There is a profound truth in that original taxonomy, however. For World 48 is indeed the highest of the boundaried realms: the realms in which forms, things, objects appear to have an actual and tangential reality. And in fact, that “actual and tangential” contributes the lion’s share of the additional laws that divide World 48 from World 24, the lowest of the unboundaried (i.e. purely energetic) realms that lie “above us” on the ray. Down here in the lower forty-eight things are reified, Latin for “thing-ified.” Human consciousness is nucleated and self-reflexive, constantly rotating between an inner, subjective pole (“I”) and an outer, “objective” pole—i.e., “they, you, me, it; everything else out there.” Relationship is experienced chiefly as an exchange between two stable objects or persons: a verb flowing between two nouns.

These perceptual constraints define the terms of love in World 48. We look at it through the lens of a nucleated, boundaried reality, and are most at home with it in the form of personal narrative. In World 48 Love is primarily a feeling, a subjective personal experience woven on the loom of self-reflexive consciousness. From there it is subsequently piecemealed into a number of different species and types (eros, agape, philia, etc.), all of which can be defined, categorized, inventoried, and ranked.

It is this “downgrade” and commodification of an original unified force that accounts for so much of the level confusion that reigns supreme in World 48. In a comment on my most recent post, one of my Substack readers raised exactly this point about Unconditional Love, which he candidly admitted “felt like a lot of pressure.” Of course it does, and for good reasons! Unconditional love does not belong to the boundaried worlds; it is beyond the capacity of this world on its own recognizance even to touch it, let alone manifest it. When you think about all those subtle capacities of love that we “civilized” humans think we already possess—say, caritas (badly translated as “charity,” actually meaning something more like Bodhicitta or universal compassion); objective conscience (or for that matter, any conscience at all)—and most of all agape, Christlike love—one can only marvel at the sheer grandiosity of the self-delusion. And for the Church to hold out the carrot stick that we acquire these Christlike qualities simply by becoming a churchgoer is perhaps the most dangerous delusion of all.

One of the most seductive traps woven into this world 48 mindframe is its penchant for dialectics—or in other words, bifurcating an original polarity into apparently opposing “either/or” qualities, which can then be compared and judged. Day vs. night, good vs. evil, faith vs. works: we compulsively separate an original whole into warring opposites. In World 48 Eros and Agape, that original shiva-like polarity of love which is taken for granted in the higher realms, now finds itself separated into two different kinds of love, which are routinely pitted off against each other—as in that celebrated proclamation by Anders Nygren, an early 20^th century Protestant theologian, “Eros is man’s way to God; Agape is God’s way to man.” Eros is duly chastised as possessive, clinging, grasping (and yes, a tad too close to sexuality for this sober Scandinavian clergyman’s comfort zone). Agape is love stripped of all these “impure” motivations and repackaged minus its vestigial sexual associations.

From our earlier tour of Love along the higher realms of the Ray of Creation, we know how impossible that is. Love began in the womb of eros—impassioned cosmogonic desiring—and in this womb still lies its fecundity, intense spiritual generativity, and original creative force. To disconnect Love from these cosmogonic wellsprings is to denature it altogether—

—which is exactly, in my opinion, what Christianity (Protestant and Catholic versions equally culpable here) continuously attempts to do, no doubt in its terror of unleashing the sexual jack-in-the-box. And so instead of authentic transubstantial agape, what gets served up for our consideration, Sunday after Sunday, cheery teaching after cheery teaching, bland assurances after bland assurance, is a weak and watered down agape clone: an Agape Lite that has been theologically altered to render it sterile and boring, all the while fueling our human illusion that we are fully capable of “harnessing” it for our collective human betterment. We just have to take all the eros out of it, eliminate that attraction/aversion underbelly, only talk about the weather, and God is good, right?

Remember that old joke, “What do Coors Lite and making love in a canoe have in common?”

