Robert Fripp - Chapter 7

Gurdjieff

         Who was George Ivanovich Gurdjieff? It appears that, even when he was alive - he died in 1949, his date of birth is uncertain, probably 1877 - if one asked ten people who knew him, one would receive ten different answers. Bennett wrote a biography of Gurdjieff, and his ultimate assessment of the man was that he was "more than a Teacher and less than a Prophet. He was a man with a true mission and he devoted his entire life to it. He needed people who could understand his message and yet he was compelled to make the message obscure and hard to understand. Therefore, he had to look for those who could acquire the required perspicacity and also the singleness of purpose to carry his work forward. Today [1973], twenty-four years after his death, there are thirty or forty people in different parts of the world who are capable of transmitting the teaching, but there are very few who can look beyond the man to his message."

         Since Gurdjieff's death, work with his methods has continued in formally and informally organized groups scattered across many countries. Any attempt to penetrate the real meaning of Gurdjieff's work leads to the inescapable conclusion that such meaning can be grasped only through sustained personal effort over a period of months and years - through self-observation, certain exercises carried out under the instruction of a qualified teacher, and a commitment to work on oneself in the context of a supportive community of fellow-seekers. Gurdjieff taught not so much a doctrine or creed as a method or a way, and it was a way whose transmission through mere books was deemed impossible.

         Nevertheless he wrote a number of books himself, and a fair number of his followers, often after considerable gnashing of teeth and soul-searching - given the admittedly ineffable nature of the subject-matter - have over the years committed their thoughts on Gurdjieff, his ideas, and his methods to the printed page. In 1985 J. Walter Driscoll, in collaboration with the Gurdjieff Foundation of California, published Gurdjieff: An Annotated Bibliography, a remarkable listing of over 1,700 books, articles, reviews, unpublished manuscripts, and other items in English, French, and other languages. Through this source one can gain some considerable insight into the identity of this enigmatic figure and the profound impact he had on any soul so fortunate or unfortunate as to grapple with him.

         Gurdjieff was born in the Armenian town of Alexandropol. With a Greek father and an Armenian mother, he had what one might call a flexible Middle Eastern appearance - one he would learn to shift, chameleon-like, at will, impersonating one or another race according to the demands of the moment. (With shaved head and groomed moustache, in his youth he looked perhaps not unlike the majestic Tony Levin.)

         Gurdjieff's father was a successful, even rich, cattle herder until his animals were wiped out by a pestilence; after the loss of all his wealth he worked as a carpenter and at other jobs. Most important to Gurdjieff, however, was his father's avocation as an asokh, or story-telling bard, for which he was widely known, having at his command hundreds of songs, poems, legends, and folk-tales. From him Gurdjieff inherited not only treasures of ancient wisdom from a rapidly vanishing oral tradition, but a tendency to view the world in allegorical terms, as a surpassingly rich drama with elements both tragic and comic.

         Gurdjieff was trained privately in medicine and Orthodox religion, but at some point around the age of twenty, driven by a need to seek answers to life's ultimate questions, he left his home environment and embarked on a lengthy series of travels around the Middle East, Central Asia, Tibet, India, and Egypt, at times alone and at times in the company of a number of other singularly committed individuals who called themselves "The Seekers of Truth."

         Tales of Gurdjieff's many expeditions and wanderings over this twenty-odd year period are told in his autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men. The modern Western reader is bound to find much in this spiritual travelogue astonishing and almost literally unbelievable. Miracles, prodigious psychic feats, exotic customs, and a faraway fairy-tale or medieval atmosphere pervade the book. Gurdjieff portrays a fluid, teeming life at the mythical center of the world, the cradle of civilization - a life in which currents of the great organized world religions mix with esoteric teachings, in which traditional Asian cultures run up against the forces of modernization - a world in which contemporary Europeans are viewed almost universally as soulless fools, a world in which Western dividing lines between body and spirit, matter and psyche, the mundane and the paranormal blur and vanish under the searchlight of the seeker's unremitting will to know.

         Enduring the harshest physical hardships, learning to be a trader, carpet dealer, businessman, fix-it man, con man, and consummate actor, drawing on his knowledge of some sixteen languages and dialects, Gurdjieff spent these years studying himself and the world, accumulating convincing evidence for the existence of higher powers, and meeting many, as he put it, "remarkable men" - gurus, yogis, fakirs, story-tellers, teachers, holy men, healers, monks - some situated in fantastically remote areas, hidden in monasteries unknown to the world and completely inaccessible to Westerners, where esoteric teachings had been transmitted orally for centuries, even millennia.

         In 1912, convinced that he had discovered and mastered a certain knowledge whose core of truth is found in all genuine religious traditions, and whose lineage went back to pre-Babylonian ages, Gurdjieff went to Moscow, where he began the teaching efforts he would pursue the remainder of his life. One of his students was P.D. Ouspensky, with whom he would split in the 1920s, but who wrote a systematic account of Gurdjieff's early ideas and methods, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, a book which Gurdjieff approved and cleared for publication shortly after Ouspensky's death in 1947.

via progressiveears.com