Gurdjieff Beyond the Personality Cult: Reading the Work and Its Re-Workings Notes on René Zuber’S ‘Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff?’

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Gurdjieff beyond the Personality Cult: Reading the Work and Its Re-Workings Notes on René Zuber’s ‘Who are You Monsieur Gurdjieff?’

Vrasidas Karalis The University of Sydney

Abstract

This article is a philosophical, aesthetic, and existential exploration of a small book written by one of Gurdjieff’s disciples, René Zuber (1902–1979), under the title Qui êtes-vous Monsieur Gurdjieff? (Le Courrier du Livre, 1977, éditions Éoliennes, 1997 and in English, translated by Jenny Koralek, Arkana, 1980). Formally the book belongs to a hybrid genre mixing autobiography, philosophy, religious reflection, memoir, and essay. It was composed by Zuber in order to interpret and contextualize Gurdjieff’s teaching and presence particularly during the last years of his life in Paris. At the core of the narrative rests the strange, tense, and somehow ambivalent relationship between Zuber and Gurdjieff, a relationship of equal admiration and reservation, in an attempt, after the death of the master, to establish the proper intellectual and phenomenological locus for Gurdjieff’s work.

Keywords

G. I. Gurdjieff – esoteric Christianity – René Zuber i Introduction

According to all the information we possess from various memoirs and autobiographical accounts, it is obvious that encountering G. I. Gurdjieff must have been quite an arduous and frustrating experience. Even for the people who admired him, such as the architect Frank Lloyd Wright or indeed like P. D. Ous- pensky himself, the relationship with the “Master” must have been full of unin- tended consequences. It seems that Gurdjieff overwhelmed his students with

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15685292-02101007 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access gurdjieff beyond the personality cult 177 the force of his personality, the aura of his presence, and the immediacy of his teachings. The combination of theory and action, of story and ritual, is what historically distinguishes Gurdjieff’s work from the similar attempts by Theos- ophy, Anthroposophy, and the ritual forms of other secret societies in the first half of the twentieth century. The very success of such societies—especially amongst the circles of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers—represents a crucial moment in the history of religious sensibility in the West, as institutional religions started disintegrating or became involved with pointless cultural wars of attrition against the central ideological systems of modernity, namely Dar- winism, Marxism and to a certain degree psychoanalysis (Karalis, “Mr Gur- djieff’s Legacy” 253–256). Theosophy and Anthroposophy emerged from the margins of cultural legitimacy to claim a place in the public sphere, while at the same time asserting the right to maintain a certain secrecy vis-à-vis the core teachings of their beliefs by attributing the origin of their ideas to invisible Masters who used the leader of the movement as their conduit for a new revelation. In the context of such revelations “charismatic leadership” became one of the most significant dimensions in the articulation of “esoteric knowledge.” A. P. Sinnett’s Mahatma Letters (1923) had established an important precedent by providing a new kind of revelation while maintaining the idea of an incommunicable “esoteric” teaching. In the introduction to the Letters, A. T. Barker stressed that: “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that in thus externalizing the source from which he seeks inspiration, the student sacrifices all possibility of the grand realities of spiritual attainment and direct knowledge” (Sinnett 4). Gurdjieff’s approach was quite different and became mainstream after the new dispensation of religious or meta-religious sensibilities that took over the West and the East in the 1960s. However, its innovative character and radical approach to religious phenomenology primarily as mental act can be seen in his conscious decision to democratize, to externalize, its manifestation, by making its re-enactments a public experience through music, dancing (the Movements), or theatrical performances, or finally through very personal autobiographical narratives about the source and the origin of the new revelation (Petsche, Gurdjieff and Music, passim). Such externalization, or opening up of its visual manifestation, through the ritual dances established a link between the causal and the symbolic, the visible and the imagined, creating thus a counter-religiosity, which, despite giving the certainty of link with the past, gave the opportunity to the individual to actively and consciously redefine its position with the continuum of a communal praxis. The historical context of the high modernism in the 1920s with the fragmentation of time, the abolition of the transcendental and the subjectification of the symbolic found in Gurdjieff’s system of “harmonious” development a powerful antidote, which ultimately