I will have a bit more to say about this eros and agape polarity in a later post— and I have already dropped the crucial hint: that this combo is in fact not even a polarity, but rather, what Gurdjieff would call a NEW ARISING. It is an alchemical transubstantiation, created when eros, primordial attraction and desiring is submitted to kenosis, or total self-surrender in the spirit of fiat, “Let it be.” Eros and Agape again become one only when they rejoin at this place of total reconciliation—and the miracle is that we humans, despite and even because of our World 48 clay feet, are somehow capable and even entrusted with it as our supreme cosmogonic task. Though that task is not accomplished in World 48, it is here in World 48 that we must begin. That will presumably be the subject of my next post.

“So much of this path seems to be based in Love—the word is used freely and frequently. I am pondering (maybe obsessing) about what it means. Would you share a description of your own association with this term Love? Seems like knowing Love is essential to The Work. Thank you, Judy.”

At first, Judy, I thought the only honorable response would be to refer you directly to Rilke:

“Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to live the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. But the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.”

But on further consideration, I realized that this would simply be a high-toned way of wimping out. Over the course of nearly eight decades of trying to live this “love” question, I have indeed come to learn a few things about the nature of the beast, and my angle of approach—from the perspective of Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation—is not one you’ll find cited in most of those more conventional definitions. So in the hopes that some of this may be helpful to your own work, I am willing to give it a shot—with apologies in advance to some of my other Substack readers who won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. If any of this intrigues you, you can explore further in my recent book, Eye of the Heart.

Like so many of those other great cosmogonic mysteries—in the Christian tradition, for example, the Paschal Mystery, the Atonement, the personhood of Christ—our understanding of love is obscured by a massive level confusion. Meanings deriving from and fully operative only under the laws of higher worlds are carelessly conflated with those emerging from far lower down the Ray of Creation—i.e., at a lower level of consciousness than they make sense at or can be empirically validated. Different worlds necessarily produce different experiences of love, and the failure to recognize this results in a cacophony of definitions ranging from the heights of Bodhisattva compassion to the depths of erotic desire, from histrionics and drama to everyday neighborliness. If there’s a common thread in all this word salad, it’s that here in World 48 we tend to picture love as a benign energy that we humans can define and mostly handle, even “harness” (as Teilhard de Chardin once bleeped in perhaps his most cringe-worthy moment) to serve our better human angels.

No, no, and more no! Thomas Keating came way closer to hitting the nail on the head when he said that a direct, full-frontal encounter with this primordial cosmogonic force would actually “turn us into a grease spot.” Whatever else we might say about it, love is irreducibly Shiva-like. Its paradoxical polarities—erotic desire and complete self-oblation; passionate folly and luminous spaciousness, utter give and utter take; creativity and scorched earth—are all there in the mix and have their authentic pedigrees and lineages going all the way back to the primordial, undifferentiated Godhead, World 1. And we need to know these pedigrees and lineages in order to be able to work skillfully with the extraordinary alchemical capacities that love puts at our disposal if we are able to submit to its stern tutelage.

So let’s bust ourselves loose from the definitional gridlock by way of a quick tour of the origin and course-over-history of love as it rolls down the Ray of Creation. (Again, have a look at Eye of the Heart to fill in some of the details).

In World 1, the primordial, formless Godhead, love is tightly coiled within what medieval mystic Jacob Boehme called the “Scientia:” the primordial, undifferentiated “knowing” that an outward manifestation—i.e., a created order—would eventually be needed to express the fullness of love lying latent in the abyss of God.

World 3 is the primordial Trinity. Here is where the “Endless Unity” (as Boehme calls the undifferentiated Godhead) “brings itself into separability and perceptivity” in order to set the wheels of manifestation in motion. It does this through a voluntary act of self-tensioning, contracting the former limitless equanimity of the divine will into primordial desiring, and the headwaters of love first appear first as a “dry, magnetical hunger,” the primordial eros. At the same time, this voluntary self-limitation also establishes the conditions for the eventual emergence of eros’s transubstantial offspring, the primordial agape. World 3 is the locus of the original cosmogonic Fiat through which kenotic self-surrender (“let it be”) becomes the inner ground of outward new creation (“Let it be!”).

