EIGHT

TWO RUSSIAN MAGES

Occult powers seem to be a matter of national temperament. Second sight and telepathy come naturally to the Irish. The Germans seem to produce more gifted astrologers than other nations.* The Dutch have produced two of the most gifted clairvoyants of this century: Croiset and Hurkos. Russia tends to produce mages – men or women who impress by their spiritual authority; no other nation has a spiritual equivalent of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, or even of Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Soloviev, Fedorov, Berdaev, Shestov. Certainly no other nation has come near to producing anyone like Madame Blavatsky, Gregory Rasputin or George Gurdjieff. Each is completely unique.

Rasputin seems to possess the peculiar quality of inducing shameless inaccuracy in everyone who writes about him. Even that sober historian of magical rites E. M. Butler manages to pack a dozen or so in the three pages she devotes to him in The Myth of the Magus. This is an example: ‘The frenzy he induced in himself and his worshippers, the intoxicated state of ecstasy, the scourging, the debauches, the mixture of cruelty, love and lust are a debased demoniacal, indeed maniacal Slavonic edition of the Dionysiac rites of Greece.’ Everything in this sentence is false, at least as applied to Rasputin. Neither is it true, as she states, that the word Rasputin means dissolute; if it did, he would no doubt have had the sense to change his name early in his career. It means a crossroads, and happens to be as common as Smith in the village where he was born, Pokrovskoe.

The truth about Rasputin is simple and unsensational; yet in its way, as remarkable as anything we have considered so far. Unlike most magicians, he had nothing whatever of the charlatan about him. He was a religious mystic of the same type as Boehme or Saint-Martin. Son of a Siberian peasant, probably the distant descendant of Siberian shamans, Rasputin became a carter in his teens and acquired a reputation as a brawler. One day he drove a young novice to a monastery, and was so impressed by the place that he stayed for four months. Then he went back to his life of drinking and womanising. Around 1890, when he was twenty, he married a girl four years his senior. Their baby son died, and Rasputin again heard the call of religion. After seeing a vision of the Virgin beckoning to him, he set out on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos in Greece. And when he returned, two years later, he was a changed man. He built a small oratory in the back yard and spent his days in prayer. His reputation as a holy man spread around the district, and soon he was holding services and preaching to rapt congregations of villagers. The village priest was naturally resentful, and told the bishop of Tobolsk that Rasputin held orgiastic rites, and that he was a member of the Khlysty, the Russian equivalent of the American Shakers or Snake Handlers. This story has been gleefully seized on by all his biographers, who rival one another in fantastic invention. Naked women dance around a huge bonfire while Rasputin roars: ‘Sin, because only through sin can you become holy’; then men and women roll on the ground and copulate with the nearest person, while Rasputin possesses his sisters one after the other (Rasputin had no sisters). Even Aldous Huxley was taken in by this journalistic nonsense, and repeats it in his essay on Rasputin. Nothing is more certain than that Rasputin’s prayer meetings were in every way harmless. The bishop of Tobolsk had them investigated and found nothing to take exception to. It is quite possible that Rasputin may have embraced any female disciples who wanted closer contact; he was still in his early twenties, and his Christianity was permeated by a Whitman-esque mysticism, the feeling that ‘everything that lives is holy’. But he was no charlatan or swindler; throughout his life he gave away the considerable sums of money presented to him by admirers.

In the course of his wanderings he began to develop remarkable thaumaturgic powers. In my own book on Rasputin,* I have pointed out the parallels with Mary Baker Eddy and her teacher, Phineas Quimby. Quimby believed that all human beings possess these powers, and that it is simply a matter of developing them. He also believed that healing can be performed at a distance as easily as at close quarters. This was because he thought that he was healing by the power of God – or, more specifically, of Jesus. This was also true of Rasputin. His cures depended largely upon kneeling by the bedside of the sick person and praying. Praying had the effect of releasing powers of optimism, ‘positive consciousness’; he felt the success of such an operation as a sense of outgoing power, inner relief. And although it would not be true to say that Rasputin could not have healed unless he was a religious man – healing is a natural power, like water divining or telepathy – he certainly required a capacity for ‘inwardness’, for calling upon instinctive depths of emotion, that is closely akin to music or poetry. A cynical charlatan could not have done it.

By the time he came to St. Petersburg, in his mid-thirties, Rasputin had developed great power. In Russia the profession of holy man (or staretz) is as respectable as in India, or as it was in Europe in the Middle Ages. The wave of spiritualism had spread from America across the world, and by 1900 it was all the rage in Russia. Russia, in any case, was in a peculiar, mystical frame of mind, which was due directly to its history of political repression. Ever since Ivan the Terrible, Russian tsars had been absolute rulers, and most of them were cruel in a casual, thoughtless kind of way. Even in the reign of Alexander I, one of the great liberal tsars, murderers were flogged to death. Sir Robert Porter, an English observer, described in 1809 seeing a man flogged until he was like a mass of butcher’s meat, after which his nostrils were torn off with pincers. The Russian was accustomed to the sight of pain and death, and it increased his natural mystical tendencies. Political oppression – which meant that a man could be sent to Siberia for expressing a liberal sentiment – and widespread poverty meant that idealism could only find expression in art or religion.

The St. Petersburg to which Rasputin came in 1905 was probably the mystical centre of the world. It was full of occultists, spiritualists, astrologers and disciples of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Soloviev. The Tsarina herself was known to be interested in spiritualism. Rasputin had no difficulty in getting into the drawing rooms of the aristocracy, where his blunt peasant manners and air of power soon won him a crowd of disciples.

The parallels between the history of pre-revolutionary France and pre-revolutionary Russia are so numerous that it is hard to believe in the ‘blind chance’ theory of history. Like Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas II was a weak, basically amiable character who had inherited centuries of absolute monarchy. Like Louis, he married a foreigner who was totally lacking in all political sense while driven by some inner demon to meddle in politics. Russia also had no parliament, but when Nicholas came to the throne, there was an increasing agitation to set one up on the English model. And Nicholas, like Louis XVI, vacillated, agreeing to call parliament (or the Duma, as it was called), and then trying to dissolve it.

But Rasputin, unlike Cagliostro, became an influence at court. The Tsarevitch, the son of the Tsar, suffered from haemophilia, inherited from the family of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Haemophilia is a disease in which the blood is unable to clot, so that the smallest cut becomes a dangerous haemorrhage. All hopes for the future of the Romanov family were pinned on the boy Alexey, for he had arrived after his mother had produced four girls. When, some time in 1907, the boy bruised himself badly and sank into a fever, someone whispered to the Tsarina that there was a miracle worker called Rasputin who might help. Rasputin was sent for; he prayed fervently beside the bed; and before he left the room, the boy was breathing normally and sleeping peacefully. This, at least, is the story told by most ‘biographers’. The most cynically inventive of these, Heinz Liepman (whose book is almost literally 50 per cent fiction),* tells the story of how Rasputin was drinking heavily with gypsies when the Tsar’s messenger arrived on horseback, asking for the miracle worker: amid deep silence, Rasputin falls on his knees and prays, then tells the messenger, ‘The crisis is past. The boy will recover,’ and makes his leisurely way to the palace.

The truth seems to be that Rasputin had met the Tsar and Tsarina at least two years before this crisis is supposed to have taken place, in 1905. When the house of the prime minister, Stolypin, was blown up by a bomb and his children injured, the Tsarina offered him Rasputin’s services; this was in 1906.

Rasputin cured the boy on at least two more occasions. In 1912, when Rasputin was in disgrace because of the machinations of his enemies at court, Alexey slipped when getting out of a boat and badly bruised himself. Fever set in. A few days later, the doctor had despaired of his life. The Tsarina’s closest confidante, Anna Vyrubov, was asked to telegraph Rasputin, who was some thousands of miles away in Pokrovskoe. He telegraphed back, ‘The illness is not as dangerous as it seems. Don’t let the doctors worry him.’ As soon as the telegram arrived, Alexey’s condition took a turn for the better. Again, in 1915, the boy was accidentally thrown against the window of a train, and his nose began to bleed. This time, Rasputin deliberately delayed putting in an appearance for twenty-four hours, by which time the boy was in a fever. He explained to the chief of police that he wanted the Tsar to stew in his own juice for a bit. But as soon as Rasputin entered the room, the bleeding stopped. Whether Rasputin possessed a ‘charm’, like the Cornish healers I have discussed in an earlier chapter, or whether his thaumaturgic powers had developed to a point where he was absolutely confident of their efficacy, it seems certain that he knew he could stop the bleeding instantly.

It is not entirely clear why Rasputin made so many enemies at court. When writing my biography of him in 1963 I accepted the story – repeated in every book about him, and in all histories of the period – that Rasputin became involved in politics and would use his influence over the Tsarina to get his friends appointed to government posts. Subsequently, a disciple of Rasputin’s, Dr. Elizabeth Judas of New York, told me flatly that there was no evidence whatever that Rasputin was involved in politics. This seemed such an astonishing statement, in view of all the history books, that I set out to disprove it by searching through all the original papers I could find, including the correspondence between the Tsar and Tsarina during the crucial years. Dr. Judas seems to be correct; there is very little evidence that Rasputin played the central role in Russian politics that is generally assumed. He advised the Tsar on the conduct of the war, and was generally ignored, and his influence over the Tsarina remained as enormous as ever. But of the diabolical schemer portrayed by Sir Bernard Pares there is no sign in these papers.

Why, then, was he so hated by so many? The first and most bitter of his enemies was a monk called Illiodor, who began as a friend of Rasputin’s, then devoted all his energy to causing his downfall. Illiodor was a religious fanatic who modelled himself on Savonarola; his sermons brought him immense influence. In 1911 he and Rasputin clashed, and Rasputin was summoned before Bishop Hermogen of Saratov, his one-time supporter, to justify himself. Illiodor, it seems, accused him of drunkenness and sexual debauchery. Rasputin seems to have been roughly handled, and he went to the Tsar with his own version of the story; the Tsar immediately banished Illiodor and Hermogen.

