On a Spaceship with Beelzebub: By a Grandson of Gurdjieff

PROLOGUE

This is the story of my discovery of the Gurdjieff work—the most powerful, effective and meaningful system of esoteric teaching ever to come to the West. It is also the story of my search for someone who could pass on to me Gurdjieff’s powerful method of self-development, who could teach it in the way that he had intended it to be taught.

Freedom. To be free. Inside myself. Freedom—and all that it means to me—is what ultimately brought me to the door of the Gurdjieff work. When I began my search, it was an idea that seemed to imply a possibility that nothing in life could answer. And although I was trapped in life, there was a part of me that yearned for something that would set me free. Now, having searched for, and found, an answer of my own to the question of inner freedom, my meaning of freedom is simply this: to know why I am here, and what I was intended for.

I have pondered for a long time the mission of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way teaching because I need to understand the obligation I have assumed by practicing his ideas. I had begun to do this work from my own egoistic needs, but Gurdjieff had said, You must first be out and out egoist before you can become altruist. Although I can see the egoistic side, my experiences in the work have not answered the question of what the altruistic side means, especially since the Gurdjieff work, as it is today, has no intention of taking its place in the world.

But before I can properly tell my story, I ought to address one obvious question: Who exactly was Gurdjieff? He was, and remains today, a mysterious figure. Perhaps this is so because he was on a higher level than we are, and we are unable to judge—or even see—anyone who is on a higher level than ourselves. And Gurdjieff was many steps removed from the platform on which the rest of his disciples stood.

He was born in the Caucasus, and raised in the city of Kars, a melting pot of Christian and non-Christian races. Gurdjieff’s question, the ‘idee fixe’ of his inner world, that arose in his mind in early youth, was this: What is the sense and significance of life on the earth in general and of human life in particular? While still a young man his travels took him to Persia, Turkestan, Tibet, India, the Gobi desert and Egypt, in an unremitting search for a real and universal knowledge. His travels in search of hidden knowledge carried him deeper and deeper into Asia, and eventually led him to a source of wisdom in which others before him had also been initiated.

Gurdjieff was unusual not only because he was able to weld a diversity of esoteric disciplines into a single method, but because the method that he conceived was tailored for the West. To participate in an Eastern teaching, with which the West has been fairly inundated, the student must change their garment of culture and memorize a lexicon of foreign words and prayers. But in Gurdjieff’s method, the essential work of translation had already been done—by Gurdjieff. He was able to make his ideas palatable to the psychologically and scientifically oriented Westerner who was suspicious of anything that hinted of religion or dogma. The religious and spiritual sources of his method were therefore well hidden, and the true meaning and purpose of his Work—as he called it—had to be discovered privately and individually by the seeker. If the student could not find his way for himself, he soon became another rat for my experiments, as Gurdjieff liked to boast, for he had his own mission, of which he never spoke.

Gurdjieff did not become a visible presence until around 1912, when he appeared in St. Petersburg, surrounded by students. It was soon after that P.D. Ouspensky met Gurdjieff, having searched on his own for esoteric knowledge. Ouspensky was a Russian journalist who meticulously recorded the teaching as Gurdjieff gave it during the early years in Russia, and on the long flight from Russia to the West.

The First World War obliterated Gurdjieff’s plans to found an institute in Russia. His flight from Russia to the West is recorded in Thomas de Hartmann’s Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff, the most heartfelt of all the books about Gurdjieff.

Together with his band of pilgrims, Gurdjieff founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Chateau du Prieure, near Fontainebleau, in 1922. He would devote the rest of his life to bringing to the West what he had discovered in the East. To do this he created an exact language and, with de Hartmann as his amanuensis, produced the haunting melodies needed for his movements, the sacred dances he had observed in the temples of the East, and that he had reformulated for the purposes of his teaching.

These movements, more than any other method, conveyed by direct experience what Gurdjieff meant by balancing the centers. He contended that we were not normal because our emotional, mental and physical centers were not in accord, for the reason that they had not been properly educated and trained. The movements, although they could not be called sacred dances as practiced by his pupils, did impart a feeling of spirituality that words by themselves could not convey. These were not only an embodiment of the Work in action, but proof of its result.

His Russian pupils were joined by members of the English nobility, as well as English and American writers, artists, and intellectuals. These were his earliest students. Gurdjieff was concerned to make his ideas and his presence known to the West. He had come on a mission, as a Herald of the Coming Good, the title of the one book he issued in his lifetime. Among his early pupils, in addition to Ouspensky, who was already a famous writer in Russia, and Thomas de Hartmann, the composer, also famous in Russia, were Alexandre de Salzmann, an artist and stage designer; his wife Jeanne, a dancer; and A.R. Orage, the editor of The New Age, whom George Bernard Shaw had called the world’s best living editor. Orage not only assisted in the translation of Gurdjieff’s monumental work, All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, but it is questionable whether that work would have achieved its final, completed form without his assistance. There were also Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, artist and writer, who together edited The Little Review, the most influential literary magazine of its time. Other writers of significance who would spread the ideas were Kathryn Hulme, Fritz Peters, and Jean Toomer.

In books, articles and letters, Katherine Mansfield, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Fritz Peters, Jean Toomer and others have given us first-hand reports of life at the Prieure, where the relationships of the people were imbued with brotherly love. No one has satisfactorily explained how and why this quality became lost among subsequent groups, and particularly among those to whom he entrusted his work before he died, and who later established the Gurdjieff Foundation in his name.

Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, published in 1949, is a monumental treatise on the teaching that was instrumental in attracting countless young people into the work during the consciousness-raising sixties. Although the work had gone through a fallow period prior to this, those that Gurdjieff had trained, as well as many who had not been trained, were now in a position to pass on the teaching to a new and eager generation of seekers.

The Gurdjieff teaching soon became known as the Fourth Way, in contradistinction to the ways of the fakir, the yogi and the monk, which were each concentrated on only one of the three centers of man; the fakir being the way of bodily discipline and control, the yogi being the training of the mind, and the monk that of the heart. The Fourth Way incorporated all of these, and on its Way one had but to swallow a pill. That pill, that proved to be too bitter for most, was Conscious Labor and Intentional Suffering. I teach these two things only, Gurdjieff had said, but if we could understand that—and it could only be understood through our own effort and earned experience—we would also understand, in his words, That when it rains, the streets get wet.

But what exactly did Gurdjieff mean by Conscious Labor and Intentional Suffering? No two people have ever given an identical answer or formulation for the reason that, like all of Gurdjieff’s ideas, our understanding is dependent on our effort and experience, as well as the level of our own being. Conscious labor quite obviously called for an effort we were not accustomed to make in our ordinary (un-normal) lives, for the reason that we were still asleep, according to Gurdjieff. Intentional Suffering, equally, could not occur when our Conscience had not been awakened. The two aspects of the formulation were correlated because Consciousness and Conscience could not be separated.

There are now countless fourth way methods in life, all of them partial and incomplete, and all of them borrowing, if not stealing directly from Gurdjieff, who has also exercised a great, abiding influence on many of the Eastern gurus who have followed in his footsteps. But I doubt that Gurdjieff would have been disappointed by any of this. On the contrary, I believe he would have considered it proof that his mission was being accomplished. He once stated that All and Everything would be read from the pulpit one day, and that modern myths would be concocted based on a partial understanding of his book. Today we see more than one Christian order of monks and nuns writing books and practicing the ideas embodied in Gurdjieff’s Enneagram. His work has entered the marketplace, as well as the church, with more than one major industry putting ideas of his into training programs for their employees. EST, Arica, The Diamond Path, to name a few of those who, in many instances, would have had no basis for existence had it not been for Gurdjieff. His yeast is alive, and the bread is rising in unexpected places, and with unexpected results; and we may never know the ultimate result, except to believe that it will be beneficent.

Unfortunately, those who have clung to the old form of the Work, deifying Gurdjieff or the current leaders of the Foundation, seem to have forgotten their original aim.

If Gurdjieff did not share his mission with his students and disciples he did share his method, which he handed out piecemeal, for he needed their participation for his own advancement, and he resisted any attempt to systematize his ideas, for good reason. In countless ways, he urged and prodded his followers to experience themselves in new ways, for only then could they begin to see themselves as they were, as opposed to their imagined pictures of themselves. It soon became evident that his teaching was based on a spiritual psychology, and although self-knowledge was not its end, it was certainly the means: the first stage in self-development and the beginning of man’s awakening from sleep.