In World 6 love shows up in its most Shiva-like dimensions. This is pure erotic creativity, fecundity: impersonal, intransigent, voracious, the endless pounding of the surf against the rocks, the ancient “groaning and travailing” of the geosphere. This is the world to which Gurdjieff is referring when he says, “There is only one force in creation. Good and evil lie merely in its application.” It is simultaneously intimate and totally impartial; it will kill you in an instant if you fall overboard at sea and yet hold you tenderly as you drown. It is wild, intransigent demiurgic force as it comes crashing out of the unmanifest into the outer limits of energy as we know it here in the worlds below; the creative/destructive force that Annie Dillard describes so fiercely in her essay on “Fecundity” in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that Teilhard describes as “caring more for life than for lives.” It will finally be tamed, Teilhard claims, in the “sphere of the personal.”

World 12 is indeed that “sphere of the personal.” For Christians, it is the Christic sphere, in which the logoic Christ (a.k.a., “second-order sun” in Gurdjieffian nomenclature), perfectly mirrors the original Scientia of World 1, but now in finite and in fact human form. It is the chiastic epicenter of the Ray of Creation and the world in which the divine antinomy set in motion by that original act of self-tensioning comes to its full cosmic reconciliation in the Paschal Mystery, whose ultimate outcome is the birth of Agape love through the cosmic enactment of that supreme transubstantial formula A=ek: Agape, or fully realized love, is the product of eros fully submitted to kenosis, total self-oblation. We humans can occasionally touch the immensity of this great love, although it is rare, and it requires everything of us.

World 24 is the realm of Conscious Love. It is the active sphere of spiritual alchemy as humans willing to step up to the plate begin to practice this great love, submitting their individual needs, preferences, and unexamined behavior patterns to the discipline of A=ek. It is the love to which Rilke is referring in those immortal instructions from his Letters to a Young Poet: “Real love is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person.” World 24 is the central locus of both the Fourth Way Path and the Fifth Way path, the Way of Conscious Love. And since it straddles the mi-fa shock point, the fruits obtained through conscious inner work redound with additional cosmic force not only for the individuals themselves, but for the Ray of creation itself.

Since you say in your query that you are actively participating in the Fourth Way Work, Judy, I believe that it is here, according to the laws and conditions of World 24, that you will find the definitions of love most germane to your own inner work. Stay close to these definitions and let the rest of the chatter go…for now. As your own heart grows under this more constrained tutelage, and its inherent spaciousness becomes increasingly a place you come from rather than a place you go to, you may begin to sense the early light of World 12 gathering on the horizon. As that light fills in, it will reveal the new laws and constraints that will carry you the next step of the way. Go by feel, knowing that as you work your way upward through the realms toward that original Unity, with each new realm there are fewer laws, but they are more binding. Godspeed and keep living the question!

I bumped into both Centering Prayer and the Gurdjieff Work basically in the same year, 1987. That was the year a copy of Thomas Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart was quietly slipped into my hand during a Holy Week retreat at New Camaldoli monastery in California. Several months later, my on-and-off search to locate a real live Fourth Way group finally bore fruit, and I officially entered the Work in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Both of these new openings grew out of an inner restlessness that had been quietly gaining ground in me in the years following my ordination to the Episcopal priesthood. I was quietly in search of a Christianity that was deeper, fuller, less manipulative, more self-aware, and which was not continuously shooting itself in its foot in the gap between its lofty ideals and its ability to actually live them. I had been deeply struck by Jacob Needleman’s striking comment in his 1980 book Lost Christianity that asking Christians in their usual state of consciousness to follow the teachings of Christ was like asking stones to sprout wings and fly to the sea. The problem lay not in the ideal itself but in the nurturance of those wings. The Work proposed self-awareness, mindful presence. The contemplative path plunged me straight into silence, where, in the words of poet Dylan Thomas, “all your deeds and words, each truth, each lie, die in unjudging love.” Though I did not at the time really know the adab of either path, I caught the fragrance. And I was hooked.

