Setting Forth a Canon of the Gurdjieff Work (2021) PDF

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[first, pre-publication draft of an article to be published in a special “Gurdjieff canon” issue of Postscripts, 2020 or 2021, edited by Carole Cusack] Setting Forth a Canon of the Gurdjieff Work David Seamon Kansas State University Abstract This article considers whether there might be a canon of t...

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[first, pre-publication draft of an article to be published in a special “Gurdjieff canon” issue of Postscripts, 2020 or 2021, edited by Carole Cusack]

Setting Forth a Canon of the Gurdjieff Work David Seamon Kansas State University Abstract This article considers whether there might be a canon of the Gurdjieff Work and, if so, what that canon might include. The author emphasizes that any canonical explication must incorporate two complementary aspects: first, texts that describe the psychological, philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological structure of Gurdjieff’s system of self-transformation; second, an integrated set of guidelines, procedures, and techniques that provide the experiential and spiritual engine for actualizing potential self-transformation. Taking this twofold canonical definition into account, the author defines the Gurdjieff canon as an ensemble of texts, methods, and performative media that when, engaged sincerely and persistently, might facilitate self-transformation psychologically and spiritually. The author gives attention to written texts because the starting point of Gurdjieff’s system is intellectual understanding. These written texts are overviewed in terms of seven categories: (1) Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous; (2) additional texts by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, including Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men and Ouspensky’s The Fourth Way; (3) commentaries on Beelzebub’s Tales; (4) commentaries on the Gurdjieff Work; (5) biographies of Gurdjieff; (6) memoirs of Gurdjieff; and (7) works that extend Gurdjieffian ideas in innovative directions.

Key words

Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, canon, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff canon, Gurdjieff Work, In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky, the Work

Introduction I ask in this article whether there might be a canon of the Gurdjieff Work and, if so, what that canon might include. The academic and theological literatures on canons and canonicality offer considerable definitional range as to what these terms refer. Typically today, canon is used broadly to refer to any body of work that claims some manner of objective endorsement, authority, or permanence—for example, a canon of American literature, of modernist art, of feminist writings, of Romantic poetry, of Western classical music, and so forth (Aliteri 1983, Bloom 1994, Camille 1996, Gamer 2018, Readings 1989, Ross 1998). The underlying assumption of canonicality is that limits must be imposed to help one locate a particular tradition’s works of most significant quality and standing (Bloom 1994, 35). Here, I ask what these significant works might be for “the Work”—the system of psychological and spiritual selftransformation set forth by G. I. Gurdjieff (c.1866–1949) and his student and associate P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947). In studying its intellectual history, one finds that the idea of canon was originally associated with the Hebrew and Christian traditions, relating to the authoritative sacred writings of these religions (Kruger 2013). Camille (1996, 199) referred to “the sacred authority of eternally reinterpretable texts,” and Ulrich (2002, 34) emphasized “a fixed standard or collection of writings that defines the faith and identity of a particular religious community.” Ulrich (2002, 34) concluded that, in the Christian tradition, canon is understood, first of all, as “the definitive, closed list of the books that constitute the authentic contents of scripture”—in short, the Bible’s Old and New Testaments. Canonical scholars considering the term theologically, however, also

