Live Teaching

….He had already explained these things to his Moscow pupils in 1916, and here we have Ouspensky’s very precise account.

‘You must understand’, he said, ‘that every real religion, that is, one that has been created by learned people for a definite aim, consists of two parts. One part teaches what is to be done. This part becomes common knowledge and in the course of time is distorted and departs from the original. The other part teaches how to do what the first part teaches. This part is preserved in secret in special schools and with its help it is always possible to rectify what has been distorted in the first part or to restore it to what has been forgotten.
     Without this second part there can be no knowledge or religion or in any case such knowledge would be incomplete and very subjective.
     This secret part exists in Christianity as well as in other religions and it teaches how to carry out the percepts of Christ and what they really mean.’

What is the fundamental sound which emerges from words like these?

Blessed is he who has a soul. Blessed is he who has none, but woe to him who has it in embryo.

Today exists to repair yesterday and to prepare for tomorrow.

Those who have not sown anything during their responsible life will have nothing to reap in the future.

All life is a representation of God. He who sees the representation will see what is represented . . . He who does not love life does not love God.

     How often he voiced the idea that there are only two ways of freeing the man (not yet born) from the animal (who carried the man in embryo); conscious labour and suffering voluntarily undertaken.
     This was the Alpha and the Omega of his teaching, his final message, the bottle which he cast upon the waters, before disappearing into the ocean.
     One would have to be deaf and blind not to recognize that this thought and the Christian tradition are identical in essence.
— René Zuber, Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff?, pp. 37-39.


     This game could be formulated thus: try (to win). Just as you are, here, immediately, take stock of yourself, discover who you are.
     The newborn child, in the first few moments when he lies, all unseeing, in his mother’s arms, does not question anything yet. As soon as he opens his eyes he will begin to do so. Since everything ends in suffering, decay, and finally death, to shut him up in a sheep-pen, behind the thick walls of reassuring ideologies, would only serve to deceive him. Let him rather hear the tigers that are always prowling outside those walls. They at least are real.
     If the innocent escapes the ‘massacre of the innocents’ or, in other words, the bludgeoning of virtue by vice, if he keeps his heart pure in spite of the wickedness, deceit and violence which hold sway in this world, he will be given as a counterweapon the magic word, the cunning, thanks to which he will triumph. The Bible, the Thousand and One Nights, fables, legends, fairy tales and myths (from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska) abound with stories of this kind. The forces of evil are destroyed or reduced to slavery by the patience and slyness of the weakest.
     This is why Gurdjieff once called his teaching the way of the sly man.
     I believe he cared too much for human beings to dupe them with the promise of ‘entering heaven with their boots on’. His slyness was directed against all forms of what he calls ‘auto-satisfaction’, in particular against that of the man who, having found a guru, falls in behind him, ceases all effort and abandons the use of any critical faculty.
     He came to waken man, if it is not too late, by reminding him of his dignity — not to anaesthetize him.
     Some people saw him as Merlin the Magician, others as the Devil, and these are only two of the many aspects of himself that he was able to present.
     In order to meet his eye one would have needed both the candid, defenceless gaze of the newborn babe and the keen eye of the hunter alone in the bush, who is attentive to the slightest sign.
— René Zuber, in Ibid., pp. 63-64.