While his students studied themselves, he was studying them, for if the West was to change—become spiritualized, as it would have to do in order for the world to survive—it would have to have a change of mind, and for this to be possible it would have to know itself. Gurdjieff was a student of the human psyche as no one before him had been, but this knowledge was only a means to an end, and the end was for a purpose that individually we would have to find for ourselves. And that of course was the point: to find in the work what we needed for our lives, just as he had found what he needed for his life, and in that discovery and achievement had provided us with an unheard of possibility.

Whatever may occur to the form he left us—that was ever in transition while he lived—his ideas and his example remain pure and will always be available for those who seek it, both in his books, where it is permanently preserved, and in whatever real groups that may survive.

I

THE GURDJIEFF FOUNDATION

CHAPTER ONE

The year was 1960, and now, with college behind me, the Army behind me, and a brief flirtation with Europe—where I thought I would settle and live—also behind me, I moved to San Francisco to resume my apprenticeship as a writer.

One of the friends I made there, also a budding writer, was Jacob (Jerry) Needleman. I had just compiled a bibliography of William Saroyan that was about to be published. Oyez, a new, small press in the Bay Area had approached me to do a series of portraits and checklists of some of the new San Francisco poets. Apparently, a poetry renaissance had begun, but the only poetry I had read was in college, and though I had been moved by the poetry of Yeats, and some of the poems of Eliot and Wilfred Owen, as well as A.E. Housman, I could make no sense of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, and most of the other American poets we were given to read.

During the 60s everyone was riding on a wave of cosmic energy, and ironically, as it turned out, I rode out on the Wave of Poetry, and very mysteriously became a poet myself, when poetry was the last kind of writing I had wanted to do.

Jerry, in the meantime, was writing short stories, and one day decided to produce a literary magazine. I would be his coeditor. He swore me to secrecy on the title, Poor Old Tired Horse. He was so convinced of its merit that he was certain the title would be stolen if word got out. We need a manifesto, he declared. I put a sheet of clean paper in the typewriter, and presto, with no more than a word or two about the direction we were to go in, I produced a perfect piece of work, according to Jerry, who from that day on was convinced I was a natural writer, born to the trade. I returned the compliment by stealing a line from one of his short stories for my description of the Beat poet, David Meltzer, for the first monograph I would publish with Oyez. When Jerry’s wife, Carla Needleman, read the booklet I presented them with (having received ten complimentary copies, and a $50.00 advance, my first earnings as a writer), she said, You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel.

Carla had been married before, and the large photograph of Gurdjieff that highlighted their library had come from her former husband. I didn’t have to be told that Gurdjieff was Armenian (mother Armenian, father Greek). But although he looked like one of several types I was familiar with, there was nevertheless something about the suffering in his face that was not like the suffering in the faces of all the other old Armenians I knew.

Carla said he was a mystic philosopher. It was never clear to me if Carla’s former husband knew Gurdjieff, or had simply studied his ideas, but it was clear that Gurdjieff was someone who had played an important part in their lives. It never occurred to me that he might be a part of their lives still.

I was struck by Gurdjieff’s bald head, that had been shaved clean, and the sad eyes, completely lacking in self-pity. The bald head and large mustache suggested a Magus, but that may have only been an affected appearance or pose to hide something else. The Oriental mind, as I well knew, never moved directly at its target. He had been photographed in his undershirt, with the top button showing. This didn’t surprise me, as my own father often walked around, both inside the house, and outside, when wandering through or working in his garden, barefooted and in his B.V.D.s. It made me wonder if Gurdjieff had not also come from peasant stock.

At Fields Bookstore in San Francisco, where I often went to search for books for my William Saroyan collection, I was handed a mimeo newsletter that Mr. Fields asked me to deliver to Saroyan the next time I went to Fresno. The request didn’t surprise me because Mr. Fields had published a limited edition of one of Saroyan’s books back in the thirties. I assumed they were friends. But I didn’t know until I delivered the envelope that the newsletter had to do with Gurdjieff, and it would be years before I would learn that Fields Bookstore was a point of connection for people in the work.

