The Outsider (50 page)

*
PAGE NOTE:
‘I was once walking along the Liteiny towards the Nevsky, and in spite of all my efforts, I was unable to keep my attention on self-remembering. The noise, movement, everything distracted me. Every minute I lost the thread of attention, found it again, and then lost it again. At last, I felt a kind of ridiculous irritation with myself, and I turned into the street on the left, having determined to keep my attention on the fact that /
would remember myself at
least for some time, at any rate until I reached the following street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya without losing the thread of attention, except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned towards the Nevsky still remembering myself, and was already beginning to experience
the strange emotional stale of inner peace and confidence which comes after great efforts of this kind.
[My italics.] Just round the corner, on the Nevsky, was a tobacconist’s shop where they made my cigarettes. Still remembering myself, I thought I would call there and order some cigarettes.

‘Two hours later, I
woke up
in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by carriage to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I
came to.
I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep.

‘At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my flat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. ... On the way, while driving along the Tavricheskaya, I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something.
And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself
(Ouspensky:
In Search of the Miraculous,
p. 120.)

Gurdjieff also points out that man wastes an appalling amount of energy in what he calls
‘
negative emotion
’
, like fear, disgust, anger, and so on. These emotions, he claims, are completely unnecessary to the economy of the human machine, and are as wasteful as tossing a match into a heap of
gun-powder. Negative emotion is just an accident that sabotages the human energy-factory.

Man also has various
‘
centres
’
: an emotional centre, a
‘
moving
’
centre (which does all the work connected with the body
’
s movements) an intellectual centre and an instinctive centre. He also has a sexual centre, and two higher centres of which he knows almost nothing, since they work deep in the unconscious mind (although mere glimpses of these centres have been the
‘
visions
’
of saints). Man tends to mix up all the centres, and to use the energy intended for the moving centre on emotions, or that of the emotional centre on intellect, or that of the instinctive centre on sex; and, apparently, all the centres tend to steal the energy of the sexual centre, and give it in return a type of energy that is practically of no use to it (
‘
It is a very great thing when the sexual centre works with its own energy,
’
Gurdjieff told Ouspensky). An important part of Gurdjieff
’
s system is his method for observing the centres, and recognizing what should be the distinctive work of each.

But the main difficulty which the system must combat is man
’
s tendency to sleep, to do things mechanically. The world has no meaning for us because we do all things mechanically. One day we are inspired by some poem or piece of music or picture, and the whole world is suddenly ten times as real, as meaningful, for us. The next day we re-read the poem, or hear the music again, and we have got used to it and hear it
‘
mechanically
’
. But other actions in everyday life are best done mechanically. I can type this page at a reasonable speed because the work has been taken over from my intellectual centre (which did all the work of learning to type) to my moving centre, which does it far more efficiently. If all the centres did their own work there would be no waste of energy, and maximum intensity of consciousness could be achieved.

The final
‘
maximum intensity
’
would be the limit of man
’
s possible evolution
{q.v.
Ouspensky
’
s slim volume,
The Psychology of Man
’
s Possible Evolution).
In its aim (higher consciousness) and the primacy it gives to the concept of evolution, Gurdjieff
’
s philosophy has obvious features in common with Shaw
’
s, the difference being that Shaw sets no limit to possible development:
‘
As to what may he beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond
’
. One day
‘
ages yet
’
, pure mind
‘
might roll unchecked over the place where the
material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters
’
. This is T. E. Lawrence, and it is pure Shavian-ism, but it is not Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff deliberately limits the aim: the first step is to break the sleep of hypnosis under which all men live. He has a parable to illustrate it:

There is an Eastern tale that 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 the 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 their skins, and this they did not like.

At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized 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 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 some that they were eagles, to some that they were men, to others that they were magicians.

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.
¹⁴

And in an earlier passage, Gurdjieff speaks with the authentic accents of mystical religion:

[Man] is attached to everything in his life; attached to his imagination, attached to his stupidity, attached even to his suffering—possibly to his suffering more than anything else.

He must
free
himself from attachment. Attachment to things,
identification with things keeps alive
a
thousand Ts
’
in
a
man. These Ts
⁵
must die in order that the big I may be born. But how can they be made to die?
...
It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one
’
s nothingness, that is, to realize one
’
s complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one
’
s complete and absolute helplessness. ... So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself.
¹⁵

And again:

One must
die all at once and forever…

St. John of the Cross expresses it:

Vivo sin vivir en mi

Y de tal manera espero

Que muero porque no muero.

