Implications of Esotericism

An Excerpt from Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way
An Esoteric Legacy
By Stephen A. Grant

About This Title

A profound new look at Gurdjieff’s life, teachings, and role as a spiritual leader through the lens of esotericism.

Gurdjieff warned against taking anything literally or on faith and advised accepting only experience that could be lived oneself. He also said that one has to find out “how to know” and that understanding knowledge of being depends on the “level of being.” The aim of the Fourth Way is toward a change of being—from the level of man number one, two, and three to that of man number four. Stephen Grant offers a profound reassessment of Gurdjieff’s role as a spiritual leader and the Fourth Way in terms of esoteric theory.

The book outlines Gurdjieff’s early life and view of ancient history, followed by the itinerant course of his teaching from Russia in 1915 to his death in Paris in 1949. The discussion then focuses on his esoteric mission—to bring the Fourth Way to the West—and its three major stages: (1) introducing the system of ideas to and through Ouspensky; (2) writing his own theory of the teaching, principally in Beelzebub’s Tales; and (3) passing on the practical teaching toward consciousness to and through Jeanne de Salzmann. The last five chapters deal with Gurdjieff’s relationship with his closest pupils, his system of ideas, his hidden doctrine in Beelzebub’s Tales, and the practical knowledge revealed by Mme. de Salzmann. Those interested in Gurdjieff will come away with a rich new perspective on his teachings and legacy.

Implications of Esotercism
From Chapter 10, page 276-285

Levels of Knowledge 

Over the past four generations, the term esoteric has been so banalized by indiscriminate usage that it is widely understood to mean simply “hidden,” or “secret” in the popular sense of “occult.” The result is to deprive the word of its essential import, that is, implying different levels of knowledge and understanding. To seek to understand Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way, it is important to apply the word in its historical sense. 

As noted in chapter five, the term esoteric was first employed in the ancient Greek mysteries to denote those who were and those who were not initiated (eso, “within” vs. exo, “outside”). It was then used to distinguish between larger and more select circles of followers of philosophers like Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. The concept was fundamental in religious practices like Tantra in Tibetan Buddhism, and implicit in the organization of Buddhist temples in Tibet and India with concentric courtyards limiting access to selected adherents. The term in its historical sense is properly applied to Gurdjieff’s teaching, which purports to reconstruct a knowledge of being handed down from ancient civilizations. It is also applicable to his writing and actions as a spiritual teacher, to the extent they imply different aspects or levels to be understood.

In his introduction to Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff explained why he became a writer, presenting his view of contemporary literature through the speech of an elderly “intelligent” Persian—that is, intelligent not only by knowledge but by being, the sense in which the word is understood on the continent of Asia. At a gathering of Persian intelligentsia to discuss European culture, this lecturer explained how, in his opinion, the literature of European civilization had been corrupted. The fundamental cause was the gradual concentration not on the quality and transmission of thought but only on exterior style, on beauty or polish. Lengthy books are built up on an “infinitesimal, almost null” idea. Thanks to artificially invented grammar, contemporary civilization has destroyed the soul of literature:

Among contemporary European people, only one of the three independent data necessary for obtaining a sane human mind has developed—namely, their so-called thought, which tends to predominate in their individuality; whereas, without feeling and instinct, as every man with a normal reason must know, the real understanding accessible to man cannot be formed.

The Persian then noted that the people of Asia had lost interest in European literature due to the emptiness of its content. This was not because the overwhelming majority were illiterate in the strict sense of the word. He cited how crowds gathered to hear a recitation of The Thousand and One Nights, a work of literature in its full sense as an art form: 

Anyone reading or hearing this book feels clearly that everything in it is fantasy, but fantasy corresponding to truth, even though composed of episodes which are quite improbable for the ordinary life of people. The interest of the reader or listener is awakened and . . . he follows with curiosity how, little by little, a whole story is formed out of these small incidents of actual life.

Gurdjieff stated that his purpose in writing was to transmit “true knowledge” to people, both now and in the future. In presenting the elderly Persian’s speech, he was explaining why this could be fulfilled only by conforming to the Asiatic tradition that engaged the feeling and instinct based on experience. In effect, this required the invention of fantasy—a collection of “tales” in his first book and in Meetings—that defied literal analysis and preempted purely intellectual interpretation. 

