Gurdjieff: 4th-way Enneagram

 

Gurdjieff's 4th-way Enneagram was put in writing by P. D. Ouspensky, and the derivation is musical and mathematical. Gurdjieff was a savante. Here's a quick look at the derivation...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way_Enneagram

In the 1960s, a couple of South American psychologists got a hold of it, and crafted what has become the modern enneagram, which has since been used primarily in psychology and business management. It is also gaining inroads as a holistic tool.
Find your enneagram type:
http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/
Holistic use:
http://www.enneagramworldwide.com/
International site:
http://www.internationalenneagram.org/

http://www.hindudharmaforums.com/showthread.php?p=54041

 

Check other versions of this blog:

http://gurdjieff4thwayenneagram.wordpress.com/
http://gurdjiefffourthway.posterous.com/
http://gurdjieff4thway.livejournal.com/
http://gurdjieffenneagramfourthway.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/Gurdjieff4Work

Mr. Gurdjieff: The centers.

The Centers are part of us we rarely separate, Moving Center, Emotional Center, Intellectual Center, Instinctive Center.

These basic four all use different speeds or degrees of Attention or lack of Attention. They can be divided into Automatic (no Attention), Captivated (Outside Fascination), or Highly Focused. ( Attention directed by Will). The playing cards of old , in past times, was used to illustrate this. Think of the Queen of Hearts statement, "Off with their heads."  Emotion works at a faster speed than the Intellect often grasping more sides of a problem or more likely focusing on just one aspect of a problem with great strength depending on the force of the emotion. Emotion uses much energy.

Negative emotion like anger, fear, sadness, self pity are emotions that consume energy otherwise used by positive emotions. To get a negative emotion usually involves some real or imaginary Instinct Center awareness of Threat.

This is just the barest surface scratching of the complex and well integrated ideas of Gurdjieff. One precautionary note. We usually have preconcieved ideas of what words mean so dismiss ideas out of hand. I suggest letting his other words define his meaning.

http://www.kheper.net/topics/Gurdjieff/preliminary.html

Gurdjieff: The Enneagram

The Enneagram
by Natasha Matins
© Natasha Matins 1975-2004
free for non-commercial use.

The Enneagram is a circle divided by nine points equally spaced with the 3rd 6th and 9th parts being the endpoints of a triangle (Law of Three). The other points, 1st,2nd,4th,5th,7th,8th create a 6 pointed figure that intersect the triangle at 12 points on the triangle and have 6 points on the circle. A curious thing is the Menorah of Jewish lore, it too, has nine points and if one were to look down from above it and the brances were moved just so the points of the enneagram could be seen.

http://www.kheper.net/topics/Gurdjieff/preliminary.html

Gurdjieff’s system

 

Gurdjieff himself taught a system of ideas which dealt not only with man but also with the world he lives in. Tonight I am only going to speak about the ideas he taught about man, but I don’t wish to leave the impression that what he taught about the world man lives in is less important than what he taught about man. If one asks oneself the question, “What is the sense and aim of man’s life?”—if one reflects about that question, one sees that it cannot be answered just in terms of man. It must be answered by placing man in a meaningful relation to the universe in which he lives. And for that you have to have a meaningful picture of that universe. So, like every other esoteric system of teaching that I’ve managed to discover, Gurdjieff’s system has two sides: the psychological and the cosmological. But tonight I shall be speaking primarily about the psychological ideas, and since there is a limited time to talk about them, you must expect me, in talking about them, to speak in pretty broad generalizations. Probably there is not an idea which I shall mention tonight which I couldn’t—if I wished to—talk about for the whole evening. So, what I’m going to talk about tonight is tremendously compressed, and obviously when it’s expanded it can and needs to be refined. But I must spread before you what is in effect a large-scale map…

Mr. Gurdjieff: Michel de Salzmann

 

By the term consciousness Gurdjieff understood something far more than mental awareness and functioning. According to him, the capacity for consciousness requires a harmonious blending of the distinctive energies of mind, feeling, and body, and it is this alone that can allow the action within man of those higher influences associated with such traditional notions as nous, buddhi, or atman. From this perspective, man as we find him is actually an unfinished being unconsciously led by his automatic conditioning under the sway of external stimuli. The wide variety of Gurdjieff’s methods may all be understood as instrumental toward realizing self-consciousness and the spiritual attributes of “real man”—that is, will, individuality, and objective knowledge. These methods and his teaching about the evolution of man are implicated in a vast network of cosmological ideas that are spelled out in his own writings and in P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (New York, 1949).

