Gurdjieff #3Written by Robert Bruce Baird
Division of Attention. Gurdjieff encouraged his students to cultivate ability to divide their attention, that is, ability to remain fully focussed on two or more things at same time. One might, for instance, let half of one's attention dwell in one's little finger, while other half is devoted to an intellectual discussion. In division of attention, it is not a matter of going back and forth between one thing and another, but experiencing them both fully simultaneously. Beyond division of attention lies "remembering oneself" - a frame of mind, permanent in hypothetical perfected person, fleeting and temporary in rest of us, in which we see what is seen without ever losing sight of ourselves seeing. Ordinarily, when concentrating on something, we lose our sense of "I," although we may as it were passively react to stimulus we are concentrating on. In self-remembering "I" is not lost, and only when we maintain that sense of "I," according to Gurdjieff, are we really awake. Like mastery on a musical instrument, such forms of heightened self-awareness can be developed only with years of practice. Hands, Head, and Heart. With many variations and complications over years, Gurdjieff's theoretical picture of human organism boils down to a tripartite model consisting of three "centers": moving, emotional, and thinking. Becoming a genuine person involves coordinating three centers and becoming capable of conscious labor and intentional suffering. Abstract Symbolism. Gurdjieff was fond of elaborate theorizing - construction of intricate symbolic systems embodying or representing relationships between phenomena at all levels of existence from atom to universe. Ouspensky devotes pages and pages to Gurdjieff's concept of "octaves" {Thus one must study Pythagorean connection with Abaris Druid.}- musical scale do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do taken as a sort of universal yardstick for determining measurements and proportions of all of nature's parts. (The theory of octaves had a tremendous impact on pianist Keith Jarrett, who read about them in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff's longest, most allegorical, and most difficult book.) Some Gurdjieff students and groups gloss over octaves or dispense with them entirely. My own feeling is that theory of octaves has a lot in common with medieval Western musical theorists' preoccupation with theo-numerological speculation based on interval integer ratios and their symbolic significance. In point of fact, Gurdjieff had studied medieval alchemists and on occasion was prone to speak of human organism as a sort of alchemical factory for transformation of various material and psychic substances. It seems that where there is music, and where there are people who philosophize about it, there will be some form of numerology and arcane quasi-mathematics. Since both musical pitch and musical rhythm are readily represented in numerical forms, urge to find primal mathematical significance in music is almost impossible to resist. A contemporary example of this perennially seductive train of thought is Peter Michael Hamel's book Through Music to Self. Another symbolic thought-form Gurdjieff worked with was enneagram, a circle with nine points around its circumference. Said Gurdjieff, ‘The enneagram is a universal symbol. All knowledge can be included in enneagram and with help of enneagram it can be interpreted ... A man may be quite alone in desert and he can trace enneagram in sand and in it read eternal laws of universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before.’ {The fabulously successful book The Celestine Prophecy uses knowledge of Enneagram and takes people to point of Enlightenment which can include dematerialization.} Through elaboration of law of octaves and meaning of enneagram, Gurdjieff offered his students alternative means of conceptualizing world and their place in it. When I say "alternative," I am suggesting that Gurdjieff sought alternatives to rational, linear, language-oriented exposition and rhetoric (though he was by all accounts also a spellbinding speaker). In other words, Gurdjieff's ideas could be only partially expounded in ordinary words and sentences; to go beyond language he drew on music (he played several instruments and Bennett tells of him improvising unearthly melodies on a small organ late at night), dance, and visual symbols such as enneagram. Furthermore, it is my impression that Gurdjieff was happy to talk theoretically with students who were theoretically inclined, but that theory itself is not an indispensable part of his overall teaching. Or, to put it slightly differently, Gurdjieff used, for instance, complicated machinery of law of octaves in order to teach his students to think. And in some respects process of thinking was more important than theoretical content of what was thought.
| | Gurdjieff #2Written by Robert Bruce Baird
Fripp in his teaching does not speculate on afterlife, but he shares Gurdjieff/Ouspensky insistence on man in his normal state as a dozy automaton. It is a paradoxical doctrine, echoed through ages in many teachings, including Calvinist doctrine of predestination: we have no free will, development of one's freedom can begin only with a clear-headed recognition of one's absolute slavery to circumstance, mental associations, emotion, instinct, genetics, biochemistry, laws of nature. Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff as saying, ‘Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all ... The struggle with small habits is very difficult and boring, but without it self-observation is impossible.’ From Fripp's Guitar Craft Monograph III: Aphorisms: ‘It is difficult to exaggerate power of habit.’ The Danish philosopher and religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), regarded as fountainhead of twentieth-century secular and religious existentialism, maintained that average person, going about his or her daily routines automatically, is as incapable of sin as he or she is of repentance. Kierkegaard, who spent his life as a writer championing conscious subjectivity as sine qua non of authentic existence, and who wanted words "The Individual" inscribed on his tombstone, was wont to find, as was Gurdjieff, confirmation of his own views in words of Socrates: "Know thyself." Gurdjieff put it like this: ‘Individuality, a single and permanent I, consciousness, will, ability to do, a state of inner freedom, all these are qualities which ordinary man does not possess. To same category belongs idea of good and evil, very existence of which is connected with a permanent aim, with a permanent direction and a permanent center of gravity ... Permanent truth and permanent falsehood can exist only for a permanent man. If a man himself continually changes, then for him truth and falsehood will also continually change.’ Sometimes Gurdjieff would refer to his methods as "Fourth Way." The first three ways were way of fakir, way of monk, and way of yogi. The fakir struggles with physical body, devoting himself to mastering incredibly difficult physical exercises and postures {Which will be like Mudras and Mutras in impact of brain lobes. I have used this to help restore mentally ill.}. The way of monk represents way of faith, cultivation of religious feelings, and self-sacrifice. The yogi's approach is through knowledge and mind. Gurdjieff said of his Fourth Way that it combined work simultaneously on body, emotions, and mind, and that it could be followed by ordinary people in everyday life - that it required no retirement into desert. The Fourth Way did involve whole-hearted acceptance of certain conditions imposed by a teacher; it also involved supreme effort to devote oneself continuously to inner work, even though one's outward worldly roles might not change that much. In spite of his insistence that work without a teacher was impossible, Gurdjieff stressed each individual's responsibility: The fourth way differs from other ways in that principal demand made upon a man is demand for understanding. A man must do nothing that he does not understand, except as an experiment under supervision and direction of his teacher. The more a man understands what he is doing, greater will be results of his efforts. This is a fundamental principle of fourth way. The results of work are in proportion to consciousness of work. No "faith" is required on fourth way; on contrary, faith of any kind is opposed to fourth way. On fourth way a man must satisfy himself of truth of what he is told. And until he is satisfied he must do nothing. In 1988 pamphlet "An Introduction to Guitar Craft," Fripp, who has explicitly called himself a follower of Fourth Way, wrote, ‘In Guitar Craft there is nothing compulsory. One is not asked to violate cherished beliefs or accept any of ideas presented. Rather, a healthy skepticism is encouraged.’ By its very nature, Fourth Way is not for everyone. Knowledge is not deliberately hidden, Gurdjieff would say, but most people simply are not interested. The former leader of a Gurdjieff group in Boston, Meggan Moorehead, told me of Gurdjieff's "five of twenty of twenty." Only twenty per cent of all people ever think seriously about higher realities; of these, only twenty per cent ever decide to do anything about it; and of these, only five per cent ever actually get anywhere.
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