by Colin Wilson
There is another power, immortal too, proceeding from the Spirit.... Aye, in this power is such poignant joy, such vehement, immoderate delight as none can tell. ... I say, moreover, if once a man in intellectual vision did really glimpse the bliss and joy therein, then all his sufferings would be a trifle, a mere nothing... 13
It was this “fiery joy’ that Seuse set out to capture.
The value of such extremes, of course, lies in the vitality of the Will behind them; if they were undertaken merely as a penance, a deliberate burden, they might be useless or even harmful. It is the Will that matters.
The argument of this book has come almost its full circle. It is not my aim to propound a complete and infallible solution to ‘the Outsider’s problems’, but only to point out that traditional solutions, or attempts at solutions, do exist. Before we turn to T. E. Hulme and his prediction of ‘the end of humanism’, there is one more modern attempt at a solution which is far too important to exclude from a study in the Outsider’s problems. This is the ‘system’ of that strange man of genius, George Gurdjieff.
Gurdjieff died comparatively recently, in 1950, at about the age of seventy (his exact age was not known). He had spent some forty years of his life teaching his ‘system’ to his pupils. Our knowledge of Gurdjieff is not very great; we know he was a Caucasian Greek, who did most of his teaching in Moscow and Petersburg, and later in Europe and America. Of Gurdjieff’s major exposition of his system, All and Everything, only the first part has to date been printed in England; this is over twelve hundred pages long, and it is hardly unfair to its author to say that it is almost unreadable—hardly unfair since it seems to have been a part of his aim to make sure that no dilettante could dip into it and then claim to ‘understand Gurdjieff; his efforts to achieve this effect have made the first volume rather less comprehensible than Finnegans Wake.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, Gurdjieff would say), there are simpler expositions of his philosophy; there is the absorbing introduction by Kenneth Walker, Venture With Ideas, and the brilliant exposition by GurdjiefPs chief follower, P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, which tells the story of Ouspensky’s period as Gurdjieff ‘s pupil; Gurdjieff played Socrates to Ouspensky’s Plato.
GurdjiefPs system can be regarded as the complete, ideal Existenzphilosophie. It is not interested in ideas for their own sake, but only in results. Therefore, the ‘system’ itself consists of various disciplines and exercises, which, at the moment, are only known to Gurdjieff’s pupils and followers. It is only with some of the ‘theoretical’ part of the ‘system’ that we are concerned here.
Gurdjieff ‘s starting-point is the completely deluded state of man; man, he claims, is so completely embalmed and enmeshed in delusions that he cannot even be considered as a living being; he can only be regarded as a machine. He has, in other words, absolutely no free-will.
This seems to be no more than the blackest pessimism, but this is not the whole. Having emphasized that men are virtually asleep, mere sleep-walkers without real consciousness, he goes on to state that man can attain a degree of freedom and ‘awakening’ : but the first step in attaining ‘freedom’ is to recognize that you are not free. Since we have spent some nine chapters listening to Outsiders emphasizing just this fact, this should present no difficulties to us. A part of Gurdjieff ‘s system is a method of observing oneself and other people, and recognizing how many actions are habitual, mechanical.
One of the most interesting points in Gurdjieff ‘s system, from our point of view, is his exposition of ‘three ways’, the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, the way of the yogi. For these are the three ways we established in Chapter IV: discipline over the body, the emotions, the mind. But what is most interesting is that Gurdjieff claims that his system is a fourth way which involves all the other three. Gurdjieff ‘s ‘school’ in the South of France was called The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’, harmonious development of the three parts. Obviously, Gurdjieff ‘s system and the Outsider have the same aim.
In my own copy of Ouspensky’s book, I have gone through the Contents list, labelling various chapters ‘philosophical’ or ‘psychological’. The ‘philosophical’ parts may or may not be ‘true’; it is impossible to say. Such a statement, for instance, as that the moon is a younger earth, and the earth a younger sun, and that the planetary bodies are living beings, just as we are, can be taken with a pinch of salt or not, according to the reader’s inclination. But there can be no doubt whatever about Gurdjieff ‘s astounding penetration as a psychologist; and it is here that he touches the field of this book.
Gurdjieff teaches that there are four possible states of consciousness. The first is ordinary sleep. The second is the condition in which the ordinary bourgeois spends his life, the state which is called—ironically, Gurdjieff thinks—’waking consciousness’. The third state is called ‘self-remembering’ (which we shall define in a moment), the fourth, ‘objective consciousness’.