Michel de Salzmann

Mr. Gurdjieff: The two struggles.

 

“There are two struggles—inner-world struggle and outer-world struggle, but never can these two make contact, to make data for the third world. Not even God gives this possibility for contact between inner- and outer-world struggles; not even your heredity. Only one thing—you must make intentional contact between outer-world struggle and inner-world struggle; only then can you make data for the Third World of Man, sometimes called World of the Soul.”

G. I. Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff International Review

Check out this website I found at gurdjieff.org

Mr. Gurdjieff's student: John G. Bennett

 

Excerpt from presentation:

I shall finish on this occasion with a few more remarks and a personal note. I was a very despondent individual lacking completely in self-confidence. I went to see him once a few years before he died and I started to wail as people do who start in this kind of work. "Oh Mr. Bennett, I cannot work on myself. I am failing." And he said, "That doesn't matter. Just do a bit of work on yourself, it's like keeping up muscle tone." He said that there are supernatural energies which work. Our job is to connect with them. There really is something working. It has produced the whole universe. This life on earth. It's extremely effective, and very positive. You can be positive idiotically or you can be positive consciously. So Bennett tapped into the central issue from which Gurdjieff began. There is something which can call on all our energy, all our intelligence, our heart, and everything. It demands all of our everything. Gurdjieff's book, All and Everything was not really to show how clever Gurdjieff was at understanding the laws of the universe. Its purpose was to completely freak out your mind. He delved to the limit of what you could think, just right to the edge of what you could possibly conceive of. That was the point of the book. Take your thinking as far as you can. It cleans you out. We are thinking beings, regardless. We've got to come to terms with different things like the creation of the universe, its structure, with the origin of human life, what happened forty thousand years ago - not by reading the Scientific American, but by considering it in ourselves, by finding it in ourselves. We must do this, constantly do this, otherwise we are simply being driven by our culture. We must try to get back to the origins of things, to ask the questions, to find the help we need. Even while immersed in this, one isn't sure. There can't be any guarantee. Who is going to give you the guarantee? If somebody comes forward and tells you "You're doing great!" why should you trust him?

Full text: http://www.duversity.org/archives/solioonensius.html

Mr. Gurdjieff: A description

 

Remember that the initial people that Gurdjieff dealt with were very competent people, with developed intellects who were very strong-willed. They were almost the cream of the cream of Russian intelligentsia. This was his first audience. They had no problems with life in the ordinary sense at all. And then Gurdjieff came to them and said, "You, you're nothing. You don't exist. You pretend to exist. What you decided to do this morning you've already forgotten. You're asleep. You're just like a wound-up clock-work mechanism."

Full essay: http://www.duversity.org/archives/solioonensius.html

Mr. Gurdjieff: A description

 

When I visited the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau for the first time, one gray and showery June Sunday morning, I was taken out into the garden to meet Mr. Gurdjieff, who was strolling there with an old Russian friend. As they approached me, Mr. Gurdjieff was walking with a slow, firm step, his hands behind his back: I saw a man of medium height but powerful build, swarthy complexion and piercing black eyes. He was dressed in almost shabby clothes, a rusty black overcoat, and a slouch hat, all of which he wore with indifference to ordinary standards of fashion. He thus presented a deceptively undistinguished appearance. In contrast, I remember how impressive he looked in oriental clothes, in an old painting by Mr. Salzman which I saw later. I also have another, and still more vivid impression of Mr. Gurdjieff sitting cross-legged in his Turkish bath and wrapped in an enormous white towel, which set off the swarthiness of his face.

http://www.gurdjieffclub.ru/en/main/resources-booksvideoslinks/articles-essay/zigrosser.html

Mr. Gurdjieff: Doing

 

Mr. Gurdjieff suggested to a student,

to act on a whim.

