Transmission, Tradition, and Integrity: Gurdjieffian Scholarship as Third Force

The scholarly interest increasingly being directed toward G. I. Gurdjieff by the academic community, while unaccustomed and even somewhat jarring to traditional Work notions of transmission, has the potential to bring important new energy to the teaching as well as a significantly enhanced influence. But navigating this new terrain will require adaptability and patience, since the values by which each group constructs itself (and the underlying epistemology on which these values rest) can at times go sharply crosswise, offering initially incompatible visions of human purpose and the verification of knowledge. By whose rules will the conversation unfold? 

We are speaking in this third conference panel about “The Value and Values of the Work.” Scholarship, of course, comes with its well-honed set of values. Among these are open accessibility to materials, rigorous critical discernment, and objective verification by a community of qualified peers. These are the foundational tools of “objective knowledge” as we usually understand that term in the Western intellectual tradition.

The values most prized, and carefully honed, in the Work largely constellate around the cultivation of Being (for which I would offer as a shorthand definition “an increase in the quality and quantity of human consciousness, conscience, and presence.”).  Being and knowledge are not the same thing in the Gurdjieff teaching. Knowledge is the product of only one center of intelligence, the intellectual center. Being requires the full, harmonious engagement of three centers of intelligence (the other two being the emotional and moving centers). Only when all three centers are online and consciously connected can a state of being be said to exist, and only in a state of being can anything remotely approaching real knowledge be apprehended. In the Gurdjieff Work, knowledge in its ordinary meaning is a valid but limited tool. Knowledge can be subsumed by being but being can never be subsumed by knowledge. 

The midwifing of authentically three-centered human beings capable of objective knowledge in the full Gurdjieffian sense of the word (informed by a genuine impartiality, an awakened conscience, and a growing transparency to meaning emerging from realms higher than our own) is the overarching aim of the Work. The training required for the realization of this aim is rigorous, individual, and labor-intensive. When it succeeds, it can indeed produce extraordinary human beings. When it runs off the rails, it can wind up in arrogance, preciosity, and a habitual inwardness (both individual and within the larger group) that can all too easily cross the line into solipsism. 

From the beginning, the Work has had to navigate the tension between its three cardinal aspirations: the first, to transmit to the world a radically new vision of human purpose and cosmic responsibility; the second, to help people grow their being sufficiently that they are able to actually live this vision; and the third, to safeguard the purity of the teaching itself and the accuracy of its transmission. What kind of organizational structure will best deliver the goods? This has been the underlying challenge for the Work from the very start, and it should come as no surprise to find that question resurfacing powerfully again in our own times— even in the midst of this conference, where it comprises the unstated question that all four panels are to some degree dancing around. 

To my mind, the most creative starting point for a reconsideration of the somewhat prickly topic of the legitimate transmission of the Work might be to acknowledge point blank that the Work has always been an experiment in progress. Its enduring strength has never resided in its outer forms (which have been constantly morphing from the start) but in an intrinsic inner intelligence that has allowed it to shapeshift quickly to meet the changing circumstances in which it finds itself. This quality, sometimes referred to as mêtis¹ or “shrewdness,” is a direct legacy from its founder, G. I. Gurdjieff, and is the Work’s most powerful, though typically underplayed, hand. Let’s take a brief historical review. 

From the start Gurdjieff seems to have consciously accepted the terms on which the esoteric knowledge entrusted to  him was being offered: that he would be conscripted as “Apostle to the West,” charged with   bringing this teaching to a culture alien to his own, in a language (or languages) not his own, against the backdrop of a world being wrenched   apart by the death of the old order and the torturous first expressions of a new one. Barely had he established his teaching presence in Russia when the outbreak of World War I (followed hard on its heels by the Bolshevik revolution) displaced him and his small band of followers relentlessly westward: to Essentuki, Tbilisi, Constantinople, Berlin, and ultimately to Paris where they finally set down anchor. For the entire three-and-a-half decades of his “apostolic” commission he was essentially a stranger in a strange land, the poignancy of his mission quintessentially captured in that haunting line from Psalm 137: “How do we sing the song of the Lord here in this land of exile?” How indeed? What was needed in this moment? How about the next? The experimental gene is seeded into the very genesis of the Work. It is important not to forget this. The Work did not begin in sequestered drawing rooms. It began on white-knuckle train rides through war zones, in makeshift refugee camps, in a daring escape through the Caucasus Mountains, in the midst of an international pandemic. That is the experimental, in your face, white knuckle stuff out of which the Work is fashioned. ²

Gurdjieff’s first sustained experiment at the Prieuré formally launched the model that would eventually become the gold standard in Work culture—a sequestered group setting supporting an intense, communally lived integrative practice. The format palpably delivered the goods, and the people who emerged from that trial-by-fire indeed acquired a now legendary force of being. But after a scant two years, Gurdjieff essentially abandoned that model in search of less labor-intensive and potentially more impactful ways of getting the word out. He emerged from an anguishing season reappraisal (precipitated by his own near-fatal car accident in 1924) with a renewed commitment to his original “apostolic” mandate. Writing became the new vehicle of choice, its crowning gem, of course, his monumental chef-d’oeuvre, Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson. While his penchant for “mercilessly destroying the mentation and feelings of the reader, his beliefs and views about everything” ³ did not (and still does not) make for an easy starting gate for those a bit too comfortably ensconced in “the bon ton literary language” of his day or our own, I believe nonetheless that Gurdjieff’s ultimate intention was to communicate more than to ridicule. His hope was always that those “with eyes to see and ears to hear” might forge their way through the sea of intellectual wiseacring in which Western culture always seems to be drowning, to the straight and narrow gate of authentic understanding.  

