In this podcast I look at some of the psychological teachings of George Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher who was born in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century.

Gurdjieff first found acclaim in Russia in the 1910s, and after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, he gained a following among the wealthy and influential classes in Europe. His unconventional teachings and methods attracted many, but have probably prevented his more progressive psychological ideas from becoming widely known and accepted.

Gurdjieff's ideas were not scientifically based, but probably woven from contemporary psychology mingled with spiritual teachings from various religions. I personally think they make a lot of sense today, and not only that - in an age where our lives are increasingly driven by technology, many of his words seem astonishingly prophetic.

My sources for this video include the books In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky, Meetings With Remarkable Men by George Gurdjieff and Psychological Commentaries by Maurice Nicoll.

A modern man lives in sleep.

In sleep he is born, and in sleep he dies.

These were the words of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff,

recorded in the early years of the 20th century by his student P.D.

Ospensky.

Gurdjieff was a spiritual seeker who travelled widely in Central Asia in the late

1800s and early 1900s.

He became a spiritual teacher, and many of his teachings relate to psychology and human nature.

Uspensky was particularly impressed by Gurdjieff's understanding of psychology when

they first met in 1915.

I have the same opinion.

Reading about Gurdjieff's teachings now,

more than a hundred years on,

I'm struck by how insightful they were,

especially his teachings on psychology.

They often seem to be way ahead of their time.

In fact,

sometimes it seems as if modern psychology is just starting to catch up on the

things that Gurdjieff was saying,

but I'll discuss more of that later.

You're listening to the Inner Kindness Therapy podcast,

where I discuss issues relating to the mind.

My name's Natalie Minnis, and I'm a cognitive behavioral hypnotherapist.

I've experienced therapy myself,

sometimes working with a practitioner and sometimes working on myself.

In this podcast,

I discuss some of my own personal psychological experiences and I also explore how

we can work with the mind,

the body and the emotions to move towards more mental freedom and self-empowerment.

So let's begin.

When he said that most people are asleep,

Gurdjieff was referring to a lack of awareness of what he saw as conscious reality.

This was not about political or a conspiratorial reality.

Gurdjieff distinguished between conscious man and mechanical man,

or as we would see it today,

conscious people and mechanical people.

Rather than evolving, Gurdjieff saw humanity as becoming more mechanical over time.

And that process seems to be continuing.

Life is governed by those who are the least conscious,

by those who are the most asleep,

he said,

quoted by his student,

Uspensky.

He couldn't see any signs of evolution in mankind.

Instead,

he described a growth of the artificial,

the unreal,

and what is foreign,

at the cost of the natural,

the real,

and what is one's own.

Together with this, we see a growth of automatism.

Contemporary culture requires automatons,

and people are undoubtedly losing their acquired habits of independence and turning

into automatons,

into parts of machines.

It is impossible to say where is the end of all this and where the way out,

or whether there is an end and a way out.

One thing alone is certain, that man's slavery grows and increases.

Man is becoming a willing slave.

He no longer needs chains.

He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it.

And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.

It's surprising to think that these words were spoken before 1916,

when Ouspensky recorded them in his book.

More than a hundred years on, our lives are probably more automated than ever.

To the extent that many of the skills that our grandparents took for granted,

like growing food,

making and repairing things,

and even cooking to some extent,

are rarely done.

Gurdjieff's teachings are meaningful enough to merit serious study by scholars even to this day.

And yet some of his philosophies seem quite bizarre.

For example, he said that people are food for the moon.

He believed that the moon and the planets influence human behaviour and direct

human will unless we work hard to free ourselves from those influences.

I think it's important to recognize that Gurjev was not some highly evolved spiritual master.

He was a flesh and blood human being, and he had human flaws.

He was someone who put an enormous amount of energy into collecting and processing

spiritual and psychological material.

But he did so in an unscientific way.

He didn't outline his sources or methodology.

And while his work gives some wonderful insights,

he probably didn't always get it right,

so he shouldn't be seen as some kind of oracle.

For me, it's his psychological teachings that seem to be way ahead of their time.

He seemed to have a deep understanding of the human psyche.

He had a way of seeing things differently.

He was able to stand back and observe human nature from a detached perspective

through an eastern rather than a western lens.

And he was able to do this regarding his own nature too.

For example, he described his own behaviour several times as cunning.

But he didn't always succeed in upholding such a detached perspective.

And in that way, he was just as human as the rest of us.

What really fascinates me about Gurdjieff and what drew me to his teachings was his

philosophy that we are all multiple,

that we are all made up,

or that our personality is all made up of multiple parts,

which he described as eyes.

