He Doesn’t Pass Like A Shadow

Part One

In this post, I wish to try and bring something which may be of continuing practical value, although it is perhaps most accessible to those in Gurdjieff groups. In June 1980 the Adies set their groups a task: submit a written report, retaining for yourself a copy, stating: (1) what you feel you have gained from the work, (2) what you feel you now need, and (3) your plan to acquire what you need. Even if one were not engaged in the Gurdjieff “work”, the task is pertinent. One can substitute for “the work” the name of one’s path, or simply the word “life”. But anyone can take this as a task. The transcripts below may provide some assistance.

On 25 June 1980, Mrs Adie said in response to a question by someone who found it difficult to formulate a plan: “…you could take one habit, for example, watching t.v., or smoking, and try and change it. But it is very important to remember why you are doing this. To stop watching t.v. or to cut down smoking will create a friction and a suffering. It can easily become an ordinary sort of misery, but the recollection of your aim is a factor which can prevent the suffering becoming an ordinary misery.”

After this reference to aim, Mrs Adie came to a related topic – wish.

“We have to realise much more our wish. Most of the time there is no truth to our wish, one could even say that there is no wish at all. That is why so little happens. But there are moments when there is some wish active in us. And the most important moment is in the morning preparation. If it is done sincerely and with a certain amount of will and force, the feeling comes from it. Feeling comes as a result of making an effort, there is no doubt about it, but it is not going to last. So it has to be repeated in some way, but it won’t be repeated unless – at that moment – I plan for the next moment.”

“But at that moment there is a wish. During the day I may remember. During the day I may get a guilty feeling, but there is no wish. Yet only that wish will produce a result. One sees more and more in all the questions that is the main difficulty, really. At some time a shock is received and a fresh impulse appears. There is a wish. But that does not stay by itself, it must be reinforced.”

Part of the significance of this statement is that wish, the wish for conscious evolution which is essential in all of us, “resides”, as it were, in feeling. “Feeling” and “emotion” are different things. Feeling is in essence, and always brings a sense of myself in relation to reality. It is always permanent, not in the sense that the feeling lasts forever, but that the truth of the experience is permanent. If love turns to hate or vice versa, this is emotional love not feeling. If I experience love in my feeling, that feeling is always true for me. I can never deny it or say that I had been deceived or was wrong. Gurdjieff says that from the result of experiencing love, “we can blissfully rest from the meritorious labours actualized by us for the purpose of self-perfection.” (Beelzebub, p. 357) This love never fades: it is always remembered as an immediate being-reality. While emotions can be very violent, and hence believable, they can be blown away. Feeling is always deeper, immeasurably deeper, but feeling is always quieter. Indeed, a correlation can be made between feeling and a certain kind of silence. But the opposite does not necessarily hold: silence, the cessation of sound, does not always point to feeling.

The feeling of “Wish” is a great mystery. In Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am”, Gurdjieff speaks of the three impulses “I Am”, “I Can” and “I Wish” as being “sacred for man”, and as “Divine impulses”. (p.136 in both the privately printed 1975 edition and the 1999 paperback). In the critically important chapter “Hypnotism”, Beelzebub refers to the “sacred being-impulses” of faith, hope, love and conscience. It seems to me that there are correlations between these two sets of impulses such that one may even think of faith as approximating to I Am, hope to I Can, and love to I Wish. I do not say that the terms are interchangeable: but if one holds these concepts side by side in thought, the experience may be enlightening.

To complete the reporting of the meeting of 25 June 1980, Mrs Adie stated in reply to a question: “It is very interesting. It has often been said “Don’t work for results.” But it’s also said that every effort has a result. But it’s not always what we expect.” She was going to develop this thought, but the person who brought the question cut across her.

Part Two

From the same period, comes this edited transcript of the meeting of Wednesday 18 June 1980, taken by both the Adies. The task was the one mentioned above: the report with three aspects. But some of the people also referred to an exercise which the Adies had from Gurdjieff in 1949, and which I call the “Clean Impressions” exercise. In my experience, to date, this is the king, as it were, of Gurdjieff’s exercises.

The first question came from Basil, who asked about his troubled younger son, and how he could not relate to his son except in the “normal fatherly way” of advising him to think of himself and others. He finds, however, that this achieves no lasting result. Perhaps, said Basil, he needs to accept the situation as it is. However, he added with real honesty, he found it very difficult to accept the situation without disapproval.

“Well unless you do”, replied Adie, “you cannot help him. If you refuse to accept the reality, you can’t understand. Everything being as it is, then you have to agree that this is the situation. As for leaving a more permanent effect, this is a big doing. Unless I have this actual transformation going on in me, how can I leave anything at all enduring in anybody? What more permanent impression can I achieve in myself?”

“Take yourself: you are the operative factor. You wish to affect him, You wish to minister unto him. But can you minister unto yourself? Because what is to do the ministration?”

“Yet”, added Adie, “this is what we need to do to come to the point of our lives.”

In this idea of the point of our lives, something very deep is touched, which having been sounded, will be picked up again later in the meeting. At this point, however, Adie referred to the task which had been given: “All the answers to these questions show this up tremendously clearly. Almost every answer, almost every one, begs the question. It says “I have to do this”. But it does not say how. It says “I have to make a plan,” but it does not say how, almost exclusively. In one or two instances there was a very theoretical one, “I must have a higher thought”. Of course I must. But how? This is the great difficulty: it stands out now from all the answers. We are not in very intelligent contact with the world we live in, or with the bigger world. See after 10, twelve or fourteen years, what is our contact with life on a bigger scale? Where is the sense of obligation or duty … or meaning? Where is the meaning of life? Have I got a duty? And whom would that duty be for?”

Let me just interrupt once more: I think this is terribly important for the future not only of each individual, but also of the Gurdjieff tradition as a whole: what is its contact with life on a bigger scale? What is the contact of each group with life? Gurdjieff used to feed the poor and support the needy. I shall one day collect the references to this, but it is sufficient here to refer to Tchekhovitch and to Conge. I hope that the same can be said of today’s Gurdjieff groups, because if it cannot, this points to a deficiency in their work. To return to Mr Adie’s answer:

“Well, I think everybody ought to study their answer and see. Some of the things which were said were perfectly alright, but they have to be taken further. In that respect, there is little difference in anybody’s answer. They all go round about. Time and time again, someone says what they need, and then they state the furthest need, “I need to remember myself”, yes, but alright, then what am I going to do about it? “I am going to try and remember myself.” It’s almost as banal as that. Almost.” He turned to Mrs Adie and asked for her opinion. She agreed, saying:

“I was thinking that there were one or two good ones among them, but most of the answers could have applied to anybody. People have not written about their particular difficulty. But everybody is different in some way: we all have our own subjective weaknesses and ways. They were left too general.”

“Interestingly”, said Mr Adie, “the answers which we had received from people who had only just come were better. At least they saw quite crisply that this was an obstacle. This specific thing. They really felt something about their lack of will, their lack of control. It came out. They felt that this they needed, and that’s why they came to the work.”

“See, we’re in front of a great challenge there. We need the influence of the far off, but we need to experience it, not as a tale that is told but as an actual fact. What is it that stops that, and how could I have that experience more often? Someone would say by remembering their far aim, yes, but how am I going to achieve this increased recollection? Practically no one cited anything that they had got to give up. Almost no one said “I have to sacrifice this”, or that they had to acquire that specific thing in order.”

“This relates to what you’re saying, Basil. How to come to be useful in this situation. One finds people who will say, “you must do this, and try to realise that”, all these wise man responses, very sage, very salutary. I think we don’t realise the necessity of getting down into the same situation. I don’t mean getting down from a condescending point of view, but standing side by side. If there were something wrong with a motor, would I sit in my chair and tell him to go outside and fix it? Or do I sense his need, leave my chair, and have a look with him? Maybe I can’t exactly do that verbally, but if I’ve got it in my feeling, then I could even remain mute and yet share his situation, and that would be much more lasting. If only I could feel myself in relation to him. You refer to your son, I can refer to one of our sons, and there there is great difficulty. From the ordinary point of view it is heartbreaking. But what is shared sometimes is a quality of feeling, and that certainly is an enduring thing.”

“Just a certain little while, shared in a wordless way, even just cooking a meal together, or getting something from the shop, because words never satisfy, they always go the wrong way, while feeling is a more permanent influence. But to have a result … ah, that’s a different matter. We have to settle for the possible, and even to be grateful for that, and to see that the other is beyond our power. But if something is exchanged there, in our presences, then that remains a recollection possible for him. Mmm?”

“One does not know what stage people are at, what point in this enormous long life, they are at. Do you know John Bunyan’s remark, when he saw the fellow led off to the gallows. He wasn’t being mock-humble, he just realised that everybody is exposed to these tremendous forces, and that there was one being led off to the gallows. “There, but for the grace of God go I, John Bunyan.”

“But too often, for us, other people present a bleak prospect, and for us it is unacceptable. Certainly, as you yourself say, acceptance is absolutely essential. That means, really, in practice, in this case, an absence of negative criticism. You don’t have to say, oh yes, it’s alright. You have to be free of blaming – in your feeling. You can realise how ghastly and costly it is. But in your feeling you don’t blame.”

Mr Adie then turned to Paul, who in his report had said that he found a good state but he could not find the words:

“And Paul wrote, certainly from the most sincere place that he could, but still you have to come to an answer, you cannot leave it unanswered, because our work is on this level. Facing that higher state, I am wordless, I cannot know. I am in challenge totally, but if I am going to work, I have to come to some kind of an answer, I have to work to it. So I go forward. Maybe you come to something trite, it doesn’t matter. You cannot remain in that exalted state for long, you return … and then you follow. Try and take it further. Don’t be satisfied with this formulation. I have to work to do. With the benefit of this, whatever it is, I go and find the work.”

Mr Adie then noticed Richard, who had not handed in a report. Why, he asked him, had he not submitted one? Well, Richard replied, he did not think it had to be submitted.

“Nonsense”, retorted Adie. “You fail. Next time you do not come if you do not bring it. You are not entitled to be here, if you are not serious.” After a pause he added: “Somebody speak about work. Let us get away from this dead spot. See what we’re speaking of is the real interest. If nothing is going to change, if we’re not going to get any of these powers, then what is it about? Our understanding is not adequate, therefore we have to work to increase our understanding. So, we’re always lacking, but if we can see our lack and go on, then that is the way of the work.”

I would relate this to what I have earlier blogged about the “romance of the search”. If there is no possibility of finding, the “eternal search” is farcical.

Someone asked about negative attitude, and surprisingly, perhaps, Adie replied: “I don’t think you need to ask about that.” My sense is that Mr Adie thought the person’s difficulty lay elsewhere. “Try and work to make it very practical for you. You, like everybody has, to some extent or other, a real possibility of playing a part in the work of the universe … it’s an enormous concept … but what is a responsible being, a man in life that one could respect for a moment?”

“What is it one respects about that man? He has some stature in humanity. He contributes something. He brings something, he works. In a way, he leaves a mark. It may not last very long, but it isn’t as if he never was.”

“He doesn’t pass like a shadow. He passes like a being with some meaning. But we have no meaning, see, when we have no aim we have no meaning. A person without any meaning is a sort of shadow, just a phantom.”

There was a silence. Even on the tape it sounds like a strong silence in which these powerful words were absorbed. Remember the reference to aim, especially if you attempt the task of the report, and recall what Mrs Adie said on 25 June. It is aim which is the catalyst which raise efforts beyond the meaningless.

Part Three

Eventually, Alwin asked a question: “Mr Adie, there’s many times during the day when I get a reminder, but I simply do not want to make use of it when I could. I might be preoccupied or in a negative state or whatever. I cannot overcome that, even in the smallest instant, and I would like to make some progress.”

“You have to bring yourself to face that time and time again. The need for that. That is practical.”

“But I can only find that in retrospect.” Alwin was fond of an argument, and fond of being at a loss. Often, I find, people would much rather have the attention which comes with having an intractable problem than they would have the solution.

Adie, however, was not to be deflected: “Do it more often and find the wish in retrospect. And then the next time it may be that you get the echo of that wish. But if you only remember it from the point of view of negative failure, you only have the recollection of negative failure. With this attitude, you don’t face it out long enough to really bring your being in contact with it. Because if you do, then when it comes again, your being contact will also come. Surely you can see that?

“Yes, but –”

“Yes, but this is the way. It’s then we can work in our confrontation. That is the preparation. Don’t think we can just change, suddenly become aware and find responses extempore like that. Of course not. We have to make the response, if there is to be one, now. When the time comes, if it has been made, there shall be the response! Which will help me then to hear the message and take some action.” Alwin kept arguing. Adie replied: “Something sees, but you are not there in the right form. But some I keeps reminding you of the work. You say you keep remembering during the day. This is a useful I, if you can connect yourself to it.”

“I have to bring myself and my feeling, and then it gives me a whole different field of work, because I can tell something about my feeling from my manifestations. I can’t make love and cut a throat at the same time – and if I am manifesting negative emotion, or pride, I will not be able to remember what I need. But my wish to respond will bring me to a moment, and then maybe I see these very definite things, and I work.”

Ian now brought a contribution. Ian saw himself not as Adie’s equal but as his superior. He did not even like to say that he had followed Adie’s suggestion. He tried to make it look as if he independently had the same idea. “I tried for myself over the break, to come to something very similar to what you asked.” What he found difficult, he said, especially while he was away by himself, was to overcome the “great inertia” in his thought.

“And a momentum. There is a momentum to our thought.”

Ian pushed on: There were two definite occasions, he said, when he was by himself, when he had a breakthrough, and he wrote some notes down in a restaurant, but now he finds that he cannot bring that feeling he then experienced into his thought.

“But if you read your question while you are present to yourself, surely it gives some kind of connection”, Adie said. “All sorts of different levels co-exist within me, and I remember clearly a level I would glad to be on. I seemed to understand, to have less doubt at that moment. I felt some wonder, not just ignorance. And I would like to be connected with that again, not to have it exactly like that, but to get the influence of that level. This is what you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

Yes, Ian replied, it was.

“I don’t see how you can expect more than that. Then, from that, there can be another experience. It won’t be the same, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a good thing it isn’t. If it was the same it wouldn’t be a birth, it would be a repetition. Every birth is a unique thing, and in a way, a momentary act is a birth, if you like. It is a unique act, every second.”

Adie then addressed the fact that Ian had then been overseas: “When you’re away like that, your possibility of sensing your own reality is greatly enhanced, because you are taken away from many of the customary stimuli: the family is not there, the climate is different, the jobs are different, the timetable is different, and one is helped to bring to oneself one’s own reality. You are operating in a rather different medium, and you have constant impressions of the new medium. I have to decide a little bit more often: even breakfast is different. It always raises different little questions. I can’t even pick my hairbrush up from the same place. All this stimulates my self-awareness in a way. And I have a sense of self-responsibility – maybe very very little, but very useful..”

“What you say is partially true,” allowed Ian.

“I am glad of that,” Adie said softly, and everyone laughed. Everyone but Ian: “I find, in general, there is a great deal of agitation inside.”

“Of course,” replied Adie, “but agitation is real, too. I may be a in a spin, but nevertheless everything is different, it’s calling me in a different way. I notice my perturbation much more. If it’s the same old dreary perturbation, I don’t notice it so much. But I can’t always be away, so how can I make use of that strange fact? Connects at once, doesn’t it, with the idea of making strange essence tasks? Of having something that’s different, something that will intrude a little on my customary automatic routine. How could I do that?”

