Let me begin this talk by thanking not only the organisation here in Seattle for inviting me, but more specifically, for inviting me to come and talk here this evening without having specified what to speak about beyond saying Gurdjieff: Fourth Way. Musing on the plane this morning, I found myself reflecting on one topic - namely, how much more disturbed we are by small things than by great ones; how much more important the small things are than the big things; how much more of our time and energy is given to the things which we really know do not matter, and how we are unable to bring ourselves to give time and energy to the things that we know do matter.

 

This is really a very strange situation because we already know pretty well what matters and what does not matter. This led me to think that I should respond to this unusual degree of freedom you have given me by attempting to speak about some of the basic questions of the teaching, or way of life, which I have been involved in most of my life, and which has come to me by personal contact as you mention on your flyer, from such teachers as P.D. Ouspensky, J.G. Bennett, and pre-eminently, Mr. Gurdjieff.

 

Mr. Ouspensky made his first impact on the Western world when be established himself in the early 30's in London, England, and began to lecture to the intelligentsia of London. The theme, which at the time made a great and unpalatable impact on all who heard him, was that we ordinary people – that is, ordinary men and women who have not persistently worked on ourselves - are always and in everything slaves, and can do nothing corresponding to our own free will. We do not see that it is useless, and even meaningless, to speak about Doing when there is no Being. And the only hope for a man lies in the possibility that he might make contact with what Mr. Gurdjieff had called something that was part of his essential nature which could give him the power to act, so that he can be free from illusion and create his own independent individuality. This something is what Mr. Gurdjieff called Conscience.

 

But before speaking of Conscience, it is necessary for me to try and give you an idea of what Ouspensky and Gurdjieff mean when they speak of Being. This is one of several basic questions which I would wish to talk about tonight together with such questions as: Why is cosmology important? What is transformation? What is work on oneself and what are its stages? What can be said about sex? And, finally, something about a subject which might sound a little more practical - that is, music, dancing, and what has become known as the Movements.

 

A medley of subjects, you might well say, but they are truly related because they all form essential parts of the comprehensive teaching left to us by Ouspensky, Bennett, and Gurdjieff.

 

Let us return to Being. The meaning turns upon the conception of different levels within the Created Universe. At the summit is the Creator Himself.

 

The mode of Being at the base is the complete passivity of dispersed unconscious matter. Between these two are many levels of Being, of which one is occupied by ordinary men and women. Below this are animals - one or two brained beings, as Mr. Gurdjieff calls them. After this comes beings whose experience is confined to a vegetative existence. Beyond this again comes the being of mere things and finally the dispersed, incoherent being which is the ground state.

 

The important thing to understand about levels of Being is that no being can understand or perceive a higher level of being than that which he occupies himself. For example, man is on a higher level than the animals because he has the faculty of reasoning, and with it the power of choice. No animal can understand what this means. Warm-blooded animals with a feeling brain have a possibility of emotional experience which does not exist for one-brained creatures, and so on down the scale.

 

Throughout the hierarchy of Being there is this relationship that beings on each level can communicate with, and to the extent of their own powers, can participate in the experience of beings of their own level, but they cannot communicate with or participate in the experience of levels of being higher than themselves. This applies also to man. There are beings higher than man, but even if he is told of them, even if he believes in their existence, he cannot know in his own immediate experience what they are, or what constitutes the essential difference between their nature and his.

 

You might object to this by saying, "If what you say is true, why do you assert that there are levels of being above man?"

 

I am referring to a general rule, and if it were to operate rigidly, that is, without occasional exceptions, all the efforts of man to attain a higher level of being would have to be made blindly, without seeing where he is going and what he can hope to attain.

 

But Being depends on Consciousness and human consciousness fluctuates. It is sometimes on a very low level, and sometimes it rises far above our ordinary waking state. Sometimes, though very rarely, a man is able to exist on a very much higher level than that which corresponds to his ordinary nature.

