Ways to Truth

Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy by Roger Lipsey.  Shambhala.  342 pp.  $24.95. ****

I read this book as a tribute to my friend Levi, who used to talk about Gurdjieff and various of his disciples almost every time we got together.  He was introduced to the man by a woman who was breaking up with him, who gave him a copy of In Search of the Miraculous and said: “Read it from beginning to end.”  He did, and continued to read it for the rest of his life.  He also read Gurdjieff’s own writing, and the writing of various of his disciples.  For years he drove a considerable distance to have weekly meetings with a Gurdjieffian teacher, though I was never clear what went on when they met.  Somehow those meetings were central to his spiritual development.

My impression from Levi was that Gurdjieff’s followers had all to some extent splintered off from him—there was no orthodox teaching—but they were highly influenced by him, had their own way of teaching the truth he had seen.  That seems similar to any spiritual practice, to Zen for instance, the one I’m most familiar with.  There’s no final Zen answer to anything.  There are different teachings by different people, all circling around the same mystery.

The first time I came across Gurdjieff’s teaching was when I was researching a book on sex and spirituality, and read the autobiography of a writer named Marco Vassi.  He was one of those people who went through every spiritual practice there ever was, beginning with the Gurdjieff “work.”   He described it, quite hilariously, as verging on abuse, and mentioned a time his teacher said to him, in a line that seems to have been lifted from Abbott and Costello (Sid Fields speaking),  “I think you are such an utter fool that if you have acquired, by the age of forty, the courage to kill yourself, it will be the one significant act of which you are capable.”  Vassi later moved on to Gestalt Therapy, and looked back on his previous experience: “There was for me the suspicion that the only thing Gurdjieff was saying was to wake up and enjoy life, its total joy and terror, its mystery and its revelations.”

That was my general impression from Levi, that what Gurdjieff was actually teaching, with all his talk about self-remembering and his system of Movements, his various systems of numbers, was simple presence.  He liked to gather people in community, so they would rub up against each other; he liked to get sophisticated intellectual people to do simple physical labor, perhaps because it was humbling but also because it was an ideal occasion for mindfulness (what I take his self-remembering to be).  And he was obsessed with the system of Movements he created, or perhaps borrowed from a variety of ancient sources.  They’re mind-boggling on YouTube.

What I think about many of these systems—Gurdjieff, Gestalt Therapy (which I read about with fascination and puzzlement in my twenties), Bioenergetics (which I practiced for a while in my thirties)—is that they were all trying to re-invent the wheel of Eastern spiritual practice.  Their founders had discovered a truth (the same truth many people discovered through the ages), and tried to create a way to teach it, but if they’d gone back into the ancient traditions they would have found that perfectly good ways already existed.  I don’t think Gurdjeff’s movements do the job any better than Tai Chi, perhaps not as well, and the communities he created are very much like the monasteries of Chan and Zen Buddhism, where physical work was important.

The thing I really don’t understand is why people didn’t see that sitting still and being present in silence is the best way to access this truth.  It’s the oldest and the simplest way.  Gurdjieff’s primary disciple Jeanne de Salzmann, with whom he apparently had a child—taking discipleship to a whole new level—did seem to discover the practice.  She more or less gives meditation instruction in the remarkable book created from her notebooks, The Reality of Being.

Roger Lipsey understands all this.  He’s a Gurdjieffian of long-standing, though not in a narrow sense; he wrote earlier books about Dag Hammarskjold and Thomas Merton.  He’s the editor of Parabola, which Levi saw as a Gurdjieffian publication, though it prints articles about various traditions.  He’s also a superb writer; the prose in this book is one of its real pleasures.  I was impressed with an interview he did on the occasion of one of his Merton books with editor Dave O’Neal, especially the last paragraph of that interview, and I feel as if he speaks with the same spirit at the end of this book.  I love his final paragraph, and final words.

“When I look into your eyes and listen to you, I have no need to know if you are a Gurdjieff pupil or a Buddhist meditator, a Sufi or a Vedantist, an engaged Christian or Jew, a secular humanist; I perceive you, not your path to maturity.  This is as it should be.  At some point, when we’re better acquainted, we may compare notes.  We’ll take out our journals, so to speak, and show one another what we’ve written there over the years.  And for the most part it will be the same.”