by Peter Holleran

   The ever-mysterious George Gurdjieff (1877-1949) was filled with a burning desire for self-understanding that moved him to travel widely throughout Asia seeking human beings in communion with truth. Some of his most important contacts were in Afghanistan where he spent a long time in a monastery in Bukhara and imbibed the teachings of the Naqshbandi order of Sufis.(1) He also claimed to have rediscovered the ancient "Sarmoung Brotherhood", whose teaching contained esoteric knowledge that had been forgotten by most of the human race.

   The one central principle that Gurdjieff obtained from his studies was that man is asleep, spending his entire life in self-forgetfulness, helplessly bound to a mechanical existence. Man is a machine whose life is nothing more than a series of reactive emotional responses-to definite stimuli. When a man asked how he could become free from these binding mechanisms Gurdjieff responded by saying that he had just made the first step towards developing free will.

   The "Work" he proposed aims at Self-Remembrance, which produces an ordeal of struggle between essence (Self) and personality. In this process there is an inevitable production of psycho-physical friction or "heat" (tapas) as an assault is made on the egoic defense mechanisms. One must be willing to endure intentional suffering as the ordeal of passage is made from personality to essence. (2) Gurdjieff believed, furthermore, that hard physical work was necessary to purify body and mind in order to facilitate this process. He exhorted his students to continually press beyond the limits of their endurance until they achieved their spiritual "second wind".

   Gurdjieff wrote three books (All and Everything, Meetings with Remarkable Men, and Life is Real only Then, When "I Am"), although he is better understood through the works of his students Ouspensky, Bennett, and Nicoll. When he died in 1949 he left no one appointed successor, but many groups continue to meet to study his teachings and engage the Work.

   The Gurdjieffian "practice" has many elements in common with the basic work required in all authentic spiritual traditions, in particular that of the Sufis, but it tends to be rather open-ended, and in any case is now (and perhaps always was) bereft of the guidance and grace of a fully-illumined teacher. The emphasis it places on insight needs to be balanced, completed, and reconciled with the teaching of the life-current or spirit-energy as given by the adepts in the high-Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian traditions.

   At one time John Bennett believed that Pak Subuh was the "Awakener of Conscience" mentioned in All and Everything who was supposedly destined to complete the work of Gurdjieff. Their teachings are very different, however (which is perhaps why he was to be the completion), and Bennett is not joined in this view by the majority of Gurdjieff students.

   Gurdjieff evidently had yogic powers of a sort, but controversy exists over his morals and ethics. Many students were pushed to extremes of discipline, and a few went over the edge. This might be looked upon as the mark of a good teacher, using forceful means for the benefit of his disciples, but many thought otherwise. Rom Landau wrote:

   "Some of his pupils would at times complain that they could no longer support Gurdjieff's violent temper, his apparent greed for money, or the extravagance of his private life." (3)

   John Bennett said that

   "(Gurdjieff) spoke of women in terms that would have better suited a fanatical Muslim polygamist than a Christian, boasting that he had many children by different women, and that women were for him only the means to an end." (4)

   Every teacher has his detractors, particularly those teachers who make bold, dramatic use of the energies of life for teaching purposes, but it is not our intent to criticize character. Teachers can make mistakes, however, and the ways of anyone teacher are not necessarily the way for all students. Gurdjieff used forceful means to reveal his students to themselves, and he particularly liked to hit upon the "sex nerve" and the "pocketbook nerve". He said that "nothing shows up people so much as their attitude toward money", and through casual incidents he delighted in awakening people to the hypocrisy of their gentile ways.

   As mentioned earlier, Gurdjieff (because of his obscure writing style) is better understood through his interpreters. John Bennett summarizes his basic arqument:

   "You think you know who you are and what you are; but you do not know either what slaves you now are, or how free you might become. Man can do nothing: he is a machine controlled by external influences, not by his own will, which is an illusion. He is asleep. He has no permanent self that he can call 'I'. Because he is not one but many; his moods, his impulses, his very sense of his own existence are no more than a constant flux...Make the experiment of trying to remember your own existence and you will find that you cannot remember yourselves even for two minutes. How can man, who cannot remember who and what he is, who does not know the forces that move him to action, pretend that he can do anything?" (5)