“You see, to begin with one makes little experiments, one finds one cannot do, and then gives up the ghost. But now after ten or 15 years we should be approaching the point of doing, of inner doing. It then gives point to these small things again. There’s a connection.”

Samuel then asked about his experience at work. He had taken as a line of work his identification with certain matters which gave rise to some rather serious grievances. One of these related to a colleague who had been mistreated, and undergone a complete mental collapse. In both instances, the employer had been deceitful. Yet he planned to be neutral and take no sides. Yet, he said, he had felt very angry, and had “disappeared into it completely.” He was now despondent.

“Yes, but don’t you see,” said Adie, “that you were deeply identified even in the task you choose. Where was your objectivity before you went? There’s an idea to be impartial, but that’s an enormous word, because it doesn’t mean that I cease to care. And if this person is callous and his policies dangerous, then surely you should take a side, at least against such behaviour.”

“That’s true,” said Samuel.

“Impartial does not mean that I cease to care. It does not even mean that I try not to do anything about this awful situation. But my first task is internal. I free myself from righteous indignation. But you choose something where you almost know you can’t do it before you start. So now go on, and try and separate yourself in your representations about it. There was something naive about the preparation. Now you see that it has to be wiser. Try and take a measure. Try and be realistic in it. Give up the dream. The dream can even help me if I listen for one moment, and then remind myself that that’s a dream … of a kind of a higher level. Okay, now I’ve got work to do here.”

“Just the same as you, Paul, you’ve come to that point, which is something. You feel it, the presence of a question you can’t answer. But I have to then come away from that at the right time, and come back to the point of practicality. I cannot continue indefinitely there, otherwise, without my knowing it, still sitting in the Buddha’s seat, I am doing some idiotic thing.”

Now Ian spoke of the “Clear Impressions” exercise. “I saw one thing in the preparation you gave, the new one you gave us, in the second part of it, in particular, where it seemed that it was possible, not continuously, to come back to the state where instead of looking I just received impressions. And, I think it was two mornings ago, I found a sort of seductive element trying to come into this. This is quite enough … well it was interesting to see the thought come, and to see it in that light. I found it difficult to look out but not think about it.”

“In a flash, you’ve lost everything, but in a flash it’s back again, differently. I am glad you’ve had that. Did anyone have this experience, of a fine division of time?” Adie paused. “We think that our measure of understanding is to say “chair” when we see a chair, and “painting” when we see a painting. But can one look at a wall without putting words on it? What can it mean without words? I am in front of a mystery, straight away. But I start looking and it becomes subjective. Why would I have to describe it? How can I hold myself in front of the wonder of everything?”

Someone then brought a similar observation from the exercise, about looking but trying “not to give any thoughts out to it.” Indeed, he said, he had tried to “blank out” all thoughts.

“Could you say how you tried to do your blanking?” asked Adie. “If you do it at all, it’s by a sort of tension, which isn’t good. Let the thoughts do what they like, but don’t have anything to do with them. If you start blanking them out, you become tense and you really increase the thought. You simply get a long tense impression, that’s all. You’re bound to get impressions of everything if your eyes are open. Receive the impression, and be present to that, but don’t resist anything.”

“The point is I wish to experience myself relatively free from thought. That force which usually gets taken in these speculations becomes mine. I need that to reinforce my being-conscious–reality for a moment or two.”

Sarah then mentioned that she had been able, in the exercise, to sit with her eyes open, receiving impressions, “I found that I am able to be in that room, take in the impressions, and the external noises without a reaction. There doesn’t seem to be a shock. I hear it, but I remain stable. It helped me during the day.”

“We have to really try and remember the finer divisions of time, and the very very fine impressions of higher thought. A higher, finer matter which is moving at incredibly faster vibrations than normal. As we begin to tune in to those a little, to receive a fraction from that, we begin to experience a totally different time, with a totally different effect. That’s one of the elusive things. Until one gets to a certain point, one does not understand this and its value, the vast differences between my time and the sun’s time. But here it now begins to become practical. If we really work during this ten or 15 minutes, there is a great amount of time there. But then one can open one’s eyes after 30 minutes and find that nothing has happened.”

Adie then gave instructions for the experience of “a different kind of physical functioning”, something essential to the practical method as he had it from Gurdjieff. After he had given the instructions, he added: “Keep on. Don’t be put off it’s a bit uncomfortable. Use it. Pass a certain point of discomfort. If you get to what you think is the limit, go for another half a minute. I think we’ll stop there.”

In memory.

Part One

In this post, I wish to try and bring something which may be of continuing practical value, although it is perhaps most accessible to those in Gurdjieff groups. In June 1980 the Adies set their groups a task: submit a written report, retaining for yourself a copy, stating: (1) what you feel you have gained from the work, (2) what you feel you now need, and (3) your plan to acquire what you need. Even if one were not engaged in the Gurdjieff “work”, the task is pertinent. One can substitute for “the work” the name of one’s path, or simply the word “life”. But anyone can take this as a task. The transcripts below may provide some assistance.

On 25 June 1980, Mrs Adie said in response to a question by someone who found it difficult to formulate a plan: “…you could take one habit, for example, watching t.v., or smoking, and try and change it. But it is very important to remember why you are doing this. To stop watching t.v. or to cut down smoking will create a friction and a suffering. It can easily become an ordinary sort of misery, but the recollection of your aim is a factor which can prevent the suffering becoming an ordinary misery.”

After this reference to aim, Mrs Adie came to a related topic – wish.

“We have to realise much more our wish. Most of the time there is no truth to our wish, one could even say that there is no wish at all. That is why so little happens. But there are moments when there is some wish active in us. And the most important moment is in the morning preparation. If it is done sincerely and with a certain amount of will and force, the feeling comes from it. Feeling comes as a result of making an effort, there is no doubt about it, but it is not going to last. So it has to be repeated in some way, but it won’t be repeated unless – at that moment – I plan for the next moment.”

“But at that moment there is a wish. During the day I may remember. During the day I may get a guilty feeling, but there is no wish. Yet only that wish will produce a result. One sees more and more in all the questions that is the main difficulty, really. At some time a shock is received and a fresh impulse appears. There is a wish. But that does not stay by itself, it must be reinforced.”

Part of the significance of this statement is that wish, the wish for conscious evolution which is essential in all of us, “resides”, as it were, in feeling. “Feeling” and “emotion” are different things. Feeling is in essence, and always brings a sense of myself in relation to reality. It is always permanent, not in the sense that the feeling lasts forever, but that the truth of the experience is permanent. If love turns to hate or vice versa, this is emotional love not feeling. If I experience love in my feeling, that feeling is always true for me. I can never deny it or say that I had been deceived or was wrong. Gurdjieff says that from the result of experiencing love, “we can blissfully rest from the meritorious labours actualized by us for the purpose of self-perfection.” (Beelzebub, p. 357) This love never fades: it is always remembered as an immediate being-reality. While emotions can be very violent, and hence believable, they can be blown away. Feeling is always deeper, immeasurably deeper, but feeling is always quieter. Indeed, a correlation can be made between feeling and a certain kind of silence. But the opposite does not necessarily hold: silence, the cessation of sound, does not always point to feeling.

The feeling of “Wish” is a great mystery. In Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am”, Gurdjieff speaks of the three impulses “I Am”, “I Can” and “I Wish” as being “sacred for man”, and as “Divine impulses”. (p.136 in both the privately printed 1975 edition and the 1999 paperback). In the critically important chapter “Hypnotism”, Beelzebub refers to the “sacred being-impulses” of faith, hope, love and conscience. It seems to me that there are correlations between these two sets of impulses such that one may even think of faith as approximating to I Am, hope to I Can, and love to I Wish. I do not say that the terms are interchangeable: but if one holds these concepts side by side in thought, the experience may be enlightening.

To complete the reporting of the meeting of 25 June 1980, Mrs Adie stated in reply to a question: “It is very interesting. It has often been said “Don’t work for results.” But it’s also said that every effort has a result. But it’s not always what we expect.” She was going to develop this thought, but the person who brought the question cut across her.

Part Two

From the same period, comes this edited transcript of the meeting of Wednesday 18 June 1980, taken by both the Adies. The task was the one mentioned above: the report with three aspects. But some of the people also referred to an exercise which the Adies had from Gurdjieff in 1949, and which I call the “Clean Impressions” exercise. In my experience, to date, this is the king, as it were, of Gurdjieff’s exercises.

The first question came from Basil, who asked about his troubled younger son, and how he could not relate to his son except in the “normal fatherly way” of advising him to think of himself and others. He finds, however, that this achieves no lasting result. Perhaps, said Basil, he needs to accept the situation as it is. However, he added with real honesty, he found it very difficult to accept the situation without disapproval.

“Well unless you do”, replied Adie, “you cannot help him. If you refuse to accept the reality, you can’t understand. Everything being as it is, then you have to agree that this is the situation. As for leaving a more permanent effect, this is a big doing. Unless I have this actual transformation going on in me, how can I leave anything at all enduring in anybody? What more permanent impression can I achieve in myself?”

“Take yourself: you are the operative factor. You wish to affect him, You wish to minister unto him. But can you minister unto yourself? Because what is to do the ministration?”

“Yet”, added Adie, “this is what we need to do to come to the point of our lives.”

In this idea of the point of our lives, something very deep is touched, which having been sounded, will be picked up again later in the meeting. At this point, however, Adie referred to the task which had been given: “All the answers to these questions show this up tremendously clearly. Almost every answer, almost every one, begs the question. It says “I have to do this”. But it does not say how. It says “I have to make a plan,” but it does not say how, almost exclusively. In one or two instances there was a very theoretical one, “I must have a higher thought”. Of course I must. But how? This is the great difficulty: it stands out now from all the answers. We are not in very intelligent contact with the world we live in, or with the bigger world. See after 10, twelve or fourteen years, what is our contact with life on a bigger scale? Where is the sense of obligation or duty … or meaning? Where is the meaning of life? Have I got a duty? And whom would that duty be for?”

Let me just interrupt once more: I think this is terribly important for the future not only of each individual, but also of the Gurdjieff tradition as a whole: what is its contact with life on a bigger scale? What is the contact of each group with life? Gurdjieff used to feed the poor and support the needy. I shall one day collect the references to this, but it is sufficient here to refer to Tchekhovitch and to Conge. I hope that the same can be said of today’s Gurdjieff groups, because if it cannot, this points to a deficiency in their work. To return to Mr Adie’s answer:

“Well, I think everybody ought to study their answer and see. Some of the things which were said were perfectly alright, but they have to be taken further. In that respect, there is little difference in anybody’s answer. They all go round about. Time and time again, someone says what they need, and then they state the furthest need, “I need to remember myself”, yes, but alright, then what am I going to do about it? “I am going to try and remember myself.” It’s almost as banal as that. Almost.” He turned to Mrs Adie and asked for her opinion. She agreed, saying:

“I was thinking that there were one or two good ones among them, but most of the answers could have applied to anybody. People have not written about their particular difficulty. But everybody is different in some way: we all have our own subjective weaknesses and ways. They were left too general.”

“Interestingly”, said Mr Adie, “the answers which we had received from people who had only just come were better. At least they saw quite crisply that this was an obstacle. This specific thing. They really felt something about their lack of will, their lack of control. It came out. They felt that this they needed, and that’s why they came to the work.”

“See, we’re in front of a great challenge there. We need the influence of the far off, but we need to experience it, not as a tale that is told but as an actual fact. What is it that stops that, and how could I have that experience more often? Someone would say by remembering their far aim, yes, but how am I going to achieve this increased recollection? Practically no one cited anything that they had got to give up. Almost no one said “I have to sacrifice this”, or that they had to acquire that specific thing in order.”

“This relates to what you’re saying, Basil. How to come to be useful in this situation. One finds people who will say, “you must do this, and try to realise that”, all these wise man responses, very sage, very salutary. I think we don’t realise the necessity of getting down into the same situation. I don’t mean getting down from a condescending point of view, but standing side by side. If there were something wrong with a motor, would I sit in my chair and tell him to go outside and fix it? Or do I sense his need, leave my chair, and have a look with him? Maybe I can’t exactly do that verbally, but if I’ve got it in my feeling, then I could even remain mute and yet share his situation, and that would be much more lasting. If only I could feel myself in relation to him. You refer to your son, I can refer to one of our sons, and there there is great difficulty. From the ordinary point of view it is heartbreaking. But what is shared sometimes is a quality of feeling, and that certainly is an enduring thing.”

“Just a certain little while, shared in a wordless way, even just cooking a meal together, or getting something from the shop, because words never satisfy, they always go the wrong way, while feeling is a more permanent influence. But to have a result … ah, that’s a different matter. We have to settle for the possible, and even to be grateful for that, and to see that the other is beyond our power. But if something is exchanged there, in our presences, then that remains a recollection possible for him. Mmm?”

“One does not know what stage people are at, what point in this enormous long life, they are at. Do you know John Bunyan’s remark, when he saw the fellow led off to the gallows. He wasn’t being mock-humble, he just realised that everybody is exposed to these tremendous forces, and that there was one being led off to the gallows. “There, but for the grace of God go I, John Bunyan.”

“But too often, for us, other people present a bleak prospect, and for us it is unacceptable. Certainly, as you yourself say, acceptance is absolutely essential. That means, really, in practice, in this case, an absence of negative criticism. You don’t have to say, oh yes, it’s alright. You have to be free of blaming – in your feeling. You can realise how ghastly and costly it is. But in your feeling you don’t blame.”

Mr Adie then turned to Paul, who in his report had said that he found a good state but he could not find the words:

“And Paul wrote, certainly from the most sincere place that he could, but still you have to come to an answer, you cannot leave it unanswered, because our work is on this level. Facing that higher state, I am wordless, I cannot know. I am in challenge totally, but if I am going to work, I have to come to some kind of an answer, I have to work to it. So I go forward. Maybe you come to something trite, it doesn’t matter. You cannot remain in that exalted state for long, you return … and then you follow. Try and take it further. Don’t be satisfied with this formulation. I have to work to do. With the benefit of this, whatever it is, I go and find the work.”

Mr Adie then noticed Richard, who had not handed in a report. Why, he asked him, had he not submitted one? Well, Richard replied, he did not think it had to be submitted.

“Nonsense”, retorted Adie. “You fail. Next time you do not come if you do not bring it. You are not entitled to be here, if you are not serious.” After a pause he added: “Somebody speak about work. Let us get away from this dead spot. See what we’re speaking of is the real interest. If nothing is going to change, if we’re not going to get any of these powers, then what is it about? Our understanding is not adequate, therefore we have to work to increase our understanding. So, we’re always lacking, but if we can see our lack and go on, then that is the way of the work.”

I would relate this to what I have earlier blogged about the “romance of the search”. If there is no possibility of finding, the “eternal search” is farcical.

Someone asked about negative attitude, and surprisingly, perhaps, Adie replied: “I don’t think you need to ask about that.” My sense is that Mr Adie thought the person’s difficulty lay elsewhere. “Try and work to make it very practical for you. You, like everybody has, to some extent or other, a real possibility of playing a part in the work of the universe … it’s an enormous concept … but what is a responsible being, a man in life that one could respect for a moment?”