 

Let's say you had an idea to go ice skating.

 

There is usually a part of us inside that will

negate that thought.

 

One has to "push" to make it happen.

 

Most usually one justifies the

"Why you did not want to do it anyway".

 

If you do follow through with the whim,

 

it can create will.

 

The aim has to be that small to begin.

Gurdjieff: Transmission

Throughout the ages, when a cultural cycle
breaks down, or comes to an end, through war,
change of political structure or power.
Deterioration, which perhaps one might call
"natural deterioration".

The form of transmission of the message or
teaching needs to be changed.

That is perhaps why the form of transmission
for Mr. Gurdjieff was on a personal level,
his book, the dances he brought with him.
His music, and even his exercises.
His dinners and face to face "interviews".

All very portable.

He saw that the world where he found this ancient teaching
was starting to break down with the encroachment of the
modern world, he saw and understood his task to bring
this ancient teaching from the east to the west.

One estimate is that in the whole period of
his teaching, he worked with no more than about
a thousand people.

Mr. Ouspensky used to give lectures to a
thousand people at a time.

Compare this to a sporting event with 60-80,000 spectators
in the stadium. People in the work are not so common.

It is noted that there are a number of people starting to
follow these notes.  Thank you.

 

Mr. Gurdjieff: Doing

In order to do it is necessary to be.

Editor's comment:

Patience with oneself, acceptance,
look for chinks of light, where you realize you
can make an effort.

Sometimes the effort to finding the light is
harder than making the actual effort itself.

Many Fairy Tales, are not just for Children, they
are Esoteric Teaching.

Their beautiful simplicity is why they have
survived, and do they not contain a powerful message?
The truth is actually very simple.

The dwarfs in Snow White, go to mine every day,
find diamonds.

One way to look at this could be,
and note: could be, the dwarfs are finding
the opportunities to make efforts, to go against
themselves or wake up for a moment.

Mr. Gurdjieff gave his students the exercise to
say "I am" every hour on the hour.

Not so easy.

Mr.Gurdjieff's student Peter Ouspensky

 

Mr Ouspensky advised that we need to make

aims that will fit into our pocket.

 

Small aims that are in our power to accomplish,

rather than big aims, that end up in dreams

and dissappointment, and end up holding us in the

grip of more dissillusion.

Gurdjieff: Love and handwriting.

Real love is a cosmic force which goes through us.

If we crystallize it, it becomes a power—the greatest power in the world.”

Mr. Gurdjieff.

 

http://www.iagf.org/
I don't know anything about them really,

no more than you, just perhaps things from the web.

 

Once, I sent an email to them once to see if it

would be possible to visit Mr. Gurdjieff's apartment.

The journey to Paris would have been worth it,

but received a polite refusal. They must receive

many requests for this.

 

If you go through the French site, and click on publications,

the background has an example of what must be his

handwriting. I did not see this before.

 

Peter D. Ouspensky

Check out this website I found at gurdjieff.org

Gurdjieff: Patience in the work

 

 Patience is the mother of will ~
Gurdjieff

 

Gurdjieff: Starting a group

 

Towards the end of his life

Mr. Gurdjieff continued to push himself

to host dinners for his students,

shop for food, prepare, teach,

play his music,

take his students on trips,

and push himself relentlessly.

 

Students who visited him, including

Fritz Peters during the war, often

noted how tired he looked.

 

It is good to remember, that while

it is always great to read the books

and stories about Mr. Gurdjieff,

work is work.

He lived it to the full.

Gurdjieff: Starting a group

 

When John Bennett told Mr. Gurdjieff

he planned to start a group.

 

Mr. Gurdjieff told him:

"You will suffer"

Gurdjieff: "The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness"

Mr. Ouspensky worked for many years to refine the

book that became known as:"In Search of the Miraculous".

 

This transmission of Gurdjieff's teaching was a tremendous gift.