I live, but there
’
s no life in me

And in such a hopeful way

I die because I do not die.
¹⁶

In
All and Everything,
Gurdjieff explains man
’
s bondage in
a
slightly more complex way, but it is significant for us because it is obviously an attempt to recreate a legend of Original Sin. He explains that some cosmic catastrophe knocked two pieces off the earth, which became two satellites, the moon and another smaller moon which men have forgotten (although it still exists). These two moons, as part of the parent body, had to be sustained by
‘
food
’
sent from the earth (I have mentioned that Gurdjieff considers the heavenly bodies to be alive), and this
‘
food
’
is a sort of cosmic ray manufactured by human beings. In other words, the only purpose of human beings is to manufacture
‘f
ood
’
for the moon.

But human beings were, not unnaturally, irritated by this completely subject-role they were expected to play in the solar system. As they began to develop
‘
objective reason* (Gurdjieff
‘
s fourth state of consciousness), their chafing became a danger to the existence of the moon. A special commission of
archangels decided to put a stop to the development of objective reason. So they implanted in man an organ, called
Kundabujfer,
whose special function was to make men perceive fantasy as actuality. And from that day onward men have been enmeshed in their own dreams, and admirably serve their function of providing food for the moon. Unfortunately, their inability to see things objectively is leading them to self-destruction at an appalling pace. It is necessary for at least a few men to develop a new type of consciousness, to develop it slowly, painfully, instinctively, without understanding what is happening to him. Would not such a man be a complete Outsider ?

They are all asleep. This is the point to which Gurdjief
f
returns again and again.
They must be made to feel the urgency of the need to wake up.
And after the legend of the magician, to call the mass of contented bourgeois
‘
sheep
’
has a new and terrible significance. At the end of
All and Everything,
the grandson of the
‘
all-wise Beelzebub
’
(Gurdjieff
’
s mouthpiece) asks whether it is still possible to save mankind and
‘
direct them to the becoming path
’
. Beelzebub answers: The sole means of saving the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ ... like
Kundabuffer
…
of such properties that everyone should sense
…
the inevitability of his own death, as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rest.
’
¹⁷

It is again the religious injunction: Remember thy last
things But we can see now just how
i
rrelevant is the idea of
‘
an allegorical abode where existence hath never come
’
. It is existence that counts. Man must live more; he must
be
more. And for this, he must be endlessly conscious of the principle of limitation. There is a definite time, a definite term, for everything,
’
Gurdjieff told Ouspensky.
‘
Possibilities for
everything
exist only for a definite time.
’

It will be seen that our study has led us to formulate a number of conceptions which are indubitably religious. We have, as it were, run over the area of human life, and re-chalked the demarcation lines of religion. We have not mentioned a great many conceptions which many sincerely religious people take to be absolutely essential to religion—God and heaven and hell among them—and what we have constructed can be called the
bare necessities of religion, the absolute, essential framework. This, I believe, is the framework of religion as it first existed for the human race. Continual intellectual rigour is necessary to stop these lines from getting vague. Our criterion has been this: that any
‘
truth
’
of religion shall be determinable
subjectively.
When we normally speak of the truth of an idea, we mean its correspondence with some outside fact. Truth is subjectivity
’
, Kierkegaard said. That is the Existentialist concept. The dog is blue.
’
Is that,
could
it be, a religious truth? No; even if it is objectively true that the dog is blue, it is an objective truth; therefore it could not be religious truth. There is a spirit world where we all go when we die.
’
That may be true, in the same sense that the dog is blue; but in that case it is a truth about the external world, and not therefore a religious truth. Religious truth cannot exist apart from intellectual rigour, apart from the individual effort to realize it. When Eckhart wrote,
‘
Man cannot live without God, but God cannot live without man either. Without man, God wouldn
’
t know he existed
’
, he was speaking a subjective truth, but when the Brethren of the Free Spirit made this an excuse for complete relaxation of the will and of all moral standards, it ceased to be true as far as they were concerned. The most absolute and rigorous intellectual truth ceases to be true when there is no life to affirm it. In Boehme, a student asks:
‘
Where does the soul go after death?
’
and his master replies: There is no need for it to go anywhere. Heaven and Hell are universally co-extensive
’
; and this is apparently an attempt at an
‘
objective
’
statement of truth. Yet it is Boehme who warns his reader with Nietzschean vigour, in his first work:
‘
If you are not a spiritual self-surmounter, let my book alone. Don
’
t meddle with it, but stick to your usual nonsense.
’
This is the essence of religion.