“What is it one respects about that man? He has some stature in humanity. He contributes something. He brings something, he works. In a way, he leaves a mark. It may not last very long, but it isn’t as if he never was.”

“He doesn’t pass like a shadow. He passes like a being with some meaning. But we have no meaning, see, when we have no aim we have no meaning. A person without any meaning is a sort of shadow, just a phantom.”

There was a silence. Even on the tape it sounds like a strong silence in which these powerful words were absorbed. Remember the reference to aim, especially if you attempt the task of the report, and recall what Mrs Adie said on 25 June. It is aim which is the catalyst which raise efforts beyond the meaningless.

Part Three

Eventually, Alwin asked a question: “Mr Adie, there’s many times during the day when I get a reminder, but I simply do not want to make use of it when I could. I might be preoccupied or in a negative state or whatever. I cannot overcome that, even in the smallest instant, and I would like to make some progress.”

“You have to bring yourself to face that time and time again. The need for that. That is practical.”

“But I can only find that in retrospect.” Alwin was fond of an argument, and fond of being at a loss. Often, I find, people would much rather have the attention which comes with having an intractable problem than they would have the solution.

Adie, however, was not to be deflected: “Do it more often and find the wish in retrospect. And then the next time it may be that you get the echo of that wish. But if you only remember it from the point of view of negative failure, you only have the recollection of negative failure. With this attitude, you don’t face it out long enough to really bring your being in contact with it. Because if you do, then when it comes again, your being contact will also come. Surely you can see that?

“Yes, but –”

“Yes, but this is the way. It’s then we can work in our confrontation. That is the preparation. Don’t think we can just change, suddenly become aware and find responses extempore like that. Of course not. We have to make the response, if there is to be one, now. When the time comes, if it has been made, there shall be the response! Which will help me then to hear the message and take some action.” Alwin kept arguing. Adie replied: “Something sees, but you are not there in the right form. But some I keeps reminding you of the work. You say you keep remembering during the day. This is a useful I, if you can connect yourself to it.”

“I have to bring myself and my feeling, and then it gives me a whole different field of work, because I can tell something about my feeling from my manifestations. I can’t make love and cut a throat at the same time – and if I am manifesting negative emotion, or pride, I will not be able to remember what I need. But my wish to respond will bring me to a moment, and then maybe I see these very definite things, and I work.”

Ian now brought a contribution. Ian saw himself not as Adie’s equal but as his superior. He did not even like to say that he had followed Adie’s suggestion. He tried to make it look as if he independently had the same idea. “I tried for myself over the break, to come to something very similar to what you asked.” What he found difficult, he said, especially while he was away by himself, was to overcome the “great inertia” in his thought.

“And a momentum. There is a momentum to our thought.”

Ian pushed on: There were two definite occasions, he said, when he was by himself, when he had a breakthrough, and he wrote some notes down in a restaurant, but now he finds that he cannot bring that feeling he then experienced into his thought.

“But if you read your question while you are present to yourself, surely it gives some kind of connection”, Adie said. “All sorts of different levels co-exist within me, and I remember clearly a level I would glad to be on. I seemed to understand, to have less doubt at that moment. I felt some wonder, not just ignorance. And I would like to be connected with that again, not to have it exactly like that, but to get the influence of that level. This is what you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

Yes, Ian replied, it was.

“I don’t see how you can expect more than that. Then, from that, there can be another experience. It won’t be the same, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a good thing it isn’t. If it was the same it wouldn’t be a birth, it would be a repetition. Every birth is a unique thing, and in a way, a momentary act is a birth, if you like. It is a unique act, every second.”

Adie then addressed the fact that Ian had then been overseas: “When you’re away like that, your possibility of sensing your own reality is greatly enhanced, because you are taken away from many of the customary stimuli: the family is not there, the climate is different, the jobs are different, the timetable is different, and one is helped to bring to oneself one’s own reality. You are operating in a rather different medium, and you have constant impressions of the new medium. I have to decide a little bit more often: even breakfast is different. It always raises different little questions. I can’t even pick my hairbrush up from the same place. All this stimulates my self-awareness in a way. And I have a sense of self-responsibility – maybe very very little, but very useful..”

“What you say is partially true,” allowed Ian.

“I am glad of that,” Adie said softly, and everyone laughed. Everyone but Ian: “I find, in general, there is a great deal of agitation inside.”

“Of course,” replied Adie, “but agitation is real, too. I may be a in a spin, but nevertheless everything is different, it’s calling me in a different way. I notice my perturbation much more. If it’s the same old dreary perturbation, I don’t notice it so much. But I can’t always be away, so how can I make use of that strange fact? Connects at once, doesn’t it, with the idea of making strange essence tasks? Of having something that’s different, something that will intrude a little on my customary automatic routine. How could I do that?”

“You see, to begin with one makes little experiments, one finds one cannot do, and then gives up the ghost. But now after ten or 15 years we should be approaching the point of doing, of inner doing. It then gives point to these small things again. There’s a connection.”

Samuel then asked about his experience at work. He had taken as a line of work his identification with certain matters which gave rise to some rather serious grievances. One of these related to a colleague who had been mistreated, and undergone a complete mental collapse. In both instances, the employer had been deceitful. Yet he planned to be neutral and take no sides. Yet, he said, he had felt very angry, and had “disappeared into it completely.” He was now despondent.

“Yes, but don’t you see,” said Adie, “that you were deeply identified even in the task you choose. Where was your objectivity before you went? There’s an idea to be impartial, but that’s an enormous word, because it doesn’t mean that I cease to care. And if this person is callous and his policies dangerous, then surely you should take a side, at least against such behaviour.”

“That’s true,” said Samuel.

“Impartial does not mean that I cease to care. It does not even mean that I try not to do anything about this awful situation. But my first task is internal. I free myself from righteous indignation. But you choose something where you almost know you can’t do it before you start. So now go on, and try and separate yourself in your representations about it. There was something naive about the preparation. Now you see that it has to be wiser. Try and take a measure. Try and be realistic in it. Give up the dream. The dream can even help me if I listen for one moment, and then remind myself that that’s a dream … of a kind of a higher level. Okay, now I’ve got work to do here.”

“Just the same as you, Paul, you’ve come to that point, which is something. You feel it, the presence of a question you can’t answer. But I have to then come away from that at the right time, and come back to the point of practicality. I cannot continue indefinitely there, otherwise, without my knowing it, still sitting in the Buddha’s seat, I am doing some idiotic thing.”

Now Ian spoke of the “Clear Impressions” exercise. “I saw one thing in the preparation you gave, the new one you gave us, in the second part of it, in particular, where it seemed that it was possible, not continuously, to come back to the state where instead of looking I just received impressions. And, I think it was two mornings ago, I found a sort of seductive element trying to come into this. This is quite enough … well it was interesting to see the thought come, and to see it in that light. I found it difficult to look out but not think about it.”

“In a flash, you’ve lost everything, but in a flash it’s back again, differently. I am glad you’ve had that. Did anyone have this experience, of a fine division of time?” Adie paused. “We think that our measure of understanding is to say “chair” when we see a chair, and “painting” when we see a painting. But can one look at a wall without putting words on it? What can it mean without words? I am in front of a mystery, straight away. But I start looking and it becomes subjective. Why would I have to describe it? How can I hold myself in front of the wonder of everything?”

Someone then brought a similar observation from the exercise, about looking but trying “not to give any thoughts out to it.” Indeed, he said, he had tried to “blank out” all thoughts.

“Could you say how you tried to do your blanking?” asked Adie. “If you do it at all, it’s by a sort of tension, which isn’t good. Let the thoughts do what they like, but don’t have anything to do with them. If you start blanking them out, you become tense and you really increase the thought. You simply get a long tense impression, that’s all. You’re bound to get impressions of everything if your eyes are open. Receive the impression, and be present to that, but don’t resist anything.”

“The point is I wish to experience myself relatively free from thought. That force which usually gets taken in these speculations becomes mine. I need that to reinforce my being-conscious–reality for a moment or two.”

Sarah then mentioned that she had been able, in the exercise, to sit with her eyes open, receiving impressions, “I found that I am able to be in that room, take in the impressions, and the external noises without a reaction. There doesn’t seem to be a shock. I hear it, but I remain stable. It helped me during the day.”

“We have to really try and remember the finer divisions of time, and the very very fine impressions of higher thought. A higher, finer matter which is moving at incredibly faster vibrations than normal. As we begin to tune in to those a little, to receive a fraction from that, we begin to experience a totally different time, with a totally different effect. That’s one of the elusive things. Until one gets to a certain point, one does not understand this and its value, the vast differences between my time and the sun’s time. But here it now begins to become practical. If we really work during this ten or 15 minutes, there is a great amount of time there. But then one can open one’s eyes after 30 minutes and find that nothing has happened.”

Adie then gave instructions for the experience of “a different kind of physical functioning”, something essential to the practical method as he had it from Gurdjieff. After he had given the instructions, he added: “Keep on. Don’t be put off it’s a bit uncomfortable. Use it. Pass a certain point of discomfort. If you get to what you think is the limit, go for another half a minute. I think we’ll stop there.”

In memory.

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George Adie a Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia (322 pages with 82 black and white photographs)
is available to purchase from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Price $49.00 plus shipping charges. £24.99 plus shipping charges

Bookshops in the UK and Europe
can order the book at a trade discount via the FourCorners Book agency contact Charlotte Kelly at fourcorners@bookweaver.co.uk
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Bookstores in the USA can order at trade discount via www. Booksurge.com
For any difficulties in ordering please email sophia@gurdjieff-books.net
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FROM THE BACK COVER

· reveals how Adie’s practical mysticism helped his students to live Gurdjieff’s ideas

From the Introduction: the tenor of the man- clear, direct and above all, caring – resonates throughout the pages.
Dr Andrew Rawlinson The Book of Enlightened Masters

At last an important account of ‘The Work’ or ‘the Gurdjieff tradition’ in Australia!
And it is a crucial primary source; diary materials and workshop notes skilfully woven and
developed into a highly readable book.
Professor Garry Trompf University of Sydney

A page turner – rare in serious work books.
John Scullion

Scholarship will be advanced by the publication of this important source.
Dr Carole Cusack University of Sydney

Helen was an important figure in her own right both as a concert pianist,
composer, and, in effect, co-leader of the Adie group.
Seymour B. Ginsburg Gurdjieff Unveiled

This book will be of interest not just to the Gurdjieff devotee and the scholar of new religions,
but also to the general reader fascinated by the goings on in such groups and the minds of their
members. It is a worthy testimony to the life of George Adie.
Dr Daren Kemp co-editor Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies

Joseph Azize has successfully straddled that perilous territory between academic objectivity
and active participation, deftly managing to reconcile these often hostile viewpoints.
Dr Helen Farley University of Queensland

A Short Review of Michel Conge’s Book by John Robert Colombo

About a year ago I heard rumours that “a book as important as ‘Fragments’” had been published in France, was being translated into English, and would soon be published in Canada. I assumed that this was no more than a rumour, if only because of the reference to “Fragments,” the preferred title of “In Search of the Miraculous,” P.D. Ouspensky’s account of the years he had spent in the 1910s and 1920s with G.I. Gurdjieff. This is a classic work of considerable breadth and depth, so I had to ask myself: Who today could write a book on that level?

It soon emerged that the rumour was substantially true. Just such a book had been published in French and it would soon be available in English. Over the next months I learned the title of the original book: “Sur le chemin de l’octave de l’Homme: Témoignage d’un élève de G.I. Gurdjieff.” I learned that it had been printed by a group of students in Paris in 2004 for limited circulation, and that it consisted of excerpts from talks and exchanges with pupils at group meetings led by Michel Conge, a physician and senior student, who had worked directly with Gurdjieff during his last years.

I am resisting the urge to describe Michel Conge as “physician and metaphysician” – it has a ring to it! – but Conge, judging by the texts of his presentations, was anything but a theorist, being a practical man, though he certainly had the plan and the particulars of the system well in hand. He was exceptionally knowledgeable and, I judge, well-loved as a person.

I sense this because I first read the text in French – as well as I could – and even reviewed it for this website. (If you are interested, check the earlier posting, available here.) I wrote the review as a provisional effort to grasp the extent and limits of Conge’s understanding of the work. I found it to be profound. Yet I am not sure that I would describe this collection of his texts as another “Fragments,” but there is a way in which it is. If “Fragments” looks at the principles of the work from outside the system – and Ouspensky is presenting the system to outsiders – the Special Doctrine (as distinct from his own occult philosophy or “psychological thinking”) – Conge is offering insights from inside the system to people already familiar with its fundamentals.

The work has finally been made available in English, sort of. I am not sure it is available to all and everyone, but I managed to secure a copy of the English translation. It is titled “Inner Octaves” and has been issued by Dolmen Meadow Editions of Toronto. The handsomely produced trade paperback of 212 pages was “translated from the French by members of Gurdjieff Foundation groups in Europe and North America,” according to the copyright page. It is extremely sensitively translated. The book appeared late last year but it is not widely available, as yet anyway.

I am not going to write a review of “Inner Octaves” for the reason that I have already written a review of the French original, but I will discuss some personal reactions to its present incarnation. If “Fragments” offers the skeleton of the system, “Inner Octaves” exposes its nervous system. It is arguably the first book to dwell on what happens at group meetings, extending help in internalizing what was formally externalized. Its only contender in this small field is the recently published volume titled “George Aide: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia” (Lighthouse Editions) written with Joseph Azize. I would dwell on the Aide volume, a marvelous work of many strengths, except for the fact that I had a hand in copy editing that volume. I had nothing to do with the appearance of “Inner Octaves,” though I wish I had, so good is it!

It is quite a remarkable work. I realized this as I began to read the first section, the one titled “The Idea of Evolution.” It is ostensibly devoted to the Ray of Creation with its lateral lesser octave. Now the Ray of Creation has always seemed to me to be an occult version of the Great Chain of Being, which I first encountered in a course in English literature that I took in high school in the mid-1950s. Later in the decade, I encountered it again in the guise of the Ray of Creation in the pages of “In Search of the Miraculous” and I felt quite at home with it. At that time the Chain and the Ray seemed to me to set in order the two worlds of which we have knowledge: the observed world and the perceived world.

Reading this short section written by Conge, I was transported. I found I was no longer looking outwardly at the black-and-white diagram of the vertical ladder of levels, but inwardly at the richly coloured hierarchy within myself. I shook my head with disbelief. Here, instead of an intellectual scheme, was a dynamic account of emotional and instinctive phrases or stages of awareness. I was inside the Ray or Chain looking out. The world looked different to me. I was seeing it through other eyes. I regard this as an amazing effect.

This section is not the only amazing effect to be found in this book, which must be ingested slowly and in small doses to take effect. It is not a book to skim, any more than are the literary works of Jean Vaysse, Henri Tracol, and Maurice Nicoll. The thirty or so sections of this work are talks to students or exchanges with students. Some of them are devotional, with appropriate maxims (”I must give up my freedom to disobey / in order fully / to be”); others are quite informative. An instance of the latter is the section that offers a list of “the principal ideas developed by a team studying ‘Fragments.’”
Here is the list:

Life is sacred.

Knowledge is sacred.

Man has a possible destiny.

The place of man is a function of his level.

There are two possibilities: involution and evolution.

It is here that we see the relationship with work on oneself.