Saroyan and I decided Gurdjieff was a charlatan, though how we came to this conclusion I can’t imagine now. Having recently reread Saroyan’s letters to me I find that I had been reading Gurdjieff at that time, or perhaps shortly after, and that his work had struck something in me. I had forgotten this, perhaps because it hadn’t taken me anywhere at the time, and being absorbed by my own work I found his writings disturbing or distracting, because I was certain of only one thing at that time: I wanted to be a writer.

It wasn’t long after this that my sister, who was much closer to the Needlemans than I was, joined a Gurdjieff group in the Bay Area, and it was only then that I learned that Jerry and Carla were also in the work. I was about to leave San Francisco, and it would be many years before I would see the Needlemans again, and under very different circumstances than those that first brought us together.

The book I wrote next would be titled Homage to Adana, after my father’s birthplace. I had already begun my own small press, that I had named after the region of Cilicia, once a notable Armenian kingdom, when Adana was its capitol city. But the homage was not strictly speaking to Adana or the old country, but rather to the men and women who had transplanted old values in this new land, and had placed my heritage in front of me as a boy, that I had inherited at my birth, but that I was only now beginning to come to terms with.

All my life the existence of my people, as well as my place in their midst, had puzzled me, even at times tormented me, because their suffering had occurred elsewhere, in another world and time, that they could not forget but that I did not want to learn about. My mother had been the sole survivor of her family of the attempted genocide of the Armenian nation by the Turks during the First World War.

Like all those of my generation, I came into myself very late, which meant that I would come to my work late, my marriage late, and the meaning of my life very, very late.

I had blamed my unhappiness on my birthplace—Racine, Wisconsin—but as I began to move out and inhabit a larger world, a world I was sure I needed, I found myself, from the very beginning—for I had left at the age of twenty—needing to return to continue my search for something I could neither name nor understand. Something had been deposited there, some secret mystery, to which I must return again and again if I was to fathom the meaning of my existence on Earth. This I knew, and this was all I knew, but I knew it with such instinctive certainty that nothing could prevent me from my search, even though I knew I was working in the dark.

Finally, with the writing of the poems that became Homage to Adana I began to sense a movement, and I realized I was directing that movement, and that at last my search had acquired an intelligence and a purpose.

I had to recover my life before I could inherit it. This was the burden of my writing. This was the life I was finding in these poems, and to my surprise I began to see patterns that I had never known were there.

From an early age I knew that I required guides, examples, some intelligent outer force that could show me, even move me in a direction that was meaningful. My spirit cried out for something more than I had seen and been given, or could ever expect to receive. But what that was I couldn’t know. Had I known it was simply my birthright that I was seeking I could have dropped the rancor and resentment.

Homage to Adana gave my life a direction it had lacked before. I had not only found my voice as a writer, but I had—though I didn’t know it at the time—prepared the ground in my search for a teaching, for what I had discovered that I hadn’t yet put a name to—work on myself—was manifest in a teaching, and specifically for me, the Gurdjieff teaching.

No doubt because I was ready, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan fell into my hands. If Theodore Dreiser’s The Stoic had put me on my path, Don Juan made it possible for me stay on the path I was on, although in the long view—that is much more apparent to me now—it was just another step on the endless Path that I had entered with this birth. But as yet I hadn’t known that I was either on or searching for a spiritual path or direction, or for that matter that the deliverance to another dimension of reality was even possible. But here was a book that opened onto a world I had never suspected was there. I did not, in one quick leap, go from tunnel vision to clear sight, but I was aware, almost instantly, that the world I had been living in was not enough, that there were worlds within worlds within worlds, and it was clear that I had encountered very few of these worlds in my short life. Don Juan moved comfortably between worlds because he was at home in both. This seemed miraculous to me, and years later I would know why, for Gurdjieff had said that the manifestation of the laws of one cosmos in another cosmos constitute what we call a miracle. Don Juan was such a miracle for me.

