Capítulo 4
The Revolutionary Teaching: We Are Asleep
In 1912, having amassed over a million rubles through various business ventures including carpet trading and machinery repair, Gurdjieff established his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Moscow. His timing proved unfortunate - Europe was about to plunge into unprecedented war. Having spent fifteen years traversing Central Asia and the Middle East seeking ancient wisdom, and three years methodically building his fortune, Gurdjieff was poised to launch his life's work just as global catastrophe loomed.
When P.D. Ouspensky, a well-known Russian journalist and mathematician who would become Gurdjieff's most influential exponent, first met him in a modest Moscow cafe, he was deeply puzzled by this enigmatic figure. Gurdjieff appeared as an "oriental type" with a distinctive Caucasian accent, dressed in a black overcoat and fedora that seemed "deliberately disguised and completely out of keeping with the place." Their early conversations ranged from esoteric philosophy to practical psychology, but the turning point in their relationship came when Ouspensky asked the crucial question: "Is it possible to stop being a machine?" Gurdjieff's response was characteristically direct: "It is possible, but first one must know the machine."
Gurdjieff's central teaching was revolutionary - humans exist in a prison of mechanical behavior while fast asleep, fundamentally mistaking their everyday consciousness for true wakefulness. This sleep manifests in unconscious habits, reactive emotions, and automatic thoughts that we mistake for conscious choice. The primary challenge, he taught, is "self-remembering" - maintaining simultaneous awareness of both oneself and the external world. This state of dual consciousness creates rare moments of genuine freedom that most humans experience only by accident, if at all.
Ouspensky illustrated this complex concept with an elegant diagram: normal attention is like an arrow pointing either outward toward the world or inward toward oneself, but genuine self-remembering requires pointing both ways simultaneously - an incredibly difficult state to maintain. These precious moments of dual consciousness - when one is aware not just of experience but that "I am experiencing this" - represent our most valuable opportunities for genuine awakening.
To develop this capacity, Gurdjieff had his pupils practice specific exercises. Students would look at ordinary objects while simultaneously maintaining awareness of themselves looking. They practiced sensing their bodies while walking, eating, or working. Ouspensky found these exercises profoundly transformative, describing how wandering through St. Petersburg at night while self-remembering made familiar buildings seem mysteriously alive, creating vivid sensations that "came by themselves" without any need for imagination or fantasy.
In particularly heightened states of self-remembering, Ouspensky reported an extraordinary phenomenon - he could actually see people walking about with "heads wrapped in clouds of dreams," their faces masked by their mechanical thoughts and associations. This startling observation demonstrated Gurdjieff's fundamental point that ordinary consciousness is literally, not metaphorically, a form of sleep - a state of unconscious automatism from which we must struggle to awaken.
Capítulo 5
Essence vs. Personality: The Divided Self
In 1922, while Gurdjieff was attempting to establish his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Europe, Ouspensky was delivering transformative lectures in London that would reshape understanding of human consciousness. His core doctrine challenged the fundamental assumption of free will: humans, he asserted, are essentially machines controlled by external influences rather than their own volition. We possess no permanent, unified self - instead, we exist as a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of moods, impulses, and reactive patterns. Even the simple act of maintaining continuous self-awareness proves impossible; Ouspensky demonstrated through exercises that most people cannot remember their own existence for even two consecutive minutes without becoming lost in thoughts or external stimuli.
Gurdjieff expanded this concept by introducing a crucial distinction between "personality" and "essence." A newborn arrives with only essence - their inherent, authentic response to the world, including natural inclinations, talents, and genuine emotions. Around age six or seven, personality begins to develop as a protective shell formed in response to others' expectations, social conditioning, and environmental pressures. This personality - comprising learned behaviors, opinions, and social masks - often becomes so dominant that essence stops developing entirely. The result is particularly visible in many successful adults who project powerful personalities while remaining essentially undeveloped within - like elaborate facades concealing empty rooms.
To illustrate this distinction empirically, Gurdjieff conducted a remarkable demonstration using hypnotic techniques. He worked with two subjects: a distinguished middle-aged intellectual known for his forceful opinions and complex theories, and a nervous young man who typically appeared scattered and uncertain. Under carefully induced trance states that temporarily suspended their personalities, both men transformed dramatically. The older man's intellectual vigor vanished completely - he became passive and showed no interest in topics he had passionately debated minutes earlier. Conversely, the young man's nervous mannerisms fell away, revealing an unexpected clarity of thought and natural wisdom. Gurdjieff explained that the young man possessed a well-developed essence beneath his anxious personality, while the older man's impressive personality masked an atrophied essence.
Most prescient was Gurdjieff's assertion that "essence and personality are even in different parts of the brain" - a claim that seemed outlandish until decades later when Nobel laureate R.W. Sperry's groundbreaking split-brain research confirmed the existence of two distinct "persons" within our cranial architecture. His studies showed that severing the corpus callosum - the bridge between brain hemispheres - reveals two separate consciousness centers. The left hemisphere specializes in language, logic, and linear thinking (corresponding to personality), while the right manages holistic recognition, intuition, and emotional processing (aligning with essence). This neurological division manifests in daily experience - the left brain controls conscious will and verbal expression, while the right governs energy regulation and non-verbal understanding. The fact that Gurdjieff accurately described this neurological reality decades before its scientific verification, despite having no formal training in brain physiology, lends credibility to his claim that his teaching system drew from ancient scientific traditions.
Capítulo 6
The Laboratory of Intentional Suffering
In 1922, Gurdjieff established his Institute at the Chateau du Prieure near Fontainebleau, formerly home to Louis XIV's second wife. Life there was intensely demanding. Students tended to gardens, livestock, and household duties in what one pupil described as "a seething atmosphere of speed and tension, of zeal and high hopes."
This physical labor served multiple purposes: it overcame natural laziness, quieted the interfering "personality," and helped wealthy students who had never done hard work to readjust their inner balance. When the body tires, personality retreats, allowing more direct contact between essence and experience.
Gurdjieff deliberately created difficulties for his followers to force them to make what he called "super-efforts"-like walking an extra two miles after an exhausting twenty-five-mile journey in bad weather. However, the crucial point wasn't the effort itself but the energy summoned to meet it. Gurdjieff's system was based on the assumption that humans possess vast "vital reserves" of energy, access to which is blocked by feelings of reluctance or boredom. The real aim was to summon the state of inner purpose that makes super-effort feel effortless.
The Hartmanns' journey with Gurdjieff became a series of deliberate hardships: long mountain walks in inappropriate footwear, traveling by moonlight, guard duty instead of sleep. Hartmann understood the purpose-by creating obstacles in strange surroundings, Gurdjieff was forcing them to reach "a certain little do in ourselves" on the scale of development.
This approach generated criticism. Some accused Gurdjieff of reducing pupils to automata through overwork. Katherine Mansfield's death from tuberculosis at the Prieure furthered its sinister reputation. Yet Bennett maintained that despite obstacles, Gurdjieff had "accomplished something never before seen in Europe," creating conditions that revealed transformation potential in dozens of people. The method was simple: stretching students' capacities to their limits while maintaining a "happy and vital" atmosphere. The work itself was often less important than the attitude it cultivated-what Gurdjieff called "the awakening of courage."
Capítulo 7
The Sacred Movements and Demonstrations
In early 1924, mounting financial pressures from his Institute at the Prieure drove Gurdjieff to seek opportunities in America. Accompanied by forty of his most dedicated followers, he organized a series of public demonstrations, first at Leslie's Ballroom in New York and subsequently at the prestigious Carnegie Hall. These performances featured intricate "movements" accompanied by haunting eastern music, traditional drumming, and de Hartmann's original compositions, followed by exhibitions that included demonstrations of what was billed as "magnetism, clairvoyance and mind-reading."
