WOULD OUSPENSKY HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF NEVER MEETING Mr. Gurdjieff? At the end of his life, if not before, Ouspensky certainly felt this way and Gary Lachman agrees. He takes Ouspensky as a genius—Webster's definition: "Extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative ability"—a Faust entranced by Gurdjieff's Mephistopheles. "He [Ouspensky] had banked everything," Lachman writes, "on the methods and ideas he had learned from Gurdjieff. And he was wrong.... For me, it's not an exaggeration to suggest it was a mistake for Ouspensky to abandon his own creativity and ideas to become an exponent of Gurdjieff's teaching." And several sentences later, "For my taste, nothing Gurdjieff wrote, nor any other Fourth Way book, approaches Ouspensky's first work in its enthusiasm, insight, brilliance, and ability to convey difficult ideas with seemingly effortless clarity." Tertium Organum, the work referred to, is not Ouspensky's first book, a niggling quibble not worth making much of, but inasmuch as In Search of P.D. Ouspensky has a disconcerting number of such mistakes, as well as larger and more important omissions, it gives an uneasy sense that the book is not the thoughtful consideration one would hope for, but more the polemic of a hurt person, much as we get, for example, with David Kherdian's On a Spaceship with Beelzebub and Paul Beekman Taylor's two books, Gurdjieff & Toomer: Shadows of Heaven and Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (see TGJ #4, #17 and #25, respectively).
Lachman, a former rock and roll musician, was involved with the Work in England for several years. He counts that "time well spent; yet, eventually I found myself moving away from the work to explore other ideas. But as the years went by I returned...." The return was not to the Work but to Ouspensky's early books in which he "found a stimulating and exhilarating mind that is oddly lacking in [his later books] like The Fourth Way." "What had turned the young poetic Ouspensky," he asks, "into an often stern and demanding taskmaster?" A crucial understanding that Lachman, like so many others, doesn't realize is that when Ouspensky left Gurdjieff he left the teaching. And as Gurdjieff said, "There is nothing that shows up a man better than his attitude towards the work and the teacher after he has left it."
That Ouspensky then set himself up as a teacher (it would be like Peter leaving Jesus to teach Christianity) shows what was in the background all along. That at the end of his life, melancholic and drinking too much, he finally confessed, "I taught too early," isn't the point. Ouspensky was never commissioned to teach. The truth behind his announcement upon his return to England in 1947 that he had "abandoned the system" is that he had abandoned it 25 years earlier. Ironically, and sadly, in doing so, Ouspensky unintentionally paralleled the fictional character Ivan Osokin in his novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin:
It is hard to believe that I can actually do nothing at all. But, at the same time, what have I done so far? I have only spoiled everything. To give myself up to the magician? That again seems strange, even cowardly. Probably this is where the greatest illusion lies, because to become convinced and to admit to oneself that one can actually do nothing is not cowardly at all. On the contrary, if it is true, this is the bravest thing one can do—but it is so difficult to believe.Before continuing, it should be emphasized that while Gurdjieff thought of Ouspensky as "a weak man"—and who among us would Gurdjieff not see as weak?—Ouspensky was a great seeker with noble and serious aspirations, who was gifted with both a strong and penetrating intellect and an uncommon power of expressing himself with the written word. Was he a genius? Lachman's assessment seems a bit too high, but the point won't be argued, for if he was, then according to Gurdjieff, geniuses, like angels, have no possibility of developing. So even in his choice of title the author gets it wrong.
Before considering the book at greater depth, let us first set the context by calling to mind the essay of the Nobel Prize–winning writer J.M. Coetzee, "What Is a Classic?" After a thrilling ride of erudition and style through various possibilities and examples, Coetzee offers this:
So we arrive at a certain paradox. The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic.So our author is to be thanked and commended for playing his role in bringing up once again the question of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky relationship and so, in effect, bringing to mind the unrivaled esoteric classic of the last century and this, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff's All and Everything.One might even venture further along this road to say that the function of criticism is defined by the classic: criticism is that which is duty-bound to interrogate the classic. Thus the fear that the classic will not survive the decentering acts of criticism may be turned on its head: rather than being the foe of the classic, criticism, and indeed criticism of the most skeptical kind, may be what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival. Criticism may in that sense be one of the instruments of the cunning of history.
