casual perception into chains of interconnected thinking. The
deliberate acceleration of connectedness.
As I was thinking along these lines:
Behold yonder toaster-oven! How was it made? What is the most
meaningful thing you can do with it? How did it end up in your life? What
are its component parts? What else could it be used for? What typically
goes wrong with objects of that kind? Where will it one day end up?
The above sequence of queries gives an example of the kind of extra linking
that is proposed by Gurdjieff. The key elements appear to be (a) rapid
extension of perception across imaginal time by forcing yourself to access
plausible future and past narratives; (b) rapid activation of additional ranges
of practical and emotional associations with any perceptual object.
Let’s dramatically oversimplify the process into three questions:
 Where did it come from originally?
How did it enter my life?
Where will it end up?

These three questions use verbal and imaginative thinking to connect a

perceptual object with personal, practical and emotional significance along
a trajectory from past to future. I glance at my shoes. They were perhaps
built in a semi-automated Chinese factory and brought to North America via
large shipping vessels on the Pacific Ocean. I received them for Christmas
two years ago from my wife and, although they are a small item, they
remind me of my love and gratitude for her. Eventually they will wear out,
usually in the heel, and be transferred into a garbage bag which will
transport them to a dump site at the outskirts of town. That is probably not
the ideal method of waste disposal for a civilization.
That is, obviously, more thinking that I usually perform when I happen to
look at my shoes. It would be exhausting to do this all the time but perhaps
as a periodic exercise it could become somewhat habituated and cultivate,
over time, a general increase in the interconnectivity of the regions of my
nervous system. Who knows?
 GIVING LIFE THE FINGER
An Introductory Exercise
Let’s apparently change the topic to what I have called the difference
between facts and understanding, which is another way of describing
the difference between bilateral and trilateral perception.
– Jan Cox,
Talk 0095

Gurdjieff was not a believer in “exercises.” Can you believe that?

Although he constantly utilized and innovated psycho-technologies, he also
tended to refrain from suggesting general exercises for human
improvement.
Practices were given to particular students for particular reasons. They were
expected to be temporary, done under supervision and lead slowly toward a
visceral understanding of the principles involved such that a person could
begin to work on their own as an improviser of appropriate practices.
Nonetheless, he did emphasize a few general introductory experiments.
The three-finger exercise is framed as a method for getting beyond the
general human difficulty of being unable to distinguish between sensations
& feelings. We tend to collapse them both into one general category of
sensitivities but Gurdjieff strongly believed that they pointed to distinct
internal intelligence systems.
Here’s the ultra-simplified practice:
Pick a finger on one hand. Sense into that finger. Experience the space,
weight and inner tingling — the raw nerve phenomena — inside that finger.
Spend a moment just with the sensation.
Now pick a second finger. Imagine it is connected to your heart. Let it fill
with emotional vulnerability. Let it be responsive to all the interpersonal
circumstances and significances of your life. Just for now let that finger be
your heart.
And now, while you are holding both the sensation finger and the feeling
finger, select a third finger to begin tapping an arbitrary rhythm. This is
your mind finger. It is deciding on a pattern and watching to make sure that
pattern gets implemented. For example, 1 tap, 2 taps, 3 taps, repeat.
Super simple.
Keep implementing the mental pattern in the mind finger while continuing
to track both the sensations and the emotional responsiveness. If you make
a bit of effort there will be moment when you are following all three with
approximately equal amounts of attention. What is that moment like?
 REMORSE AS PRAXIS
The whole problem is how to feel more contradictions. What could join
the contradictions? Only my ability to be there between them.
– Lord John Pentland

During the 20th-century (counting from the legendary birth of the Judeo-
Roman God-Man) the educated global population of Earth was
psychologized.

Suddenly everyone was aware of Mommy issues, sexual dysfunctions, self-

esteem issues, alienation & a growing list of disorders allied worryingly to
the pharmaceutical industry. We also began to rethink our basic relationship
to guilt and shame.

Brilliant theorists pointed out how clans, religions and societies-in-general

exerted control over sensitive human bodies by thwarting their natural
tendencies and blaming them for the resulting bad feelings. This artificial
bad conscience about ourselves is then remedied by obedience, self-
sacrifice and updated shopping habits.

Much of the work of the therapists, therefore, has been to help people
overcome a sense of learned unworthiness and alienation from the natural
complexity of the human experience. Old cultures made us feel bad. New
cultures make us feel bad about feeling bad. Dr. Gregg Henriques, in the
Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) system, describes the triple
negative neurotic loop of bad experiences leading to bad feelings which we
then suppress because we feel bad about them. Tricky, tricky.

The solution, apparently, begins by loosening the knot. We must learn to

allow ourselves to tolerate our negative affects rather than compulsively try
to escape, overpower or ignore them through positive action aligned with
social instructions is a profound task.
Many people in the 20th century (often with the help of therapists and drugs
and bodywork and supportive friends) tried to get over their sense of being
sinners in need of redemption. How dare the old religionists teach that
humanity is basically guilty! Those poisonous spiders have tarnished a
beautiful and natural thing.
But what gets left behind in our planetary psychologization? What useful
role might the ancient human discourse of sin and shame have had in
authentic developmental praxis?
As much as we might want to shake off oppressive and denigrating
worldviews and give ourselves the much-needed booster shot of self-
esteem, we are also incomplete and tragic beings who, from day one, are
empowered by the motivation that is given to us by our self-recognition as
flawed, imperfect beings. Beings with room (and necessity) to grow.
We do have a kind of original sin. Not because other people have told us so
but because we instinctively know ourselves to be capable of more
integrity, more coherence, more capacity than we automatically exert.
Gurdjieff proposes a notion of organic shame — a moral authenticity rooted
in the unfolding subconscious intelligence of human organisms rather than
in local cultural behavioral agendas.

More than this interesting post-postmodern distinction, he places

“intentional suffering” as one of the two key meta-principles that govern
human self-unfolding. And one of the most fertile sources of intentional
suffering is to lean deliberately into the pain of remorse. To develop a good
conscience about the fleeting moments of inner conflict that implicate us
morally.
Remorse is the disagreement between our embodied memory of agentic
action and our aspirational values. It is a dissonance between these two
“systems.” And as the famous Milgram Experiment showed, most human
brains prefer to quickly exit from the friction state (contrasting perspectival
frames) by modifying their beliefs and serving a habit or an authority
figure.

It is natural to escape from cognitive dissonance into blaming, obedience or

forgetfulness. There is a kind of pain in the mutual contact between our
values, memories and actions.

We can, to some degree, tolerate this as conflict rather than forcing the re-
homogenization of our beliefs and calming ourselves down into the mindset
of the self-consistent single entity.

This heat is a powerful developmental trigger. It catalyzes the growth of

integrity. Integrity means both the integration across internal systems and a
moral quality of actions emerging in alignment with values.
Our current systems of ‘moral higher education’ often consist of nothing
more than thought experiments about the consequences of choice making or
debates about various theories of ethics. Anciently, goodness seems to have
emerged from the agon between appreciation of worthiness and beauty and
the willingness to voluntarily, within ourselves, place our actions such that
they can be painfully judged by our appreciations.
We are not guilty because someone else says so; we get to be guilty if we
say so. That’s the heat we need.
 HYPNOSIS

Gurdjieff was a free-range hypnotherapist happily splitting his attention

between the needs of his clients and his own deep curiosities about the
architecture of subconscious human intelligence.
He appears to have used both trance and placebo, among other techniques,
in lucrative public service ventures as he roamed through the towns of Asia
and the Middle East (later continuing this practice in Paris and New York
City). Of particular concern to him was the still relevant epidemic of opiate
addictions. It is typical of his multivalent integrative approach that he
privileged activities that addressed many problems simultaneously.
Compassionate service, profitability and the opportunity to make
investigations into the human psyche were among the numerous values that
converged in his work.
At the end of the 19th century there was quite an interest among
psychologists and open-minded citizens as to the potential role of hypnosis
and “mind control.” While Gurdjieff spoke highly (and only half-jokingly)
about the greatness of Mesmer, he was not content either with the standard
mystical or clinical theories of his day.
His private hypotheses and experiments with what we today call hypnosis
seem closely aligned with three perennial shamanic concerns:
(a) developing defenses against rampant suggestibility in the general
population;
(b) discovering the mechanisms of access to alternate states of
consciousness and unusual capacities;
(c) communicating with the intelligence of subconscious minds.
Since we are assured by contemporary neuroscience that the great bulk of
human cognitive processes are not represented in the conscious waking
mind, the subconscious is still a fertile territory for exploration. Gurdjieff
seems to have been seeking two types of data from deeper mind. Firstly,
knowledge of its mechanisms. Secondly, any data it might be able to access
(a la channeling) about cosmology, forgotten periods of human history and
anomalous sentiences. He speaks frequently of the oracular pythonesses of
the ancient world who were used for long-distance communication, remote
viewing and access to wisdom from different scales of entities.
His early conclusions, based on placing people of many cultures into trance
states, seem to have centered around his early model of a psyche being a
non-integrated plurality characterized by three separated “centers” each
running on a memetic set of “associations” that govern behavior. A later
model, outlined in the chapter “Beelzebub as Hypnotist,” seems both more
simplified and elaborated.
The argument here is that human beings have evolved socially into a two-
system zoostat. Our psyche has both a long-term and short-term function.
Children are born with a distributed, embodied personality that combines
hereditary data with unconscious experiential observations of the world.
This could be called an ancient self which operates through blended
imaginal and perceptual experience that is highly flavored by epigenetic
traits and a basic neurotypicality. However, the organism, in order to
flourish, must also access more nuanced information from the local social
ecosystem. It therefore is also equipped (sic) with a specialized “waking
state” personality that can gather bursts of symbolic data from other human
beings. The local information can then enter into negotiations
(“confrontations”) with the organismic intelligence at multiple levels of the
self — producing a unique adaptive understanding of how to function in
current circumstances according to conserved ancient patterns.
This all works very nicely for hundreds of thousands of years of human
prehistory but it gets modified by the advent of recorded civilization Under
the regime of urban, linguistic, written, state-controlled & hypermediated
civilization, there is a dramatic increase in reliance upon the waking state
psychology. The amount of social information explodes. Deliberate forms
of domestic and civic education are introduced in order to accelerate the
individual’s horde of socially mediated data. Everything is named, given a
back story, placed in a linear narrative. Behavioral and communicative
codes abound. Tricks for dealing with artificial living conditions sprawl.
Thus the local helper consciousness becomes increasingly swollen and
fixed in place. Privately and socially privileged as “the” personality, it
begins to conflate waking state, socially-mediated sensory perceptions with
the normative totality of experience — and relegate other modes of
intelligence to children, witches, dreams and madness. This is roughly
analogous to McGilchrist and Schlain’s claims that exaggerated left-brain
function has characterized the last several thousand years in a distorting,
dehumanizing and inaccurate manner.
In Gurdjieff’s narrative, we arrive historically at a split condition. We are
double-minded. And these two rival psychologies occupy different
physiological modes — different largely in tempo of brain waves and the
circulation of blood (and electricity) through the body. He addresses three
hypnotherapeutic modes for drawing out the other (now subconscious)
personality.
The first is the combination of emotional concentration and unspecified
significance. This is still used today in most hypnotherapeutic interventions.
The sense of a meaningful but non-specified target of focus is generated
visually or verbally. A beautiful shining object with no special content. A
mysteriously potent mystery. A suggestive countdown toward…
The second is the use of what he calls the hanbledzoin — a kind of somatic-
affective charge and persuasive self-presencing that “energetically” draws
the other person into a deep resonance and willingness. These feelings
stances and voluntary capacities reside in what is currently subconscious
and so that is evoked.
However, with some humor, the self-parodying character of Beelzebub
laments that his work benevolently hypnotizing highly deserving clients
uses up his wondrous supply of hanbledzoin — leading him to innovate
another more efficient method. He begins to experiment with direct
modification of body positions and pressure to alter the physical tempo of
blood circulation, breathing and metabolism in order to resurrect the slower
consciousness.
The rather fabulous proposition of the narrative of Beelzebub’s Tales is that
all wisdom-instruction thus far has failed on our planet. Through human
history, the noble efforts of awakened saints and illuminated avatars have
been squandered and irrevocably distorted within one generation of their
teachings specifically because they are teaching to the socialized waking-
state mind. That mind co-opts the input by placing it into symbolic
categories. Wisdom, he says, is readily coopted by the superficial functions
of the waking-state consciousness and the only time that a great truly wise
avataric teacher had real success in turning around life-conditions was when
Ashiata Shiemash worked directly with the seeds of virtues and wisdom
latent in the subconscious.
We must bear in mind, knowing both the virtues and dangers of trance
states, that some of Gurdjieff’s writings and communications, perhaps on
purpose, perhaps by instinct, have the trappings of “induction.” Although
much great literature is also like this.
 THE INTEGRATION SURPLUS MODEL

I have acquired a small amount of notoriety for my “integration surplus

model of religion and spirituality.” This framing began in the neurogenetic
tendency of my own youthful shamanoid brain to (instinctively, and then by
degrees seeking theories that reinforced this slant of my character)
preferentially circulate information between different parts of my brain.
What is the emotion of the number 5? Are the small subconscious
movements of other children on the soccer field trying to convey ideas to
me? Is there an art to science? A science to art? But despite this long inner
prehistory, the idea first emerged into the clear light of day when I set
myself the task of wrestling with Ken Wilber’s five definitions of
spirituality in his excellent volume Integral Psychology. Since the obvious
move following a deconstruction is a synthetic reconstruction that maintains
the challenge of plurality while regenerating an intuitive wholeness, I
assumed there must be some general way to think about post-postmodern
spirituality.
I began, at first tentatively, but with growing confidence, to suspect that the
integration of quadrants or states or lines, enabled by inner stances that
turned cognition into inner praxis, was the driver of unfolding nondogmatic
nonromantic spirituality. That the result of successful integrations created a
“gestalt” wholeness experience (not necessarily an ontological claim about
underlying wholes) which was an enlightening peak or plateau insofar as it
outshone or excessively permeated the entire field of cognitive and
perceptual objects (understood at the moment) and which appear pre-
critically as the whole world and the self.
That’s when I realized that this was an elaboration of what Gurdjieff had
been saying a century earlier.
At the core of his project was a trans-modernist reformulation of spiritual
growth as a process by which the harmonization of key lines of intelligence
(described simply as heart, mind and body) results in the emergence of
beingness (a coherent excess) that changes your way of being in the world,
bit by bit, regardless of what you believe.
I would extend the number of lines of intelligence and include other basic
epistemological and ontological zones. I would also point out that there is a
social analogue (religion) that performs a similar process with social genres
and types-of-people. And that the resulting numinous surplus coherence can
be lensed in first-, second- or third-person culturally-informed content. But
essentially Gurdjieff already presents a pragmatic short-hand version of the
underlying dynamic.
 THE GRANDFATHER
OF PARTS WORK

In the year 2022, just after the Canada/United States border reopened (to
people like me who were willing to pretend that face masks & dubious
corporate injections were keeping us safe from a novel flu-like pandemic), I
found myself on a tour of Stanford University in California.

I was in the austere company of a traveling Men’s Group organized by the

Integral Leadership Review. It consisted of Eric Reynolds (head of ILR),
Joe Lightfoot (the Australian podcaster who had run an intentional
community in South Asia), Jeremy Johnson (an ecological activist
specializing in Jean Gebser’s theories of Time) and the inimitable Adam
Wright (an expert in ethics and power dynamics within developmental
cultures).

Mr. Jordan Gruber was our gracious and loquacious local guide. I had
interviewed Jordan a year earlier for the Integral Stage Podcast’s “author
series” about a book he had co-written on the normative plurality of the
human psyche. It was called: Your Symphony of Selves.
I mention this because the idea of an inner symphony, or Dionysian chorus,
or what philosopher Gilles Deleuze called “the dividual,” is a point of
convergence between archaic worldviews, emerging science & Gurdjieffian
assumptions.

Today we use the term parts work to describe forms of neuropsychology,

psychotherapy and coaching that ask people to explore their own identity as
though it were a community or ecosystem of many sentient parts who can
be engaged through inner dialogue. It is a surprisingly effective and non-
invasive approach to self-knowledge and psychic healing. And like the soul-
retrieval practices of the shamanic lineages that pre-date the Babylonian
civilization, these approaches are deeply animistic. Not in the sense that
they insist on the objective fact of souls inhabiting every conceivable and
perceivable object but in the more general sense of presupposing a
distributed network of diverse and often unseen intentional agents as the
background condition in which growth, healing and transformation can
occur.
Near the end of our walk, Jordan took us into a shady copse of trees,
decorated years earlier with highly suggestive Polynesian carvings of men
and women in activated yogic trances. My shamanic attentions were
captivated. The rest of the tour vanished from my mind as my emotions
reached out for these sages and witches with wide eyes, gaping mouths and
outstretched fingers.
They appeared fully dialed open to receive whatever force was represented
by snakes of fire descending from the sky and passing through their bodies
into an underworld of death and decay. Or was it coming up from below?
Inside their bodies was depicted a menagerie of half-recognizable quasi-
human and animalistic forms. A lively inner ecosystem filled with many
magical species who were awakened and summoned together in these
representations of expansive bio-spiritual postures that had been passed
down by generations of South Pacific carvers from some primeval network
of unknown experiential adepts.
I wondered what it would mean for our own pack of digital nomads and
spiritual philosophers to take seriously that these images were important
technical messages sent specifically to us from across vast aeons of time?
And what would it be like for all of us to take seriously the living plurality
of the activated inner world?
The book Your Symphony of Selves proposes that it may not simply be the
psychologically unstable and traumatized people among us who have so-
called “multiple personalities,” but rather that this condition of psychic
manyness is normal and obvious except when veiled by the destructive
social illusion of a fixed singular identity.

Personally, I have always (always! I say) been intrigued by the notion that
the most mentally healthy people have the greatest ability to empathize with
diverse descriptions of psychological disorders. Is sanity just a symphony of
mental illnesses?
It is not so implausible.

Our brains consist of many modular networks whose particular functions

could be likened to instruments in an orchestra. The tuba on its own,
playing too loud or off-key, might be an exaggerated sense of anxiety,
deception, aggression or resignation. These qualities stand out as
psychological disorders when they are not harmonized and integrated with
the rest of their team. Proper orchestration, mediated by improved
communication and mutual appreciation between these parts, might turn
apparent disorders into a form of collaborative order that exceeds the
meagre fantasy of an individual inner ego-controller.
The epistemological framework of Gurdjieffian spirituality is
developmental coherent pluralism.

A productive transformational animism whose implied definition of

spiritual growth is that of increased communication between plural
psychological agencies and, in this sense, Gurdjieff’s work identifies itself
as an extension of indigenous shamanic practice.

This increased inner cooperation can be like a supportive dialogue, as it

often is presented in therapeutic contexts, but it can also be like a fiery
struggle in which our willingness to undergo contradiction, cognitive
dissonance and the sting of remorse places us in the position to connect two
highly charged behavioural tendencies that might otherwise be blind to each
other. In metamodern thinking, we should explore Gurdjieff’s
encouragement of self-struggle and intentional suffering through the lens of
parts work, dividuality and neo-animistic psychological ecosystems.

Again, as I have argued throughout this text, Gurdjieff is surprisingly

leading-edge.
 THE DISCOVERY OF PLURALISTIC
SPIRITUALITY

How on Earth did Gurdjieff get to be the way that he was? Obviously part
of the answer is simply that it was inborn and, just as obviously, much must
also have come from the general conditions of his childhood — perhaps
particularly his father’s unusual “educational experiments.”
However, in the introductory chapter of Beelzebub’s Tales, he also tells us
about three special events in his early life. These three anecdotes, however
allegorical or biographical they might be, are proposed as unique sources of
the attitude with which he confronted life.
One story involved his dying grandmother admonishing him very seriously
to make up his mind about normalism. That is, either commit himself
entirely to conventional social behavior or else commit with equal ferocity
to willfully unconventional behavior in all circumstances no matter how
serious other people feel those situations to be. He chose, as the dying
matriarch clearly wanted, the latter path.
The second situation involved a incurious barber and a hotblooded fight
between several young boys that involved a pretty girl, copious amounts of
saliva and the puzzling “wisdom tooth” that got knocked out during the
battle.
Yet it is the third preposterous anecdote that I wish to point out here
because its punchline catchphrase (“When you go on a spree, go whole hog
including the postage,”) became a regular teaching-reminder in the lore of
the Gurdjieffian lineage.
The phrase has a folksy charm. It suggests, at the surface level, the simple
idea that you shouldn’t balk at trifles when you are in the mode of having
an indulgent adventure. Good advice? Certain intensities of excitement
exist at the edges of our behavioral investments. Their energy and inner
treasures do not rise to the surface except when totally engaged. And if we
cannot do this in silly situations then perhaps we will lack the ability to act
with full integrity in serious circumstances? The teachings of the
controversial Indian guru Osho propose a tantric principle that any energy
will turn around and convert into spiritual refinement if you actually open
to it fully and ride it to the end.
If you’re gonna do wrong buddy, do wrong right.
– The Devil Makes Three, “Do Wrong Right”
Yet, what has Gurdjieff got to do with the obvious reading of an aphorism?
In fact, I will propose that — as per his theory of leaving the keys not near
the doors — that the phrase “whole hog including the postage” may
function as a general indirect indicator rather than a straightforward
communication. It marks the area around which to dig. And when he
proposes that “it” is the magical, energy-generating principle by which he
then lived his life, he may be talking not about the phrase itself, or the story
in which it is embedded, but about something sketched out in the contextual
material that is by-the-way to the story.

Here’s how it goes:

Gurdjieff claims to have heard a story about a respectable businessman
visiting a major Russian city. This fellow had been asked by his favorite son
to, if possible, look for a certain rare book at one of the large bookstores in
the city.
The businessman met a friend of his in the city and they got totally drunk
on vodka together before staggering over to the store and with some
difficulty located the book. It was priced at 45 kopecks but when he got to
the counter, the oily bookseller shyster charged him 60 kopecks! Highly
confusing to their drunken brains. The man began to get belligerent with the
seller who calmly explained that although it really does cost only 45 there
is, of course, 15 kopeks added for “postage” — even though, of course, they
were not posting it anywhere.
Two prices. Two impulses. A strong desire to get his son this book and an
equally strong desire to tell this bookseller to fuck right off. The pressure
made the man’s head feel as if it were going to explode. But the explosion
did not occur. Instead, all its energy hybridized. The two lines of passion
harmonized into an idiosyncratic insight structure that took the form of the
(apparently) intergalactically famous phrase: If you go on a spree, go whole
hog including the postage.
So they paid and left.
Hearing this story as a young man, Gurdjieff claims, his own head
exploded.
He became in that moment, “unfortunately doomed, while still living, to
experience the delights of Hell.” That meant he dropped immediately into
his cacophony of inner and writhing contradictions tearing him apart. It felt
like various “competitive races” has begun between his inner parts.
He describes an agitation in his spine and strong sensations in his solar
plexus, almost unbearable, but which “after the lapse of some time suddenly
were replaced by such a peaceful inner condition as I experienced in later
life once only when the ceremony of the great initiation into the
Brotherhood of the Originators-of-Making-Butter-From-Air was performed
over me.”
He then quotes an Arab and a Greek philosopher and suggests that a
“relatively transferable arising” was produced from the combination of
“thought, feeling and organic automatism” and that this is his actual “I.”
So he is describing a condition in which (permitting) a strong struggle
between different inner systems resulted, eventually, in a super smooth
delightful feeling of intensified authentic selfhood similar to being filled
with prana (i.e. a supersmooth, melty “something” that can come from the
air — according to ancient esoteric groups).
I would argue that it is this inner process, just described, and not merely the
total indulgence of a postage spree, that becomes, for Gurdjieff, an “all-
universal principle of living.”
The experiential possibility of working with contradictory inner pluralities
becomes the key insight that he uses, in the rest of his adventures, to probe
and tweak all our inherited human psychotechnologies.
In other words, he embarks upon a life that reframed all psychology and
spirituality through the lens of the dynamic pluralistic psyche.
 CONSCIENCE

Ouspensky has a beautiful formulation. He says: Consciousness is when

you think all your thoughts at once; conscience is when you feel all your
feelings at once.
To feel all your feelings at once, of course, would require being able to
access the largely subconscious panoply of contradictory emotions and
valuations lurking within us, and it would require the attitude of willingness
to suffer those contradictions.

When Gurdjieff speaks of the unfolding of the organic conscience as the

heart of his work, it is almost always coupled with the notion of remorse of
conscience.
In the mythological suggestions of Beelzebub, the creative Divinity of the
cosmos constantly mediates between joy & sorrow, and suffers their
interaction in all times and places. Conscience is our local attunement to the
emanations of sorrow that pervade the universe and your interest in
receiving these rays can help take the pressure off God.