From our point of view, ‘self-remembering’ is the most important state. We have seen in the course of this study many Outsiders experiencing this state. Perhaps the best example is Steppenwolf in bed with Maria; Yeats in the ‘crowded London shop’ is another.
Ouspensky explains ‘self-remembering’ with great clarity. Normally, when you are looking at some physical object, the attention points outwards, as it were, from you to the object. When you become absorbed in some thought or memory, the attention points inwards. Now sometimes, very occasionally, the attention points both outwards and inwards at the same time, and these are moments when you say, ‘What /, really here?’: an intense consciousness of yourself and your surroundings. (A fine example in literature is Olenin’s first sight of the mountains in Tolstoy’s Cossacks, a moment of complete self-remembering.) Ouspensky says: ‘Moments of self-remembering came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people, while travelling for instance... or in very emotional moments, moments of danger, etc’
Self-remembering can be produced by a deliberate discipline, but it is very difficult. Try, as an experiment, looking at your watch, and then, while your attention is concentrated on seeing the time, try to become aware of yourself looking at the watch. A moment will come during which you are aware of both the watch and yourself, but it will not last more than a few seconds. You will either become aware only of yourself looking, or only of the dial of the watch. That moment of self-awareness, looking at the watch and at yourself, is Gurdjieff’s third state. (And, of course, people who are incorrigible self-dramatizers, like the young Nietzsche, are only trying to get themselves ‘outside’ the situation, and to see themselves in the situation objectively.) To express it in the Outsider’s way: we identify ourselves with our personalities; our identities are like the pane of a window against which we are pressed so tightly that we cannot feel our separateness from it. Self-remembering is like standing back, so you can see ‘yourself (the window-pane) and the outside world, distinct from ‘y°u’- Ouspensky relates how deliberate exercises in self-remembering produced strange intensities of feeling. Obviously, he had found one solution that the Outsider has overlooked.*
* PAGE NOTE: ‘I was once walking along the Liteiny towards the Nevsky, and in spite of all my efforts, I was unable to keep my attention on self-remembering. The noise, movement, everything distracted me. Every minute I lost the thread of attention, found it again, and then lost it again. At last, I felt a kind of ridiculous irritation with myself, and I turned into the street on the left, having determined to keep my attention on the fact that / would remember myself at least for some time, at any rate until I reached the following street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya without losing the thread of attention, except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned towards the Nevsky still remembering myself, and was already beginning to experience the strange emotional stale of inner peace and confidence which comes after great efforts of this kind. [My italics.] Just round the corner, on the N
evsky, was a tobacconist’s shop where they made my cigarettes. Still remembering myself, I thought I would call there and order some cigarettes.
‘Two hours later, I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by carriage to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep.
‘At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my flat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. ... On the way, while driving along the Tavricheskaya, I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself (Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, p. 120.)
Gurdjieff also points out that man wastes an appalling amount of energy in what he calls ‘negative emotion’, like fear, disgust, anger, and so on. These emotions, he claims, are completely unnecessary to the economy of the human machine, and are as wasteful as tossing a match into a heap of gun-powder. Negative emotion is just an accident that sabotages the human energy-factory.
Man also has various ‘centres’: an emotional centre, a ‘moving’ centre (which does all the work connected with the body’s movements) an intellectual centre and an instinctive centre. He also has a sexual centre, and two higher centres of which he knows almost nothing, since they work deep in the unconscious mind (although mere glimpses of these centres have been the ‘visions’ of saints). Man tends to mix up all the centres, and to use the energy intended for the moving centre on emotions, or that of the emotional centre on intellect, or that of the instinctive centre on sex; and, apparently, all the centres tend to steal the energy of the sexual centre, and give it in return a type of energy that is practically of no use to it (‘It is a very great thing when the sexual centre works with its own energy,’ Gurdjieff told Ouspensky). An important part of Gurdjieff’s system is his method for observing the centres, and recognizing what should be the distinctive work of each.