The story told by Maria Rasputin in her book on her father is that Illiodor had raped, or tried to rape, a neurasthenic woman who came to him for confession, and that the woman had asked Rasputin to help her obtain justice. This version is almost certainly untrue for a simple reason (of which I myself was not aware when I wrote my book): that Illiodor was homosexual. And this piece of information makes the puzzle suddenly fit together. In December 1909, Rasputin had spent some time visiting Illiodor’s ‘spiritual fortress’, a monastery he was having built near Tsaritsyn. Rasputin showed an inclination to hug Illiodor’s more attractive parishioners. After this, Illiodor went to Pokrovskoe with Rasputin, and Rasputin told him about his own early debaucheries in graphic detail (Rasputin made much of the sinfulness of his early life). Illiodor was younger than Rasputin, and more of a natural ascetic; Rasputin, unaware that Illiodor’s indifference to women was not entirely a matter of superhuman purity, took pleasure in twitting him about it. By 1911, when Illiodor’s cautious admiration had turned to intense dislike, Rasputin had no doubt discovered Illiodor’s secret. He was not noted for tact or discretion, particularly when he had been drinking his favourite sweet Georgian wine. This probably explains Illiodor’s gradual loss of influence at court – the Tsarina was as prudish as her grandmother about such matters – and the estrangement between himself and Rasputin that led to the clash of 1912.

It should also be borne in mind that the Tsarina was hated by her husband’s courtiers. Like Marie Antoinette, she was known as ‘the foreigner’, and at the beginning of the 1914 war, it was generally believed that she was on Germany’s side. It was she who regarded Rasputin as a father figure and treated him as a saint. In effect, all the Tsarina’s enemies became Rasputin’s.

At all events, Rasputin was at the centre of a vortex of vicious gossip, plotting and counterplotting. Stories about his drunkenness led the Tsar to banish him from court several times.

There was one time in which Rasputin may be said to have meddled in politics. He had on two occasions strongly advised the Tsar against going to war about the Balkans, which were claimed by Austria. In June 1914, as everyone knows, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo by a young Bosnian patriot, and as a consequence, Austria declared war on Serbia. The world’s destiny was in the hands of the Tsar, for he now had to make up his mind whether to stand by Serbia and declare war on Austria, or let the Balkans solve their own problems. This was the point where Rasputin’s advice would have made all the difference between war and peace. Unfortunately Rasputin was not around to give advice; he had also been stabbed by a would-be assassin in his home village of Pokrovskoe, and was hovering between life and death for weeks.

When I was writing my book on Rasputin I noted the coincidence – that Rasputin and Archduke Ferdinand had been struck down at about the same time – and tried to find the actual date when Rasputin had been stabbed. The accounts seemed to differ; the most reliable historian, Sir Bernard Pares, seemed to think it was on Saturday, June 26, 1914. But Maria Rasputin’s book on her father states quite definitely that they all arrived at Pokrovskoe on the Saturday, and that it was the following day, Sunday, when Rasputin was stabbed. This was made even more likely by the fact that he was stabbed after he returned from church. So Rasputin was stabbed on the same day the Archduke was shot. Maria Rasputin gives the time as shortly after two in the afternoon.

I now looked up the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He had felt certain he was going to die even before visiting Sarajevo, telling his children’s tutor: ‘The bullet that will kill me is already on its way.’ Shortly after ten o’clock that morning, a home-made bomb was thrown at his motor-car, but the Archduke and his wife were uninjured. They attended a ceremony in the town hall, leaving half an hour later. It was on the drive back through Sarajevo, at about eleven o’clock, that Gavrilo Princip, a consumptive young student, leaned forward and fired two shots, killing the Archduke and his wife. The carriage was travelling slowly because it had taken a wrong turning, and was now turning back on to its correct route.

Sarajevo and Pokrovskoe are, of course, on different lines of longitude, so the time in the two places differs. I set out to work out the difference. There are 50 degrees of longitude between Sarajevo and Pokrovskoe. It is a simple sum, because the earth passes through 360 degrees when it does a complete turn in twenty-four hours. That is: 180 degrees in twelve hours, 90 degrees in six hours, 45 degrees in three hours. So to turn through 50 degrees, it takes exactly three hours and twenty minutes. The Archduke Ferdinand was murdered shortly before eleven. Rasputin was stabbed at 2.15, and 10.55 in Sarajevo was exactly 2.15 in Pokrovskoe. The man whose death caused the First World War, and the man who could have averted the war, were struck down at the same moment. The coincidence is as extraordinary as any I have come across.

Rasputin was finally murdered on the night of December 29, 1916. He felt strong forebodings of death, and wrote a curious letter, which was shown to the Tsarina soon after it was composed, saying that he felt he would be dead by January 1, 1917; and that if he was killed by the Russian peasantry, Russia would remain a prosperous monarchy for hundreds of years; if, however, he was murdered by the ‘boyars’ (aristocracy), their hands will remain soiled with his blood for twenty-five years, and no nobles will remain in Russia; the Tsar and his family will die within two years.

It sounds like a fabrication; but Sir Bernard Pares saw a facsimile of the letter and was inclined to accept its authenticity; he is the most sceptical and balanced of historians of the period. Twenty-five years, of course, takes Russia to the German invasion (June 1941), which may certainly be reckoned a turning point in Russian history, if not the date when all nobles finally vanished from Russia.

Rasputin was invited to the house of the wealthy Prince Yussupov at night, and given poisoned cakes and wine. The cyanide, which should have rendered him unconscious within a minute and killed him in four (its effect is fundamentally that of suffocation, preventing the blood from carrying oxygen), seemed to have no effect. Yussupov shot him too. But when he came back with the other conspirators for the body, Rasputin got up, and burst through a locked door into the courtyard. He was shot again, then battered with an iron bar. Finally, he was dropped into the river through a hole in the ice. When his body was recovered, it was found that he had died of drowning. The crime writer Nigel Morland was told by an acquaintance of Rasputin’s that he suffered from alcoholic gastritis, which thickens the lining of the stomach and would prevent cyanide from being absorbed quickly. A more likely explanation is that Yussupov was lying when he claimed to have poisoned Rasputin. No poison was found in the body. Yussupov lived for the rest of his life on the reputation of being ‘the man who murdered Rasputin’, and was prone to fly to law whenever anyone described the incident in such a way as to show him in an unfavourable light. Not long before his death, he even stated in court that Rasputin had been a German spy – a story he must have known to be nonsense, since it had been exploded by half a dozen biographers since Rasputin’s death. Yussupov, like Illiodor, was a homosexual, and his hatred of Rasputin may have had some curious sexual basis.

Rasputin’s prophecy, like Cagliostro’s, was remarkably accurate; the revolution came in the following year. The Tsar and his family were kept prisoners, like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, for a year, and executed in the Ekaterinburg cellar on July 16, 1918. The parallels with the French royal family continue, for the story quickly went about that one of them – the Grand Duchess Anastasia – had escaped. In 1922 a girl who had made a suicide attempt in Berlin was ‘recognised’ as Anastasia by another woman in the ward, and admitted her identity. Various exiles from the Russian court recognised Anna Anderson as Anastasia, but her claim was not legally allowed – the Tsar had deposited large sums of money in foreign banks, all of which would go to Anna Anderson – and a German court has only recently dismissed her final appeal for recognition. Maria Rasputin met her in America in the late sixties, and is reported to have declared her belief that Anna Anderson was the Grand Duchess Anastasia (whom she had known well as a child).

There were also at least two false Alexeys – the Tsarevitch – but neither of them gained anything like the credence accorded to Anastasia.

Rasputin, like Crowley, was a natural mage. He did nothing to develop his powers; it is even doubtful whether he had any control over them. And this applies, by and large, to every ‘magician’ I have discussed in this book. It is because it does not apply to George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff that he is probably the most interesting of all magicians. He possessed certain powers to begin with, and he spent a lifetime carefully developing them. There can be no doubt that he achieved a large degree of Faculty X.

The key to Gurdjieff’s teaching lies in the word ‘work’. A typical story will make it clear. A. R. Orage, a noted literary figure in the London of pre-1914, and editor of The New Age, decided to sell his newspaper and become a pupil of Gurdjieff. He then went to Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff handed him a spade and told him to dig in the garden. Orage was out of practice, and soon found digging so exhausting that he used to go to his room and try to restrain tears of fatigue and self-pity. It seemed that he had made an appalling mistake. He decided to make a still greater effort, and suddenly found himself intensely enjoying the digging.

The story* clearly has much in common with Elizabeth Fox’s account of her month’s meditation under Crowley’s orders. What happens is simple. We fall into a habitual mode of life, which means that our day-to-day activities become so repetitious that the ‘robot’ in the subconscious mind can go off-duty. There are no sudden emergencies to keep him alert. So one’s inner world becomes as habitual and predictable as one’s outer life. The problem is to persuade the robot to start fertilising consciousness with bursts of ‘newness’, so that one can develop. The best way to do this is through discomfort, one’s first reaction to which is misery and pain. When this self-inflicted misery has gone on long enough, the robot has to take some action to counteract it. The additional effort is important in breaking through, for it convinces the robot that this is serious. One’s inner life ceases to be barren and repetitious. The inner spring is flowing again.

The ascetic practices of saints obviously work on the same principle.

From birth until the age of twenty-one, we grow physically and in every other sense. Changes take place inside us without our volition. Then it stops. We are so used to the changes taking place ‘automatically’ that we find it difficult to stop expecting automatic growth to continue. It doesn’t, and most people slowly ossify. If growth is to continue, unusual efforts must be made in order to stimulate the robot into providing ‘newness’. This is the core of Gurdjieff’s work. Its first aim was to defeat man’s natural laziness, his tendency to relax and ‘switch off’. Orage, describing what happened when he made the ‘extra effort’ at gardening, says, ‘Just then, something changed in me.’ He had learned the basic secret; that there is no good reason why we should not continue developing, in this inner sense, all the time, so that something continues to ‘change’ every day.

Gurdjieff was born in 1873 in Alexandropol, in the Transcaucasus, so that although his parents were Greek (his surname was actually Gorgiades), his nationality was Russian. In his book Meetings with Remarkable Men he summarises the salient features of his early years. His father was an ashokh, a ‘bard’. One of the poems he ‘sang’ was about Gilgamesh. When he read in a magazine that the tablets of the Gilgamesh epic had been found at Nineveh, he experienced enormous excitement at the idea that a poem sung by his father should have been handed down verbally for thousands of years. It was the beginning of a suspicion that perhaps other forms of knowledge had been handed down through the ages – secret teachings. Certain curious events stimulated in him the feeling that there was secret knowledge to be obtained, if he only knew where to look. A neurasthenic young man in the village was able to predict the future with astonishing accuracy; he did this by sitting between two candles and staring at his thumb nail until he went into a trance and would see the future (of whomever he happened to be enquiring about) in his nail. He foretold correctly that Gurdjieff would develop a painful sore spot on his right side – it was a carbuncle that had to be removed – and that he might have a gun accident (he was shot in the leg when hunting). One evening, companions suggested ‘table turning’, and the leg of the table rapped out correctly the age of each one of them. Oddest of all, perhaps, was the phenomena connected with a sect called Yezidis, a tribe in the Mount Ararat region, sometimes known as devil worshippers. He saw a Yezidi boy crying, unable to escape from a circle that mischievous children had drawn around him. Subsequently he verified this fact by experiment, and records that it took himself and another strong man to pull a Yezidi woman out of a circle drawn around her. As soon as she left the circle by this forcible means she lapsed into a trance; placed back in the circle, the normal consciousness returned. The Yezidi is confined to the circle as if by walls of glass; if not put back into it after being dragged out, the trance state lasts from thirteen to twenty-one hours. The Yezidi priests could restore consciousness in such a case by means of an incantation.

One day a young man well known to Gurdjieff died after a fall from a horse. The night after he was buried, he was seen trying to re-enter his home. His throat was cut, and the body was taken back to the cemetery. It sounds as if the man had not actually been dead when he was buried, but the neighbours were convinced that his body had been possessed by an evil spirit, perhaps a vampire.

Gurdjieff began to read everything he could find on occultism in an attempt to explain these phenomena. He visited monasteries. On a pilgrimage to a nearby wonder-working shrine, he saw a young man who was completely paralysed down one side crawl uphill, fall asleep beside the shrine and then wake up cured. He saw a girl dying of consumption cured overnight by drinking rose hips boiled in milk after the Virgin had told her in a dream that this would cure her. And he saw a special service for rain, in which all the churches of the town participated, followed by an immediate downpour.

Gurdjieff took a job as a stoker on the local railway, and when he was asked to accompany an engineer to survey the route of a proposed railway, Gurdjieff managed to make a great deal of money by approaching the mayors of the towns that the railway was scheduled to go through, assuring them that their towns were not on the proposed route but that he could ‘fix’ it for a sum of money. Gurdjieff had no objection to making money by dubiously legal means, and he tells with relish a number of similar stories in his book. He used the money to set out with a friend, Sarkis Pogossian, trying to find the remaining members of the ancient Sarmoung Brotherhood, which, Gurdjieff says, was established in Babylon in 2500 B.c.

It was Pogossian who, according to Gurdjieff, told him the great secret about work. Pogossian never merely relaxed; he always swung his arms rhythmically, marked time with his feet or moved his fingers. He explained to Gurdjieff that he was trying to accustom his whole nature to love work, to get rid of its laziness. Evidently he possesed a strong sense of the futility of wasted time. He told Gurdjieff, ‘I am convinced that in this world no conscious work is ever wasted …’

The moral sounds obvious; but it should not be underestimated. Crowley, like most ‘magicians’, wasted his life, moving restlessly from one futile activity to another. Why? Because he was driven by the negative desire to escape boredom, to escape the feeling that if he stopped moving, life would also stop. It is a negative feeling of the emptiness of life that drives them. Pogossian’s belief that all work ultimately ‘pays off’ is obviously the perfect antidote to this attitude, and the secret needed by magicians.

Pogossian and Gurdjieff got mixed up in a fight in Smyrna, and the English sailors on whose side they fought somehow got permission for them to travel on a warship to Alexandria. Here Gurdjieff went on to Jerusalem, while Pogossian travelled to England and trained as an engineer. In Egypt he met Prince Yuri Lubovedsky, who seems to have introduced him to the idea of ‘work on oneself’. A Persian dervish later told him that he was wasting his time practising Hatha Yoga, and explained that the body is a complex machine: ‘If you know every small screw, every little pin of your machine, only then can you know what you must do.’

Gurdjieff travelled widely for the first forty years of his life. According to his own account, he visited monasteries all over Europe and Asia, and even joined an expedition to look for a hidden city in the Gobi desert. ( It turned back when one of its members died from the bite of a wild camel.)

It was shortly before the First World War that Ouspensky met Gurdjieff. Ouspensky was another ‘seeker’ who had visited the East looking for secret knowledge. He was disappointed. But when he came back to Moscow, he felt that the search had, for the time being, reached a dead end. He gave a few lectures on his travels, and was told that he ought to meet Gurdjieff. He found a small, black-moustached man with a face like a rajah, who answered his questions about hidden knowledge precisely and carefully with no attempt at mystification.

Gurdjieff’s basic point was simple and startling. Man is such a bundle of impulses and emotions that he can hardly be said to exist in any meaningful sense. He changes from hour to hour, almost from moment to moment; he is a helpless victim of the events that carry him along. He wanders around in a kind of hypnotised state. In fact, he is, in a quite literal sense, asleep all the time. He has occasional moments of intensity, flashes when he glimpses what he could be, the freedom of which he is potentially capable. But in no time at all, his mind has gone back to sleep again, and he is again living a routine, habit-filled existence, his mind entirely occupied by trivialities to which he attaches far more significance than they deserve.

Is it possible to ‘wake up’? Ouspensky wanted to know. It is, said Gurdjieff, but it is very difficult. Because the habit from which we are trying to escape is like a powerful current, and after trying to swim against it for a few minutes, we gradually lose strength and go to sleep again. It is necessary to follow a precise method of escaping.

Man is a machine. If he is to learn to rise above his ‘mechanicalness’ (‘living and partly living’, as Eliot says) he must understand the machine.

The essence of Gurdjieff’s doctrine can be summed up in an image taken from that remarkable novel The Haunted Woman, by David Lindsay. A woman goes to buy a house from a man she has never met. They are, on the whole, indifferent to one another, having, apparently, little in common. But as she walks alone across the hall, she sees a flight of stairs leading to an upper region of the house. When she goes up them, she finds herself in a part of the house that ceased to exist a long time ago; the scenery outside the window is different. And when she sees herself in a mirror, she is also different, somehow more mature and developed; she has ‘realised herself’. The ‘self’ she is looking at in the mirror is the person she might have become, to so speak, if circumstances had been ideal for the development of her inner qualities.

Her host, the man from whom she may buy the house, also wanders up the stairs, and finds her there. He is also changed, and these two ‘realised’ people fall in love. However, when they descend again to the lower part of the house, they have totally forgotten everything about the upper storey, which now no longer exists. And when, accidentally, they again find themselves together in the upper storey, they rack their brains for some method by which they can overcome this amnesia, and remind themselves about the other regions of the house.

Lindsay has created an image of the basic problem of the artist and the mystic. In the moments of ‘higher consciousness’ there is always a feeling of ‘But of course!’ Life is infinitely meaningful; its possibilities are suddenly endless, and ‘normal consciousness’ is seen as being no better than sleep. For, like sleep, it separates man from reality.

When man gets this feeling of ‘reality’, he knows that nothing in the world could be so important as keeping it. He tries every possible method of reminding himself not to forget, not to stop fighting to achieve it. What is more, in this state of intensity, it becomes clear that it can be achieved. He sees now as something that is self-evident that he possesses a true will, the ability to focus clearly on an objective and then to achieve it in the most economical way. But then he descends back to his lower storey, and can only remember dimly that he had a vision. The sleep comes back.

The main trouble is a kind of listlessness, a tendency to waste time and consciousness, like a person staring out of the window at the rain and yawning, wondering what to do next. On the other hand, the moment Paris saw Helen of Troy, his whole being was gripped by an objective. Loyalty, honour, gratitude to his host, all ceased to matter, as a kind of tornado shook his soul.

That is to say, an objective (Helen of Troy) arouses immense depths of will and energy.

The revelation that strikes a man in the moods of ‘waking consciousness’ is that this objective is always there. All he has to do is learn to see it, and everything else follows; his true will awakens.

Now, Gurdjieff, in his travels, had made the simple discovery we have already mentioned: that any unusual effort, any new beginning, has this effect of shaking the mind awake. I am normally quite out of touch with ‘reality’, almost as out of touch as when I am asleep and dreaming. I look at that tree, but I don’t really see it, or believe in its existence. My mind is elswhere – like half listening to someone who is talking and half thinking about something else. The result is a kind of double-exposure effect in my consciousness, a certain blurring. Any crisis or sudden touch of ecstasy makes me put twice as much effort into perception, and whatever I am looking at suddenly comes clearly into focus, like the slight touch on the wheel of a microscope or pair of binoculars that makes things appear clear and sharp.

But life is largely routine: ritual, as Lionel Johnson said. I don’t set out on some exciting journey every day. I cannot rely on such things to keep my mind awake. I do not meet a Helen of Troy every day, and what is more, unless I propose to waste my life like Casanova, I cannot rely on the pleasant ‘shocks’ of sexual desire to keep waking me up.

Sometimes, music or poetry has this effect of awakening my mind to reality, causing that broadening of inner horizons, the widened sense of reality. But that doesn’t always work either.

We need, so to speak, a reliable alarm clock.

