Gurdjieff & Work

A critical survey essay attempting to map Gurdjieff's central ideas, trace their sources, describe the chief methods of his 'Work,' and assess its place in history and in the present. Setting aside the cosmology as a personal blend of Neopythagorean vibratory cosmogony and quasi-Gnostic descending worlds, the author concentrates on the psychology, since that is what gives the practical exercises their rationale. Gurdjieff is characterized as an operating Theosophist crossed with a proponent of the Rosicrucian-Hermetic doctrines fashionable at the turn of the twentieth century — someone who tried to achieve in practice what the Theosophical movement had only discussed. The essay works through the four bodies (physical, astral/Kesdjan, mental, and causal or 'divine'), noting Gurdjieff's departure from both traditional wisdom teachings and Theosophy in holding that an unawakened soul is mortal and may be 'eaten by the Moon'; the polarity of essence and personality, compared to temperament and to the psychoanalytic unconscious; and the division of man into three stories with their respective centers, including the dormant higher intellectual and higher emotional centers. Throughout, the tone is analytical and skeptical rather than devotional: the author presses questions Gurdjieffians tend not to ask — notably where the centers are actually supposed to reside, and how work on lower centers could affect the soul if no energetic connection between them is specified — and draws comparisons to Assagioli's psychosynthesis and to Eastern and Western formulations of the indestructible self.