Views from the Real World.pdf

Paris, 1922

Views from the

Real World

Early Talks

in Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London,

Paris, New York and Chicago

As Recollected by His Pupils

Introduction

This Dutton Paperback edition first published in 1975 by

E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

First Edition

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing

from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief

passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a

magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company

Limited, Toronto and Vancouver

ISBN: 0-525-47408-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-10482

Gurdjieff is becoming well known as a pioneer of the new current

of thought about man's situation, such as has been provided through-

out the ages at times of transition in human history.

A quarter century after his death, his name has emerged from a

background of rumor and he is recognized today as a great spiritual

force, who saw clearly the direction modern civilization is taking and

who set to work behind the scenes to prepare people in the West to

discover for themselves and eventually to diffuse among mankind the

certainty that Being is the only indestructible reality.

The outline of his life is familiar to readers of his Second and Third

Series, Meetings with Remarkable Men (published in 1963) and Life

Is Real Only Then, When "I Am" (privately printed in 1975).

Born on the frontier of Russia and Turkey in 1877 "in strange,

almost biblical circumstances," his education as a boy left him with

many unanswered questions and he set out when quite young in

search of men who had achieved a complete knowledge of human life.

His early travels to unidentified places in Central Asia and the Middle

East lasted twenty years.

On his return, he began to gather pupils in Moscow before the first

World War and continued his work with a small party of followers

while moving, during the year of the Russian revolution, to Essentuki

in the Caucasus, and then through Tiflis, Constantinople, Berlin and

London to the Chateau du Prieure near Paris, where he reopened his

Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in 1922 on a

larger scale.

[v]

After his first visit to America in 1924, a motor accident interrupted

further plans for the Institute. From 1924 to 1935, he turned all his

energies to writing.

The rest of his life was spent in intensive work, chiefly with French

pupils in Paris where, after completing arrangements for posthumous

publication in New York and London of his First Series, Beelzebub's

Tales to His Grandson, he died in 1949.

What does his teaching consist of? And is it intelligible to

everybody?

He showed that the evolution of man—a theme prominent in the

scientific thinking of his youth—cannot be approached through mass

influences but is the result of individual inner growth; that such an

inner opening was the aim of all religions, of all the Ways, but re-

quires a direct and precise knowledge of changes in the quality of

each man's inner consciousness: a knowledge which had been pre-

served in places he had visited, but can only be acquired with an ex-

perienced guide through prolonged self-study and "work on oneself."

Through the order of his ideas, and the exercises which he changed

repeatedly, the minds of all who came to him were opened to the most

complete dissatisfaction with themselves and at the same time to the

vast scale of their inner possibilities, in a way that none of them ever

forgot.

The statement of his teaching which Gurdjieff presented in

Beelzebub's Tales has to be searched for within a panorama of the

whole history of human culture, from the creation of life on the planet

through the rise and fall of civilizations up to modern times.

Fortunately, some record exists of his actual words and his direct

instructions given in conversations, talks and lectures at the Prieure,

and as he traveled from one city to the next with his pupils, often in

difficult conditions. These are the talks contained in this book.

They consist of notes put together from memory by some of those

who heard the talks and recorded them faithfully afterwards. Trea-

sured and carefully protected from misuse, even the fact of the exis-

tence of these notes became known only gradually.

Incomplete as they are, even fragmentary in some cases, the collec-

tion is an authentic rendering of Gurdjieff's approach to work on

oneself, as expressed to his pupils at the required moment. More-

over, even in these notes from memory, it is striking that regardless of

the variety of his audiences—on some occasions, people long familiar

with his idea, on others people invited to meet him for the first time-

there is always the same human tone of voice, the same man evoking

an intimate response in each of his listeners.

In her foreword to the first edition of this book, Jeanne de Salz-

mann, who spent thirty years with Gurdjieff from 1919 in Tiflis until

his death, and participated in all the stages of his work, even carrying

the responsibility for his groups in the last ten years of his life, states

that:

"Today, when Gurdjieff's teaching is being studied and put into

practice by sizeable research groups in America, Europe and even

Asia, it seems desireable to shed some light on a fundamental charac-

teristic of his teaching, namely, that while the truth sought for was

always the same, the forms through which he helped his pupils ap-

proach it served only for a limited time. As soon as a new understand-

ing had been reached, the form would change.

"Readings, talks, discussions and studies, which had been the main

feature of work for a period of time and had stimulated the intelli-

gence to the point of opening it to an entirely new way of seeing,

were for some reason or other suddenly brought to an end.

"This put the pupil on the spot. What his intellect had become

capable of conceiving had now to be experienced with his feeling.

"Unexpected conditions were brought about in order to upset

habits. The only possibility of facing the new situation was through a

deep self-examination, with that total sincerity which alone can

change the quality of human feeling.

"Then the body, in its turn, was required to collect all the energy of

its attention, to attune itself to an order which it was there to serve.

"After this, the experience could follow its course on another level.

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