The answer to this is simpler than one might suppose. It is simply a matter of getting the ‘robot’ habituated to producing larger quantities of energy than necessary.

Gurdjieff’s basic method therefore consisted of ‘work’. The first thing that happened to a new student at the Prieuré was that he was told to join a working party. They might be making a road, cutting down trees, breaking stones, diverting a stream, milking cows. The anonymous author of the Gurdjieff Journal had an experience common to all. He ‘worked’ well, but with a certain resentment. Gurdjieff sent one of his right-hand men, Dr. Stjoernval, to explain that the student was failing through resentment to economise energy. He should work like a labourer, not like a machine. He advised him to make a list of foreign words and learn them as he worked, and also try to ‘sense’ his body and be aware of its activities. The moment he ceased to work in a negative, ‘withdrawn’ frame of mind, and ‘involved’ himself and his will in the work, he began to find it deeply satisfying.

This aspect of Gurdjieff’s teaching could be called ‘applied Taoism’. He laid great stress on the importance of learning to work, and told Ouspensky that a man who could make a good pair of shoes was potentially a better student of ‘the work’ than an intellectual who had written a dozen books. Similarly, when a woman novelist told Gurdjieff that she felt more conscious when she was writing, he replied, ‘You live in dreams and you write about your dreams. How much better for you if you were to scrub one floor consciously than to write a hundred books The clashes between Confucius and Lao Tse in the Taoist scriptures immediately come to mind. (See p. 108.)

What Gurdjieff did at his institute was to turn bored, egotistic, confused people into well-balanced machines, too busy to think about themselves. His exercises allowed the student’s natural capacities to operate again. He spoke of man’s three ‘centres’, the intellectual centre, the emotional centre, the ‘moving’ (or physical) centre, and said that each works with its own energy. When man is working at top pressure, each centre works in harmony with the others. When man is unbalanced, as he tends to be in modern civilisation, centres work lop-sidedly and often become exhausted.

But it is not only the habit of civilisation that makes most people lop-sided and inharmonious. They get the habit of indulging negative emotions, and these temporarily damage them, as a fire damages a building. One of the most interesting things about Gurdjieff as a person was his apparent freedom from negative emotions. The best example of this is a story told by Seabrook. In the 1920s, Gurdjieff decided to write down his ideas in the form of a vast book called All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. He decided to apply his principle of ‘work’ to the book, and deliberately wrote it in an incredibly long-winded and complicated style, to force his readers to make an enormous mental effort to grasp his meaning. Beelzebub, flying around the earth in a space ship, tells his grandson about the ‘three-brained beings’ on the planet earth, and their peculiar tendency to treat fantasy as reality. This is because a commission of archangels got worried about man’s developing powers and planted in him an organ called Kundabuffer, whose purpose is to keep him from achieving ‘objective consciousness’. This is obviously a legend of original sin, like Plato’s legend of the gods cutting man in two.

Seabrook was asked to ask a number of intelligent friends to supper to hear chunks of the magnum opus. These included Lincoln Steffens, two pragmatist philosophers from Columbia, and J. B. Watson, the founder of behavioural psychology, who also believed that man is a machine, but firmly disbelieved that he could turn himself into anything else. Gurdjieff’s disciples proceeded to read at length. Seabrook writes:

Late in the evening, Mr. Steffens and John Watson began whispering. Presently Mr. Watson said: ‘Either this is an elaborate and subtle joke, whose point is completely over our heads, or it’s piffle. In either event, I don’t see that much can be gained by hearing more of it. I propose, if Mr. Gurdjieff is agreeable, that we now converse for a while.’

So we all relaxed and conversed, and presently supped, with equal amiability on the part of both hosts and guests. Mr. Gurdjieff was more brilliant, and more witty, than the manuscript had been. He was so agreeable, so keen, so affable, that Steffens, Watson, Montague, and all the rest of them took him into their complete confidence and explained unanimously their conviction that – unless he was trying to put over a cosmic joke of some sort whose point had not yet become manifest – his future did not lie in the field of authorship. Gurdjieff suggested that his purport might be too deep for our limited comprehension.

Presumably Gurdjieff’s reason for wanting to read aloud to a group of American intellectuals was the desire of the author to reach an audience – that is, vanity played some small part in it. But the rebuff only had the effect of making him more witty and friendly than ever.

Fritz Peters, the author of Boyhood with Gurdjieff, has some interesting stories that make a similar point. One Russian emigré called Rachmilevitch was peculiarly irritating; he grumbled non-stop. One day when the pupils were all planting lawns, he threw down his hoe, told Gurdjieff he was insane and marched off. Gurdjieff sent Fritz Peters, a boy of twelve, after him, and Rachmilevitch was brought back. Later that evening, Gurdjieff made everyone laugh by telling them that Peters had found Rachmilevitch sitting up a tree (which was true). This time, Rachmilevitch marched out and returned to Paris. Gurdjieff went to Paris and persuaded him to return. He explained to Fritz Peters that Rachmilevitch had one valuable quality – he irritated the hell out of everyone. And this prevented people falling into a routine!

Gurdjieff placed a Miss Merston in charge of the institute while he was away, and she and Peters soon clashed; his chickens got into her garden and scratched up flowers. She threatened to wring the neck of the next one that did this, and carried out her threat. Thereupon Peters dug up and destroyed some of her favourite flowers. This was reported to Gurdjieff on his return. He pointed out to Peters that the chicken had been eaten, so it had served some purpose, whereas the destruction of the flowers had been pointless. But he also told Miss Merston that she had failed him by wasting his time with such trivialities.

On another occasion, when Miss Merston had drawn up a long list of everybody’s misdemeanours when Gurdjieff was away, Gurdjieff startled everyone by handing out money for each misdemeanour committed (Peters received by far the most). But the rebuff had the effect of making everyone sorry for Miss Merston, so that she ceased to be a dragon.

Perhaps the most amusing story concerns a special occasion when Miss Merston served tea to everyone. Every time she bent over to hand someone a teacup, she farted gently, and said, ‘Pardon me.’ Everyone was slightly embarrassed, but Gurdjieff was delighted; he proceeded to draw attention to the explosions of wind, comparing them to the report of a toy gun, and remarking on her politeness in excusing herself after each fart. Again, the result was to reduce Miss Merston’s ‘dragon’ status and make everyone like her.

There are many stories of this kind of attitude towards ‘difficult’ people; in each of them Gurdjieff displayed what Shaw called ‘natural Christianity’. But in another sense, it was not ‘natural’. The natural reaction to such people is to ignore them or quarrel with them. After the affair of the flowerbed, Gurdjieff told Peters that both he and Miss Merston had merely reacted to one another in a purely mechanical way. Gurdjieff’s response to difficult people was a deliberate exercise of freedom.

The physical work at the Prieuré was only the beginning. The real work was bound up with dancing. Again, Seabrook gives one of the most striking accounts. In 1924, Gurdjieff took forty of the Prieuré students to New York, where they put on displays.

What excited and interested me was the amazing, brilliant, automaton-like, inhuman, almost incredible docility and robot-like obedience of the disciples, in the parts of the demonstrations that had to do with ‘movement’. They were like a group of perfectly trained zombies, or like circus animals jumping through hoops ringed with fire, or like the soldiers of Christophe who marched without breaking step off the parapet of the citadel on that sheer mountainside in Haiti. They did things, without suffering any apparent hurt, almost as dangerous as dropping off a cliff, and certainly more dangerous than leaping through fiery hoops.

The group consisted of young and youngish women, most of whom were handsome and some of whom were beautiful; and of men who looked as if they had come, and probably did, from the best British and continental homes and universities. I met some of these disciples and they were almost without exception people of culture, breeding and intelligence. The demonstrations, I imagine, were to show the extent to which the Gurdjieff Institute … had taught them supernormal powers of physical control, co-ordination, relaxation, etc. And there was no fake about it, … because if they hadn’t learned supreme co-ordination, they’d have broken their arms and legs, and maybe their necks, in some of the stunts they did. But what I felt the demonstrations showed, even more than their control over themselves, was the terrific domination of Gurdjieff, the Master. At his command, they’d race, spread out at breakneck speed from left to right across the stage, and at another low command from him, freeze in full flight as if caught by a race-track camera. Once I saw Gurdjieff push a dancer who had been ‘frozen’ by his command in an attitude of difficult equilibrium. The dancer tumbled and rolled over several times, then rolled upright and back again, apparently without volitionally assuming it – in the original frozen position.

Gurdjieff himself, a calm, bull-like man, with muscles in those days as hard as steel, in immaculate dinner clothes, his head shaven like a Prussian officer’s, with black luxuriant handlebar moustaches, and generally smoking expensive Egyptian cigarettes, stood casually down in the audience, or off to the side beside the piano … He never shouted. He was always casual. Yet always in complete command. It was as if he were a slave-master or wild-animal tamer, with an invisible bull-whip swishing inaudibly through the air. Among his other qualities, he was a great showman, and a climax came one night which literally had the front row out of their seats. The troupe was deployed extreme back stage, facing the audience. At his command, they came racing full-tilt towards the footlights. We expected to see a wonderful exhibition of arrested motion. But instead, Gurdjieff calmly turned his back, and was lighting a cigarette. In the next split second, an aerial human avalanche was flying through the air, across the orchestra, down among empty chairs, on the floor, bodies pell-mell, piled on top of each other, arms and legs sticking out in weird postures – frozen there, fallen, in complete immobility and silence.

Only after it had happened did Gurdjieff turn and look at them, as they lay there, still immobile. When they presently arose, by his permission, and it was evident that no arms, legs or necks had been broken – no one seemed to have suffered even so much as a scratch or bruise – there was a storm of applause, mingled with a little protest. It had almost been too much.*

Seabrook quotes Gurdjieff as saying, ‘If we live calm, monotonous days and peaceful nights, we stultify. We had better torture our own spirit than suffer the inanities of calm.’

He adds: ‘His disciples therefore were awakened at all hours of the night, suddenly, and had learned to remain “frozen” in whatever positions they had chanced to stand or fall in when leaping out of bed.’