Back in the early 1990s there were as yet no such thing as Wisdom Schools, at least not in the lineage I now tend. I led straight up Centering Prayer retreats following the template developed by Thomas Keating in his Contemplative Outreach network. My Gurdjieff connection I kept pretty much to myself, using it purely and simply for my own inner work; I suspected (probably correctly) that any connection to what was still widely regarded as a “cult” would not play well with my largely conventionally Christian audiences. I was equally tight-lipped with my new Gurdjieff cronies, many of whom already regarded me with a certain suspicion because of my Christian affiliations. But as long as the left hand did not (formally) know what the right hand was doing, I could continue to quietly feed myself with both hands. And so I did.

That worked well enough for a few years. Then out of the blue St Benedict called the question on me.

Well, not quite out of the blue. Gradually my twain paths started to converge; if truth be told, they simply have too much in common NOT to. On the Christian contemplative side, folks in my groups began to grow a bit bored of simply running the Contemplative Outreach programs and Thomas Keating’s “psychologically updated” version of the classic contemplative path. They wanted a deeper immersion in the full-on tradition itself. The Christian monastic template was already in my heart and blood; and thus the Rule of St Benedict quietly entered my teaching mix, a text which for more than 1500 years has given both the outer form and the inner spark to the Christian monastic pursuit of spiritual transformation.

On the outside, the Rule may simply look like a schedule for how a monk is to spend his day. But on the inside, it is an early run up-on what Christian mystical tradition calls theosis, or “divinization,” which really boils down to the transformation of consciousness. Through my Gurdjieffian lens, I could begin to see the Rule through a whole new light, a perspective that still escapes many Benedictine practitioners who often miss the forest for the trees. The Rule is a precocious sixth century handbook for what we nowadays call “conscious evolution.” And at the heart of its transformational formula, as most people know, is Ora et Labora: the intentional, rhythmic juxtaposition of spiritual aspiration and practical work.

Exactly the template I was now encountering in the Gurdjieff Work, which basically relies on this same archetypal pattern, but turns it in a slightly different way, toward honing skills of self-observation and three-centered intelligence. Once the lightbulb went off, I realized that all I needed to do was with my contemplative retreat groups was to shift the daily work chores (like cooking, cleaning up, housekeeping) from a “helpful do-gooder” model to a path of conscious, intentional work with an inner task—and the Wisdom School format was born.

In their overall aim and pedagogy the Gurdjieff work and the Christian contemplative path are pretty much polar opposites. The contemplative path is all about surrender, letting go, sacrifice—which, as Thomas Keating once poignantly explained, means “to give up whatever self you are.” It is a path of pure diffusion, a freewill offering of everything that one has and is. The Gurdjieff path is a path of concentration; the overarching aim is to “crystallize” something in oneself in order to build a permanent individuality that can survive one’s physical death. To avoid at all costs becoming “food for the moon.” Its premier tool is a concentrated and increasingly more masterful wielding of attention, the very tool that Centering Prayer seems to be encouraging us to loosen our grip on.

I always wondered why this did not feel schizophrenic to me. But in fact, it didn’t and still doesn’t. In ways that continue to surprise me, opposites do in fact attract and come together to create a polarity. At very least I find that these two distinct spiritual pathways do tend to knock the worst edges off each other: the contemplative’s to a pleasant, dissociative sort of inner numbness that can become a seedbed for manipulation and sentimentality; the Work’s to anxiety, as people take on so solemnly the full weight of building their own inner self, lest they “die like a dog.” I relish the polarity between them; for me it has been both a respite and a mirroring. Maybe even a leveraging. I guess I would say that in my own case the surrender current runs a little stronger. It comforts me to know that even after my best efforts and all that high striving have come to naught, I can—and eventually will—simply yield myself up and say, “Into your hand, I commend my spirit.” This small measure of ease allows me to embrace the Work as a path of gratitude, not a desperate means to the end. A freewill offering for all that has been laid before me and all that I will hand back (whether actualized or not) when my time comes ripe for it all to “die in unjudging love.”

