Access over 20 million homework & study documents

Gurdjieff & Work

Content type
User Generated
Type
Study Guide
Rating
Showing Page:
1/13
Gurdjieff & Work
This essay is an attempt to survey Gurdjieff's central ideas, locate his sources and to
delineate
the main reasons for his "Work", chief methods, as well as to evaluate its place in history
and in
the present.
Gurdjieff's vison of human machine
We will completely omit Gurdjieff's cosmology (a strictly personal combination of
Neopythagorean "vibratory" cosmogony and quasignostic scheme of ever constricting
"worlds"),
and focus on the most important parts of Gurdjieff's (in short, we'll use popular acronym
GIG from now on) psychology. This is necessary because only this will give raison d'etre
for his specific psychospiritual exercises.
GIG can best be described as a blend of operating Theosophist and the protagonist
of Neopythagorean/Rosicrucian-Hermetic doctrines in vogue these times ( turn
of the 19/20th century.)
What the Theosophical movement had been teaching in last two decades of the 19th
century,
GIG, armed with his vitalist temper and adventurous spirit tried to achieve in practice. For
all the
nice talk about India and "Masters", Theosophists remained an influential, but rather
impotent
debate club. GIG yearned for "the right stuff" of superhuman mastery and actualization of
the
"miraculous", a pervasive theme during the fin de siecle.
Bodies
GIG's Theosophical "roots" can be traced in his analysis of a human being:
he divides man (I'll use Biblical chauvinist Yahwespeak) into four "bodies":
1. Carnal or Physical Body
2. Astral/Kesdjan Body (feelings, desires)
3. Mental or Spiritual Body (mind, mental faculty)
4. Divine or Causal Body ( "I" consciousness, will, soul)
From this survey, one can easily extract a few observations:
a) GIG didn't use the bodiless terminology, both East and West
( Atman, Buddha Nature, Spirit, Inner Christ, Ar-Ruh al-Qudsi
(Supreme Spirit), Hsing/Original Nature ). For him, (potentially)
transtemporal and indestructible "spiritual" element in human being
remains equal to (not encased witin) a "higher" body.
b) GIG's vision of human composition is in many respects strangely similar
to Assagioli's Psychosynthesis (10, 11; for both of them, the central attribute
of the innermost self is will). Although, some dubieties remain: looks
like Assagioli has been subtler re the indestructible self: in shallower and
lower levels of disidentification it is a pure witnessing "I". In deeper and
more potent dimensions of its "life" it is Transpersonal or Higher Self- virtually
bodiless Atman or Spirit.
c) like most Theosophists, GIG calls the 4th body soul.

Sign up to view the full document!

lock_open Sign Up
Showing Page:
2/13
It is the soul Gurdjieff's "Work" is all about. But, equally ironic, in his
version of thanatology Gurdjieff (not unequivocally) radically departs both from traditional
wisdom doctrines and Theosophy: if not worked upon sufficiently and not
awakened, even soul is mortal. It is "eaten by the Moon"- probably the
weirdest destiny that has ever befallen the spiritual element in man.
So, in his rather incongruos blend of Theosophy, Neopythagoreanism
Rosicrucianism and Alchemy, even (in a few interpretations, 4) the
inborn spiritual self is doomed to post-mortem extinction in ordinary
human beings.
In order to understand GIG's exercises, we'll address only three more
concepts, leaving the intricate web of other Gurdjieffian speculations untouched.
Essence and Personality
These two crucial concepts can be taken as the central human
polarity: essence is, so to speak (in astrological parlance), the
sum total of individual incarnational/behavioral tendencies one is
usually not aware of, but lives their mechanical life according to
the essence promptings. Essence grows, decays,..but a person is
generally not aware of its processes. It's innate, the mould of one's
personality and the matrix of a human being's conscious life.
With a bit of stretch, the essence could be compared either to temperament, or to Freudian
Id, or at least to a host of rudimentary subconscious quasientities emerging out
of it. We can equate it to the psychoanalytic subconscious
( A short remark: essence is nothing "spiritual"; this term has completely
different connotations in other wisdom doctrines).
Personality is something inauthentic, a sort of fluctuating mask a
human being adopts in dealing with the world (inner and outer).
Essentially, it can be compared to ancient "persona", false series of "I"s or
"acting" spurious self one uncounsciously adopts as optimal (from their
viewpoint) in dealings with the life's challenges.
Succinctly: GIG's insistence on the dichotomy between essence and personality
is just another weapon more in his arsenal stored for attack on "ordinary man's" hypnotized,
sleepy and inauthentic existence. Both building blocks of human being are just
raw, mechanical matrices of human bondage. Polarity between "carnal" and "spiritual" is
alien to
Gurdjieff "Work". There is no "struggle for one's soul" (conventionally speaking)
one encounters in all monotheistic traditions.True, he frequently plays with these concepts,
but,
evidently, his "God" is more akin to the deistic Enlightenment Deity not intersted in human
affairs; it's some weird and concocted mechanical laws (not more convincing than one
can encounter in the Jain cosmology, bending under inflatio numeri gone berserk) operate
on
both inner and outer worlds (something like the Newtonian paradigm pushed to the extreme
and utterly improbable conclusions.)
Both concepts are fundamental to Gurdjieff "Work" and integrated with the
rest of his psychology: for instance, crucial GIG's elements of human transformation,
centres,
are frequently described as "being contained in essence".

Sign up to view the full document!

lock_open Sign Up
Showing Page:
3/13

Sign up to view the full document!

lock_open Sign Up
End of Preview - Want to read all 13 pages?
Access Now
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Gurdjieff & Work This essay is an attempt to survey Gurdjieff's central ideas, locate his sources and to delineate the main reasons for his "Work", chief methods, as well as to evaluate its place in history and in the present. Gurdjieff's vison of human machine We will completely omit Gurdjieff's cosmology (a strictly personal combination of Neopythagorean "vibratory" cosmogony and quasignostic scheme of ever constricting "worlds"), and focus on the most important parts of Gurdjieff's (in short, we'll use popular acronym GIG from now on) psychology. This is necessary because only this will give raison d'etre for his specific psychospiritual exercises. GIG can best be described as a blend of operating Theosophist and the protagonist of Neopythagorean/Rosicrucian-Hermetic doctrines in vogue these times ( turn of the 19/20th century.) What the Theosophical movement had been teaching in last two decades of the 19th century, GIG, armed with his vitalist temper and adventurous spirit tried to achieve in practice. For all the nice talk about India and "Masters", Theosophists remained an influential, but rather impotent debate club. GIG yearned for "the right stuff" of superhuman mastery and actualization of the "miraculous", a pervasive theme during the fin de siecle. Bodies GIG's Theosophical "roots" can be traced in his analysis of a human being: he divides man (I'll use Biblical chauvinist Yahwespeak) into four "bodies": 1. Carnal or Physical Body 2. Astral/Kesdjan Body (feeli ...
Purchase document to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Anonymous
Very useful material for studying!

Studypool
4.7
Trustpilot
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4