The following pieces were written by members of the Gurdjieff Foundation. They were inspired by experiences in their lives that were deepened by their practice of the Work, opening them to a greater meaning.
Listening
Walking near our flat in San Francisco one evening, I approached a homeless man who was camped on the steps of a vacant building. I had seen him around: the standard issue shopping cart full of random junk with waterlogged and stained blankets thrown over the contents. He was not that old but was getting there fast, looking ill and weather-beaten beyond his years and, as is so often the case, babbling endless nonsense to no one.
An empty vodka bottle sat on the sidewalk before him and I could smell the vomit and urine from half a block away. Instinctive aversion arose and I crossed the street to get upwind, noticing as I looked back that he had evidently recovered an old guitar from some pile of trash and was busily trying to tune it. ‘Good luck with that,’ I thought. The guitar was the cheap, toy-store variety, had been sitting out in all kinds of San Francisco weather, and was clearly held together only by its strings.
But as I passed by him, he abruptly stopped tuning and played a loud, ringing C chord. The guitar was perfectly tuned, perfectly pitched, and had a tone that many guitarists would have paid thousands for. I slowed down but walked on, listening, now listening, the homeless man playing brilliant, simple major chords, jewels in the evening air.
by Bill Dudley
“Your principal mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness and, in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality, consciousness is a property that is continually changing. There are different degrees and different levels of consciousness.”
–P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 117
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Seeing
In a small town in the Rockies, I worked one summer on a construction crew—four man or sometimes five, and I was generally the low man. The youngest and, frankly, the least skilled, I did a lot of grunt work—hauling material, shovel work, pushing a broom, cleanup. They all had pickup trucks except me, but there was a company flatbed I could use most of the time. Not much bigger than their trucks but the bed was wider and rested above the wheel-wells, and it had removable sides. When we weren’t bringing in lumber or other material we’d load it up with the construction debris—wood scraps, dried cement chunks, busted forms and 2-bys, bad dirt and garbage. And invariably it was me who made the dump run.
It was a country dump, an abandoned quarry, drained out and close to filled in by now. Well out of town and half a mile off the highway, it was down a dirt road that went nowhere else. I took a full load at the end of the day. Dusk was approaching, and I was in a mood, looking forward to heading home for the weekend.
The quarry walls only dropped off ten or twelve feet anymore, everyone else’s trash before me growing slowly upward. And you could back right up to that edge if you were careful. There was a slight incline leading up to it that made it tricky, but if you worked the clutch just right, if you knew what you were doing, you could hang that truck bed just over the cliff and basically shove a lot of the pile straight off.
The back half was easy enough to unload this way, but the front half—piled up against the cab—was pretty much a pain; one piece at a time flung behind me or shovels full of smaller debris that mostly fell off the shovel. But I had a system. I had set a four-by-four piece of weathered plywood on that bed up against the cab before piling everything on. And after I cleared off the back half, I’d pull the whole pile of junk on the plywood to the back of the bed. Then I’d basically shove the pile straight off like I had done before. So I got the back half unloaded and I took the big pieces off the plywood to make it light enough to slide. Then I tugged on the plywood but it barely budged. So I cleared a little more and tried again, and it moved a little more.
Of course I was aware of the momentum of tugging on this thing, it would send me over the cliff if I pulled too hard. So squatting down, I kept one foot pretty much behind me to leverage against going in that direction. And I kept testing the weight of the pile, just rocking my weight against it and gauging the resistance. Finally it was sliding more easily, a few inches at a time, until I got it pretty close. With my feet firmly planted and carefully taking in the end of the bed and the drop-off beyond, I knew what I was doing. I took a firm grip on the lip of that sheeting and gave it one more good tug.
With no detectible resistance, that board slid free from under the pile like it was on ball bearings. I launched myself backwards off the end of the truck like a high diver at the Olympics.
Two seconds, maybe three. I was facing upwards and all I saw was the dome of the blue sky. There was no resistance in the empty air I floated through, no perception of where I was going to land, no sensations to react to, nothing to be done. I was completely at the mercy of this law we call gravity and I completely submitted. My entire life did not play back before me, there was no time.
I landed flat on a piece of scrap drywall that was apparently the exact size and shape of my body. It rested atop the loose debris that made up the accidental arrangement of junk and trash beneath me. The sheet gave a little when I hit it, sank as if cushioning my landing with care. Unhurt and strangely relaxed, I was just lying there. It took me longer to realize what happened, to take it in, to register my extraordinary luck, than the time it took to actually fall.