 

This brings me quite appropriately to the question of sex, which as has often been said, is a gateway available to ordinary man to reach higher levels. The sex centre in man indeed differs from all the other centres, such as intellectual, emotional, or instinctive, in that it has an enormous range of experience into which it can enter, extending from simply temporal activities connected with the life or the physical body, to participation in the world of essences and union with higher centres which exist in man and with which man is not normally connected.

 

There are a few important things to be said about sex, or the sex centre. First, that it provides a greater proportion of the direct motives of human actions than any of the other functions.

 

Two, that when it enters in conflict with the other functions, the sex function almost always has the upper hand. The power of the sex function prevails over hunger or pain, over fear and anger, approval or disapproval, and habits of most kinds.

 

Three, the sex centre is free from dualism. If this seems to you contrary to experience, reflect that these dualistic manifestations, like sympathy and antipathy, belong in fact to other centres, the very centres in which dualism is strongest.

 

Fourth, the sex energy is commonly used by the other centres. This leads to jealousy, envy, possessiveness, cruelty, immoderate indulgence in excitement. None of these activities belong to the sex centre alone.

 

Fifth, this explains why the study of the sex centre is so difficult, in that it can seldom be observed in its pure form.

 

Six: It is, however, a psychic centre in its own right, with a very special mode of cognition and knowledge. It deals by participation and concern with the experience of essences; it gives knowledge of other beings and their essential nature. The character of its memory, for instance, is very special. Because the energy it uses is not limited to processes taking place in time only, it can remember the past as well as the future. Think of “love at first sight,” and the feeling of quasi-certainty which often comes when a relationship develops in time which the sex centre had remembered in advance.

 

Seven: There is a sacredness about the work of the sex centre, in the sense that it has access to higher levels of being and can lift a man or a woman above his or her own petty existence.

 

Eight: There are methods for work on the sex function, but they do not apply at the commencement of work on oneself, because any work which results in energy becoming released may cause it to flow into negative and destructive processes, so long as we are still prone to imagination, self-love, and the like.

 

Finally, there is a wrong use of the sex function as soon as it ceases to be the spontaneous movement towards unity and begins to depend either on a selfish will or upon some external stimulus and excitement.

 

Now let me say something about Mr. Gurdjieff‘s cosmology. With this we come to a subject which matters but which most people are reluctant to face, and that is - not only the meaning and purpose of our lives, but the meaning and purpose of the Great Universe of which we and our fellow men are a tiny part.

 

Mr. Gurdjieff teaches that the universe is such that the work of conscious, independent individuals is needed to maintain its coherence, to hold it together without disaster. This implies the presence in the universe of self-creating beings, for only such a being can become a truly independent individual. But a self-creating being must also be equally capable of self-destruction. Obviously, the appearance of a being of this kind in the universe is a dangerous event, because there cannot be any weighting of the scales in one or the other direction, either towards creation or destruction, or freedom would be meaningless. Thus, many processes will be liable to uncertainties. The universe is, as Mr. Bennett puts it, a Dramatic Universe.

 

The question naturally arises in our minds why and how such beings can come into existence in a universe brought into being by the act of an all-wise and all-just Creator. Mr. Gurdjieff explains this in a way that is very simple, but very profound. The universe exists in time. It was created as a temporal process. That means not something complete and ready-made, but something which must unfold and realize itself progressively in a definite order.

 

But this very fact carries with it one inevitable consequence, and that is that the process cannot go back or stand still.

 

Let us suppose that the universe existed in the beginning as something perfect and complete. Obviously, the only possible change must be in the direction of imperfection and incompleteness. Mr. Gurdjieff expresses this idea by referring to the primordial state as the Sun Absolute surrounded by endless space into which its substance is slowly being radiated. The consequence of this is that, sooner or later in time, it must dissolve into the infinity of space and disappear.