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access 178 karalis appealed to the ability of the individual to synthesize incongruities and polar- ities, indeed to reconstitute the locus of sacrality outside the traditional forms and spaces of numinosity, while at the same time actualizing the potentialities of the self. Gurdjieff’s presentation was uneven and in most occasions the Master over- powered the Disciple. Therein also we can locate the ambivalent element in Gurdjieff’s anthropology, which Anthony Storr noted in his anti-guru diatribe Feet of Clay (1996). Despite Storr’s cautious rejection however, the very success of Gurdjieff’s teachings indicates that they covered an important gap in the socio-cultural and psychological dynamics of the period. Storr himself stresses that his teachings “bewitched so many interesting and intelligent people” (23), indirectly foregrounding an intrinsic value in the communicability of his ideas which belonged to a period when the “nostalgia for the absolute” was relocated to new forms of philosophical religions, revisiting the older model of Renais- sance philosophical, indeed Neoplatonic, religions of Pico della Mirandola and Marcilio Ficcino. In a recent study,Costica Bradatan pointed out that with them the idea of human life as “a project of self-fashioning” was for the first articulated and established the intellectual matrix for the re-imagining of religious philosophy for contemporary European thinkers (13). Bradatan observes that the key to the understanding of the act of philosophizing in contemporary terms can be located in Mirandola’s “key phrase” about man as “‘a creature of indeterminate nature’ (indiscretae opus imagines, literally ‘a work of indistinguishable form’).” As Bradatan suggests: “God must have a messy working style indeed. That’s the only explanation why man has been left in such a raw state: a creature of imprecise, indistinguishable (indiscretus) contours, a work still in progress—a rough draft really” (Bradatan 16). Gurdjieff understood human nature as being in an incomplete and almost confused state, and the purpose of the teacher’s personality and work was to consciously reshape, indeed refashion, the center of its existential presence. The renaissance idea was reinvigorated in the late nineteenth century through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a thinker who reduced human life into “an aesthetic phenomenon” and understood philosophy as an autobiographical unfolding of a discontinuous self. The idea that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (Nietzsche 38) prepared the way for the new forms of self-fashioning that were to be expressed later both in philosophy and in esoteric thinking. Michael Hamburger traced the movement of prophetic and exhortatory German writing from the start of the twentieth century in (Hamburger A Proliferation of Prophets). This concept was re-articulated by Raymond Furness in Zarathustra’s Children: A Study of a Lost Generation of German Writers (2000), in which he traced the spiritual and

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access gurdjieff beyond the personality cult 179 visionary influence of Nietzsche on a group of seven German thinkers (Furness 1–16). The period was full of apocalyptic and eschatological expectations, moti- vated by symbolic dynamism, radical imagery, and somehow spurious meta- physics, together with narrative visions of utopian societies constructed in isolation and through the efforts of communal bonds between disciples. There are two books, both composed by migrant writers from the cultural periphery, that combine the Nietzschean cult of the charismatic individual as found in Thus Spake Zarathustra and the autobiographical transcultural hybrid imagery, that can be detected in the semantic horizon of Gurdjieff’s work, especially of his Meetings with Remarkable Men (written in 1927). These are Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid (1911) and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923). We could also add a later novel expressing the same angst concerning origins, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943), as well as Mikhaʾil Naʾima’s The Book of Mirdad (1948). In their own distinct way each one of these books combined traditional forms or knowledge and narrative structure with very strong elements of autobiographical commentary, in their attempt to establish a unifying pattern for thinking and acting under conditions of fragmentation, exile, and trauma. “Self-fashioning” however was the underlying subtext in all such efforts: the image of an individual self, irreducible to its historical circumstances or its psychological particularities, is what inspired these writers as well as many thinkers at the same period. Such perception of the self was within the intellectual horizons that Gurdjieff found himself in after moving to Petersburg and his meeting with P. D. Ouspensky. In the final sentences of hisTertiumOrganum (1921), Ouspensky declared: “Therefore the true and real progress of thought is only in the broadest striving towards knowledge, that does not recognize the possibility of arrestment in any found forms of knowledge at all. The meaning of life is in eternal search. And only in that search can we find something truly new” (Ouspensky 336). During this period, an intense metaphysical unrest permeated the cultural imaginary of Europe, as a reaction the mechanistic nineteenth century as well as an attempt to reconsider the consequences of the critique and rejection of religion. The position of Gurdjieff is crucial at historical moment shortly after WorldWar i and the post-World war ii intellectual and spiritual malaise defined by the sense of an ending and at the same time by a profound expectation for a liberation, indeed for an emancipation, from the structures and strictures of the past. Paradoxically, Zuber perceived tradition as a radical response to the impasses and the dilemmas of his time; and he was not alone in this. The dis- covery of Gurdjieff’s teaching by the American and French intellectuals, artists and thinkers, in Harlem or in Paris, coincided with the semantic implosion of all the certainties and the practices that dominated the world-view of the lib-