To do this you must be willing to lean into things you do not want to feel
(Gurdjieff says “help non-desires to predominate over desires”). You have
to want (or at least want to want) to feel your pangs, grief, resistance, etc.
But as things currently stand, your so-called “consciousness” automatically
rejects most of this material. It protects itself from insights that arise out of
our complex self-critical instincts. It does not wish for the self-knowledge
that hurts. Instead, as any animal would, we prefer the strategy of self-
calming. We take neural shortcuts to resume emotional homeostasis and
minimize cognitive effort.
Unfortunately, this keeps us emotionally fragile and morally narrow. Most
of us do not come from homes or schools in which there is any encouraging
advice or deliberate actions in the intentional experience of inner moral
conflict. Our civilization features no significant education of the
conscience. In fact it is foreclosed by most of our bureaucratically-
monitored educational helpers who typically use the idea of avoiding bad
feelings to reinforce obedience to the social norms that best serve family,
country and business.
We think we’re being nice when we tell children not to be sad. We cover up
for our failures and avoid the frustrations involved in learning new things.
We say “don’t cry” and we explain to apologists that they should not “be
sorry.” Perhaps we even recommend medication.
Yet we grow through doing things that make us feel ignorant. And our
country will have an inherently corrupt corporate community if businesses
are legally incentivized to pay fines rather than make admissions of
culpability. We must start to challenge the idea of compulsively evading the
sense of our own wrong-doings and failures.
Moral growth is largely dependent upon being encouraged to be disturbed
by those actions of ours that contradict our own values. This is a special
subset of the general developmental need to welcome the self-contradictory
feelings that “cognitive dissonance” typically tries to evade.
It is through these contradictions that we start to forge an integrity-
intelligence that will progressively begin to express itself as the subtle
prompts and evaluations of “organic conscience” (in distinction to
moralistic reactivity and cultural norms).
The minimum requirement would be to normalize, and learn a positive
attitude about, the emotional experience of organic self-critique so that it
can begin to more fully enter into your behavioral sensemaking.
 THE ROLES OF MEN & WOMEN
From the chapter “France” in Beelzebub’s Tales:
These said contemporary customs or fashions of theirs are, firstly, only
temporary and thus serve for the satisfaction only of the personal
insignificant aims of these present and future Hasnamusses, which
become phenomenally abnormal and trivially egoistic; and secondly,
they are neither more nor less than the results of automatic Reason
based on that relative understanding, which generally flows from the
abnormally established conditions there of ordinary being-existence.
Thus, in this same city Paris, about one and a half of their centuries
ago, several of these Hasnamussian candidates ‘invented’ that the
beings of the female sex there should go about with their hair cut, and
this maleficent invention of theirs began to spread like wildfire by ways
and means already established there. But as at that period, in the
beings of the female sex of that same community France, the feelings
of morality and patriarchality were still very strong, they did not adopt
that maleficent invention; but the beings of the female sex of the
communities called England and America did adopt it, and began to
cut their hair. Moreover as the beings of the female sex of both these
communities there began voluntarily to deprive themselves of that part
of themselves which is adapted also by Great Nature for certain
exchanges of cosmic substances, Nature did not fail to react and began
to produce corresponding results, which will certainly take the forms,
as had already occurred twice on this planet: the first time, in the
country ‘Uneano,’ now ‘Kafirstan,’ where there appeared what are
called ‘Amazons,’ and the second time in ancient Greece, where there
was created the ‘religion of the poetess Sappho.’ And while in these
two contemporary communities, namely, in the community England
and in the community America, the cutting of women’s hair has already
produced, in the first case ‘suffragettes,’ and in the second what are
called ‘Christian Scientists’ and ‘theosophists,’ and moreover when
this Hasnamussian fashion of cutting the hair of beings of the female
sex became universally spread, as you will learn from the continuation
of my tale, a proportionate increase was everywhere noticed — as I
 was informed by the etherogram I received — in the number of the
illnesses of these unfortunate beings of the female sex, which they call
women’s diseases, namely, various sorts of venereal inflammations of
the sexual organs, such as ‘vaginitis,’ ‘uteritis,’ ‘ovaritis,’ and what
they call ‘cancer.’

Is Gurdjieff actually claiming that increases in ovarian cancer, and the

prevalence of theosophical movements, can be traced to the lesbianism-
inducing modern fad of women trying to appear more agentic by cutting
their hair short and thereby interfering with a delicate cellular structure
designed to facilitate subtle electrochemical exchanges that are necessary
for general health and self-regulation?
It is fun to even ask such an odd question.
Obviously Gurdjieff is (at least) critiquing social surfaces. To his pre-
Babylonian gaze, the people of the cities have adopted bizarre customs of
self-presentation that are not based in organic patterns or even in actual
cultural vitality.
Fashions (including our attempts to signal our social values and personal
identities through choices about how we present ourselves in public) are for
him — like news, advertising, sporting events, conventional churches,
dance clubs, popular music, contemporary art, etc. — just more of the same
stupidity that reinforces a low-energy, dispirited civilization that cannot
unfold its individuals to their full psychophysical potential. And which, in
addition, frequently erupts into polarization, mass hysteria and self-
destructive violence.
Many seers have felt likewise. Nonetheless there remains an open question
about how he viewed sex and gender. Should we actually discourage girls
from the unnatural, anti-feminine and dubious-looking modern fad of
wearing their hair short? Is he actually saying that it turns them into
Amazons and lesbians and gives them vaginal infections? Or is he making
fun of those ideas based on having heard them espoused by countless inane
commentators? It is intriguingly hard to say.
You see, you have to be careful with writers.
Nietzsche, for example, is often credited with the phrase, “If you are going
to see a woman, do not forget the whip.” Even assuming you actually know
what he means by a deliberately hyperbolic word like “whip” you should
not forget that this is simply a line of dialogue from a fragment that he
wrote in which the comment is spoken by a cantankerous old lady. So what
do you think — does it represent Nietzsche’s views or not?
The longest Gurdjieffian discussion on appropriate gender behavior occurs
in Beelzebub’s Tales in the section on “France,” but unless we simply
pretend that context and characterization do not exist, then its importance
becomes extremely murky — and who knows what old treasures could be
submerged in such old murk as black as the fertile silt of the ancient Nile.
Gurdjieff is telling the story of a devil from Mars who, in turn, is telling a
tale to his grandson on a starship. The tale includes a sub-tale about how
our disguised alien Satan met a young Persian man in the city of Paris who
recounted his own uncle’s views on appropriate relations between men and
women. That’s the context.
Encountering the views expressed in such a context, to what degree would
you feel that you had accurately received Gurdjieff’s opinions about sex
and gender? Especially when he claims so frequently that the surface
content of his books consists mainly of ploys designed to convey more
cryptic data to various layers of the subconscious mind. Hesitate at the gate.
The general Gurdjieffian approach is focused on renormalizing ordinary
human beings of contemporary civilization so that a resuscitated wisdom
culture could become capable of participating in the cosmically-significant
regeneration of the terrestrial biosphere and the associated emergence of
authentic new shamans from among the dominant sapient species. Right?
That requires working with long-evolved natural structures found both in
biology and old cultures. And since most human beings, both by
temperament and by virtue of the intergenerational need for breeders, tend
to sort into “male” and “female,” it is likely that a truly humanizing
teaching will, on average, help males to become more like real men and
females more like real women.
On average. That certainly does not mean everybody (although everybody,
in his view, should be humorously denounced, individually and en masse,
for all their preferences and identities).
In fact, the shamanoids, regardless of their neurogenetic mating and
breeding preferences, typically exhibit a high degree of openness, fluidity
and indifference to traditional gender roles.
What do the god-emperors of ancient Egypt have in common with archaic
shamans and Elvis Presley? Mascara.
And in 1920s Paris, a lady with short hair and trousers probably had a
higher than normal chance of being exactly the kind of well-educated,
organic proto-witch that Gurdjieff’s project required. Sometimes Zen
teachers use metaphors of darkness, ignorance and triviality to describe
states of extraordinary illumination. They may describe the Buddha as a
piece of dog shit or suggest that you kill him if you see him on the road.
Would it really be so strange if Gurdjieff used the term “vaginitis” to
describe that special positive something that might allow him to sniff out a
promising female apprentice?
So it is hard to get a read on his opinions in this matter. He does indulge in
the vociferous presencing of patriarchal customs and makes wildly derisive
comments on the supposedly liberating nature of contemporary styles but
he also puts a lot of attention onto praiseworthy descriptions of the “third
sex.” He even elaborately explains that existential development proceeds
much more readily and pleasantly on the “planets” where non-binary
gender culture is stabilized.
Overall, my impression is that he doesn’t give a damn about people’s
sexuality or gender identities. He attacks them because one “ought” to
attack everyone’s habits, preferences and identities. Especially if you care
about their post-conventional growth. He attacks pretty much everyone
pretty much all the time.
As Groucho Marx sang, “Whatever it is… I’m against it!”
Today’s social incentives and norms are fine-tuned for a cultural battle
between the self-asserted identities of marginalized classes & the
reactionary re-imposition of simplified identity-husks by the distressed
members of formerly hegemonic classes.
A metamodern spirituality growing in the midst of such polarizing nonsense
must take time to ponder seriously how it might subordinate both sides (and
both-sides-ism) to the goal of assisting the inner growth and social
significance of shamans, sages and wisdom-participants.
 HUMOUR & CHARACTER

One of the most personal and, at the same time, most divine things about a
human being is their sense of humor. They do not have to be good at
making jokes. Many people are not. Yet there is still a radiant part of them
— a quality of wit, cognitive liberty and perceptual acuity — that can
appreciate the ridiculous. Many people, even in our own families, may be
very difficult to sympathize with until you realize that they are actually, on
occasion, trying to make jokes or be silly. Play is a deeply organic capacity
(even in those who cannot do it well and will not do it often)
I grew up exceedingly remotely and fell in love with the radio comedy
presented by the nationalized Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was
pretty much the only radio signal we could receive. I heard good natured
vocal impersonators, scathing political satire and — my favourite — a
Summer-only program called Comedy Classics. This featured famous
stand-up comedy routines and wild excerpts from classic humor albums.
Monty Python. Steven Wright. Woody Allen. Eddie Murphy. George Carlin.
And I would almost put George Gurdjieff in that group. To me he is so
damned funny it is hard to believe.
Of course, I have a terrible habit of finding humor in inappropriate places. I
was once thrown out of a Shakespeare play (As You Like It) in Victoria, BC
because my raucous laughter was distracting the other patrons. Apparently
the members of the local Shakespeare Appreciation Society did not
“appreciate” it as a source of 17th-century puns, ludicrous double entendres
and ridiculously extended ironic monologues. It seemed to me that I “saw”
the vast head of William Shakespeare hovering in the space of the theatre
and transmitting these hilarious reflections and comedy “bits” down
through the centuries.
Can you actually appreciate an author if you do not connect to their sense of
humor? You certainly miss out on some of their intention and deprive
yourself of the deeply human place inside them that resonates with the
preposterousness of reality.

One of the things I have enjoyed very much about the online dialogues
between Christopher Mastropietro and the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke
is the way that they emphasize the need for sincere irony. In their analysis
of Kierkegaard and Socrates, they conclude that it is only through the
double-impact of a “performed perspective” — a simultaneous gesture of
empathy and criticism — that one encounters the personal dimension of a
philosopher deeply enough that their own character becomes a portal into a
transcendental apprehension.
I would say that you cannot receive Gurdjieff’s “transmission” unless you
also decide to resonate with the peculiarity of his jokes. If it does not seem
funny to you then perhaps you have not turned it over enough times that the
message becomes clear.
Dig for the jokes.
Let sincere irony be your guide.
 “CRAZY WISDOM”

My own awareness of Gurdjieff began with the disreputable Wilson twins:

Colin (British) & Robert Anton (American) were both well-connected and
well-respected Wilsons. They were both humorous sci-fi novelists,
philosophers and alternative historians with a deep interest in new
existentialism, magic, flow states and transformational neuropsychology. I
read them young.
They both educated me about the great and outlandish 20th-century
alchemists and virtuosos-of-the-imaginal such as Dr. Timothy Leary,
Abraham Maslow, Aleister Crowley, Phillip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft,
Terence McKenna, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and many others. It was
almost frightening how many of the same people and themes were being
explored by these two unconnected transatlantic Wilsons. They both had a
real knack for locating and promoting smart, experimental “outsiders” who
operated in the cultural twilight zone between spiritual brilliance and
bizarre buffoonery.
With that background, in my early teens I picked up some material by
Ouspensky in the Sidney Public Library. His famous The Fourth Dimension
caught my attention and I was thrilled to find a powerful intellect investing
his inquiry simultaneously into speculative physics, Nietzsche’s eternal
recurrence and the imagery of the Tarot deck. And once his name was
imprinted on my mind it became easier to see in many places.

I found William Patterson’s Struggle of the Magicians, which details his

own take on the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky relationship. Part of that relational
struggle involved Ouspensky’s well-behaved refusal to accept Gurdjieff’s
increasingly indirect communication and socially unconventional behavior.
For example, one time Ouspensky arranged for Gurdjieff to present his
method to an audience of leading Russian academics. This lecture on
frontiers of psychology was delivered in a masterful and plausible
fashion… until the very end. In the final moments of the talk, Gurdjieff
pivoted, with a straight face, to an increasingly bizarre tale about how he
had once seen very crafty rural villagers training vultures to retrieve lost
jewelry from an impenetrable chasm in the remote mountains. The audience
went from seemingly interested to seemingly dismissive.

Why did Gurdjieff do this? Was it an instinct for trying to set up a

postconventional mood in that particular space? Was it an allegory meant to
communicate past the “left brain” to its nonlinear subconscious levels? Or
was it an indulgent, self-destructive bit of pointless nonsense that inhibited
the practical spread of wisdom in the world? Ouspensky struggled.
I did not really zero in on Gurdjieff until I had access to the University of
Victoria library. I was not impressed by my University life. Although my
classes in Existentialism, Aesthetics, Ethics, Psychology and Physics
touched on topics that obsessed me, the general atmosphere was a soul-
crushing ordeal of institutional hazing that radically undermined my
romantic ideal (about which I had written a scholarship-winning essay)
about institutions of higher culture.

As I began increasingly to ponder the option of fleeing academia into the

jungles of Central America for a psychedelic, erotic and poetic adventure in
the hypnagogic ruins of Mayan civilization, I started to withdraw from my
classes and spend more and more hours each days in the old “stacks” of the
library. It had good stuff. The anthropology of shamanism. Philosophies of
paradox. Non-standard models of physics. Research data on Harvard’s use
of psilocybin to treat federal prisoners in the 1960s. Obscure dusty volumes
about the Surrealist art movement and Tantric Yoga. It was here that I came
across Georg Feuerstein’s analysis of Crazy Wisdom teachers — entitled
Holy Madness.
Crazy wisdom? Holy madness?
Anyone versed in the Tarot Deck will have noticed that the “Fool” and the
“Magus” cards are directly adjacent to each other. There is a long tradition
of blurred lines between shamanic tricksters & compassionate bodhisattvas,
but it is highly disputed to use that overlap to assert a peculiar subclass of
enlightened saints who violate religious norms in the service of blowing the
minds of their students.
From the perspective of developmental psychology it is very easy to
conflate pre-conventional and postconventional intelligence. There is a real
risk that emotionally immature and socially undisciplined people will treat
their experience of altered states of consciousness as a general permission
to indulge in egregious behavior under the banner of Crazy Wisdom.
We all know assholes who think that they are “helping” other people by
abusing, confusing and distressing them. And why not? They are ostensibly
at “war” with “your ego” — and everyone knows that you cannot make a
spiritual omelette without breaking some narcissistic eggs.
There is a certain plausibly to all this but the opportunity for misuse, trauma
and degradation of the Dharma is obviously enormous. But perhaps the
opposite risk is even worse? It is possible that spiritual wisdom begins to
degenerate as soon as its window of experimentation becomes narrow and
its prophetic rebelliousness is submitted to the professional pseudo-ethical
standards and ideals of the very society that is oppressing our soulmaking
capacity. The marginalization of our spiritual wilderness and wildness may
be as destructive as the loss of natural chaos in external ecosystems.
And let us not forget that the vast majority of abusers do not present
themselves as deviants and outliers. Statistically, the greatest danger usually
comes from those who conceal their madness and strange instincts under
the cover of being a well-behaved, virtuous and wholly admirable figure.

Remind me again who turned out to be ritually sexually abusing children —

was it the Satanists or the Catholic Church? And it is anyone’s guess
whether a group of a hundred mayors and police chiefs will contain fewer
sociopaths than a group of one hundred so-called “cult leaders.” Predators
have an instinct for camouflage and the easiest form of human cultural
camouflage is to portray yourself as exemplifying conventional virtues.
Gurdjieff never seemed to want to present himself as wholly admirable. “A
stick,” he always said, “has two ends.” That means that if he takes the good
end of the stick — what does that leave for us?
But back to Feuerstein’s book! It featured folks like Chögyam Trungpa
(who popularized the phrase Crazy Wisdom), Adi Da Samraj, Bhagwan
“Osho” Rajneesh and Gurdjieff, whose status as trickster-teachers was
backed up by a host of famous “crazy saints” throughout history who give
the concept a kind of pedigree.
Nevertheless, Gurdjieff was different than these other teachers. He did not
set himself up in the Eastern manner. There were no halls of devotional
worship, no elevated dais of garlands, no beads, no robes. He did not hide
from the world like a tenured professor but was a free range explorer who
interacted constantly with the general public and associated with people of
all ranks, professions and ethnicities. He took his show on the road. And,
especially after his wife’s death, he seemed to both critique the social
personality and gain some odd energy by generating hassle in public.

He tended to cause perplexity, vexation and consternation much like Larry

David from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sascha Baron Cohen in Borat or the
Marx Brothers on vacation. Whether this was the result of a perverse
element in his character or a stratagem for rapidly exposing the essence of
people around him, or perhaps simply a natural result of “being himself” in
an abnormal civilization, I’m not sure anyone can know definitively.

It places us in front of a question mark.

Consider the following Monty Pythonesque incident from among many
such examples chronicled in Fritz Peters’ entertaining volume My Journey
with a Mystic:
I had planned to go to Chicago during my two weeks’ vacation in the
summer of 1934, and when Mr. Gurdjieff learned of this he decided
that he would make a visit to Chicago at the same time as it would be
convenient for him to have me as a travelling companion. I was very
proud to be “selected” to act as his companion and secretary when he
went to Chicago and I looked forward to the trip. For some reason, I
think because he felt it would be a suitable time for him, we were to
leave on a train at midnight. I was packed and ready for the trip early
in the evening and went to his apartment in what I thought was plenty
of time.
What with his packing—piles of clothing, books, food, medicine, etc.,—
he was not ready to leave the apartment until well after eleven p.m.,
and when we arrived at the station with only about ten minutes to
spare we were met by a large delegation of the New York followers. It
seemed that each one of them had some urgent last-minute business to
take up with him, and about two minutes before train time I interrupted
him impatiently, and told him we had to board the train. He said that
we had to have a few more minutes—that the extra time was absolutely
essential—and for me to talk to someone and arrange to delay the
train. I looked at him dumbfounded, but realized that there was no
arguing with him. I managed to find some official and made up some
story about the importance of Mr. Gurdjieff which, to my great
surprise, was effective, and the official agreed to hold the train for ten
minutes. Even so, Mr. Gurdjieff did not manage to complete his urgent
farewells until the train was actually moving and I had to push him
through the door of the last car with his six or seven pieces of luggage.
As soon as he was in the moving train, he began to complain in a loud
voice about having been interrupted and demanded that a bed be
prepared for him immediately. The conductor, with my help, explained
to him that our berths were thirteen cars ahead and that we would
have to walk to them —very quietly, as most of the other passengers
had boarded the train early and were already asleep—through the
entire train. Gurdjieff looked appalled, sat down on one of his
suitcases, and lighted a cigarette. The conductor or porter told him
that smoking was forbidden except in the men’s room and he groaned
loudly about this hardship, but did consent to put out his cigarette. It
must have taken us—Gurdjieff, conductor, porter, and me—at least
forty-five minutes to get to our assigned berths. Our progress — with
all the luggage and with Gurdjieff’s lamentations about the rude
treatment he was receiving—was so noisy that we awakened almost
everyone on the train. In every car, heads would appear through the
curtains to hiss at us and curse us. I was furious with him, as well as
exhausted, and greatly relieved when we found our berths. Then, to my
horror, he decided that he had to eat, drink, and smoke, and began
unpacking his bags in search of food and liquor. I was finally able to
force him into the men’s room.
Once there, he settled down to eat and drink and to discourse in loud
tones about the terrible service on American trains and the fact that he
—a very important man—was being treated in this shoddy fashion.
When we were finally threatened—in no uncertain terms— by both the
conductor and the porter, with expulsion from the train at the next
stop, I lost my temper completely and said that I would be glad to get
off the train in order to get away from him. At this, he looked at me in
wide-eyed innocence and wanted to know if I was angry with him—
and, if so, why. I said that I was furious and that he was making a
spectacle of both of us, so he put his food and drink away sadly and
then, lighting another cigarette, said that he had never imagined that I,
his only friend, would talk to him in this way, and quite literally, desert
him. This attitude only increased my anger and I said that once we
arrived in Chicago I hoped never to see him again. He then went to
bed in his lower berth, still very sorrowful and still muttering about my
unkindness and lack of loyalty, and I climbed into the upper berth
hoping for some much-needed sleep. After about five minutes,
punctuated by moans and groans from Gurdjieff as he tossed and
turned in the lower berth, and by renewed hissing and cursing from the
other passengers, he began to talk in a loud voice, complaining that he
needed a drink of water, had to have a cigarette, and so forth. There
were more threats from the porter and finally, at about four a.m., he
settled down and did go to sleep.
We were the last passengers to awaken the next morning and while he
dressed and made several trips to the men’s room in whatever state of
undress he happened to be at the moment, we were stared at by a car
full of hostile travelling companions who had, of course, identified us
as the troublemakers of the night before. After about one hour, I
managed to get him to the dining car, hoping for a peaceful breakfast,
but once again my hopes were dashed. There was nothing on the menu
that he could eat, and we had long, irritating conversations with the
waiter and the head steward about the possibility of procuring yoghurt
and similar—at that time—exotic foods, accompanied by vivid
descriptions of his particular digestive process and its highly
specialized needs. After several long discussions, he suddenly gave in
and ate, without any visible discomfort but with a great many
complaints, a large American breakfast. As the train did not arrive in
Chicago until late that afternoon, I was not looking forward to
spending the day in the Pullman car, but once again I hoped for the
best. My fears, however, were well-grounded.
I have never, in my life, spent such a day with anyone. He smoked
incessantly, in spite of complaints from the passengers and threats
from the porter; drank heavily, and produced, at intervals when we
seemed momentarily threatened with peace, all kinds of foods, mostly
different varieties of strong-smelling cheeses. Although he apologized
 profusely every time the other passengers complained about his
behaviour, he also constantly found new ways to annoy, irritate and
offend them— not to mention me. When we did actually arrive in
Chicago it seemed to me nothing less than a miracle.
What do you make of this preposterously exaggerated performance of
public disturbance? Was it for the sake of young Fritz or for the train
passengers or only himself? It is not quite the behavior of a straightforward
asshole — especially when combined with the many tales of his
compassion and benevolence — but neither does it resemble our standard
expectations about a saint or spiritual teacher.
And I would not want to do you the uncouth disservice of rationally making
sense of this outrageous social turbulence for you, since I suspect that the
ambiguity itself may prove pivotal for anyone daring enough to take this
seriously and simultaneously foolish enough to have completed this
sentence….
 THE TWO ERRORS OF
HISTORICAL BUDDHISM

In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, the wily protagonist makes sojourns

down to the planet Earth where his primary activity could be interpreted as
“correcting the religions” (what he calls the havatvernoni).

Our Divinely-Wise & Patriarchal Galactic Rebel-Demon is a gardener of

sacred cultures. He critiques the errors of avatars and attempts to correct
course for the predictable deviations and disruptive interpretations that
occur among the advocates of esoteric practices and social morality.

In the garden of world religions, the gorgeous flowers of Buddhism stood

out prominently to Beelzebub as deserving special attention. He says that
the early hunters, fishermen and traders of the Indian subcontinent found
lush natural resources that led to the formation of early cities and
communities. Particularly in the northwestern region, between the
Saraswati and Indus rivers, where the great and mysterious proto-Harappan
civilization seems to have overseen the growth of shamanic practices into
the yogic schools later inscribed into the Upanishads and the Vedas. This
“land of pearls,” Beelzebub tells us, attracted surviving lineages of
prehistoric wisdom.

Although a flourishing sacred culture arose rapidly, it just as rapidly

decayed as India became host to an ever-expanding cacophony of drug-
addicts, sociopathic gurus, political priests, masochistic ascetics, gullible
populations, untreated emotional-sexual problems, suppressive domestic
patterns, horrifying rituals and rampant pollution. Regressive, cult-like and
deviant forms of intentional community spread across the land. India’s
pearls were cast before swine. And it was for this reason that a genuine
Divine Alien — whom Beelzebub calls “Saint Buddha” — chose to
incarnate in this most wretched hive of scum and villainy.

But Buddha made a classic mistake. Despite being wise, sincere and fully
illuminated, he was too reasonable.

He concluded that people could be returned to healthy living, existential

self-unfolding & transpersonal praxis through an appeal to their pragmatic
reason. A sensible analysis of human suffering coupled to an almost medical
prescription: the 8-fold path. This might have worked on most planets but it
was nearly useless on Earth.

