Gurdjieff Studies

[draruns...@gmail.com]

What did he teach?

Gurdjieff was a fate-changer, a catalyst to self-initiation. Today his
teaching still offers a supremely practical, streetwise
Existenzphilosophie for independent spirits who cannot quite swallow
society's consensual lies. Perceiving men and women virtually in trance
using only a fraction of their latent powers and forces, his call was
urgent and uncompromising: Awake! Awake from your unsuspected hypnotic
sleep to consciousness and conscience..... Unlike his contemporary,
Heidegger, Gurdjieff translated his massive interest in Being into an
evolutionary psychology. To the purposeful cultivation of I-HERE-NOW
(an unmistakable psychic event sometimes involuntarily tasted in
moments of danger and crisis) Gurdjieff harnessed a subtle,
non-mechanistic methodology centred on mobilised attention and sensory
self-awareness. Abjuring lop-sided genius, he promoted the balanced
development of head, heart and hand.

Like every major ideology or religion, Gurdjieff's System is a complete
and précis-defying critique - nourishingly, if contentiously,
explanatory on three levels: social and cosmic as well as individual.
His key dynamic of "reciprocal feeding" anticipates various Green and
holistic paradigms (Schweitzer's "reverence for life", Vernadsky's
biosphere, and Arne Naess's "deep ecology"). If Gurdjieff's so-to-say
Hubble-telescope-vision or "celestial optics" assigns humanity at large
a chasteningly subordinate and involutionary role, it nevertheless
reserves for a questing minority a radical, survivalist option of
service to Higher Powers.