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access 180 karalis eral bourgeoisie after the French Enlightenment. In a very interesting passage of the short book, Zuber himself attempts a contextualization of his own intellectual endeavour and tries to give an interpretation of his own thinking: “I was born, he stresses, almost seventy-five years ago into the French Protestant bourgeoisie. At that time, when the characteristics of the nineteenth century were exaggerated to the point of travesty, science was seen as objective, pitiless, in a word, masculine; whereas religion was subjective, sentimental, tender-hearted, in a word, feminine” (Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? 39). At the same time, he sees Gurdjieff as a link between tradition and inno- vation. He stresses that tradition “etymologically (from the Latin tradere: to transmit) the emphasis must be put on the transmission of a living primordial knowledge and not at all on a blind attachment to the forms and structures of the past” (53). Zuber’s emphasis on Gurdjieff as a link between tradition and modernity finds a very strange formulation in the book. “Was Gurdjieff a traditionalist?” he asks. “It would be much more correct to say that everything about him was traditional: he was himself the tradition” (57; emphasis in the original). The statement is extremely interesting and somehow provoca- tive; one could even claim that it goes against the intention of his teachings to “destroy mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and vies, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world” (Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson i). In a sense, the French background of Zuber can account for his identification of a venerable institution, the tradition, with one individual. Within the French environment, the idea resonates with the two famous statements by Louis xiv “l’etat—c’est moi” or even within the Roman-catholic context with the pronouncement of Pope Pius ix,“La tradizione sono io.” Gurdjieff himself would have felt uncomfortable with the idea that he was the very embodi- ment of the tradition, or indeed the tradition itself, as probably he would have thought that he was inaugurating a new tradition which would synthesize the secretly transmitted knowledge to a new form of thinking and being as indi- viduals who possessed a certain knowledge. In his very interesting “fantastic soliloquy” in the beginning of his book Life is Real Only Then when ‘I Am’, Gur- djieff offers a very strange reflection on the position of the individual: “… my Being is necessary not only for my personal egoism but also for the common welfare of humanity. My Being is indeed necessary to all people; even more necessary to them than their felicity and their happiness of today” (2). The autobiographical mode gives to Gurdjieff’s pronouncements a tone a didactic revelation, instructing the reader to accept the position of discipleship. It was a common anxiety in the period, especially during the inter-war period, when all old certainties had collapsed and new were not articulated yet. Expressing the

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access gurdjieff beyond the personality cult 181 same existential anxiety in front of cultural implosion, Nikos Kazantzakis pro- claimed in his The Saviors of God: “We are living in a critical, violent moment of history; an entire world is crashing down, another has not yet been born. Our epoch is not a moment of equilibrium in which refinement, peace and love might be fruitful virtues” (113–114). Within this context we must understand Zuber’s approach and experience of Gurdjieff and his work, together with his own project of la Nouvelle Objectiv- ité. Zuber was primarily an artist and more specifically a photographer and a cinematographer. His films and photographs celebrate the organic materiality of objects. In his 1935 film La Crète sans Dieux (Crete without Gods), made with Roger Leenhardt, Zuber focuses the camera on the strong and immutable forms of stone and rock that dominate the Cretan landscape with the human forms presenting an organic continuation of the materiality of the natural topogra- phy.He insists on the rituals that create a form of perennial connection with the past and elevates societal practices to supra-historical phenomena connecting the material and the symbolic world of language. His “new objectivity” found in Gurdjieff’s teaching a justification of the “organic materiality” of life unlike the sharp and somehow platonic divisions between the real and the symbolic. Gurdjieff’s idea that all such centers of activity converge on the actual presence of the objective event became one of the central principle of his photography throughout his life. Zuber’s own cultural and artistic background needed Gurdjieff’s objectivity as the only way to recreate and reconstruct the immediacy of experience within the artistic event and the experience of art. Furthermore, it is obvious that in his attempt to locate his own thinking Zuber revisits the old romantic dichotomy between naïve and sentimental culture, re-articulated as a polarity between science and religion and redefined as a cosmological divide between masculine and feminine. Such dualistic understanding of culture and most certainly of Gurdjieff’s contribution to the presumed divide would had infuriated the Master himself, with his tripartite understanding of the human phenomenon. Zuber still thinks of Gurdjieff as a chronological error, like a postdated prophet, whose proleptic announcements were already realized: “Gurdjieff, he writes, appeared at the beginning of this century like a megalith, a survivor, of some unknown catastrophe, set there as a challenge in his isolation: in a word, he was an anachronism” (Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? 52–53). Furthermore, for Zuber Gurdjieff exists through his disciples because of the individuating methods constituting his cognitive epistemology. Rene Zuber’s interpretation of the connection between work and individual, as well as the master and the disciple, is used as an eloquent example of a process of both participatory identification in the times of modernist fractured subjectivities.

