Gurdjieff in Egypt Understanding Egyptian Monuments

For ancient Egyptians, all life, every facet of it, was rooted in the spiritual. They lived their lives and designed their monuments as messages and manuals of esoteric knowledge.

The temple complex at Karnak has been built so that on the winter solstice as the sun rises in the east, it comes to a place where visually it sits just atop the Eastern lintel, its rays upon the naos and streaming down the great corridor. Seeing this marriage of science, art and religion; you get some impression of what Gurdjieff means by "objective art." You get a sense of the infinite, of being, that is stupendous.

In Gurdjieff in Egypt, we see how all knowledge of the time was encoded in the temple—in its plan, in sculpture, in the bas-reliefs on the walls, and in the placement of hieroglyphic texts. Where the human head would be the Egyptians located the most sacred part of the Temple, the Naos, or Holy of Holies.

"There are two kinds of art," said Gurdjieff, "one quite different from the other—objective art and subjective art....The difference is that in objective art the artist really does 'create,' that is, he makes what he intended, he puts into his work whatever ideas and feelings he wants to put into it. And the action of this work upon men is absolutely definite; they will, of course each according to his own level, receive the same ideas and the same feelings that the artist wanted to transmit to them. There can be nothing accidental either in the creation or in the impressions of objective art."
— P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous