In Search of the Miraculous

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None of those hopes came to fruition. This book is a ponderous, wearying exposition of an extremely vague and varied approach to ...literally everything. When you take "everything" as your objective, and then flavor your route to that objective with a complex system of changes in focus, apparent dead-ends in thinking, and a multitude of different approaches in descriptive terminology, you wind up disappointing people who have just come from reading one of the most "miraculous" accounts ever written in Tertium Organum. The latter exhibited a wonderfully inspiring revelation of interpretations, which were simple, clear, and directly perceivable--not to mention being also clearly interconnected. What an incredible let-down it is to go from that kind of an atmosphere to In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. The "fragments" part I can attest to. The miraculous part escaped me. I'd been interesting in learning more about Gurdjieff for a while, with the vague understanding that he was a Greek / Armenian turn-of-the-century mystic with some schools and some teachings. This is perhaps the best introduction to him & his school of thought, written by an acquaintance and later follower and popularizer, P.D. Ouspensky.

Another hurdle to wakefulness is that while we believe we possess a single “I,” a stable, reliable ego, the truth is that “we are legion,” as the man possessed by devils tells Jesus in Mark 5:9. We are not one but many. Our “I’s” shift with every mood. We decide to get up early tomorrow; when the alarm bell rings we turn it off and stay in bed. We decide to start a diet; when dinner time arrives we conveniently forget this. Our “I’s” shift because we are subject to a kind of hypnosis Gurdjieff called “identifying.” We lose our identity, our “I-ness” by giving it over to practically everything around us. Some of these disparate “I’s” can congeal into what is known as “false personality,” a picture of ourselves that allows us to ignore the contradictions that run rife through our lives but which are obvious to others. Originally published at the time of Gurdjieff's death and authorized by Gurdjieff himself, it is considered one of the best expositions of the structure of Gurdjieff's ideas and is often used as a means of teaching Gurdjieff's system, although Ouspensky himself never endorsed its use in such a broad manner. Nevertheless, this book is by far the most quoted by current disciples of Gurdjieff as they attempt to teach his system to new students, and Gurdjieff himself even had some of his students read parts of the book as part of their studies. What was Gurdjieff’s teaching? When Ouspensky remarked on how life in big cities like London, where he had just been, was becoming more mechanical and increasingly turning people into machines, Gurdjieff corrected him. They already are machines, he said, and would be whether they lived in the city or not. “This must be understood,” Gurdjieff impressed on Ouspensky. “All the people you see, all the people you know, all the people you may get to know, are machines, actual machines working solely under the power of external influences.” Ouspensky was already concerned about the increasing mechanisation of modern life, but he believed that some things, the most important ones – thought, art, poetry – could stand against it. Gurdjieff told him he was wrong. These, too, can be and regularly are performed mechanically. He put up a fight, but it was not long before Ouspensky, himself a novelist and short story writer – witness Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and Talks With the Devil, respectively – agreed. The sight of someone crying in close-up or taking a plunge into a canal touches you because a cinematic rhetoric is played out in its most simple and effective form. He believed in pilgrimage. He believed that going to sea was the only transcendental thing one had left.While some artworks in In Search of the Miraculouscontain narratives that are immediately apparent, others liebeneath the surface.Richard Long’s A Line of 33 Stones, A Walk of 33 Days(1998) describes a deliberate and poetic quest for marking time, space, and a line from the “southernmost point to the northernmost point in mainland Britain.” In a selection of prints from 24 Landscapes(2000/2008),Paul Pfeiffer digitally removes Marilyn Monroe from a series of glossy photoshoots, including thefinal portrait series shot by George Barris on Santa Monica beach in 1962; without Monroe, some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century are transformed into cliché views of the sea.Harry Gould Harvey IV’s mystical, devotional, and diagrammatic drawings meld the history, architecture, and ecology of the south coast region of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, each presented in ornate, handmade frames cobbled from materials sourced from local textile factories, churches, and demolished Gilded Age mansions.

What impressed Ouspensky most was what Gurdjieff had to say about a strange third state of consciousness he called “self-remembering.” There are four states or levels of consciousness. First there is sleep, which we pass through each night. Then there is what we normally call “waking consciousness,” but which is really another layer of sleep. This is our usual mechanical state of consciousness, which we falsely believe to be true consciousness. True consciousness, “self-consciousness,” only comes in the third level, what Gurdjieff called “self-remembering.” Normally our attention is directed outwards, toward the external world. Because we usually “identify” with things outside us, we “forget” about our own inner world. We forget that it is “I” – “you” – who is conscious and is actually in this moment engaged in the act of perceiving the world. Gurdjieff knew, as did Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, the philosophical method that gave birth to existentialism, that perception is intentional. He also knew that the less intentional and more passive we remain, the deeper our forgetfulness becomes. There now proceeds a discussion of the structure of the human organism seen in the light of the universal laws of the transformation of energy. The food man eats, the air he breathes, and the impressions he experiences are intimately interconnected as forms by which energies are accepted into the organism and assimilated or rejected. This is the idea of the “three foods” of man, and much of the Gurdjieff teaching is understandable only on the basis of this idea—for example, the reason he places complete emphasis on consciousness as seeing, rather than on efforts of man to make changes in himself. The deepest and most important change of human nature comes about, according to Gurdjieff, through the assimilation of the energy of impressions, and this takes place through the work of awareness without dire efforts to make changes. This work of awareness, called here self-remembering, is the principal instrument by means of which man may accumulate the force necessary for the eventual manifestation in himself of the properties of will, creative intelligence, conscience, and the power to love.