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Yet he stressed something extremely pertinent for both the encounter with him as a teacher and the understanding of his work. “He seemed to be filled with an experience—almost incommunicable—which set him at an unbearable dis- tance from the common run of mortals” (3). This sense of incommunicability is probably what intrigued Zuber and inspired him throughout their relationship. In one of his notes written about their encounters during the period of the German-occupied Paris, Zuber stressed the immense impact that Gurdji- eff had on his own privileging of the organic materiality of the aesthetic event: “What did Gurdjieff cure me of? Of imagination. He cured me of imagining my own life instead of living it. Imagining it, moreover, was proof of the deep wish which I had to live it …” (“Notebooks” 353). It is indeed an interesting statement as Gurdjieff always avoided all forms of romantic imagining of himself as a supra-human master. John Bennett in his autobiography also stressed the constant concern that Gurdjieff exhibited to express his human imperfections as part of his own teaching. Bennett aptly suggested: “I had reached the conclusion that Gurdjieff 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” (Bennett 379). In a way Zuber’s attitude is very close to that of the American writer Jean Toomer; “I watched Gurdjieff, he wrote. Said I to myself—There is a man, if ever I have seen one. He seemed to have everything that could be asked of a developed human being, a teacher, a master. Knowledge, integration, many- sidedness, power—in fact he had a bit too much power for my comfort.” And later he added: “Gurdjieff’s power disturbed me. I was not sure of it, and I wanted to be sure before I placed myself wholly in his hands” (Toomer 136– 137). Both Toomer and Zuber desire to develop the participatory identification with the Master but the personality itself raises obstacles and indeed in the end simply undermines and ultimately destroys the mutual understanding. What is interesting in these cases of discipleship is the connection between the teaching and the teacher, and the fundamental dichotomy within the students who accept the teaching by distancing themselves for the teacher. This is pattern we have seen in many instances in the life of Gurdjieff. The act of recollecting the life and the encounters with the Master shows that the harmonization between the teacher and his message takes place only as imaginative reconstruction after the death of the Mage, as Margaret Anderson wrote in the final pages of her memoirs. “Now I go away with all my secrets and my mystery. My work is finished here” (Anderson 207). The mystery of the