The movements were far more than choreographed dance sequences - they were precise physical exercises meticulously designed to develop heightened attention and presence. Students faced the extraordinary challenge of moving different parts of their bodies in distinct rhythms simultaneously. For instance, one exercise might require the head moving in 5/4 time, while the arms followed 3/4 rhythm, and the legs maintained a complex 7/4 pattern. Some movements involved counting in different number sequences while performing these polyrhythmic motions. This intense coordination demanded complete attention and created what Gurdjieff termed "a new mind" - a higher level of consciousness that transcended ordinary mechanical thinking.
Contemporary observers were deeply affected by these demonstrations. William Seabrook, though skeptical of the purported psychic elements, was particularly struck by what he described as the "automaton-like, inhuman, almost incredible docility" of Gurdjieff's disciples. He compared them to "perfectly trained zombies, or circus animals," noting their absolute precision and unwavering focus. During one particularly dramatic performance at Carnegie Hall, Gurdjieff orchestrated a shocking demonstration of his students' control. Rather than having his troupe demonstrate their usual arrested motion exercises, he unexpectedly turned his back as they came racing toward the footlights at full speed. The students, displaying complete trust and mastery, flew through the air into the orchestra pit, landing in perfect frozen immobility without any injuries - a testament to their extraordinary training and body control.
The sacred movements remain one of Gurdjieff's most significant and enduring legacies, actively practiced by groups across Europe, America, and Australia. They fundamentally embody his central teaching that true consciousness requires the harmonious functioning of all human centers - intellectual, emotional, and physical - working in perfect coordination rather than at cross-purposes. Each movement serves as a living laboratory for self-study, allowing practitioners to observe their mechanical habits, develop presence, and experience moments of genuine self-remembering. Modern movement instructors, trained in direct lineage from Gurdjieff's original students, continue to preserve and transmit these exercises exactly as they were taught, maintaining their integrity as precise tools for inner development.
Capítulo 8
The Final Chapter: Writing for Posterity
Following a near-fatal car crash in July 1924, Gurdjieff's life took a new direction. Realizing his ideas needed to be transmitted to posterity, he began dictating "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" to Olga de Hartmann. The accident profoundly shook both Gurdjieff and his disciples, who had believed him invulnerable.
This period brought further tragedy with the deaths of his mother from liver disease and his wife from cancer. Despite his weakened condition, Gurdjieff demonstrated remarkable powers, once holding water in his hands for five minutes that allowed his pain-stricken wife to drink without suffering.
Gurdjieff now focused entirely on writing, though his style proved notoriously difficult. "Beelzebub" featured outlandish invented words and convoluted sentences that many found impenetrable. After three years of work, he realized extensive rewriting was necessary, a task so daunting he contemplated suicide. Nevertheless, he persisted, creating what many consider his most important work.
During this period, Gurdjieff deliberately distanced himself from disciples like the Hartmanns, believing they made him too comfortable and sapped his creative energy or "hanblezoin." He understood that suffering strengthened his "essence" and creative powers, leading him to seek "intentional suffering" rather than comfort.
During World War II, Gurdjieff remained in his Paris flat despite the German occupation, surviving by selling rugs and running a false eyelash company. After the war, American followers returned to find him older but still commanding, living simply in an apartment crowded with disciples and "pensioners"-elderly people he supported with remarkable kindness.
Gurdjieff's health deteriorated after another car accident in 1949. During his final days, he cryptically told Bennett: "The next five years will decide. Either the old world will make me 'Tchik' or I will make the old world 'Tchik'." He died on October 29, 1949, though doctors were baffled by his autopsy, which revealed intestines in such a state of decay that he should have died years earlier.
Capítulo 9
The Dilemma of Consciousness
The fundamental problem Gurdjieff addressed is the profound conflict between security and intensity in human consciousness. Our everyday consciousness becomes increasingly limited by mechanicalness and habit - a protective shell that while offering comfort and predictability, simultaneously robs us of the vital feeling of being fully alive. This mechanicalness manifests in countless ways: our morning routines, habitual responses to situations, and even our patterns of thought become so automatic that we move through life in a kind of waking sleep.