Lachman says what led him to write his book was William Patrick Patterson's Struggle of the Magicians. While he found the book "fascinating," he says, "I found myself questioning its premises that Ouspensky failed to grasp the import of Gurdjieff's mission, and, when it came to it, couldn't abandon his own independence, self-will, and egoism in order to devote himself entirely to Gurdjieff's work." Where Patterson's book was written from Gurdjieff's perspective (Patterson felt too many books had been written from the author's viewpoint and so used a chronicle approach citing in the main text just the historical facts sans interpretations, with references to the text in endnotes), Lachman tells it from Ouspensky's using a narrative largely based upon Patterson's chronology. Fair enough. But in doing so one needs to not overlook or eliminate important and telling facts that weigh against one's interpretation.
The central question of any book about Ouspensky's relationship with Gurdjieff is why Ouspensky left him, not
once but three times—Essentuki, 1918; Constantinople, 1921; Prieuré, 1924. What was the chief impetus behind these three breaks? The early history of the relationship we know from Ouspensky's Search. Having been involved with Theosophy (a pseudoteaching Gurdjieff clearly disdained), Ouspensky said he wanted a teaching "of a more rational kind." He had traveled to India in search of a teaching, but finding none returned to Russia, where in April 1915 he met Gurdjieff, who gave him a more rational teaching than he had ever conceived. While interested in the teaching intellectually, Ouspensky refused to join a Work group. It was only when Gurdjieff began to no more than half answer his questions that he reluctantly agreed to join. A significant point entirely missing from Lachman's book—but an important part of Patterson's Struggle of the Magicians, which Lachman claims to have read—has to do with Ouspensky's frame of mind when he finally consented to join a group. As Gurdjieff was living in Moscow and Ouspensky in St. Petersburg, he had Ouspensky gather people there for a group which Gurdjieff would visit every two weeks. Ouspensky speaks of this as "The St. Petersburg Conditions," an odd bit of legalese, as teachers do not make contracts with their students. Interestingly, this and later Essentuki material appears in Ouspensky's first draft of Search, but
was cut from the published version.
Ouspensky's first break with Gurdjieff occurred in 1918, only three years and five months after they first met. The break was presaged as early as August 1916 in Finland. Ouspensky had been wanting what he called "the miracle." Gurdjieff gave him a resounding telepathic experience of long duration. Though it brought a wealth of deep insights, Ouspensky refused to be completely sincere with his teacher (breaking the first demand of the Work). He held something back. "I knew that he would not believe me and that he would laugh at me if I showed him this other thing," Ouspensky writes in Search. In other words, he still believes he can see the teacher and so judge him, whereas he will later write that a student cannot see the teacher. So, apparently even this early, Ouspensky was only "auditing" the teaching, not taking himself as a student. Lachman gives only a literal mention of the Finland experience.
Seeing how Ouspensky defended his emotional center with an over-inflated intellectual center (Ouspensky's chief feature was "extreme individualism," and "Wraps Up All Thought"), Gurdjieff ingeniously used Ouspensky's "St. Petersburg Conditions" against him in the hopes of breaking through his student's emotional defenses. Because of the civil war raging in Russia, Gurdjieff called his Moscow and St. Petersburg students to him in Essentuki, in the Caucasus. After they arrived, he told Ouspensky the Moscow students were acting up and that he was responsible. Bewildered, Ouspensky said he was only responsible for the St. Petersburg students. But Gurdjieff insisted. Not only unfair, his teacher's insistence was irrational, something that all intellectuals, and Ouspensky especially, would despise. This was a defining moment: either Ouspensky would remember he was in the Work and observe his emotional center or he would identify with it. He identified and so left Gurdjieff, trumping up the excuse that Gurdjieff was leading them on the religious path, requiring blind obedience and faith. This identification was the real reason behind Ouspensky's break. (It, too, was cut from the published version of Search but is reported in Struggle of the Magicians and again in the video Gurdjieff's Mission.)