There is a discussion of each of these principles. The conclusion to this section reads as follows: “The mystery I sense regarding my origin – the one, omni-present and yet multiple Consciousness – shatters, at least for an instant, my limited view of the ego: ‘Who am I?’”

There are also lovely passages like the following: “The teaching tells us that man comes from the level of the stars. On the scale of Worlds – a scale that attempts to offer us a certain insight that is very difficult to grasp – man comes from the level of the stars, and he descends progressively until he has come all the way down to Earth. What a vast perspective! Maybe you already partake of these higher levels without realizing it.”

Work-related principles inform so much of the text that it is difficult to dissever it from the Work: “Here is an interesting idea for those who consider it an injustice that only some men can work. Men who truly work consciously act as a thread connecting the highest summit to humanity as a whole, and if they were to stop working – they are the salt of the earth – all the rest of humanity would die. This corresponds to the interval filled by organic life, through which the life of the Earth and the Moon is made possible.”

There is so much more, from information on “sittings” to references to “coating of bodies” to a wry account of a trip to Vichy with Gurdjieff, that every reader of the book will learn from it. The point of all of this? “The aim is to enable us to live an ordinary life consciously.” So I commend the dedicated people of Dolmen Meadow Editions on the production of a fine work, one of quality in an age of quantity, and only hope it reaches a wide and appreciative public.

John Robert Colombo, whose interests include Canadiana and consciousness studies, is the author, compiler, or translator of more than 180 books. He is an Esteemed Knight of Mark Twain and the recipient of the Harbourfront Literary Prize.

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A “Sacred Web” of Perennialism, Gurdjieff, Theosophy, Etc.

A review of two issues of the journal “Sacred Web” by John Robert Colombo

Late last week there arrived in the mail not one issue but two issues
of “Sacred Web.” This publication is – in the words of its subtitle –
“A Journal of Tradition and Modernity.” The journal is thoroughly
professional in production and entirely scholarly in subject and
style. It is among the two or three most important journals currently
being issued devoted to the subject of Traditionalism, Perennialism,
Perennial Philosophy, call it what you wish. His Royal Highness The
Prince of Wales has noted: “I am always delighted to receive the
latest issue of ‘Sacred Web’ because, so often, I come across such
deeply revealing and enlightening articles, rich in content and
diverse in subject matter.”

I have subscribed to “Sacred Web” for the last half-dozen years, and
Issue 19 and Issue 20 arrived simultaneously, along with a notice to
inform me that my subscription had lapsed. (For subscription and
information, check the publication’s website via a search engine like
Google.) I have been busy reading these issues, the first one 180
pages in length, the second one a jumbo number 272 pages long.

Issues may slightly differ in content but they scarcely differ in
subject. The theme for each issue is set forth by its editor, M. Ali
Lakhani, an Ismaili Muslim and Vancouver lawyer, in one of his
carefully worded editorials. Editorials run to some length, as do the
ten or so scholarly contributions included in each issue. Each issue
closes with its correspondence column, notes on contributors, and
announcements. The publication is a model of its kind.

It is a well-printed and very high-minded publication but not an easy
one to read from cover to cover because of its seriousness and often
dense style. Yet I persist. Issue 19 prints selected papers from the
Sacred Web Conference which was held in Edmonton on the campus of the
University of Alberta on September 23 and 24, 2006. My wife Ruth and I
attended that conference, and although it took place all of a year and
a half ago, we still discuss the papers and how we enlivened our
experience, though we were not entirely happy or pleased with all
aspects of the two-day session.

Having heard the speeches delivered at the conference in Edmonton, it
is good to see them in type. Some of the addresses and papers are
exemplary in form and content, though the conference itself was less
an academic conference than it was a colloquium at which one point of
view was expressed to the exclusion of all other points of view. There
were perhaps four hundred people in attendance, mostly youngish
Ismailis, and I have never before encountered so intelligent, polite,
courteous, and educated a group of people. It was an appreciative
audience though not a critical one.

I had problems with the proceedings of the conference, as I mentioned
in the 6,000-word article, a running diary, that I contributed to
Fohat, the journal of the Edmonton Theosophical Society. A couple of
speakers took swipes at U.S. foreign policy; none of these went
answered. Theosophy was mentioned only once, only to be dismissed with
a wave of the hand. You would think that a group that is committed to
the perennial philosophy would at least mention the existence of
Israel and contributions of Israeli thinkers and writers. There were
no mentions. For that matter, there were no allusions to Gurdjieff.

In this regard I recall the story told about Edwin Hubble, the
astronomer who discovered that the cosmos was expanding. He was asked
whether or not he had spotted any flying saucers through his telescope
at the Yerkes Observatory. “No,” he replied, “the telescope is too
powerful for us to see nearby objects like flying saucers.” Indeed,
the traditionalists or perennialists are too high-minded to see
Israel.

So much for the conference, though these and other reservations that I
have with respect to traditionalism apply also to issues of “Sacred
Web.” As far as I can recall, there are no references to G.I.
Gurdjieff in back issues or current issues. Perennialism and the
Fourth Way have much in common, but you will find the latter to be a
subject thoroughly dismissed, once you have read Whitall Perry’s
polemical book “Gurdjieff in the Light of Tradition” (Sophia Perennis
et Universalis, 2002).

I have dwelt on some of the limitations as I see them of the spirit of
Traditionalism, or at least of Traditionalists. Let me comment on some
of the excellent features of this school of thought. This column would
be too long if I did anything more than mention a few of the fine
contributions to these two issues. Lakhani’s editorials titled “The
Secular and the Sacred” and “A Commentary on the Teachings of Frithjof
Schuon” are models of exposition. To give an instance, here is a
passage from the first editorial which distinguishes between the
secular (modernism) and the sacred (traditionalism):

“All aspects of politics, economics, social relations, and all matters
pertaining to the public sphere are engaged by religious thought. It
is not only impossible to exclude religious views from politics, but
it is also undesirable to do so. For religious views, in their depth,
are seeded in the soil of the sacred, and this endows them with an
immense richness – the richness of the wisdom to find the alchemical
connection that, despite our diversity, unites us all.”

That may be a strong statement but it brings to a conclusion five
pages of hardy argumentation. Currently there is much discussion in
Canada of the relevance of sharia law to the civil and criminal codes
and the appropriateness of publicly funded religious schools, so the
editorial might serve as ammunition for these skirmishes. That appears
in the first issue. The second issue is dedicated to the memory of
Frithjof Schuon, one of the founders of Traditionalism, and the editor
has contributed a succinct introduction to this Swiss-born
metaphysician’s many contributions to spiritual thought. It is rich in
phrases like “the unshakable Substance of our Being.”

As a rule Traditionalists are fine if sometimes impenetrable stylists.
They write with great authority, even grandeur, so much so that I was
driven to devise an aphorism about becoming a Sufi. It goes like this:
“To become a Sufi master you must first become a master of
catachresis.”

You should also become a trained polemicist. In my day I have read a
great many book reviews, but never in my experience have I encountered
a review so mordant and toxic as the one that appeared in a back issue
of “Sacred Web.” It was written to expose the failings of Mark
Sedgwick’s comprehensive survey titled “Against the Modern World:
Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Modern
World” (Oxford University Press, 2004). The review was so one-sided I
immediately sided with its author.

The keynote address at the conference was delivered by Seyyed Hossein
Nasr, a man of considerable presence, who serves as University
Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University,
Washington, D.C. His biographical note says, in part: “He is one of
the most important and foremost scholars of Islamic, Religious and
Comparative Studies in the world today.” The edited transcript of his
address appears here as “The Recovery of the Sacred: Tradition and
Perennialism in the Contemporary World.”

It is a masterful survey of the secular nature of modern society, a
consideration of the “spirit” (so to speak) of Modernism, and a record
of the progress made by “Traditionalist metaphysicians” in enriching
the intellectual-spiritual culture of the Western world since 1910,
when logical positivism and analytical philosophy predominated, to the
present, which has seen a flowering of perennialist ideals. He writes,
“The Traditionalist school has been very successful and has rendered a
service that is invisible to many, but that is extremely important.”
He ends with an image of Traditionalism as a rope: “It is the rope
thrown from Heaven to us who are drowning in a sea of dispersion and
error, the rope to which we must cling.”

Other impressive articles in the first issue were contributed by
Jean-Louis Michon and James S. Cutsinger. Articles of particular
interest in the second issue were written by Michael Fitzgerald on the
subject of beauty, Patrick Laude on “Quintessential Esotericism and
the Wisdom of Forms,” and Renaud Fabbri on “The Milk of the Virgin:
The Prophet, the Saint and the Sage.”

Here is an treasury of riches. I would discuss these articles in
detail, as well as other articles in passing, except that “time must
have a stop.” I have other tasks to perform, including writing out a
cheque for another year’s subscription to “Sacred Web.”

John Robert Colombo, the Toronto anthologist and author, is a regular
contributor of reviews and commentators to this website. He recently
compiled collections of humourist Stephen Leacock’s fantasy fiction
and mystery fiction. He takes a special interest in Richard Maurice
Bucke, who popularized the phrase “cosmic consciousness,” and
co-edited “The Higher Consciousness,” a selection of Dr. Bucke’s
papers on Walt Whitman and other subjects.

February 2, 2008

A revisionist scholarly view offered by John Robert Colombo

When I saw a publisher’s advertisement for Young Stalin, written by the young Cambridge historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, I immediately thought, “I wonder if he has anything to say about G.I. Gurdjieff?” I am now in a position to answer that question. The answer is yes and no.

So far Soviet historians, and now Russian and Western historians, have written at length about Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili. But they have written nothing about G.I. Gurdjieff. In his new critical biography Young Stalin (Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2007), Simon Sebag Montefiore has devoted 400 pages to focusing on the early years of the man who, as a youthful renegade, a middle-aged revolutionary, and a senior dictator, assumed no end of names, nicknames, bylines, and aliases. Among them are Soso, Soselo, Koba, and Stalin (”steel”). The author lists a total of forty sobriquets. Stalin was a man of many parts, many “I”s.

Readers interested in Gurdjieff are likely to regard Stalin as an instance of a hasnamuss, someone deserving of “Objective-Contempt.” But they are also likely to be sensitive to the suggestion made by Gurdjieff himself, and repeated by commentators in books and in videos, that the paths of the two men crossed when they were young. In fact, it is stated that as youthful seminarians they spent their formative years in each other’s company in the same seminary in Tiflis in the Caucasus.

I have never held an opinion on the matter, but I had always assumed that this was a “tall tale,” perhaps a teaching parable about the struggle of the Black and the White Magicians. So when Montefiore’s biography appeared on the shelves of my local library in Toronto; Canadians will recognize its location when I refer to it by its official name: Barbara Frum Library and Community Centre), I immediately checked the index and, to my delight, I discovered that it offers a reference to G.I. Gurdjieff.

I borrowed Young Stalin and quickly burrowed into its 400 pages. The reference appears on page 62, and it takes the form of a footnote that explains everything, at least as far as Montefiore is concerned. While he is a ranking expert on the subject of Stalin, he is not an expert on the subject of Gurdjieff.

The author writes clearly, so allow me to quote the entire footnote:

“George Gurdjieff, the spiritualist author of Meetings with Remarkable Men, charlatan to some, hierophant magus to others, claimed to have attended the Seminary with Stalin who, he said, stayed with his family in Tiflis. But Gurdjieff, of Armenian origin, was a fantasist born in 1866, he was twelve years older than Stalin and there is no evidence he attended the Seminary at all. Stalin boarded at the Seminary during the term. Gurdjieff also claims a ‘Prince Nijeradze’ as a companion:

‘Nizheradze’ was an alias later used by Stalin in Baku. But there is no evidence that any of Gurdjieff’s claims are true. During his reign, Stalin persecuted spiritualists and specifically ‘Gurdjieffites,’ who were often shot.”

I will withhold any reservations and agreements that I may have. Each reader will have his or her own and is invited to do the same!

R. M. BUCKE

John Robert Colombo explores the origin of the term “cosmic consciousness” and discusses the contributions of R.M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter

The notion of cosmic consciousness is associated with Richard Maurice Bucke, the Canadian alienist and theorist of alternative states of consciousness. Bucke may or may not have been the first person to use these words to refer to the psychological state that has also been described as “mystical,” “spiritual,” or “religious.” He made this notion the centrepiece in his masterwork: Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901).

Bucke’s work is mentioned with approval by William James in his influential series of Guifford lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). No one knows who coined the term itself, if any single person could be credited with its coinage. The words cosmic consciousness are absent from The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1991) – all 2,386 nine-columned pages. (The words cosmic emotion and cosmic philosophy appear, however; interestingly, the former term is attributed to Henry Sedgwick, the scholar and psychical researcher.)

One person who might have coined the term is Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) who made use of the words in print about the same time that Bucke used them. Carpenter was a remarkable English socialist, essayist, poet, exponent of manual labour, proponent of gay rights, and adventurous traveller. Carpenter’s contributions to the cultural life of the English-speaking world are so many-sided they are inclined to be overlooked. Indeed, he is a hard man to pin down. The essayist E.M. Forster found him to be elusive but described him as “possibly great” in the short appreciation of the man written in 1944 and included in Forster’s collection Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).

In his day Carpenter knew everyone who was anyone, and he found himself in the vanguard of many popular and unpopular movements. He advocated what might be called “mystical socialism.” He favoured redemption through manual labour, an idea identified with Leo Tolstoy. He wrote knowingly and openly about “uranian” love and lived quietly with his male partner at the time England was agog with the trial of Oscar Wilde. He championed the poetry and person of Walt Whitman, whom he knew personally, when hardly anyone else had a good word to say about either men. He corresponded about spiritual matters with Whitman’s biographer, the above-mentioned Dr. Bucke. Why, he even introduced the use of sandals to England. (He discovered the footwear to be in widespread use in India in the late 1880s, crafted his own pair back home, and promoted them throughout Great Britain.) I could go on.

Carpenter was a fluent writer and a superb travel-writer. His chef d’oeuvre is a hefty work titled From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta. It was published in 1903 by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Limited in London and by The Macmillan Co. in New York, and it bears the subtitle “Sketches in Ceylon and India.” It is as readable and as relevant today – after a lapse of more than one hundred years, now that Ceylon has been renamed Sri Lanka, now that the subcontinent has been severed into India and Pakistan – as it was when first written, about the time Bucke was publishing his big book.

Carpenter’s book is an account of his travels and thoughts during a six-month sojourn on the subcontinent in 1890, and he had much of importance to say about the class of the English people who managed the mass of the Indian people: Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Jains, etc. At the time he found the gulf between the rulers and the ruled understandable but unbridgeable. He had an historical sense and recalled the observation of an Indian friend who maintained that India had fared better under the East India Company than it was faring under the British Crown. The reason for this is that the Company respected Indian traditions and rights, whereas it was all commercialism under the Crown.

Carpenter fared poorly as a social prophet, for he regarded with the utmost seriousness a discussion between Hindu intellectuals and Muslim intellectuals which concluded that within one hundred years the conflicts and clashes between these two major religions would be reduced to nothing.

The author’s thoughtful and impressionistic prose flows from chapter to chapter, and as it did so, I found it hard to shake off the sense that I was reading the prose of a contemporary correspondent, not a late Victorian essayist. The modern writer who came to mind is, curiously, Thomas L. Friedman, the thoughtful, sweet-talking foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times. Both men are unobtrusive masters of the language and adroit at finding incidents to illustrate ideas. They write like angels, as the saying goes.