Gurdjieff’s method of teaching corresponded to his approach to writing, that is, in not addressing the pupil through the mind, for example, by explaining what was being conveyed. When asked about education, he emphasized the principle that everything must come from the pupil’s own will: 

Nothing should be given in a ready-made form. One can only give the idea, one can only guide or even teach indirectly, starting from afar and leading him to the point from something else. I never teach directly, or my pupils would not learn. If I want a pupil to change I begin from afar, or speak to someone else, and so he learns.

In addition, Gurdjieff created impressions in pupils by playing roles. If, for example, he wished someone to understand injustice, he played the part of an unjust man to provide an actual experience, obliging the pupil to hold back from reacting badly and not be resentful. 

At the same time, Gurdjieff took steps to forewarn people not to take anything literally. In their first meeting, he invited Ouspensky to a house to introduce some of his pupils. In the carriage on the way there, he spoke of his expensive apartment and how his work attracted well-known professors and artists. Then the supposedly upscale apartment was an empty flat over a municipal school, evidently belonging to unimpressive teachers. Ouspensky wondered why Gurdjieff had exaggerated the expenditure connected with the apartment. This was just the beginning of contradictions that recurred in St. Petersburg. After a year of studying with Gurdjieff, Ouspensky concluded,

One could be sure of nothing in regard to him. He might say one thing today and something altogether different tomorrow, and yet, somehow, he could never be accused of contradictions; one had to understand and connect everything together.

It is fortunate that Gurdjieff, who never explained to his pupils, did speak openly about his aim to Denis Saurat, the friend of A. R. Orage who was granted an interview at the Prieuré in 1923. A professor of French literature in King’s College and the head of the French Institute in London, Saurat wrote widely about the occult tradition in English literature. In the two-hour interview, Gurdjieff told Saurat that his group spent several years in Central Asia, reconstructing the doctrine from the remains of oral traditions, from the study of ancient customs, folk songs, and even from certain books. Saurat said, “He told me himself that he aimed at achieving a synthesis of Western science and technique on the one hand, and Eastern spirituality on the other,”5 in effect, reconstructing the original revelation from which he assumed all the great religions had been derived. 

Seekers of Truth

At Essentuki in 1918, Gurdjieff spoke about the origin of his mission—that it began with a meeting of three men at the foot of the Egyptian pyramids sometime around 1890–1892. Thomas de Hartmann recounted Gurdjieff’s characterizations as follows: 

The first of these three was a man of science who was able, through Western knowledge, to verify and evaluate in a scientific way all that was apparently miraculous. The second was a connoisseur of religions and their histories. The third man could be called a “man of Being.”

Gurdjieff asked his pupils to write in their own words a story of one of the men and then read their accounts to the whole group, sitting cross-legged on mattresses piled on an iron bed. Mme. de Hartmann’s essay on the “man of being” was chosen as the best. 

A man of being 

Gurdjieff’s expression man of being is as indeterminate as his knowledge of being, although it clearly implies the esoteric concept of different levels. In the system of ideas, he compared levels of being from man number one through man number seven. A fundamental principle is that a person cannot see above his own level, as illustrated by the anecdote of Mme. Ouspensky trying to perceive Gurdjieff. Watching him like “cat at mouse hole,” she admitted that she wanted to see him. “You want too much,” he replied. “Many people saw me for many years and never saw me.” In esoteric terms, Gurdjieff’s being, that is, the level of his being, was above that of the people around him. In this sense, he was invisible. 

What is intriguing is that Gurdjieff’s actions, however mystifying, were so often purposeful, in effect, inviting people to see what he wanted them to see. Jeanne de Salzmann agreed, even when he seemed to be more spontaneous, freer. “But was it really freer,” she asked, “or did it only seem so because he intended to appear like that?” So, if his acting was purposeful, the challenge becomes to determine what he was intending. 

