As our trust in this brother, Father Giovanni—which was the name we called him when we learned that he had once been a Catholic priest and had been called Giovanni in his own country —was growing all the time, we considered it necessary to tell him who we really were and why we were disguised.
Listening to us with great understanding and clearly wishing to encourage us in our strivings, he thought for a few moments and then, with a kindly, unforgettable smile, said:
‘Very well then ... in the hope that the results of your search will benefit my compatriots also, I will do everything I can to assist you to attain the aim you have set yourselves.’
The fulfilment of this promise of his began by his obtaining that same day, from the proper source, permission for us to stay at their monastery until we should become clear about our plans and decide what to do next in these regions and how. On the following day we moved into the living-quarters of the monastery and, first of all, took a good rest, which we really needed after so many months of tense life.
We lived there as we wished, and went everywhere in the monastery freely, except in one building where the chief sheik lived and to which were admitted each evening only those adepts who had attained preliminary liberation.
With Father Giovanni we went almost every day to the place where we had sat together the first time we came to the monastery, and there had long talks with him.
During these talks Father Giovanni told us a great deal about the inner life of the brethren there and about the principles of daily existence connected with this inner life; and once, speaking of the numerous brotherhoods organized many centuries ago in Asia, he explained to us a little more in detail about this World Brotherhood, which any man could enter, irrespective of the religion to which he had formerly belonged.
As we later ascertained, among the adepts of this monastery there were former Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Lamaists, and even one Shamanist. All were united by God the Truth.
All the brethren of this monastery lived together in such amity that, in spite of the specific traits and properties of the representatives of the different religions, Professor Skridlov and I could never tell to which religion this or that brother had formerly belonged.
Father Giovanni said much to us also about faith and about the aim of all these various brotherhoods. He spoke so well, so clearly and so convincingly about truth, faith and the possibility of transmuting faith in oneself, that once Professor Skridlov, deeply stirred, could not contain himself and exclaimed in astonishment:
‘Father Giovanni! I cannot understand how you can calmly stay here instead of returning to Europe, at least to your own country Italy, to give the people there if only a thousandth part of this all-penetrating faith which you are now inspiring in me.’
‘Eh! my dear Professor,’ replied Father Giovanni, ‘it is evident that you do not understand man’s psyche as well as you understand archaeology.
‘Faith cannot be given to man. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment of height, breadth, thickness, form and weight, or from the perception of anything by sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste, but from understanding.
‘Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced.
‘For example, if my own beloved brother were to come to me here at this moment and urgently entreat me to give him merely a tenth part of my understanding, and if I myself wished with my whole being to do so, yet I could not, in spite of my most ardent desire, give him even the thousandth part of this understanding, as he has neither the knowledge nor the experience which I have quite accidentally acquired and lived through in my life.
‘No, Professor, it is a hundred times easier, as it is said in the Gospels, “for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” than for anyone to give to another the understanding formed in him about anything whatsoever.
‘I formerly also thought as you do and even chose the activity of a missionary in order to teach everyone faith in Christ. I wanted to make everyone as happy as I myself felt from faith in the teachings of Jesus Christ. But to wish to do that by, so to say, grafting faith on by words is just like wishing to fill someone with bread merely by looking at him.
‘Understanding is acquired, as I have already said, from the totality of information intentionally learned and from personal experiencings; whereas knowledge is only the automatic remembrance of words in a certain sequence.
‘Not only is it impossible, even with all one’s desire, to give to another one’s own inner understanding, formed in the course of life from the said factors, but also, as I recently established with certain other brothers of our monastery, there exists a law that the quality of what is perceived by anyone when another person tells him something, either for his knowledge or his understanding, depends on the quality of the data formed in the person speaking.
‘To help you understand what I have just said, I will cite as an example the fact which aroused in us the desire to make investigations and led us to the discovery of this law.
‘I must tell you that in our brotherhood there are two very old brethren; one is called Brother Ahl and the other Brother Sez. These brethren have voluntarily undertaken the obligation of periodically visiting all the monasteries of our order and explaining various aspects of the essence of divinity.
‘Our brotherhood has four monasteries, one of them ours, the second in the valley of thePamir,the third in Tibet,and the fourth in India. And so these brethren, Ahl and Sez, constantly travel from one monastery to another and preach there.
‘They come to us once or twice a year. Their arrival at our monastery is considered among us a very great event. On the days when either of them is here, the soul of every one of us experiences pure heavenly pleasure and tenderness.
‘The sermons of these two brethren, who are to an almost equal degree holy men and who speak the same truths, have nevertheless a different effect on all our brethren and on me in particular.
‘When Brother Sez speaks, it is indeed like the song of the birds in Paradise; from what he says one is quite, so to say, turned inside out; one becomes as though entranced. His speech “purls” like a stream and one no longer wishes anything else in life but to listen to the voice of Brother Sez.
