GURDJIEFF AS AVATAR
GURDJIEFF WAS NOT WHAT he has come to represent within our culture. His book Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson is the autobiographical account of a being who descended to Earth on a number of occasions in order to see what was going on and possibly, to intervene. This is the behavior of an avatar—an Indian term, largely for the god Vishnu (a galactic god) who comes to Earth to rid it of false demonic cultures and to support the dharma of cosmic order. As a turtle, for instance, one of these incarnations of Vishnu upholds the churn that the gods and demons turn, and the churning of the oceans is one of the clearest symbols of the polar mill that we have in myth. Was Gurdjieff a precessional hero?
John G. Bennett says, “Gurdjieff spoke ambiguously about himself. Sometimes he came very near to claiming that he was an avatar, a Cosmic individual incarnated to help mankind.”1 We must keep in mind that presenting himself as an avatar could engender serious problems in its effect on other people: the claim has proved destructive for many, irrespective of their true status. In addition, in the case of an avatar the experience of being incarnated is not without its confusions and ambiguities. In a sense, the term avatar, meaning “a descent,” must be used in a fresh way.
Gurdjieff’s primary question was: What is the sense and significance of life on Earth in general and of human life in particular? Bennett suggests that
The answer Gurdjieff gives to the question is radically different from any current views. Gurdjieff asserts in Beelzebub’s Tales that the doctrine of reciprocal maintenance is derived from “an ancient Sumerian manuscript” discovered by the great Kurdish philosopher Atarnakh. The passage quoted runs: “In all probability, there exists in the world some law of the reciprocal maintenance of everything existing. Obviously our lives serve also for maintaining something great or small in the world.”
This passage occurs in the description of a Central Asian fraternity called “The Assembly of the Enlightened,” which had existed from Sumerian times and flourished openly in the Bactrian kingdom when Zoroaster was teaching. After Zoroaster, it disappeared for a hundred generations and only now begun to send out into the world its “Unknown Teaching.” I have suggested that this is the Sarman society [one of Gurdjieff’s direct sources].2
Beelzebub goes on to say that “the suppositions of the Kurd Atarnakh were very similar to the great fundamental cosmic law Trogoautoegocrat.”3 This law prevented the creator from being subject to the merciless Heropass (or time), once the reciprocal feeding of everything that exists (in time) ensured the permanent harmony of the universe.
Gurdjieff’s vast harmonic cosmology emerges from a simple principle that, once implemented, would set up a universe in which octaves can “beg, borrow and steal” from each other as a necessary way to progress. Surely, such a simple principle in everything around us should be obvious. Bennett makes the observation, which is also true for modern science,
that very little attention is given by Eastern religions and philosophy to purposes and so do not need to account for anything.
Buddhism, in all its forms, rejects such questions as futile and that the aim of existence is man’s own need to escape from durkha, which does not mean suffering so much as the conditioned state of the incarnated self. The one significant exception is the old religion of Zarathustra, which taught that both life on the earth and man endowed with intelligence were created to be allies for the Good Spirit Ahura Mazda in the struggle with the power of darkness. The Avestan hymns are full of references to the role of man as a helper in the cosmic process. For example Yastna 30.9 has the invocation: “May we belong to those who renew the world and make it progress!” I have given my reasons for believing that Gurdjieff found the Zoroastrian tradition lived on in Central Asia long after it ceased to be a state religion. For some reason, this important myth was forgotten and for a very long time the question “why does life exist on the earth?” was lost to view.4
It may well be that the highest teachings always need some kind of a renewal on Earth by an avatar, because such teachings are simpler than all others. The simplicity of the trogoautoegocratic principle is that a similar form is employed throughout the universe (the laws of seven and three) in order to achieve the same principle throughout (the principle of reciprocal maintenance). The rest of what happens is simply consequent and subsequent.