Eyes as in the letter I, not the eyes on our face.

This really surprised me when I first read about it because it's so similar to the

philosophy behind IFS or internal family systems.

IFS is a psychological approach that's become very popular in recent years.

Although the way that Gurjev regarded parts,

or eyes as he called them,

is quite different than the way that IFS views them.

Gurjev saw parts as troublesome things that had to be got rid of or that you had to

separate yourself from.

in ifs on the other hand the belief is that all parts have have good intentions and

that we can connect with those parts and work with them compassionately even the

ones that are causing problems with the aim of trying to encourage them to take on

more positive and more helpful roles within the system within the psyche

Referring to parts or eyes,

Gurdjieff said,

The physical body is controlled not by one,

but by several minds,

entirely independent of each other.

Each of them is caliph for an hour.

On another occasion he said,

One of man's important mistakes is his illusion in regard to his eye.

Man has no individual I,

but there are,

instead,

hundreds and thousands of separate,

small I's,

very often entirely unknown to one another,

never coming into contact,

or,

on the contrary,

hostile to each other,

mutually exclusive and incompatible.

Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking I...

And each time, his I is different.

Just now it was a thought.

Now it is a desire.

Now a sensation.

Now another thought.

And so on.

Endlessly.

Man is a plurality.

Gurdjieff expanded on the kind of chaos that results as hundreds or even thousands

of parts or I's vie against each other to take charge of the system.

He said, Man has no individuality.

He has no single big I. Man is divided into a multiplicity of small I's.

And each separate small I is able to call itself by the name of the whole.

act in the name of the whole,

to agree or disagree,

to give promises,

to make decisions,

with which another I or the whole will have to deal.

This explains why people so often make decisions and so seldom carry them out.

A man decides to get up early beginning from the following day.

One I or a group of I's decide this.

But getting up is the business of another eye,

who entirely disagrees with the decision and may even know absolutely nothing about

it.

Of course,

the man will again go on sleeping in the morning,

and in the evening he will again decide to get up early.

In some cases this may assume very unpleasant consequences for a man.

Internal Family Systems identifies a self that is not a part,

that does not change,

that's objective and carries wisdom,

and that may connect us with the true selves of others.

By connecting with the energy of this true inner self,

we can help and guide the parts that have become stuck in unhelpful roles from the

past.

so that their energies can be turned in a more positive and helpful direction.

Gurdjieff, at least from what I've read of his work, didn't recognise a specific self.

And yet,

some of the things he said suggest that he may have been moving towards that way of

seeing things.

At one point he presented an allegory from an ancient eastern teaching,

which compared the psyche to a house with many servants,

but with no master or steward.

A steward was a kind of supervisor in those days.

Referring to the inner world, to the psyche, he said...

The servants have all forgotten their duties.

No one wants to do what he ought.

Everyone tries to be the master, if only for a moment.

And, in this kind of disorder, the house is threatened with grave danger.

The only chance of salvation is for a group of the more sensible servants to meet

together and elect a temporary steward,

that is,

a deputy steward.

This deputy steward can then put the other servants in their places and make each

do his own work,

the cook in the kitchen,

the coachman in the stables,

the gardener in the garden,

and so on.

In this way,

the house can be got ready for the arrival of the real steward,

who will,

in his turn,

prepare it for the arrival of the master.

The master in this allegory was often described as real I,

and real I seems to correspond to the internal family system's idea of a self.

The philosophy of I's or parts made up just a small part of Gurjev's teachings on psychology.

The main focus was on self-observation or self-remembering.

And this was the key to what became known as the fourth way, or simply the work.

In some ways,

self-observation seems to relate to Buddhist and Hindu philosophies of

non-attachment,

but it also resonates with contemporary psychological theories.

A key element of acceptance and commitment therapy,

or ACT,

is noticing and observing,

becoming aware of the observing self,

This can be a way of avoiding being pulled or absorbed into a situation or a behaviour.

In ACT, it's often referred to as being hooked by thoughts or behaviours.

Instead of trying to struggle with difficult thoughts or to push them away,

the aim is to unhook from them,

to notice what's happening.

And by acknowledging it,

instead of trying to fight against it,

the difficult thought or behaviour can then gradually loosen its grip on you.

It seems quite amazing that Gurdjieff was teaching these ideas and approaches more

than 100 years ago.

Where ACT talks about being hooked,

Gurdjieff referred to identification,

being identified with a thought or a behaviour or an opinion.

He said...

Look at people in shops,

in theatres,

in restaurants,

or see how they identify with words when they argue about something or try to prove

something,

particularly something they do not know themselves.

