first and third Wednesday of every month - May 2 and 16
One Hundred Years of Gurdjieff’s Work
October 5th - 7th, 2012
There are people who attain something special and those who help others to attain, who are often called ‘teachers’. We use the word ordinarily for those who educate children in the ways of the world. Gurdjieff used his own word oskianotsner for those who educate children in the ways of the soul and the concept can be extended to all those who provide help and guidance for the attainment of inner reality. The general population looks to special people in such guises as artists, scientists, athletes, political leaders and the stars of entertainment. All such special people are highly visible in society and make their mark of excellence in some specialised field. There is another class of special people who are not so visible and may not have any commonly accepted mark of excellence but who play a significant role in the lives of people who are seeking some inner change in themselves. Such people form a class of seekers for what is within, clearly not something visible, for whom John Bennett coined the term psychokinetic, because their psyche is in flux and not fixed as it is in the much larger class of psychostatic people, which can include most of those who make their mark on the world.
Psychokinetic people have a special problem because they are neither the one thing nor the other; they are seeking but have not found. Their path is hazardous particularly because, in a precise sense, they do not know what they are doing and can only do so when they have arrived or made the transition from ordinary life where they are driven by external forces to another position in which they are guided from within. Because of this uncertainty, they have to rely on people who claim to have gone further and found at least something. It is unlikely that such people have completed the transition themselves. There is yet another class of people whom Bennett called psychotelios, those who have arrived, but they may be quite invisible in society and have tasks we do not understand and rarely teach.
The psychokinetic seeker has no way of knowing for sure whether the teachers they meet know something that can help them. Consequently, they are highly vulnerable to exploitation and are often deceived. They may become slavish followers of some charlatan and reject someone who can give them practical help. There is no explicit structure of learning equivalent to that for academic studies, mainly because there are no external measurements of accomplishment for the inner search and the subjective feelings and judgments of the seeker are obviously unreliable.
The idea of making a major step from external to internal life can be expanded into a picture of a series of steps. Gurdjieff referred to this in terms of a staircase bridging between the two worlds. Along the various steps in this staircase, the seeker will find people who, though they have not attained a final realisation of themselves nevertheless know and even understand something that can be useful to relative beginners. Gurdjieff elaborated on the metaphor of the staircase to say that each step or place in it should be occupied by someone who can help those on lower levels, just as in the ancient scheme of the Great Chain of Being that bridges between nature and God. And, if someone makes a step up the staircase, he has a duty to bring someone up to take his place.
Gurdjieff’s model gives us a way of representing the known phenomena of seekers, cults, spiritual schools, esoteric groups, mysterious teachers, black and white magic, mystical communities and so on as the visible appearance of an inward process that is not so visible, that is generating a psychokinetic society which, in any particular detail, can always go wrong. The image of the staircase raises a question because the reality and logic of where one starts from and the reality and logic of where one might arrive are so different that they can even contradict each other. Gurdjieff sometimes spoke of humanity being divided into two streams, from Sumerian times, having almost nothing to do with each other. This means that the staircase cannot be constructed in a straight line and might well be more appropriately modelled by modern complexity theory. Cynics might well imagine the staircase to be akin to a labyrinth or maze and certainly many experience it twisting and turning upon itself.
The people appearing on the staircase as teachers or helpers to the seeker are, for good or ill, representatives of the realm of freedom that beckons them on. But, the further up the staircase the special person, the possible teacher, is the less likely he or she is to be of practical help, because the seeker will not be able to make use of their insight and incapable of following their logic. There are many stories about this in the Islamic tradition and Gurdjieff himself caustically remarked that everyone wants to be taught by Jesus Christ while hardly anyone can be, as clearly indicated in the Gospel saying of Christ, ‘He who has ears let him hear!’ Christ taught the multitude in parables or stories as, even today, we learn something indirectly through literature, but not the practical way that requires some deeply personal transaction between the seeker and the teacher that does not follow any formula. A twentieth century teacher in his own right, Rudolf Steiner, met one his teachers, a herb seller, on a train only once and was told to read a certain book in a certain way.
The teacher is special relative to the seeker. When real practical help is transacted, the teacher plays the role of higher intelligence in relation to the seeker and should in turn seek a higher intelligence still. The teacher can obscure what is beyond him or her and then be a false god, or serve as a doorway to the truth that is sought within. He or she is imperfect and will make mistakes, but they can do what the angels cannot, because they know what it is to be human as the angels with all their shining intellect never can.