The section that is the centrepiece of From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta is placed in the middle of the book and it bridges the sections on Ceylon and India. It is titled “A Visit to a Gnani,” and it was so popular in its day, it was reissued as soft-covered booklet of eighty-odd page titled A Visit to a Gnani: Or Wise Man of the East by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. in London.

The word gnani (or gñáni, with its two accents) is the general term that Carpenter uses for a Hindu yogi. Here, willy-nilly, it becomes the given name of the Hindu scholar and teacher, elderly in his early seventies yet still hale and hearty, who in fluent English instructed Carpenter about Hindu beliefs and meditative practices. He is referred to as Gnani. The word itself is Hindi or Sanskrit for a yogi who practices the way of knowledge or wisdom, as distinct from physical or emotional forms of yogic practices. Carpenter spent six weeks meeting with this yogi who instructed him in the overall aim or objective of this form of work:

“With these little provisos then established, I think we may go on to say that what the Gñáni seeks and obtains is a new order of consciousness – to which for want of a better we may give the name universal or cosmic consciousness, in contradistinction to the individual or special bodily consciousness with which we are all familiar. I am not aware that the exact equivalent of this expression “universal consciousness” is used in the Hindu philosophy; but the Sat-chit-ánanda Brahm to which every yogi aspires indicates the same idea: sat, the reality, the all pervading; chit, the knowing, perceiving; ánanda, the blissful – all these united in one manifestation of Brahm.”

That is one point that Carpenter makes. Another point is the following one, which is condensed somewhat here: “The West seeks the individual consciousness …. the East seeks the universal consciousness …. ” Individual consciousness “takes the form of Thought” whereas “the other consciousness is not in the form of Thought.” The West’s awareness is “is specially related to the body,” whereas “the whole body is only as one organ of cosmic consciousness.”

Does Nirvana (”Nirwana”) indicate “a state of no-consciousness or a state of vastly enhanced consciousness? “Probably both views have their justification: the thing does not admit of definition in the terms of ordinary language.” Carpenter argues that hypnotism is “another form of consciousness” which he calls “secondary consciousness in the body.” He discusses the case of an idiot savant and also that of a lecturer or a pianist who may operate without conscious awareness. Internal bodily processes proceed without our awareness.

He then introduces the notion of the fourth dimension which he illustrates with a paradox: “a person living in London may not unlikely find that he has a backdoor opening quite simply and unceremoniously out in Bombay.” It seems the soul is everywhere in space. This chapter is neatly titled “Consciousness without Thought.” P.D. Ouspensky found Carpenter’s views on the fourth dimension to be a stimulus for his own theory of eternal recurrence and he discusses these theories at considerable length, along with the views of Dr. Bucke, in the last chapter of Tertium Organum (1912).

The fact that Carpenter repeatedly employs the words cosmic consciousness throughout From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta shows that he is at home with the term and the concept. More broadly, he suggests that “the influence of India and its wisdom-religion on the world” is evidenced by two facts. The first fact is “that in every age of the world and in almost every country there has been a body of doctrine handed down, which, with whatever variations and obscurations, has clustered round two or three central ideas, of which, perhaps, that of emancipation from self through repeated births is the most important.” There is what he calls “a kind of tacit understanding and free-masonry on this subject between the great teachers throughout history.”

The second fact is “that there must have existed in India, or in some neighbouring region from which India drew its tradition, before all history, teachers who saw these occult facts and understood them well, probably better than the teachers of historical times, and who had themselves reached a stage of evolution at least equal to any that has been attained since.”

He concludes on an affirmative note about “the heritage … for the whole world” of man’s conscious evolution:

“If this is so then there is reason to believe that there is a distinct body of experience and knowledge into which the whole human race is destined to rise, and which there is every reason to believe will bring wonderful and added faculties with it.”

John Robert Colombo is an author and anthologist who is known as Canada’s “Master Gatherer” for his compilations of quotations, lore, literature, etc. He recently edited with Dr. Cyril Greenland the work The New Consciousness, which collects the essays and papers of the Canadian alienist Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke.

JR Colombo looks at Atheism & Consciousness in the light of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (N.Y./London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004)

Atheism & Consciousness

For some years now the mass media has been reflecting the existence of what might be called the “atheism movement” to counteract the “theism movement” so prominent across the United States and Western Europe and, indeed, across what is known as the “anglosphere.” The “theism movement”was introduced by neo-conservative intellectuals (and
semi-intellectuals) in Washington, D.C., who made common cause with religious fundamentalists in the southwestern United States. These two groups are the conservative proponents of Intelligent Design, the new, oh-so-smart label for dumb, old-fashioned Biblical Creationism.

Another contributing factor to the “theism movement” of the last two decades has been the legacy of the New Age Movement of the 1960s, which has produced two generations of North Americans who are “politically correct” and intent on showing respect to all advocates of “values” no matter the nature of those values. Muslim immigration and Islamic extremism have also contributed to the “theism movement” wherein non-Muslims bend over backwards to accommodate values that would not for twenty-four hours be countenanced in their first home in Saudi Arabia.

The militancy of the “atheism movement” has taken many commentators and most serious-minded readers by surprise. What were formerly regarded as unassailable virtues – faith, belief, religion, etc. – have became objects of distrust, derision, and detestation. Even the notion of tolerance has came under attack. The new atheistic movement gives no quarter, takes no hostages. The question that is asked is the following: “Why should ‘faith groups’ be respected? After all, science is ‘expected’ to produce tangible and beneficial results, and it does, whereas religious groups traditionally demand ‘respect’ for their ridiculous, irresponsible, and exclusivist claims, which inhibit the free expression of other views.” Perhaps not since H.L. Mencken have such challenges been made in the mainstream of North American life. G.B. Shaw and Bertrand Russell were also outspoken but were never this dismissive of “people of faith” and their ill-founded beliefs.

For the last three years I have noted the names of the three men who are regarded as the “shock troops” or “storm troops” in the assault on religious fundamentalism and its encroachments on modern life. The trio – or trinity! – of militant atheists consists of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. I must have read this litany of names a dozen times, and every time I have wondered about the third name. Every serious reader knows Richard Dawkins, the brilliant biologist, and Christopher Hitchens, the lively columnist and contrarian. But who is this fellow Harris? He does not seem to belong here.

It turns out that he is Sam Harris and he is the most thoughtful trooper of the lot. Harris is a student of both philosophy and neuroscience and the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Religion (2004). This book might be described as a tract – and it is, in part; but it is also, in part, a testimony in which the author affirms from personal experience that spirituality is positive whereas religion is negative. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, Harris is an atheist. They are not just agnostics, but genuine atheists. Yet unlike the other two, Harris is a champion of consciousness studies. All three men dismiss organized religions per se as delusory and dangerous, especially in the twenty-first century. But Harris is the only one to suggest that there is a substratum of religious thought and feeling – man’s consciousness – that should be valued and respected. Harris does not take it quite this far, but he is close to saying that between theism and atheism there is a “third force,” consciousness.

Sam Harris was born in the Midwestern United States in 1967, he is a graduate from Stamford University in philosophy, and he is currently completing his doctoral work in the neuroscience of belief. In interviews he has explained that he is the child of a Jewish father and a Quaker mother; whatever his background, he is one bright guy. You can see and hear him on YouTube directly or accessible through his website www.samharris.com. His major work is The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (N.Y./London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004). It is his first and very readable book because the author is up-front about his likes and dislikes, and he writes with clarity, force, and intelligence. The book is 336 pages long, but almost one-third of those pages are devoted to notes in small type, an epilogue, a bibliography, and an index. The notes are even more interesting than the text, for they add a subtlety and, in a sense, “a way out” for mankind.

Here I will offer a terse outline of his argument as it appears in each of the seven chapters of the book, mainly through quotation, but I will also spend some quality time with the last chapter, the Epilogue, and the Notes – an undertaking that few if any of the book’s reviewers have attempted. Indeed, one critic (whose review of the book may be accessed on the Internet) dismisses entirely the subtle analysis in these pages and the author’s espousal of mind-altering appraisals of life and self. My view is that what gives this book its character and importance is its section of Notes. Otherwise the arguments found in six of the seven chapters of The End of Faith have much in common with Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

Chapter 1: Reason in Exile. The assault of the 9/11 suicide bombers has occasioned this meditation on the nature of faith which permits belief. “We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbours believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia – because our neighbours are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.” He continues in this vein and argues that we are wrong to honour such beliefs and faiths; we are wrong-headed to assume they are minor annoyances and that in time they will pass or be accommodated or be compromised. There is no “moderation” in Islam.

In an interesting analogy, he refers to “a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century” who is an ignoramus in all things except in matters of faith. “There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago – while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate – or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogmas, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress.” This certainly applies to Islam. The extremism of Muslims knows no rational bounds. Man embraces one faith or another because he fears death and will embrace annihilation for an “afterlife.”

Harris anticipates his later argument about consciousness studies when he states, “There is little doubt that a certain range of human experience can be appropriately described as ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical – experiences of meaningfulness, selflessness, and heightened emotion that surpass our narrow identities as ‘selves’ and escape our current understanding of the mind and brain.” He continues, “The basis of our spirituality surely consists in this: the range of possible human experience far exceeds the ordinary limits of our subjectivity. Clearly, some experiences can utterly transform a person’s vision of the world.”

He refers in passing to spiritual practices, meditation sessions, and psychedelic drugs, which may lead one to “relinquish the sense that they are separate from the rest of the universe.” He says, “Such experiences are ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical,’ for want of better words, in that they are relatively rare (unnecessarily so), significant (in that they uncover genuine facts about the world), and personally transformative.”

A body of data attests to “the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which has been ignored by mainstream science.” Again: “The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute.” Once again: “You are, at this moment, having a visionary experience. The world that you see and hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness, the physical status of which remains a mystery.” Finally: “As it turns out, there are many ways to deconstruct a self, to extract (apparent) meaningfulness from the deliverances of one’s senses, and to believe that one knows how the world is.” Some pages later he concludes, “It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs. I fear, however, that the time has not yet arrived.”

Chapter 2. The Nature of Belief. We treat religious beliefs unlike other beliefs and fail to analyze them. This is dangerous. “Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behaviour.” Beliefs are “representations of the world” and hence they must be logical and must cohere. As such they must be open to change because the world ever offers new evidence.

“The truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern.” Believers make claims about the world that cannot be refuted. There is no discourse that permits their proof or disproof. “A man’s faith is just a subset of his beliefs about the world.” “Is a person really free to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No.” Why do people take such a hard stand? “We believe most of what we believe about the world because others have told us to.” Here follow a discussion of the insights of Karl Popper on “falsification” and Thomas Kuhn on “paradigms.” The notion is dismissed that science is “just another area of human discourse.” Truth is not up for grabs.

Chapter 3. “In the Shadow of God.” The entire chapter is devoted to the terror and the horror: the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Time is spent on the scriptural underpinnings of these events that originated in Spain and Germany. The Holy Inquisition was established to check the Catharist heresy; two other groups targeted by the Holy Church are witches and Jews. The author looks at anti-Semitism, belief in blood libel, witchcraft, host desecration, racism, and the Muslim revival of the Russian forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Along the way he examines the Virgin Birth and the role played by miracles in the writings of Augustine and Pascal, who see them as “proof” of faith and belief. At the heart of the totalitarian state are “outlandish dogmas” that are incitements to action. The Vatican “maintained a decorous silence” despite the genocide of the Second World War on its doorstep. “Not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during or after the war.” The chapter’s purpose is to show “some of the terrible consequences that have arisen, logically and inevitably, out of Christian faith.”

Chapter 4. The Problem with Islam. “We confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth-century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately they are now armed with twenty-first-century weapons.” The author asks why are there no Jain terrorists, only Muslim terrorists. The difference between extreme and moderate groups is “the degree to which they see political and military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith.”

There is some discussion of jihads, greater and lesser, and the nature of martyrdom, the status of apostates, the position of non-Muslims, all based on quotations from the Koran and the Hadith: “Paradise is in the shadow of swords,” etc. The views on the experience of imperialism of Bernard Lewis and Edward Said are contrasted. As for the disposition of unbelievers and infidels – five and a half pages are devoted to a list of quotations of invective from the Koran with chapter chapter and verse. Better not be born than to be an unbeliever! Harris adds, “This is all desperately tedious, of course. But there is no substitute for the text itself.”

Extraordinarily high rates for Muslim acceptance of terrorism – suicide bombing of innocent bystanders – are discussed country by country. Couple this with access to atom bombs: “I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns.” Here he discusses Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and the riddle of Muslim “humiliation.”

He asks the question, “Given what many Muslims believe, is genuine peace in this world possible?” He answers no, and sighs with relief at “the relative weakness of Muslim states.” The illogic of Jean Baudrillard is quickly dismissed, but the anti-Americanism of Noam Chomsky is considered at some length. Much of Chomsky’s determination of American hegemony is acknowledged, but Harris finds Chomsky (along with Anudhati Roy) astonishingly unable or unwilling to “distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair.” In doing so he uses the argument of “the perfect weapon.” In whose hands would you trust “the perfect weapon” which would eliminate one person or one group with no collateral damage? “A moment’s thought reveals that a person’s use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics.” American expression of guilt and remorse at My Lai suggests it would not be employed by Americans; the implication is that only religious extremists would use it.

He harbours no reservations about Islam: it is incompatible with civil or civic society. He sees “modern despotisms” in terms of “hostage crises,” and argues the need for a “world government” to handle the humanitarian crises brought about by Muslims bankrolled by oil revenue. Muslims must come to the see the wisdom of moderation, or the non-Muslim world will respond with force. “In this case, it seems all but certain that our newspapers will begin to read more and more like the book of Revelation.”

Chapter 5. West of Eden. The reader of the book might come to the conclusion that it was written to counter Islam. But this is not so. In this chapter the author castigates the U.S. government and the influence on the rest of the world of neo-conservatives (i.e., right-wingers and religious zealots ) like John Ashcroft, Tim LaHaye, George W. Bush, William G. Boykin, and Antonin Scalia. They are waging their own “war on sin.” “It is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others.” Faith-based initiatives have made a mockery of U.S. criminal laws and convictions regarding drugs, just as Prohibition (promoted by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union) led to bootlegging and criminal syndicates.

Drugs have replaced alcohol in this lexicon of forbidden substances. “As a drug, marijuana is nearly unique in having several medical applications and no known lethal dosage.” Prohibitions have affected research and scholarship. “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behaviour of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Limitations on embryonic stem-cell research is an outstanding instance of lack of critical thinking. The same for family-planning clinics abroad which advocate abstention rather than distribute condoms against HIV/AIDS. The enemy is the prevailing spirit that animates the U.S. government, the spirit of medievalism.

Chapter 6. A Science of Good and Evil. “The fact that people of different times and cultures disagree about ethical questions should not trouble us. It suggests nothing at all about the status of moral truth.” “The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics.” The author takes a stand against “anthropocentrism” and “cognitive chauvinism” as he stands alongside science’s “biological truths.” “Most of our religions have been no more supportive of genuine moral inquiry than of scientific inquiry generally.” The author quotes Christopher Hitchens’s remark: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

The author then knocks the notion of “moral communities” (composed of immoral people?) as well as “the demon of relativism.” There is a discussion of Richard Rorty’s pragmatism and its limitations. “I believe that relativism and pragmatism have already done much to muddle our thinking on a variety of subjects, many of which have more than a passing relevance to the survival of civilization.” Harris argues in favour of realism. “Realists believe that there are truths about the world that may exceed our capacity to know them; there are facts of the matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view.” Hence there are truths that await their discovery. Along the way he demolishes Jürgen Habermas’s clever notion that beliefs are justified only on the basis of sentences about them.