In July 1920 Ouspensky reunited with Gurdjieff in Constantinople. The following August he again broke with Gurdjieff and left for London. Again, Gurdjieff had worked on Ouspensky's emotional center, acting strangely and telling him dirty jokes and creating black and white dramas (which always evoked Ouspensky's sensitivity to good and evil).
Though Ouspensky had only fragments of the fuller teaching that Gurdjieff was to later give, his efforts were serious enough for him to have come to a new feeling of "I." He had asked Gurdjieff in early July 1917, after some two years of work on himself: "How can one strengthen the feeling of "I" and strengthen the activity of "I"?" Gurdjieff had told him that he could do nothing about it but that "This should come as a result of all your efforts." Two years later, in June 1919, Ouspensky wrote, "I had acquired a strange confidence." Though there were still "very ordinary stupid small I's" he now had "a big I, which nothing can frighten and which would be equal to everything that happened.... This confidence is the result of that work on myself which I began four years ago."
In the fall of 1921 Gurdjieff arrived in Germany. In early 1922 Ouspensky asked him to speak in London and so they reconnected. However, in January 1924, just as Gurdjieff and his students were leaving for America, Ouspensky broke with him again. Because of Gurdjieff's continued antics, Ouspensky came to see Gurdjieff as "a tainted channel," something that he himself would become. Breaking off all ties with Gurdjieff, he forced his students to choose between himself and Gurdjieff, commanding those who remained never to speak Gurdjieff 's name (and until his death no one did). His inner life became increasingly distanced, then melancholic and morose, and ultimately frozen. The methods and ideas indeed proved not to work. When at the end of his life Ouspensky declared that he "abandoned the System" (he could never admit that it is a Teaching), it was the first genuine step he had made since leaving Gurdjieff. All the intervening years he followed the methods and ideas as he understood them. These were from the Russian period of Gurdjieff 's teaching of The Fourth Way and he brilliantly conveyed them in a book that is a classic among all esoteric works, In Search of the Miraculous, as his publisher retitled the book he had called "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching." What he realized before dying was that he had crystallized and entombed himself unwittingly in a cul de sac. He so blamed Gurdjieff that he wished in the next recurring life to never see him again.
Putting this all in incisive perspective is the Indian sage Sri Anirvan:
Gurdjieff had this lightly tinted whiteness. He never stopped playing with all the colors of life; that is why fools cry out against him. Ouspensky, who was a philosopher, tried to stay in the whiteness he had discovered; but if you are the disciple responsible for the kitchen, your duty is to prepare the food. If you refuse to do this, you will be sent away by the Master or you will leave of your own accord and your refusal will be a weight that will burden you for years and possibly even crush you.
Gurdjieff had warned that once one enters the teaching it is dangerous to leave it because then one is half-baked, as it were. Sri Anirvan gives his viewpoint on this, saying:
At the start, the "I" towards which all the "I's" converge is only theoretically the Void. Through your present discipline you draw close to an "I" from which you can calmly observe yourself. From there the world is seen with all its mechanical movements; from there a glimpse of the "I" which is the Void may appear. The next stage cannot be taught by any book. It must be lived degree by degree, with the Master holding one's hand. It is the slow discovery that finally there is no "I" but only that "which is active" in you.... In his book In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky speaks about the first two stages [plurality of "I's," a single "I"]. He remained silent about the last two [no "I," the Void] because he had left Gurdjieff.It would have been interesting to read how Lachman might have defended Ouspensky against C.S. Nott's viewpoint, not included in this book: "[His] work was too theoretical," said Nott, "too one-centered, intellectual centered; and often I would leave with a feeling of emptiness, of emotional hunger.... I get more from inner work with one lunch with Mr. Gurdjieff than from a year of Ouspensky's groups."