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recognize that canon and canonicality may have a processual dimension in that canons can include directives as to how practically claimants, supporters, or adherents should conduct their lives and spiritual formation (Ulrich 2002, 25–26) In this processual sense, canon refers to a set of precepts and directives that guide, motivate, and concretize the sacred tradition: “A law, principle, body of law, or set of standards, enacted or endorsed by competent authority” (Ulrich 2002, 28). In seeking out a canon of the Gurdjieff Work, I emphasize at the start that any designation must draw on both aspects of canon: first, a textual core that describes the psychological, philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological structure of Gurdjieff’s system of self-transformation; second, an integrated set of guidelines, procedures, and techniques that provide the experiential and spiritual engine for actualizing potential self-transformation. I therefore tentatively define the Gurdjieff canon as an ensemble of texts, methods, and performative media that when, engaged sincerely and persistently, might facilitate selftransformation psychologically and spiritually. If one defines the Gurdjieff canon in this comprehensive manner, one recognizes four interconnected components: first, well-respected written works of the Gurdjieff tradition; second, Gurdjieff’s music; third, his sacred dances, or “Movements”; and, fourth, the inner psychological exercises that became an important part of Gurdjieff’s teaching methods beginning in the early 1930s. In this article, I emphasize written texts because the starting point of the Gurdjieff Work is intellectual understanding. As Ouspensky (1957, 61) explained, “[W]e must begin with intellect. Our intellectual centre is better developed, or more under its own control …. [S]ince we have more command of our intellectual centre, we have to use it until either we become more conscious or learn to use other functions more efficiently.” My aim is to present one compilation of key written works that contribute to a Gurdjieff canon. Obviously, this selection is grounded in my personal understanding and is, therefore, subjective, tentative, and open to criticism and revision. Other individuals involved with the Gurdjieff tradition, either as practitioners or researchers, might delineate a considerably different list. In this sense, my compilation provides one baseline for comparison and contrast. In making the selections offered here, I have been guided by what literature-canon scholar Harold Bloom called the “daemon”—“the inspiring power that appears whenever we write or read a work of true imagination” (Bloom 2019, 2). I argue that many of the written works of the Gurdjieff Work ignite this daemon of “true imagination” and “inspiring power.” I first discovered Gurdjieff in the early 1970s in a university colleague’s office where I happened to notice, on his desk, a copy of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous. Attracted by the provocative title, I opened the book randomly and happened to read, “The human organism receives three kinds of food: (1) the ordinary food we eat; (2) the air we breathe; (3) our impressions” (Ouspensky 1949, 181). Instantly, I was struck by the reasonable but novel idea that impressions could be food. I had never encountered anyone else stating such an obvious fact, once one thought about it. Very soon, I was reading my own copy of Search. Shortly after, I joined a Gurdjieff group. In relation to Bloom’s daemon, the point I make is that, regularly in the Work literature, one discovers the rousing insights and inspiration of which Bloom speaks. One sees and understands aspects of human life and experience out of sight before.

Written texts and the Gurdjieff canon As one becomes familiar with the written materials relating to the Gurdjieff Work, one realizes the wide range of entries generated since Ouspensky’s death in 1947 and Gurdjieff’s in 1949.

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Published in 1985, researcher Walter Driscoll’s invaluable compilation, Gurdjieff: An Annotated Bibliography (Driscoll 1985), listed over 1,100 books, articles, and other entries in English; and several hundred more in other languages. Since then the number of publications has increased dramatically; for example, my personal library of Work-related books currently numbers some 500 volumes. In short, there is a huge range of published materials that potentially contribute to a Gurdjieff canon. In this article, I set forth a range of central texts organized in terms of the seven following categories, each of which is then discussed in detail. For each category, I have chosen the particular entries because, at least for me, their language, expression, and content house the creative energy that marks Bloom’s daemon. The seven categories are as follows: 1. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous; 2. Additional texts by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; 3. Commentaries on Beelzebub’s Tales; 4. Commentaries on the Gurdjieff Work; 5. Biographies of Gurdjieff; 6. Memoirs of Gurdjieff; 7. Works that extend Gurdjieffian ideas in innovative directions.1

