Giving Up Yourself to Find Yourself?

Giving Up Yourself to Find Yourself?

[The forecast for Thursday has already been posted.]

One tragedy in connection with Gurdjieff, from my viewpoint, is that while he strongly emphasized, taught, and dramatized a particular method in what might be called the "occult tradition" or "spiritual tradition," that method as he used it shows very definitely how wrong all such methods can be. It also shows how effective they can be. 

What is wrong about them? Their subordination of the individual, the chela, student, or learner, to the teacher or Teacher. Gurdjieff did not claim to be G*d or an agent of His, directly, for the tradition within which he worked was not essentially theistic. But even more than most theistic gurus, he taught the utter subordination of the will of the learner to the will of the teacher. After subtly inducting his students into his system (as the spider guiding the flies around the first circuits of the web), for months and months of good teaching (I call it good because it has helped me and a great many others), he gradually tries to take away from them their own will and identity. But, of course, he claims that the purpose of this is to give them their own will and identity.

That, in two sentences, is the essential paradox of the Gurdjieffian system commonly known as The Fourth Way.

I thank Gary Lachman, again, for summarizing much of the teaching in a laudably perspicuous and accurate manner in his book "In Search of P. D. Ouspensky." As I read it it brings back to me my own struggles with the Fourth Way, although I learned it never from Gurdjieff and his writings but from the writings of Ouspensky, which did in fact help me enormously through a very difficult period of my life. I worked with all the techniques Ouspensky taught in his own book entitled The Fourth Way (transcriptions of his talks with disciples in, I believe, mostly London). It is a book I would in fact recommend to anyone struggling with a hard place in his or her life, although as a matter of fact I do not believe it gives anything near to a complete answer to the problems of human living. 

It does have some essence of Gurdjieff's sternness, which apparently most of us need:  We are machines. We are not conscsious. We do not have will. We are acting as automotons and do not "remember ourselves" (a great deal is included in that process of "self-remembering" which I cannot point out in this essay). Ouspensky, at least to my memory, does not take the final leap which, according to Lachman's account, he took with his students in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere: They cannot awaken without a group. (This is common to many occult teachings and teachers, from the Roman Catholic Church--"no salvation outside the church"--to the Sabian Assembly--the seeker must dwell within and work within an invisible fellowship of fellow seekers.) But even more, they cannot awaken without giving themselves over to the teacher of the group. Here is the critical and crucial step which I consider not only extremely questionable but perhaps very wrong (even suicidal, some might say). 

As Lachman puts it: "In order for the group to be effective, it must have a teacher. Unlike the students, the teacher is a man who has woken up [I prefer the term awakened--HHH]. He has escaped from prison, has overcome his mechanicalness, and can lead others out of the trap. But in order to be freed, the pupils must relinquish their will, which in any case is illusory, and submit wholly to the will of the teacher. The first step was to recognize unequivocally their absolute nothingness; until they do they will still feel that they have a right to their own ideas, their own judgments, their own views on how work on themselves should go, in which case nothing can be done for them. 'When a man begins work on himself,' Gufdjieff told them, 'a man must give up his own decisions.' He must no longer think for himself. This will be difficult for a man who has not realized that in submitting to another he loses nothing because in reality he has nothing to lose. He must first realize that, as he is, he does not exist and, as such, should have no fear regarding submitting himself to the will of another." 

A crucial step indeed! I am not sure that Ouspensky, Gurdjieff's most famous pupil, ever took that step himself, and in fact I would have less respect for him if he had. In fact, Lachman's book is in some ways an explication of what happened with Ouspensky both before and after he outwardly broke with Gurdjieff (though he never denounced him) and then, much later, with Gudjieff's "system" itself. But that does not deny the value of some of the preliminary steps in that system. I still believe it very helpful to work with some of them. 

It is complex and I cannot hope to give an explanation or much less a solution of all the difficulties in this piece. I am less than half way through my second reading of Lachman's book. More to come.

Do you have a self? Are you a self? Do you remember yourself every second of the day, or do you become a mechanical semi-conscious entity pushed around by your desires and the forces, individuals, institutions and media around you? Gurdjieff is to be praised, I believe, for asking us these questions.

HHH
Wednesday, March 15, 2017  10:14 PM