A rational and pragmatic teaching will inevitably be intercepted by the

automated socio-verbal machinery of domesticated human consciousness.
We imagine that we hear and understand the teaching. We think it is very
straightforward. We gather to enact it — but we do not reckon with
widespread bias in our cognitive systems.
The parts of ourselves that actually need to receive the Dharma, and which
might be able to authentically embody it, remain untouched in the strange
twilight zone of the subconscious mind. A verbal, rational teaching of
Enlightenment is like a country that legally enshrines its egalitarian values
without noticing that it remains systemically racist or sexist. The official
position changes very little about the way the world actually works. The
behavioral biases are encoded at a layer below the content of knowledge
and they impose limits on the effectiveness of that knowledge.

So within a generation, according to Beelzebub, Saint Buddha’s wise

teachings and superlative transmission left behind only a distorted and
deluding (but highly praised and socially suggestive) form of Dharma. In
particular, he noticed two gaping discrepancies between the teaching of
Buddha and the social doctrines that spread through India and Tibet under
the name of “Buddhism.”

The FIRST GREAT ERROR concerned the role of suffering and ascetic
practice.
While the divine alien Buddha indicated that human beings could grow to a
self-transcending degree of Beingness through undertaking a life of self-
perfecting that involved intentional conscious struggle with our egotistical
reactions, he nonetheless specified that the most useful form of
transmutational suffering was interpersonal friction.

We can accelerate our growth into transpersonal intelligence through the

mutational power of interpersonal friction or misalignment (dukkha). This
is where we encounter our traumas, stimulate our parts work & open more
deeply into the relational coherence upon which the emergence of spiritual
intersubjectivity depends. It did not occur to Saint Buddha that the humans
would immediately use this as an excuse to escape from the suffering of
their actual personal lives and social encounters.

Many sects of Buddhists began to organize special monastic prisons for

solitary celibacy, malnourishment and private physical ordeals coupled with
exaggerated exercises of inwardness. They sought transcendence in the self-
nullifying struggle of isolated asceticism. Yet religious hermits and anti-
relational cave-dwellers are extremely unlikely to encounter and transmute
the friction generated in their typical patterns of psychological upset with
other people. Today we might call this a form of spiritual bypassing.
The SECOND GREAT ERROR concerned the subtle body.

According to Beelzebub, Saint Buddha did communicate an esoteric

teaching about the need to use mindful breathing practices to absorb and
assimilate a developmental “energy” called prana. In order to nourish
yourself on this substance — whether via breathing or directly through the
permeability of the skin — one must already have at least a rudimentary
capacity for experiencing oneself as a generalized field of enlivened
somatic interoception. A “subtle” form of embodiment. Once you have this
capacity stabilized, you need to feed it, work it & make it smarter.
Otherwise you may suffer psychophysical destabilization, erratic sensitivity
and dangerously weird perceptions. An untended half-soul is probably
worse than no soul at all.

However, while it is essential for such people to regularly engage with the
intentional and imaginal blending of their “kesjdan body” with this airborne
(or oxygen-bound) excitation, this does not happen automatically for all
beings. It requires that we are already operating as quasi-independent,
localized centers of prana-refinement. The mere stimulation of your cells
through breathing does not activate this additional layer of capacity.
Beelzebub mocks the people of India for the common belief that everyone
is born with a soul. That just by existing, he scoffs, they assume that they
are “already particles of Mr. Prana himself.”

Our wise UFOnaut and creative problem-solver decides to see if he can

accomplish some good with this widespread superstition. He wants to put
an end to the ancient practice of mass animal sacrifices. As a transcultural
metashaman, Gurdjieff constantly sets his protagonist the task of stabilizing
ecological complexity and preventing the loss of the necessary biodiversity
upon which the material, energetic and imaginal machinery of the Gaian
world-system depends. Since the people of India already believed
(idiotically, in his view) that everyone is born with a reincarnated soul, he
only has to extend that delusion slightly by convincing them that “every
breathing creature” also has an automatically existing soul.

He persuades a few zealots that the religious murder of animals is a crime

that will invite the wrath of Mr. God and prevent them from being taken
away, at death, to His island paradise where fresh fruit, piles of diamonds &
nubile, multiracial maidens with low-standards are found in abundance. He
mocks their religious ideation with such descriptions, but he is not far off
from many mythic-literalist scenarios. His idea spreads like wildfire. The
population is already gullible and the land is rich in narcissists, gaslighters
and sociopaths who want to gain social status by promulgating idealist
doctrines that prey on people’s aspirations, empathies and conformism.
In a few years, almost all the people of the Indian subcontinent had not only
stopped their practices of animal sacrifice but taken up vegetarianism en
masse. Many sects even became carried away and began refusing to walk
on the ground or breathe unfiltered air for fear of killing the sensitive little
organisms.

So, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, it goes.

ADDENDUM

Despite the widespread errors of the Buddhists, Beelzebub hints that they
nonetheless produced some of the greatest inner saints in the world due to
their meditative, contemplative and empathic practices. Unfortunately the
disparity of consciousness between the greatest Tibetan Buddhist saints and
the rest of the civilization proved too great. They could not blend with the
rest of humanity. And as the metaphorical “Himalayas” grew so high,
capable of such rare vision, they began to imbalance the planet itself and
provoke great cultural earthquakes. We are used to blaming the Chinese
communist revolution for the obscene slaughter and oppression of Tibetan
spiritual culture. Perhaps, in a typically Gurdjieffian reversal, we should
also blame Tibetan spiritual culture for the earthquake of the Chinese
communist revolution…

Don’t tell me what the poets are doin’

Those Himalayas of the Mind
Don’t tell me what the poets are doin’
In the long grasses, over time…
– The Tragically Hip, “Poets”
 ANOMALY AS SHAMANIC
CURRICULUM

As of 2023, the United States Military has officially opened the AARO
(All-inclusive Anomaly Resolution Office). All-inclusive anomalies! That
means that the “flying” in U.F.O. and the “aerial” in U.A.P. are now
professionally regarded as overly exclusionary terminology.

According to people in the government and the military, these unknown

things also appear under the ocean and upon the land. And they not only
violate our standard preconceptions about the particular terrains in which
vehicles ought to confine themselves but their brazenness strays into a
disregard for our most basic ontological categories. Are these objective
physical crafts, subjective mysticism or shared hallucinations? Are they
technologies of matter or mind?

Should we treat them as real — or unreal?

But anomalies be all, like, anomalous ‘n’ shit.
The experts are divided. We may be dealing with classes of phenomena that
are as-or-more-complex-than our ability to interpret them. Or, perhaps, we
have been sending the wrong experts at this problem?
Topics like cryptozoology, parapsychology, parapolitics, psionics, trans-
mundane entities, higher dimensional patterns, altered state perceptions,
synchronicity, lateral thinking, the imaginal arts, siddhis, etc. were
traditionally the para-normal domain of our shamans and witches.
The typical human brain, coupled with the pressures of pragmatic and
social life, tends to dismiss such vexatious peculiarities either by quickly
seizing on details that marginalize this entire class of data or else by
slipping into a simplistic metaphysical framework that equally removes the
anomalous quality by affirming an unproven, idealized and suspiciously
cartoonish version of events.
This ambidextrous habit of reductionism could be a problem for our general
sensemaking capacity but it might also indicate an ancient fact — that there
are organic specialists to handle these investigations. It is not for everyone.
A subset of the human population typically exhibits neuro-atypicalities that
are strongly drawn to ontological and epistemological anomalies.
Unfortunately, in contemporary civilization, very little comes of this interest
because we lack the normal custom of identifying, supporting and
promoting such people. And that, a cynic might add, is when we are not
actively burning them as heretics, confining them as lunatics or exploiting
them as entertainment commodities.
Gurdjieff repeatedly describes his own childhood as a theater of incredulity
in which the tritely reductive commentary of adults told him next to nothing
about the nature of prominent anomalies. They always told him the same
three things. It was always either an instance of psychological hysteria or
childish supernaturalism or some moralizing variant of the dominant mythic
religion of the region. Ghosts, devils or madness.
No one was very interested in considering complex possibilities or gaining
any firsthand experience of the paranormal. Thus, as the shaman children of
archaic villages have often done, he began his own researches in a quasi-
obsessive manner.
Personally, I feel fortunate to have parents who allowed open investigation.
There were also a few role models in 1990s popular culture. Fox Mulder
from the X-Files. FBI special agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks. Dirk
Gently (the Holistic Detective) and Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour. Not to
mention the French information scientist Jacques Vallee who proposed
higher dimensional models that combined aliens with folkloric entities.
When I wasn’t wandering in the forest by myself, I spent my free time
reading science fiction novels about non-human intelligences & altered
realities. I even portrayed the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus at a
Medieval Fair in Grade 8. The signs were all there. I was attempting to train
myself to be a rational investigator of transrational, imaginal and anomalous
phenomena. This is absolutely standard for a certain percentage of the
human population. And, more importantly, it is for something. It serves a
function that is necessary to the general population and perhaps even to the
biosphere itself.
But the keys to doing it well, as indicated by Gurdjieff’s fairly successful
self-example, are these:
 (a) persistently attend to the anomalous
(b) perform your own experiments
(c) do not accept any simplistic affirmations or dismissals.
You have to stay with the weirdness and in-betweeness of it. As I told Dr.
Sean Esbjörn-Hargens (the leading voice of integral exo-studies in the early
21st century), it is like we have laid out our best onto-epistemological map
of reality upon a carpet that turned out to have a mouse underneath. Now
we are puzzled to observe a strange and distorting lump that seems to be
navigating irrespective of our fundamental categories.
Although Gurdjieff never explicitly reports what our culture has come to
call “abductions” or “close encounters,” it is certainly suggestive that the
primary protagonist of his major work is the alien occupant of a flying
saucer — decades before such things became popular public memes. And,
in a way, his entire oeuvre is presented from the transhuman anomalous
visitor’s gaze.
 HUNTING FOR CHIEF FEATURES

The notion of a “chief feature” is not found in Gurdjieff’s writings but it

does play a significant role in many of the Gurdjieff group lineages —
particularly those in which Jane Heap was involved.
For example, it is explored prominently in On a Spaceship With Beelzebub
about an Armenian-American couple living on a Fourth Way farm run by
one of Jane’s students, Ms. Stavely, as well as in Diana Faidy’s
Reminiscences of My Work With Gurdjieff, which is connected both to the
Jane Heap network and Jean Toomer’s Chicago group in the 1930s.
The simple idea of Chief Feature is that each person’s false personality, ego
or reactive self (to spuriously use a Scientology term) has one central
prominent pattern located at the nexus of all its various non-essential issues.
Other people keep noticing this thing about us but we are blind to it. There
is a characteristic signature to our foolishness.
Does such a Chief Feature exist? That is an interesting psychological
question, but in terms of the practical heuristics of spiritual development it
is useful to pretend that it exists. We can elicit a very productive form of
mindfulness by watching our behavior through the lens of the question,
“What easily-described pattern which I am currently blind to is
characterizing much of my idiocy, hypocrisy and weakness?”
Elsewhere in this volume I have told the story of how I noticed that I
sometimes bent over to tie my shoelaces and straightened back up without
having done so! I’ve also checked my watch in a conversation and looked
back up without having learned what time it was.
And I used to “helpfully” do just a few of the dishes. In fact I would often
do a particularly difficult item to wash, imaging that I was freeing up the
next person by removing the obstacle.
What do all these have in common? Maybe nothing. Or maybe that I
compulsively congratulate myself too soon and stop doing the task before it
is completed.
Did I ever do 8 or 9 pushups, having intended to do 10, and then stood up,
quite pleased with myself — as though victorious? Did I ever abandon a
board game before it was over because I already felt like I’d won? Yep. Is
this my chief feature? Not necessarily. Who cares. I could list half dozen
possible chief features. What matters is that by watching out for them I
encountered moments during which these patterns burst saliently into my
consciousness as the characteristic of my own idiocy — requiring my own
efforts to correct. THAT feels productive.
The first phase of our personal journey begins when we are capable of
going astray. We gain an inferiority complex or an Achilles’ Heel. We are
privileged to join the community of human blind spots and, with our peers,
we turn the great wheel by trying to correct ourselves using the very
distorted view that generates the abnormal results (which then need to be
corrected).
A second phase of the journey begins when we start to “go meta”
(viscerally, not just intellectually) by living out the discovery of our pattern-
generating pattern of pattern-corrections.
A whole new mood of living starts to grow when we become capable of
these vivid glimpses of the “one error” that spoils and depraves our
behavior. Our characteristic weakness. But how will we find it?
Of course we can gain assistance from those who have already undertaken
such struggles or who are otherwise uniquely gifted in responding to us in
productively provocative and intuitive ways. But whether we find such a
person or not, the work is our own.
We must take up the interpretive lens of the inquiry. Begin to inspect your
moments of insufficiency. Get curious. Perform tests. Accept or invent
disciplines that might make these insights more frequent. Pay attention to
your own suspicions but check them with others. Postulate outlines but not
bind yourself to them. When you feel like you’ve got something relatively
stable, check with an insightful person and solicit their feedback.
Your particular original sin may be something that seems trivial and
unproblematic for others but for you it is an almost unfaceable shame.
The effort is three-fold:
(1) enter circumstances in which a chief feature might be provoked
while holding a curiosity about it,
(2) see it characterizing you,
(3) characterize it; name it.
You are not to fight it or change it but to see it more clearly. Discipline is a
situation to provoke the pattern for inspection. It is not a willful attempt to
override the pattern. It is the “seeing it more deeply” that should lead to an
organic change that fits in with your general organism — not an act of half-
informed self-modification.
The most basic shift is simply the attitudinal adjustment. It is an intrigue,
curiosity or even an ardor for really encountering an immature fragment of
our essential character that has been pressed into the hidden spot at the
center of the (retroactively) false personality. That is where it is located.
That is where it can be made visible to the self and then matured into its
own competence. That’s when things get really interesting.
This characteristic flaw, when actually integrated, may be the source of
your unique strength and contribution.

The only proof you’re getting any smarter is the realization of what an
idiot you’ve been until very recently.
– Robert Anton Wilson
 SURREALISM

One of the first books I ever read that referred to Gurdjieff called him “the
Salvador Dali of old-time Holy Men.” That turned me on because I was
quite crazy for Dali after encountering, by purest chance, his uncanny
painting of a burning giraffe featured in my father’s copy of Carl Jung’s
Man and His Symbols.

This was pre-Internet. I had to do a little detective work to discover that this
outrageously talented Spaniard was associated with a prominent
philosophical art movement originating in post-war Europe. There were
numerous pre-teen parties that I avoided in order to spend weekends at the
public library researching Magritte, Miro, Ernst, Eluard and Artaud. They
all appeared to be associated with two movements: Dada & Surrealism.
The spirit of the Dadaists was refreshingly anarchic. Akin to the relentless
transrational critique of civilization found in Beelzebub’s Tales, these poets,
painters and performers were in full revolt at the seemingly “reasonable”
modern system of liberal management, bureaucratic control, ethno-
nationalism and sane industrial progress. They had just seen all that stuff
lead to the most disastrously homicidal and unnecessary tragedy in human
history (WWI).
It became painfully obvious that the cultural avant-garde needed to explore
culture’s other options. Randomness. Irrationality. Primitivism. Non-
linearity. Deconstructive juxtapositions.
Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
– The Talking Heads, “I Zimbra” (1979)
from Hugo Ball’s Dadaist sound poem
Yet this was not nihilism. It was not merely a puerile negativity but rather a
series of liberating experiments that began to unfold toward new or
forgotten pathways. Most of the Dadaists started to mutate into something
like a new faithfulness. Oscillating between rational and irrational
intelligence, they encountered an emergent alchemical urgency toward le
surrealisme — the French word for hyperreality.
Just down the road from Gurdjieff’s Paris commune, a young French
medical student, obsessed with hypnotic states and the psychoanalytic
practice of free association, penned the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto.
Most of the avant-garde gathered around this Andre Breton, who proposed
that our spiritually bankrupt civilization needed to be magically regenerated
through the development of a kind of genius catalyzed into existence by the
hybridization of conscious & subconscious intelligences. A shamanic art-
pope, who said that he wished to change his sex as easily as he changed his
shirts, and who proclaimed that the new human being would be, “as
beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a
dissecting table.”
He had a real hard-on for the edges of meaning.
And although the madcap humor and artistic strangeness of the surrealists
do not typically characterize the serious-minded members of the Fourth
Way, Gurdjieff himself was clearly a very funny, inventive & artistic person
operating in 1920s Paris.

He delighted in the production of perplexing juxtapositions and spent a

large amount of his time with avant-garde poets, dancers and authors. In
fact the whole imagery of Beelzebub’s Tales is cosmo-Dalinian, and its
barbarous multilingual critique of human history is reminiscent of James
Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.
While Gurdjieff’s work has a potency and profundity that exceeds the
musings of mere modern art movements, it nonetheless has strong echoes of
the world-historical moment in which the Surrealists appeared.
From the poems of the “Mad” Dalai Lama to David Lynch’s odd mixture of
cinematic brilliance and neo-Hindu mysticism, there is a long, scattered and
largely unexplored history of the fertile intersections between surrealism &
spirituality. This is hardly surprising if we imagine the wisdom traditions as
streams that trickle down to us from the archaic shamanic dreamtime prior
to the rise of the Mesopotamian civilization.
I wish to bring to the knowledge of what is called your “pure waking
consciousness” the fact that in the writings following this chapter of
warning I shall expound my thoughts intentionally in such sequence
and with such “logical confrontation,” that the essence of certain real
notions may of themselves automatically, so to say, go from this
“waking consciousness” — which most people in their ignorance
mistake for the real consciousness, but which I affirm and
experimentally prove is the fictitious one — into what you call the
subconscious, which ought to be in my opinion the real human
consciousness…
– G. I. Gurdjieff,
The Arousing of Thought
 THE FIVE INSTINCTIVE OBLIGATIONS

Gurdjieff proposes that the imaginal cells — those parts of the caterpillar
that are prepared to become a butterfly and by which I mean the natural
esoteric subset of the human subset of the biosphere — naturally, and
eventually consciously, pursue 5 obligatory (“obli-gonian”) strivings over
the course of their lives. Let’s see how well you fit into this category:
First Striving: “To have in their ordinary being-existence everything
satisfying and really necessary for their planetary body.”
While this initially appears to be the goal of all beings, it can be peeled
back to reveal further nuances. First of all, this suggests stabilization and
intelligence at the ordinary level of life. All domestic situations are
imperfect and menaced, but you might slowly discover how important it is
for you, despite your love of novelty, to have a routine that meets your
nutrient, safety, conversational, sexual and belonging needs in a fairly
reliable way that frees you up for something else.

And that, of course, also requires that your inner, spiritual or existential
search is not expressed as a reactively ascetic withdrawal from the
relationships, energies and necessities of flesh and world.
Second Striving: “To have a constant and unflagging instinctive need
for self-perfection in the sense of being.”
Are you always working on something internally? Something that you
eagerly or even embarrassingly connect to enlightenment, salvation, magic,
existential authenticity, wisdom? This type of person that we are discussing
might frequently discover or conclude that One great desire underlies all
their motivations and terminates in (or proceeds indefinitely towards — for
a metamodernist can hold both of these together) some fundamental or
accumulating shift in the subjective quality of personal experience. This
shift involves a change in self-feeling, an increase of moral strength, a kind
of alignment to an external or virtual Absolute.
Although you cannot step outside the system to proclaim an objective state
of self-perfection, you certainly can arrive, again and again, and start to
stabilize in, a sense of self that exceeds all reasonable concerns. A sense of
being which, like the state triggered by serious Zen koan work, seems to
have answered all questions before they are asked. The mixture of the
ongoing developmental effort, the quality of subjective perfection and the
notion of an organic instinct are all combined in the shamanic individual.
Third Striving: “The conscious striving to know ever more and more
concerning the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance.”
Are you always checking in with the latest claims in cosmology,
psychology, cognitive science, complexification, organic growth, etc.? Do
you have a deep, instinctive and transdisciplinary compulsion to know big
picture, big history, and to constantly assimilate into your subconscious
feelings the leading edge world-maps?
There is a specialized form of ongoing transdisciplinary education implied
by this internal obligation. Although you might periodically feel as if you
should let go of thinking and rest finally in the unutterable condition of
consciousness and being, you find yourself feeding regularly on
information from the leading-edge of those sciences that describe the basic
structures of internal and external reality at all scales. You may wonder why
you do this — since you are not professionally involved in all these fields
and have no special desire to be “educated.” Nonetheless, you seem to be
compelled…
Fourth Striving: “The striving from the beginning of their existence to
pay for their arising and their individuality as quickly possible, in
order afterwards to be free to lighten as much as possible the Sorrow
of our Common Father.”
Do you have an odd “moral” compulsion to be helpful to the cosmos? To be
one of “God’s helpers”? Do you relate to the Bodhisattva vow? In hindsight
does it appear as though you moved very quickly through the normal
options of youth and young adulthood, spending very short bursts of time
on things that other people devoted their whole lives to, in order to make
yourself available for….? What? Something essential in the Big Picture that
seems to need to be fixed or improved as rapidly as possible…
Fifth Striving: “The striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting
of other beings, both those similar to oneself and those of other forms,
 up to the degree of the sacred Martfotai, that is, up to the degree of
self-individuality.”
Is it important to you — based not on your aspirational claims but on
impartial observation of your behavior — to help other people (both those
like yourself and people in general) to develop inwardly, in the vague
direction of enlightenment, at least to the point of greater authenticity, self-
awareness, uniqueness, agency, open-heartedness, inner coordination and
the ability to have constructive multidimensional and organic relationships
with other people as a part of a sacred human culture?
These obligations can be interpreted as a set of values to follow OR as a set
of tendencies that identify a certain type of person that has been showing up
in human tribes since the archaic period.
 WHAT IS SEX MADE FROM?

Gurdjieff is typically ambiguous about human sexuality. At times he

denounces homosexuality with the fierce judgmentalism of the 19th-century
rural and patriarchal Greco-Armenian communities in which he was raised.
But then he pals around with lesbians and claims that all wise societies have
always recognized the “third gender” — and when Beelzebub relates a tale
of the planet of three-sex’d creatures, he calls them “the most ideal and
perfect” of all the forms of sapient beings.

Likewise he speaks very severely and regularly against the onanistic sin of
masturbation. Yet he also comments that he doesn’t mean innocent jerking
off — he usually means pop music, dancing, sports and every kind of
superficial social titillation that divorces human capacity from its actual
function.
Similar to Dr. Wilhelm Reich, father of the 20th century’s “sexual
revolution,” Gurdjieff criticizes covert sexuality as the perverted “center of
gravity” of social gatherings such as church, parties, concerts, political
rallies, etc. and suggests that it would be a healthier and more spiritual thing
if people just used this energy for having more sex.

He discusses this in the book In Search of the Miraculous, in which (as far
as Ouspensky’s supposedly prodigious memory is concerned) he calls it the
“wrong work of centers.” Are you getting unnecessarily worked up about
how to make the Christmas holidays go well? Do you constantly want to
expose people to your gushing description of new findings in physics?
Picking political fights with people just to “blow off some steam?” There is
a good chance — according to the doctrine of the wrong-work-of-centers —
that your intellect, emotions or neuromuscular system are stealing energy
from your ancient bio-energetic sexual systems.
These archaic systems operate upon a very refined form of bio-electrical,
neurogenetic and hormonal chemistries. They have to take the food you eat,
air you breathe and all your subtle energetic reactions, and convert all that
into a mysterious cellular fluid capable of regenerating human life. Our
entire organism works to reproduce itself — with the exception of one
delicate substance designed to leave the body and become “new life.”
Perhaps we do not yet even know the full suite of electrical, molecular and
even quantum complexity involved in this exquisite and disgusting work of
slimy art. Thus the end result of many digestive processes and biochemical
transformations is the secretion of a special set of hormonally-charged
substances (Gurdjieff calls this “sperm” in both men and women) which
gather around reproductive packets of chromosomes and are coupled with a
particular set of vitalizing arousal functions in the organism.
We could think of this very generally as regenerative energy.

It is capable of regenerating the human species through the physical

reproduction of live offspring, and it may also be capable of regenerating
the individual character through the real-and-or-metaphorical growth of a
subtle “new body” within our organism.

Under most ordinary life-conditions, the state of being turned on is perhaps

the most enlivened, meaningful and poetically productive opportunity
afforded to a human being by Nature. Unforced, non-perverse and bio-
chemically open erotic modalities allow us to transfigure our nature,
encounter the Other as quasi-divine, undergo rigors with a good conscience,
change our lives, encounter new worlds and breed the future of the species.
Pretty incredible.
And under special conditions, a “body of desiring,” — which might be
similar to what Dr. Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of evolutionary
unfoldment called neuro-somatic activation and hedonic integration —
might saturate our body and nervous system to the point that it almost
glows with a certain semi-permanent quality of excitation.
When I was a boy on the farm, on Malcolm Island in the Pacific Northwest,
we would lower a “heat lamp” over the chicken eggs in order to encourage
their hatching. Another reproductive metaphor for whatever symbolic
“substance” distinguishes the ordinary lump of human flesh from its most
naturalistic enlivenment.
 SAMBHOGAKAYA VS DHARMAKAYA
The So-Called “Higher Being Bodies”

In Buddhist lore, an illuminated saint is said to have three bodies.

The first body is an ongoing ordinary manifestation that appears
in regular time-space (nirmanakaya).
Secondly, there is a special enjoyment body (sambhogakaya) in
which these wily saints can work with unusual bliss and poetic
capacities.
And thirdly they possess an ultimate realization body
(dharmakaya).