Diversity of opinion is distrusted, and so is intuition, whether moral or a woman’s, etc. “but notice that the only manner in which we can criticize the intuitive content of magical thinking is by resort to the intuitive content of rational thinking.” Acceptance of honour killing, whether tribal or religious in nature, justifies abuse of women as a weapon of war. Anthropologists refuse to judge behaviour with in terms of good or bad actions because they claim, wrongly, “any behaviour is compatible with any mental state.” What is the answer? Love and the Golden Rule! Morality and happiness go together!

The author discusses Alan Dershowitz’s notion that we are all Grand Inquisitors faced with ticking bombs with respect to torture. Here the author becomes a moral philosopher and discusses many consequences of violations of moral and ethical behaviour. “I believe that I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance in which we would be willing to cause collateral damage.” Pacificism is difficult to maintain in practice and even worse in theory. “Gandhi was a religious dogmatist, of course.” “Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethical asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.”

Chapter 7. Experiments in Consciousness. For the discerning reader this will be the most relevant chapter. After demolishing the pretensions of some of the world’s major religions, Harris focuses attention on the transformative nature of human consciousness, not systems of faith or belief. “At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed.” This would be fine except for the fact that religion “blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.” The possibility of transformation may be discussed in rational terms, as part of a discourse, rather than in irrational terms, as part of a diatribe.

Harris employs the term “spirituality” but admits that “it has connotations that are, frankly, embarrassing.” The word is interchangeable with that of “mysticism” which has “more gravitas” but “it has unfortunate associations of its own.” “Neither word captures the reasonableness and profundity of the possibility that we must now consider: that there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, indeed, that transcends the vagaries of experience itself.”

Harris discusses forms of happiness and emphasizes “our search for happiness” and “even our yearning for spiritual experience itself.” The pitfall here is that these forms of happiness cause us “to overlook a form of well-being that is intrinsic to consciousness in every present moment.” He says, “The underlying claim here is that we can realize something about the nature of consciousness in this moment that will improve our lives.” Paradoxically it is true: “That which is aware of joy does not become joyful; that which is aware of sadness does not become sad.” We are able to “stand perpetually free of the vicissitudes of experience.” Pain, pleasure, drugs, ideas: these “have the power to utterly define a person’s experience of the world.”

Descartes’ dualism and “folk psychology” suggest the mind-matter split with “spirit” a grandiose synonym for mind. Psychical researchers, philosophers, and scientists now reject the split as a simplification, yet scientists are generally “physicalists” who argue “that our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings of our brains.” “The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present.” “Is a starfish conscious. No science that conflates consciousness with reportability will deliver an answer to this question.” There is a discussion of the Turing test as to the nature of awareness. “Consciousness may be a far more rudimentary phenomenon than are living creatures and their brains.”

Schelling asked the question why should there be anything at all in this universe rather than nothing. “The problem is that our experience of brains, as objects in the world, leaves us perfectly insensible to the reality of consciousness, while our experience as brains grants us knowledge of nothing else.” There are facts that are based only in our subjectivity. “Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice.” Harris hits paydirt in the following key paragraph:

“The history of human spirituality is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants. There is no question that experiences of this sort can be conducted in a rational manner. Indeed, they are some of our only means of determining to what extent the human condition can be deliberately transformed. Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence.”

Having made this connection between rational and scientific inquiry and transformation through consciousness, outside the domain of religion, Harris devotes some pages to an epistemological review of “the sense of self” and how this sense may or may not be part of the brain’s representation of the world. “It is, after all, conceivable that a creature could form a representation of the world without forming a representation of itself in the world. And, indeed, many spiritual practitioners claim to experience the world in just this way, perfectly shorn of self.” He adds, “A basic finding of neurophysiology lends credence to such claims.”

“While the experience of selflessness does not indicate anything about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world (and is thus mute on the question of what happens after death), it has broad implications for the sciences of mind, for our approach to spirituality, and for our conception of human happiness.” A few pages are devoted to a discussion of perceptions that are dualistic and non-dualistic – phenomenology.

“In subjective terms, the search for the self seems to entail a paradox: we are, after all, looking for the very thing that is doing the looking. Thousands of years of human experience suggest, however, that the paradox here is only apparent: it is not merely that the component of our experience that we call ‘I’ cannot be found; it is that it actually disappears when looked for in a rigorous way.”

Personal, social, and world problems flow from man’s “feelings of separateness.” There is help: “It would seem that a spirituality that undermined such dualism, through the mere contemplation of consciousness, could not help but improve our situation.” Readers who might regard this as “speculative philosophy” should be aware that there is nothing speculative or particularly philosophical here. “In fact, the spiritual differences between the East and the West are every bit as shocking as the material differences between the North and the South.” Harris notes that “nondualistic, empirical mysticism seems to have arisen only in Asia.” He argues that it did not arise in the West because of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim emphasis on faith.

These ideas are explored in the section called “The Wisdom of the East,” and he makes a bold statement to buttress his thesis: “Nevertheless, when the great philosopher mystics of the East are weighed against the patriarchs of the Western philosophical and theological traditions, the difference is unmistakable: Buddha, Shankara, Padmasambhaava, Nagarjuna, Longchenpa, and countless others down to the present have no equivalents in the West. In spiritual terms, we appear to have been standing on the shoulders of dwarfs.”

To illustrate his point, he reprints a long paragraph about the nature of consciousness from Padmasambhava’s treatise “Self-liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness.” (Padma is credited with bringing the teaching of Buddhism from India to Tibet in the eighth century.) Harris offers a disarming invitation: “I invite the reader to find anything even remotely like this in the Bible or the Koran.” “The comparison with Islam is especially invidious, because Padmasambhava was virtually Muhammad’s contemporary.” Harris argues that this is not a statement of metaphysics because it is rigorously empirical. “Although we have no reason to be dogmatically attached to any one tradition of spiritual instruction, we should not imagine that they are all equally wise or equally sophisticated. They are not.”

Another section is devoted to meditation, a skill that, in principle, is available to anyone, but that in reality requires the “refinements in perception or cognition” which can only be “facilitated by an expert.” A few more pages are devoted to a discussion of various states of consciousness (and unconsciousness) and the influence of thoughts and emotions on consciousness and “the phenomenon of selflessness.” Genuine mysticism can be “objective” and need not be “contaminated by dogma.”

The chapter “Experiments in Consciousness” ends with a discussion of the interface between human and machine intelligence. The essence of the argument of the book occurs in eight words: “Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not.” Belief is irrelevant to the empirical pursuit of conscious experience. “While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.” When mankind discovers the power of this fact, it will be “the end of faith.”

The last chapter is followed by the “Epilogue” in which the author confesses that he wrote the book “to help close the door to a certain style of irrationality.” The irrationality is faith and belief, and the rationality is reason and experience. The stakes are higher than ever. “Whatever our religious differences may mean for the next life, they have only one terminus in this one – a future of ignorance and slaughter.” He imagines the collapse of civilization will follow present ideas and practices including societies in which “people are put to death for imaginary crimes – like blasphemy – and where the totality of a child’s education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction.”

“Our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another.” Only secular knowledge and secular interests restrain them. “It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil.” “People who harbour strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.” “Nothing is more sacred than the facts.” We have no notion of the final understanding of processes: biochemical, behavioural, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual. “Indeed, we know enough at the moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.”

The inevitability of death and of the loss of everything we love in the world should be sobering thoughts. “The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece.” “Man is manifestly not the measure of all things.” “No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation.”

The last two sentences are sobering: “The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.”

So Sam Harris emerges as something of a prophet, a latter-day, empirical-spiritual prophet. He also emerges as an enthusiast for philosophy and neuroscience. It was mentioned earlier that the Notes to the text are rich in amplification and digression; these alone are worth the price of the book. There is neither time or space here to review them, but note will be made of the fact that Harris goes to town on the aspects of his argument that touch upon philosophy and neuroscience. He makes an interesting observation: “This is the astonishing fact, not a single Western thinker can be named who rivals the great philosopher-mystics of the East.” To find such a person who goes back to Plotinus, the third-century Neoplatonist.

The most intriguing note that Harris sounds is his acknowledgement of “my debt to a variety of contemplative traditions that have their origin in India.” He singles out Buddhism – the Dzogchen teachings of the Vajrayana – and Hinduism – the teachings of Advaita Vedanta. He admits to spending “many years spent practising various techniques of meditation.” He finds no “unified perspective on the nature of the mind or the principles of spiritual life,” yet they represent “the most committed effort human beings have made to understand these things through introspection.” “The esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by dogma.”

He offers an amusing picture: “It is no exaggeration to say that meetings between the Dalai Lama and Christian ecclesiastics to mutually honour their religious traditions are like meetings between physicists from Cambridge and the Bushmen of the Kalahari to mutually honour their respective understandings of the physical universe.” Yet man may rise from the morass: “Every religious tradition, no matter how wayward its beliefs, is likely to have produced a handful of men and women who profoundly realized the inherent freedom of consciousness.”

I will end on a lighter note. To dismiss the pretensions of the New Age, as well as the literalists among us of all persuasions, Harris offers a “reading” of a recipe taken from a cook book called “A Taste of Hawaii.” In its recipe (chosen at random) for “wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish,” he finds “the presence of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence.” I am condensing his analysis:

snapper filet, cubed

3 teaspoons chopped scallions

salt and freshly ground black pepper

“The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himself – you and I – awash in the sea of existence. Three teaspoons of chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportion. Salt and freshly ground black pepper: here we have the perennial invocation of opposites – the white and black aspects of our nature.” And so on. There are ten ingredients in all, and Harris has an interpretation for every one of them that savours of New Age thought.

G.I. Gurdjieff always marvelled that human beings will believe “any old thing.” Harris has taken Occam’s razor to such beliefs, managing to ally atheism not with belief but with considerations of consciousness. To put it another way, what Harris has succeeded in doing in The End of Faith, as well as any one person may succeed in doing it in any one book meant for a general readership, is placing faith and belief under the microscope of reason and science and pointing out that their traditional benefits flow not from religious faith, beliefs, or practices; the benefits flow, in an undiluted and unadulterated way, from man’s spiritual nature: his consciousness.

John Robert Colombo studied philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Then he discovered Aldous Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy.” He has discussed the nature of belief and non-belief in the prefaces to such compilations of mystical experiences as “Strange but True” and “The Midnight Hour.” He is known across Canada as John “Bartlett” Colombo for his dictionaries of Canadian quotations.

In Search of Inner Octaves

John Robert Colombo’s
Commentary on an Important Book by Michel Conge

Students of the Fourth Way are no doubt familiar with the name and reputation of Michel Conge (1912-1984), the French physician and senior student of the Work.

Following the death of Mr. Gurdjieff in 1949, Madame de Salzmann appointed a small number of followers to assist her in carrying on with the Work. Among these men and women were Pauline de Dampierre, Michel de Salzmann, Henri Tracol, Lord John Pentland, William Segal, Margaret (Peggy) Flinsch, and Michel Conge. Even in this group, Dr. Conge stood out, at least in the affections of his followers who heard him speak in many cities throughout France. He visited Israel in 1965 where he started the first Israeli group. His talks to followers in Paris and Reims and other cities were well attended and well remembered.

Not many of Dr. Conge’s words have appeared in English. Ricardo Guillon has good things to say about Dr. Conge in his memoir “Record of a Search: Working with Michel Conge in France” (2004). Excerpts from some of Conge’s talks on individual and group effort have appeared as articles in at least two back issues of the “Gurdjieff International Review,” and these have led me to conclude that his sensibility is subtle and discriminating like that of Henri Tracol. That is saying a lot!

It is worth pondering whatever it he says and particularly how he says it. No doubt it is a coincidence that the French noun “congé” (with an acute accent) means “leave” or “holiday” or “respite.” Maybe it is not a coincidence because to read his prose is to experience a respite from clichés and conundrums, for the reason that he speaks from the depths of the heart and not chiefly from the head.

So it came to me as something of a surprise to learn that the pupils of Dr. Conge had compiled and published a collection of his talks and reminiscences. I learned about this publication via the grapevine and confirmed it via the Chinese whisper. The seminal work bears the title “Sur le chemin de l’octave de l’homme: Témoignage d’un élève de G.I. Gurdjieff.” The book was published in January 2004 by a group known as Set, which consists of pupils who met with Dr. Conge. Three years following his death they legally constituted their association and gave it its present name. I have no idea why the group is called Set, though the word brings to mind the mathematician’s “set theory,” the Egyptian deity Seth, and even a class of roots in Sanskrit. No doubt there is another reason for the name.

What is at hand are some details about Sur le chemin (which may be translated “On the Path to the Octave of Man: Testimony of a Student of G.I. Gurdjieff”). Even in France the publication is not well known because its distribution has been restricted. The trade paperback is 200 pages in length; its International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is 2-9519513-0-2. It was printed by Groupe Corlet Imprimeur, SA - 14110 Condé-sur-Noireau, France. The printer’s number is 75920 and the legal deposit of two copies of the book was made to the Bibliothèque nationale in February 2004, where it may be examined. It seems the book has never been offered for general sale, though it is known that copies have been sold to individual members of groups.

The book consists of thirty sections, twenty-nine of which are talks devoted to the teaching as Mr. Gurdjieff presented it in Paris from 1944 to 1949, plus one more section of a biographical and anecdotal nature. That final chapter succeeds in capturing Mr. Gurdjieff in action, the occasion being his last motor trip, the one to Vichy, and the learning experiences that it entailed!

Dr. Conge’s transcripts of talks, exchanges, minutes of meetings, letters, and essays were written or delivered in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus some of the sections of the book are more than forty years old, but the prose has hardly aged at all. I understand from people who are in a position to evaluate it that the French text is quite remarkable. In fact, men and women whose opinions I trust prize the work and have shelved it alongside P.D. Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous.” That is high praise indeed!

I am now in a position to agree with these readers. After some effort I located a copy of the French edition and it lives up to its underground reputation. It is tempting to say that Conge’s book continues where Ouspensky’s book leaves off. Ouspensky conducts a symphony orchestra; Conge, a chamber ensemble. The Russian offers the reader and the student “the big picture,” the outer octaves; the Frenchman “the snapshot,” the inner octaves. In a modest, intimate, and disarming fashion, Conge focuses on man’s needs and especially on the almost inhuman effort required to discover “the motionless in motion,” all the while keeping the aims of the Work in their rightful place in a vast overview of the cosmos. Throughout the work, the “inner octaves” reflect the “outer octaves” – or is it the other way round? It is a work of inner transformation.

It is a shame that there has been no English translation of this important book, but I understand that one is in the works, scheduled to appear in the not too distant future. It will be titled “Inner Octaves” and will be the second publication of Dolmen Meadow Books in my hometown of Toronto. It is unlikely that I will be able to review the English translation, at least in the immediate future, for the reason that its distribution, too, will be limited.