As I lay there staring up at that luminous pale blue sky, in the periphery of my vision appeared the jagged spike of a split two-by-four pointing upwards, intruding into that blueness. It rested exactly vertically between my outstretched right arm and my ribcage. And that’s when it was as if my entire future life passed before me, a future that I could see in relief, its non-existence, if I had landed differently.
I cannot tell you how perfectly blue was that pale blue sky.
by Robert Roehl
“But everything that can be said about such a state (self-remembering) remains somewhat hypothetical for us. In our waking state, we have only two ways of approaching it, two kinds of special moments which life sometimes brings and whose value we generally sense without understanding very well why. The first are given us in serious moments of emergency—at a moment when one’s life is in danger, for example, or at the loss of a loved one—which makes a very deep impression on us. The second are moments of inner awareness, of a conscience which is our own, which we find intuitively when life puts everything in question for us and which forces us to look deeply within ourselves and respond “to the very best of our knowledge and belief” and no longer on behalf of an acquired morality and ready-made ideas.”
–Jean Vaysse, Toward Awakening, p. 64
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Contradictions
Something nagged at me from a very early age. The ocean of life seemed full of contradictions. So many beautiful things – the mountains, the sky, the smells of fall. So many troubling things – the shouting in the street, the anger of my father, the bullying after school.
The little girl next door who wanted to hold my hand—how I struck her in the eye with a slush-ball. The anguish I then felt, and experienced again a few days later, embedded in the slow movement of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. The very same experience, so precisely expressed; blended with a searing tenderness.
I felt desperate, called at first through the music of Bach and Mozart, and later on, by the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, to seek out a place in myself where there was a sense of unity and safety.
Over time there seemed to be no escaping the ‘unanswerable questions’. They began to show a new direction, and even attract me to a circle of new friends with similar concerns. Slowly we found central and lasting themes by sharing our experiences. We began to ask together: is it possible to experience vividly, in our bones, the action of the diverse energies flowing through us? Can we stand quietly in front of such contradictions, to know them in a new way?
Gurdjieff implores us to study constantly in ourselves the trinity of forces that lead, on the one hand, to the higher, to grace, and on the other hand, to the lower, toward negativity and even the impulse of violence.
At first, compelled by the force of self-compassion, and then, touched by the need to be of some service in our suffering world, we learn to watch, to contain, and ultimately to appreciate, a more complete truth of what we are. As we begin to succeed, even a little, a voice cries out –
Who am I? Why have I come here, to live on this Earth? At this moment, a new force appears. Without self-pity or self-justification, I feel the joy of the Creation, while tasting the genuine sense of my place here, now, as a human being. For a moment I perceive clearly that through a work on myself, the immense forces to which I am subject could be liberated to serve, in some measure, the needs of the whole of Creation. It is for this divine purpose that I AM.
by Matthew Shubin
“Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, Holy Reconciling… Transubstantiate in me for my being.”
– Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson by G. I. Gurdjieff
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Recognition
I sit reading a magazine in the waiting room. The nurse comes in to get me saying, “He’s still asleep but it’s okay to see him.”
I walk back through the doors separating the waiting room from the recovery area, aware of a slight anxiety in my chest. This is a routine procedure after all so why am I nervous, hesitant?
He is laying in the first bed. I sit close, next to him. His eyes are closed, his breathing even, except for the soft intermittent out breath, almost a snore, I know so well from 22 years of sleeping together.
This is the man with whom I have been irritated, bored, happy, I have fought with, laughed with, hurt and been hurt by. I often think “I know what he is going to say” and I am often right.
All of this, what I know about him, about us, has disappeared. This man next to me sleeps, quiet, his face soft, so vulnerable. This is a man I have never seen, never been able to see. I stroke his forehead gently with such love, tenderness for this human man.
We stay like this for awhile, me sitting, him sleeping. He stirs, his eyes flickering.
I feel the returning of the familiar between us but the faint whisper of the man I do not know remains.
by Kristine Jensen Smith
“From realizing the significance of your neighbor when your attention rests on him, that he will die, pity for him and compassion toward him will arise in you, and finally you will love him; also, by doing this constantly, real faith, conscious faith, will arise in some part of you and spread to to other parts, and you will have the possibility of knowing real happiness, because from this faith, objective hope will arise–hope of a basis for continuation.”
C. S. Nott, Teachings of Gurdjieff: The Journal of a Pupil, page 114-15