First, however, I need to provide a very brief introduction to the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff (1866/1877-1949). Gurdjieff, who was born in Alexandropol, Armenia, which was then part of the Russian empire, and who was of Greco-Armenian parentage, was a mystic and spiritual teacher who claimed to belong to no tradition. As a consequence, he was able to argue that he was offering a ‘fourth way’, one in opposition to the ‘ways’ of the fakir, of the monk and of the yogi, all of which he believed to be obsolete for the twentieth century. Gurdjieff may have benefited from access to esoteric knowledge from the various individuals he would have met in his early adult years which he spent travelling in Egypt, in other parts of the Middle East, in India, as well as in Central Asia, where he states in one of his works that he had undertaken a three-month retreat in a monastery in Turkestan belonging to the mysterious Sarmoung brotherhood (apparently, a Sufi sect). Gurdjieff’s central tenet was that humans’ routine, or rather mechanical, responses to everyday life prevented them from reaching a state of higher consciousness. As such, in order to jolt his followers out of the planes in which they found themselves either emotionally, mentally or spiritually (or a combination of all), Gurdjieff would impose on them various sets of bizarre as well as at times highly unnerving exercises, together with some particular dance movements of his invention, plus some rather unsettling if not crude forms of psychodrama. All this so that his disciples would be roused from their sleep and thus be able to awaken to the richness of their essence.

               [Excerpt from page 219 of In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P.D. Ouspensky]

     “But there are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep.

     “First of all it must be realised that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotised and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position. [my emphasis]

     “There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.

     “At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotised his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.

     “And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.

     “This tale is a very good illustration of man’s position.

For another entry (published on this website) about a ‘fourth way’ member and advocate, click here.

Lausanne, the above was written and posted on the first day of the tenth month of the year two thousand and twenty-one.