In the meantime, to satisfy the curious or inquisitive among us, here are some notes that I made and others that I had made on a single reading of “Sur le chemin.” This is not a full-fledged review of the book, merely a fly-by-night commentary on those parts of the work that are readily summarizable (and not all are). It should be understood that the use of quotation marks is provisional in the sense that French work terminology is not all that accessible and the sole aim here has been to catch the drift of Conge’s thought and feeling, meaning and taste. It would take an inventive and sensitive translator like A.R. Orage to do the job properly.

As a teacher and a scientist, Conge explored the balance and the connection that exists between the “inner octaves” of man and the “outer octaves” of creation. After his meeting with René Daumal and Jeanne de Salzmann, he encountered G.I. Gurdjieff and studied with him from 1944 to 1949. Faithful to this wake-up call, he pursued the quest for reality behind appearances with his study groups until his own death in 1984.

“Foreword.” The foreword is written in the third person. Conge was a man who sought after truth, the reality behind appearances. This book contains answers to the questions he asked of himself and of the members of his study groups. His teachings are a blend of Gurdjieff’s ideas and his own inner searching wherein the wisdom of the heart is awakened. His way of teaching was not without humour for he mistrusted any teacher who could not elicit laughter. One question he loved to ask his study groups was the following: “There are cooked potatoes and raw potatoes. What are you?” and then he would answer the question: “You are raw potatoes.” (Here he seems to follow the lead of P.D. Ouspensky, who talked about raw and cooked eggs, and the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who built an entire system on a similar distinction.)

“My Life and My Death.” This section amounts to a mission statement that Conge shared with his students: He was not a man to take a permanent stand on something and hold onto it as if it was the absolute truth. Instead, he was a work in progress, in constant process. He saw the connection between his life and his death, between freedom and being lost. Neither the head nor the feelings lead to truth, and if he believed that his vision of things was the only right one, then he would be lost. He approached others without pretending that he alone had understanding. He taught that there must be a hierarchy of understanding that involves both parties to make a true connection. That way little by little relationships are created.

“The Idea of Evolution.” In this section, Conge looks at the problem of evolution with his study group. He begins by saying that no one can make headway in his inner development without taking into account simultaneously both approaches, the psychological and the cosmological. The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, his will, and his power to act. To avoid limitations in discussing this problem of evolution, which he insists is universal, Conge draws a diagram of the parallels of the Ray of Creation, the lateral octave and the achievements of Man. What Conge says at the end of this section is indicative of the complexity of pursuing the process of awakening-awareness-will-action: “To perceive the substance of all the inner worlds and all the laws that order them, to discover the motionless in motion and the unique in the multiple, then I could speak to you of evolution. But because I am still so far from this, I can only prepare the groundwork.”

“The Lateral Octave and Its Influences.” Evolution starts with a change of direction from mechanical involution to conscious evolution – in stages – through a whole gamut of surprises, changes in direction. We move along this lateral octave without much understanding – we are organic, terrestrial, living a life that does not correspond to latent possibilities within us. So we go along the scale of evolution affected by earth-bound influences until our essential self hungers for something more. Until we are well disposed to certain influences on a higher scale, as in a musical scale, then and only then can we evolve.

The next three sections – “The Scale of Man,” “This Stranger, the Self” “To Be There between Worlds” – deal with exactly what they imply. Even angels must descend into incarnations to evolve. This explains the following: “I come from the world of stars and I am called to return.” In the meantime there is the struggle with duty undone, eating beyond hunger, and making oneself sick with guilt and remorse. We move in the cosmic scale of things, attached to what is One, to what is independent, and embraced by everything at the same time.

Conge goes on to say, “The lateral octave is just that – an octave. It’s not a note. It’s eight notes, and in some way that note is me. It’s also all of humanity, and many other things as well. My centre of gravity is between the notes, and I am stuck here on this planet as if I have feet of clay. But if I open to that stranger within me, that Self, I discover that my Self exists also in the upside of the interval between notes and I am in contact with a greater force that comes from On High. I see that I have to die to my illusions, to my memories. All these words are so clear and simple when we begin to live them.”

Then Conge asks, “What do we have to do to attain awareness? We have to depend on precise knowledge and at the same time on precise but limited experience.” Someone in the study group claims that he is at the threshold of one of the lateral intervals and cannot get past it. Conge suggests that he who speaks of a threshold speaks of an interval; he who speaks of an interval speaks of an octave; he who speaks of an octave speaks of notes. Notes are like facts, tangible realities within you. You are the octave. You have to accept that you are filled with a knowing, that you receive impressions, emanations from the other side of the interval. Then, as Gurdjieff would say, you will accept the labour you have to do. The work is the plough unused in the field, the half-hour of exercise you did not do. This is for us the whole problem – the problem of faith. We must learn not to doubt.

Our inner life contains the good and the bad. It is how we take it and when we get attached to it. You will never get past the interval if you remain “raw.” You must get “cooked” and digested to move on, like a potato. You are a raw potato.

“Awareness and Mechanicality.” Conge discusses the difference between man as awareness and man as machine, and shows how they are connected in the process of transformation and evolution. He finds it difficult to admit that he is a machine but if he were not a machine he would not have the means to organize his transformation. The Universe is a machine formed by a Creator who is pure Awareness, who desired to create such an organism as man.

“I don’t like to be called a machine,” says Conge. “I don’t like to admit it. But something extraordinary is evident: I am an organism that can transform substance because the possibility of evolution is built into the machine that I am. Of all the machines, only man has this in-built capacity for change. Is it not clear that awareness and mechanical functions work together in that immense cosmic game where an organism allows the transfer and transformation of energies? I am a machine but I am also awareness, and my body – that machine – allows me to live a life of awareness. So it is not an insult to be called a machine, for I am also awareness.” Conge expresses his gratitude to Gurdjieff for bringing him to this understanding of Man the machine, Man the Awareness.

“What Is It that Evolves?” The study group in Reims pursues the subject of evolution and ends with the understanding that “I am not obliged to stay locked into myself.”

“Can I See Myself as Awareness?” This is an excerpt from a discussion to be found in “Fragments” (presumably “In Search of the Miraculous”) in the form of questions and answers. Conge answers questions by raising related questions. The following are the questions he is asked: “Could evolution be only awareness and will?” “From the moment of my creation what happens to the Creator? He seems to distance himself from his creature.” “What does it mean that man is a product of what he has learned in school?” “But how does a man who possesses higher knowledge lose it? And how can he lose it without losing his soul?” “If evolution doesn’t occur, will humanity be destroyed?” “What compensations does this (evolved) life bring to us?” Conge’s final reply: “The raison d’être for evolution is an immense maintenance program – the law of reciprocal feeding. I eat therefore I must be eaten.”

“What Is Man?” This section’s title is again a question and within the section other questions are asked of Conge who answers with still more questions. One of the chief questions he asks is the following: “Why are we so blind that we cannot see that man does not end where his skin ends?” Here are some of the questions put to Conge: “What is life?” “You said that you are a grain of wheat. Does a man who appears less gifted have within him the potential to become a more gifted man?”

Conge’s answer: “If I remain a potential, a dormant grain of wheat, without understanding the innate impulse to grow, then I shall never awaken to my fullness, to my totality. We have to hit bottom, the very bottom of the barrel to rise to the notion of a higher level. There is no hardship, no injustice. It’s absolutely extraordinary that I could ever have completed the work that awaited me had I not been forced into that descent …. You have to understand that had I been created in one shot, then I would never have known self-awareness. One is tempted to ask why man was created in this way.”

“What Is the ‘Work’? An Overview.” There is “the way, the idea of liberation” and there is “the idea of working with an awareness of a life with the Work,” and it cannot be considered in any other way but from a perspective so vast that it breaks with our egocentric vision. What is the Work? It cannot be seen with the part of me that understands nothing about the life with the Work.”

“There is a place, a space between the Beginning and the End, that starts and ends with the Absolute, where there is shift, some sort of rhythmical change as you hop about in one spot. You feel this and you go with the shift and it is the way that the Work begins. It is where you realize that the Work is not made for me, but I am made for It. We cannot take for granted, that the Work will happen to us. How often we can pass by it and miss it. And once we go through the essential shift away from egocentricity we have begun to take part in the Work which is to understand, to obey, and to serve.

“The direction of the Work is Descent – Achievement – Return, or if you like, Incarnation – Passion – Resurrection – Redemption. It is difficult to penetrate the secret of the origin of the Work or to understand its progression.” There are three levels of progression in the Work: to work on oneself, to work with others and for others, and to work for the school.

“To Understand.” “Understanding is usually based on everyday functions. To make the shift to higher understanding, so that you can proceed with the Work, you must learn to free yourself from the constant slavish preoccupation with mundane functions. When you begin to live with the union of your mind, your body, and your awareness, then you will begin to understand the Work This work is painful but you must do it to begin the Work.”

“To Obey.” Man was born to serve nothing greater than himself, but the only way that he can even suspect that there is something else is to see himself in a cosmic context. Every other form of existence – suns, planets, satellites, angels or archangels – obeys unconditionally. It is in their nature to do this and they are unable to do otherwise. They are all part of the Ray of Creation that displays the harmony in the Universe. But Man is not on that Ray. He resonates in the octave of Organic Life. Man is the only creature and cosmic creation that has the free will to obey or not to obey. And this is his problem. What is the secret to shifting his understanding? Conge says it is “to obey like a loving friend and not like a servant from fear. It is with love, with desire and will that the shift to unconditional obeying begins … I must renounce my life for Life. I must give up my illusions of myself and my dreams for myself … I must renounce my freedom to disobey, to exist totally.”

“To Serve.” “We are conduits of energy, and like the machines that we are, we transmit it elsewhere, and in this way the need to feel, the need to understand the magnitude of this energy, is lessened within us. This energy should return to its source but we have not accepted that it is a double current. It is a gift and we have forgotten how to return it to its source. To enlarge our outlook we have to ‘die’ to our ignorance and to our conditioning. We have to see self-serving as a calamity, as an abomination. We have to recognize the error of our ways. How do we reconcile these opposing needs to serve ourselves and to serve others? When we do, a flood of well being and joy is returned to us.”

“The Struggle Has to Take Place in the Middle-World of the Soul.” It is not in the calm and the silence, not in the spiritual Himalayas, where we learn awareness in our ordinary lives. This would disconcert the hopes that were held for the seeds that were sown for us On High.”

“When you feel the void within you, feel it, taste it. The void is not emptiness. It is alive! Look within and you will find reality and subtlety at the same time – real thought and feeling and awakened intelligence. You will engage in your mundane life in a new way. You will begin to understand the sensation of seeing yourself, with all your painful destructive faults, at last, and you will live with self-awareness. You will feel as if you are living two lives at the same time, that you have two natures struggling in the Great Combat. Eventually you will see that this struggle takes place in your soul.”

“Functions Put to Good Use.” A machine-man functions without awareness. What is the purpose of these functions? They have a double objective: To take one through life; to curry favour or influence, nurture them, and transform them. There are two directions to go in life: downwards mechanically; upwards with awareness.

“The Graduate of Inner Work.” Conge starts work with one study group by saying that if they think he is a graduate of the inner work, they delude themselves, trusting him when he does not give a fig about that. An exchange follows:

Student: I feel that I’m turning around in circles exhausting myself –

M.C. (interrupts; ironically): Oh, so if you’re really exhausted, then the earth will split in two for you and you’ll be free!

Student: Yes! But I’ve totally exhausted myself and not been true with myself.

M.C.: But you haven’t entirely exhausted yourself because then you would be exsanguinated!

Student: I know that I have one step to get through this … but I can’t.

M.C.: It’s not life or nature stopping you from being free – it’s this “coco” (nut) that is looking at me terrified.

Student: I don’t have the subtlety to understand.

M.C.: Well, now, I ask myself if we have a super “coco” here. When we try to unravel him he is still muddled. This is why we have to work on our emotions … not be annoyed by everything, not get upset, not say that time is running out. When we tell you it takes time, that bothers you even more. Are you a seeker or a player?

Student: A player? I don’t understand.

M.C.: You have to play out the game. All your cards are on the table so you have to win.

“As Stubborn as a Mule.” When we get stuck in our inner work and are aware of this, then this is the beginning of change. We have to desire the change. We have to have the will to make it happen.

Student: If one day I feel the need for some peace between my desire for awareness and this crass laziness within me, don’t I need to beat myself up about this?”

Conge tells the student the story about the man who had a mule but fell asleep and allowed the mule to wander off its course. And then it stopped, exhausted. The man tried everything to get it going again – pulling, pushing, tempting it with goodies. Nothing worked. Finally he decided that if he wanted to get where he was going, he would have to carry the mule. But he could not do that for long and had to rest.

M.C.: Isn’t it better to do the work on yourself in stages, admitting that at times you need to give it a rest?

Two sections follow: “The Devil … a Very Very Important Personage” and “The Freshness of Innocence.” A student bemoans the fact that in a movements class he lost control of his body. Conge explains that this was because he has lost his innocence by killing it or allowing it to be killed. “Could it be the devil at work whispering to the mountain climber, ‘It is so high and far away, and you have been walking for hours.’ And you begin to think that you can go down again. Was it really the devil? G. says that the devil is a good trooper, always in a hurry, and that he knows everybody’s business. Get back your innocence? You can always say that you have lots of time. It will come back. But you can also say that it’s still there and I aim to keep it. But it needs your constant attention. It depends on you.”

“Learn to Accept a New Impression of Yourself.” Gurdjieff said: “Let the angels help you. Let the devil help you … and in between, may God help you.” “With an inner shift you need both polarities – the plus and the minus. Stars move in a complex way that is not visible to the naked eye. It is the same for our inward shifts. We do not see ourselves as others see us when we have changed. As you shed your old skin, learn to see yourself in a new light.”

“A Self-impression: I Exist, I Have Always Existed.” “Life gives us hard knocks. Sometimes we give off a dull sound – other times a crystalline sound. You exist but you can’t leave it at that. You react. You can’t simply accept that you exist, that you always have.
You think this is presumptuous, but as soon as you say or think this, impressions change. Finally you have to dare to say, ‘I exist.’ This fact seems so simple, understanding it within your grasp, yet it is so distant. So where do you go from here?”

“Making Sense of the Question.” The question is: What is this world we live in? The question cannot be answered with the intellect. It has to resonate within you. Is it a question without an answer? Can you stay with it until you see that all our problems are simpler than we imagine? Conge explains, “We like to find quick solutions but the earth has to tilled to bring forth a harvest. One quick pass with the plough is not enough. You have to stir the soil deeply.”

“The Role of Attention in the Process of Deliverance.” Conge gives a talk in Santiago, Chile. He repeats material on how we behave mechanically; how nothing can be done if not by ourselves; how when we think we act freely, we are dependent on things and people outside ourselves; how we allow functions to control us, distract us; how we are divided within ourselves; how we can become whole by learning from others who have achieved unity within themselves.

The solution to the dilemma of the division within each of us is the ability to be aware. We need to become the focus of awareness. Where that focus is, you are. If it is weak, you are weak. If it is mechanical, you are mechanical. If it is free, you are free. Wherever you direct your awareness, there you will be, high or low. As you learn to free yourself from the grip of tyrannical functions, your focus has new power, and you sense a new quality of thought. From there you become more vigilant. Conge adds, “I must attempt to live this, to hold it secretly in my heart, and to protect it from everything that could destroy it.”