These are not too different from what are called gross, subtle & causal
bodies in the neo-Theosophical traditions of the West. Body, soul & spirit?
Concrete, etheric-imaginal & transcendental? There are numerous varieties
of the three-body model in the esoteric lineages.

Gurdjieff also deploys the concept of additional forms of embodiment. We

could call that “the production of extra bodies” if we were trying to use an
industrial or constructivist metaphor. Our spiritual lives might even be
described as the “crystallization” and “coating” and “feeding” (and
“perfecting to the degree of Reason”) of what he called the higher-being
bodies.
In early recordings of his talks, he associates the first of these two non-
ordinary possibilities of embodiment with the Renaissance alchemical
terminology — astral body, body of desire, body of fire. Later he settles on
a rather unique term: the Kesdjan body.
It is imagined as a supersaturation of our flesh by particles of the subtle
aspect of solar energy that permeates the terrestrial biosphere. This
crystallization depends on a combination of intentional activity, inner
struggle, regenerative sexuality & a practice of sensitivity to liminal moods
and flows. We might call it the unique integration of the many subtle fields
associated with our organism.

Most people, Gurdjieff provocatively claims, simply get their subtle fields
liquidated in the days following mortal death but if some success is
obtained in these practices, then the kesdjan body might survive — at least
for a while — after the breakdown of the planetary body. It then has the
opportunity to be absorbed into a more advanced role in the imaginal
cosmos. Unfortunately, if it has not grown into a third body, then it gets
sucked into another flesh body and has to try again.

Reincarnation of the integrated self for a limited number of sapient beings.

In philosophy and cognitive science, the word imaginal is used to make an
important distinction. Some forms of imagination deviate from reality while
others help us to perceive and think more accurately. The Canadian
researcher and public theorist John Vervaeke speaks of the “imaginal
augmentation” of our experience. Gaining skill in the constructive use of
imagination may reveal invisible patterns, enrich existing perceptions and
evoke modes of actions whose results are more competent than those drawn
merely from reductive left-brain tactical capacity.
How could I possibly know what Gurdjieff really meant by “kesdjan
body?” I can’t. Nonetheless, I did pick up a bad habit from a substitute
music teacher at my A. J. Elliot Elementary School. It went like this:

After a very inventive, vigorous music class, he asked us all to lay down on
the gymnasium floor. Breathing slowly, counting, he told us to put our body
to sleep, bit by bit. Head to toe. Well, I didn’t find myself asleep but I did
notice that I was tingling. This did not mean much until I found a similar
instruction in a volume of paperback New Age fluffery on my mother’s
book shelf. Now I was definitely intrigued.

I began to practice each night in bed and my goal was to “make my whole
body buzz as fast as possible.” I got pretty good at it. It even seemed to
behave like a nascent second body. When I was tingling, I could make
additional kinds of observations about the world. Nature was more
informative. My intense emotions had a slightly different flavor. My body
become a better friend and was more nuanced in how it responded to other
bodies.

Obviously I did not do this all the time but, over the years, I did enough that
it seemed to change, intensify, gain and lose certain capacities. The whole
experience was a bit like being turned on. Or perhaps like hyper-
oxygenation. Or floating. Is this what Gurdjieff meant? Is it what the old
alchemists and theosophists meant? Who knows.
The second body that Gurdjieff describes is more abstract. He sometimes
refers to this highest-being body as “soul,” but not always. It is formed from
a concentration and assimilation of the theomertmalogos (divine radiance
and intelligence) that enters our solar system. It seems to be related to
“objective reason” and “empathy.”
Is this body itself the very essence of the highest teaching? An
indestructible and brilliant “diamond” that can flash forth as luminosity and
wisdom beyond the forms of the world? A neuron in the emergent cosmic
brain of God? Wisdom-as-embodiment?
If you know the answer, don’t tell me. I’m keen to guess…
 ENLIGHTENMENT BY THIRDS

Gurdjieff used to “joke” that people die by thirds. That means that they
burn out their moving, emotional or intellectual systems. He often used the
bawdy term masturbation to describe this useless, self-depleting exertion of
a particular part of the organism. A professional athlete might ruin the
complex and subtle potentials of their body. A compulsively dramatic and
emotive person might become, in later life, incapable of freshness, subtlety
and nuance in the heart. And a disembodied egg-head might become oddly
stupid after a lifetime of one-sided indulgence in analytic arguments.
I’m going to use this same terminology — thirds — to describe a spiritual
recommendation that is almost unique to the Gurdjieffian Work. Typically,
we hear the idea that religious awakening is supposed to be a “radical”
conversion from ordinary consciousness into a perpetual state of non-
narrative love and divine self-identity. A dramatic rupture with ego and
ordinary life. This is not how it is viewed either in shamanic cultures or in
Gurdjieffian doctrine. In these systems, we are meant to creatively oscillate
between our higher and lower intelligences.
Divide your waking life into three equal parts:

One third for your dedicated inner practice and exploration of

sacred spaces.
One third for your ordinary responsibilities to yourself, your
loved ones & society.
And the remaining third for rest, regeneration, play and pleasure.

The goal is not to spend the maximum amount of time in the most exalted
efforts and identities. That might actually be an exaggerated or imbalanced
approach that ends up ultimately destabilizing or dehumanizing you.
At the end of Beelzebub’s Tales, the grandson Hassein begins to become
emotionally upset by his expanding cosmocentric sympathies. This kind of
empathic response is generally a good sign, but his wise alien grandfather
advises him to put it aside. Sleep on it. Why?

Our goal is not simply to activate higher forms of consciousness but to

integrate and assimilate them harmoniously — alongside the rest of our
functions and responsibilities. Sleeping and dreaming, like distraction and
play, are not the enemies of our most advanced consciousness. They are
intelligent biological mechanisms that allow us to operate as healthy and
sane examples of organic unfoldment rather than radical rupture.
This is connected to another unique feature of the Gurdjieffian lineages,
which is their emphasis on playing a role. Serious play allows us to inhabit
our mundane lives without losing contact with the attempt to achieve a wise
complementarity between responsible, regenerative and developmental
activities.

Get better at playing your particular character. This allows you to function
with other people and rest from your (hopefully diligent) intentional efforts
at self-deepening.

In daily life, other people do not need to know all about your inner practice
and you require time to just get things done, practically and socially, by
taking work and pleasure with others.

And while you’re at it — they probably don’t need to hear your political
opinions either.
 THE PERIODIC PROCESS OF
RECIPROCAL DESTRUCTION
A Bi-Partisan War Against Evolutionary
Wisdom

I heard once (who knows if it is true?) that the most common bombing
targets of Islamic fundamentalists are Sufi temples. That might be
exaggerated but I do remember seeing, as a child, the Taliban in
Afghanistan blowing up beautiful ancient Buddha statues.

It is not unusual for the representatives of Wisdom to be attacked during

periods of cultural distress. The occultists, alchemists, witches and scientists
were all hunted down by Christian European authorities. Psychedelic
researchers were persecuted by 20th-century governments. The Chinese
Empire smashed and desecrated the Lama culture of Tibet. There certainly
could be something like a recurring human war on wisdom.

Even if we put aside this ultra-fantastical notion, we still observe that

history is overpopulated by culturopathic fads. Our species periodically
shifts into flocking behavior — “mass formations” — that destroys the
artistic, intellectual and spiritual achievements of the past. The library of
Alexandria was burned. Anti-sensualist puritans smashed the gorgeous
sculptures of antiquity. Books get banned and burned. The indigenous
wisdom-lineages of North America were broken, burned and traumatized by
colonial European powers.

We would probably be much further along our deep evolutionary trajectory

if we did not keep attacking the leading-edge. Mr. Gurdjieff spent years
pondering this problem. He was always going into warzones and regions of
mass hysteria to study the psychology of human beings who were involved
in these periodic eruptions of the trauma-promulgating destruction of
accumulated resources both material and spiritual. What was his
conclusion?

He laid the blame on “suggestibility.”

If we could just stop teaching each other to be so gullible, then we would

not have to get our natural self-defense and self-glorification instincts
mixed up with varieties of nihilistic social idealism that fall so easily into
narratives about heroic killers, evil nations & righteous assaults on other
people’s way of life.

Perhaps then we would not respond too quickly to periods of stress and
peculiarity by flocking to destroy the accumulated gains of human
ancestors. Perhaps then we could start to resume a psychological and social
progress aligned with our technological progress. But how can we be full
participants, even virtuous protectors, without believing things?

That might require a great work…

 THE VERY SAINTLY ASHIATA
SHIEMASH

Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson has been called a compendium of the

“failure modes” of psychotechnologies. In his various descents to Earth, the
wise Martian devil who serves as our narrator-protagonist, watches many
genuine saints, avatars and prophets fail to illuminate humanity — time and
again. Except for one special example. One of them pulls it off.

Beelzebub tells us that the unknown messiah Ashiata Shiemash did what
Christ, Buddha and Muhammed all failed to accomplish. He actually turned
around the trend of human degeneration and began the slow growth back
toward organic planetary wisdom-civilization.

He was the great medicine man who re-established productive relations

between the dominant sapient species and the biosphere. And he started a
spreading network of worldly-competent and enlightened initiates. It was
working very well until his project was foiled by the treacherous,
hasnamussian social-philosopher Lentrohamsanin.
Who is Ashiata Shiemash? Is he a real historical teacher? A pseudonym for
Zoroaster? A thinly veiled version of Gurdjieff? Or just an imaginal
alternative to the errors of the saints?

In the book he is a Sumerian shaman who wisely taught absolutely nothing

to the general population. His special instructions, entitled The Terror of the
Situation, are preserved on remarkable tablets in the possession of a still-
existing translineage esoteric brotherhood. And the mentioned “terror,”
previously unrecognized, resides in the fact that direct spiritual teaching
will consistently fail to transform the world.
From childhood, Ashiata could tell that he had a spiritual task. He devoted
himself, instinctively, to endeavors that increased his ability “to be able to
be” just and fair — with the assumed goal of gaining enlightenment and
spreading it to other human beings through the perennial doctrines of faith,
hope & love.
However, living near the large, emerging city-state of Babylon, Ashiata
encountered an enormous variety of different human types. He got to know
them and had many personal experiences in their company. As he closely
observed them, he began to worry that they were immune to the dharma.
Most simply did not care about wisdom and transcendental virtues. And
those that did profess to care seemed to think, feel and behave almost the
same as everyone else. No transformation was occurring.
As an initiatory ritual, he climbed a mountain and underwent an extended
period of fasting, prayer and self-challenges. He used this time to sink
deeper and deeper into a meditation on how to BE.
Slowly it became obvious to him that the entire process of communicating
to the mass of humanity about the need for “believing,” and “loving” and
“hoping” was deeply corrupted. It could not penetrate into the real marrow
of the newly civilized human beings. Somehow their socialized waking-
state consciousness was inhibiting the very ideas that it claimed to
understand and value. Even if these people heard the great wisdom-
teachings and devoted their lives to living on that basis, it would (a) not
significantly illuminate them, and (b) lead to contradictory future results
such as war, dogma and ignorance. And, indeed, this is a large part of the
inheritance of the great religious traditions.
The only real option, Ashiata concluded, was to proceed by activating the
“objective conscience.” This was a deeply organic and deeply personal
faculty hidden in the subconscious minds of socialized beings. Although we
might glimpse it in dreams, peak experiences or entheogenic journeys, it is
protected from the interfering gaze of the educated conscious mind. The
social personality typically rejects this faculty because it involves
undergoing the cognitive dissonance between opposing internal attitudes —
and results in navigational impulses that deviate from cultural training.
Ashiata believed that his project to illuminate the subconscious mind could
not be attained directly by teaching to the masses. Other prophets had tried
and failed in such an attempt. Instead, he decided to locate and join a
leading-edge secret society in possession of some actual wisdom-practices.
He would parasitize it from within by training the best existing adepts in his
indirect methods of evoking the hidden enlightenment and, at the same
time, helping them to grow strong enough to be influential over many
others. Together they began to unfold a methodology for spreading the
awakening of the subconscious conscience in the world.
This secret society within a secret society finally broke away and formed
their own context with special new rules. One could only become a “priest”
if they (a) were able to constantly work on the unfolding of their own
subconscious conscience, and (b) persuade, explain and cultivate
subconscious conscience in at least one hundred other humans.

This combination of wisdom and ableness led to a series of expanding

networks, often operating through the host bodies of other esoteric
societies, to re-establish the organic hierophantic capacity necessary for the
fulfillment of the human function within the biosphere.
And it really worked, for a while…
 THE PROBLEM OF MISINTERPRETING
FUCKED-UP VIBES
Solioonensius and the Metacrisis

If you have not read (and re-read) Gurdjieff’s arcane, hilarious & profound
mega-text of 1930s sci-fi religion, The Tales of Beelzebub to His Grandson,
then I will point out a single example of its many strangenesses.

The Devil — a wise, god-loving alien from Galactic Central who lives on
Mars with his extended family and a fancy telescope — describes for his
grandson the sacred cosmic law of Solioonensius.

It is a condition of intensified peculiarity on the Earth resulting from

interstellar tension. The heliospheres (star systems) are just like you. They
get weirded out when somebody walks too close to them on the sidewalk or
stands uncomfortably near them in an elevator. Our beloved “the Sun”
enters into exacerbated proximity with other solar systems. The resulting
solar agitation ripples through the Gaian biosphere of the Earth — and it
feels like an ambient wave of uncanny cosmic striving.

If this was a normal planet, we would experience this period of accelerated

strangeness as the iabolioonosor effect. An intensification of organic
religiousness.

During these interstellar perturbations, the biosphere turns up the volume on

evolutionary enlightenment. The striving to rapidly perfect the personal and
intersubjective sensemaking of sapient beings is amplified. Unfortunately,
the Earth is not a normal planet. Instead of metabolizing this extra energy,
we feel ambiently harassed by it.
The sense of “fucked-up vibes” flows into our neurotic identities and
creates a temporary global surge in mutually-destructive stupidity. Our
unprepared brains interpret the Solioonensius wave as a sense of
apocalyptic dread, ontological flooding and righteous agitation about the
ignorant or malign Others who are placing the entire natural order in
jeopardy!

For example this cosmic pressure-wave could be imagined as rippling into

the terrestrial biosphere in the early 20th-century. Think of the many great
physicists lying awake at night in the 1920s, haunted by intense visions of
the subatomic or galactic realms.

There was, at least poetically, a powerful incursion of “cosmicism” that

drove artists, theorists and researchers into a passionate, international and
quasi-religious fraternity of sages. Yet where did it lead? The atomic bomb,
communist witch-hunts and the greatest recorded slaughter of human beings
in history.

The great hysterias of global war, terror and financial collapse may have
erupted from the same sense of cosmic pressure that drove Bohr, Einstein,
Schrodinger, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg. Some minds are prepared to have
their consciousness and social relations reorganized around vast, strange
and celestial forces, many others experience a destabilizing sense of vast
chasms of confusion and meaninglessness that drive them into idealism,
self-destruction and xenophobic schemes for securing and re-homogenizing
their perceptions of the world.

Thus the natural increase in the desire to mobilize, improve and transform
the sapient life-network (humanity) within the biosphere is diverted into
wars, revolutions and collective psychosis. I am writing these words from
within such a period — at least metaphorically.

The major powers of civilization are engaged in a uselessly destructive

proxy war in Ukraine while their capacity for collective sensemaking is
being shredded into polarized teams. Everything feels uncanny. Overtly
deceptive conservative clowns and impotent cosmopolitan administrators
are ruling the nations of the world in the service of a corporate financialism
whose built-in “incentive structures” cause them to undermine the social
and ecological fabric whether they want to or not. But various geopolitical
military conflagrations are only a piece of this puzzle.

Human gender can now be changed. Pills modify our reproduction and
hormonal cycles. New species are being created in laboratories. We have
machines to capture gravity waves and wireless surveillance devices in our
pockets. Artificial Intelligence has unleashed a period of mass simulation
and we are getting strongly mixed signals from military authorities about
the actual existence of “extraterrestrial technologies.”

Weird, right?

The atmospheric urge to do something, change something, risk something

— mobilize! — is palpable.

Either we become better at inhabiting these fucked-up vibes or we will

succumb to the usual foolishness. The attitude of metabolizing the
strangeness is necessary in order to profit from this period of history rather
than simply take righteous action whose only result will be the destruction
of lives, happiness and the leading-edge artifacts of public wisdom. Can we
consciously assimilate the metacrisis? We better try.
 A MYTHIC-ECOLOGICAL FRAMING FOR
HUMAN PSYCHOTECHNOLOGIES

Most human spirituality and religion — over the last few hundred
thousand years — took place in “natural settings.”
Yoga, meditation, prayer, ritual, psychedelics, philosophical discussions,
self-overcoming exercises & ecstatic epiphanies occurred in the woods,
among the rocks, and on the mountainsides. Our wisdom specialists were
not urban, monastic or literate. They were shamanic intermediaries.
Transpersonal eco-psychologists.
The terrestrial biosphere was not only the context for our special activities
of existential and developmental praxis but it was also the complex
symbiotic and distributed body (Gaia) within which our species emerged.
Human intelligence evolved within the distributed intelligence of the
ecosystem which, in turn, evolved within the complex niche of the solar
system. It would actually be surprising if our possibilities for authentic
spiritual development were not closely tied to the all-pervasive system of
ecological interactions in which we are embedded. Yet for thousands of
years we have allowed ourselves to become overly reliant on Axial Age,
book-based religions, socially-controlled spirituality & urban monastic
models. This kept our sacred attention aimed inward at humanity, social
opinions, and the mediated masses. We might say that we suffered
exaggeratedly anthropocentric wisdom-traditions under those conditions.
Today, as we grow increasingly clear about the enormous disruptive
cleavage between anthropological systems and the ecological systems upon
which they depend (and for which they evolved), we face an ethical
obligation to re-place nature & naturalness at the very heart of all
developmental traditions. To support this we may need a narrative that
explicitly places our use of psychotechnologies within a service-oriented
biospheric context. Gurdjieff experimented in Beelzebub’s Tales with
situating human developmental praxis within an imaginally-augmented
planetary ecology.

Here’s the myth:

A long time ago our local heliosphere formed. This solar system, which
Gurdjieff calls “Ors” (Ours?), is not rare. These radiant, gravitational,
electromagnetic and nuclear star-fields hatch in vast numbers throughout
the galaxies. And under normal conditions, a heliosphere will cultivate
biospheres within itself.
The regular emergence of biospheres is contingent but non-trivial and non-
accidental. The slope of the transformation of energy and information in the
cosmos potentiates the need for local structures to step the current up or
down (quantitatively and qualitatively). It is easier for energy-transforming
structures to form at certain distances from large concentrations. Then they
adaptively stabilize as part of a larger system by both upcycling and
breaking down the material at their disposal.
So a while ago, a local biosphere emerged on our planet. It began to evolve
within the environmental niche of the local heliosphere. It is objectively and
subjectively tuned into that particular field of ambient intelligence.
As per usual, this biosphere began to form microcosmic worlds (“cells”).
Spreading to envelop the geosphere, these proto-creatures complexified into
an interconnected, mutually regulating and adaptive meshwork
characterized by local quasi-autonomous structures called “plants” or
“organs.”
Collectively they specialized in receiving and translating heliospheric
radiation into both food for themselves and bioelectrochemical outputs that
cultivate a shared physical atmosphere. These mutually adaptive, self-
replicating pseudo-organisms collaboratively favored depth-thriving and so,
when possible, they selected and replicated supportive conditions for their
own leading-edge unfolding.
Like most normal biospheres, ours then unfolded a class of neuro-mobile
gardens (integrated collections of pseudo-vegetative organisms) called
“animals” — although Gurdjieff refers to them charmingly as
Tetartocosmoses.
Such beings exhibit, along with mobility, a capacity for advanced sentience
and agentic responsiveness. This allows for increasing complexity in
biospheric self-regulation. They also provide the pool out of which one or
more species may become the sapient-noospheric animal.
Each biosphere requires sapient-noospheric beings who evolve within the
general ecological intelligence field to specialize in the assimilation,
transmutation and communication of additional classes of energy and
information. They are analogous to the evolution of nervous systems within
animals.
The hominization, as Teilhard de Chardin called it, looks very different on
different worlds. It can also begin from a variety of different animal species.
(Beelzebub is especially fond of the Crow people of Saturn and their
interesting subtle energy engineering projects).
When I was a boy, I once dreamed that I went up in the terraced family
garden behind the house, level by level, and finally dropped over the tall
cedar fence at the back.
Often I had such dreams. I would drop down among bears, lions, ancient
kings, komodo dragons or other collections of very intense beings who, by
contrast, highlighted my youthful inability to join with their eerie stillness.
This time, however, I splashed down into the water and was surrounded by
“killer whales.” These powerful telepathic Orcas showed me two intriguing
images:
First, I saw our world. Yet it was many worlds overlaid upon each other. In
each “timeline” a different species had evolved to become the upright and
self-conscious species. Lizard people. Dog-headed people. Jaguar people.
Etc. We just happened to be in the timeline where the monkeys (lemurs)
became the noospheric species. And the biosphere was somehow able to act
as a communication relay between these different parallel narratives.
I will relate the second and more cosmic image elsewhere. Here I mean
only to give a sense of the plurality of different species that might fulfill the
operating requirements of the biosphere and to highlight, again, the deeply
shamanic nature of Gurdjieff’s vision. So that is all perfectly normal and
respectable for perfectly normal planets.
Our local planetary biosphere, unfortunately, is fucked.
 ORIGINAL SIN IN PLANETARY ECO-
MYTHOLOGY

How did it go wrong on Earth? A great mystery. Fortunately there was an

eyewitness to those tragic events — none other than the remorseful Devil
watching through his fancy telescope on Mars. According to him, it was a
typical bureaucratic blunder.
You cannot blindly trust angels, guides and celestial beings. The cosmic
traffic authorities simply screwed up and let a comet smash into our
juvenile planet. This collision traumatizes the emerging biosphere and
blasted large chunks of geosphere into nearby space. One big chunk we call
“Moon.”
To stabilize this errant, unnatural mini-planet, our biosphere had to use
large amounts of its own self-organizational energy (“askokin”). Askokin is
sourced from special refined substances produced primarily by the sapient
noospheric organisms. We all release a small amount of it during death.
Some of us produce larger and more consistent quantities through
“conscious labor and intentional suffering.” However, since the latter
process requires a great deal of preparation and special supportive
conditions, Nature adapts herself to the former solution.
Therefore we need more human beings, living short lives and dying tragic
deaths while allowing their most profound energy to be used to fix a
problem of typical cosmic mismanagement.
At least this was the solution contrived by another team of well-meaning
and overconfident celestial bureaucrats sent from HQ to address the
problem. Unfortunately they lacked skin-in-the-game and, no matter how
enlightened you are by nature, you still can’t fully appreciate a situation of
which you have no embedded personal experience.
So they devised this plan to siphon a special substance out of us, but they
became fearful that we would discover our slavery and revolt against this
project. Like the deluded humans being used as batteries in The Matrix, we
were hooked up to a special piece of biotech designed to pacify us. An
artificial organ called the Kundabuffer was attached to our asses (“tail
area”). It merged neurogenetically with us and projected a false perception
of reality accompanied by an inverted value system.

Thus we were made to believe that it was good, ideal, aspirational, civic,
normal, to do those artificial things which drained our sacred evolutionary
energy. Our own exploitation was perceived as virtuous, rewarding and
unquestioned. The same phenomenon can still be seen today in most
people’s Christmas celebrations, weddings & school assemblies.

The degrading and draining effect of regular “positive and important”

activities upon sensitive people is dismissed as an anomaly. Perhaps
medication is required. It certainly does not justify challenging the obvious
“goodness” of performing these normal activities in the “usual way.”
Later these Kundabuffer devices were removed but we still continued,
largely by habit, to live in a completely fucked up manner. The behavioral
grooves remained. We still largely evaluate the world in an inverted manner
and we breed in large numbers and slaughter each other and other species
rather pointlessly.
Askokin occurs naturally in the energies that grow higher being bodies in
sapient-noospheric organisms. It is released under two known conditions.
Large amounts are released, as noted, during the practice of “conscious
labor and intentional suffering,” and secondly a small amount is released
during the death of a sentient creature.
So, although mass animal sacrifice has been tried, the basic strategies are
either
(a) constantly breeding and slaughtering of vast numbers of human
beings;
(b) the training of an adequate number of humans who can deepen
their consciousness and transmute their own suffering for the good of
the biosphere.
And our own spiritual growth is simply a happy side-effect of that service
to the system in which we evolved to perform this function.
So to stop war and re-establish the self-organizational potency of the
biosphere, you have to commit yourself to an intentional life of self-
developmental psychotechnologies! That’s the punchline. You need to be
doing self-cultivation work in an inherently ecological context.
Inner growth is not a personal aesthetic preference or some scheme for
social salvation. It must be conceptualized as direct service to the local
biospheric and heliospheric systems (superorganisms) in which our species
adaptively evolved.
 WHO ARE BEELZEBUB’S
GRANDCHILDREN
For Whom the Book is Written?