But the main difficulty which the system must combat is man’s tendency to sleep, to do things mechanically. The world has no meaning for us because we do all things mechanically. One day we are inspired by some poem or piece of music or picture, and the whole world is suddenly ten times as real, as meaningful, for us. The next day we re-read the poem, or hear the music again, and we have got used to it and hear it ‘mechanically’. But other actions in everyday life are best done mechanically. I can type this page at a reasonable speed because the work has been taken over from my intellectual centre (which did all the work of learning to type) to my moving centre, which does it far more efficiently. If all the centres did their own work there would be no waste of energy, and maximum intensity of consciousness could be achieved.
The final ‘maximum intensity’ would be the limit of man’s possible evolution {q.v. Ouspensky’s slim volume, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution). In its aim (higher consciousness) and the primacy it gives to the concept of evolution, Gurdjieff’s philosophy has obvious features in common with Shaw’s, the difference being that Shaw sets no limit to possible development: ‘As to what may he beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond’. One day ‘ages yet’, pure mind ‘might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters’. This is T. E. Lawrence, and it is pure Shavian-ism, but it is not Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff deliberately limits the aim: the first step is to break the sleep of hypnosis under which all men live. He has a parable to illustrate it:
There is an Eastern tale that speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where the sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines and so on, and above all, they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and their skins, and this they did not like.
At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them, first of all, that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned; that on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place, he suggested that if anything at all were going to happen to them, it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further, the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to some that they were eagles, to some that they were men, to others that they were magicians.
After this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again, but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins. This tale is a very good illustration of man’s position.14
And in an earlier passage, Gurdjieff speaks with the authentic accents of mystical religion:
[Man] is attached to everything in his life; attached to his imagination, attached to his stupidity, attached even to his suffering—possibly to his suffering more than anything else.
He must free himself from attachment. Attachment to things, identification with things keeps alive a thousand Ts’ in a man. These Ts5 must die in order that the big I may be born. But how can they be made to die?... It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one’s complete and absolute helplessness. ... So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself.15
And again:
One must die all at once and forever…
St. John of the Cross expresses it:
Vivo sin vivir en mi
Y de tal manera espero
Que muero porque no muero.
I live, but there’s no life in me
And in such a hopeful way
I die because I do not die.16
In All and Everything, Gurdjieff explains man’s bondage in a slightly more complex way, but it is significant for us because it is obviously an attempt to recreate a legend of Original Sin. He explains that some cosmic catastrophe knocked two pieces off the earth, which became two satellites, the moon and another smaller moon which men have forgotten (although it still exists). These two moons, as part of the parent body, had to be sustained by ‘food’ sent from the earth (I have mentioned that Gurdjieff considers the heavenly bodies to be alive), and this ‘food’ is a sort of cosmic ray manufactured by human beings. In other words, the only purpose of human beings is to manufacture ‘food’ for the moon.
But human beings were, not unnaturally, irritated by this completely subject-role they were expected to play in the solar system. As they began to develop ‘objective reason* (Gurdjieff ‘s fourth state of consciousness), their chafing became a danger to the existence of the moon. A special commission of archangels decided to put a stop to the development of objective reason. So they implanted in man an organ, called Kundabujfer, whose special function was to make men perceive fantasy as actuality. And from that day onward men have been enmeshed in their own dreams, and admirably serve their function of providing food for the moon. Unfortunately, their inability to see things objectively is leading them to self-destruction at an appalling pace. It is necessary for at least a few men to develop a new type of consciousness, to develop it slowly, painfully, instinctively, without understanding what is happening to him. Would not such a man be a complete Outsider ?
They are all asleep. This is the point to which Gurdjieff returns again and again. They m
ust be made to feel the urgency of the need to wake up. And after the legend of the magician, to call the mass of contented bourgeois ‘sheep’ has a new and terrible significance. At the end of All and Everything, the grandson of the ‘all-wise Beelzebub’ (Gurdjieff’s mouthpiece) asks whether it is still possible to save mankind and ‘direct them to the becoming path’. Beelzebub answers: The sole means of saving the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ ... like Kundabuffer… of such properties that everyone should sense … the inevitability of his own death, as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rest.’17
It is again the religious injunction: Remember thy last thingsBut we can see now just how irrelevant is the idea of ‘an allegorical abode where existence hath never come’. It is existence that counts. Man must live more; he must be more. And for this, he must be endlessly conscious of the principle of limitation. There is a definite time, a definite term, for everything,’ Gurdjieff told Ouspensky. ‘Possibilities for everything exist only for a definite time.’