They become greediness, desires, or words.

Of themselves, nothing remains.

So long as a man identifies,

or can be identified,

he is the slave of everything that can happen to him.

Freedom is first of all, freedom from identification.

I'm not suggesting that Gurdjieff was an early and forgotten influence on modern psychology.

It's likely that both have similar roots.

ACT and other third wave therapeutic approaches take some influences from Eastern

spiritual traditions like Buddhism.

For example, mindfulness.

And Gurdjieff was also very influenced by Eastern spiritual traditions and he was

fascinated by contemporary psychology.

He studied hypnosis and he was almost certainly aware of the psychological advances

that were being made at that time in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Where I think Gurdjieff's ideas become really interesting and quite different from

modern psychological approaches,

at least the ones that I'm aware of,

is in his uncompromising scrutiny of human behaviour.

When people are identified with the attitudes of other people, he described this as considering.

He said, A man is identified with what others think about him, how they treat him.

what attitude they show towards him.

He always thinks that people do not value him enough, are not sufficiently polite and courteous.

All this torments him,

makes him think and suspect and lose an immense amount of energy on guesswork,

on suppositions,

develops in him a distrustful and hostile attitude towards people.

How somebody looked at him,

what somebody thought of him,

what somebody said of him,

all this acquires for him an immense significance.

Such considering is wholly based upon requirements.

A man inwardly requires that everyone should see what a remarkable man he is,

and that they should constantly give expression to their respect,

esteem and admiration for him,

for his intellect,

his beauty,

his cleverness,

his wit,

his presence of mind,

his originality and all his other qualities.

Requirements in their turn are based on a completely fantastic notion about

themselves,

such as very often occurs with people of very modest appearance.

Various writers,

actors,

musicians,

artists and politicians,

for instance,

are almost without exception sick people.

And what are they suffering from?

First of all,

from an extraordinary opinion of themselves,

then from requirements,

and then from considering.

That is,

being ready and prepared beforehand to take offence at a lack of understanding and

lack of appreciation.

Harsh words, but they do have a ring of truth, and that applies to all of us, myself included.

People-pleasing also came under scrutiny from Gurdjieff,

although he didn't use those exact terms.

He said,

There is still another form of considering,

which can take a great deal of energy from a man.

This form starts with a man beginning to think that he is not considering another

person enough,

that the other person is offended with him for not considering him sufficiently.

And he begins to think himself that perhaps he does not think enough about this

other,

does not pay him enough attention,

does not give way to him enough.

All this is simply weakness.

People are afraid of one another.

This is not just senseless criticism.

Recognising these tendencies can be the first step in gaining mental freedom.

It's only once you start noticing and acknowledging these automated behaviour

patterns that are carried from early childhood that they can begin to lose their

importance,

to loosen their grip on you.

If you can start to recognize these tendencies,

even to laugh at them,

that's when you can start to work against them.

And once you start doing this,

you start to realize that it can actually be quite freeing,

quite liberating to recognize that in my own case,

for example,

I've noticed some judgmental tendencies.

Maybe I picked them up in early childhood, but that's not really important.

The important thing is to recognize that at some point this habit has become second nature.

And if I want to stop automatically judging people in my mind,

the first step is to recognize that tendency in myself,

to notice it as soon as it starts happening.

And as for vanity, well, let's not go there.

you can then start to drop your defences.

No one's going to become a saint overnight, and that's not the aim.

First of all, you start to notice these cognitive distortions.

They keep happening, and you notice that you're still making mistakes.

But that's part of the human condition.

So you just keep at it.

You keep working on yourself, as Gurdjieff put it.

You don't have to beat yourself up or to criticise yourself for it.

Because it's natural.

We're all made this way.

Gurjev didn't live by all of his teachings and he sometimes fell into the very

behaviour that he accused the masses of.

In his autobiographical book,

Meetings with Remarkable Men,

he discussed the efforts he put into remembering himself and not being distracted

from his aim of writing books.

But he wasn't always successful.

The more I read about Gurdjieff's teachings, the more insightful they appear.

And even his more implausible ideas about the moon and cosmology start to make a

kind of sense,

in ways,

of course,

that can't be proved.

But I can see why he upheld those ideas,

when all around him,

people seemed to be losing their heads and chaos was going on.

The First World War,

the Bolshevik Revolution,

governments and monarchies being overthrown,

borders changing.

Gurdjieff lived in particularly turbulent times,

and he blamed the chaos of those times on mass psychosis,

which he believed was caused by lunar influences.

His father died after being wounded in a Turkish attack in 1917.

Writing about the event,

Gurdjieff described it as having happened during the last great periodic human

psychosis.