1. In Search of the Miraculous and Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson

In identifying key works in Gurdjieff canon, I begin with Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (Gurdjieff 1950) and Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (Ouspensky 1949). I expect that most Gurdjieffians would agree that these texts are the two anchor entries for any Gurdjieff canon. These two works are striking in their contrast: Ouspensky’s—clear, accessible, and carefully structured throughout to identify key precepts and principles; Gurdjieff’s—dense, difficult, and uneven in its passages of unexpected revelation or disconcerting ordinariness. Search is Ouspensky’s first-person account of his time spent with Gurdjieff from 1915 to 1918, after which he broke with Gurdjieff and did not work with him again. Search is unique in that it provides an accurate, comprehensible, in-depth description of the integrated psychology, philosophy, and cosmology of Gurdjieff’s system, carefully explicating humans’ crucial role in the universe as well as precisely explaining Gurdjieff’s central psychological claims that “human beings are machines”; “human beings are asleep”; “human beings are not one ‘I’ but many”; and “human beings are three-centered” (i.e., human experience incorporates bodily, emotional, and intellectual functions that must be understood and integrated if one is to be a complete human being). Portions of the manuscript of Search were read to Ouspensky’s London groups in the 1930s, but the text remained unpublished at his death in 1947. In 1949, Madame Ouspensky showed the manuscript to Gurdjieff, who was said to exclaim, “Before I hate Ouspensky; now I love him. This very exact, he tell what I say” (Moore 1999, 305). As Driscoll (Driscoll and Loy 1998/1999, 67), concluded, Search “remains unparalleled as a lucid and systematic account of Gurdjieff’s early formulation of his ideas.” Taylor (1978, 22) made a similar point when she wrote that Search is the most thorough compilation of Gurdjieff’s teaching during the years of the First World War and Russian Revolution: 1

For other efforts to identify key texts of the Gurdjieff tradition, see the special issue of Gurdjieff International Review on the “Gurdjieff literature” (Driscoll and Loy 1998). Also see bibliographer J. Walter Driscoll’s most recent inventory (Driscoll 2017).

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The form of the book allows Ouspensky to present Gurdjieff’s ideas in a specific psychological sequence and in carefully selected juxtapositions without calling this strategy to the attention of the reader. The vast ideas covered include philosophy, cosmology, psychology, religion and traditional knowledge of all kinds, and in this book Gurdjieff’s synthesis of them was introduced to the West for the first time. In turning to Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales, one encounters a second anchor text that is much more obscure, confusing, and—for many readers—off-putting. Reviewer Martin SeymourSmith (2012, 76) argued that Beelzebub’s Tales is uniquely difficult because “Gurdjieff believed that his reconstructed doctrine contained much of the truth about human existence; he thought truth difficult; he therefore made intense difficulties and created may obstacles for anyone who wished to discover it.” Partly myth, partly science fiction, partly teaching parable, Gurdjieff’s masterwork begins aboard the spaceship Karnak, which transports Beelzebub and his grandson Hassein to a conference on a far planet where the wise Beelzebub will share his life experiences and scientific research. As they travel, Beelzebub tells Hassein stories about the universe, the Earth, and psychological and cosmic laws. Via these accounts, Gurdjieff unfolds his understanding of human nature and the inescapable role that human beings play in the involution and evolution of the universe. Central to this cosmology is Gurdjieff’s notion of “Reciprocal Maintenance” and the “Trogoautoegocratic process”—the continuous, universal exchange of substances in which everything in the cosmos is in an interdependent relationship with everything else, whereby all portions of the cosmos are always interconnected. Only conscious awareness, including human understanding, stands potentially outside this inexorable, universal process, propelled by two fundamental laws that Gurdjieff identifies as the “Law of Three” and the “Law of Seven.” Beelzebub explains to Hassein how all living beings, including organic life on earth, are apparatuses for transforming energies required for the Trogoautoegocratic process. Because, however, they are a more sophisticated transforming apparatus than plants or animals, human beings can potentially choose the kind of energies required for their existence. Like plants and animals, they can generate these energies unconsciously and habitually, whereby they “feed the moon” and “die like dirty dogs.” Or, through awareness and understanding, they can become attuned to their mechanical, sleeplike lives and learn ways to become more present and real, escaping the involution of mechanical humanity and moving toward a hard-earned, selfconscious evolution. The history of the publication of Beelzebub’s Tales is complicated and usefully summarized by Gurdjieff scholar Paul Beekman Taylor (2012, Ch. 5). No doubt the English version of the book gains much of its force through the extraordinary editing and writing abilities of Gurdjieff colleague A. R. Orage, a major figure in early-twentieth-century British literary, political, and economic circles. The original English version of Beelzebub’s Tales, edited by Orage, was published in 1950. In 1992, a revised English edition was released, said to be a more accessible “modern” version than the 1950 edition and based largely on a French translation of 1956. At the time the new edition was published, there was considerable controversy as to the accuracy or need of the revised translation, apparently directed by Gurdjieff associate Jeanne de Salzmann.2 Both English versions of Beelzebub’s Tales have their strengths and weaknesses; 2

On this controversy, see Taylor 2012, Ch.10; Taylor 2013; Grant, 2013; Moore 1994, 13-16; Staveley 1993.

