Gurdjieff's Vision

Originally from the Caucausus, Gurdjieff founded a school near Paris where he died in 1949. In Gurdjieff’s system, students perform movements and dances in a state of heightened self-awareness. At his school, he used ritualized gestures to break apart dead habits – old postures, moth-eaten ideas – and release new forces.

Some intellectual defenders of the Rave movement have adopted Gurdjieff’s system as a way of explaining the innate mystical rapport Ravers feel while dancing. Gurdjieff thought that the purpose of human existence is to channel and transmit certain cosmic energies. Clearly, the all-night exuberance of Burning Man, its playing with the elements of heat and light – fire, laser and lightning – is an attempt, in Benjamin’s phrase, to "commingle with the cosmic powers."

Gurdjieff’s many visionary ideas seem quite strange at first. He believed the earth and the moon were living, evolving beings – also a shamanic concept – and that humanity was designed to serve the evolutionary purposes of the earth and the moon. Human beings are, in his theory, the "organs of sense perception" for the earth, and in their continual transformations of this planet they serve the planet’s needs – not their own. "Humanity, like the rest of organic life, exists on earth for the needs and purposes of the earth. And it is exactly as it should be for the earth’s requirements at the present time."

In his system, there are many finer gradients of matter that science does not register – not only ideas and thoughts, but even a substate of the human soul are types of material. After we die, according to Gurdjieff, the moon consumes the fine matter of human souls. It is like a magnet that draws our souls into it: "Everything living on the earth, people, animals, plants, is food for the moon. The moon is a huge living being feeding upon all that lives and grows on the earth." Someday, the earth would evolve into a being like the sun, while the moon would transform into a second earth. Humanity was simply a stage in this process.

Only through an intensive effort of conscious evolution – what he called "self-remembering" – was it possible for an individual to escape being eaten by the moon. "The liberation that comes with the growth of mental powers and faculties is liberation from the moon." He argued that humanity was not truly conscious, that mans’ actions were entirely mechanical: "Everything ‘happens,’ he cannot ‘do’ anything. He is a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside." The influences of the other planets determined wars, revolutions, technological breakthroughs, and environmental catastrophes on the earth’s surface. In his system, social progress is an illusion: "Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago."

Most of my life, I have been chained to cities where night is, for the most part, a muted void and the elements are reduced to abstractions. On the other hand, in Manhattan, it is very easy to have the uneasy awareness of being a miniscule cog in a vast machine, a "cybernetic pulse engine," accelerating outside of human control. I now suspect that Gurdjieff is right: the cosmic apparatus of swirling constellations and planetary bodies and radiating moon exerts a direct and causal influence on human destiny -- that those forces might be responsible for the running of the entire mechanism.

In a sense, it seems a strictly logical idea. "What is war? It is the result of planetary influences," Gurdjieff said. "Everything that happens on a big scale is governed from outside, and governed either by accidental combinations of influences or by general cosmic laws."According to Gurdjieff, intellectual knowledge – technical or academic mastery of any subject – is always shallow and one-dimensional.

"Knowledge by itself does not give understanding. … Understanding depends upon the relation of knowledge to being." He thought that ancient cultures prioritized one’s state of being – developed through self-discipline and spiritual training – while modern culture only appreciates the amount that one knows: "People of Western culture put great value on the level of a man’s knowledge but they do not value the level of a man’s being and they are not ashamed of the low level of their own being." If understanding is linked to being, then certain types of phenomena can only be comprehended when the observer has changed: "There are things for the understanding of which a different being is necessary."

This transformative process takes place in stages, over time. He also believed that everything, including psychic processes and thoughts, was actually a form of material – and all material was, to some extent, sentient. "Everything in its own way is intelligent and conscious," he said. "The degree of consciousness corresponds to the degree of density or the speed of vibrations. The denser the matter, the less conscious it is."

In his view, the universe worked through a system of "reciprocal maintenance," with each level of being feeding on the beings beneath it. Human beings, the most conscious organic entities on earth, were food for the demiurges above them.