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The Gurdjieff JournalLLC
Back Issue - #12 Volume 3 Issue 4
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Gurdjieff in Egypt
Part III
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Gurdjieff says that the origin of The Fourth Way is esoteric Christianity, which first existed in prehistoric Egypt.
It follows then that The Fourth Way is the source of the Egyptian religion. And so, too, the source of Judaism,
Christianity, Islam and Sufism. Gurdjieff often stated that we see things "topsy-turvy." This is usually taken only
in a psychological way. How startling then to consider that we also have everything upside down historically.
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Returning to the Source:
A report from the recent symposium at the University of Delaware
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In All and Everything, First Series, Gurdjieff presents an objective history of the planet Earth beginning
shortly before the accidental formation of the moon and the implantation in man of the special organ, kundabuffer.
He describes the first civilizations arising on Atlantis, emigrations to Eurasia, the foundation of the Akhaldan Society
by Belcultassi, the destruction of Atlantis during the second Transapalnian perturbation, and the resettlement of members
of the society in the Nile Valley. Earlier, all of Beelzebub's tribe remaining on Earth moved from the source of the Nile.
Now members of the tribe and society meet and the society is told to settle in the Nile Valley. Once there they influence
the development of the Egyptian civilization. Usually, these details, and many others, are taken in an allegorical sense.
What if Gurdjieff's history is objective, not only allegorically and symbolically but factually?
Many of the speakers at Return to the Source: Rediscovering Lost Knowledge and Ancient Wisdom, a symposium held at
the University of Delaware in September 1996, presented new research which supports much of Gurdjieff's history.
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The Kanari Papers
Part I
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Beautiful and talented, a free- and high-spirited woman, Solita Solano first met Mr. Gurdjieff at the Prieuré at
the urging of her friends Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, co-editors of the literary magazine The Little Review.
She could see nothing in him.
She was not to see him again until the autumn of 1934. "In a crisis of misery," she said, "I suddenly knew that I had long
been waiting to go to him and that he was expecting me. I sought him out and sat before him, silent. . . . He was then
living in the Grand Hotel, over the Café de la Paix—his 'office,' while waiting for a flat to be found. The
Prieuré group had dispersed, there were no followers or pupils near him except Elizabeth Gordon who sometimes came
to the café. Three friends of mine, who had previously met Mr. Gurdjieff, also began to go to the café to
see him. Within a few days he gave us chapters of All and Everything to read aloud to him. And thus, by such an
'accident,' we four formed the nucleus of a new group which was to grow larger year by year until the end of his life."
The new group, of course, came to be known as "The Rope." It was unique among all of the groups that Gurdjieff formed since
it was composed only of women. And the women were all intelligent and strong-willed, mostly lesbian, and largely involved
in the literary and dramatic worlds. The Kanari Papers are excerpts from the notes and transcripts kept by Solita Solano
of her meetings with Gurdjieff.
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Book Review:
Asking for the Earth:
Waking Up to the Spiritual/Ecological Crisis
by James George
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"If, by a certain time, what ought to be done has not been done, the Earth may perish without having attained what it could
have attained," Gurdjieff told Ouspensky in 1915. With this as its theme, former Canadian Ambassador James George's book,
Asking for the Earth, forcefully demonstrates how relevant Gurdjieff's teaching is to ecology.
Summarizing the many psychological and cosmological ideas of Gurdjieff's that relate to a contemporary understanding of
ecology, George discusses the role of attention in Work, coming alive to our bodies and "through that connection to start
to train the emotions," and the self-centered egotism that keeps the world as it is. On the cosmological side, he writes
of the interchangeability of matter and energy, the ray of creation, processes of involution and evolution, the
"Autoegocratic" and "Trogoautoegocratic" processes. George sums up with, "I have argued in this book that Gurdjieff has
given us both the scientific conceptual framework and the traditional spiritual practices that are needed for the new
Renaissance, if there is to be one."
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Working in the World:
Zoonoses & Zoostats
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What was earlier called "genetic engineering" and now presents itself as the amorphous sounding "biotechnology" has
allowed man to break the species boundaries with which Nature has differentiated one species from another. Heretofore,
the genetics of every species was sacrosanct. Through biological rejection mechanisms, each species was protected from
the introduction of organs, cells and tissues from all other species. No longer. Now through a kind of Trojan horse
biological trickery, science has been able to transplant baboon bone marrow and fetal pig cells into human organisms.
Baboon livers have also been attempted—so far unsuccessfully—and pig livers will soon be included on the
transplantation menu.
Science, of course, is all agog with the endless possibilities of xenotransplantation, the catch-all, kitchen
sink word for any type of genetic tinkering. Big business, too, is falling all over itself as it views the new markets
and problems (and hence need for solutions) that xenotransplantation would provide.
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Critas
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Tidbits gleaned from the world and the Work.
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