‘But Brother Ahl’s speech has almost the opposite effect. He speaks badly and indistinctly, evidently because of his age. No one knows how old he is. Brother Sez is also very old—it is said three hundred years old—but he is still a hale old man, whereas in Brother Ahl the weakness of old age is clearly evident.
‘The stronger the impression made at the moment by the words of Brother Sez, the more this impression evaporates, until there ultimately remains in the hearer nothing at all.
‘But in the case of Brother Ahl, although at first what he says makes almost no impression, later, the gist of it takes on a definite form, more and more each day, and is instilled as a whole into the heart and remains there for ever.
‘When we became aware of this and began trying to discover why it was so, we came to the unanimous conclusion that the sermons of Brother Sez proceeded only from his mind, and therefore acted on our minds, whereas those of Brother Ahl proceeded from his being and acted on our being.
‘Yes, Professor, knowledge and understanding are quite different. Only understanding can lead to being, whereas knowledge is but a passing presence in it. New knowledge displaces the old and the result is, as it were, a pouring from the empty into the void.
‘One must strive to understand; this alone can lead to our Lord God.
‘And in order to be able to understand the phenomena of nature, according and not according to law, proceeding around us, one must first of all consciously perceive and assimilate a mass of information concerning objective truth and the real events which took place on earth in the past; and secondly, one must bear i
n oneself all the results of all kinds of voluntary and involuntary experiencings.’
We had many other similar never-to-be-forgotten talks with Father Giovanni.
Many extraordinary questions which never enter the heads of contemporary people were then aroused in us and elucidated by this rare man, Father Giovanni, the like of whom is scarcely ever met with in contemporary life. One of his explanations, which followed a question put to him by Professor Skridlov two days before we left the monastery, is of enormous interest for everyone, owing to the depth of the thoughts it contained and its possible significance for contemporary people who have already reached responsible age.
This question of Professor Skridlov was torn from him as from the depths of his being, when Father Giovanni had said that, before counting on really coming under the effects and influences of the higher forces, it was absolutely necessary to have a soul, which it was possible to acquire only through voluntary and involuntary experiencings and information intentionally learned about real events which had taken place in the past. He convincingly added that this in its turn was possible almost exclusively in youth, when the definite data received from Great Nature are not yet spent on unnecessary, fantastic aims, which appear to be good owing only to the abnormally established conditions of the life of people.
At these words Professor Skridlov sighed deeply and exclaimed in despair: ‘What, then, can we do; how can we live on?’
In answer to this exclamation of Skridlov, Father Giovanni, having remained silent for a moment, expressed those remarkable thoughts which I consider it necessary to reproduce, in so far as possible, word for word.
I shall place them, as relating to the question of the soul, that is, the third independently formed part of the common presence of a man, in the chapter entitled ‘The divine body of man, and its needs and possible manifestations according to law’, but only in the third series of my writings, as complementary to two chapters of the same series which I have already decided and promised to devote—one to the words of the venerable Persian dervish concerning the body, that is, the first independently formed part in the common presence of a man, and the other to the elucidations of the old ez-ezounavouran concerning the second independently formed part of a man, namely, his spirit.
During our stay in this monastery, besides the talks with Father Giovanni, we had frequent conversation with other adepts of the brotherhood with whom we had also become friends, having made their acquaintance through Father Giovanni, who had taken us under his paternal protection.
We lived in this monastery about six months and left it, not because we could not have stayed there longer or did not wish to, but only because we were finally so over-filled with the totality of impressions we had received that it seemed as if even a little more would make us lose our minds.
Our stay there brought us so many answers to the psychological and archaeological questions which interested us, that it then seemed as if we had nothing more to seek, at least for a long time; so we abandoned our journey and returned to Russia by almost the same way as we had come.
After arriving in Tiflis the professor and I parted, he going to Piatigorsk, by the Georgian military road, to see his elder daughter, and I to Alexandropol to my family.
After this I did not see Professor Skridlov for rather a long time, but we corresponded regularly. I saw him for the last time in the second year of the World War,in Piatigorsk, where he was visiting his daughter.
I shall never forget the last conversation I had with him, on the summit of Mount Bechow. At that time I was living in Essentuki, and one day when we met at Kislovodsk he proposed that, in remembrance of the good old days, we should climb Mount Bechow, which was not far from Piatigorsk.
One fine morning about two weeks after this meeting, taking provisions with us, we did indeed set out on foot from Piatigorsk towards this mountain, and began the ascent up the rocks from the difficult side, that is, the side at the foot of which there is a well-known monastery.
