HISTORY
JG Bennett writes: "THE WORK is concerned with bringing people together and not with seperating them. I am sure that this is a very visible characteristic of this twentieth century of ours. In one way, this obligation to unite stirs up most serious reactions; and therefore we have seen troublesome wars and hostilities and hatreds.

"But if you look behind all this, you can see they all come about because there is an urge to unite and not to isolate. One very obvious feature of this is the increase in tolerance that has come over the world; and the mutual acceptance by people of each other - which is perhaps the most hopeful and admirable feature of our century, with all its depressing features.

"Now, what does this add up to in practice for us, and what was Gurdjieff really after? There is a very interesting hint that he gives - I think it is not in any of the published writings - in certain lectures that he gave in New York in the early 1930's; and he refers to it very specifically in this book I mentioned: The Herald of Coming Good. That is, his hope that it would be possible to found on the Earth "Clubs of a New Kind." He took this extremely seriously, although he was never able to realize it during his life. He saw that it was necessary for people to be able to meet and to exchange experiences. But the way they do so under present circumstances is foolish, because they usually exchange experiences and converse only about things that are trivial and external, or else they do so under highly formal and ritualistic conditions. Gurdjieff wanted to see it made possible for people to meet and share in experience so that many types of people would come in contact with one another; and understanding of the problem of human life and the way people should live should spread. Right up to the end of his life, he used to speak about the gravity of the problem.

"In other words, what he wanted to do was by no means esoteric, or hidden; on the contrary, he was very much concerned that as many people as possible should realize that there is this problem of human life and that this realization should be shared and faced. He saw it was inevitable that there would be many different ways of interpreting and understanding this, and hoped that some means could be found by which there should be some kind of common ground on the basis of which people could meet. I think he had hoped that he would be able to make a definite start towards this during his lifetime. But he was singularly unfortunate: his initial attempt in France, at Fontainebleu, failed; and just when he had really prepared things again -- in the late 1930's -- the Second World War broke out. After that war, he was too ill and too near the end of his life to be able to do much; though he did make one very serious effort to set up a place outside Paris.

"I think Gurdjieff hoped that what he had discovered and understood about these questions would be freely spread among people, without any sort of secrecy, so that people could come to realize that it is possible for anyone who is prepared to do so, to participate in the task of living his or her life in such a way that it is productive in the Creative World. For some people this can be carried very much further; and they can attain what Gurdjieff called 'accelerated results.' He certainly believed that it is possible for other people, without having the same intensity of living for themselves, to participate in this general process. It is the obligation of those who have more strength in this field to share with others, so that there can be a general dissemination of an understanding of this way of life and the ability to live it. This is intimately connected with the transformation of substances. It means, in simple language, that those who are spiritually strong can help those who are spiritually weak, not by their outward actions alone but by lending them a supply of the 'substance of work.'"

—JG Bennett. Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma,
lecture III, "Gurdjieff's Teaching and Methods," 1963.

 

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[please come back]Last Updated March 5, 2010