Gurdjieff admitted that the driving force in his formative years was an almost compulsive striving to understand the meaning of human life and the mystery of supernatural phenomena. The origin of his obsession was not revealed, almost suggesting it came from heredity or some essential inherency. In his system of ideas, he differentiated between a man’s essence and personality, defining the former as what is his own, what is “real” in him as a young child before the development of personality, of what is not his own. In Beelzebub’s Tales, he stated his opinion that the subconscious ought to be regarded as the real consciousness. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, he repeatedly conjured up the image of an old man, a stranger who somehow knows the unknowable, who suddenly appears and points to, or offers to assist, in a life-changing decision. With Gurdjieff, it was in Bukhara when he was introduced to an old member of the Sarmoung Brotherhood who somehow knew “a great deal” about him and advised him to go to the Sarmoung monastery.

Whether his compulsion was literally essential, it was nourished by Gurdjieff’s childhood education, which had a profound effect on his preparation to face unanswerable questions. The most important influence was his father, alone and collaborating with Dean Borsh, his first tutor, to prepare the boy to go beyond a strictly intellectual approach to mysteries. Every Saturday evening his father recounted stories and sang songs about ancient peoples and heroes, or about God, Nature and mysterious miracles, and invariably concluded with a tale from The Thousand and One Nights. The boy was deeply impressed by the Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh, especially the twenty-first song about the Gods resolving to flood the land of Shuruppak. Many years later, when four-thousand-year-old tablets were discovered in Babylon with the song as chanted by his father, Gurdjieff realized that these stories left a mark on his whole life, providing impressions that served as a spiritualizing factor enabling him to comprehend that which usually appears incomprehensible. 

Gurdjieff’s father collaborated with Dean Borsh to expose his son to wonder about the nature of God and question the meaning of ancient legends. Asked by the dean about the whereabouts of God, the father answered seriously that He was in the Sari Kamish region making double ladders and, on their tops, fastening happiness so that individuals and whole nations might ascend and descend. At another time, when the father opined that the Gilgamesh legend was undoubtedly the origin of the Flood in the Hebrew and Christian worldview, the dean began to object, citing contrary facts, precipitating a heated argument in front of the boy that lasted until daybreak. Gurdjieff’s later discovery that the legend had been handed down in its original form opened his eyes to the immense significance of legends of antiquity, that is, the esoteric meaning they contain. 

It was Dean Borsh who was also responsible for insisting that Gurdjieff study science as well as religion. This provided a foundation for his later reflections on the apparent opposition between the two, a concern that underpinned his search for meaning. He concluded that for thousands of years there has been a contradiction because the proponents study from different angles. But at a certain point both science and religion are concerned with human development—the question of evolution, of change of being. Man contains this possibility within him. 

A master-key to mysteries 

After years of reading and exploring in Transcaucasia, Gurdjieff came to the conclusion that the knowledge he sought had been forgotten and could only be found in ancient documents. At this point, on a trip toward Kurdistan he encountered the Armenian priest with a map of pre-sand Egypt. There is nothing fantastic about a priest with a family heirloom, although the location (the “town of N, on the road toward Kurdistan”) is surreal. The story becomes fantasy by virtue of the document itself and the appearance of a Russian prince from out of nowhere who was a collector of antiques and somehow knew it was in the priest’s possession. Gurdjieff described the parchment as precisely what he had spent long months of sleepless nights thinking about and of such significance that he decided to travel to Egypt. This corresponded to the intense interest earlier displayed by the Russian prince. When Gurdjieff was seated at the foot of the pyramids, the prince standing over him was excited to see what he was reading and struck up a conversation. 

Circumstances outside the narrative point to Mme. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled as the pre-sand Egypt map. Most obvious is the book’s subtitle, “A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology,” which was, indeed, precisely what Gurdjieff had been obsessing over. Gurdjieff said he had read Blavatsky’s works at the age of twenty-one, as surely had Prince Lubovedsky. The book would have been highly unusual reading for a youthful guide and caught the attention of the prince. In fact, having identified Skridlov’s friend “looking for truth” a few days earlier, Gurdjieff would have been true to character to have positioned himself conspicuously in a place to be seen by the prince. The otherwise improbable conversation between a Russian aristocrat and a tourist guide would have followed naturally.