And to hear Gurdjieff laugh??? To feel the Work playful and joyful like Adam and Eve in paradise? That just might be the most delicious fruit on the vine, although I admit it is still quite rare.

The analogy is unnervingly literal. Cancer cells are driven by one thing only, their own insatiable impulse to multiply, until in the blindly aggressive pursuit of that impulse, they wind up destroying their host. Tell me what part of this analogy does not fit. And are we so arrogant as to assume that Great Nature in all her evolutionary intelligence does not possess an innate skill for intelligent self-balancing? While Teilhardian tatonnement may be the usual evolutionary modus operandi, when things get too far out of balance, there is little other choice than to step in and take the situation radically in hand, even at the cost of her former “axis and arrow of evolution?”

What, you might wonder, can possibly be gained from taking the viewing lens this far out, to the place where all those individual details—human grief, human tenderness, art and beauty, conscience and coherence, all that has been ventured and gained here in twenty millennia of continuous human civilization—simply blur beyond recognition and vanish into a serenely impersonal evolutionary mechanism? Where are the tears? Where is God?

But no, I do not believe it is spiritual bypassing to consider the terror of the situation” from this Teilhardian scale. For me, it feels more like touching solid ground, finally finding that place from which, in the words of poet T.S. Eliot, “I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice.” For at this scale it becomes clear that our only real hope of a breakthrough will come when a critical mass of human beings begin to exercise their capacity to think planetarily—i.e., as a single species: rising above nationalist divisions, theological story-telling, sacred-cow histories, and ideological illusions to begin to work as whole greater than the sum of its parts breaking into totally new ground. There is nothing in our past—nothing—that will save us. To be truly unflappable we have to be prepared to let it all go. But in our present, it is already all here, waiting to receive us and refashion us if we can only break free of the heavy boots on our feet. Whether this will happen in “time” (whatever that is at this scale), I do not know. I only know that it is real.

When I truly open to the full Teilhardian landscape, I find that beneath the initial desolate space Teilhard is actually offering me a quiet reassurance if I am able to meet him on his own ground. For there are two things he affirms very strongly, two things whose absence might otherwise finally extinguish all hope. And in this quiet consolation he is simultaneously pointing us toward a way out of the tunnel, a way that is immediate and effective at every scale.

The first consolation is this: Teilhard’s evolutionary view does not end in ultimate tragedy; it is only oppositional when you apply it on too short a timescale, or are unwilling to bend on dogmas you consider to be immutable. Yes, the playing field may change dramatically—even, from our point of view, catastrophically. Over its 4.5-billion-year evolutionary history, our planet has shapeshifted continuously. Formerly arable lands become deserts (and vice versa), continents split apart then reconfigure; mountain ranges rise, oceans appear and then disappear. Asteroids periodically strike the planet, as they did as recently as 12,000 years ago some say, dramatically destabilizing both the atmosphere and geosphere. Entire continents disappear; entire species are wiped out. The biosphere is a relative newcomer, and its loss is not an unthinkable option—remember, ALL options are possible. A planet with no biosphere would be a different place for sure—not one that would be habitable by our present human species. But from deep within the geosphere there would still be that restless teleological spirit drawing it onward to manifest new forms and innovations, new species. And beyond even that, should the planet and stars themselves disappear, that resilient spark would still remain intact, for its source does not lie within the created order, but is rather at its headwater, in the eternal, ever-creative, inexhaustibly playful yet purposeful Origin.

And we belong to Origin as well. Right here and now. This pixel of consciousness I call “I”— infinitesimal though it is, a flash in the pan of eternity, ever shifting in its form—is nonetheless imperishable and unquenchable in its essence. Here and now I participate in the Omega point. It is the full of the moon out of which my finite life is woven.