With Western civilisation apparently teetering on a precipice,

it's not surprising that many people were turning towards Eastern philosophies and

ways of living.

Ugev was born literally on the borders between the East and the West,

borders that were fluid and changing at that time.

He was born in the 1860s or 70s.

No one knows the exact date of his birth.

He was born in what was then known as Alexandropol, part of the Russian Empire.

But today it's Gyumri in Armenia.

His father was a carpenter, a once wealthy man who had lost his fortune.

gurdjieff always had a lively and inquiring mind but when his favourite sister died

at a young age his thoughts turned to spirituality and he embarked on a quest to

find out more about the world beyond the material plane

According to the book Meetings with Remarkable Men,

in his youth,

Gurdjieff was very interested in the practices of Hatha Yoga,

as taught by some of the famous Indian yogis of his day,

possibly Yogananda and Vivekananda,

who were well known throughout the Northern Hemisphere in the late 19th century.

Later on,

he became interested in Islam and used what he described as much cunning to visit

the holy centres of Mecca and Medina.

But he was disappointed in what he found and instead decided to seek what he

described as the secret knowledge of Islam in Bukhara.

It seems clear that Sufism and Eastern Orthodox or esoteric Christianity were also

strong influences.

It also seems likely to me that Gurdjieff was probably a spy,

and others have suggested this too.

He spoke several languages,

and although he writes in detail about the many inventive things he did to earn

money,

his travel expenses may have been at least partly funded by secret service

missions.

And it may have been for that reason that he was refused permission to settle in

the UK after the First World War.

He certainly showed himself capable of being able to write a good yarn.

In his book,

Meetings with Remarkable Men,

he describes how,

along with fellow members of the group that he called the Seekers of Truth,

they embarked on an expedition to cross the Gobi Desert,

looking for a lost city.

and using twenty-five foot high stilts as a means of avoiding desert sandstorms the

writer garry lackman suggests that this may have been an allegory symbolic of

rising above the difficulties of life

But a lot of the book does seem to ring true, and it's certainly fascinating.

One of Gurdjieff's early escapades as a boy was diving for coins thrown by tourists

in Istanbul,

and he described how,

after diving very deep to retrieve a treasure lost by a wealthy visitor,

he became very sick.

He said that his skin began to crack and burn unbearably.

And yet he didn't connect this with decompression sickness or the bends.

He just said that it was due to the effects of salt water.

And this to me suggests that he was telling the truth, at least in this instance.

And that was the case in other sections of the book as well.

So it seems to be a mix of truth, exaggeration, symbolism and maybe outright fabrication.

I think that Gurdjieff was on a spiritual search,

even if he was also in the pay of the tsarist secret service,

as the author Gary Lachman suggests.

gurdjieff seems to have woven his own spiritual philosophy out of many different

influences some religious some cultural beliefs and some contemporary psychology

frequently when i read some of the things he said i think that's complete nonsense

or that's outrageous but then as i read more it starts to make a kind of sense

I think this was Gurdjieff's genius,

presenting ideas that seemed to be outlandish and then somehow gradually starting

to shift your perspective towards those ideas.

Sometimes you continue to reject the ideas, but at other times they become paradigm shifting.

In a way,

it's not really surprising that so many people literally gave up their careers and

lifestyles to follow Gurdjieff.

Whole families would join his institutes and centres.

And many people still do devote a lot of time to practising his ideas,

to practising the fourth way.

I'm not one of those people.

I'm so glad that I came across Gurdjieff's work and I will continue to learn from it.

But I think it's important to be able to admire someone's work and to learn from it

without putting them on a pedestal.

If you put someone on a pedestal,

then as soon as you find out that they have flaws,

the whole thing can come crashing down.

Either that, or you can blindly refuse to acknowledge their flaws.

And you can end up tying yourself in knots, trying to excuse their worst feelings.

P.D.

Ouspensky,

who was already a spiritual seeker,

a traveller and a writer before he met Gurdjieff in 1915,

and he was probably most responsible for bringing his work to the attention of

people in Western Europe,

continued to follow him for several years.

But in the end, he broke with his former teacher.

After this break from Gurdjieff,

Uspensky continued to teach his work to others,

giving regular lectures about the work in London.

In other words,

he was aware of Gurdjieff's very human failings,

but the value of the work spoke for itself.

I also think it's very important to separate Gurdjieff's teachings from the man

himself,

although the man himself was certainly a very remarkable human being.

If you'd like to hear more from the Inner Kindness Therapy podcast,

please press the subscribe button and please feel free to tell your friends.

Thanks for listening.