Beelzebub’s Tales is not addressed to his children but to his grandchildren

— the next generation. We may be entitled to question whether the most
comprehensive and visceral understanding of Gurdjieff’s teaching is likely
to be found in his direct students or in subsequent generations of readers
who slowly gain the capacity to decode his writings. It is a provocative
ambiguity.
The first students were privileged. They had direct access to many things
now veiled from us — hints given in secret, casual remarks never recorded,
hands-on instruction & the embodied “transmission” of his immediate
personal presence. Fragments of this living teaching are carried forward by
the official Gurdjieffian lineages. Prior to his death, he gave special
administrative tasks to particular students who would be responsible for
different political and geographic regions. And a general “institute” was
established under the authority of his senior official teacher-helper Madame
Jeanne de Salzmann.
For many people these lineages alone comprise the authentic “Work.” Such
people may even view some prominent direct students of Gurdjieff (such as
J. G. Bennett) with grave suspicion as potentially illegitimate pretenders
operating outside the legitimate institution.

Yet the counter argument can also be made.

Perhaps to become official is already to have lost authenticity. Perhaps

merely by direct contact with Gurdjieff himself something is occluded. He
seems to have gone to great pains to emphasize the deluding effect of being
near to him. And we should recall the seriousness with which his writings
emphasize the fact that the first generation of students has no choice but to
misunderstand, wiseacre and distort the meaning of a prophet’s message.
The American spiritual teacher Lee Lozowick, who combined the Gurdjieff
work with devotional tantric nondualism, once said that in order to become
enlightened you must first become a real woman. He went on to say that
this is often much harder for females — because they assume that they
already are real women.
Is the same true for real students of Gurdjieff?
Whether or not the first wave of legitimate teachers are the praiseworthy
sources of the true transmission or the misguided appropriators of the
teachings (it is probably a bit of both), we must certainly observe that
Gurdjieff is very intentionally sending his message to the future.
Course correction is expected. Misunderstandings are anticipated. The
method is scattered and buried like the dismembered pieces of the god
Osiris in the Egyptian desert of the Gurdjieffian texts.
Today we face the planetary crisis of modernity much more acutely than
was obvious to people in the early 20th century. And we have new tools,
new ideas and cultural attitudes that can mix with Gurdjieff’s writings to
catalyze surprises.
In 1930 it was pretty far out for Beelzebub to read the “etherograms” he
received on board the starship but this is now ridiculously normal for kids
raised in the world of lightspeed digital text-messaging. We already look
back on the psychedelic 1960s and the infusion of Eastern wisdom into
mainstream Western culture. We have walked on the moon (probably) and
heard about transpersonal psychology. There is an environmental
movement, an integrative metamodernity and a mainstream model of the
plurality of the human psyche.
And, perhaps importantly, we can pick a word in Gurdjieff’s writings and
skip digitally through all of its instances — resulting in a very different
impression than one gets from a straight reading. Our new tools gives us
new ways to interact with the texts. Although I am not Orage, Heap or
Hartmann, I have repeatedly listened to audiobook versions of Gurdjieff’s
writings while hiking through forests, fixing sinks, mowing the lawn,
shopping, waiting for trains, etc. This repeated acoustic interpenetration is
new. It is not something the original students had. Just as they certainly had
things we lack today.
This is a very different environment than the modern, industrial, sexist,
racist & still mostly Christian culture that fought World War I while the first
wave of Gurdjieffian experimenters were trying to grok the message.
Certainly we have lost some things along the way but we have also gained
familiarity with new forms that might allow us to unpack the writings that
Gurdjieff hurled into the future.
Without sacrificing our epistemic humility and veneration of those who
have gone before us, consider the possibility that you, now, are perfectly
positioned to be the one who truly unfolds the secret meaning of this
tradition…
 GURDJIEFF’S USE OF SEMANTIC
PLACEHOLDERS FOR TRANSRATIONAL
STRUCTURES
Hooshoomagoosh & Related Concepts

I just made up the word hooshoomagoosh. It is fun to say. It has the vague
structure of a word but emerges more from the cellular gibberish of my
body than from any cultural indoctrination into the English language.

Perhaps it speaks in a more ancient tongue? At the very least it has the
virtue of being relatively uncontaminated by conventional socio-linguistic
assumptions. It might remain, therefore, available for use as an indicator of
subtle or complex ideas that must be thought freshly. Metacognitive ideas
located outside of the ordinary frame of familiar symbolic referents.

By using unfamiliar playwords to occupy the space of a complex concept

we allow ourselves to repeatedly explore the structure of the idea without
getting trapped in familiarity.

Let me give you an example of this utility:

Once upon a time, in the early 20th century, a pair of ape-descended bipeds
called “Bohr” and “Heisenberg” discovered the universal-cosmic principle
of Hooshoomagoosh. This principle is normally discovered much earlier in
the unfolding of a planetary system but better late than never!
Hooshoomagoosh describes the conjoined status of certain basic variables.
Two things that appeared quite independent are actually closely-related
twins. “Where it is” and “what it’s doing” are twins. Normally we think
these are two unrelated pieces of information like eye color & birthdate.
Not so! When the two doctors looked through microscopes at the tiniest
possible objects, they discovered that position and momentum are — below
a certain threshold — actually the same piece of information. The more you
learn about where it is, the less you know about its movement. And vice
versa. They are the head and tail of the same dog.
That’s Hooshoomagoosh! Two basic variables turn out to be so intimately
entwined that they are effectively a single complex variable with two heads.
I call this a “metapheme.” That just means a meta-thing. These are types of
dynamic structures found in what Ken Wilber calls vision-logic space.
Unlike regular patterns, these have a Mobius-like structure. A flexible,
paradoxical but coherent shape that can only be approximated by thinking
in terms of opposites. When Albert Einstein demonstrated that space and
time can partially convert into each other, we had to start saying “space-
time.” Can subjective and objective ultimately be separated from each
other? Or do you need both of them in order for either to have any
meaning?
Order-and-Chaos is another good example. Perhaps we should say Chaordic
because you cannot have one without the other.
Imagine a situation of total chaos. It still has one rule: no order. It
homogenously obeys this constraint. So you could have minimal order but
never zero order. Likewise you can have very little chaos but never a
complete absence of chaos. They are a complementary pair that varies in
relationship and they are both needed in order to define the real situation —
a metaphemic Order-Chaos unit.
Metaphemic?
Metaphemes are transdisciplinary, affective, dynamic transdual logic
structures whose discovery constitutes the bulk of the content of integrative
metatheories. And the hooshoomagoosh is the irreducible-but-calculable
entanglement of two or more superficially unrelated or opposed variables.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
It should be pointed out that the Principle of Wilizmarenk states that the
Hooshoomagoosh is actually an illusion based on people’s refusal to accept
intrinsic physical plurality.
If a single position actually is doing several different things AND a single
action actually takes place in several different locations, then this may be
adequate to explain the perceived data.
However, advocates of the Hooshoomagoosh suggest that the mere fact that
multiple interpretations fit the data is itself evidence of a higher-order
metaphemic structure and therefore proves the Hooshoomagoosh.
 THE SUPERIOR BRIGAND

You will be surprised, Gurdjieff (more-or-less) says to Ouspensky & co. in

pre-war Russia, when I say that a good brigand is more spiritual than you.

This is certainly surprising.

We are not accustomed to imagining a murderous rural thug, waiting to

waylay innocent travelers, as being more “evolved” than the well-informed,
well-intentioned adepts of leading-edge contemporary culture.

Surely our aspirational interest in Universal Consciousness and

Evolutionary Emergence makes us, if not actual saints, at least more
spiritualized than such outlandish deplorables! Yet perhaps there is
something to be learned from this unflattering evaluation?
My sophisticated mastery of metatheory and ecological psychology vanish
when I stub my toe or when an anticipated sexual encounter is rudely
thwarted. I enter transpersonal states at Church, sure, but then become
grumpy and vocal when I hear the predictably stupid news on the car radio
during the ride home. Although I can coherently answer questions about
embodiment, I can barely get an unexpected physical task accomplished
without sulking.
Sound familiar?
By way of contrast, the dastardly brigand waits in the hot sun with his rifle
trained all day. Insects pester him but he can undergo the struggle of these
distractions without giving up.
His values are clear. He works to get money and keep his family alive. He is
physically, emotionally and mentally involved in his task. He is capable of
inner struggle. Something in him has crystallized or become reliably
aligned. His value hierarchy makes sense to him, has utility in his life and
enables him to remain uncomplaining and on-task despite vicissitudes,
alternative options and interferences. It is a complex and deeply human
existence regardless of how unpalatable and unethical it might be.
What is enduring in the popularity of characters like James Bond, beyond
vague notions of murder and womanizing, resides primarily in the sense of
a person who “has it together” in a supranormal fashion. All of his parts
cooperate. He has a sense of unity, power and identity that exceeds the
average human psychology — even the average altruistic, spiritual or
introspective psychology. It is fiction, of course, but it points to the notion
of a half-step between ordinary and the spiritual path. A step that may often
seem anathema to the idealistic sentimentality of the “seeker.”
Perhaps the inwardly coordinated brigand is truly a step higher than the
average person, yet he remains a step below a saint.
To move on he will have to transcend many forms of immoral behavior and
separateness in which he is embedded by his crudeness and circumstances.
 DISTINCTION-MAKING IN HIGHER
MORAL REASONING

Nietzsche once said that “pity makes misery contagious.” A strong claim.
Maybe that notorious alpine philosopher was just a super-sensitive empath
whose doctrines represented his own attempt to prevent himself from
getting emotionally infected by other people’s unacknowledged pain amidst
the social savagery of 19th-century proto-Nazi Germany? Who knows.
Nevertheless, his famous phrase invites us to put more nuance and curiosity
into our conventional assumptions about altruistic sentiments.
Gurdjieff also liked to problematize everyday compassion. We know from
the stories about him that he emphasized discrimination between superficial
social-indoctrination and the complex effort to development an organic
conscience. We also know that, like Nietzsche, he was devoted to an
attitude of benign kindness in his daily interactions with random human
beings. However that is not the whole story. He also frequently lambasted
his students for what he viewed as two significant weaknesses in their
moral reasoning. I would characterize those weaknesses as “short time
scales” and “the crudeness of homogeneity.”
The first problem — short time windows — is that our moral emotions
seemed to have evolved in mammal bodies that respond to stress and
incongruity by flooding their bloodstreams with the chemistry of immediate
action. We typically have a short window of arousal that treats moral issues
as if they were physical injuries. Quick! Get the band-aids! Put an icepack
on it! Chastise the guilty party! Kill the perceived violator!

Like Prince Hamlet, we are built to get ourselves worked up into rapid
bursts of ill-informed action. And this would indeed be the essence of
justice if we existed, as we imagine dogs and cats to exist, in a world that
exists only for a few minutes or hours. If reality is longer — if it is felt to be
longer — then we must calculate harmful or benevolent actions over an
increased range of time.
Gurdjieff’s father supposedly told him to wait 24 hours after being insulted
before communicating to the offending party. This is classic embodied
human wisdom. Perhaps something that will make everyone upset right
now might maximize good outcomes over the next 6 months?
Sane parents struggle to determine whether their “corrective” impulses
toward children are actually designed to benefit long term well-being at the
expense of momentary upset, or whether that is just a rationalization for the
adults’ own short-term emotional outbursts. While we cannot possibly know
all the variables that influence the future (just as we cannot perfectly evade
our own blindspots), we can at least make efforts to separate our moral
reasoning from the immediate circumstances and attempt to task ourselves
with actions that will probably objectively help over greater ranges rather
than simply assuage our immediate moral upset.
The other problem is crude homogeneity. A generic superficiality in our
ethical responses.
Gurdjieff seemed to feel that many of his students were simply good little
boys and girls from Europe and America who wanted to be (seen to be) nice
to everyone, honest with everyone, all the time. Their parents and educators
had taught them to secrete a drop of rewarding dopamine into their brains
every time they smiled at a stranger, sighed with performative sympathy or
expressed their “sincere condolences” for anyone’s recent loss.
It looks perversely like their notion of social status is dependent upon
demonstrating that they can jump immediately to the largest and most
generic possible sphere of moral inclusion. A race to be seen to be treating
everyone the same way.
Spheres of moral inclusion are prominent in developmental stage models
and metatheories. They are convenient ways of bypassing the “selfishness
vs. altruism” debate — if a relatively larger egotism looks unselfish to a
smaller egotism. I can quite selfishly serve all humanity if they are
integrated within my self-identity!

Yet these bits of ethical prestidigitation can be held in a dangerously

superficial and idealized manner. We do not simply evolve upward to
incorporate all ethnocentric and then all worldcentric and cosmocentric
beings equally within our sphere of enacted care & justice. An expanded
ethical framework does not instantly translate into an equal moral
appreciation for all possible beings within that new framing space.

Such a thing would itself be unjust. Preferencing is a feature, not a bug. You
must save your own children from the fire. Moral strength is born in
suffering and choice-making. It is not homogenous.
Christ infamously tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in which an ill,
injured Jewish man is not helped by his family, countrymen or co-
religionists. In the end, he is saved by a single member of a despised enemy
nationality. He is not helped by all the Samaritans and that Samaritan did
not help all the Jews. There was something special and organic about this
event, this relationship. A choice was made. A selection.
Although an expanded ethical space describes a greater range of beings (to
whom instinctive care could be extended), it does not yet tell us when,
whether, or how such care will be extended.
We are often uncertain whether our evaluations and preferencing are
justified. We have learned through “Christian” and then “popular liberal
humanist” cultural rhetoric that it is good to be egalitarian, fair, equal. Who
are we to judge? Should we not be equally compassionate to all? In our
hearts, perhaps; but if we do not enact righteous discriminations we cannot
function morally at all.
Almost anyone can prefer the moral to the immoral, in general, but ethical
growth requires that we discern and act upon decisions between moral
things.
We determine weight. We deploy a scale. We have no choice but to accept
this or not.
I grew up on a farm, so it has always been a creative negotiation in my heart
— which has had to nurture, protect and kill animals — as to which
creatures are more important to me, deeper, more soulful, smarter, etc.
Perhaps I am wrong in my choice but I have taken up its burden as we must
do in all areas of life. Even in the subtlest areas.
Once Gurdjieff took one of his lesbian students to a French strip club and
asked her to pick one of the dancers. She balked. Does this old-fashioned,
sexist man not understand that just because she is a lesbian does not mean
she is turned on by any naked woman she sees?
I don’t like any of them, she told him.
No, he said. Must pick. If I am here and you are dancing, I pick you.
If we pretend that’s a lesson, what does it mean? We are practicing a skill of
making subtle discernments. Shamans and witches face this problem
constantly. Which stone is proper for the ritual? Which feather is sacred?
Which tree is blessed? These all refer to a process of delicate discrimination
which has no immediate justification but instead invites us into a practice of
trusting our subconscious perceptions and taking a stand upon them.
This principle applies in all areas but it is specially pertinent to morality and
ethics. We are the Samaritan who must decide to whom we shall be Good.
We do not rule other options out of our hearts but we only have a certain
amount of compassionate action to deploy and we must aim it wisely, in
some way that our conscious and unconscious organism will be satisfied
with over multiple future time scales.
What’s the alternative to getting better at this difficult choosing? It is to
simply react with a performative and idealized empathy that is so generic
and universal that it might as well not apply to anyone.
Idiot compassion […] refers to something we all do a lot of and call it
compassion. In some ways, it’s what’s called enabling. It’s the general
tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see
them suffering. Basically, you’re not giving them what they need.
You’re trying to get away from your feeling of I can’t bear to see them
suffering.
– Pema Chodron
 SLEEPING MACHINES & THE ALL-
INSULTING ETHIC

Ethical people may balk (and arrogant narcissists may perversely rejoice)
at Gurdjieff’s teaching that the bulk of humanity can be dismissed merely as
robots. This is a frequently cited trope about his teaching but does it
actually characterise his view?

There are many valid prophetic critiques of the human condition but these
must be distinguished from the agitated, often mentally imbalanced, and
self-important social critics who feel they must accost everyone with the
Truth (!) in their compulsive urge to awaken all the sleepers and denounce
the so-called sheeple. These untutored shamans have forgotten that their
role is to serve the well-being of the community.

Gurdjieff is not such a naive denouncer of the “deluded masses,” but at the
same time he is not opposed to denouncing. In fact he seems to treat it as a
positive and necessary tool — perhaps akin to a comedic roast.

We are today so accustomed to the idea that wise helpful people will
compassionately see (and speak to) the best potential in ourselves, that we
can barely imagine the ferocious criticism that ancient prophets typically
levelled at the conventional behavior of their societies. We are ourselves
untutored in the complexity and ambiguity of insults. Can we be sure that
seemingly insulting words are as denigrating as we assume (or assume that
other assumers might assume)?

For example, Gurdjieff will often describe humanity as merde! That’s

French for shit. The lofty destiny of human beings who are not driven to
undertake soulmaking praxis and cultivate metacognitive ecological &
imaginal intelligence is not some heavenly afterlife but simply to become
shit. Humans are biological transformers who input material food and
output feces. That is our function. And eventually, like the pieces of shit we
are, our psycho-organisms break down into fertilizer and return to the soil.
But if this off-putting talk triggers us, we should hesitate. Why are we
presuming that shit is negative? Does Gurdjieff himself evaluate it
negatively according to social convention? Or does he actually embody a
high regard for manure?

The ecosystem needs shit. It may be quite virtuous. Let us therefore go

carefully, though still jauntily, and be prepared to revalue our values if that
proves necessary.
So the famously unflattering Gurdjieffian descriptions of humanity as
“sleeping people” or “machines” (which, to be honest, were exaggerated
and promulgated by Ouspensky’s writings) should invite us to pause and
wonder whether we are correct in assuming that these are negative or
marginalizing designations.
Gurdjieff: French have no friendship for anybody. Americans too
much. It is a disease with them. Destroy all factors in you of faith,
hope and love in your old understanding. Make new factors with your
new understanding. Know yourself, then mankind, then the planet —
which is only another organism like a human being but higher. I say
stingy like Scotch people — for American and English understanding.
For Russians, I tell “stingy like Americans.”

Kanari: Stingy like Scotch, stingy like Americans — where is the truth?

Gurdjieff: Man never sees truth in his own subjectivity, only in other
nations. Stinginess, Jewishness in all man is, within each according to
his subjectiveness and his heredity. All mankind is merde (shit), all
different kinds of merde.
– Jan 30, 1937 entry,
Gurdjieff and the Women of the Rope

What is the lesson here? That we ought to use charged terminology in order
to describe all human groups, including our own, as shit? Perhaps. This
runs, however, against our contemporary sensibility.
We have our contemporary “digital political correctness” — but of course
that term does not indicate a fundamentally new phenomenon. It is the old
courtly rule associated with the theatrical power-centers of low-literacy,
urban-agrarian kingdoms.

In those social situations — unlike in the vast countryside where respect is

more gestural or improvised and occurs at a slower pace — it is a way of
life to be constantly suffering social anxiety about using the correct, up-to-
date terminology for whom (and which groups) to respect. As political
realities change through war, marriage, exposure, church dicta, soap opera
interactions, etc., the class of educated hangers-on must make sure that they
learn, use & insist upon the hippest new terms that reinforce whoever is
being socially distinguished at the moment.
Today our civilization is teeming with these educated hangers-on who are
desperate to prove their social status by staying current about who should
be singled out for respect and protected from unflattering designations.
It is routine today for people to attempt to figure out if a phrase is “okay to
use.” The principle of such an evaluation is typically to determine whether
or not the combination of letters falls into any established pattern of
symbolic disrespect for a category of people. But is this tendency itself
being critically examined?
Why do we unthinkingly assume that “categories of people” should not be
verbally disrespected? Gurdjieff takes the opposite approach.

Perhaps it is good to disrespect people according to broad categories?

Perhaps we should go out of our way to publicly denigrate each group —
honkey-ass crackers, gooks & ni**ers alike? What cowardly asterisks! How
do those words make you feel? I’d be suspicious if they made you too
happy or too anxious.

Clearly you should wonder about my impulse to include these phrases but
you must also, I hope, wonder about your own automated judgements of all
kinds. If human beings are all, to whatever degree, unevolved and shadow-
laden and missing-the-mark, then it may (on occasion) be useful to slander
them.

But what good is the toothless and generic slander of humanity as a single
homogenous mass? Trite and abstract misanthropy takes us nowhere.
Instead, we may need to single out each group, high and low, privileged or
marginalized, for particular and egregious verbal disrespect. (Be especially
sure to include any people-categories that you have been raised to assume
that you belong within).

Is this a terrible idea, or are you just a coward?

Social emotions can easily be triggered by discussions like these, but that
might be necessary in evolving a human ethos that actually both embraces
and transcends our differences. In particular we may need to safely dare our
social and symbolic fault lines in order to explore the ways in which
dehumanizing prejudice is actually instantiated.
Sexism and racism, for example, may be patterns of distorted embodiment
which are actually protected by the attempt to fight this battle at the most
superficial layer — that of merely symbolic verbal norms.
“Racism is what you do — not what you say, stupid!”
– Alan Alda in Horace and Pete
 GURDJIEFF’S INCOMPLETENESS
THEOREM

God botched the cosmos. With this notion Gurdjieff moves us from
theorem (logos) to a vivid scenario (mythos) that enfolds the
incompleteness and vexation of the world (pathos). The story can be found
in “The Holy Planet Purgatory” — a chapter from Beelzebub’s Tales that is
uniquely singled out for attention by a reference in Life Is Real Only Then
When I AM. It goes like this:
The Divine Intelligence, dwelling on his ultimate Star at the center of an
infinite cosmos, existed as a luminous matrix of pre-established perfection.
It was called the “autoegocratic” system. Self-generating, self-ruling and
self-reflecting Endlessness. Yet something very subtle was going wrong.
Although everything was fixed in perfection, there were tiny changes
occurring. Time existed too. This “merciless heropass” of Becoming was
foreign to God and permitted the slow entropic dysregulation of His
Excellent Design. Perfect structures became less perfect.
After a long period of pondering, God struck upon an idea. To prevent
further degradation he would have to scrap the entire cosmos and make
another one. This time it would be a universe that could absorb entropy and
use perpetual transformation to re-generate perfection. This new universe
would be fundamentally relational and distributed. Many versions of the
holonic “divine creativity” would exist at all scales. They would be
incomplete on their own but structured in such a way that their mutual
collisions and mutual feeding-upon-each-other would accomplish an
ongoing process of breakdown and reconstruction. An all-composting
cosmos in which the Divine Order was endlessly re-produced via a bottom-
up transformational process.
The chapter on The Holy Planet Purgatory is worth careful reading because
it lays out Gurdjieff’s entire imaginal cosmology. The point here, however,
is simply that even God screwed up. The Divine “missed something.” All
processes and structures involve messy and incomplete results. If you
attempt to preserve perfect structures, you will inevitably fail. The only
solution is to work with imperfection.
And it isn’t just God. The tendency to screw up goes all the way down the
line. The great celestial beings responsible for the biosphere of the planet
Earth botched it. They got us smashed up by a comet and thrown out of
whack. And the wise angels who tried to fix this problem ended up creating
the conditions for all human ignorance, delusion and warfare. They didn’t
know how much they didn’t know. All the teachings of the Divine Avatars
on Earth went wrong almost immediately. They were legitimately profound
but they simply did not know how to succeed under abnormal and changing
conditions.
This is the merciless critique of Beelzebub’s Tales. It not only offers a
repeated and kaleidoscopic view of Gurdjieff’s understanding of
developmental principles at all scales but a relentless revaluation of our
naive notions of totality and order. Everybody screws up. And this is not
merely a surface phenomenon underneath which lurks a domain of perfectly
divine Order. The challenge is the same one symbolized by the Darwinian
revolution — accepting that the process is not under perfect control. Instead
of idealized top-down control natural processes improve if they have a
mechanism for correction and feeding upon errors. If they try to assert and
preserve a perfect system they will go astray. If they believe in the
perfection of Nature or God as a “designer” of our system, they will
misperceive.
Nothing is closed and perfect.
Gödel was correct.
 PERSPECTIVAL COUNTERPOINT IN
THE GROWTH OF PERSONAL
UNDERSTANDING

In his hieroglyphic “autobiography” called Meetings With Remarkable

Men (although one is a woman), Gurdjieff describes a scene in which his
party of esoteric researcher-adventurers encounters a wise old Dervish.

As a devout, young practitioner of the Yogic arts, Gurdjieff is observed by

the Dervish while he performs hatha yoga stretches. To his chagrin, these
are derisively denounced by the desert sage, who then also casts excoriating
scorn on his esoteric breathing techniques. And then on his careful and
thorough chewing of his food!
The dervish tells him sternly:
If you give your stomach well-chewed food, it will slowly start to
atrophy. It needs exercise as well. If you value your health in old age,
you will swallow whole, unchewed hunks of food and let your digestive
muscles get some exercise.

This was quite vexing and preposterous for the young seeker but due to the
old man’s extraordinary presence he could not dismiss these unreasonable
instructions.
Now, why does Gurdjieff tell us this? Should you stop chewing your food?
Probably not. Most people do not chew adequately.
Instead, he offers an example of his receiving the very kind of thing that he
subsequently tries to provide to others — an oppositional counterpoint to an
ideal that he had taken for granted. Now — only now — does he have the
possibility to consider his own opinion.
Chapters in Beelzebub’s Tales with titles like “Why the Sun Provides
Neither Light Nor Heat” are both fanciful and intriguing but among their
other functions, they offer a complementary reversal of knowledge from a
respected source.