“Management.” To know management is to know our needs. “To know my needs is to know that I am. To know that I am is to know I am focused. What else do you need to know? If you live this way everything falls into place, absolutely everything.”

“Prayer.” Conge begins this segment with something like a prayer or an invocation: “God Saint. God Strong. God Immortal. / God All. God Nothing. / Light unthinkable. Darkness unthinkable. / The entire Universe is prayer./ That is to say a call in response to a call.” “Real prayer is not of this world. The entire universe is a response to prayer. In the silence I perceive the life that is restorative. This is grace. Prayer is submission, recognition, abandoning trust in my thoughts, my feelings, my attachment to my body, to go into the silence, not for the silence in itself, but because in the silence comes one question: Who, me?”

“Presence and Prayer.” There is a divine presence that is alive within us and it is through prayer that we can maintain that divine spark within us. It gives us the get-up-and-go to attempt and achieve in life, and we are always sustained by that divine presence.

The final chapter of the book is the longest and it offers a precious glimpse of Gurdjieff in action. It is titled “Michel Conge Reminiscences about Monsieur Gurdjieff.” On each January 13, Gurdjieff’s traditional birthday, Conge assembles his students and recounts anecdotes that have appeared in an lesser-known publication titled “Les Dossiers H ‘G.I.Gurdjieff.’” Conge stresses that for him Gurdjieff is a bridge that the teacher erects between himself and his students so they will not be able to build a new religion on his teachings with Gurdjieff as its evangelist.

From this section it would be pleasant to quote some brilliant remarks of Gurdjieff’s, but brilliance is lacking and the French he speaks is best described as broken. It is what he does not say that is brilliant, and how through spontaneous responses to students’ quandaries he ushers them into processes that seem so simple but yet are so profound. It might be described as metaphysical shock-treatment. This is his particular genius. To quote Conge: “He gives you the most awful knocks that seem to have no effect and he says: ‘Ah! Ah!’ What extraordinary moments! Then we know he will let us rest because we need to gather our energy for the next onslaught. And how we loved him at that moment, and how grateful we were.”

“First dinners at Monsieur Gurdjeff’s.” Conge arrives at G.’s on St. Michael’s Day for the first time with other beginners. Although he is a doctor with a full practice, he feels like a schoolboy. Madame de Salzmann is there and she warns everyone to be prepared for the worst and the unexpected. “Be vigilant,” she says. “He’s your master now. He’s going to test you.” And test them he did. Conge has to wait a long time for the answer to his first question. He thinks it an important question but it is ignored by G. He endures this without being annoyed and passes his first test this way. There are more tests to come.

“The Forgotten Briefcase – the Turkey Neck.” G. makes spontaneous use of very ordinary and mundane events as they occur as occasions for major lessons. Conge passes two more tests. The first, when he fits his schedule into G.’s to retrieve a briefcase he has forgotten, a briefcase that holds important secret research documents. The second, when he stubbornly refuses to eat the turkey necks simmering on G.’s stove because he does not care for them. Conge describes the scene in G’s kitchen:

“Oh! Doctor, you like turkey necks?’

“No!”

“What! You don’t like? This best piece. Special treat to honour you. Take!”

“No, monsieur, I don’t want any.”

“What! You, idiot!”

“Perhaps I am. Idiot who doesn’t like.”

“Yes, yes! Take to please me.”

“I assure you that I don’t want any.”

“Want! That, mechanical thing. You must experience new treat.”

“No, monsieur.”

G. got angry and insulted Conge. Conge stood firm and the dispute and G.’s efforts to humble him through humiliation continued on through the dinner with others present. No one spoke. Only for the toasts. When G. insisted Conge stand and defer to an elderly doctor, something rebelled in Conge, but at the same time he realized how far he had to go in his inner work with G.

After dinner. alone with Madame de Salzmann, she says, “You have had a great victory. G. just put you through your second difficult test, and you have behaved well. It was important for the rest of your work.”

Conge is rewarded with an invitation from G. to accompany him on a motor trip to Vichy. After enduring every possible obstruction in the planning of the trip, while on the road, and arriving at their destination, Conge is amazed to see that “in the end, everything fell into place as if by pure enchantment.”

On this happy note ends “Sur le chemin de l’octave de l’homme.” And so ends this commentary.

John Robert Colombo is interested in the writings of Gurdjieff and
Ouspensky and has written and compiled numerous books about
supernatural and paranormal activity in Canada. His latest titles are
“The Midnight Hour,” “Terrors of the Night,” and “Strange but True.”
With Dr. Cyril Greenland, he compiled the published and unpublished
writings of Richard Maurice Bucke in a book titled “The New
Consciousness.”

The Video called “Gurdjieff”

A Review by John Robert Colombo

The Paris-based Institut G.I. Gurdjieff authorized the production of a video in DVD format titled, simply, “Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.” It is described as the first video in a projected series of three disks under the general title “Les Chercheurs de Vérité / The Seekers of Truth.” It comes in a tastefully designed, purple-and-black “jewel box.” Its narration may be heard in five languages: French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. It is recorded in both PAL and NTSC version, one version on each side of the single disk, so in this way it is something of an anomaly among single-sided DVDs. However, it is not new; it was copyright 2005. The running time is 72 minutes.

The cover copy reads as follows: “‘The Seekers of Truth’ is a series of three films dedicated to the work of G.I. Gurdjieff. This first film shows his unending search, from early years in the Caucasus to his last days in Paris, accompanied by those who later on carried on his Teaching.” The web address is given: The copy that I have bears two lines in small type. They read as follows: “Edition Privée / For Private Distribution Only.” For this reason, I suppose, I should append here the following “Spoiler Warning” to this blog:

“The producers of this DVD may not wish you to view this video, at least at the present time, unless you are a member of a working group. Indeed, they may not wish you to read a review of this video on a blog like the present one. So it is possible you may not wish to read any further.”

I have the video on loan. It did not come from anyone in Canada or France. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to view it. It is a work of quality but not a very demanding one. Despite any individual reservations, I see no reason why a video like this one – especially this one – should be limited in distribution. Indeed, it should be released commercially, and I have not a single doubt that in the future it will be sold through regular channels, perhaps sooner rather than later, so that people like me, who have a curiosity about the Work, may benefit from it. After all, it was a Canadian author who first said, “Build it and they will come.” I wonder how long will be take to come?

The video is sensitive and unsensational. It tells the quite-familiar odyssey of a child of the Caucasus who grows into a man with a mission to travel to remote places in Central Asia, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other “seeker of truth,” on a quest to find a connection with the wisdom of the past that resides in ancient monasteries or that lies in the heart of man. After that man finds much of what he is seeking, he appears in Moscow, then Tiflis, then Constantinople, then Fontainebleau-on-Avon, then New York, Philadelphia, Boston, then Paris, etc. He leaves behind followers who value his teachings, writings, musical compositions, dance movements, as well as rich memories in the hearts of his followers. In a sense the video covers some of the same ground as Peter Brook’s Meetings with Remarkable Men but in a documentary rather than a dramatic mode.

There is a skillfully constructed narration with two voices: a kindly voiced narrator who speaks for Gurdjieff and the disembodied voice of an unidentified narrator. Gurdjieff’s words are the familiar ones from his memoirs. The visual element is handled deftly. Here are vintage stills, early film clips (some tinted for the occasion, one or two animated), along with generous glimpses of the rhythmical and demanding movements demonstrated on different occasions. Some of the stills and many of the film clips are new to me. Accompanying the narration and the visuals are plangent piano compositions and at one point the voices of a choir are heard.

What follow are some of the features of the video that struck me as effective or interesting. Much attention is paid to Gurdjieff’s father who instilled in his young son “aspirations towards high ideals.” Greek, Russian, and Armenian influences are specifically mentioned. Also noted is the influence of the Dean of the school he attended, and the priesthood and the medical profession are identified as possible careers for the young man, the two being closer to one career at the time than they are today. Instead, he sets out in search of “forgotten knowledge” in Tiflis, Syria, Jerusalem, and Egypt. He meets with “Professor Skridlov” and “Prince Lubovedsky” and they investigate ancient monuments to determine the intention of their builders. Gurdjieff envisions himself devoting the rest of his life to determining “the deep meaning of being and the aim of life.” The three men form the nucleus of the Brotherood of the Seekers of Truth. At Constantinople and elsewhere they study brotherhoods which practise “rituals going back to the creation of Christianity.”

Gurdjieff says he has visited Mecca and Medina but found no answers there, yet in Bokhara he found Islam’s “concentrated doctrines.” Associating with “men of the highest culture,” he determines that “the science of hypnotism” leads him to realize that man has “three types of associations”: thought, feeling, and motor instinct. Eventually the group of Seekers disbands. Some members give up, some are wounded, some have died. Yet he at least finds in Central Asia a “universal brotherhood whose members were united in God’s truth.” He realizes deeply that “all is one” because the same laws pervade all of creation, the structure of which manifests the divine nature.

To support himself he enters the world of business, specifically fisheries and oil wells and he deals in carpets and antiques. Then in 1912 he liquidates his business interests and takes up residence in Moscow where he begins to lecture and teach. As for his teaching, some time is devoted to drawing parallels between the state of man today and the coachman, the horse, and the carriage, specifically the absence of a “permanent I.”

Philosopher and writer P.D. Ouspensky is mentioned at this point and so are future followers, Dr. Leonid Stjoernval and Thomas de Hartmann. This sequence takes place against the backdrop of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, creating a sense of the intense importance of the teaching as society around them is disintegrating. A group that includes the above men and their families follows Gurdjieff to the Caucasus to sit out the revolution. Here he creates conditions that generate friction to work against man’s automatic manifestations. In Tiflis in 1919, the group finds relative calm and sets up an institute dedicated “to “work on oneself.” Its motto is “To Know To Be To Understand.” Alexandre de Salzmann, the painter, husband of dancer Jeanne de Salzmann, work with him on the ballet “The Struggle of the Magicians.” Conditions force them to liquidate their investments and with about thirty people they remove themselves to Constantinople, where they observe the parallels between their movements and the Mevlevi dervish dances, a common feature being mental exercises.

Ultimately Gurdjieff finds France congenial and in 1922 he acquires the Prieuré at Fontainebleau-sur-Avon where his old Russian followers work alongside new English disciples led there by Ouspensky and the editor A.R. Orage. This relatively stable period is explored in some detail, specifically from the vantage-point of manual labour. “The value of work lies not in quantity but quality.” Katharine Mansfield is mentioned and the one aim “to be able to be” free from identification. Lectures, movements, celebrations, all of these take place in the airplane hanger that is shown being erected to serve as the Study House. “The secret is simple: to do things like a man.” Among other things, it requires man to work with all three centres. Self-observation and self-remembering are mentioned, and the stop exercise is illustrated (by stopping the accompanying music, albeit for a second or two): a neat touch.

The reactions of journalists to life and work at the Prieuré are contrasted with the inner work that is underway. Gurdjieff’s mother and sister and other family members join him and take up residence at the nearby Paradou. The movements are exhibited on the Champs-Elysées. The troupe of forty-six members sails for New York City and arrives penniless. Luckily Orage has prepared for their arrival. The movements are demonstrated in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. Work on oneself is emphasized. “We must always start with ourselves.” Inwardly man is one; outwardly man is an actor.

Gurdjieff’s near-fatal automobile accident and the Great Depression will signal the end of the summer of the Prieuré. Yet the work continues. After convalescence, he moves from practice to theory and in 1925 begins to write “Beelzebub’s Tales,” sometimes in the Café de la Paix. In the meantime, scenes are shown of numerous children who have their own vegetable garden and animals to tend. Within months his wife and then his mother die. “The most beautiful roses have thorns.” He collaborates with de Hartmann on three hundred musical compositions over a period of three years. There are regular trips to the United States throughout the 1930s. He begins to work with a circle of American and other women in Paris.

By the late 1930s he leads a Paris circle that includes Madame de Salzmann, Henri Tracol, Henriette Lannes, René Daumal, and Luc Dietrich. They meet at his apartment on rue des Colonels-Renard. Throughout the German occupation of Paris, movements are held at the Salle Playel. their work accounting for moments of sanity during turbulent and tragic times. After the war, clips show him writing at Child’s restaurant in New York. He is shown as a trencherman, handlebar moustache and all, eating with gusto, “with all my attention.” There is a last motor trip in the summer of 1949 to view the cave paintings at Lascaux, evidence of early life. He dies knowing “Beelzebub’s Tales” will soon be published. “Then I will go far away where I will be able to rest.”

The production credits scroll by swiftly. The director is Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, the Paris chief and also a recognized documentary film-maker. The names of perhaps two dozen men and women are given; I recognized a number of them, notably those of Michel de Salzmann, Tom Daly, Peter Brook, and James Moore.

Taste and tact are characteristic of the video. Since it was not conceived to break new ground, it is perhaps a mistake to be critical of it on that account. It is a fine if limited tribute that keeps this side of hagiography. How it quite accomplishes that, I am not quite sure. But it does display a surety of step, a balance, which is a little too … balanced, perhaps … for the film biography of a man who could exhibit a fierce temper and used words like “mercilessly” and “uncompromising.”

I understand that there will be three videos, maybe four. Part One focuses on G.I.G. The subject of Part Two will be Mr. G.’s followers. Part Three will review the Work internationally. In the planning stage, it seems, is Part Four, which will distill the essences of the mind, heart, and body of these three videos and render them accessible to the general public.

If the present video is so traditional in approach and such a responsible presentation of the teachings, why is its distribution limited? I am able to entertain four reasons for the “restricted” label. Here they are.

The first reason is that as long as the distribution is limited, copies may be sold at higher prices than if there is general distribution. The fact that it is not widely available becomes its USF (unique selling feature). The profits from the sales will then be earmarked towards the costs of production of Part II and Part III. Once the costs have been recovered, the videos may go into general distribution. I am not impressed with this argument, as more revenue will be generated through general sale than through private distribution.

The second reason is that secrecy generates interest. People (like myself) may take the video more seriously if it is passed from hand to hand rather than displayed on the shelves of the local video outlet. There is some truth to this, but restriction does “preach to the converted.” It also raises false hopes that something new will be said.

The third reason is “membership premium value.” The leadership of every group knows that the group needs to reserve something of value for its members. Otherwise, why join a group? Perhaps the video is regarded as one of the “perks” of membership. Freemasonry faces this problem today, as it wishes to acquire new and younger members, but secrecy and anonymous charitable giving have little appeal to the younger generation of potential members. Perhaps the Institute faces a similar problem.

The fourth reason is excess caution, exquisite circumspection. I have been hearing for the last forty years that the Institute has for more than half a century been squatting on its treasures – preserving its treasures might be a more understanding way to express it – so that a sense of hesitancy has now become a hereditary factor, like rickets.

Yet times are changing, though the nature of man remains constant. There is a Traditionalist saying that at the time of the Prophet – an age of faith – it was necessary to observe ninety per cent of the law, whereas in our day and age – parlous times indeed – it is required that only ten per cent of the law be observed.

John Robert Colombo is known across Canada as the “Master Gatherer”
for his curiosity and his ability to find and comment on little-known aspects of Canadian social and cultural life. He is the host of the six-part television series “Unexplained Canada” shown on the SPACE Channel. The National Film Board of Canada released two short animated films based on his poems. He is currently working on an expanded edition of his earlier book called “Walt Whitman’s Canada.”