The fact is that Ouspensky—a serious seeker of a very high caliber and a good and decent man—lost his way quite early and never recovered, believing to the end that he had made a mistake in following Gurdjieff when the real mistake was in his leaving. It was true that in the Russian period Gurdjieff only gave fragments of the teaching and so that is all that Ouspensky left with. The centerpiece of the teaching is the enneagram with its Laws of Three and Seven which Ouspensky spent his whole life studying. Unfortunately, with the Law of Seven, Gurdjieff, in the early period, had given only the two intervals between mi and fa and between si and do (of the ascending octave) and said nothing about the dissonance created by Harnel-Aoot, at the fifth Stopinder.
After Ouspensky's death in 1947, Mme Ouspensky showed Gurdjieff a few chapters of In Search of the Miraculous when he was in New York the following year. He praised it overall, saying, "Very exact is. Good memory. Truth was so." But about one passage he said, "Is too liquid. Lost something."
What did he mean by "too liquid"? Recently, the former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov was asked what the art of chess was to him. Karpov said it was the beauty of the combination/sacrifice, the depth of great positional play and, at maximum level, meaning to play without mistakes. "In Russian," he said, "we have a saying that when intelligent people speak, they speak without water. Each word has an exact meaning. Speaking with water means that your words are empty."
Lachman's book raises the question as to why when people leave the Work they never really seem to leave it. Like a moth to a candle, they keep circling around, pontificating and flexing their ‘esoteric' muscles on Fourth Way Internet forums and gatherings. How is it they don't sell their Gurdjieff books or pack them away in the attic, end any involvement no matter how peripheral and ... move on! Does it have something to do with, as Mr. Gurdjieff said, being "poisoned" by the truth of the teaching? Not presenting itself as a religion and having no formal rituals or initiations, and unlike the ‘Church' of Scientology requiring a five billion-year contract to fulfill their obligations to L. Ron, how is it that people can't get it out of their system? Just go. No blame. No judgment. Get on with their lives. Down deep is it a question of buffering—that they have to make themselves right? And the Work wrong? Are they carrying an anger and guilt over having worked themselves to a place where they are really going to not only see but actually feel and taste and acknowledge their nothingness, admit the hopelessness of their grandiosity built on a deep bedrock of inferiority and lame will—the inner swaggering stuff of Kundabuffer—and ... what? They never experience the what that comes next because they leave, hoping to start over and go beyond, dismiss the inner emptiness they almost fell into. Instead, the false personality blows up again, but now it can talk the Work talk, intellectualize about the Ideas, and psychologize their experience in—since they once belonged to a ‘school,' and taking the word literally—their self-graduation. But when one leaves, what they take with them usually crystallizes, taking the part, or fragment, for the whole. Furthermore, they are no longer under the conscious influence of the teaching and its three lines of work, but instead once again fall under the mechanical influences of the ordinary world.
—Henry Korman
(1) When people leave the Work. According to Lord Pentland, people leave because of "their grandmother, indigestion, money or sex. And few leave rightly. They sneak out the back door." From a private conversation reported to the author.
(2) So we arrive at a certain paradox. J.M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2001), p. 16.
(3) Gurdjieff had this lightly tinted whiteness. Lizelle Reymond, To Live Within (Portland, Ore.: Rudra Press, 1995), p. 257.
(4) At the start. Reymond, pp. 193–94.
(5) St. Petersburg Conditions. William Patrick Patterson, Struggle of the Magicians (Fairfax, Calif.: Arete Communications, 1996), pp. 91–92, 233. Oddly, John Shirley's Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2004) also does not mention this or a number of other salient ideas in Struggle of the Magicians. Shirley, as well, completely overlooks why Gurdjieff went to Egypt and what happened there, which is addressed in Gurdjieff in Egypt, Part I, of the video trilogy The Life & Significance of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.
(6) Without water. Chess Life, October 2004, p. 15.