Skip to main content

The trail of Mr Gurdjieff




I first read about Gurdjieff in a book by Anne Bancroft entitled 'Modern Mystics and Sages, when I was a teenager. Incidentally it is a marvellous book. She is a miracle writer able to evoke the life of spirit of her subjects in short, concise and captivating chapters (I met Thomas Merton and Martin Buber here first too, and cannot thus be thankful enough).

I must have been sufficiently impressed as I bought my mother a copy of Gurdjieff's 'Meetings with Remarkable Men' This she read (and I did not) expressing disappointment, I recall, that it talked insufficiently of the content of the remarkable mens' belief and practice. I noticed that it had been made into a film by Peter Brook, which I have never seen (but which I have just ordered), in whom I was interested. Brook had directed the first serious play (Anthony and Cleopatra) that I ever saw on a professional stage (at Stratford) and I had heard him subsequently give a mesmerising talk on both the play and the craft of theatre.

For years any connection with Gurdjieff lay in abeyance. Until I went to work with Ann to help found the Prison Phoenix Trust. She had read him, his errant disciple, Ouspensky and two of his key collaborators: Maurice Nicoll and J.G. Bennett. The latter, I think, she had met. The one who most deeply impressed her was Nicoll (and I inherited her copy of Living Time and his Psychological Commentaries on Gurdjieff and Ouspensky). I have read 'Living Time' and Nicoll's books of commentary on the parables of the New Testament: 'The Mark' and 'The New Man' with great profit. They have a profound simplicity and a quality of depth that sings through the surface pedestrianism of their text. No literary artifice should distract from the seriousness of their message. It was here I first encountered the understanding of sin as a 'missing of the mark' of one's own being. We are all works in progress towards glory gone astray and there are ways of finding our way that are law like that, by their practice, open us to the ever presence of grace.

The whole nexus, however, disappeared again until last year I read Jacob Needleman's 'What is God?' where, for the first time to my hearing, Needleman described his own indebtedness to 'the Work' (as Gurdjieff described it) and his long term practice within a number of its groups. Retrospectively it explained a great deal of Needleman's preceding work: a kind of hermeneutical key explaining his attitude towards traditional spirituality - its value and yet being a value whose full worth is hidden, that is not immediately accessible to the mainstream of those traditions themselves. I re-read Nicoll's 'Living Time', de Hartmanns' 'Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff' and most recently Ravi Ravindra's account of his work with Jeanne de Salzmann (Gurdjieff's principal disciple).

It does not appear that life will allow me to escape this strand of thought (and practice) - even though (like perhaps any group over time), it possesses features (and people) from whom one recoils. The recoiling, of course, might say as much about you as it does about them!

There is, I feel, however, something 'here' - a kind of rigour about the importance of sustained practice, the stress on the body in practice that works in from movement and posture to states of mind and spirit, a way that does not inflate one with a spiritual ideal in such a way that you miss all the many fold ways you miss the mark of that ideal and yet, at the same time, a way that carries a high sense of what it means potentially to be human.

I do not think I am likely to 'be converted' but I will continue to pay attention and I notice, even this morning, when meditating in the prayer of the heart, certain things that de Salzmann had said to Ravindra were resonating with my practice and ever so gently adjusting it, and deepening its seriousness.

What reading de Salzmann has (re) convicted me of is the importance of attentive, regular practice. The form is analogous, yet different, but there is a sense that we are of the same party, much closer in what unites than in what separates.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev