It is really very interesting that we have two men perfect for the time and psychological space the work
needed to be in to be presented tothe west.
Mr. Gurdjieff had brought this great knowledge from the east, and was able to present it in a literal
and technical way to some of the most intelligent people of the day.
Mr. Ouspensky had a perceptive and powerful mind, capable of taking and developing the knowledge
that Mr.Gurdjieff shared with him, leaving behind the legacy of the book the Fourth Way, the record
of his meetings between the wars, finally presenting this information in the technical language most available to our twentieth century, engineering culture.
Mr. Gurdjieff too, had taken probably a poetic and ancient knowledge source, and transformed it into
a comprehensive body of work, encapsulated in his great work, "Beelzebub".
It is not by chance that since then I keep encountering people who know “all about” Gurdjieff.” They proceed to share their “information and insights” with me. When this happens it is diverting but also dismaying, yet it remains instructive. Indeed, I recall the story told a few years ago by the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson (I think it was) about the middle-aged man who boarded an airplane and took his seat beside that of a distinguished-looking older man. The two passengers began to chat.
During the course of the flight, the middle-aged man waxed eloquent about the intricacies of “string theory,” basing everything he knew on article that he had enthusiastically read about it in a popular science magazine. When he had finished with his disquisition, he asked the older man what he thought – and it turned out that he had been explaining “string theory” to Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate!
To me in the 1950s, the Work represented ideas and effort. To the men and women who lived through that period as adults from 1912 to the 1950s, who were in daily and often intimate contact with Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, it was work and effort too, but it was also a lively time that was rich in character and personality, in idiots and toasts, in events and experiences that were seen to be teaching situations. There was the sprightliness of the Twenties and the literary and technological innovations of the interwar years generally – with inventions like the Theramin – which seemed outwards signs of inward change.
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