This ascent is considered very difficult by everybody who has made it and it was indeed not easy, yet for both of us, after the mountains we had climbed up and down during our many travels together through the wilds of Central Asia, it was, as is said, child’s play. Nevertheless we experienced great pleasure from this ascent and felt ourselves, after the monotonous life of the city, in an element which had already become almost natural to us.
Although it is not high, this mountain is so situated in relation to the surrounding countryside that from its summit we saw spread out before our eyes an extensive panorama of really extraordinary beauty.
Far to the south arose the majestic snow-capped peak of Elbrus, with the great chain of the Caucasian mountains outlined on both sides of it. Below us, as in miniature, could be seen the numerous settlements, towns and villages of almost the entire region of the Mineral Waters, and just below to the north stood out various parts of the town of Zheleznovodsk.
Silence reigned all around. No one was on the mountain, and no one was likely to come, as the usual easy road leading up from the northern side was visible for many miles and as clear as the palm of one’s hand, and there was no one to be seen on it. And as for the southern face by which we had come, one rarely meets anybody daring enough to climb that!
On the summit of the mountain was a small hut, evidently for the sale of beer and tea, but that day there was no one there.
We sat down on a rock and began to eat. Each of us, spellbound by the grandeur of the scenery, silently thought his own thoughts.
Suddenly my glance rested on the face of Professor Skridlov and I saw that tears were streaming from his eyes.
‘What’s the matter, old fellow?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he answered, drying his eyes, and then added: ‘In general, during the last two or three years, my inability to control the automatic manifestations of my subconsciousness and my instinct is such that I have become almost like an hysterical woman.
‘What has just happened, has happened to me many times during this period. It is very difficult to explain what takes place in me when I see or hear anything majestic which allows no doubt that it proceeds from the actualization of Our Maker Creator. Each time, my tears flow of themselves. I weep, that is to say, it weeps in me, not from grief, no, but as if from tenderness. I became so, gradually, after meeting Father Giovanni, whom you remember we met together in Kafiristan, to my worldly misfortune.
‘After that meeting my whole inner and outer world became for me quite different. In the definite views which had become rooted in me in the course of my whole life, there took place, as it were by itself, a revaluation of all values.
‘Before that meeting, I was a man wholly engrossed in my own personal interests and pleasures, and also in the interests and pleasures of my children. I was always occupied with thoughts of how best to satisfy my needs and the needs of my children.
‘Formerly, it may be said, my whole being was possessed by egoism. All my manifestations and experiencings flowed from my vanity. The meeting with Father Giovanni killed all this, and from then on there gradually arose in me that “something” which has brought the whole of me to the unshakeable conviction that, apart from the vanities of life, there exists a “something else” which must be the aim and ideal of every more or less thinking man, and that it is only this something else which may make a man really happy and give him real values, instead of the illusory “goods” with which in ordinary life he is always and in everything full.’
THE MATERIAL QUESTION
ON THE EIGHTH OF APRIL 1924, the day of the opening in New York of a branch of the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, a dinner in honour of Mr. Gurdjieff was arranged at one of the Russian restaurants there by his friends and by several pupils of the French branch.
After dinner most of those present went with Mr. Gurdjieff to the apartment of Mrs. R, at 49th Street. Here, over coffee served by the amiable hostess and liqueurs obtained somehow by Dr. B
, conversation continued until breakfast of the following day.
Mr. Gurdjieff spoke mostly through interpreters, Mr. Lilyants and Mme Versilovsky, answering all kinds of questions that were put to him, chiefly of a philosophical character.
During a brief interruption, while we were eating water-melon-which came from Buenos Aires, and was a great rarity at that time of year even in New York—Dr. B, the proprietor of a large, fashionable sanatorium, who had the reputation of being a practical man, suddenly turned to Mr. Gurdjieff with the following question:
‘Could you tell us, sir, what are the means by which your Institute exists and approximately what is its annual budget?’
To our surprise, Mr. Gurdjieff’s answer to this question took the form of a long narrative.
As this story revealed an unsuspected aspect of the struggle he carried on throughout his life, I have undertaken to reproduce it, in so far as possible, exactly as it was told that day. I consulted other pupils who, like myself, had listened to the story with such interest and attention that they remembered it in almost all its details. And I verified my text by comparing it with the notes of Mr. F—the stenographer who took down all Mr. Gurdjieff’s talks and lectures in America, so that people who asked questions which had been asked before could simply read through what Mr. Gurdjieff had already said on these subjects and thus economize his time.
Mr. Gurdjieff began as follows:
‘The question you have put to me, esteemed Doctor, has always interested a great many of the people who have become more or less acquainted with me; but until now, not finding it necessary to initiate anyone into this personal affair of mine, I have either not answered at all or have turned it aside with a joke.
Meetings With Remarkable Men Page 27