The gymnastic exhibitions were not the only part of the displays. There were also ‘tricks’ that Seabrook describes as being similar to those practised by Houdini, thought-reading, etc. The audience were warned that there would be ‘tricks, half-tricks, and true supernatural phenomena’. Half-tricks, it was explained, depended on an abnormal sensitivity. An object is hidden and a blindfolded man takes the hands of various people in the room, without speaking to them, and ‘reads their minds’, so that he finds the hidden object. In fact, says Gurdjieff, he does not read their minds, but is highly sensitive to the pressure of their hands, which make slight involuntary movements of the muscles which indicate where the object is hidden.

Genuine telepathic phenomena also seemed to occur; a pupil would sit among the audience and be shown some object; he would then telepathically ‘transmit’ the name and shape of the object to pupils on the stage. Even more startling, the pupil in the audience would transmit to M. de Hartmann, the pianist, the name of an opera – any opera – and he would play an extract from it. An artist pupil sketched animals ‘transmitted’ by the pupil in the audience.

These could, of course, have been ‘tricks’. But Gurdjieff himself possessed strong telepathic powers – of which I shall speak in a moment. It may well be that he was able to convey these to some of his pupils.

As can be seen from Seabrook’s account, the dances were so complex and difficult that they required an almost yogic training. Gurdjieff claimed to have collected them from various Oriental sources: dervishes, Essenes, Buddhists and so on. Kenneth Walker, in his own account of Gurdjieff, Venture with Ideas (perhaps the finest introduction to Gurdjieff), mentions that the dances involved learning to do different things with different limbs. Anyone who has ever tried rubbing his stomach in a circle and waving the other hand straight up and down will see the difficulty involved here. The dances certainly had the effect of releasing Walker’s hidden energies. He records that he often left his Harley Street surgery exhausted, then drove a considerable distance to the Gurdjieff group meeting; but after several hours of ‘exercises’, he felt totally wide-awake, brimming with energy.

Everyone has noticed this phenomenon at some time. No matter how tired you are, some sudden excitement or crisis can snap you into full alertness. We possess two types of will. I have elsewhere used the illustration of a bullet. The bullet is driven by an explosion of cordite. But the cordite, although powerful, is quite harmless and inexplosive on its own. At the end of the bullet there is a tiny cap of a substance called mercuric fulminate, which explodes instantly on contact. The hammer of the gun explodes the fulminate, and the fulminate explodes the more powerful cordite. Man possesses a fulminate will and a cordite will. If I am doing some routine job, like mowing the lawn, I use my cordite will. But it burns rather dully. If something really excites me or arouses my sense of urgency, it is the fulminate will that explodes, and that produces a roar of power from the cordite will. The fulminate will is tied up with the imagination and sense of purpose, and these in turn detonate my ordinary willpower and vitality.

But sudden emergency is not necessary to produce the same effect. Any hard and unusual work causes me to ‘warm up’ until finally my consciousness broadens. This is the basis of the Gurdjieff disciplines.

Gurdjieff’s ‘system’ is highly complex; but there would be no point in trying to summarise it here. Planets are regarded as living beings. Different worlds exist on different levels of materiality (this sounds like Madame Blavatsky) and have different vibrations. Man’s chief business is actually to produce a kind of psychological vibration that ‘feeds’ the moon. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, one of the most thorough expositions of Gurdjieff’s ideas, is full of tables of ‘octaves’, ‘worlds’, ‘triads’, ‘elements’ and so on. It is an interesting but not important question whether Gurdjieff learned this during his travels, or whether he invented it as a kind of framework for the theoretical side of his ‘system’. He speaks of seven centres in all: intellectual, emotional, moving (physical), instinctive, sexual and two more called ‘higher thinking’ and ‘higher emotional’. He explains that the centres tend to work with one another’s energies and take over one another’s functions. ‘It is a very great thing when the sex centre works with its own energy.’ It then becomes akin to the higher emotional centre. Everyone can understand this statement; for example, D. H. Lawrence’s descriptions of the gradual improvement in the sexual relation between Mellors and Lady Chatterley showing the sex centre learning to use its own energy instead of working on emotional or (worse still) thought energy. When the sex centre works with its own energy, sympathy and tenderness are involved; sex ceases to be a kind of mutual masturbation. But then if anyone takes the trouble to analyse this statement phenomenologically, he will see that it is untrue. Sex can be bad because my mind is elsewhere, because I am worried, because, in short, I am involved in a world of fantasies. When I am properly balanced, when my mind is aware of the objective reality, sex is likely to produce maximum intensity and insight.

However, this is unimportant. We may take a sceptical view, and say simply that Gurdjieff was a psychologist of singular brilliance and insight, on a level with Nietzsche. The important thing is that he grasped the basic problem and tried to remedy it.

The core of his system concerns levels of consciousness. Man has potentially four states of consciousness, says Gurdjieff. First of all, there is sleep, when you are wrapped in your own private world. Then there is waking consciousness, or so-called waking consciousness. which you appear to share with other people. But we are not really sharing a common consciousness. We each remain wrapped in our own blanket of subjective fantasy. And into this semi-sleeping state there burst occasional moments of intensity-consciousness, when we seem to wake up. Gurdjieff calls this self-remembering. He demonstrates by a simple exercise how difficult this is to achieve. If you close your eyes, you sink into a subjective inner world in which you think only of yourself. If you look at your watch when someone asks you the time, you forget yourself, and become aware only of your watch. But try looking at your watch, and also being aware of yourself looking at it. You will find that you can only do this very briefly. After a moment, your attention slips, and you either forget your watch and become aware only of yourself, or forget yourself and become aware only of the watch.

All the moments that we remember for the rest of our lives, the moments of sudden intense happiness, are moments of self-remembering. I seem to wake up, and have a feeling of ‘What me, here?’ I am as aware of the place as of myself being in it. And such states may last for half an hour or so.

Beyond self-remembering there is a fourth state called ‘objective consciousness’, that is, a constant state in which the mind actually perceives objective reality all the time. This is seldom or ever achieved by human beings, even in flashes.

One of the chief aims of the ‘work’ – either manual labour or dancing – was to induce increased self-consciousness, the possibility of achieving self-remembering for long stretches.

In my own terminology: habit leads the robot to economise on the energy it sends up to my conscious mind. This in turn leads my conscious mind to find life rather dull. In fact, the dullness is inside me, but I think that the world itself is to blame, so I allow my consciousness to become even duller and lazier. This means that the robot sends even less energy. And so the vicious circuit continues. If, on the other hand, I can somehow induce in myself a state of optimistic expectation, I cause the robot to pour more energy into consciousness, and the more energy he releases, the more the world strikes me as delightful and interesting. If I am at all self-observant, I will also recognise that this state of wide-awakeness, intense aliveness, is due to effort on my part. Once I clearly grasp this, the old vicious circle – whereby we can get used to anything – is broken. It could be quite permanently broken, and then a new form of man would appear.

Gurdjieff’s system was based upon the same insight as Freud’s and Edmund Husserl’s: that although man appears to himself to be a very simple, straightforward being – a mirror-like consciousness – he is actually an immensely complex machine with many levels. Like the top gear in a car, consciousness is our weakest level. It is unfortunately the only level that many of us are aware of. Our real strength lies on other levels. The evolutionary problem is for us to become aware of these other levels.

The essence of personal evolution is the actual heat generated by mental effort. Gurdjieff distinguishes between what he calls ‘personality’ and ‘essence’. Most actors have a great deal of ‘personality’, because they take the trouble to develop it. But it is only a surface layer. ‘Essence’ is inner strength, true ‘personality’. Gurdjieff says that one of the few men he had ever known who possessed true essence was a Corsican brigand, who used to spend all day peering down the sights of his rifle in the hot sun, waiting for passing travellers; the strength and endurance caused that inner fusing called essence.

Two years after meeting Gurdjieff, Ouspensky had begun to develop the ‘mental muscles’ for longer periods of self-remembering. To begin with, his efforts at self-remembering had tended to slip into total forgetfulness. He speaks of a long effort at self-remembering as he walked through Petrograd, and the ‘strange emotional state of inner peace and confidence that comes after great efforts of this kind’, and then of suddenly waking up two hours later, and remembering that he has completely forgotten to remember himself. Here, it can be seen that the plunge from a higher form of consciousness to a lower one is exactly like a black-out. In the summer of 1916 the ‘miracle’ began to happen; he describes it in Chapter 13 of In Search of the Miraculous. In a house in Finland, after a session during which he had been savagely sarcastic to everyone, including Ouspensky, Gurdjieff suddenly began to speak to Ouspensky telepathically. ‘I heard his voice inside me, as if it were in the chest, near the heart.’ Gurdjieff put questions without speaking, Ouspensky answered them, and it continued for half an hour.

The experience also demonstrated, to Ouspensky’s satisfaction, that Gurdjieff was by no means infallible, in spite of his occult knowledge. After two hours of walking in the forest, struggling with conflicting emotions, Ouspensky says, ‘I saw that Gurdjieff was right; that what I had considered to be firm and reliable in myself in reality did not exist. But I had found something else. I knew that he would not believe me, and that he would laugh at me if I showed him this other thing. But for myself it was indubitable and what happened later showed I was right.’

Later, in bed, Gurdjieff’s voice again spoke in his chest, and Ouspensky replied mentally. They carried on a conversation from different parts of the house.

The following morning, at breakfast, the mind-reading act continued, Ouspensky began to brood on a problem about the ‘ray of creation’; Gurdjieff told him – speaking normally – to leave it for now, because it was too far ahead.

Ouspensky says that he was in a strange emotional state for three days, and although Gurdjieff told him that he was now no longer asleep, he felt this to be untrue; he was undoubtedly ‘asleep’ at times.

What had happened is that long effort had broken through to Ouspensky’s psychic faculties, the red end of the spectrum. This is why he felt that he had not achieved full ‘wakefulness’.