And that in turn leads to another powerful Teilhardian affirmation. Throughout all these evolutionary upheavals, life forms are constantly disappearing, only to return again in stronger, more vigorous form. At the end of the Pliocene era, no evidence of human life is to be found anywhere. By the dawn of the next geological era, signs of prehominid life are ubiquitous. The curtain then closes for another several dozen millennia as the face of the earth again endures a massive resculpting; when the curtain reopens, the prehominid life forms have disappeared, replaced by the markedly more advanced neanderthals, who are now indisputably wielding tools, forming communities, and burying their dead. Like that biblical grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, the evolutionary seed apparently needs to go fallow periodically, returning to its womb in the geosphere. Yet on the other side of this incubation, nothing seems to be lost; things pick up exactly from the point where the highest benchmark has been established.

Not only do they pick up; they pick up with all the force of a spontaneous combustion. There is nothing hesitant or even linear about this new evolutionary transmission. It is a mutation pure and simple, a leap to a whole new level of capaciousness—and it is contagious! Teilhard remarks how, once the new evolutionary form springs forth, it seems to show up virtually simultaneously: in Africa, Asia, on the American continent. As he concludes movingly, speaking equally out of his own struggles to be heard against a Church intent on suppressing his voice, “Truth has only to appear once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze” (The Heart of Matter, p. 102).

No matter how long the hiatus, evolution will resume directly from its former highwater mark. This is what our 4.5-billion-year Earth Story confirms to us again and again. If this is true, it tells me clearly where and how I am to live.

Right at that highwater mark, as best I can understand, as best as I can hold it.

Not for myself, but for the future. From the fullness, for the future.

No matter how devastating the short-range outcome, and for however long this next sleep may be, the one thing that is mine to contribute here and now to that “long arc of evolution” is the quality of that pixel of consciousness I am temporarily privileged to steward. Even in this tiny space I presently occupy I can strive with all my heart to seed into the future my highest understanding of what it means to “be made in the image and likeness of God”; to hold the highest note I can hold as a human being. I can quietly commit my life to the inner work of catalyzing within myself those higher spiritual substances through which this world is ultimately transformed—love, joy, forbearance, kindness, gentleness, self-control; “the fruit of the spirit,” as St Paul called them. These are not organic substances; they do not come naturally to the human animal; they are produced only through the conscious alchemy of the human heart. That is what we humans are called to bring to the continuing evolution of our planet. And with our next mutation, I believe we will finally be able to deliver it. And then, at last, things will change.

To that hope, and the work entailed to bring it into reality, I will gladly dedicate the remaining years of my human life. It is the one thing I can do, and my heart tells me that it will not go for naught.

Teilhard’s theological masterpiece was The Human Phenomenon, published posthumously in 1957 after his death finally removed the censorship the Vatican had clamped down on his expansive cosmological reflections. It is a wondrously panoramic universe story from a theocentric perspective, beginning with the birth of our planet some 4.5 billion years ago and culminating in a theoretical “Omega point” at which all that had originally been flung out as divine possibility is returned as the consummate fruit of divine love. Along this long evolutionary journey, the way seems to be guided, ultimately by the Omega Point’s own inexorable gravitational pull, but the countless twists and turns in the road are subject to the massive play of what Teilhard called tatonnement, trial and error. Basically, almost anything that can happen eventually will. The long arc of evolution ultimately bends toward consciousness, Teilhard claims, but the journey unfolds across an epic geological time scale against a backdrop of mountain chains rising and falling, entire continents swallowed into the earth, dramatic climate upheavals, and periodic cataclysmic events (such as an asteroid strike), which wipe out all apparent forward motion, sometimes for ten thousand years. But then the seed buried in that beleaguered earth wakes up and begins to grow again, picking up right where it left off with even more evolutionary strength. Beneath the fractured surface God apparently writes straight, but with crooked lines —and on a timescale so vast that human causality simply no longer obtains.