That contradictory perspective gives us the dialectical material with which

to begin to ponder and sift for our own unique “take” on the nature of the
world.
This is not merely contrarian, or playing Devil’s Advocate, appropriate for
Beelzebub, but a serious proposal that your unfolding understanding of
yourself and your cosmos is not necessarily benefited most by finding and
sticking to the truth but rather by discovering a logic that you can use to
upset yourself at every step.
What good is a non-contradictory Dharma that simply feels uncontested and
true?
 THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY
SIGNIFICANCE OF TRIADS & OCTAVES

3 and 7 are two of Gurdjieff’s top 10 numbers. Mine too. Like many of the
great alchemical and hieroglyphic sages, this unique Armenian weirdo used
these numerical abstractions to engage in speculative transdisciplinary
sensemaking.

They are tools for thinking about Event and Process across different
knowledge domains. Gurdjieff calls them “cosmic laws” of the
Triamazikamno (law of three) and the Heptapara-parshinokh (law of seven).

Students of the Gurdjieff Work can get a long way up their own assholes by
going down this particular mathematical rabbit hole, and not without
occasional rewards, but let us focus our attention simply on getting a sense
of how 3 and 7 might be generalized across all different kinds of human
attempts to describe the cosmos.
Everything in the world obeys the Law of Three, everything existing
came into being in accordance with this law. Combinations of positive
and negative principles can produce new results, different from the
first and the second, only if a third force comes in.
– G. I. Gurdjieff
What is the simplest thing to understand in this matter? Nothing occurs
without a triad. You wish to make flour and water into a delicious flatbread,
but that will also require heat. Competing scientific theories must be
adjudicated by an additional factor — experiment. Two sides reach a
stalemate until a vote is taken.
For every force, said Isaac Newton, there is another equal and opposite
force. Your body’s mass pushes down upon the Earth, and if the Earth were
not pushing back equally against you, then you would immediately begin
sinking into the ground. It is our normal condition to be caught between
apparent opposites. This is how our cognitive and perceptual sensemaking
apparatus operates. We encounter the struggle of two forces as the default
simplification of our responses to reality.
We find ourselves so often in conflict, indecision, stalemate or alternation
that we barely notice. The pragmatic problem with this simplistic dualism,
of course, is that it never resolves any of our problems. The two sides never
finally defeat each other — nor do they get together and fix the outstanding
issues from which everyone is suffering. Something else is missing.
For something to happen, or to have happened, an additional factor must
mediate the two alternative agencies.
To make a point about psychoanalysis, the famous Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Žižek tells a bad joke about a man who is trapped on a desert island
with Cindy Crawford. Years ago she was a famous celebrity model who
people knew it was their social duty to pretend was very sexy and beautiful.

The “joke” goes like this:

After a long time isolated on the desert island they eventually have sex. He
should be happy that he got to make love to one of the most attractive
women in the world but instead he seems depressed. She asks him what is
the matter? At first he says nothing but eventually he pulls a fake moustache
out of his pocket.

“I’d like you to put this on,” he says. Cindy Crawford is shocked. Is this
some weird fetish? “No, no,” he says. “It is nothing like that. But in order to
help me feel better I would like you to put this moustache on and meet me
over by that palm tree.”

So she makes herself look like a man by putting the moustache on and she
goes over to the palm tree. He comes over, glances around, and whispers,
“Hey — I just had sex with Cindy Crawford.”
The joke is stupid and long out of date but the principle is clear. The success
of two people getting together requires a third party. The idea of a third
participant enables the event to have actually taken place.
The third catalyzing participant is not always obvious. In the case of the
flour and water getting together, it is the heat of the pan or oven. But what
is the third force when part of you wants to send a text message and another
part does not? Or when you want to exercise but you are too lazy?
Gurdjieff is asking us, at minimum, to begin looking for the role of the third
factor in our perception of events. An interface. A referee. A hybrid. A
translator. A shared medium of exchange. A reference point for mutual
triangulation. A common enemy unites two warring clans. With three forces
interacting in a mutually sustaining manner, a new phenomenon can be
generated.
The first of these fundamental primordial cosmic sacred laws, namely,
the law of Heptaparaparshinokh, present-day objective cosmic
science, by the way, formulates in the following words: “‘The-line-of-
the-flow-of-forces-constantly-deflecting-according-to-law-and-uniting-
again-at-its-ends.’ This sacred primordial cosmic law has seven
deflections or, as it is still otherwise said, seven ‘centers of gravity’
and the distance between each two of these deflections or ‘centers of
gravity’ is called a ‘Stopinder-of-the-sacred-Heptaparaparshinokh.’
This law, passing through everything newly arising and everything
existing, always makes its completing processes with its seven
Stopinders.
Nothing also occurs without an octave.
In Pythagorean harmonics, still used in Western music and electronics, all
flows of vibratory energy can be usefully explored as a spectrum of seven
sub-phases or tones or colors or “steps.”
The same action potential unfolds by changing its frequency in ways that
human eyes, ears and brains easily register as being about seven different
zones. This is called an octave because the 8th step is a return to the first
note — at a lower or higher level. It is almost like a spiral. It goes all the
way around the circle but ends up having ascended or descended.
In a perfectly empty universe a flow of energy might pass unchanged
through the void but — thank goodness! — there is no such thing as a
perfectly empty universe. So in the Gurdjieffian cosmos, all energy and
information is envisioned as flowing up and flowing down in frequency.
Every being (every holon in the metaphysical holarchy, so to speak) is a
transformer. Not a giant cartoon robot that turns into a truck but something
analogous to an electrical transformer.
If you are reading this in the late 20th or early 21st-century, you have
probably seen small metal barrels high-up on the wooden poles that bring
the electricity to houses and other buildings. You probably have a nuclear
power plant or gushing waterfall or giant hamster that flips over magnets to
make the “alternating current” flow. It is sequestered in central power
facilities that distribute it through long wires in the air. When it gets to your
building it is so intense that it would blow you at least halfway to
smithereens. To make it safe, it has to be transformed.
Inside the metal bucket is a coil with a certain number of loops. Inside or
nearby is another coil with fewer loops. When the electromagnetic field
turns into a flow in the second coil it has the same energy but less voltage
so it is now safe to flow into the holes in your walls without exploding
them. The energy was “stepped down.” It could also be stepped up.
This is metaphorical. Gurdjieff is not talking specifically about physical
electricity but about a certain “something” that flows and changes in any
area of life.
How do you get from not being able to play the piano to actually being able
to play it? What happened between your first meeting with someone and
ending up in a relationship with them? The book you are reading right now
began as an idea. One way to think about that is to imagine that the pattern
of stimulation connected with the idea was stepped up — it rose through a
series of steps, each with their own flavor, and luckily it completed its cycle
at the next octave. The law of seven is a transdisciplinary metaphor that
applies to your own creative projects and the evolution of civilization as
much as it does to electron shells and musical orchestration.
A triad is a way of thinking about an event; an octave is a way of thinking
about a process.
 ANTICIPATING DEVIATIONS IN
CREATIVE PROCESSES

There is a lot of lore and pondering in the Fourth Way about elaborate
schemas that depict the deviation points in the octave of an unfolding
process.
Gurdjieff even gives us a myth about how God adjusted the length of the
intervals between the phases of a spectrum of energy so that regenerative
interaction could occur between processes. He calls these intervals
“stopinders.”
He says that God stretched out the interval that occurs after the first few
notes & also squished up the interval that comes just before the completion
of the octave. Forget about all that elaboration. Just carefully and curiously
attend to your own processes.
Do you ever give up on a project “a little while after starting” or “just
before completing?” Is there a common pattern to the ways that you lose
contact with an inspiration? Can you anticipate that something unexpected
will fuck up your plan just before you get it to the next level? Trouble at the
gates.
An impulse or inspiration arises. You prepare to take action. You get started
using the amount of energy and understanding that you currently have at
your disposal. At some point that gives out or gets disrupted. Unless you
learn something new, enfold an outstanding factor, or receive an infusion
from someone else — your momentum may grind to a halt.
However, if you receive that bonus energy, you can continue. Hurray! But
that is still not quite enough to realize the project.
When you are nearly at the end, you might suddenly lose interest, get
distracted, put it aside, grow angry and dispirited, etc. Something extra
needs to be enfolded again.
I used to have this idiotic habit. I would bend over to tie a loose shoelace
and straighten back up, congratulating myself — without having tied them!
This happened many times. Finally, the force of my own chagrin at this
clear deviation from my own purpose accumulated enough additional
energy to start completing the task every time. It seems to me that the most
simple way to start appreciating the deviations in how processes actually
unfold is watch for incongruities in your action.
As your appreciation deepens you may wish to contemplate the digestive
processes of the multidimensional human organism. One of the more
intriguing pieces of the Gurdjieffian cosmology is the notion that the food
we consume cannot unfold its whole octave without some help. Thinking
about those steps and the nature of that “help” can be a very big thing.
 DENYING THE FLESH

Fuck the body. Why not? An anti-flesh ideal has formed part of the implicit
argument of many ascetic monotheistic cults over the course of recorded
human history.

Under ideal conditions, of course, it can be very empowering to thwart the

inclinations of the body. That is almost the definition of exercise. Plus
fasting is good for your health and breath-holding can be a profound
exercise. The struggle to sit still can make us into a more potent human
being.

Yet despite all this potential, it is still notoriously easy for religious and
social customs to become perversely biopathic. Like captive zoo animals
gnawing on their own limbs, socialized human beings can get caught in
self-torment, self-nullification and idealized devitalization practices.
The Germanic professors F. Nietzsche & W. Reich famously critiqued the
culturopathy that results in people taking up idealized lifestyles that
undermine the emotional, physical and instinctive energies required for
meaning-making, robust health and peak experiences. We have learned this
lesson well.
Prudery, chastity, self-denial, cultured stiffness & emotional austerity have
lost their ancient aristocratic glamor. Under the condition of liberal
consumer-capitalism, we may have become lopsided in the other direction
— indulgence. We may have lost touch with the self-regulatory and
developmental benefits of struggling against the inclinations of the
organism.
Gurdjieff, a great believer in the artful use of both discipline and
indulgence, proposed an attitude of gratitude toward the recalcitrance of the
flesh.
If the body did not helpfully disagree with so many of our inspired self-
improvement plans, he says, we would have to invent some other
mechanism for generating constant inner disagreement. We need friction to
power the unfolding of our creative potential. Thank goodness for internal
disagreement.
But before we indulge our inherited macho temptation to push the body
beyond its inbuilt and habitual boundaries, keep in mind that he also said it
doesn’t matter which way the friction goes.
It does not matter whether it is the body resisting the mind’s schemes or the
mind resisting the body’s tendencies.
What matters is the creative effort to maintain symmetrical contact with
both forces, allowing your inter-part space to be enlivened as the smoothing
out of the tension, making more energy available for your unfolding and
producing self-insights along the way.
 HUNTING FOR HARNEL-MIATZNELS

It is fun to say “harnel-miatznel.” Try it. Harnelmiatznel! Harnelmiatznel!

This is Gurdjieff’s neologism for a special formulation of his triadic
principle of the event.
A new arising from the previously arisen through the “Harnel-
miatznel,” the process of which is actualized thus: the higher blends
with the lower in order to actualize the middle and thus becomes either
higher for the preceding lower, or lower for the succeeding higher.
When a (relative, contextual) affirming force is constructively entangled
with a denying force and mediated through an actively resolving force, then
the possibility of novelty emerges. Novelty does not occur in a vacuum. It
negotiates an adaptive fit within the multidimensional ecology of the local
cosmos — which consists of qualitative energies rising and falling along the
trajectory of frequency changes.
How does this adaptation occur? A vertical triamazikamno happens when
two forces or beings resonate with each other. Between them forms an
intersubjective and interobjective overtone — higher than the lower
frequency but lower than the higher frequency — which takes on a
mediating life of its own.
The makers of binaural beat acoustics suggest that by sending a different
sonic frequency through each earphone, into either hemisphere of the brain,
the whole brain will begin to pulsate electrically at the frequency of the
difference between the two signals. If one ear/brain hears 15 beats-per-
second (Hz) and the other ear/brain hears 5 beats-per-second then the brain
synchronization will gravitate to 10 beats-per-second. But I suppose one
could generalize this notion…
 EXOTERIC, MESOTERIC & EXOTERIC

When Gurdjieff, repeatedly, in various slightly different forms, tells the

“instructional parable” of his attempt to set up an Institute For the
Harmonious Development of Man with local branches in all the major cities
of the world, he invariably makes a point of describing three overlapping
circles of participants: exoteric, mesoteric & esoteric.
Two of those terms are quite familiar to anyone who has a passing
knowledge of religious history.
Classically, community religious practice is divided into the habits/beliefs
of the general population (exo-teric) and the depth-oriented life of
contemplation and inner practice among adepts, shamans or priests (eso-
teric). Gurdjieff, unusually, but usually for him, always cites a third rung —
the meso-teric mediator.
His distinctions generally break down like this:
● A general population of people interested in new ideas, new ways
of living, who can be exposed to wisdom-artifacts to help realign
their ordinary lives.
● A smaller class of people who maintain strong ties with the
general sentiments of life but who are deeply interested in both the
study of new ideas and the experimental practice of vetted
techniques for well-being and maturation.
● An even more rarefied network of people who are deeply driven
to prioritize, clarify and improvisationally extend the praxis while
contributing to the production of new wisdom-artifacts and
training as “adept-helpers.” People for whom their way of being in
the world is primarily focused on the personal and interpersonal
practice of being-partkdolg-duty.
We might casually get the mesoteric and the esoteric mixed, mistaking
those who meditate and take weekend self-improvement workshops for the
dedicated network of agents who have no choice but to compulsively
ponder and labor in the service of something like existential depth, subtle
patterns and ontological ultimates. We might also get the mesoteric and the
exoteric mixed up — assuming that the interested in-between people can be
chastised for “not really committing.” Bah. They have their special role.
Who do we suppose can promulgate a regenerative change in the planetary
civilization? The exoteric masses? The remote esoteric cabals? No. It will
come, if it comes, from appropriate mesoteric influence on exoteric habits.
But, then, of course, the further question emerges, the “meta-meso”
question, as to who exists halfway between these three categories…?
 STARSHIPS & GRAVITY
The Law of Falling

Developmental stages enfold each other. It is not a rejection of the lower in

favor of some dubious notion of the “higher” but rather a growth into
structures that are more inclusive. Molecules still have, and rely upon,
atoms that maintain quarks, etc. Einstein’s theory of gravity is only next-
level because it explains where and why Newton’s theory is correct. It
enfolds, re-validates & extends the simpler perspective. And Newton’s
model was already weird. We are always falling toward the center of the
Earth which, in turn, is falling toward the center of the Sun.
Everything existing in the World falls to the bottom. And the bottom for
any part of the Universe is its nearest “stability,” and this said
“stability” is the place or the point upon which all the lines of force
arriving from all directions converge.
– St. Venoma in “The Law of Falling,”
Beelzebub’s Tales
Einstein’s model, of course, is even weirder. There is no such thing as
gravity. Not really.
If you and I walk, in parallel, from the equator to the North pole then our
paths will converge. We will get closer and closer until we collide. An
external observer might think an “invisible force” was pulling us together
but actually that’s just what moving-in-a-straight-line looks like on a curved
surface. The Earth and I are not being pulled toward each other. We just
collide because that’s what straight lines do in curved space. Weird.
Einstein also said that no one is ever falling. If you topple off a roof, you
are floating. Just like in deep space. Falling, floating, flying and flow states
are mysteriously entangled.
The trickiness of falling plays a prominent role in several chapters of
Beelzebub’s Tales. He tells the story of how one system of “starships”
(spiritual teachings?) was eventually replaced by another more advanced
system. Originally the great engineer St. Venoma invented a gravitational
engine — a way of harnessing the law-of-falling.
This was pretty far out in the 1930s but has a little more credence now that
humanity has devices for detecting gravitational waves. Many have even
speculated that engines of this kind might explain the odd movement
patterns associated with credible UFO/UAP anomalies.
Gravitational effects, like light, are a series of changes that propagate
through space at nearly the maximum possible velocity. And in empty space
this falling could continue by inertia with little or no added energy. Very
efficient. The only problem is that space is not always empty.

Around planets there are atmospheres (containing air, gases or, he notes,
concentrated etheric energy). These can get in the way of your free flowing
pathway through life. Realizing this problem, Venoma built a laser. His
concentrated beam of what he calls elekilpomagtistzen —
(electromagnetism, i.e. Binary okidanhokh) would blast a hole through the
local atmosphere and create a neutral space. But this process of
neutralization took a great deal of energy and was very complicated for the
poor crew of the starship.
That’s what led to the innovation of the Archangel Hariton. He figured out a
way to use the hassle of the problematic local vibes to benefit one’s path. It
involved a scheme rather like pranic breathwork whereby a flexible
cylinder opened, absorbed the local “ether” and then expanded, and grew
larger before discharging the noxious material.
In reality, your pathway simply is going to be disrupted. If you are lucky
enough to have a stable home, a monastery, a walled garden of consensual
nourishment and praxis, you will still periodically encounter zones of
problematic vibes. Stress. Weirdness. Resistance. This can either be a
serious problem that you need to avoid or expend a lot of hassled energy to
pacify or else you can adopt a growth mindset and look for ways to convert
these noxious encounters into a profitable part of your spiritual path.
If you work with the resistance properly, you can inwardly expand and pass
right through — resuming your flow…
 THREE LINES OF WORK
NOTE: the style of this chapter is composed according to a theory
described in the appendix of this book

The story is well-known of the famous & important early Medieval Dutch
painter Trillinus Bok. His biography erupted into my own awareness
through a personal friend, an art historian, who unexpectedly, and with a
degree of enthusiasm quite unusual for such a sober academic, sent me the
following short synopsis which he had come across in some arcane volume:
“Bok is now believed to have invented the triptych — that strange half-
object, half-genre that turned out to play such an important role in
Renaissance religious art. The great independent painters of Europe and
communitarian mystics of Russia (and across the former Byzantine Empire)
made rich use of the triptych, which eventually was recognized as a
significant contribution to the history of art itself.
Although similar objects can be dated in fragmentary form to earlier
periods, it was Bok who, in 1338, first formalized the use of three separate
but interconnected “panels” that could either be closed, boxed up and
hidden from view or else unfolded, in various degrees, to reveal distinct
aspects of a single interconnected visual concept. Common subjects for
triptychs have included the relationship of Heaven, Hell & Earth and the
supra-domestic phantasy of Jesus, Mother Mary and a shaft of light pouring
down from majestic masses of divine clouds.
Bok was a portrait painter of good reputation who had been hired by the
Salzburg Court to portray Lady Delphine, the young, buxom and precocious
daughter of Count Spessiale. The count was quite impressed by Bok’s work
and commissioned a second religious piece from him while, in turn, Bok
had been quite impressed by Lady Delphine and therefore sought to
astonish her with his new work which would, in time, come to be regarded
as the first official triptych painting. His approach, which is still studied
seriously in some schools, moved by layers from one compartment to the
next — first putting down faint lines to indicate general distinctions and
then moving on to shapes and finally the elements of colour and texture that
are so essential in making the forms come to life.
This first triptych was quite unique and mercifully avoided the subsequent
religious cliches that came to dominate the field.
The initial panel consisted of a cavern in which Saint Anthony (with an
image of the radiant heart girt with a serpent on his breast) is adorned by
both a general halo and a special nimbus of light blue around his head. The
saint is depicted as praying on his knees in a blue and red robe while in a
polished bronze mirror, apparently lit by the saint’s luminous power, the
viewer can just make out a reflection of the holy man from behind.
The central image was more multifarious being and populated by a
parliament of owls bedecked with various arcane religious insignia of office
— later said to have been a critical commentary on the organization of
papal authority of the time. This grouping of birds featured dappled sunlight
from nearby trees and various shadows are shared across the feathered
flocking throngs. They appear to be jostling up against each other as if
violence is about to break out but also, in the corners, we see heads tilted in
serious questioning and mutual consideration.
Although this image is quite serviceable, its craft, delicacy and vividness
cannot compare to the third and final panel of the triptych. Here we see an
enormous field of activity in which a massive red and white striped tent is
in the process of being erected, framed by the tall grasses of the field, for a
half dozen sculptors already working diligently to bring forth half-realized
forms from out of large stone blocks.
This work of art, years before the proto-surrealist astonishments of
Hieronymus Bosch, was so strange and vividly executed with such haunting
portents and, arguably, social critiques, not to mention the sheer novelty of
placing it in an mobile, three-part wooden framing device, that the Salzburg
court was quite beside themselves as to how they should respond. In
consultation with local religious authorities, the Count decided to deny
payment to the artist and in fact to threaten him with death for so
outrageous a production. Although it broke Bok’s heart open to part from
Lady Delphine he had no choice and, on the fourth of August of that year,
by the old calendar, he left his work behind and went on his way. He vowed
never to make another triptych and to constrain his art solely for the
predictable pleasures of his patrons.
Yet the story does not end there. While Bok was restoring his reputation as
a capable and reliable portrait painter, rumors spread about the peculiar
triple painting. A few years later, following the Count’s death, Lady
Delphine — who was half French herself — was wed to the eldest son of
the Duke of Normandy. He turned out to have a much more daring attitude
toward art and a rather bleak view of the established church such that they
decided to indulge public curiosity by erecting Bok’s triptych in the palace
museum. News of this reversal reached Bok’s ears and despite the fact that
he disowned that work he could not help but take the situation very
personally. As the fame of the work grew it seemed to reflect upon him
personally to the point that he went, in disguise, to view it among other
members of the public. According to personal papers discovered after his
death, he struggled very much between viewing the situation as a social
phenomenon, produced by others as much as himself, and a secret triumph
for which he took a degree of private pride. Although he could not know his
position in the future history of art, he struggled greatly and these inner
struggles were only exacerbated by his loneliness and periodic thoughts of
Lady (now Countess) Delphine. In 1353 he was found dead in a public pit
in Prague, torn apart by three ravenous lions, at the site of what would later
become the first official European zoo. In Prague today there are still some
who consider him to be an unofficial Catholic martyr who bestows good
luck upon laborers of all kinds.”
I cannot verify all the facts in the story related to me by my art historian
friend but I cannot deny that there is something in the tale of Trillinus Bok
that intrigues me a great deal.
 INTENTIONAL SUFFERING &
RESEARCHES INTO LABOR-ABILITY
How Gurdjieff Got His Groove Back

There is a rather extraordinary story in the introduction to Gurdjieff’s final

book. He tells how he was beset, in the years following his accident, with
an ongoing need to improve his physical health, with the death of the two
women closest to his heart, the material problems of the institute, the
overwhelming task of introducing his practices in human life and training
adept-helpers, and the task of completing his second and third writing
projects when he realizes that what he has already written is terrible — no
one who does not know him well can understand it. It didn’t transmit!
What does he do with all the troubles? He puts himself at stake. He resolves
to kill himself if he has not found a way out of these predicaments by the
winter holidays.
As the date grows closer, an interesting thing happens one evening when he
has been in agonized pondering about the death of his beloved wife and his
mother.
In my thoughts there suddenly realized itself, and after only a little
confrontation there was established for me very clearly, the following:
During the period of my greatest occupation with writing, the quality
of my labor-ability and its productivity was always the result of, and
was dependent upon, the length and gravity of the constating with my
active mentation of the automatic—that is, passive—experiencings of
suffering proceeding in me concerning these two, for me, nearest
women. … And the next morning, when I did awake, the constatation
that I had made the previous night recalled itself. I began once more to
remember these things and to compare them. And this time, beyond
any doubt, I again established that during the first three years of my
 authorship, my labor-ability, as well as my productivity, in reality at all
times strictly corresponded in its duration with the length and quality
of the, so to say, “degree of contact” between my consciousness and
the suffering proceeding in me on behalf of my mother and my wife.
He solves his energy problem and induces spontaneous peak experiences of
unparalleled intensity. Victory. But how? The specifics of this section are
very interesting. In my opinion they should be read and re-read with various
eyes. It ostensibly records a moment of transformation in his understanding
of how suffering can be transmuted into creative bio-cultural energy.
Whereas he previously understood that such energy can be produced by
inflicting struggles upon yourself, he now saw that there was an untapped
reservoir of this power available to him in the degree to which he could
make his consciousness touch the intolerable core of personal pain being
circumstantially suffered.
That is perhaps profound, but the more general lesson is given by his
example. One can and ought to become a researcher, speculator and
experimenter in the matter of producing creative energy.
There are days when you get more things done. Solve outstanding
problems. See more deeply into situations, puzzles and relationships. What
did you do the previous day? What was it that you have not clearly
constated to yourself that put you in the situation of having more of the
ability to do work that you care about in multiple areas of life?
It has something to do with some kind of suffering. But which kind
specifically?
A number of early translations of Gurdjieff’s teachings used the phrase
“voluntary suffering.” In his final (esoteric instructive) coded text, Life is
Real only Then When I AM, he clearly problematizes this translation in two
important ways. Firstly, he stages a scene in which he is arguing with his
translator-secretaries about the “philological” distinction between voluntary
and intentional. He is drawing attention to a subtle difference.

J. G. Bennett would later write about his own perception of the difference
between involuntary, voluntary and intentional suffering: Most suffering is
passive, unwanted, unproductive and inflicted upon us merely by life-
circumstances or our poorly arranged inner life. Voluntary suffering is
accepted as a means to attaining some other positive goal — getting up
early to train for the Olympics, quitting smoking to improve health,
inhibiting flirtatious habits in order to deepen an existing romantic
commitment. One agrees to the suffering for personal gain.

