Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Gurdjieff movements - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The Gurdjieff movements are the name given to the collective body of sacred dances that were collected or authored by G. I. Gurdjieff and taught to his students as part of the work of self observation and self study. Certain of Gurdjieff's followers claim that the Gurdjieff Movements can only be properly transmitted by those who themselves have been initiated in the direct line of Gurdjieff; otherwise, they say, it leads nowhere.

The movements are purportedly based upon traditional dances that Gurdjieff studied as he traveled throughout central Asia, India, Tibet, the Orient and Africa where he encountered various Indo-European and Sufi orders, Buddhist centers and other sources of traditional culture and learning. However, Gurdjieff insists that the main source as well as the unique symbol of the Enneagram was transmitted to him as an initiate in the Sarmoung Monastery. There were literally thousands of movements collected and taught by Gurdjieff throughout his teaching career. The music for the movements was written by Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, as well as British composer Edouard Michael.

An example of Gurdjieff's later series of movements (The 39 series) are:

1. The Automat.
2. Prayer in Three Parts.
3. Four Tableaux.
4. Prayer for Instruction.
5. Pointing Dervish.
6. Movement in canon
7. Esoteric
8. Triads in Pairs. Complexity in Simplicity.
9. 'Olbogmek'. Double Multiplication
10. (A light dance with counting in canon)
11. Lord Have Mercy.
12. Halleluia
13. (A prayer movement)
14. Reading from a Sacred Book
15. (Tibetan) Days of the Week.
16. -- 17. Multiplication of Enneagram
18. -- 19. Stop Exercise. 'Frightened'
20. Six Displacements. Dervish exercise.
21. Remorse of Conscience
22. of Mesoteric series
23. -- 24. Chadze Vadze (Lord, Mercy!)
25. Black and White Magic.
26. (A multiplication)
27. (A canon)
28. -- 29. -- 30. Canon of Six Measures. A 'cosmic' dance.
31. Fifteen Rythmns. Getting up and Down
32. Automaton.
33. Premier exercise apri le retour d'Amerique
34. (A continuous multiplication)
35. -- 36. Dervish Movement. People scattered about
37. -- 38. (A canon)
39. (Thinking, Feeling, Sensing)

The famous "movements", often done to music Gurdjieff had composed, were dances based on those Gurdjieff said he had observed and participated in, such as in the Sarmoung monastery and in other ancient traditional monasteries. Gurdjieff taught that the movements were not merely calisthenics, exercises in concentration, and displays of bodily coordination and aesthetic sensibility: on the contrary, in the movements was embedded real, concrete knowledge, passed from generation to generation of initiates - each posture and gesture representing some cosmic truth that the informed observer could read like a book.

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