Gurdjieff's Enneagram

via ourladyswarriors.org

The Enneagram, visually shows us a description of how the
energies, personalities and processes, circulate in the univers.
This is a part of what is known as Objective Knowledge.
No with the internet, this is freely available.
This however takes a lot of study, contemplation and observation
to make it one's own.
It is power.

Enneagram

via ourladyswarriors.org

The Enneagram, is a diagram used by Gurdjieff to transmit his teaching.

Gurdjieff: "One stone consciously moved is worth all this pile."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were soon taught that pointless, slogging work was of no avail. As Mr. Gurdjieff pointed out to Mr. Pindar when barrow-loads of stones were being moved from one part of the grounds to another,

 

 

 

 

"One stone consciously moved is worth all this pile."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ref: http://www.gurdjieff.org/bell.htm

Gurdjieff: Cafe de la Paix, perhaps a bit before his time.

via youtube.com

This at least gives a taste of the Cafe de la Paix,
as it was in the 1920's, I am sure Mr. Gurdjieff
would have been at least aware of it at this time.
But at about.51secs in, you get a taste of how
busy it was, and where he did his writing.

Gurdjieff's Prieure: A journey to inaccessible places

via jcrows.com

http://www.jcrows.com/Gurdjieff/A_journey_to_inaccessible_places.html

I have always appreciated this site.
I am told the Prieure is a retirement home of some kind these days?

Gurdjieff: Little by little, you will arrive

 

Gurdjieff reiterated that that was not necessary.
“Do your exercise just as a service, and little by
little, you will arrive there. I did say, on one
occasion, that it was better to work intensely and
for short moments. But the intensity is in the
attention, the intensity of concentration, and not
in any shock (choc). … Your effort must be to
concentrate, not to wrench.”

 

 

Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and the Fourth Way

Check out this website I found at kheper.net

Real work

Gurdjieff's Aphorisms

Check out this website I found at gurdjieff.org

Go against the machine.

Gurdjieff: Man is like a coach driver

http://www.deeshan.com/images/Gurdjieff2.jpg The reason for this necessary “inner struggle” is that Man is not a unity, but a divided being. Gurdjieff says that “Man is like a rig consisting of passenger, driver, horse and carriage.”20 The carriage is the body, the horse is the emotions, the driver is the mind, and the passenger is the possibility of consciousness, of self-awareness. This imagery comes straight from Plato’s Phaedrus: “Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer.”

Gurdjieff: Religion is doing.

 

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it,

he "lives" his religion as much as he is able,

otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.
G. I. Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff: Without struggle

 

Without struggle, no progress and no result. Every breaking of habit produces a change in the machine.
George Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff: Every ceremony has a value

 

Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.
Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff The three stages

 

Mr Gurdjieff advised that there are three stages

one has to go through as one evolves.

 

To wish

To be able

To be

Gurdjieff's secretary

There is an anecdote regarding Mr. Gurdjieff, that once while working on his monumental legominism, All and Everything, he remarked that he would have to “bury the dog deeper”—not, in this case, the dog’s bone, but the dog itself. With this he conveyed that the ideas he was concerned with were living entities with their own vitality and instinctive potency, and they were not meant to come into our possession without exceptional efforts, sustained efforts of the sort that only those who valued them most would ever put forth.

On his last visit to America, Mr. Gurdjieff chose Paul Anderson as his last American Secretary, stating “He not only has eaten one dog, but swallowed whole packs of dogs … and I rest very contented when I leave because you are my special American Secretary.”¹

File:Georges Gurdjieff.JPG - Wikiquote

via en.wikiquote.org

He taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy through various awareness exercises. According to his teachings, such inner development is the beginning of a possible further process of change, and spiritual evolution. Wiki quote

Gurdjieff "If take, then take!"

“If take, then take!” was one of his favourite aphorisms—no sipping, no trifling—and for many the special nourishment that was offered in addition to the delicious edibles was indigestible, hard to stomach. The exotic flavours and the vodka in which the famous “Toasts to the Idiots” were drunk (Gr. idiotes, private person, that which in myself I am) did not make things easier. But easiness was not the aim. The patriarchal host, massive of presence, radiating a serene power at once formidable and reassuring, dispensed this “food” in various ways, always unexpected; sometimes in thunderclaps of rage, sometimes telling a story that only one of all the table would know was meant for himself, sometimes merely by look or gesture thrusting home the truth.