On the way back to Petrograd, Ouspensky, alone in the compartment, not only talked to Gurdjieff but saw him. And back in Petrograd, Ouspensky had the impression of seeing ‘sleeping people’: ‘suddenly I saw that the man who was walking towards me was asleep … Although his eyes were open, he was walking along obviously immersed in dreams, which ran like clouds across his face. It entered my mind that if I could look at him long enough I should see his dreams … After him came another also sleeping. A sleeping izvostchik [cab driver] went by with two sleeping passengers. Suddenly I found myself in the position of the prince in “The Sleeping Princess”. Everyone around me was asleep.’ After a few weeks this strange state passed off and Ouspensky returned to ‘normal’ consciousness. This again demonstrates that what he had experienced was not true waking-consciousness, although it was certainly more awake than everyday consciousness. It was some kind of accidental return to ‘jungle sensitiveness’, to the occult faculty of animals. But as a result of this period, he also reached new depths of intuition. He explains his sudden clear perception that violent means, to achieve anything whatever, are always a mistake. They always produce negative results. This is not, he says, a moral conclusion, like Tolstoyan non-resistance, but a practical one. This is obviously the reason for Gurdjieff’s patiently creative attitude in his personal relations, the refusal to give way to the impulse to destroy or dismiss.

The Revolution forced Gurdjieff to leave Russia. No doubt he would have been ‘liquidated’ fairly quickly as an organiser of ‘secret’ groups. In London, Ouspensky himself began to teach groups what he had learned from Gurdjieff, and his group finally provided the money for Gurdjieff to buy the buildings at the Prieuré. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff had ceased to work together. In fact, there was a total opposition of temperament. Ouspensky was a scientist by nature – dry, precise, abstract (although this is not to say that he was a mere ‘intellectual’). Gurdjieff was a Walt Whitmanesque type of character, in some ways not unlike Rasputin. He was not a saint. He liked good food, and drank a lot of Armagnac. When he was settled at Fontainebleau he moved in his mother, brother and sister, and the anonymous author of the Journal remarks that he was a patriarchal figure. An aphorism on the wall in the study house said: ‘It is a sign of a good man that he loves his father and mother.’ He was, as Orage said, a ‘complete man’. When the men bathed communally, they had a ritual of telling dirty jokes, and Gurdjieff would make them line up to examine the degree of sunburn of their behinds. His wife died at the Prieuré, and Gurdjieff took a mistress, who was soon pregnant. He was, apparently, capable of sleeping with attractive female pupils, and I myself have met a professor at an American university who told me he was one of Gurdjieff’s natural sons, and by no means the only one. In God Is My Adventure, Rom Landau tells a story of an American woman novelist, who sat next to Gurdjieff’s table in a restaurant. Gurdjieff suddenly began to inhale and exhale in a peculiar way, and the woman went pale. She said that she had caught Gurdjieff’s eye – ‘I suddenly felt as if I had been struck right through my sexual centre. It was beastly!’ Even Crowley did not possess the capacity to cause instantaneous orgasms in strange women.

Landau also mentions that he stumbled upon proof that Gurdjieff had been in Tibet; an Arab writer, Achmed Abdullah, said he had met Gurdjieff in Lhasa, when Gurdjieff was an agent of the Russian secret police.

On his return to France after his American trip, Gurdjieff had a serious motor accident that almost killed him. There was something odd about this accident. Fritz Peters has described Gurdjieff as an insane driver who would not last two minutes on a modern road. Before leaving Paris for the Prieuré he told Mme. de Hartmann to order the mechanic to carefully check his car; he was peculiarly insistent. He then told her to take a train back to the Prieuré instead of coming with him. No one knows exactly what happened; a passing gendarme found the wrecked car by the side of the road, and Gurdjieff, badly injured, lying beside it covered with a blanket, with his head on a pillow. The gendarme said it seemed impossible that a man so badly injured could have moved that far. Only Gurdjieff’s fantastic vitality saved his life. Had he somehow foreseen the accident? Or was it, in some odd sense, deliberate? He was not usually an accident-prone man.

On the other hand, neither was he a superman. Fritz Peters describes a trip to Vichy with Gurdjieff driving. Gurdjieff insisted on driving too fast on the wrong side of the road. Peters was supposed to map-read, but Gurdjieff went so fast that they usually shot past turnings. He always refused to turn back, so they had to find new routes all the time. He declined to stop for petrol, and would drive until the car ran out. Then one of the two boys had to walk to the nearest garage, and bring a mechanic too, since Gurdjieff was convinced that it could not be mere lack of petrol that had made the car stop. (It is not clear why he didn’t keep a can of petrol in the boot.) He always arrived at hotels so late that they had to knock the proprietor up. In the Vichy hotel, his behaviour was wildly eccentric, and he introduced the boys as the sons of Henry Ford and Vanderbilt.

Out of this Vichy trip sprang another curious proof of his occult knowledge. He invited a Russian family to the Prieuré. They had a daughter. Gurdjieff told the assembled pupils that he would now demonstrate an Eastern method of hypnotism, which depended on the subject’s susceptibility to music, especially to certain chords. At a certain climactic chord, he said, the girl would go into a trance.

The Russian family came into the room, and the girl sat beside Gurdjieff. During the music, played by Hartmann at the piano, she was obviously moved, and at the climactic chord, seemed to faint. It took a long time to bring her round, and the Russian family were so alarmed that it cost a considerable effort to persuade them to stay. After this, Gurdjieff persuaded the girl to perform the demonstration several times. Peters says that her hysteria when she came out of the trance was too obviously genuine for the whole thing to be a ‘put-up job’.

Neither is there any need to look for ‘alternative explanations’ in the case of Gurdjieff. He had learned to push his senses to new limits through various disciplines and studies. As a consequence, he had gained certain occult powers. Whether these powers were of any importance is another matter. Probably he did not think so himself.

He differed from all the other magicians we have considered in one obvious respect. He was free from the usual magician’s destiny of sudden rise and slow downfall. Compared to him, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Dee, Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, seem to be talented eccentrics, lacking in self-discipline and the sense of self-preservation. The author of the Journal of a Pupil describes a meeting between Gurdjieff and Crowley, but it is clear that they had nothing to say to one another. He says, ‘Crowley had magnetism, and the kind of charm that many charlatans have; he also had a dead weight that was somehow impressive’ – that is, Crowley was a ‘man of power’. ‘His attitude was fatherly and benign, and a few years earlier I might have fallen for it. Now I saw and sensed that I could have nothing to do with him.’ He does not describe the tea, except to say that Gurdjieff kept a sharp watch on Crowley, and says, ‘I got a strong impression of two magicians, the white and the black – the one strong, powerful, full of light; the other also powerful, but heavy, dull, ignorant.’ This seems to be a fair estimate.

Gurdjieff’s life was controlled, ordered. Perhaps the only quality he shares with most magicians – apart from the natural occult faculty – is the need for disciples. The real difference between the mage and the mystic (or saint) is that the saint has no business with other people. On the other hand, Gurdjieff insisted that a group of people can achieve more than one person working alone. Ouspensky himself was interested to discover that his own teaching had the curious effect of teaching him things he did not know before. That is to say, his awareness deepened as he taught. This may also have been true of Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff called his method ‘the fourth way’. The first three are the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, the way of the yogi. That is, the way of physical discipline, the way of emotional discipline, the way of intellectual discipline. The fakir treats his body as the circus ringmaster treats the performing animals; the monk concentrates on prayer, on achieving samadhi through deep love and devotion; the yogi tries to work directly with consciousness, expanding it by certain exercises and disciplines. Gurdjieff sometimes called his fourth way ‘the way of the cunning man’. But essentially, it is a way of knowledge; scientific knowledge. Man must set out to learn, and accept nothing on trust. (This explains why teaching was so important to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.) How does this differ from the way of yoga? I might put it this way. At school I learned to solve mathematical problems by means of log tables or formulae like the binomial theorem; but as often as not, I could not work out the logarithm of a number myself without the tables, or explain to someone how the binomial theorem was invented. So there is a million miles of difference between a clever schoolboy who comes top of the class in mathematics, and a mathematical prodigy like Bertrand Russell who was devouring Euclid for pleasure at the age of nine. The difference is that Russell becomes a creative mathematician, while the brilliant schoolboy remains merely a competent calculator. Gurdjieff’s problem was to convince his pupils of this: that loving and continuous efforts put into ‘the work’ will not only give a man a new degree of freedom, but will make him a creatively free personality, while the fakir, the monk and the yogi remain somehow statically free.

All the emphasis in his work is laid on the idea of being. He insists that most people do not exist, or hardly exist at all: they are little more than wisps of vapour held together by a body. Asked whether there is life after death, Gurdjieff replied that such wisps of vapour do not survive because there is hardly anything to survive. Asked whether there is such a thing as destiny, Gurdjieff replied that only a person with essence has a destiny; other people are merely subject to the law of accident.

At its simplest level, Gurdjieff’s ‘work’ is an attempt to gain control of one’s own life rather than being a leaf tossed around by the wind. At the beginning of the 1914 war, Ouspensky was impressed by the sight of a lorry loaded with crutches – crutches for limbs that had not yet been blown off. Such a sight raises the immediate question: But cannot something be done about it?

Gurdjieff’s reply would strike a social reformer as pessimistic. Nothing can be done, because a war is a situation in which several million machines fight several other million machines, ‘reacting’ helplessly to one another. A criminal or a sex maniac often argues that he was carried away by an ‘irresistible impulse’, and this is precisely why criminals are among the lowest members of the human race. We are all carried along to some extent; the highest type of human being would be the one who is not a mere leaf in the gale of his emotional reactions. The aim of the ‘work’ is to put on weight, psychic weight, until you are a heavy stone rather than a leaf, and the wind cannot move you.