In the years immediately following Gurdjieff’s death in 1949, struggling inwardly to regroup under the new leadership of Jeanne de Salzmann and outwardly to protect itself against an influential sector of critics all too eager to dismiss the teaching as a cult, the newly formed Gurdjieff Foundation kept its head down and adopted an intentionally more hidden way of doing business. For the next several decades, the Work (at least among its Foundation groups and generally more widely) did not publicly advertise its presence, preferring to veil itself behind compatible presenting storefronts (most notably “myth and tradition”)⁴  and behind high-sounding humanitarian titles that explicitly avoided any mention of Gurdjieff  (such as “The Society for Study and Research toward Knowledge of Man”). Intentionally screening itself from both academic and religious scrutiny, it gravitated toward a much more Prieuré-like format, where behind the walls of its enclosure it could devote itself full-time to a remarkably subtle cultivation of being. When forays into the outer world were made (and many in the Work were and still are accomplished scholars, artists, and cultural creatives), artful dissembling became a skill highly prized. It was a faux pas to mention Gurdjieff’s name directly; the teaching was rather to be insinuated through subtle allusion and what we would today call “dog whistles.” A celebrated example of this veiled presentational style is Jacob Needleman’s iconic book Lost Christianity (1980).⁵ While the book is clearly a straight-up exposition of foundational Gurdjieffian teachings on attention and presence, and while its protagonist “Father Sylvan” is widely known to have been closely modelled on Needleman’s own teacher, Lord Pentland, the Gurdjieff Work itself is never directly acknowledged in the text. Not until the very end of his life, when the intellectual currents of the times had clearly shifted out from under him, would Needleman publicly acknowledge his longtime involvement in the Work. It was simply not the style of his era.

But the ground has indeed shifted, and in our own times there is little doubt that the Gurdjieff teaching is on the public ascendancy again. Despite or even because of the deliberately traditional transmission practices employed by most authorized Work lineages, the teaching itself has increasingly jumped ship into the popular mainstream, where a predictably reductionistic version of itself is gaining ground rapidly within a new, cultural matrix much more hospitable to its basic premises. The biggest single driver of this Gurdjieffian revival has been the widely popular “Enneagram of Personality” movement, but other significant influences include the continuing growth of interreligious dialogue, as well as contemporary mindfulness and integral evolutionary movements. Collectively, they bring Gurdjieff’s once-radical notion of conscious evolution much more into alignment with contemporary spiritual and scientific reference points. There they are meeting a hungry and appreciative audience. The times have finally caught up with Gurdjieff’s original precocious insights; perhaps they were aimed for our times all along.  

The question, of course, is how to encourage and guide this grassroots reawakening without losing that precious quality of subtle being so profoundly cultivated in Work circles over the past seven decades and so fundamental for a fuller comprehension of the teaching? Can the teaching in fact be passed on at all under conditions more public and primitive (think: the internet, Zoom . . . ) than the requisite baseline established under the legacy curatorship of the Foundation groups?   If so, what are the new protocols? And where are the lines of accountability?

By way of a bit of wider perspective, in Buddhist teaching considerable store is placed on the preliminary task of establishing a “right view.” A right view essentially bridges the gap between “knowledge” and “being.” It is not in and of itself the sort of three-centered being knowing so highly prized in the Work; it is aimed directly at the intellectual center. But it at least brings an expansive and correctly aligned metaphysical framework in which pieces can begin to be put together with spiritual integrity and moral force. I believe that the leading edge of the Gurdjieff teaching has always been—and still wants to be—the breathtaking force of “right view” that it brings. It simply puts together pieces found nowhere else to create a “big picture” in which people can find their way to personal understanding and collective right action. From my own (somewhat controversial) bridging experiments over these past three decades, I know very clearly that there are ideas in the Work expressed in no other body of teaching that are crucially necessary puzzle pieces for even non-transformed seekers seeking to pull themselves out of metaphysical cul de sac in which our present culture has stranded them. Top three among these puzzle pieces are the Law of Three, the Law of Seven, and the principle of reciprocal exchange between the realms. Without ornamentation, without further unpacking, even partially understood, these ideas change lives, change game plans, and are gulped down gratefully like water in a desert. They could change the course of our planet once again, even at the eleventh hour. It is an unpardonable failure of mêtis to oppose their wider dissemination.  

Throughout this transition time, as the Work struggles to shapeshift yet again, accepting the necessity of creating a wider onramp to the teaching in full recognition of the risks that this poses, academic scholarship is well poised to contribute what it has always contributed so well: open access, rigorous critical discernment, and objective validation within a community of qualified peers. And this role, while very different from that played by traditional formation groups, needs to be gratefully acknowledged and encouraged. In Gurdjieffian terminology, it offers itself as a potential “holy reconciling,” mediating between the “holy affirming” of the lively but often undiscriminating popular reawakening, and the “holy denying” of the finely honed but intrinsically conservative stewardship of the Gurdjieff transmission as it has manifested itself to date. The ultimate New Arising may be the Work itself, reinvigorated and reinvigorating, in an era where its presence has never been more crucial.