Most of my life—certainly all of adult life—I had been consumed with the need for fame. Fame was to be my ticket to the larger world I was seeking, my entry card, the proof-positive of my arrival. It would also validate me, the son of immigrant parents, and certify me American, artist, citizen of the world. But I had another side to me that I didn’t see nearly as clearly, that would not accept anything from the outside, a side that was determined to make life as difficult as possible, to seek discomfort the moment comfort appeared, a side that would never be relaxed or at home anywhere, a side that knew that this Earth was not home and would never be home. Gurdjieff had also said that every stick has two ends, and that life’s two-sided stick appears in all things, including the inner life of man. I could understand that the law of opposites was absolute, but what I did not see, for myself, was which end of the stick I was holding at any given time—or even which end I wished to grasp.

What I did understand of all this was that I had just had my first flirtation with fame. Through my press I had edited and published an anthology of twenty Fresno poets. Up until this time it had always been assumed that New York was the proper arbiter and judge of things literary. At best, magazines or journals were produced in the hinterland, but with their sights clearly aimed at mecca. But Fresno was rife with poets, and when one of them suggested that my press produce a journal, I suggested an anthology instead. There were poets everywhere, all waiting to break into the big time, and here was a new opportunity, because what my anthology—Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poets—really heralded was a celebration of place and time and people, all of whom were as valid as anyone, anywhere.

The book was so successful among the literati, both nationally and locally, that I was on the verge of becoming a local celebrity. Within two months of the book’s publication, and after I had produced a second printing, I left Fresno, never to return. This effectively ended my long relationship with Saroyan, who never forgave me my departure. I had wanted to tell him, but couldn’t, that my brush with fame had had a shrinking effect on me—instead of an enlarging one. I had felt pigeon-holed, marked down and defined, and anything—even total obscurity—would have been better than that.

If this was not what I wanted, what was it then that I was seeking? Did I know, did I even know to ask? A failed marriage behind me, Fresno behind me, the Armenians presumably behind me, wherefore and to what was I headed? I didn’t know. I was taking the next step, and the next step was the Berkshires in Massachusetts, where I soon began writing the poems that would become the book, Looking Over Hills.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had to leave everything behind before it would be possible for something completely new to appear. And this newness was ostensibly only a change in my poetry—from people to nature, from outer to inner. I didn’t see it as a progression because what I was confronted with was so much bigger, that I could see nothing but it. There was a declaration behind the vision that produced the poems, which were poems about the invisible, interconnected fabric of the universe and life, and what I not only sensed but knew, was this: I have become a channel, a radio that can transmit messages between stations, but this glory is not mine, it is temporary, and nothing of its quality will accrue to me if I leave it at that; that is, if I accept this and do not take a step beyond this, into a dimension where I can make something that is mine, and that will not, can not be taken away.

I knew that this glory or attunement that I was feeling, although temporary and belonging to the poet, not to me, could be permanently achieved if I could put aside my attachment to being the poet and work to make this state of raised consciousness a permanent reality. Surely this is what Don Juan had been speaking about, and this is what the apprentice, Castaneda, had been seeking.

CHAPTER TWO

It has taken me a very long time to understand that we can never know more than the next step, with the ledge we are standing on being the step already taken. But about this one step we are able to be relatively certain. And we can only know it by feeling. We must trust our hearts.

Somewhere in Castaneda, he speaks of the leap into the abyss. In a sense, every step we make is that, but some more dramatic—more important and urgent—than others. On the step we are on we incorporate what we have understood, which must then be actualized. The previous step is a preparation for the one that will follow. We are stopped—if we are—by thinking in terms of conclusions or results, instead of seeing that our life is a series of steps, the outcome of which is unknown to us because we neither know where we came from nor where we are going.

I was about to make two successive steps, both of which I had prepared for, but in totally different ways.

Something in me knew that my work with the Armenians was not over, that a great deal of psychological material had to be put in order. Homage to Adana had revealed this, and in doing so had pointed me in a direction. Ararat, an Armenian-American literary magazine, where I had published many of my early poems, was about to lose its editor, and applications were being taken. Shortly after finishing Looking Over Hills I drove down to New York to apply for the job, which meant meeting with the assistant editors and the publisher, and presenting a verbal proposal. I was very eager to have the job, and I was both passionate and persuasive during the interview. I made a number of promises: I would introduce photographic covers, institute a series of oral tape recordings of the survivors of the Massacres, travel to Armenia for a special issue,