In her book The Unknowable Gurdjieff, Margaret Anderson describes how an intellectual woman writer spent only a day at the Prieuré, asking intellectual questions all the time. The Gurdjieff pupils naturally ignored her request to ‘put it in a single phrase’, although one of them did say, ‘It is a method for preventing your past from becoming your future.’ The woman left in a state of spiteful annoyance, having decided that the whole thing was a bluff. Fourteen years later, Margaret Anderson met her again, and realised that she had not changed in the least. Every word and every gesture was predictable. Her past had become her future, in spite of her intellectuality.

On the other hand, the very title of Margaret Anderson’s book – The Unknowable Gurdjieff – underlines the chief fault of the ‘Gurdjieff movement’ (which still exists). Her contention is that Gurdjieff is so profound as to be ultimately unknowable. It was J. G. Bennett, one of Ouspensky’s most brilliant followers, who coined the phrase. Gurdjieff is undoubtedly the greatest ‘magician’ dealt with in this book; but he is not beyond human understanding. Neither is he uniquely original. In his essay ‘The Energies of Man’, William James talks about the phenomenon of ‘second wind’: why, on some days, we feel dull and washed out, ‘as though a sort of cloud weighed upon us’, and why this ‘cloud’ can often be dispersed by deliberately driving yourself to painful effort. The exhausted runner gets second wind, proving that he was not exhausted after all. James also speaks about neurasthenic patients, to whom life has become a whole series of insurmountable obstacles, and how a psychiatrist jars them out of it by forcing them to make efforts, which at first are agonising, and then are succeeded, quite abruptly, by a feeling of relief. James is pinpointing the problem Gurdjieff deals with, and prescribes precisely the same course of actions, ‘shocks’ or abnormal efforts. What is more, James is more deeply concerned with the problem of why our minds get narrower and narrower, until life is a series of obstacles; Gurdjieff nowhere analyses this important problem. Again, in the preface to Back to Methuselah, in a section headed ‘And the greatest of these is self-control’, Shaw emphasises that this is the difference between a man and an animal, and in the play itself, he tries to show human beings who have gradually achieved this higher degree of self-control. Shaw goes further than Gurdjieff in believing that this higher degree of self-control would prolong human life indefinitely. That Gurdjieff died at the age of seventy-six is evidence that he had not acquired a high degree of this self-control. (Kenneth Walker warned him a year before that he was eating and drinking too much, and would soon be dead if he did not stop; Gurdjieff ignored him.)

Gurdjieff was a very great man; but he was not unknowable – neither was his system an unsurpassable ultimate in human knowledge. There are even vital matters upon which he was relatively ignorant. Let me try to define these.

The most important realisation of all is Husserl’s recognition that human consciousness is intentional. As I go through conscious, everyday life, I am unaware of the amount of deliberate work I am putting into ‘living’. So much of life seems to ‘just happen’, so much seems to be ‘given’, that I get into a habit of thinking of myself as a passive object, acted upon. This is as absurd as if I tried to write with a pen without putting any pressure on the nib.

Ask yourself why a holiday often produces an increasing state of ‘positiveness’, of optimism and well-being and the feeling that life is immensely interesting? Because the change makes you put more interest into the act of consciousness, of seeing and doing. Why did Sartre feel so free during the war when he might be arrested at any moment? Because the danger made him keep alert – that is, put more interest into seeing and doing. Normal consciousness is shy and lazy and mole-like, hardly putting any effort into living. We allow habit to tempt us into devaluing experience. It is too easy to forget the values we have fought for. Why does Paris feel such ecstasy as he lies naked beside Helen for the first time? Because he has fought and plotted and schemed for this moment, and now it has arrived, he means to savour it to the last drop. But unless he is a very remarkable person, he will be taking her for granted when he has made love to her a thousand times. We have to live ‘close up’ to life, to see it from a worm’s-eye view, and we forget the wider bird’s-eye view.

What can be done about this ‘forgetfulness of existence’ (to borrow Heidegger’s phrase)? At the end of All and Everything Beelzebub tells his grandson that what man really needs is an ‘organ’ by which he can be constantly aware of the exact date of his own death. This would stop men wasting their lives as if they were immortal. This solution is precisely the same as the one offered by Heidegger in Being and Time: live with a constant awareness of death.

The injunction is useful, but not very helpful. Hemingway, for example, tried to live up to it, and still died a pathetic alcoholic.

To grasp the meaning of intentionality is to grasp the solution. Every moment of ‘intensity consciousness’, every ‘Paris-in-Helen’s-arms’ moment, gives us a clear glimpse of the very simple answer. Our normal more-or-less-bored state of everyday consciousness arises from the habit of devaluing the world. Instead of saying ‘How fascinating’, we yawn and say ‘That’s old stuff But the law of intentionality says that the less you put into perception, the less you get out. And it becomes a vicious downward spiral.

There is, however, an important point without which this cannot be fully understood. If someone were to ask me to do a crossword puzzle, I might reply, ‘No, crosswords bore me.’ If he then said, ‘But this is a special crossword puzzle. Its solution will tell you exactly where a million pounds worth of gold is buried in your back garden,’ my whole attitude would change – provided of course, I believed him, or even half believed him.

The Paris-in-Helen’s-arms moment reveals the objective meaningfulness of the world. It also reveals that consciousness need not be so barren. Everyday consciousness tends to be narrow because we have to take a worm’s-eye view of life if we are to be efficient. But we make it worse by a dull, passive, discouraged attitude towards it. It is like having a capacious bag, and using it only to carry a single pencil. In moments of intensity we realise that far more can be got into consciousness – other times, other places. There is no good reason, for example, why I should not remember my whole childhood as vividly as Proust remembered his when he tasted the madeleine dipped in tea.

Man’s trouble is not so much the narrowness of his consciousness (which is important and necessary) as that he lives perpetually on a far lower level of value than the universe merits. Poetry, music, sexual delight, holidays, disappearance of crisis, can raise him momentarily to a higher level. But since he is ignorant of the fundamentally intentional nature of his response to existence, he tends to fall back into passivity and forgetfulness. At present, his ‘devaluing tendency’ is unconscious. First of all, he must grasp his ‘devaluing tendency’ consciously. Then he must begin a conscious, disciplined process of revaluation.

I must emphasise that everything depends upon understanding the intentional mechanisms of consciousness. Once these are grasped you are working in the daylight. Until they are grasped you are fumbling in the dark.

Gurdjieff’s remarkable achievement was to understand that most of our limitations are arbitrary, due to habit. William James says, ‘There seems no doubt that we are each and all of us to some extent victims of habit neurosis … We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey. Most of us may learn to push the barrier further off, and to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power.’ James instances an officer in the Indian mutiny who performed astonishing feats of endurance when the lives of many women and children were at stake. Now, there can be no doubt that all of us would live on a far higher level of vitality if we could choose more interesting and adventurous lives. But the whole point of civilisation is to rob life of the element of danger and risk, and we cannot have it both ways. Gurdjieff’s discovery was that this is not a real setback. We are intelligent creatures with minds, and we can devise disciplines that are as exciting as any physical danger. These disciplines can make our evolution – which has so far been a matter of accident and natural selection – conscious and deliberate.

An interesting problem arises: the black-room problem. If a human being is placed in a completely black and silent room, his mind is totally destroyed in a matter of days or weeks.

The reason is obvious. Even when surrounded by physical stimuli, our value sense gets eroded too easily. We let ourselves sink into the downward spiral. It is even more so in the black room. Man’s habitual negative, devaluing tendency now has the run of his mind, unchecked by sudden bonuses of delight or glimpses of misery and danger that restore the sense of reality. It is like placing a man with a persecution complex among people who do rather dislike him.

Man’s sense of values is sick and enfeebled. However, this statement should not be taken as an excuse for cultural despair. To diagnose our ‘original sin’ as clearly as this is to already be within easy marching distance of the solution.

Now, it is certain that a Gurdjieff pupil could stand the black room longer than the average person, simply because the neurotic tendencies to self-pity, egoism, destructiveness, have been partly erased. But since the Gurdjieff system depends so much on ‘exercises’, on ‘work’ in a purely physical sense, the black room would present a very formidable obstacle. The only final answer to the black room is to develop the ‘value muscle’, the ability to ‘pull back’ and take a bird’s-eye view. Man becomes godlike not merely through effort, but through values. Gurdjieff’s Corsican brigand may possess ‘essence’, but that is only the first requirement. Intelligence, imagination, creativity, are equally important. And these spring into being from the value sense.

How is all this connected with ‘occult faculties’? At this point, the answer can be stated with some degree of precision.

Faculty X is a vivid sense of the reality of other times, other places. I possess a book of pictures of Cornwall as it was a hundred years ago, and to look at the old cobbled streets of Penzance or St. Austell produces in me a kind of shock of wonder, like catching the breath with delight. Suppose we discovered some method of taking the mind back into the past, so that I could see the cobbled street in three dimensions and hear the people who walked along it in those days. Suppose someone could invent some occult method whereby I could actually be present at the execution of Charles I, or watch the boy Mozart playing his own concerto to Marie Antoinette, or glimpse the face of Jack the Ripper as he walks under a street lamp. The sense of wonder would now be so intense, the mental energy aroused so enormous, that I could never be the same person again. Deeper levels of my being would be permanently shaken into life, never to fall asleep again. For having glimpsed such wonders, I could never sink back into my previous state of un-wondering sloth.

This new sense of wonder would be quite different from Ouspensky’s strange excitement during the three weeks that he became ‘telepathic’. Ouspensky’s telepathy happened to him; this intensity would be something I do myself. I would control it, by my knowledge.

Ouspensky declared that during his telepathic period, he could clearly see the futility of violent methods of achieving anything. Gurdjieff’s anonymous pupil said he could instinctively feel that he should not get mixed up with Crowley. The ‘psychic radar’ begins to operate when the mind overflows with energy, and the mind overflows with energy when its perception of values is clear and intense. The achievement of any degree of Faculty X would animate all the so-called psychic faculties, the red end of the spectrum. These occult powers should be a function of the sense of purpose. This does not mean that all the occult faculties would wake up – only those that are important. For a man with a strong sense of purpose, the faculty for avoiding accidents is important, certainly more important than telepathy. Gurdjieff’s faculty was apparently inoperative when he drove from Paris to Fontainebleau that day.

