George Gurdjieff

The teaching

Taught from Beelzebub's Tales and his other books, with his talks as Ouspensky recorded them in In Search of the Miraculous.

Asleep

Gurdjieff's teaching begins with a hard fact about ordinary people: they are asleep. The state they call waking is only another kind of sleep, in which they walk, talk and work without being present to themselves. Man is a machine: everything he does, says and thinks happens to him, set going by outside influences, and in his present state he cannot do. Nor is he one. He has no permanent I but a crowd of small I's, each calling itself I: one promises, another forgets, a third breaks the promise, and none of them is master.

He pictures a person as a carriage, a horse and a coachman. The carriage is the body, the horse the feelings, the coachman the mind, and the master who should give the orders is absent or asleep, so the coachman drives wherever the horse pulls or the passing hirer asks.

Self-remembering

The first work is to see the machine as it is, by self-observation without judging or trying to change what is seen. The second is self-remembering: to be aware of oneself in the very moment of attending to something else, so that attention points both inward and outward at once. Most of the time a person is identified, lost in a thing, a person, a mood or an argument, and so forgets themselves; much of their energy goes on considering, worrying what others think of them, and on the expression of negative emotions, which the work asks them to stop expressing. Every such effort is small and must be made again and again, and he holds that only such efforts, kept up, can wake a person.

Centres, essence and personality

The human machine has its centres: the intellectual, the emotional, the moving and the instinctive, with the sex centre, each working at its own speed and each often doing the work of another badly. There are also a higher emotional and a higher intellectual centre, fully formed but cut off from ordinary consciousness. A person whose centre of gravity is in the moving centre is man number one, in the emotional man number two, in the intellectual man number three; man number four is balanced by work on himself; man number five has a unity, a crystallised I; and the higher numbers go beyond. People are not born with a soul, in this teaching, but may make one, by long work.

Essence is what is one's own, what a person is born with; personality is what is acquired, learned, borrowed. In most people essence stops growing in childhood while personality grows over it, and the work makes personality passive so that essence can grow. Buffers are the devices that keep a person from seeing their own contradictions and so from feeling the shock that conscience would give.

The law of three and the law of seven

Every phenomenon, he teaches, arises from three forces: an active force, a passive force, and a third, neutralising force that brings them into relation, and people are blind to the third. Beelzebub's Tales calls this the sacred Triamazikamno. The second fundamental law, the Heptaparaparshinokh of the Tales, is the law of seven, the law of octaves. Any process develops like a musical scale, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do, but the vibrations slow at two places, between mi and fa and between si and do. At those intervals a line of action turns aside unless a shock enters from outside, which is why good intentions so often end in their opposite, and why a person who wants to keep a direction must know where the intervals fall.

On these laws stands the ray of creation, the world as a descending octave: the Absolute, all worlds, all suns, our sun, all planets, the earth and the moon. Each step down is under more laws, one, three, six, twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight and ninety-six, so that humanity on earth lives under forty-eight laws, and to grow is to free oneself from some of them.

The enneagram

The enneagram is a circle with nine points. A triangle joins points three, six and nine, which is the law of three; a six-pointed figure joins one, four, two, eight, five and seven, the repeating digits of one divided by seven, which is the law of seven, with the shocks entering at three and six. He taught it as a universal symbol of any process that sustains itself, which can be read only by someone who understands it, and his pupils also learned it in movement, walking its lines on the floor.

Three foods and the fourth way

The human body is a factory of three storeys fed by three foods: ordinary food, air and impressions. Impressions are the most important, and ordinarily they enter and are lost; self-remembering at the moment impressions are received is the first conscious shock, which lets their octave go on and makes finer substances in the body.

There have long been three ways: the way of the fakir, who works on the body; the monk, who works on the feelings; and the yogi, who works on the mind, each beginning with renunciation of ordinary life. The fourth way works on all three at once, in the conditions of ordinary life, with no retreat from the world, and needs a school and a teacher. His Movements, sacred dances in which the arms, legs and head follow separate patterns while the attention holds them all together, are a practice of this way, since no one can do them while asleep in themselves.

Kundabuffer and conscious labour

Beelzebub's Tales tells the same truth as a myth. Early in the life of humanity, the higher powers set in human beings an organ called Kundabuffer, which made them see reality upside down and take pleasure in what they saw, so that they would not perceive why they existed and refuse their part in the order of the cosmos. The organ was later removed, but its consequences had crystallised in human nature as vanity, self-love, envy and the rest. Of all the sacred impulses only conscience survives, buried in the subconscious, and the messenger Ashiata Shiemash taught people to build their lives on it.

The way out is conscious labour and intentional suffering, and the five strivings of a true being: to have what is really necessary for the body; to feel a constant need for self-perfection; to know ever more of the laws of world creation and world maintenance; to pay as quickly as possible for one's own arising and individuality, so as to be free to lighten the sorrow of our common Father; and to help other beings toward the same perfection.