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access gurdjieff beyond the personality cult 183 teachings was amplified by the secrets of the master. Anderson also stated: “But Gurdjieff is not only unknown. Perhaps he is unknowable” (6). Even Zuber asked himself: “in the end did you meet the real Gurdjieff?” To his question he gave the ambiguous and somehow ambivalent answer: “A master meets you for the sole purpose of showing you the direction, the way to the inner master which is called conscience. He helps you to discover that you are already its subject, but that you were not aware of it. And then he disappears. He melts into the sky as the mountain does the moment you believe you have set foot on it” (Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? 65). From his final statements we extract this feeling of ambivalence towards his own subject matter. Zuber explored the psychodynamics between master and disciple both in cultural and psychoanalytic terms. The relationship obviously was not based on domination or indeed suspension of his own subjectivity. If nothing else, Gurdjieff insisted on waking up of the dormant conscience within the brain of the individual: conscious suffering as an expression of conscious being is probably the most important and the most controversial aspect of the Gurdjieff method, especially for those who presented his work as a feel-good escapist placebo. The purpose of his teaching in an era of fragmented grand narratives was to provide a new way of re-imagining the self: indeed, his teaching was and is about the project of self-fashioning in times of “self-deception, subjectivity, introspection. Introspection is bad: we have nothing to look into,” as Anderson recorded (56). Gurdjieff pointed out that modernity was another myth for self-alienation and the pretext for avoiding the confrontation with the “inner” self. Zuber aptly concluded: “His slyness was directed against all forms of what he calls “auto-satisfaction,” in particular against that of the man who, having found a guru, fall in behind him, ceases all effort and abandons the use of any critical faculty” (Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? 64). Probably this is something we must always keep in mind when his work is discussed: it is an uncomfortable and unpleasant exercise in testing the limits of the self in an era when it is widely believed that the self is limitless. ii Monsieur Gurdjieff and His Esoteric Christianity

The central point of Zuber’s book is that Gurdjieff himself “defined his teaching as ‘Christian esotericism’” (Who AreYouMonsieur Gurdjieff? 31). Zuber explores this “hidden aspect” of Gurdjieff’s teaching and through a very substantial part of his book he struggles to link his teaching with the “essence of Christianity” as he found in a fragmented form throughout the Gospels (35–37). Further- more, he points out elements of such “hidden Christianity” as articulated in

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Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (1949) and foregrounds the central eth- ical ideas in Gurdjieff, which he condenses into two principles: “conscious labor and suffering voluntarily undertaken” (38). By pointing out these two principles he concludes: “This was the Alpha and the Omega of his teaching, his final message, the bottle which he cast upon the waters, before disappearing into the ocean. One would have to be deaf and blind not to recognize that this thought and the Christian tradition are identical in essence” (38–39). Zuber’s suggestion is both right and wrong; right as it indicates a horizon of meaning that can be detected in Gurdjieff’s writings and wrong as there are ideas and practices in his work that cannot be understood within the context of any esoteric or exoteric Christianity. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Annie Besant had published her most important study of the subject under the title Esoteric Christianity or The Lesser Mysteries (1902). In that study, to a certain degree following G. R. S. Mead’s study Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1900) she tried to differentiate between the excesses of a Gnostic interpretation of Christian knowledge and an esoteric understanding of the accepted Gospels as structured around “mysteries.” Besant indicated that the Gospels contain “lesser mysteries” and this is what the interpretation of the New Testament should focus upon. But at the same time she indicated: “Only by teaching above the grasp of the little evolved can the way be opened up for the restoration of arcane knowledge, and the study of the Lesser Mysteries must precede that of the Greater. The Greater will never be published through the printing press; they can only be given by teacher to pupil, ‘from mouth to ear’” (Besant ix). According to her, through the visible rituals the faithful witnesses the “partial unveiling of deep truths” and shows the true “nature of the teachings that have to be mastered.” And she states: “Where only hints are given, quiet meditation of the truths hinted at will cause their outlines to become visible, and the clearer light obtained by continued meditation will gradually show them more fully” (Besant ix). Besant’s study put forward the idea of a disciplina arcani or even revived the Renaissance belief in Prisca theologia: for her Christianity was, since its inception, a mystery religion, based on rituals of theurgic reenactments of a deeper spiritual knowledge, whose hidden core was transmitted mystically throughout the centuries. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum reflects the same idea and sometimes one could claim that Ouspensky in most of his early writings is closer to theosophy than to Gurdjieff and his teaching. In the Fourth Way, Gurdjieff calls his system also “esoteric Christianity” although he had a completely different understanding of the Christ’s teachings: “… you must take Christianity as a teaching of action, he stated, not as a mental teaching” (Ouspensky,TheFourthWay 404). Of course to a certain degree it is very difficult