I am reasonably convinced that we could, at this point in our evolution, deliberately develop a great many faculties that have so far been accidental. I will give only one example of this. The following is an account of an experiment in will-power conducted by a group that included Professor M. Welford, who teaches psychology at Leicester University. Professor Welford writes:

In my early twenties I was systematically reading-up as much as possible on chiromancy, divination by means of playing cards, and telepathy. A group of four, all at Leicester University College (as it then was), all young men, and all closely associated for several years at school – and as obsessed bridge players – were involved in the experiment. The fourth person I can’t remember, but the second was a friend I had known for five or so years (and who eventually shot himself) and the third was a typically volatile, fluent and amiable Jew, with whom I had very considerable success in fortune-telling by cards and palmistry.

(1)  a series of cards was dealt, face up, on a table, while the ‘receiver’ was out of the room. The transmitters agreed which card was to be chosen, and brought the subject into the room. He would hold his hand loosely over the cards (eyes shut or open) and allow his hand to be moved towards the cards at the transmitters’ directions which was given by a series of carefully pre-arranged sequential directions piecemeal, very like ‘talking a plane down’ when the pilot is incapacitated or blinded by fog.

(2)  In a room roughly ten feet by ten feet, and full of furniture and other articles (ashtrays, trinkets, pipes, books on shelves and window sill), the transmitters would sit, having decided upon the objective to be reached while the receiver was out of the room. A typical programme would be: ‘Pick up the pipe on the coffee table and place it to the left of the vase on the window sill.’ The receiver was brought in, and disoriented while blindfolded, and then ‘guided’ to the target piecemeal, movement by movement (as described in [1] above), as though directing a machine. E.g. ‘turn left – stop – move forward – stop – lower left hand – move to right – grasp – lift –’ and so on.

The receiver emptied his mind and remained poised but passive. The transmitters concentrated on projecting the ‘orders’ as powerfully as possible. The atmosphere was tense, exciting and strangely still. Exhaustion usually followed.

The chief difference between this and Rhine’s experiments with cards is that Rhine’s assistants were trying to transmit images, pictures, while Professor Welford’s group were trying to transmit orders, impulses. And here it was not a statistical matter – how many times the receiver guessed right – but a matter of immediate and visible results. There is no ‘magic’ involved, only a faculty that we all possess. This explains the mindreading part of the demonstrations of Gurdjieff’s pupils; intense work had got them all ‘in tune’, awakening their ‘receivers’. It also explains the ‘miracle’ of telepathy between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. In an ordinary group of more or less sceptical people, the telepathy would not be successful because of a lack of concentration and conviction; the highly complex Gurdjieff exercises broke down this barrier of indifference.

The question of why his pupils suffered no damage when they all fell off the stage is even more interesting. If I am deeply and powerfully concerned to perform some action perfectly, or to avoid something that I very much want to avoid, I draw a deep breath, so to speak; I prepare to pour energy into the task. In doing most jobs, my boredom level is fairly high. If I am tightening a nut on a machine, I may waste a great deal of energy because I am not willing to get up and readjust my position until I am at the best angle for gripping it with the spanner. In most of my actions, I decide in advance how much energy it is worth putting into it, like a mother telling a child, ‘Don’t spend more than five shillings …’ Gurdjieff’s aim was to force his pupils to pour energy into their dancing, not to economise in any way, to aim at absolute perfection. The vast amount of effort turned the dancing into an instinct, and when instinct is operating powerfully, the chance of accident is immediately diminished. It is almost as if the stores of poised energy create a psychic armour.

The achievement of Gurdjieff was to raise such matters as these from the realm of ‘magic’ and the occult to the realm of scientific common sense. He did this by creating a framework of psychological knowledge big enough to embrace them all. His influence has not yet made itself felt; but when it does, he will be seen as an innovator of the same rank as Newton, Darwin or Freud.

This section on Gurdjieff would not be complete without some mention of Subud, the ‘religion’ that was embraced by Gurdjieff’s chief English follower, J. G. Bennett. For it was Bennett’s assertion that Subud was the logical end-product of the Work, and that its founder, Pak Subuh, was the forthcoming Avatar, the Awakener of Conscience, who is described in All and Everything under the name Ashiata Shiemash. It is true that Gurdjieff’s Ashiata is described as having lived near ancient Babylon; but Bennett convinced himself that it was intended as a hint of the coming Messiah. In his book Concerning Subud he also describes travels in the East, and meetings with sheiks and holy men who all foretold that he, John Bennett, was to become the English John the Baptist of a new Saviour. This is no exaggeration; Bennett apparently believes that Subuh is ‘the second coming’, heralding the end of the present age in earth history.

Subuh, who was born in 1901 in Indonesia, came to England in 1957, and was installed at Bennett’s home, Coombe Springs, where a flourishing movement soon sprang up. The film star Eva Bartok, a former Gurdjieff pupil, came there shortly before Subuh’s arrival, suffering from an internal complaint that necessitated a serious operation; she was pregnant and expected to lose the baby. Subuh’s wife administered the latihan, a form of meditation, to her, without spectacular result. After nineteen days, when Miss Bartok was about to enter the hospital for her operation, Subuh himself took a hand. Bennett describes the bedroom as ‘charged with energy that annihilated all personal feeling’, and says that those present had a telepathic experience of fear and physical pain, slowly displaced by growing faith in the power of God. Afterwards Subuh declared that Miss Bartok would not need an operation; her doctors verified this, and the baby was born normally. The resulting publicity helped to spread Subud throughout the Western world. But Bennett’s hope that all Gurdjieff’s followers would join Subud was frustrated. Many of them felt, understandably, that the essence of Gurdjieff’s system was its logical, scientific nature, and that Subuh, whether a genuine Avatar or not, had nothing whatever to do with it.

The essence of the method called Subud (Bennett denies that it is a religion or a belief) is the latihan. What is the latihan? It is an ‘opening up’ of the mind that permits divine energies to perform their work of transformation. Followers of Subud have to be initiated into the latihan by a ‘helper’, and at first it has to be ‘taken’ in a group. Later, after the practice has been established, the latihan can be taken at home. Each latihan lasts about half an hour, and followers of Subud practise it about three times a week.

The essence of the latihan is inner stillness, the opening of the heart to meaning. It would seem, then, that it is simply another name for the basic mystical experience. For example, Powys’s ability to somehow enter into the essence of trees and rocks was a form of the latihan. It is not an exercise or a form of prayer; the only ‘action’ involved is the initial act of submitting the mind to the force, which should thereafter produce a kind of chemical reaction on the soul.

The latihan is not only the basic mystical experience; it is also the basic poetic experience. Wordsworth begins the Intimations of Immortality ode by describing a state of inner confusion and discouragement; he then opens his mind to nature, deliberately induces positive consciousness, until he can write ‘and I again am strong’. Subuh, a greater spiritual dynamo than Wordsworth, can apparently initiate this state in other people and transmit his own ‘positive consciousness’ directly. Bennett points out that the latihan differs from ordinary meditation or relaxation exercises in that it does not lead to drowsiness; like Gurdjieff’s exercises, it makes the mind more awake. Poetry has this same effect, like adding a pinch of yeast to grape juice; an inner ferment begins, a cleansing process.

The latihan, then, is one of the basic forms of mystical discipline, perhaps the basic form. The importance of the ‘helper’ should be clear; the starting point of the latihan is the transcendance of the usual self-division, and this is difficult for a self-divided person without help, without a feeling of definite purpose induced by someone else. For the same reason, it is more difficult to hypnotise yourself than to allow yourself to be hypnotised.

Nevertheless, it must be stated clearly that latihan is not the logical consummation of Gurdjieff’s exercises. Gurdjieff aimed at a strengthening of man’s ‘true will’. His starting point was that there is something wrong with man, as there might be something wrong with any machine – a car or a watch, for instance. The first necessity is to understand the machine. This is not the way of the monk, the fakir or the yogi, but the fourth way. Gurdjieff calls it ‘the way of the cunning man’, but it might just as accurately be called the way of the engineer, the man who understands the machine. Subuh’s way is essentially the way of the saint or monk, the opening of the soul to God. It is the way of Ramakrishna, of Sri Ramana Maharshi, of Sri Meher Baba, and it has found a more recent exponent in the Maharishi who gained so much influence over the Beatles. It is difficult to see how Bennett, who had known Gurdjieff since 1920 and who regarded him as the most remarkable man he ever met, could arrive at the conclusion that Subud is a direct continuation of the Work. It is an important alternative road, leading in the same direction; but it is not at all the same thing. Gurdjieff was aiming at a kind of ‘yoga for the West’, at utilising the typical Western qualities – scientific analysis, intellectual precision, practical ability, driving energy – for psychological purposes. Subud is essentially a religious method. Gurdjieff himself would have viewed it with the warmest approval; but it would not have taught him anything he did not already know.

Bennett himself apparently came around to this opinion; he left Subud four years after joining.*

* See Ellic Howe’s Urania’s Children: The Strange World of the Astrologers, 1967.

* Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs, London and New York, 1964.

* After I had pointed out that the book was full of invented ‘facts’ and quotations, my publishers wrote to Liepman and asked him to comment on the allegations; he replied that he had written the book so long ago that he had forgotten the details.

* Taken from the anonymous Teachings of Gurdjieff, The Journal of a Pupil (London, 1961), p. 28.

* Witchcraft, Its Power in the World Today, 1942, Part III, Chapter 3.

* Andrew Haydon, a Subud member, gave me the following information: ‘He [Bennett] felt the latihan was not enough and wanted to practise Gurdjieff exercises. On asking Pak Subuh’s advice, he was told that it was his choice, but Subuh felt that it was unnecessary for further work, and asked Bennett to retire as a helper. But the final breach was over a clash of personalities on a committee dealing with practical needs of Subud.’