The Philosophy of G.I. Gurdjieff
Man is asleep, said Gurdjieff, he has no real consciousness or will. He is not free; to him, everything happens. He can become conscious and find his place as a true individual, but a major transformation is needed to achieve this.
Many of Gurdjieff’s senior pupils taught in England following intensive training at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, in Fontainebleau, near Paris in the 1920’s.
Gurdjieff's writings contain many metaphysical, allegorical and mythological components which provide a wealth of material. Gurdjieff himself called his work 'Objective Science'.
Gurdjieff spent many years travelling the world to bring together ‘fragments’ of an esoteric teaching he knew must have existed in antiquity. He re-assembled parts of this teaching which had been preserved in various schools and monasteries into a suitable form for the Western psyche.
Gurdjieff's System has become known as The Fourth Way - meant to indicate there is a possibility of following a spiritual path in ordinary life, as distinct from the three traditional ways of the Monk, the Yogi, and the Fakir. It is not a philosophy, nor a religion, but a body of knowledge which uses a system of psychology, cosmology, music and movements as a means for transformation. Through these methods, it is possible to get a glimpse of 'who I really am'. This can be a shock - but a necessary step towards what Gurdjieff called 'self-perfecting'.
If you are prepared to see yourself 'as you are', and not as you would 'wish to be' then Gurdjieff's ideas may be of interest. From this 'glimpse of one's true situation' may arise a wish to change - although Gurdjieff makes it clear that no change should be made without 'understanding' - Understanding in this sense has a special meaning:
Understanding = Knowledge + Being
In other words it is not enough to know - one should strive to change one's being as well. This is a difficult concept for the Western mind to grasp since our upbringing and education places great value on knowledge, and little value on being.
Group work can then be extremely useful to facilitate the process of 'becoming more real' through the practices of self-remembering and self-observation. Through this 'practical psychology', one's horizons begin to widen - then a whole new world of possibilities, undreamed of before, begins to be revealed.
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