Gurdjieff

Lonsdale, Joy. Gurdjieff and the arch preposterous an Hermetic descent into the mind. [Canberra] Joy Lonsdale, 2000. viii, 280 p. ISBN 0646404199... 

Webb, ]. The Harmonious Circle The Lives and Work ofG. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers. Boston Putnam, 1987. 

Gurdjieff sees the rapid, unnoticed transitions between identity states, and their relative isolation from one another, as the major cause of the psychopathology of everyday life. I agree with him, and believe this topic deserves intensive psychological research. 

Gurdjieff, G. views from the Real world. New York Dutton, 1973. 

Nicoll, M. Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. London Stuart Watkins, 1970. 

Gunther Weil is now the director of the Media Center of the University of Massachusetts, but he s also been running the Gurdjieff group in Boston. He is closely identified with the Gurdjieffian work. He has put out records, he has tried to create art movies, he s lectured on the acculturation of the psychedelic experience. 

Take the ideas and practices in this book as stimulation. If they resonate with something in you, try them out. Do they fit in your personal experience. Do they expand your understandings. Do they need modifi-cation. Are they appealing to the better or worse sides of your personality. Should some be rejected. As Gurdjieff emphasized, you should believe nothing about his teachings or, for that matter, my version of them. If the ideas and practices appeal to you, be open to them until you feel you have a basic understanding, and then test them. If they work for you, build on them and go on. 

Me I m wondering how best to use a machine analogy in presenting Gurdjieffs ideas. 

Me Ever since I started this book. Gurdjieff is hard on people. 

A person may appear to be acting intelligently and consciously, but he may be mechanically running on automatic. By mistakenly thinking he is really conscious, he blocks the possibility of real consciousness. This is why it is so important to understand what Gurdjieff meant in saying that man is a machine. 

Gurdjieff constantly emphasized that almost all human misery results from the fact that our lives are automatic, mechanical affairs. You (your behavior, thoughts, and feelings) are the effect of external and historical causes, rather than the cause, the initiator of desired actions. The horror of this fact is that we do not have to be machines, yet we are, too much of the time. 

The unfortunate truth about people is how machinelike we can become. Gurdjieff observed how mass forces in cultures tend to make people more mechanical we will look at these forces in detail in other chapters. Right and wrong ways are set up and rules to implement them are established. Goodness then becomes a matter of following the rules. 

Gurdjieff was, among many other things, an accomplished hypnotist. 

Gurdjieff characterized a newborn baby as pure essence. Essence is your genuine, deepest self, your desires, tastes, likes and dislikes, potentials, inherent in you before the consensus trance induction process has begun to change it. Essence is who we really were when we came into this world. 

Gurdjieff stated that our movements are quite automatized. We have a fixed number of characteristic movements, gestures, postures, definitions of appropriate personal space, and the like, each keyed to certain situations and subpersonalities that bring them out. We will examine subpersonalities in later chapters. 

Gurdjieff observed that it was easy to make his students carry out frightening, unpleasant, demanding tasks, but almost impossible to make them give up their suffering. I have observed the same thing with my students. Work on something unpleasant in themselves Yes. Be happy and nice to themselves for five minutes No way ... 

Many people distort their perceptions in the opposite way, of course. They see sinister implications behind actions that are quite innocent. Their automatized simulations of reality highlight the negative instead of the positive aspects of the situation. Indeed, one of the fundamental types in Gurdjieff s system of false personality types sees such sinister possibilities in others behavior all the time. ... 

If the situation is really more complex than identity K can handle, identity K (which is you for the time being) may perform badly. All the rest of your identities, and whatever real you is behind them, inherit the consequences of what identity K did in that situation. Gurdjieff expressed it as the fact that any one of your many identities can sign a check or a charge slip all the rest of you is obligated to pay, whether you/they like it or not. How often have we asked ourselves, Why did I ever promise to do such-and-such. The person who asks may well not be the person who promised. 

In the previous chapter we spoke of the pervasiveness of the process of identification. Anything can be given the I quality. This can happen with great strength and almost instantaneously. Gurdjieff put it this way ... 

The pattern of an identity state is fairly suble until some event or events, external or internal, occur which are an important stimulus for some other identity state. Emotions are common triggers of changes in identity states. The usual range of identity states that we function in, ordinarily called personality, was called false personality (which will be discussed in Chapter 15) by Gurdjieff because the identity states were... 

---