   The "Fourth Way" was Gurdjieff's term for the way taught in his system. According to him, there are three traditional paths, those of the faqir, the monk, and the yogi. The faqir works on disciplining the physical body with harsh austerities. The monk works on his emotions with prayer, fasting, and meditation. The yogi attempts to discipline his mind and alter his state of consciousness. “The fourth way" is that of simultaneously working on the other three dimensions (which correspond with the three bodies: physical, emotional or astral, and mental (which Gurdjieff called the spiritual) while applying the process of self-observation to make oneself less mechanical. This is the way of the "cunning man", who thus surpassed the faqir, the monk, and the yogi and came to know the true “I " which was the presiding ego, the 'divine' body, the owner of the other three bodies. With this language, almost theosophical in character, one can see the possible limit of Gurdjieff’s teachings in encompassing the higher non-dual philosophy.

   The whole purpose of the work is to reveal the chief defense mechanism that prevents the waking state from manifesting. E.J. Gold, a contemporary teacher sympathetic to the Fourth Way school of Gurdjieff (6) explains:

   "Each individual has a particular defense mechanism called the chronic (Gurdjieff's 'chief feature') which is triggered off whenever the machine (the egoic body-mind) is threatened with awakening.

   The nearer the waking state, the more profound the manifestations produced by the defense mechanisms. Then, when the waking state no longer threatens, the defense mechanism tends to subside."

And again:

   "The machine has developed an automatic defense mechanism against the waking state, which often takes the form of some chronic negative emotion such as anger, sarcasm, cynicism, self-isolation, fear, paranoia, hysteria, resentment, envy, pettiness, jealousy, vengefulness, greed, piety, boredom, grief, loneliness, anxiety, helplessness, stupidity, hatred, compulsiveness, and so on, so that it can continue to function with significance and importance according to the expectations of others." (6)

   The "chronic" or "chief feature" binds up a great deal of life-energy and keeps one "asleep" to his essential self, or essence. Gurdjieff felt it was imperative for a true teacher and school to provide the "shocks" necessary to reveal to an individual this chief feature, as it is nearly impossible to do so by oneself. (Gold says that one way to get a glimpse of the chronic is to observe one's first reaction when someone forceably awakens you in the middle of the night. The "cranky animal" is the machine in its survival mode).

   Paradoxically, one who is correctly working on himself in the Gurdjieffian fashion will go through a period when he appears anything but more peaceful and loving, as his chief defense mechanism is being brought to consciousness. Gold states that such a person is "about as pleasant to live with as an angry camel." This is, however, a healthy advance over the mediocre existence of the ordinary man, whose sole purpose is to maintain the effort of self-enclosure and self-survival, which is another description of the sleeping state of the machine.

   The process that Gurdjieff partially understood and the means he employed were intended to produce a crisis of self-understanding where one can become responsible for his egoic fixated behavior patterning. The insight or glimpses thus gained serves as the enlightened means for the greater spiritual process that is then truly possible. Then grace becomes the prime mover in one's case, and the strenuous, muscular efforts which Gurdjieff advocated become secondary and unnecessary. Gurdjieff did not, however, acknowledge this full scope of the spiritual process, although he may himself had partial glimpses.

   His work is, nevertheless, of immense practical value, and all I have said here barely scratches the surface of his doctrines.


1. The great Mullah Nasrudin belonged to this order. His simple tales warning aspirant of self-deception have been popularized by Idries Shah.
2. Gurdjieff went so far as to teach that personality and essence inhabited different parts of the brain, although he did not specify which. Author Colin Wilson (G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against' Sleep) suggests that personality, is a left-brain phenomenon, while essence belongs to the right-brain. To Gurdjieff a baby is only essence, but when personality develops at the age of six or seven the essence ceases to grow. The practice he taught was designed to re-establish the dominance of' essence over personality, and re-unite the two consciousnesses so that a more complete development could be realized.
3. Rom Landau, God Is My Adventure (as quoted in: Colin Wilson, G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1986), p. 89
4. J.G. Bennett, Witness: The Autobiography of J.G. Bennett (Turnstone Press, 1974), p. 258
5. Ibid, p. 87
6. E.J. Gold, The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus (Nevada City, CA: IDHHB, INC, 1986), p. 115-116