In Search of the Miraculous – The Setting

When I went to see the exhibition of Remedios Varo I saw a book that interested me among his collection, one of Peter D. Ouspensky with the title "In search of the miraculous: fragments of an unknown teaching". Ouspensky recounts his trials learning this new system, which he later refers to as the Fourth Way, often recollecting entire lectures, or parts of lectures, which Gurdjieff gave to his disciples in St. Petersburg and Moscow from 1915–1917. He describes many of his experiences, particularly concerning the "art of self-remembering", and he recounts some of the methods and various exercises which comprised Gurdjieff's system. Nevsky Prospect, St Petersburg, circa 1900. After first meeting Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1915, P.D. Ouspensky returned to St Petersburg and joined Gurdjieff’s core six-member St Petersburg group. Gurdjieff said about groups, “When a group is being organized its members have certain conditions put before them… First of all it is explained to all the members of a group that they must keep secret everything they hear or learn in the group and not only while they are members of it but forever afterwards. This is an indispensable condition whose idea should be clear to them from the very beginning.” (Pg. 223) If you know how to look you may find a third of this in all our culture’s most sacred texts but all of those came out from what we have still in our day not yet buried over (the primordial spring of perennial wisdom teachings from great school behind and within not yet awakened present man form: this work).

In the latter half of the book numerous ideas are introduced which both amplify those already given and at the same time provide a completely new angle of vision on the whole system and which also seem an integral part of the whole. There is something about the intensity and underlying urgency with which this book is written that gives each portion the rather rare characteristic of seeming new on each reading, just as the whole system keeps being redefined over the course of Ouspensky’s years with Gurdjieff.Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the author of many influential books, including The New Religions (1970), The Heart of Philosophy (1982), Money and the Meaning of Life (1991, Rev. 1994). His most recent work is Time and the Soul (1998). Past a certain stage, evolution is not and cannot be automatic, mechanical; it requires special work and conscious discipline. It can only proceed through individual human beings working together. In short, the evolution of man is neither the mechanical, biological process of modern science, nor the social or planetary phenomenon of the contemporary “Aquarians.” The fascinating details of the structure of Gurdjieff groups that appear in this portion of Ouspensky’s book are more understandable when it is seen that human evolution requires extraordinary conditions of individual and collective effort, conditions which go against the grain of every known psychological, religious, or social organization. In advocating a more open attitude to human sexuality he caused controversy in India during the late 1960s and became known as "the sex guru".

Mary Sue Ader [Andersen]: No. I’m absolutely convinced that was nowhere in his consciousness. We talked about it, and he assured me repeatedly these were not his intentions. Great care is taken throughout the book to characterize the master-pupil relationship between Gurdjieff and his circle. The resulting picture of Gurdjieff is of a man obviously possessing immense wisdom and personal power, capable at once of painfully stripping away the pupil’s “mask” while carefully guiding him through the emotional and bodily experiences necessary for the process of deep learning. The information and speculations which Ouspensky offers about the sources of Gurdjieff’s knowledge and about his motivations for acting as he did in various situations, rather than satisfying the reader’s curiosity about Gurdjieff, communicate instead the impression of an indecipherable man, doubtless one of the most enigmatic men of the twentieth century. Rajneesh emphasized the importance of meditation, mindfulness, love, celebration, courage, creativity and humor—qualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition and socialization.Stephen Friedman Gallery is proud to present internationally renowned American artist Kehinde Wiley's second exhibition at the gallery entitled, ‘In Search of the Miraculous'. This exhibition marks a crucial moment in Wiley's career, as he sets out to push both his artistic process and social critique in to new territory. Apparently, it was much closer than he thought. In fact, it appeared one afternoon in small café in a busy Moscow side street in the form of a “certain G., a Caucasian Greek,” whom Ouspensky remembered was the author of a strange ballet, “The Struggle of the Magicians,” a notice for which he had recently seen in a newspaper. He had agreed to this meeting only after one of G’s students, who had attended his lectures, had persisted in inviting him. Ouspensky had finally said yes to his requests just to stop his pestering. Ouspensky had had his fill of gurus and had returned from the East not a little disillusioned. His interest in Theosophy and other occult ideas was more than a little bruised, and he was sure all that would come from this encounter was more confirmation of his scepticism. But what he learned from this “certain G.” changed all that.