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access gurdjieff beyond the personality cult 185 to distinguish between Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s ideas especially in the way that the former recorded them in his books. Yet Gurdjieff’s own writings frequently parody religion and the understanding of god as an omnipotent father. From another point of view there is a strong element or religious syncretism in Ouspensky’s ideas which may or may not be found in Gurdjieff’s teachings, although the belief that there is a secret knowledge common to all religions can also be found in Gurdjieff. It is obvious that from Mead to Zuber and probably closer to our age with Gary Lachman, there is no clear distinction between Christianity and Gnosticism or there is a constant attempt to isolate pronouncements from the logia of Jesus, that is from the early oral period of Christian faith, with the later period of the fully articulated narrative gospels. Despite the fact that Besant refers to a “graduated” understanding of religion (Besant 4), there is a strong element of an imaginative (or indeed spiritual) reconstruction of the originary foundations of Christianity which transcend history and memory. Zuber is very close to such an understanding of Gurdjieff’s esoteric Christianity without however trying to define it in any way. Nevertheless it is not truly obvious with Gurdjieff himself. His teachers are outcasts and heretics from many religions and cannot really seem to express a unified perception of the deity. “As we later, ascertained, among the adepts of this monastery were former Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Lamaists and even one Shamanist. All were united by God theTruth” (Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men 239). Beyond the idea of esoteric Christianity, even beyond Jesus, Gurdjieff advocated the primacy of the real, the centrality of “objective consciousness” and through this the spiritual emancipation of the individual from their imprisonment in the obvious and the heavy burdens of societal protocols. A thorough study of his system shows that it is closer to the renaissance philosophical religions blending self-fashioning and autonomy in a way that transcends all forms of esoteric Christianity. In a way however he remains within a Christian framework as defined by Wolfgang Smith’s understanding of Christian Gnosis. For Smith, Christianity is a tradition without a “secret” or “esoteric” doctrine while at the same time, following a catego- rization by Clement of Alexandria, distinguishing between “preparatory” and “supreme” gnosis (Smith 17).

The question whether Gurdjieff offered to Zuber and his other disciples a preparatory or a supreme gnosis is still to be investigated without any precon- ceptions about the nature of the Christian doctrine, their faith in Christianity or their faith in Gurdjieff as a Christian. The best characterization of both Gurdji- eff and Zuber is given to us in the introduction that the writer of Mary Poppins,

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Pamela L. Travers provides for Zuber’s memoir. She called them parabolists (Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? 1), narrators of parables, through which the relationship between the disciple and the teacher as well as between the disciple and the teachings is expressed in brief imaginary fables. Esoteric Christian- ity was the confabulation of a retrieved self or indeed of a self imagined before the fragmentation of modernity: every autobiographical narrative is to a certain degree a confabulation based on distorted memories, fantasized landscapes and imaginary circumstances. From Meetings with Remarkable Men to Who are you Monsieur Gurdjieff? the mode of constructing narratives about the self is homologous; the contribution of the Christian mythos is equally significant. It gave a sense of deep time and deep history to generations of people who expe- rienced the melting of all certainties by the rise of technological modernity (Karalis “Situating G. I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men” 312–314). Maybe Gurdjieff’s love for machines indicated that his teachings revived the awe-inspiring character of the real without the fragmentation of psychoanalytic self or the cult of ephemerality that dominated the society of consumers that was to dominate the Western world after the death of Gurdjieff in 1949. iii Conclusion

Because of his complex and paradoxical teaching, Gurdjieff remains, as Nevill Drury described, “one the first gurus of spiritual self-help in theWest. He used to say, ‘Man must live till he dies,’ by which he meant that man should consciously labor and voluntarily suffer in order to achieve true spiritual growth—and he not only believed it, but put it into practice. In many ways Gurdjieff was years ahead of his time” (Drury 25). By studying Zuber’s book you see the interesting ways in which the past threatened to imprison Gurdjieff in categories of thought and conceptual frameworks that his teachings tried to undermine and transcend. Gurdjieff was the first representative of a new Christian Gnosis in a post-Christian world; his teachings and the distinctive culture that he cre- ated merits far greater scholarly exploration, and more thorough investigation, than it has received to date. In this article I have focused upon only one of the memoirs that his pupils produced; the process of patient sifting through and comparison of these texts is yet to be undertaken in a systematic fashion, and represents an urgent research project that will clarify and enhance understanding of Gurdjieff as a spiritual teacher; the sources and significance of his teaching; its relationship to traditional religions including Orthodox Christian- ity, Islam (in particular Sufism), and Buddhism; and its legacy in the contemporary world.

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