Bennett further proposes, and not without some justification, that

intentional suffering is undergone for the sake of the future well-being of
planetary wisdom-civilization and a thriving biosphere —both gross and
subtle.
I like that, but I would say something else. To me the essential difference is
that intentional suffering is reaching for a potency that resides within the
suffering itself.
It does not look beyond the suffering to calm itself down with a proposed
future gain but rather takes a proactive stance of feeling into the pain-
within-the-pain as a self-healing and self-transformational medicine.
In the very autohagiographical story of Gurdjieff’s so-called suicide
attempt, he appears to critique his own previous assumptions about
intentional suffering. He describes a shift from believing that one must
generate and inflict the suffering upon oneself to a perspective that passive
circumstantial angst can generate creative energy depending on the “degree
of contact” between consciousness and the suffering.
You can, essentially, intentionalize a pre-existing suffering.
It simply depends on the duration and intensity with which you
intentionally lean into the kernel of the suffering. Merely undergoing the
suffering does not become labor-ability. One must reach specifically and
intentionally for the quality of sufferingness.
 ONLY OBJECTIVE ART FANS

Gurdjieff has this whole thing about legomonisms. I like to pronounce it in

two syllables: Lego. Monism. That’s partly because I’m perversely
intrigued about what sort of monotheistic cults could be built from
commercial Lego blocks but also partly because my mis-emphasis
introduces an inexactitude into the discussion. And Gurdjieff claims that
legomonisms speak the language of inexactness.

Hold on — what are we talking about? Have I leaped too quickly into the
most abstruse intricacy of this topic? And what does the word abstruse
mean? Let us widen the lens slightly:
In the Fourth Way there is a notion of “objective art.” It is supposedly
distinct from merely social or subjective art. The latter is what dominated
contemporary discussions on this subject. Ordinary discourse about art
involves its use as a social activity, its amplification by commerce and the
oddly narcissistic idea that people ought to be sharing their angst, hopes,
fetishes and personal appreciation of natural vistas (not to mention the
perennially popular bowls of fruit and vases of flowers). Music, dance,
writing, painting, sculpture. Is it social commentary? Decoration? A
business? A means of personal expression? These are the standard options.
Gurdjieff opposes them all!
An objective work of art is defined as the stimulation of a particular state,
feeling and behavioral tempo in human organisms. It is the orchestration of
beings according to a nuanced understanding of how we are co-created by
participation with our environments and perceptions.
Great cathedrals are meant to exalt people. Horror movies are meant to
startle and arouse people. The art is producing an objective effect. Stand-up
comedians, for example, are often puzzled by the question, “How far is too
far? Are there some things you just can’t joke about?” because the answer is
not found in our personal political opinions. It is based entirely on whether
audiences laugh.
There is an objective metric. So our culture — especially where there is
direct feedback and skin in the game — actually does have objective art of
various kinds. We are not purely subjective despite the dominant discourse
on art. What we typically lack, however, are legomonisms.
Legomonisms are a special form of object art created by shamans, sages
and esoteric networks. They are designed to encode truths about the
structure of the cosmos, the dynamics of human psychology and the nature
of developmental praxis. And they do this by introducing anomalies,
deviations and surprises within the presentation of an otherwise sensible
structure.
Why would an ancient artist who can depict the human body with a high
degree of accuracy nonetheless make one eye much larger than the other?
Why are the enlarged phalluses on the walls of some of the oldest Egyptian
temples shown protruding from the solar plexus rather than the crotch?
Why would a piece of music that is transforming smoothly along an octave
include one false note? These are hints to anomaly hunters. X marks the
spot.
Gurdjieff claimed that his books were a legomonism — so be prepared to
seek their meaning in contradictions, deviations or just off to the side of the
claims. He famously said that he “included all the keys… but not near the
doors.”
Galileo, father of the scientific method, wrote plays. And in his plays he
asserts that the greatest amount of learning is to be found where your
predictions are disrupted. This, in fact, is the principle of the hypothesis.
But we seldom inspect art as if it had a message (that’s even considered to
be rather gauche by late capitalist art critics and rhetoricians) let alone as if
the message were in a code that could be located by making a prediction
and finding it to be violated.
Of course writing is fairly new — i.e. only a few thousand years old. The
majority of the developmental activity of our species went of before that
invention. Wisdom is therefore mostly “written” in statues, architecture,
myths, parables, aphorisms, chants and dances. These were the basic
communication tools available for sending messages into the future.
Gurdjieff also put a lot of his teaching into non-verbal forms such as
dances, music and meals. He worked closely and regularly with the famous
Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, who helped convert half-
remembered, half-improvised “temple music” into songs for use in sacred
dances.
These dances were important. For some students they are the unique
essence of the teaching. They set Gurdjieff’s work apart from most other
spiritual lineages, except certain Sufi lines, in terms of the importance
placed on these complex intersubjective exercises for making simultaneous
mental, emotional and physical efforts interactively with fellow esoteric
aspirants.
Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff’s most prominent successor, originally
joined after she discovered in these dances something more interesting than
the Eurythmic (the dance and movement practice that the Annie Lennox
band “The Eurythmics” was named after) work she had been engaged in.
And Gurdjieff proudly listed “teacher of dancing” as his real and
metaphorical occupation on his passport.
To what degree they are remembered from his time in temples in the Middle
East, Egypt and Asia is uncertain. They are probably partly recalled, partly
inspired by what he observed there and partly a creative emergence from his
own artistic intelligence and his constant desire to experiment with the
effects of different frequencies upon people. The same can probably be said
for his constant cooking and preparing of great feasts of “special dishes
learned in exotic lands.”
His theory was that particular frequencies and sequences had an actual
objective (and largely subconscious) impact on organisms and brains. The
goal of true art, or at least the goal he promoted as a counterbalance to the
subjective self-expression notion of capitalist Western 20th century art, was
to be able to convey true information through the creation of predictable
responses. You should go into a cathedral and feel uplifted to heaven. The
artifact should produce the appropriate response in a healthy organism so
that it can become a language. And then, on top of that, special esoteric
messages can be communicated through oddities, asymmetries and
misplacements within that language.
While this all sounds as though it depends on a special kind of intention and
superknowledge possessed by the makers of art, the role of the recipient is
where this really becomes enacted. Gurdjieff and his fellow esoterics cannot
prove conclusively what was in the minds of the builders of the Sphinx, the
composers of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the carvers of the Göbekli Tepe
pillars. What they know more directly is the process and interpretive frame
that they brought to their own pondering and analysis of cultural artifacts
both ancient and contemporary.
How does your own experience of art, culture and self change when you sit
contemplatively and attempt to work out, for yourself, the “coded message”
of artistic works? What happens when you treat the affect as a
transmission? Which internal doors begin to open when a statue, dance or
film is inspected as though it were an intentional coded message revealing
itself especially in its anomalies?
And since I grew up in the woods, I wonder what happens when trees,
boulders and mountains are inspected through this lens…
 THE QUESTION OF BEING
[…] while I have received no impression that M. Gurdjieff is by any
means as outstanding intellectually, emotionally or practically as his
faithful disciples suppose him to be, I am convinced by my personal
experience of him that he possesses another quality that may be more
important than any of the foregoing. This quality he possesses to a
degree that is not merely superior to that of any other man whom I
have ever encountered, but to a degree greater than it would ever have
occurred to me could exist, had I not met M. Gurdjieff. It is the quality,
not of mind or of feeling; or of successful accomplishment, but simply
of being. I have never failed to experience this in his presence; one (or
I) cannot “put one’s finger upon it” but it is most certainly there.
– C. Daly King,
The Oragean Version

It is what it is. Or is it? People often spout tautological nonsense of that

kind as though it were irrefutably profound. These parasites are so
numerous I have to fend them off like wild dogs by waving my Skeptical
Suggestiveness stick in the air very aggressively.

However it is not only nitwits and dopers who get impressed by the self-
proving quality of Being. It is also the great and true mystics of human
history. They never cease to irritate the rest of us about the is-ness of things.

They are consistently turned on by the psychophysical affects associated

with the attempt to perceive the sheer existyness of what exists. One such
sage, the notorious and politically dubious German savant Martin
Heidegger, made a big deal about how our civilization is soulless because it
keeps looking just at the totality-of-all-the-beings rather than peering
directly into the poetic and unthinkable condition of Being itself.
We fill our college philosophy courses and New Age bookshops with
provocative questions about the relationship between Being & Becoming.
Apparently, these days, all Being is really just Becoming. Although, for that
to be true, Becoming would have to really BE — right? And, without fail,
some tipsy wag will point out that the -ing means that Be-ing was always a
verb (even though we want to get better at doing our Being by contrasting
our being-mode to our doing-mode). It is a real mess, and this kind of
slippery talk might get you imprisoned for six months in certain autocratic
Middle Eastern kingdoms. But don’t worry, all the best people are already
in there.
Very few of them, however, have tried to define “beingness” as a quality
that can be amplified in sapient organisms. That’s why I strongly appreciate
J. G. Bennett’s attempt. He said it was the intensity of inner
interconnectedness. That’s pretty good. Very practical. You could probably
use that to judge your own nervous system. His teacher Gurdjieff seems
pretty happy with the word “being” to denote both the existential quality
par excellence as well as the degree of wholistic coherence that varies
across the subjective embodiment of individual entities.
It does not matter, as far as I can tell, what term we use. Yet we do need
some (or perhaps many) weighty and suggestive and intriguing words to
help us refer to “whatever” quality is evoked by efforts to integrate our
psychic parts, to bear our authentic sufferings & to show up more deeply
with others.
Since I’ve already provided at least two definitions of beingness and
pointed to a half-productive, half-foolish schism within the use of
existential tautologies, I should — following Gurdjieff’s lead — break off
suddenly. Or perhaps imply ambiguously that I have one more important
point to make, which is…
 THE FINAL PREAMBLE
I am…? But what has become of that full-sensing of the whole of
myself, formerly always in me in just such cases of self-questioning
during the process of self-remembering. …Is it possible that this inner
ability was achieved by me thanks to all kinds of self-denial and
frequent self-goading only in order that now, when its influence for my
Being is more necessary even than air, it should vanish without trace?
No! This cannot be! …Something here is not right! If this is true, then
everything in the sphere of reason is illogical. But in me is not yet
atrophied the possibility of actualizing conscious labor and intentional
suffering! … According to all past events I must still be. I wish! … and
will be!! Moreover, my Being is necessary not only for my personal
egoism but also for the common welfare of all humanity. My Being is
indeed necessary to all people; even more necessary to them than their
felicity and their happiness of today. I wish still to be … I still am!
– G. I. Gurdjieff
The (Pre)Prologue to
Life is Real Only Then When I AM

With these words he begins his final book. His so-called “truly instructive
and edifying book.” This inner monologue provokes the Prologue — which
is a multi-timeline commentary on the stream of reasoning suggested by
these words. So they are being strongly emphasized.

Let’s break it down line by line. Not because I want to privilege one of my
own interpretations of this passage but because I wish to impress upon us
the possibility of putting more analytic effort into these writings. I would be
happiest if you undertook this exercise once a year and, drawing an
apparently completely different conclusion each time, strongly felt: Aha!
NOW I certainly get what he means based on my own experience…
So let us, at the end of our first book, begin to look again at the beginning
of his last book:
I am…?
This is a form, perhaps, of self-inquiry. The great Hindu saint Sri Ramana
Maharshi is believed to have observed the ongoing mantra “Nan Yar?”
(Who am I?) And with typical subtlety and playfulness, Lee Lozowick
famously kicked it up a notch by teaching his students the self-inquiry
mantra: Who am I kidding?
But Gurdjieff does not write “Who am I?” He writes instead, “I am…?”
This form of self-awareness exhibits more organic puzzlement. Is it not
very strange to find that you continue to be? And if you are lucky enough,
or ingenious enough, to have intensified your wholistic existential self-
sense to the point at which it is notably different than the average, you
nonetheless still discover that it has the open-ended, exploratory and even
vexatious quality of a thorny question.
Perhaps it would be correct to say that Selfhood is the presence of the
question of the Self. Imagine what it is like to awaken with amnesia or to
survive a deadly duel by a fraction of an inch. What do you think these
conditions do to our selfness? They make it more acute, more intense and
more uncertain all at once. Dear God — what sort of beingness is this?!
With that question we always begin. Not by asking it but rather by an open-
ended registering, in this moment, of the variable quality of the self’s
ontological sufficiency. In what way are you here? To what degree are you
here?
But what has become of that full-sensing of the whole of myself,
formerly always in me in just such cases of self-questioning during the
process of self-remembering…
Something is missing. Something is not quite right. Did I not already
“attain” ? Was there not a peak experience in the past? A realization of the
Self as permeated utterly by divinity? An establishment of a more robust
sense of being? A seeming accumulation of existential competence and
freedom from ordinary neurotic conditions? Was I not somehow whole
already? De-contracted? Fully embodied? Where has all that gone?
How could such an absolute thing merely come-and-go? I could swear that
I had already reached a condition in which, when I checked on myself, I got
a really strong “thumbs up,” a real wink of encouragement — a strongly
embodied sense that I was going, and had been going, in the correct
direction. Now where is that? I am “back to normal.” The first step of
remembering my Being is to be with the insufficiency of my Being. A
stronger sensing of reality is possible.
Is it possible that this inner ability was achieved by me thanks to all
kinds of self-denial and frequent self-goading only in order that now,
when its influence for my Being is more necessary even than air, it
should vanish without trace?
Look, I have spent time on this already. Energy. Effort. I have been
countless times torn apart by my inner contradictions. I have risked many
dear things and pushed myself often in order to achieve whatever level of
spiritual virtuosity I did achieve. And now it is gone??? Shall I have to go
through all that misery again to get it back? It feels desperate. Whatever
part of myself is represented by this emergent presence, it seems even more
important to me than my mortal life and all the vital stimulation that I seem
to breathe in with the air.
No! This cannot be! …Something here is not right! If this is true, then
everything in the sphere of reason is illogical.
I recoil against my insufficiency, against the world, against myself. I access
my organic motivation as though it were an aggressive frustration between
two sets of profound reasoning. The apparent facts and my inner truth are
equivalent challengers. Him or me! I allow space for my individual being to
unfold because I hold that space open with an emotionally charged critique
of the very laws of reality. The apparent nature of the world is one
negotiating partner — and I am the other! Each of us has a say about what
constitutes “reason.” We will have to work something out to our mutual
advantage.
But in me is not yet atrophied the possibility of actualizing conscious
labor and intentional suffering!...
Not yet. It is possible that all this could be taken away but — not yet. Here I
am. Still. The mere fact of having a recognizable self-presence means that I
am qualified to engage the process of self-unfolding. I may be at the bottom
of the hill under a Sisyphean boulder, but that means I can get up and have a
go at it again. The spiritual is constantly knocked down. Yet it is possible to
begin again by making intentional efforts to reconnect with my Being and
trying to access the authenticity hidden in my typical sufferings. Who cares
what I have already achieved? Who cares what my intuitions of reality tell
me? Who cares what beautiful visions I have already had? Keep going. To
BE is to BE MORE.
According to all past events I must still be. I wish! … and will be!!
In fact I have learned this very lesson already many times. I am still here.
The events of my life have put me here with these possibilities and this
motivation. I have an impulse, an instinct, a wish for MORE BEING. For
BEINGNESS itself and for the BECOMINGNESS of BEING. And my
capacity to will, to create, to determine, in whatever degree that exists, is
now engaged by my recognition of my actual wish to be as completely as
possible.
Moreover, my Being is necessary not only for my personal egoism but
also for the common welfare of all humanity. My Being is indeed
necessary to all people; even more necessary to them than their felicity
and their happiness of today.
The impulse toward MORE BEING is inherently self-transcendental. It is a
moral impulse. I wish for my wish to align with the well-being of beings. In
order to BE MORE, I must BE MORE WITH others. Instinctively, I must
take up a kind of Boddhisattva Vow that fundamentally entangles the
increase of my beingness with the increase of the beingness of all beings as
the pinnacle of their interconnected thriving. There must be alignment.
I wish still to be … I still am!
Beingness is not an inert fact. It is an affirmation and a transformation. I
only AM when I wish to BE MORE and to STILL BE. The willingness to
go beyond myself is what it takes to be myself. The very shape of Being is
that its indefinite extension through time and change must be affirmed.
When Ouspensky asked Gurdjieff about Nietzsche and the Will to the
Eternal Recurrence he said it was not exactly true but, if you understood it,
it was probably the closest approximation possible at this time.
As I said, this is not “the meaning” of the specially privileged, ultra-
personal, ultra-universal, encoded soliloquy that begins and frames
Gurdjieff’s final (and purportedly most technically instructive) text. It is a
demonstration. Begin, again, to chew through this material…
 BARBAROUS TONGUES

Gurdjieff’s books are notoriously difficult with their long, multi-clause

sentences, multiple languages, neologisms and complex, esoteric and
counterintuitive concepts.
One of the major factors determining whether you can profit from his
teachings is simply your attitude toward all this. It either strikes you as a
very appropriate, depth-oriented challenge (given the obvious triviality of
conventional social communication) or it impresses you negatively as a
useless indulgence that is not worth the trouble and clearly indicates an
author who should not be read. If you are in the second category, please
discontinue reading this sentence and resume whittling.
For the rest of you, here are several probes into the particularities of
Gurdjieff’s theory of communication and his application of personal style to
“literature.”

I. A Prelude to Metamodern Esoteric Literature

The Gurdjieffian volumes are not written in a casual manner. He appears to
have labored significantly, writing and re-writing, generating new concepts
and struggling heroically with his own texts. Certainly some of that
impression could be attributed to his notoriously laborious cognitive accent
(i.e. his well-known and half-humorous habit of always claiming vast
struggles & insurmountable difficulties). However these literary and
religious works are indeed huge, complex, interlinked and were composed
in multiple drafts — modified by repeated public readings of particular
passages to different types of people.
Although we cannot say exactly how much effort and hidden architecture is
involved in these cultural artifacts, we can — given his notorious penchant
for 3s & 7s — speculate that his three official books might have been
composed in seven overlapping genres.
I would suggest that this interpretive lens is not merely a way of thinking
about the different layers that Gurdjieff might have brought to his writings
but also a way of connecting them to broader emergent trends in human art
and communication. He may have been working toward a new integrative
pluralistic genre of communication that is on par with contemporary avant-
garde films and television shows that are unique blends of comedy, drama,
supernatural, romance, philosophy, social critique, character studies & art
films all at once.
What possibilities open internally for us when we consider that Gurdjieff is
demonstrably proposing that future literature should be (simultaneously):

An Autobiographical Narrative
A Psychological System
A Cosmological Myth
A Historical Compendium of Real Events
An Esoteric Instruction Manual of Psychotechnologies
A Sociological Critique
A Surrealistic Exploration

One explanation for the sheer amount of work that Gurdjieff seems to have
put into his books is that each scenario, character and statement might have
to work in multiple genres simultaneously. This would make it a true full-
spectrum work of literature. A rough and sprawling example of the trans-
genre of the future.
Are these the perfect 7 genres? You could argue them differently. Or go
with 9. Or whatever. The point is to consider the attitude, skill and sheer
energy to attempt multiple overlapping essential genres. We should at least
challenge ourselves with the idea of an image that is not merely
simultaneously “two faces” and “a vase” but at the same time also “a 17th
century cavalry saber,” a “platypus,” a cluster of “mitochondrial DNA,” and
an ancient Sumerian astrological sign that no one recognizes any more.

II. Don’t Over Optimize Your Linguistics

My pal John (the Canadian cognitive scientist & quasi-Platonist John
Vervaeke) is very concerned about the potential for systems to get trapped
within their own frames. Intelligence is always at risk of over-adapting to
the patterns it is best at recognizing.
We cease to notice our own bias. We look for answers in the places that we
are good at looking — not necessarily the places that are likely to have
answers. So in order for any intelligence to operate responsibly, in tandem
with reality, it has to have some strategy for escaping its own privileged
zone of specialization. It has to stray frequently across the border into and
out of unfamiliar territories. Noise, surprise and incongruity are important if
we want to continue growing and learning organically.
On the other hand, if we wanted to covertly shut people down, we would
make sure that we stayed carefully within a prescribed sensemaking
territory in which everything is prepackaged and pre-interpreted. One of the
“helpful” things done in many of the popular books about Scientology and
Dianetics from L. Ron Hubbard is to carefully define any big word at the
bottom of the page. They claim that this is so that readers do not experience
a gap in their understanding which undermines their comprehension of the
material.
An uncharitable counter-claim would be that they are specifically interested
in reinforcing a low-grade trance state in which an individual’s active
intelligence is slowly rendered obsolete. They are encouraging you to over-
optimize for the Scientology reality tunnel. Gurdjieff does the opposite.
He is exquisitely sensitive to the Procrustean problem of making ourselves
fit into the pregiven shapes of our conventional understanding. The
introductions of all his books contain attacks on standard contemporary
habits and styles of communication. He gives scathing descriptions of the
authors of both popular literature and popular science and pours special
critical scorn on journalistic communication (news, marketing & social
media) for being contaminated by what he calls the “bon ton literary
language.”
All of these critiqued streams of information skew toward being easily
recognized and easily consumed. That does not immediately sound bad but
there are studies indicating that children raised in wild environments, where
they constantly have to make careful distinctions between gnarly,
overlapping and camouflaged objects, have much better sensory acuity that
those raised in urban environments (where the STOP sign and the “Golden
Arches” are built to send very simple message that require almost no effort
to detect). It makes us clumsy, dull and weak in certain ways.
When communication signals fit too readily into our pre-existing cultural
habits and symbolic niches they may cease to provide us with semantic
nourishment while also encouraging the slow degeneration of our
perceptual and interpretive capacities. Junk food is terrible for you but
addictively easy to consume. So Gurdjieff observes that our constant diet of
information junk food puts us at risk of becoming inwardly dormant, lulled
into a non-comprehension that fails to notice its dire condition because
everything feels so familiar and accessible. We specifically don’t get it from
the materials that make us feel that we “obviously get it.”
This critique might sound a little bit strange to contemporary people. We are
raised in public education systems and commercial communication schemes
that rely explicitly on rapid arousal and the production of a sense of
immediate comprehension.
We are taught that an ideal form of language is one in which the reader
understands all the words immediately and can quickly (before getting
exhausted or distracted) grasp the superficial gist of the matter well enough
to repeat it on the test or give it a thumbs up on social media.
Very few of us can stand against these conventional incentives. The average
person is quite busy and has fairly low literacy skills. Academics and
professionals often have more skill but are usually institutionally
overwhelmed by being given too many, often uninteresting, things to
process and in general they cannot spare much time digging into the cryptic
depths. Especially in atmospheres of administrative and political insecurity.
Thusly, among both the well and poorly educated we find that simplicity,
addictive ease and comfortable seduction are proposed as governing
principles for good writing.
Gurdjieff strongly disagrees.
He aggressively claims that material which is easy to follow and
comprehend contains little to no value for human depth and transformation.
If the nice words (“bon ton”) are used to make succinct, readily digested
and obviously welcoming linguistic summaries of profound topics then
their utility will be confined to the most superficial and “merely left brain”
modes of comprehension. The information is aimed at, and sequestered in,
the part of the mind which neglects assimilative multidimensional
understanding.

Furthermore, Gurdjieff is of the opinion that this slide toward nutrient-free,

identity-oriented, easily-consumed floods of public communication is
maintained specifically by the “esprit du corps” of journalists and media
producers who promote and protect each other regardless of whether their
output happens to be generating cultural flourishing or cultural enervation.
It is only, he says, when you actively try — through intensified feeling-
attention and/or multiple re-readings in different modes of comprehension
— to discern the patterns concealed by the surface of the text that your own
capacity to start generating wisdom-insights is activated.
And do not worry, I shall not be so bad mannered as to ask what you think I
‘really’ mean by that last sentence.

III. Long-Adapted Particularity in Embedded Languages is “Deeper”

Than Popular-Official Linguistic Universality
In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff performs an ethnogeographic
inversion of standard institutional assumptions about grammar and
linguistics.