 

To prevent the dissolution of the Creation it therefore became necessary for the Creator to perform a second act of Creation. This was to bring a new diversity into the Universe by which there could also be a return to the Sun Absolute to compensate for that which was sent out from it. For this purpose there was brought into existence the whole great system of stars and galaxies which constitute the Universe as we are beginning to know it.

 

The Second Creation is based on the fundamental principle of eating and being eaten. Everything in the Great Universe is both eater and food. There is a universal cosmic exchange of substances, instead of a mere out­pouring into the void. So we have a building up process to balance a running down process due to the nature of time. The passage of time, with its inherency of decay and ultimate running down Mr. Gurdjieff calls the Merciless Heropass. It is the mode of existence of things as opposed to living organisms. The first kind of existence Mr. Gurdjieff calls Autoegocrat, just existing by one's own coherence, like a table holds together until it wears out.

 

The second kind of existence is based on this relation of eating and feeding, by which every living being feeds other living beings and derives its food from living things in its turn. The whole universe is conceived as a living organism composed throughout of smaller, but similar living organisms which make up its body. This mode of existence in which everything eats and is eaten Mr. Gurdjieff calls Trogoautoegocrat, which I believe can be translated: I maintain myself by eating and being eaten. Thus the natural decay of the world in time is counterbalanced.

 

The Great Universe can exist indefinitely by replenishing its own life and not radiating irreversibly into endless space. According to Mr. Gurdjieff, there are living organisms on all scales, vastly greater as well as vastly smaller than man. Suns and planets are alive, eat and are eaten, just as men and animals, or cells and viruses. The solar systems grow by processes strictly analogous to those which build our own bodies. Indeed, the whole Great Universe, the Megalocosmos, grows in the same way, receiving its food from the Endless Source, and the everlasting exchange of substances throughout its extent.

 

There is, however, one new factor arising from this free growth by which the trogoautoegocratic process is sustained, and that is that the Universe constantly elaborates on its own structure. New forms of life appear and the process of eating and being eaten grows more and more complicated. The Universe expands into the endless realms of time and space and in doing so, it loses its coherence. The original act of creation, by which it was brought into being, gradually diminishes in its effect, simply because its energy gets spread more thinly over a growing world.

 

The trogoautoegocratic process cannot do anything to maintain unity because that is not its purpose. So we finally come to realise that to maintain unity and coherence, a third and quite different factor has to be brought to bear.

 

A third creation was necessary and this was the coming into existence of independent conscious individuals and, as I think I said before, to be truly independent, one must be self-created. There had to be independent or free beings who could bring something to the Universe which even the Creator Himself could not put into it without annulling His own creative act. This is the third mode of being, significant for men and for all three-brained beings of the Universe because such beings alone have the possibility of self-creation.

 

Let me sum it up: Man has a threefold destiny. His primary destiny is to be a thing. Like every other material object in the Universe, he is subject to the laws of time. He persists and is subject to change and ultimate dissolution, and this he shares with every other thing in the Universe, whether it is suns or galaxies or material objects or atoms or electrons.

 

Secondly, he is an animal and fulfills the purpose of the trogoautoegocratic process. He is subject to the universal law of eating and being eaten. But he is so constituted that it is possible for him, while serving the needs of the trogoautoegocratic process to, at the same time, also work for his own independent individuality. That means, to become a free, conscious being, able to determine his own destiny. If a man does this, he then acquires cosmic significance because he then becomes a being who can contribute something towards maintaining the order and harmony of the growing universe. This is the meaning of Mr. Gurdjieff's saying that man is a being in whom the highest hope of the Creator is placed. According to Mr. Gurdjieff, this applies not only to man, but to all three-brained beings similar to man on all the planets of our Universe.

 

This, then, is the picture of man which Mr. Gurdjieff puts before us. He is a being called to a supremely great destiny, but whether he achieves that destiny depends entirely and exclusively on himself. He is not and he must create himself in order to be.

