Gurdjieff The Meaning of Life

Gurdjieff: The Meaning of Life

Gurdjieff spent most of his early adult life trying to answer the question “What is the sense and significance of life on earth in general and of human life in particular?” Once he found an answer to his question, he spent the rest of his life trying to share his wisdom with selected students through out the western world. Former students, and their students carry on his work.

At a very early age Gurdjieff discovered that there is something more to life than what he was taught in school. He saw a number of extraordinary events that could not be explained by books and schoolmasters. He discovered that organized religion could not answer the questions that he was asking. He went off to the East to try and find Masters of Wisdom that could unveil the secrets that he was trying to fathom.

Once he discovered the Truth that he was searching for, he set up a number of schools first in Tashkent, then in Russia, and later in France. Branches of his schools were later established in England and in the United States. These schools were Fourth Way schools where students could work on their being without withdrawing from the every day world. Though many of the students would stay at the institutes for years at a time before returning to the outer world.

Gurdjieff discovered that there are higher-level beings in the world that have a knowledge far beyond what is known by ordinary professors, thinkers, and scientists. These “Masters of Wisdom” have been present since the beginning of time. Their purpose on earth is to help man on his journey to a higher level of being. Since man was created as a self-evolving being the Masters cannot force their Knowledge on the world, but will share it with those who come seeking.

Gurdjieff taught that man as he is asleep, but can awaken with super effort. The greatest obstacle to awakening is the fact that we think we are awake. According to Gurdjieff, there are four levels of consciousness, sleep, waking sleep, self-consciousness, and objective consciousness. In sleep, there is very little consciousness of the out side world though there is some. In waking sleep, we think we are fully conscious, but we are so conditioned and identified that we do not see things as they really are. In self-consciousness, we remember ourselves and are aware of our relationship to the inner and outer worlds. In objective consciousness, we see things as they really are.

Self-consciousness is the birth right of every normal man. In fact man cannot be called man unless he has reached this state of being. We have fallen to a lower level of conscious because we are caught up in the intricacies of ever day life. We are not conscious of our selves because we are identified with earning a living and getting by in life. Our teachers are not aware of their lower level of being, and neither are our leaders.

Objective Conscious is a level of being that most men cannot reach in one lifetime. Gurdjieff taught that one cannot reach the state of Objective Consciousness unless he has first achieved the state of Self Remembering. Therefore most of his instruction is on how to reach this third state of being.

Another aspect of man that Gurdjieff emphasizes is in the difference between essence and personality. He maintains that we are born with essence but as we develop it is over shadowed by personality. Essence is what is real in man. Personality is what is acquired in life by imitation and education. Some of personality is necessary for the material existence of man. One should develop a strong personality so that he or she can meet the needs of life. However, much of personality is what Gurdjieff calls false personality. It is developed just to please the vanity and self-love of man, and one must die to false personality if essence is to grow.

Essence is sometimes referred to as the spirit or soul. It is what Jesus refers to when he says, “How do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?” If essence is developed in this lifetime it does not die with the death of the body. Essence cannot develop without conscious work on oneself to develop it. Often essence dies in a man while his personality and body are still living. These people are those who are referred to as the living dead. Gurdjieff told one of his students that he would be surprised to see how many dead people strolled the streets of London.

Much of the instruction that Gurdjieff gave at his schools was focused on how to develop essence. He gave some lectures to his students. But most of his instruction was presented by giving practical tasks to his students. They worked long hours in tending the garden, building structures for the institute, and in cooking and cleaning house. Gurdjieff in many instances worked right beside his students. They were taught to work intelligently, but to shut off thought and bring all centers into play.

Gurdjieff felt that much could be learned by work on the moving-instinctive center and he spent a lot of time at his institute in France teaching dance and movement. He had learned sacred dances during his travels in the East, and felt that these sacred movements could lift both the dancer and the audience to higher levels.

Gurdjieff taught that there were universal laws that governed the life of man as well as every thing living. He felt that if man did not understand these laws he could not serve his proper place in the universal scheme of things. He spent much of his teaching on trying to help his pupils understand the Law of Three, the Law of Seven, the Law of Reciprocal Maintenance, and other universal laws.

It cost an enormous amount of money to run the institute in France and Gurdjieff had to spend a great deal of his time trying to raise funds. He had no qualms about raising money to support The Work. He bought and sold oriental carpets. He bought land in the Near East and sold it at huge profits because he has knowledge of where the railroads would be built He established restaurants in France and once they got going sold them at for large amounts of money.

He traveled to the United States in the late1920’s for the expressed purpose of relieving some of the rich Americans of their money. He established a branch school here in America. The school was not successful at the time. His efforts to raise money in America did not succeed. After an automobile accident that nearly killed him, he closed the institute in France and began his writing career.

One of his most readable books is Meetings With Remarkable Men, which gives an account of his early life and his search for truth in Central Asia. One of the remarkable men that Gurdjieff describes is his father who among other thing was an amateur asokh, a poet, singer of songs, and storyteller. He was in the tradition that preserved ancient knowledge through the spoken word. (One of Gurdjieff’s sayings is, “It is a sign of a good man that he loves his father and mother.”) J. G. Bennett maintains that Meetings With Remarkable Men is allegorical and must be read very carefully.

The most profound of Gurdjieff’s writings is his three volume set, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. He spent nearly seven years writing and rewriting it. He deliberately made it difficult to understand through the normal thought process stating that the reader had to use more than one center in order to grasp the truth of what he wrote. He trained many of his pupils to interpret the work and expected them to work with those who would attempt to understand his teachings through these tales.

In the Tales, the protagonist, Beelzebub, who comes from another place in the universe, is telling his grandson about his experiences on the planet Earth while they travel on a space ship toward their home. He is trying to help his grandson formulate a higher level of thinking as he explains the difficulties that the earthlings experience in their egoist existence. He shows that because they have no real purpose in life the earthlings exist at a level of being barely above that of animal life. They fall far short of the life that three-brain beings experience on other planets.

Today former students like J.G Bennett and Maurice Nicoll carry on Gurdjieff’s work. These teachers have their own students who continue to address the question that Gurdieff posed. “What is the sense and significance of life on earth in general and of human life in particular?” Each one of us must ultimately answer this question for his or her self. If we fail to do so, our life will be meaningless.