The typical modern — arguably imperialist — approach presupposes that it

is effective, benevolent and humanizing to establish and promote a
simplified, abstract and universal set of grammatical principles. This allows
for the widespread liberal enforcement of public literacy leading to the
production of professional classes, organized by official experts, who set
the rules that allow everyone to engage cross-culturally in commerce,
entrepreneurship, free expression and the furtherance of the objective
sciences.
It is a beautiful vision which often partially succeeds.
At the same time, modernity also generates mass pollution, cultural distress,
weapons of incalculable horror, proliferating addiction and toxicity,
dehumanizing administrative bureaucracies, minimalist pseudo-
democracies & the endemic promotion of tactical deception and “public
relations” (i.e. the top-down control of human minds) to such a point that all
this is barely registered as problematic except, apparently, by a few
romantic regressives and uncompromising radicals “on the fringe” who
simply do not understand “how the world works.”
Interestingly, all of this modern civilization depends on establishing a
shared social surface populated by technical and colloquial concepts that
can be translated across languages, regions and ethnicities. You cannot have
“free trade” without “popular translation.”
Thus our academic institutions and social norms (which in turn are
embedded in the interests of the dominant economic states) are called upon
to produce translators and grammatical principles that specify the fungible
interchangeability of global terminology. Bonjour = Jambo = Hello.
Okay, but what is the French word for what my people call “skookum
interoperability?” And why doesn’t the modern Ukrainian language have as
many different words for God as old Inuit had for Snow? Nuances, subtle
perceptions, deep complexity & emerging insight into multi-perspectival
patterns are among the hardest things to preserve in a system where
economic advantage, institutional authority and generic phraseology
converge together to occupy the dominant discourse.
A standardized metalanguage of this kind need not even be strongly
enforced by top-down authorities. Self-interested parties in local regions,
wishing to participate both in extended trade routes and the cultural glamor
of world-dominating progress, willingly neglect their regional and
physiological peculiarities in favor of more common forms of
communication. But what gets lost is precisely the set of local
ethnogeographic peculiarities in which, Gurdjieff posits, the long-adapted
depth potentials of language are uniquely embedded. Thus we get his
savage critique of this incentivized generic universalism as being precisely
the condition under which humanizing spirituality, complexity and
solidarity are marginalized.
Gurdjieff was in a unique position to draw personal conclusions on this
subject. At the end of the 19th century, as the machine-driven empires were
extending themselves across the planet, he was a guy who spoke numerous
rural languages, loved etymology, had lived among various ethnicities &
was highly attuned to very subtle and difficult-to-communicate concepts.
His observation was that, although barbarous local “folk terms” from
particular regions often contained variants of the profound and subtle
patterns referred to by folks in other regions, these remarkable and
idiosyncratic meanings were largely excluded from the official dictionaries
of the large modernized nations.

Such words were abandoned precisely because they were identified as

esoteric, archaic, “poetic,” or regionally peculiar. Across the world, children
were scolded — sometimes even physically assaulted — for their
inappropriate use of language customs that were considered to fall outside
of the newly established “expert consensus” about terminology, dialect,
punctuation and phrasing. An automated grammar cop was installed in the
brains of everyone who had the right to consider themselves as educated
members of the literate public.
According to Gurdjieff’s critique, we should expect that it is precisely in the
exchanges of variable and embedded outlandish subtleties that people
intersubjectively bring forth material that contributes to a wisdom-
civilization. It is the collective sapience embodied within fields of regional
and racial peculiarity that may act, over time, as an effective search engine
for discovering, through the interaction of ecological, geological,
psychological and sociological patterns, many of the depth-structures of the
human psyche.
This situation of contemporary linguistically-enabled thinking is analogous
to what modern industrial corporations did by extracting, reducing and
amplifying single chemicals from out of complex medicinal plants. The rich
local terrain of semantics was replaced by a very useful but homogenously
flattened “parking lot” of grammars that conformed to imperial, superficial
and mundane needs. And now these parking lots exist everywhere and pass
for normal.
Thus Gurdjieff’s argument is that wisdom-dialog emerges from the sharing
of idiosyncratic phraseology among those who are engaged in existential
and developmental praxis within culturally peculiar life-worlds. These
exchanges are inhibited by the form of standard or popular terminology
EVEN WHEN these common phrases appears to refer to spiritual,
philosophical and esoteric topics.

IV. The Theory of Fragmentary, Indirect & Ambient Wisdom-

Teachings
Gurdjieff also challenges the principle of directness that has become
expedient in Globalized Culture.

Perhaps straightforward communication it is fine for figuring out the

appropriate price of one kilogram of frozen Brazilian ham, or negotiating
the correct financial compensation for one hour of commercial photography
involving a bland-looking, surgically-modified swimsuit model who
specializes in seductively ambiguous facial expressions, but human
transformational data can only be — he believes — effectively
communicated in a more distributed and seemingly incidental fashion.
N’est-ce pas?
Education that is too direct, too pre-loaded, too tidy, becomes superficial
and is unconsciously rejected by deeper levels of the psyche. In order to
communicate from depth to depth, therefore, one must break up the main
points and provide them as a nonlinear scatter embedded within or
positioned strategically adjacent to other more overt material.
As Gurdjieff tells the ladies of the Rope, “teaching can only be by-the-
way.”
There are several important facets of this principle but one of them is
common to many schools of professional hypnotherapy. It is a process of
using indirect stories or examples to suggest a conjunction (“neuro-
associative conditioning”) upon which a new behavioral understanding
depends.

Suppose you have elicited the natural trance induction process in a human
being who wishes to be free from their irrational fear of snakes. You might
make a lot of superficially unrelated comments involving both the feeling of
emotionally secure curiosity and certain objects that the subconscious mind
could connect to the notion of serpents.

Perhaps there is a story about a little boy who was just fascinated by
watching trains weave their way through tunnels. Perhaps there is a tale
about a sssssssslimy shampoo that turned out to be delightfully scented and
wonderfully effective. The brain is being taught a throughline between
associative patterns that allows it to accessing one set of connections and
conclusions more quickly and regularly than another, less valuable, set of
connections. The pieces that make up the unwanted behavioral patterns
should become harder to coordinate and the fragments that collaborate to
form the desired pattern should be easier to connect — without having to
think about it.
This can become an approach to verbal communication in general. A writer
might try to bypass the standard response patterns and invoke a new right
brain’d grok by providing and repeating the pieces necessary for
subconscious intelligence to conclude a new form of knowledge.
Suppose I wanted to bypass your so-called consciousness and allow a
hidden part of your mind to say, “Ah! That’s an elephant!” What would I
do? I might establish a putative narrative scenario which, although seeming
odd on the surface, contain fragmentary features associated with an
elephant. Largeness, grayness, ears, tusks, memory and tropical jungles are
scattered around the discourse rather than placed nominally in the
foreground.
For example,
Today I am having a meeting today at a restaurant. It is called Senor
Tropicala’s and it features a garish jungle theme. However my plans were
foiled because I inadvertently left my house wearing no pants! I drove
almost halfway to the meeting before I remembered. I seemed to have been
tranced into some ancient animal state of consciousness in which I was
hardly noticing anything. Even the loud sounds of other motorists had not
reached my floppy ears. Roaring at myself in fury, I drove back and put on
my large gray and ivory trousers. What a morning! But what I really
wanted to tell you was about what happened at that meeting…
Do you think some layer of your mind is smart enough to make the
“elephant” pattern out of all those partial and seemingly irrelephant (sic)
descriptors embedded in the linear narrative? Imagine doing something
similar with essential subtle wisdom-insights and the functional principles
of developmental praxis.
Scatter them for the purpose of subconscious pattern making. And signal
that you have done this in a particular section of your writing by suddenly,
almost abruptly, dropping the topic or segueing into something else.
For a further example, read the chapter of this book entitled, “The Three
Lines of Work.”

V. Regenerative Abstraction
Do black lives matter? Or do all lives matter? Or is the slogan “black lives
matter” the appropriate, locally-privileged method of accurately articulating
the fact that “all lives matter?” Hmm.
There may be situations or thresholds at which universality fails to
communicate itself on its own terms and at which it only operates
effectively when instantiated in a partial form. The question of the
relationship between the particular and the universal is found throughout
the history of philosophy and has a peculiar relevance to Gurdjieff’s
theories of communication. It seems to me that he frequently pursues a
strategy of meta-level abstraction followed by idiosyncratic re-
particularization.
What does that mean?
Abstraction is often the defining characteristic of an intellect that is
evolved, acute and comprehensive. It can “go meta” by sifting out patterns
the encompass whole categories of content. Socrates, for example, often
liked to initiate his transformative social dialogues by pointing out to some
regular Athenian that specific examples do not tell us the essence of things.
It makes no sense to answer the question, “What is red?” by telling me
about some particular red thing. Redness is a quality shared by many things
and is not reducible to any of them. This is the great proto-philosophical
and educational insight of the West.
So a certain cognitive effort is required in order to notice a common feature
across many examples and then to efficiently begin treating this whole field
as if it were a single object of thought. That is how abstraction is
accomplished. But is abstraction, nonetheless, only half of some other
process? Is there another step that could be involved? Should we content
ourselves to speak abstractly to other smart people using high-level generic
concepts or might we (as Gurdjieff is wont to do) re-anchor our abstract
considerations in the form of a new concrete instance?
The capacity to do abstract thinking is powerful but it can also become a
trap. Years ago I watched the BC Ferries Corporation (a formerly public
entity now using tax dollars to supplement the wallets of international
financialists) roll out a new fleet of ships for transporting people between
Victoria, Vancouver and the Gulf Islands. Each vessel had a name. A very
generic name.

One, for example, was called: COASTAL INSPIRATION. Lovely, yes, but
empty. It sounds like a name designed by a timid committee that could not
agree on anything. Instead of figuring out something that was both coastal
and inspiring they opted to simply assert the abstract fact of being both
coastal and inspiring. They went into the abstraction and were not able to
come back down. Perhaps that is because the return to particularity always
involves risk, choice, visceral sensations & the possibility of leaving
something out. Office workers and Vice-Presidents do not want to take that
responsibility upon themselves. But what do we lose by favoring the
bloodless non-provocative abstractions?
Consider George Carlin’s ferocious critique of the insidious institutional
drift toward a cowardly “precision” of abstract languaging that puts no one
at stake:
“There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a
fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute
maximum. It can’t take any more input. The nervous system has either
snapped or is about to snap. In the First World War, that condition was
called shellshock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables:
shell-shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy
years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the Second World
War came along, and the very same combat condition was called battle
fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem
to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shellshock! Battle
fatigue. After Korea in 1950 Madison Avenue was riding high and the
very same combat condition was called Operational Exhaustion. We’re
up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed
completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational
exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. After
the war in Vietnam the very same condition was called Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And
the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress
disorder. I’ll bet if we’d still been calling it shellshock, some of those
Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed…”
So I called this section of the appendix “regenerative abstraction.” However
that is itself very abstract. Instead, I could have thought of something that
exemplified regeneration. For example, the process of animal reproduction.
Breeding. Sex. Re-generating the species. And what about an example of
abstraction? Film genres are abstract categories of entertainment. So I could
have, with at least a partially clean conscience, entitled this section: Sex
Movies. That would imply both regenerative reproduction and abstract
categorization but it would do so by taking the abstractions and reverse
engineering from them an idiosyncratic particularization whose oddity, in
the given context, should alert you to the fact that I’m clearly not discussing
pornographic films.
Had I entitled this section “Sex Movies” would that constitute a failure to
communicate or, quite the opposite, would it offer a whole different kind of
communication for those who are willing, as Gurdjieff says, to make a little
unusual effort?
Readers of Gurdjieff should be advised — or at least I advise myself in this
regard — to treat his specific examples as post-abstractions.

VI. Transmission by Provocation vs. Transmission by Duplication

What is the role of a spiritual teacher? Maybe that question is too broad.
What is the role of any teacher? Heck, what is the role of any
communication?
They are all trying to get something across. But what does that mean? They
want do to something, share something and then have something result in
another person. The question, of course, is what kind of something are we
talking about? Do I want to say a word sequence and then have you repeat it
plausibly? Or do I want my insight to distort my use of language and
through the reception of that distortion, allow you to have a good idea on a
similar topic? Which one counts as depth communication? One is certainly
more common than the other.
If the British neuro-anthropologist Iain McGilchrist were hiding in the
corner of a room in the house near Toronto in which I am writing these
words, lampshade over his head, white-bearded with a ruddy Celtic face,
gleefully pretending to be a lamp for some reason, he might — if
interrupted — remind us that civilization has been straying for thousands of
years into an exaggerated “male left brain” dominance pattern.
Part of this neurosocial bias has been the assumption that unless something
has been clearly verbally formulated, in a repeatable manner, and then
communicated straightforwardly and then duplicated and repeated back by
the recipient, then no reliable communication has taken place. And I get it.
I’m a linguistically competent, over-educated het-cis male with things to
say and I feel a great deal of frustration when other people do not quickly
get to the point or else waste my time by circling around a position. I scored
very well on tests where you have to remember and repeat back the logical
architecture of a communication. And that’s important. But it’s not the only
important thing.
If I slap you the communication is not such that you now exhibit the shape
of “a slapping” but rather that you have a hot, stinging cheek with an
accompanying emotional response. The indicator that the message is
received is not always indicated by the formal similarity of the result to the
initiating process.
The appropriate result might be the reciprocal of the initial signal. And it
might not involve a particular set of words. If we are interested in
multidimensional communication between sapient agents we should be
interested in the ways in which a message could be considered to be
successfully transmitted according to the evidence of some “other” pattern
arising at the point of reception.
Suppose your guru speaks, in a rather odd way, about vegetarianism and —
halfway through — you suddenly think about the biopshere in a vivid
manner that influences your life forever after. Was this successful
communication or not? Is duplication the only criterion or should we also
consider idiosyncratic provocation as a functional method of instruction?
This becomes an especially pertinent question when considering
communication between people who do not share a common language and
also when exploring the long history of our distant, minimally linguistic
ancestors. So much human communication is not verbal and this must
inform part of the way that we think about higher and subtler verbal
communication.
Suppose one mute tries to demonstrate fire-making to another mute. I
gesture toward you with a stick and then toss it into blaze while gazing at
you encouragingly. The sign of successful communication is not how
precisely you duplicate my stick but rather how well you go off on your
own and find some other, vaguely similar stick and burn it. A primal pattern
of exchange of like this, if translated into contexts of spiritual and
philosophical instruction, might seem radically different than you asking me
a question, me answering it reasonably and then you being able to repeat
the answer. Perhaps in an ideal situation an un-attuned visitor would think
we were speaking about two completely different topics and utterly failing
to communicate.
I’ve spend a lot of time with spiritual adepts who impressed me deeply with
their comportment, ontological vibe, insight and capacity but they also said
a lot of stuff that struck me mostly as pseudo-paranoid, hyperpersonal,
stupidly traditionalist nonsense. Was that an error? Do I simply know
better? Or is my goal to deepen my own insights and refine the quality of
my own pseudo-paranoid hyperpersonal nonsense to the point that it does
what theirs could do?
So when are you reading Gurdjieff, please consider that the purpose of
words does not lie specifically in your recognition and comprehension of
his sentences, although that is good to work on, but be specially attentive to
odd images, feelings or ideas that erupt into your mind — seemingly
unrelated or barely related — whilst you are struggling with the text.

VII. The Gurdjieffian Allegory Style

“In this method the fact that it is allegory is well concealed and the
message is far from obvious.”
– John Henderson,
Podobnisirnian vs Literal
Gurdjieff’s books could be said to present the same collection of integrated
insights and exercise prompts in several distinct genres. The Herald of
Coming Good presents them as a straightforward public announcement.
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandchild is a Science Fiction “frame tale.”
Meetings With Remarkable Men is autobiography. And Life is Real Only
Then When I AM (assuming we pretend it is complete as intended) is a
postmodern deconstruction worthy of Marcel Duchamp. Is this the same
message in four different genres? That is an odd personal speculation of my
own. I credit John Henderson’s book A Field Guide to Gurdjieff’s Buried
Dog with opening me up to all kinds of different ways of thinking about
Gurdjieff’s writings.
John takes seriously Gurdjieff’s claim that these are “10 books in three
series.” He proposes that this means each of the three volumes can be read
in three different ways, making 9 books (incidentally with each of them
being the first book of one of those three readings) and then add The Herald
of Coming Good to bring that 9 up to a 10.

Who cares if John is correct? His main usefulness lies in reminding us to

think more intensively and openly about how this author is attempting to
communicate — both in terms of the layout of the texts and also the
particular allegorical style (what Gurdjieff claims was anciently known as
podobolizovany or “making-alike”) that is deployed in these volumes.
 I want, right from the beginning of this series, to speak also of such
external facts, the description of which for a naive reader might
appear at first sight almost a meaningless, mere succession of words;
whereas for a man who has the habit of thinking and of searching for
the sense contained in so-called “allegorical expositions,” on
condition of a little strengthened mentation, they would be full of inner
significance…
– G. I. Gurdjieff,
Life is Real Only Then When I AM
How seriously are we to take the notion that there is a special style or
theory used by Gurdjieff to create pieces of writing that are not about their
apparent topic? What is the psychological benefit to ourselves and others
from learning to read/decode messages using a swathe of intersecting
perspectival and interpretative options? And how did this approach to
communication evolve in his life?
Although Gurdjieff tells us fleetingly in Meetings With Remarkable Men
about a “literary school which I happened to study in my youth” that
focused on the “creation of images without words,” his beginning as a
writer is ostensibly presented in The Herald of Coming Good.

He says that following his really disastrous automobile accident, and as part
of his slow recovery, his friends would take him to the movies in Paris just
to get him up and moving. They thought he liked it because he was focusing
so intently on the screen but really, he says, it took enormous effort just to
make his eyes function at all — especially in an airless, cramped and crass
public situation that was so obnoxious he needed to be distracted from it.

Nonetheless, he began to take note of the plots of these film scenarios and
devise a few of his own which would expand their themes in ways that
would allegorically depict the shape of his insights. His first impression
comes when he works out how the popular film “The Two Brothers” could
be rewritten as the story of three brothers whose interactions represent the
structure of different internal intelligence systems. The Three Brothers. The
Cocainists. The Unconscious Murder. The Chiromancy of the Stock-
Exchange. These were his early screenplay scenarios.
Among them was one idea to do a short tale based on the events of the
Biblical Garden of Eden but told from the Devil’s point of view. This
started to grow in his mind, mixing with his boyhood obsession with The
Thousand-and-One Nights, into the notion of a frame tale to be called
Beelzebub’s Tales. That work is monumental and strange but it wasn’t until
the second book Meetings with Remarkable Men that we start to hear him
suggesting that he is slowly figuring out how he wants to write. He claims
to be getting better at “something.” If there is an unfolding of skill and
clarity in the matter of his writing style, we would expect to see it presented
most dramatically in the final book. Here is a truncated version of what he
says in the introduction to Life is Real Only Then When I AM,
Expecting with indubitable certainty that this series of my expositions,
as I have already said, will be really “edifyingly instructive,” […] I
want, right from the beginning of this series, to speak also of such
external facts, the description of which for a naive reader might
appear at first sight almost a meaningless, mere succession of words;
whereas for a man who has the habit of thinking and of searching for
the sense contained in so-called “allegorical expositions,” on
condition of a little strengthened mentation, they would be full of inner
significance, and, if he makes the slightest effort “not to be a puppet of
his automatic reflection,”
As perfect “showing material” for searching and understanding the
inner sense in the description of similar, at first sight seemingly
meaningless, external facts, there may serve what I said then at the end
of the evening, on leaving the studio where this meeting had been
arranged with the Americans gathered there to wish me personally
welcome.
Okay. Pause. What has he said? That he is applying a well-developed
style of indirect communication that is going to predominate in this
book. He is going to present fictionalized versions of some incidents
from one of his trips to America but these should be regarded as
allegories. The style of the allegory is going to be very particular. In
order to prepare you for it, he presents a training-allegory for you to
decode before moving on.
Here is that allegory:
Walking out and pausing on the threshold, I turned round and
addressing myself to them in that half-joking, half-serious tone at times
proper to me, I said:
“Half-and-quarter powerful Gentlemen and to the extreme degree
powerful Ladies of this ‘dollar harvest continent’ . . . I was very, very
glad to see you and, although sitting so long among you this evening in
the blissful sphere of your ‘canned’ radiations, there did develop
energy enough—perhaps even more than necessary—for actualizing
my aim for which I have this time come here to you; yet at the same
time to the great misfortune—I do not know, though, whether yours or
mine—there was imperceptibly again awakened in me that impulse I
have always had, but which never acted during the time of my writing
activity, namely, the impulse of pity for certain people who have
reached majority, and whose vani-tous parents or tutors, profiting from
the absence in these future ‘derelicts,’ in their preparatory age, of their
own wisdom, persuaded them, helping them with money, of course in a
manner foreseen in Italian ‘bookkeeping,’ to become in their
responsible age ‘physician-psychiatrists,’ in the present case for full-
aged unfortunate people vegetating in American-scale organized
‘lunatic asylums.’
“To speak frankly, I am not yet convinced of the exact cause of the
reawakening in me of this previously existing undesirable impulse; as
yet I only know that the reaction to these data began gradually to
manifest itself owing to the fact that during the reading of the last
chapter of the first series of my writings, while sitting in the corner
and observing out of boredom the expressions on your faces, it seemed
clear to me that there stood out on the forehead now of one, now of
another of you, the inscription ‘candidate for the madhouse.’
“I said ‘out of boredom’ because the contents of this chapter, over
each sentence of which I had to think and again to think for three
months almost day and night, bored me more than your fish called
‘mackerel’ which, during my first stay here, I was compelled to eat for
six months morning and evening, it being the only fresh food you
have.” After this, giving to my voice the tone which is taught in
monasteries and is called “the tone of confused humbleness,”
I added: “I am not yet certain if it really is so, or if it only seems so to
me, as happens often in the psyche of a man who has experienced a
great many ‘troubles.’ Owing to the six days of incessant pitching and
rolling on the waves of the boundless ocean, and to the frequent
introduction into myself of the noble French armagnac and the
constant regulating of its vibrations by the introduction into myself of
the no less noble German ‘hors d’oeuvres,’ something in me is today,
as it is said, ‘fishy.’
“Three days after the significant American meeting just described,
days which the inhabitants there would characterize differently—those
having many dollars in their pockets, no matter what were the ways of
obtaining them, as “passed with no monotony,” while those for whom
the absence of these dollars is chronic would say “the shortening by
one more day of the approach of our last breath”—the five
aforementioned Americans came to me, headed by Mr. S. Conversing
with them about all kinds of naturally flowing associations and at the
same time elucidating all the details I required concerning the
suspicions that had arisen in me during the reading on the first
evening of my arrival, I began to depict to them in relief all the already
described constatations of mine in regard to the arising in the psyche
of people, followers of my ideas, of this strange peculiarity and the
perspectives ensuing from this and then, speaking briefly about the
reasons for my present coming to America and the impossibility for me
to spare much of my time for the members of their group, I requested
them to avoid what had happened during these days when, on account
of visits of one or another member of the group and their sometimes
quite idiotic questions, I had not the opportunity to write a single
word. I therefore proposed to them to form a kind of committee and to
take upon themselves the work of organizing twice a week general
meetings of the members of their group, at which I would always try to
be present; and also to see to it that on other days nobody should
disturb me by personal visits, by letters or even by telephone.
After this, we decided together, in order to economize my time and also
for many other considerations, to hold the proposed general meeting
in my apartment and, in view of the limited size of the largest room
there, which was a kind of hall, not to admit to these meetings more
than fifty persons and, for the remaining members of the group, to
arrange meetings in the studios of Carnegie Hall or in other private
rooms where, without my necessarily being present, there should be
read aloud by one of my translator-secretaries everything taken down
 in shorthand of the questions that had been asked me, and my answers
to them.
As a conclusion, I begged them as yet not to tell anything of what I had
said that day to any of the members of their group and added:
“According to the deductions after the observations and questionings
made by me during these days, to my great regret, I shall be compelled
during my present stay in New York to take various measures toward
many of your comrades in order that either they should become
completely disappointed in my ideas or there should disappear the
faith crystallized in their individuality during these years in regard to
Mr. Orage and his authority.”
So — are we still paying attention? — what is that passage “really” about?
Remember that it was presented as a tutorial anecdote to demonstrate the
method of written communication that he will deploying.
What did you learn? What is it an allegory for? How will you go about
deciphering it? Which aspects of our outer or inner reality are represented
by the authority of Mr. Orage? By the herring? By the “canned vibrations”?
Or by his impression that these students, ostensibly of his work, might as
well be “candidates for the madhouse” in the neurotic manner that they
have confidently butchered, narrowed and lopsided his vision?
Did I just use “lopsided” as a past-tense verb?
This book is clearly getting out of control. And while I could put a small
reasonable summary of the points I’ve just made about Gurdjieff’s
approaches to the art of writing, that would — if he is correct — reduce the
amount of actual communication between us that would be of existential
value. It is also likely that if I have suddenly changed topic that means that I
just told you the thing already…
Here is a list of the “Fourth Way” books that I personally have found worth
re-reading.
By Gurdjieff (in the Order in which they delight me):

Life is Real Only Then When I AM

The Tales of Beelzebub to His Grandchild
The Herald of Coming Good
Meetings with Remarkable Men

By Others specifically on the theme of Gurdjieff’s Work:

In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky

The Reality of Being by Jeanne de Salzmann
Deeper Man by John Bennett
Teachings of Gurdjieff by CS Nott
The Unknowable Gurdjieff by Margaret Anderson
Idiots in Paris by JG & Elizabeth Bennet
Witness by JG Bennet
Gurdjieff’s Buried Dog by John Henderson
A Boyhood with Gurdjiefff by Fritz Peters
Eating the “I” by William Patrick Patternson
On a Spaceship with Beelzebub by David Kherdian
Psychological Exercises & Essays by A. R. Orage
Nonstandard sources of insights into the Gurdjieff Work:

As It Is by M. Young (from the Lozowick community, combining

The Work with devotional nondualism)
The Death of Gurdjieff in the Foothills of Georgia by Jan Cox
The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus
by E.J. Gold
Tenacious Magic by Schulyer Brown (a serialized Substack novel
about the life, death and afterlife of Katheringe Mansfield, who
died at Gurdjieff’s commune in Paris).
Gurdjieff: Cosmic Secrets podcast
MGReadshaw’s constantly fluctuating YouTube channel.
www.josephazize.com