The Moon eats people

P.D. Ouspensky was a Russian spiritual seeker who searched for esoteric truth during a series of journeys to India, Ceylon and Egypt. Much to his surprise, Ouspensky met an esoteric teacher after his return to Russia. The teacher was, of course, the Greek-Armenian G. I. Gurdjieff. "In search of the miraculous" is Ouspensky's record of his meetings with Gurdjieff and an exposition of Gurdjieff's system. The book briefly mentions Ouspensky's subsequent break or quasi-break with his teacher. There are also sections dealing with Gurdjieff's and Ouspensky's contretemps during the Russian revolution and its aftermath. Gurdjieff eventually settled in France, while Ouspensky apparently ended up in London. The book was published posthumously, two years after Ouspensky's death. It's a much easier read than Gurdjieff's own tome "Beelzebub's tales to his grandson".

Gurdjieff's ideas strike me as similar to Buddhism. They sound like a Buddhism stripped to its bare bones, combined with some kind of pop psychology. A few bizarre ideas have been introduced as well, such as the claim that the Moon eats people (you heard me). Nobody really knows where Gurdjieff picked up his ideas. His autobiography "Meetings with remarkable men" claims that he travelled widely in the Middle East, India and Central Asia. This might very well be true, but it's also possible that Gurdjieff was a product of his native land. After all, there are Orthodox Christians, Sufi Muslims and "Tibetan" Buddhists in the Caucasus and adjacent parts of southern Russia. Ouspensky depicts Gurdjieff as a clever survival artist, almost something of a con man, who earned a living by selling Persian mats, knew quite a lot about machines despite not being an engineer, and had contacts at posh resorts in southern Russia. But above all, Gurdjieff had an all-encompassing, esoteric teaching which he gradually portioned out to his few devoted followers. The con man impression is strengthened by Gurdjieff's description of his system as "the way of the sly man", and his statement that the "sly man" might have access to a teaching which he found by accident or stole somewhere! This suggests that Gurdjieff wasn't part of a legitimate succession of teachers - no big deal in itself, but probably embarrassing for those of his followers who consider such things important.

Gurdjieff's worldview strikes me as very bleak. Most humans are machines. They are bundles of meaningless passions and sensations, have false personalities and are easy prey to deterministic cosmic forces, many of which are astrological in character. The cosmos is "spiritual" in a kind of panpsychist sense, but there doesn't seem to be any overriding meaning or purpose, at least not from a human viewpoint. Quite the contrary. The "purpose" of organic life on Earth is to feed the Moon. The Moon lives on cosmic energies emitted by humans. Essentially, humans are a kind of cosmic cattle! Nor do humans have immortal souls. There is a kind of reincarnation, but it seems to happen only once or twice. After that, humans simply dissolve together with whatever spiritual components they might have. Only a paltry few are able to liberate themselves from the wheel of existence and the tyranny of the Moon, by literally creating immortal souls in themselves. "Waking up" in this manner takes a lot of "work" and voluntary suffering. The "work" seems to consist of various meditation techniques, constant self-observation, breaking with past habits, learning Dervish-inspired dances and experimenting with various parapsychological phenomena. Is this "liberation"? In what sense are these people really "free", I wonder, and "free" to do what?

Many passages in Ouspensky's book suggest that the group around Gurdjieff was really a cult. Unquestioning obedience to the teacher (i.e. to Gurdjieff) is absolutely necessary for the "work" to succeed. People can be expelled for the misdeed of *other* members, presumably to create a harder internal discipline. Gurdjieff also told Ouspensky that he sometimes forced members to resign by placing them in impossible situations! These forced resignations were a kind of tests to see how the expellee would react - if he remained loyal to the guru despite the expulsion, he could be readmitted at a later date. Gurdjieff frequently told the entire group things that a member had told him in strict confidence, etc. These are all classical cult techniques. Ouspensky, who comes across as rather naïve, frequently reports the adverse reactions of outsiders to Gurdjieff's group, reactions he doesn't seem to have understood. It seems the outsiders easily spotted the group members' devotion to Gurdjieff, their mechanical habits, reserved demeanour, strange and uniform language, lack of love, etc. The elitist character of the Gurdjieff circle was compounded by Gurdjieff's habits of having his meetings at impossible hours, places that were difficult to reach, etc. He also demanded large sums of money from some of his supporters. People who couldn't "work" would presumably be eaten by the Moon, but that's just tough... Naturally, only those who have reached a higher elevation can understand the message, making it impossible for an outsider, newcomer or defector to judge Gurdjieff's methods. Gurdjieff is, simply put, always right.

Ouspensky seems to have been a victim of the brain washing himself. He broke with Gurdjieff already before their respective departures from Russia, apparently because he couldn't accept Gurdjieff's erratic antics. And yet, he never *completely* broke with Gurdjieff either, even sending some of his own students to "work" with the rogue guru in France. It seems Ouspensky had a strange, love-hate relationship with his former teacher all the way until his death in 1947 (Gurdjieff himself passed away in 1949). "In search of the miraculous" is yet another example of Ouspensky's strange relation to "G", as he constantly calls the erratic Armenian.

"In search of the miraculous" is a quite uneven book. Some chapters are relatively easy to understand. Others are extremely convoluted, and contain Gurdjieff's mysterious cosmology: "the law of octaves", "the law of three and the law of seven", the "enneagram" and other symbols, and long-winding lectures on some kind of esoteric atoms or "hydrogens". The autobiographical information is found throughout the book at various places, rather than being placed in one single chapter. I suspect that the book is deliberately written in a somewhat unsystematic way. This was probably how Gurdjieff himself revealed his teachings: little by little, rather than all at once, perhaps in order to entice or snare people?

The book ends with Gurdjieff and his supporters being forced to leave Moscow and Petrograd, fearing the Bolsheviks. Ironically, the Communists took power in the region to which Gurdjieff's group had fled, as well. The survival artist Gurdjieff managed to survive anyway, even claiming that his cultic commune was really some kind of socialist initiative (the Bolsheviks had other things on their minds than checking G's claims). Later, Gurdjieff relocated to Menshevik Georgia, once again under cover, and even later moved to Constantinople (the centre of Russian White émigrés), where Ouspensky had already set up shop. As already mentioned, the odyssey of the two men eventually ended in France and Britain, respectively. Gurdjieff seems to have recruited a group of wealthy supporters with an almost astounding speed, perhaps aided by the hapless Ouspensky, who was on a first-name basis with members of the British intelligentsia.

I admit that "In search of the miraculous" is a fascinating read, with the possible exception of the "hydrogens". Ouspensky does manage to communicate how it feels to belong to the chosen few with access to the absolute truth, and the worthlessness of existence outside the exclusive circle. I had to pinch myself a few times when reading this in order not to fall for it...

But, of course, I didn't. I suppose that means I'm going to be eaten by the Man in the Moon. But then, I prefer that perspective to the moonshine of Gurdjieff's cult...