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
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