Yet security tends to conflict directly with wide-awakeness, which emerges more naturally in situations of insecurity and challenge. When faced with unexpected circumstances or genuine challenges, we suddenly find ourselves more alert, more present, more conscious of our existence. This creates what might be called "the dilemma of the Outsider" - a concept that recognizes fundamental differences in how individuals approach this tension. Some personalities, whom Gurdjieff called "seekers," naturally prefer insecurity and intensity to security and boredom, finding conventional life suffocating. Others deeply crave intensity but remain unwilling to trade their security for it, caught in a perpetual state of unfulfilled longing.
The ideal would be combining security with intensity - precisely what major religions have attempted through structures like monasteries. These institutions provide physical security and basic needs while demanding rigorous spiritual discipline, creating an environment where both stability and awakeness can coexist. This balance represents what Gurdjieff saw as a potential solution to humanity's spiritual crisis.
Gurdjieff's method approached mechanicalness with scientific precision, understanding that security causes automatic relaxation - analogous to a hypnotic trance state. His observations were later supported by sensory deprivation experiments showing how the mind begins to disintegrate without external stimuli. His solution was what he termed "artificial insecurity" - a carefully calibrated combination of intellectual efforts, physical disciplines, and emotional shocks. This approach synthesized the traditional ways of fakir (physical discipline), monk (emotional development), and yogi (intellectual work) with a "fourth way" of the "cunning man" who uses precise knowledge to achieve spiritual advancement.
The real starting point in Gurdjieff's work isn't human mechanicalness but rather our glimpses of freedom - those moments of intensity that make us profoundly dissatisfied with ordinary consciousness. We experience these glimpses whenever problems or emergencies galvanize us to urgency, creating a temporary state of heightened awareness. This observation became central to Gurdjieff's method: training pupils to maintain a permanent sense of urgency without requiring actual emergencies to trigger it.
Our consciousness contains what Gurdjieff identified as a mechanism for awakening - like a powerful spring inside the brain that can be wound tight during emergencies, giving us an extraordinary sense of power and control. This mechanism explains why people often perform remarkably well in crisis situations, accessing resources normally unavailable to them. Unfortunately, this spring lies partly beyond conscious control, in what Gurdjieff calls "essence" - our fundamental nature beneath the personality. The personality, or acquired self, lacks the authority to convince this "other self" of its seriousness, creating a fundamental challenge in spiritual development that requires specific methods and approaches to overcome.
Capítulo 10
The Legacy of the Awakener
After decades studying Gurdjieff's ideas, it becomes clear that his system contains both profound insights and certain limitations. His emphasis on man's mechanicalness implied that moments of "awakeness" are rare, but this isn't entirely true. Humans regularly experience flashes of freedom, as T.E. Lawrence described: moments when sensations strike directly, unfiltered through thought.
If Gurdjieff's ideas could be summarized in a sentence, it would be that man is like a grandfather clock driven by a watch-spring-an enormous mechanism powered by an inadequate force. The problem is clear: to increase the driving force. Man may be more than half mechanical, but he can choose whether to live in a blank, hypnotized state, or whether to live as though some immense unguessed meaning lay on the other side of everyday reality, waiting to reveal itself to a sense of purpose.
Gurdjieff's contrast with Ouspensky reveals much about his approach. While Ouspensky taught with scientific detachment, focusing solely on spreading the "fight against sleep" with little interest in individuals, Gurdjieff found people amusing and interesting. His teaching style involved unpredictable behavior, humor, and personal challenges designed to break through his students' mechanical responses.
Kenneth Walker, previously Ouspensky's student, found Gurdjieff's approach refreshingly different, noting that Gurdjieff fostered personal responsibility and freedom rather than mere obedience. This reflects Gurdjieff's understanding that true awakening cannot be forced-it must come from within, through one's own efforts and insights.
Gurdjieff's 'System' represents perhaps the greatest single-handed attempt in human history to make us aware of the potential of human consciousness. Whether he fully realized it or not, his life's work achieved its purpose-not by creating perfect disciples or a flawless system, but by leaving behind a body of ideas and practices that continue to challenge our assumptions about consciousness, will, and human potential. In a world increasingly dominated by mechanical thinking and technological distraction, Gurdjieff's call to awakening remains more relevant than ever.