 

http://www.gurdjieff.org/ a really wonderful site with a collection of well written articles.

Gurdjieff on suffering

 

A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.
G. I. Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff Attention, Wish, Will, Free Will

Check out this website I found at gurdjieff.org

But we do not have enough Will. And we do not have enough Attention. So we must increase them as best we may. And the only way to increase them is to make the right kind of efforts. Without efforts, nothing can increase. But if we turn all our Attention, all our Will, and all our Efforts, towards our big Aim, little by little, like the caterpillar, we will approach it: Talk from Thomas de Hartman

Here is a link to the Gurdjieff Foundation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"It is better to be temporarily selfish than never to be just"

Gurdjieff

Here is a link I found

http://www.gurdjieff.org/foundation.htm

 

Gurdjieff attracted some of the most well known and respected people of his day

 

This thought was in a blog, but it feels that it sums things

up very well.

 

Begin excerpt...

 

In my opinion the adequate part of his teaching is about Willpower: People are mechanical. Their thoughts are mechanical, not to mention emotions and motion. It`s because they lack will. They lack even constant desires. Everything "happens" to them. They can do nothing. Instead of being individual everyone consists of numerous divided parts which are always in conflict with each other. In order to become whole, to become One, a man must train and suffer to 1. Stop daydreaming 2. Cristalyze his inner structure -- create constant will.

 

...End excerpt.

Gurdjieff: "a man is never the same for long"

 

“It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.”

Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff's student Peter Ouspensky

Book Summary of Call No Man Master

This is the fascinating story of a woman's life and spiritual search that touches on all the great esoteric moments of the last century. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, her brother-in-law Rodney Collin, and other spiritual supermen fired Joyce Collin-Smith's imagination from a young age and she literally 'sat at the feet' of many such masters and esoteric teachers.

Gurdjieff's student Peter Ouspensky

Georgevanitch was not only an original philosopher; he was a great artist. I often hear his music. It is from another world.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Gurdjieff attracted some of the most well known and respected people of his day

The level of Gurdjieff's most devoted students was very high. In order to study this movement, nobody will have to do any intellectual slumming.

J. B. Priestley

Gurdjieff's student Peter Ouspensky

 

Ouspensky is well-known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff, whom he met in Moscow in 1915. He was associated with the ideas and practices originating with Gurdjieff from his thirty-eighth year. Eventually he separated from Gurdjieff personally, and it is said that he finally gave up the "system" that he had shared with people for 25 years in England and America, but this is unclear if one goes from his own recorded words on the subject ("A Record of Meetings," published posthumously) and not from the statements of others. In London while lecturing in 1924, he made the announcement he would continue independently the way he began in 1921.

He wrote some very good essays also about his experience in Russia during the political upheaval of the revolution.

J.G. Bennett

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

Gurdjieff's student John Bennet wrote:
"The work is most alive in us, where at any point,
you may fall off"      
 
 
this is to my best recollection will correct later

- Show quoted text -

 

Gurdjieff Fez picture

Gurdjieff's grave in Avon

via youtube.com

The announcer is speaking in French, I do not know what he is saying but the video is very good quality.

Gurdjieff Fez picture

Brother: Stop! Everyone in the monastery learns the alphabet of these movements. They are exactly like books. We can read in them truths placed there many thousands of years ago.

Gurdjieff: What is the real meaning of these movements?

Brother: They tell us of two qualities of energy: moving without interruption through the body. As long as the dancer can keep in balance these two energies, he has a force, but nothing else can give.

Gurdjieff said say "I am"

Gurdjieff told his students to say "I am"
every hour.

Gurdjieff Fez picture

 

Gurdjieff wore a fez in many of the pictures that

 

were taken when he became older.

Introduction to Gurdjieff Fourth Way Work

Hello

A journal of the work I hope you find this of interest.