GURDJIEFF: Mysticism, Contemplation and Exercises
By Joseph Azize
Oxford University Press 2020
Reviewed by John Shirley
Years ago, I wrote a letter to Colin Wilson, the prolific writer on the paranormal, to thank him for his book The Occult, purely because of the book’s capacious section on Gurdjieff. He had provided a reasonably good precis of some central Gurdjieff teachings, and I was excited to recognize notions that were part of my own viewpoint on life: that we are asleep when we think we are awake, that we are mostly mechanistic in our responses, having very little objective control over what we do; that we are so deeply identified with the series of trances, of states, that consume our lives, we’ve lost touch with the purpose of living. Inspired by what I’d read, I searched for Gurdjieff, found his advocates, and learned a great deal more, which was of enormous benefit to me. But I did take issue with one observation of Wilson’s—he claimed that Gurdjieff had failed to pass his teaching along, in any powerful way, to his pupils. The common fallacy is that Gurdjieff had no methodology; that he had only shocking ideas to work with, so he couldn’t teach anyone how to reach his level.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Great exponents of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way, like Lord Pentland, Michel Conge, Michel de Salzmann, William Segal, the late Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, and—most especially—Jeanne de Salzmann, attained to profound consciousness through the Gurdjieff Work. Many of their students developed into fine teachers of this fusion of Eastern and Western esoteric teachings. As for methodology, it is the core of Gurdjieff’s teaching. Gurdjieff did not say that we’re in this awful state implacably or hopelessly. He said that we there is a way out; there is a praxis leading to real consciousness, inner freedom, and higher being. Only—it is hard and unsettling work.
Until recently, the methods were nearly all passed along orally, in person, with teachers of a Gurdjieff group. This is a time-honored means to keep an esoteric school relatively pure. A few methods were offered for public consumption, in Gurdjieff’s unfinished work, Life is Real, Only Then, When I Am; certain others, such as the practice of intentional suffering (not as scary as it sounds), can be found in allegorical form in his gigantic tome, All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Works by his followers, like Maurice Nicoll’s “Psychological Commentaries”, provided some scant samplings of his methods.
But in recent years two books have emerged to offer the general public real, fairly in-depth entry into the actual methods Gurdjieff used. The first is The Reality of Being by Jeanne de Salzmann. That superb book dismayed some of the more hidebound Gurdjieffians with its limpid exposition of Gurdjieff’s methods. The second has come upon us this year, and it may be equally controversial in Gurdjieff circles: Joseph Azize’s thoughtful exegesis, Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises.
The book is constructed in three parts: Introductory, Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises, Exercises from Gurdjieff’s Pupils. Azize derived these techniques largely from transcribed talks by Gurdjieff and some of his more important students. He has also shown how some of them dovetail with known practices of esoteric Christianity.
Part I fills readers in on highlights of Gurdjieff’s life, so far as it’s known. and while his biographical sketch contains a few lapses into unconvincing speculation, it’s on the whole quite sound. It also contains “An Overview of Gurdjieff’s Ideas” in which Azize niftily and handily lays out many of the Fourth Way’s anthropological, esoterically psychological, and cosmological complexities.