Blavatsky’s contribution was in bringing the founders together at the pyramids and contributing to the cosmological structure of Gurdjieff’s teaching. He said that when he read Blavatsky’s works, he took her indications seriously, vowing to travel to India and Tibet. After years of searching, however, he found that nine of every ten of her references were not based on firsthand knowledge. This, of course, became the source of controversy within the Theosophy movement. When Gurdjieff introduced the Fourth Way in St. Petersburg, he was careful to avoid association with Blavatsky, citing elements derived from The Secret Doctrine without mentioning the source. When this was later discovered, Ouspensky respected Gurdjieff’s decision to remain silent, noting enigmatically that attempts to establish the origin explained a great deal concerning Gurdjieff’s system as well as its history. In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff finessed the controversy over Blavatsky’s purported relation with Masters of Wisdom in Tibet by having the group of spiritual leaders blown up in an explosion.

A connoisseur of religions 

In Meetings with Remarkable Men, the “connoisseur of religions” at the pyramids was a Russian nobleman named Prince Yuri Lubovedsky, who over time became Gurdjieff’s closest friend. Before they met, the prince had lived for years in Moscow. After the death of his wife in giving birth to their first child, he became drawn to the study of occult sciences and to the search for the meaning of life. One day he was suddenly visited by an unknown old man. “To the astonishment of all his household, the prince immediately received the old man and, shutting himself up with him in the library, conversed with him a long time.” Very soon after this visit, the prince left Moscow and spent almost all the rest of his life in expeditions, rarely returning to Russia. When he tried to purchase the map of pre-sand Egypt from the Armenian priest, he said he was a connoisseur and collector of antiques. 

As noted in chapter one, the real-life Lubovedsky was almost certainly Prince Esper Esperovich Ukhtomsky (1861–1921). The prince satisfied Gurdjieff’s description by virtue of his title and aristocratic position, his interest in the occult and specifically Mme. Blavatsky, and his extensive travel within the Russian Empire and abroad. More distinctively, he was prominent as a collector of antiques, having amassed a collection of two thousand objects of Tibetan and Chinese art, which was displayed in exhibitions in Moscow and Paris. Part of his collection remains over a hundred years later in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. 

The definitive clue pointing to Ukhtomsky is Gurdjieff’s fantastic map of pre-sand Egypt, which inspired both men in their search for esoteric knowledge. Once the object is recognized as Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, the prince’s identity comes into focus with his actual visits— first, to the pyramids in the fall of 1890 and then to the Theosophy Society headquarters in India three months later. The decisive fact appears in his record of the journey, proposing a society of “seekers of Truth” in the broadest sense of the word for “penetrating deep into the most secret doctrines of Eastern religions.” Lubovedsky could not have expressed their purpose better. 

In Meetings with Remarkable Men, the high point of Gurdjieff’s spiritual quest was reaching the Sarmoung monastery where he was reunited with Prince Lubovedsky. The prince also had found the mountain fastness thanks to an old man, this time one who had been to Moscow and St. Petersburg and somehow even knew his childhood nickname. He was wholly disillusioned by failed expeditions to discover truth outside himself, and had forsaken his prior life in order that the desire of his mind could become the desire of his heart. Taking admission to the monastery as a spiritual attainment, Lubovedsky sent a welcoming note, congratulating Gurdjieff on reaching the goal without his help or that of their mutual friends. In fact, Prince Ukhtomsky had been engaged in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism for years, likely under Lama Agwan Dordjieff, who opened a Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg in 1909. Their “mutual friends” would then have referred to Dordjieff or his colleagues in Lhasa or monasteries on the Tibetan plateau or in Mongolia.

Prince Ukhtomsky, the leader who named the Seekers of Truth and prescribed their mission, can fairly be regarded as the godfather of the Fourth Way. The depth of their relationship was revealed by Gurdjieff’s account of their final goodbye: 

We spent almost the whole of those last three days together and talked of everything and anything. But all the time my heart was heavy, especially whenever the prince smiled. Seeing his smile, my heart was torn, because for me his smile was the sign of his goodness, love and patience.

Finally, the three days were over and, on a morning sorrowful for me, I myself helped to load the caravan which was to take away this good prince from me forever. He asked me not to accompany him. The caravan began to move, and as it passed behind the mountain, the prince turned, looked at me, and three times blessed me.

In the fictional account, Lubovedsky died three years after leaving the monastery. In fact, Gurdjieff left St. Petersburg for the last time in February 1917. Prince Ukhtomsky remained behind and died in 1921.

Books Related to Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way