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through comparing and contrasting the two texts, one discovers aspects of the “mother work” that one might not see otherwise. I agree with Gurdjieffian Stephen A. Grant (2013, 86, 89) who concluded that it is time “to respectfully recognize the merits of both books…. [W]e … should be big enough to accept both [editions]without trying to impose one over the other.”

2. Additional texts by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky There are additional texts by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky that contribute to a Gurdjieff canon, and here I highlight four: Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963) and Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am” (1981) ; and Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution (1950) and The Fourth Way (1957). Meetings with Remarkable Men is the second of the “three series” of books that, as a comprehensive explication of his system, Gurdjieff called All and Everything. Gurdjieff’s aim in the “First Series,” Beelzebub’s Tales, was to provoke readers to call into question their taken-for-granted understandings of human life and experience. In the “Second Series,” Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff aimed to depict more authentic ways of human life; in the “Third Series,” Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am,” he offered practical means whereby an authentic way of life might be facilitated. The achievable result might be “a veritable, nonfantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality” (Gurdjieff 1981, v).3 At first glance, Meetings with Remarkable Men seems autobiographical, since most of the book describes Gurdjieff’s childhood and his later involvement in the expeditions of a group of men (and one woman) as they quest for scientific, sacred, and esoteric knowledge. Though most of these expeditionary efforts probably happened, there are events depicted that sometimes seem more fantastical than real—e.g., the group’s coping with a fierce sandstorm in the Gobi desert by walking on stilts above the tumultuous winds. Other than the first and last, all chapters in Meetings are titled by names of “remarkable men” who played important roles in Gurdjieff’s life: “My Father,” “My First Tutor,” “Bogachevsky,” “Prince Yuri Lubovedsky,” “Professor Skridlov,” and so forth. All these individuals—relatives, teachers, priests, doctors, engineers— are remarkable men “not from their surface appearance but from their resourcefulness, selfrestraint, and compassion” (Moore 1999, 25). In this sense, Meetings can be understood as “a parallel geography of [Gurdjieff’s] psyche and the route he followed to penetrate it” (Moore 1999, 24). More broadly, the book’s purpose is “to convey a picture of a value system different from modern man, rather than to give an [exact] account of Gurdjieff’s own life” (Bennett 1973, 16).4

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There are three other writings attributed to Gurdjieff that I have not included here: The Herald of Coming Good (1933); Views from the Real World (Gurdjieff 1973); and In Search of Being (Gurdjieff 2012). I have not included Herald because Gurdjieff retracted the work shortly after publication. The other two works I have not included because their provenance has not been clearly established. Views is comprised mostly of undated talks by Gurdjieff recollected and written down after the fact by students not identified in the text (Taylor 2007, 311). Though the author of In Search of Being is stated to be Gurdjieff, most of the book appears to be “retranslations” of entries from the earlier Views from the Real World and Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous. By whatever manner the book’s contents came into being, a good portion is drawn from a “new English translation of the original Russian text of [In Search of the Miraculous]” (xiii). In this sense, the author of the volume is as much Ouspensky as Gurdjieff, and it is an enigma as to why Gurdjieff is named as sole author. 4 Helpful overviews of Meetings include Bennett 1973, 83–96; Moore 1999, 24–33; Webb 1980, 30–47. Film and theatre director Peter Brook and Jeanne de Salzmann produced a film version of Meetings, released in 1979; an inciteful comparison of the book and the film is Cusack 2011.

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As Taylor (1997, 179) pointed out, Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ is the least studied and referenced of Gurdjieff’s three series, partly because the book is incomplete and suffers from a lack of closure.5 Life Is Real is the most directly personal of the three series in that Gurdjieff discusses his spiritual search and his efforts to found Work groups in Europe and the...