 

We now come to the obvious question: How can it come about that man has such great possibilities if he begins only as an animal? What is the method? How can such an extraordinary thing happen that an animal should turn into a man? The secret of this lies in the meaning of the word “transformation”, the transformation of matter, a process of separating the fine from the coarse, the famous alchemical process of making gold from baser metals. Transformation of matter turns on the particular property of that matter which is needed for the power of choice, the particular energy which enables one to say "yes" or "no" and carry out his decision. The all important thing here is that there is produced in man, automatically by the processes of eating and breathing, a certain amount of this energy, and although the amount is small, it gives man the power of choice. In other words, man is given a start without which it would be impossible for him to work. In an animal, this energy cannot produce a change of being because to effect the change it has to be directed by the thinking brain, which animals do not possess.

 

There is a further process connected with the air a man breathes, but the mechanism for this is not ready-made; man has to produce it by work on his attention. Our attention is one of the two things with which we can pay in order to get something great. We can pay with it because it is ours to spend. We have sufficient power to direct our attention. But insofar as we allow our attention to go automatically, just following whatever happens to attract it at any given moment, nothing happens to produce the transformation of the higher substances in the air. However, insofar as we direct our attention by conscious effort, this transformation takes place. Thus, what a man does with his attention is of great importance.

 

The second mode of payment connected with the creation of higher energies in man to help towards his liberation can be expressed in one word: Sacrifice. One very significant form of sacrifice is the struggle with one's egoism. This is very difficult because, even if we wish to do it, we still do not know how far our actions spring from our own egoism. It is, unfortunately, possible to make efforts based on egoism without even knowing it. This is where guidance and work with others can accelerate the process of transformation and work on oneself. What is this work on oneself'?

 

Roughly speaking, work on oneself can be divided into three stages. First of all, it is necessary to get rid of the illusions which we have, both about ourselves and the world we live in. It is not profitable or even possible for something new to enter so long as we are full of illusions and prejudices. It is necessary to make quite a lot of efforts - and quite disagreeable efforts - in order to free oneself from what objectively may be illusions and prejudices, but to us appear to be common sense and the right way of thinking.

 

The second stage is the stage of subjective work; that is, the work to arrive at experiencing consciously the work of our, let us say, machinery, and disengaging a real "I" in oneself from what has been termed the “imaginary I.“ For this there ere all kinds of special exercises and methods that Mr. Gurdjieff and Mr. Bennett have adapted, and which we study and practice at the school with which I am associated at Claymont in West Virginia. These come from all quarters: the Far East, the Middle and Near East, and also from early Christian sources. Gurdjieff and Bennett sifted this material out and put it together in the form of practical exercises that can be applied by people who are searching.

 

Generally speaking, this second stage of the work is common to everyone. This does not mean that all exercises and methods are suitable for everyone, but that there is no real need at this stage for individual guidance.

 

The third, or objective, stage is almost entirely personal and each person can benefit from specific guidance. Theoretically, it is possible for a person to find at the end of the subjective stage just what objective work he requires. He needs for that the knowledge of what his central weakness is, and what it is he must struggle against in order to develop his "I" from a mere transient experience into something permanent, a true vehicle for his own individuality. That can only be reached by persistent and unrelenting struggle with the greatest weakness, or weakest point, in each of us. It is possible to do this by oneself, but experience shows that this comes very rarely. By oneself, a self swayed by egoism, and many negative processes, there is the utmost danger of self-deception.

 

I think that it is at this point that I must introduce the notion of schools. Much has already been said and written about schools. You are no doubt familiar with the distinction which is made between schools which are predominantly based on physical, emotional and intellectual studies and called respectively, Fakir, Monk and Yogi schools and so-called 4th Way school based on a way of understanding. But let us pause a minute and be sure that we understand one another when we use the term "school."

 

If I say “a school is an organisation or a set of conditions in which people can come together and in which there can be communications between different levels in eternity, as distinct from the communication between activities in time,” I may not have been of much help and we had better go back a little.