18. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (2)

18. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (2) 1. In this paper I examine another incident which reveals O’s awareness that G was of superior knowledge and being but also his own resistance to this fact. In the immediately previous paper, I examined the highly significant event in Finland which was the telepathic communication that G set off between O and himself thus giving to O proofs of his own [G’s] superior ability. We take it that O described accurately an actual event. Despite this, I pointed out, O assumed (p 263, In Search of the Miraculous) that G could react in a certain way deriding him, if he, O, told him of something he had found about himself: this shows very great presumption on O’s part. How could O, after G’s clear demonstrations of his own undoubted higher knowledge and power, assume that he knew G so well as to be sure of G’s ways and reactions? 2. A little later, after the events in Finland, two people of the group dropped off. They seemed suddenly, writes O (p 269), not to understand anything of the teaching, to see in everything G told them a misunderstanding on his part and to find in their fellow-students a lack of sympathy. The two thought all the other members conspired against them, failed to inform them of what G said when they were absent and, on the contrary, told tales to G in order to make him distrust them (= the two). The two became mistrustful, suspicious and openly hostile to the group. They accused them all of giving to G wrong information about themselves and presenting them in a false light. O was astonished by this change. 3. But the more significant aspect of this sad event is that O notes fully the two person’s change of attitude towards G himself! I quote O’s description of their new attitude: - “G. himself had completely changed, had become altogether different from what he used to be before, had become harsh, requiring, had lost all feeling and all interest for individual people, had ceased to demand the truth from people; that he preferred to have around him people such as were afraid to tell him the truth, who were hypocrites, who threw flowers at one another and at the same time spied on the others". Note: O writes that the two others thought G had changed, had become different; had ceased to demand the truth from people; preferred to have round him hypocrites. Yet some such notions appeared in O himself subsequently leading him to leave G! 4. At first O begins to "separate" G the man/teacher from the "system". In the circumstances this is an absurdity. Particularly as G does absolutely nothing that goes against the "system" as far as one can see at that stage by O’s own description. 1 Later he writes openly that there were many things (unspecified) he could not understand and that he had to go (p. 373) i.e. abandon G. He valued immensely the ideas of the system realising their significance. But he doubted that he, together with "the majority of our company", could continue under G's leadership. "I do not in the least," O explains, "mean that I found any of G's actions or methods wrong [here too he becomes judge of his teacher!] or that they failed to respond to what I expected". This explains nothing, of course; and the same holds for O's additional explanation that "a man has choice" and he is not obliged to follow something which “does not respond to what he is seeking" (p. 374). This seems to me to contradict the preceding statements about the two members who left and about O’s valuing the system. He does not say how exactly G’s methods failed to meet his own expectations! And when he wanders off into different types of school he is obviously covering up or evading something. How did G become different? No explanation! Nor is there the slightest improvement or clear explanation when he says that a leader (=G) should put off people for whom his methods or subjects will be "alien, incomprehensible and unattainable". O does not and will not give any real reasons as to his objections. He states then that he had been mistaken about many things that he had ascribed to G. But again we have seen no mention of these things. It all sounds like clumsy self-justification. Here I stop to return with another paper. 2 19. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (3) 1. In my youth in England, I got acquainted with Krishnamurti’s and Ouspensky’s writings and, shortly after, Gurdjieff’s. Krishnamurti was very much alive then (late 1950’s) and I attended some of his talks. But he had no “school”, no practical, methodical system of teaching – only the practice of non-interfering “watching” or “self–awareness”. Therefore, I could not follow him in a practical way because no sooner did I remember to watch my condition and state of mind than I forgot again for a very long period. Fortunately, soon afterwards I joined an organisation descending from O, the School of Economic Science run by L. MacLaren. But I enthused immensely over the teaching of G & O as given in the dispassionate style of O’s books and the immense span they covered in human psychology and cosmic structure. I confess though, that, even then, I found rather artificial, some thing like the hydrogens and the food-octaves based on them. 2. Today, (Sept 2018), the G and O traditions are very fragmented even where groups continue in direct descent from one or the other man. In those days around 1960, we looked at the life and legacy of the two in great awe. I myself thought of G and O as Socrates and Plato, even though Socrates had not written any books and had died many years before Plato, whereas G outlived O by 2 years and had written his own books. Even in those days there were those who favoured O and those who favoured G. This initial split, which obviously had begun much earlier, gradually, with the passage of years, became a strong and rather “un-esoteric” partiality towards the one or the other line of descent. I suppose it was inevitable. Over the years appeared books promoting implicitly or explicitly the one or the other line, vindicating G over O and vice-versa, sometimes not without much acrimony. 3. Of the two lines, O’s would seem to be the more successful but only in so far as it changed very radically. At present I shall focus on one important aspect of O’s character which comes out strongly in his own writings. This is ascertained, searched out and sketched by W.P. Patterson in his Struggle of the Magicians (1996 Arete Commun. Publ. Fairfax, Cal). WPP writes (pp 36-37, n 22) that the point of O’s real break with G began in Finland, in August 1916. At that time, G had induced in O his telepathic ability of communication and O had discovered something about himself but decided (as he writes in his In Search of the Miraculous p 263) that he would not show this to G “because he would laugh at him”. Quite rightly WPP considers that here O betrays lack of trust in his teacher (one moreover who had just demonstrated to O powers unknown to him!) and assumes contrary to all esoteric principles, which O himself would later emphasise to his own students, that a student cannot know his teacher’s level of being! 3 4. In O’s A Further Record: Extracts from Meetings 1928-1945, in the section on the “Short History of the work”, O says that he went to the East to look for schools but, in India, he found only devotional ones which expected acceptance on the students’ part of all they were told and he was not interested; for such schools existed in Russia too. This to me sounds very odd for three important reasons. First, in his book In Search of the Miraculous O writes (p 5) of the devotional schools, indeed, but also that he heard of a different type that could have been what he was looking for; moreover, the people who were connected with and spoke to him about that type of school were, he adds, very different from others. Nonetheless, he rejected that, too, without further investigation because, as he says, such schools demanded too much – that he should give up his ideas and plans! But is not this what a school with a genuine esoteric teaching would ask? Second, O himself put similar conditions of obedience on his students also, sometimes quite severe, demanding and seemingly unreasonable, especially towards the end of his life. (In a later paper I shall examine the last months od his life in England which have been preserved in great detail.) Third, O enjoined his successor in London in 1947 to make contact with the Inner Circle and find the source of the system but he made no such effort himself throughout his life. Why not? He said at an interview in the 1930’s that Central Asia was closed and one could not travel there and in any case conditions, people and institutions like monasteries etc, would have changed beyond possible recognition. But John Bennet did travel there in the early 1950’s and discovered much. India was easily accessible being a British colony and one, moreover, which O had visited much earlier and found possibilities! Yet he did no further exploring for more than 20 years.

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