The Gurdjieff Work
"The commandment inculcated in me in my childhood, enjoining that “the highest aim and sense of human life is the striving to attain the welfare of one’s neighbour,” and that this is possible exclusively only by the conscious renunciation of one’s own."
- G.I. Gurdjieff, All and Everything
G.I. Gurdjieff
"Gurdjieff was considered by those who knew him simply as an incomparable “awakener” of men. He brought to the West a comprehensive model of esoteric knowledge and left behind him a school embodying a specific methodology for the development of consciousness.
By the term consciousness Gurdjieff understood something far more than mental awareness and functioning. According to him, the capacity for consciousness requires a harmonious blending of the distinctive energies of mind, feeling, and body, and it is this alone that can allow the action within man of those higher influences associated with such traditional notions as nous, buddhi, or atman. From this perspective, man as we find him is actually an unfinished being unconsciously led by his automatic conditioning under the sway of external stimuli. The wide variety of Gurdjieff’s methods may all be understood as instrumental toward realizing self-consciousness and the spiritual attributes of “real man”—that is, will, individuality, and objective knowledge."
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-Michel de Salzmann
Jeanne de Salzmann
“She is like a fan, which gradually opens until more and more is revealed.” After Jane’s death, Natasha and I went frequently to Paris, where Gurdjieff’s work was being maintained with increasing intensity by Madame de Salzmann, who had been close to Gurdjieff since she had met him in the Caucasus during the First World War. Through her own unremitting struggle, she had gained the capacity to transmit to others a unique quality of experience, and I now made a vow to myself always to be available whenever the opportunity arose to be near her.
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I would like to be able to draw a portrait with words of this remarkable person, but I know how inadequate this will be. In my work with actors, I have learned that impersonation only succeeds if it can capture the rigid areas in which a personality is imprisoned. Someone whose life flows freely has none of the rigidities on which imitations or even descriptions can comfortably hang.
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Madame de Salzmann had achieved this freedom through a life devoted to the service of that unknown source of finer energy that can only become manifest when the human organism is completely open—open in body, feeling, and thought. When this condition is reached, the individuality does not vanish; it is illuminated in every aspect and can play its true role, which is to bend and adapt to every changing need.
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Wherever she went, she seemed always in the same place, her stability unaffected by outer change.
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- Peter Brook