Viewed through the Teilhardian lens, what I see with dark clarity is that the human species appears to be well on its way to self-extinction, partly through its own direct actions and partly as a result of the collateral destabilization of its primary habitat through the unmoderated exercise of its own most cutting-edge evolutionary features. In short, after a very long period (12,000 years) of climate stability in which we have been able to set down our roots and tend our human vineyard, we are now embarking upon a period of climate cavitation whose end result, if the direction continues, will be the destruction of the narrow bandwidth of conditions in which human life is possible. The shift is already well underway, and while we humans may not be fully to blame, we are at least heavily implicated. Who am I to say if the rate of change has passed a tipping point, or is now irreversible? But the change is definitely happening before our eyes: visible not only in species loss, but in the destabilization of fundamental patterns in the geosphere—wind, current, heat, tides, atmospheric composition. I live on a small island in the ocean. I see it every day. And as a species now rapidly headed toward the “endangered” list, we seem obstinately incapable of facing up to the situation. We simply refuse to think —or have not yet learned to think— at a planetary scale.

According to Teilhard, the primary cause of extinction is when a species becomes overspecialized: when it develops evolutionary adaptations that ultimately make it viable only within a tiny niche habitat. Think of those enormous racks of antlers on elks, tusks on mastodons, trunks on elephants or long necks on giraffes, brilliantly adapted to a specific environment, but a huge, eventually lethal over-specialization once that environment is yanked out from under them. For me the comparable evolutionary weak spot for us humans would be our increasingly overspecialized brains. Along that long arc of evolution the human brain has developed extraordinary but seemingly unmoderated abilities to tear into the inner fastnesses of things, develop technological fixes for every self-created problem, and now even to reproduce and replace itself with an entirely new octave of machine-generated AI simulacrum, essentially evolving itself right out of the biosphere, drawing our entire élan vital from what Teilhard called the noosphere, the “virtual” habitat of human culture and cleverness. Unfortunately, Teilhard may have failed to emphasize sufficiently that the noosphere depends on the biosphere for its continued existence.

I was shaken to the core many years ago when I learned from one of those popular science writers (Brian Swimme? Brian Greene? Ilya Prigogine?) that human life is viable only within a very narrow temperature gradient: no more than 10 degrees. “Patently untrue,” I scoffed, immediately countering with all those strange and variable habitats where human beings have learned to survive, from the arctic to the equator. But then I realized that this author was not talking about the external temperature, but about the internal temperature, the inner core temperature the body must maintain to survive. If that inner core dips consistently much below 93, we develop hypothermia and die. If it soars above 103, as in fevers or heat waves, we die of heat prostration. And this is what we are already seeing as each summer heat-related deaths continue to mount as increasingly severe heat waves grip our planet for increasingly longer periods.

Who cares, we think. We sit in our comfortably cool houses in cities already now rendered uninhabitable outdoors during those summer months and push up the air conditioners.

I will go no further in this rant; there is no need to drive up the emotional thermostat as well. But I watch, and my heart shudders and breaks. Remember the Darwin Awards? For me, the planet’s hands down winner this year is the US Congress, in its decision to repeal landmark environmental protections hard won over the past thirty years through a noble bipartisan effort to at least try to slow down the rate of positive acceleration. But of course, we need those fossil fuels, don’t we, to generate more power to power those air conditioners to escape the oppressive heat that the fossil fuels are substantially responsible for. This is what is meant by “overspecializing oneself out of existence.”

As I watch from this vast Teilhardian timescale, my initial sense of hopelessness rises like the waters around my neck. There is nothing I can do, nothing, to stand at any scale against the dark powers of human greed, shortsightedness, and stupidity now actively massing on the near-horizon to bring this 350,000-year-old experiment in “three brained beings” to its screeching mastodon halt.

And yet, for all its apparent futility, there is indeed hope in daring to apply the Teilhardian scale. I have looked at the dark side of things in this post; in the next I will try to follow the golden thread as it winds its way through what otherwise might look to be an impenetrable maze. And I will say right now that hope has something to do with a word that both Gebser and Teilhard consistently brought to the forefront: a mutation…a biological, evolutionary change in the way we human beings live within our own skins. Even in my own darkest moments I do believe that it is already underway, and that its effects are already beginning to break on our planetary shores if we can only keep riding the wave.

Humility, I remind myself. What makes me so sure that I KNOW what is needed in this moment, that I know which one of Gurdjieff’s three lines of action (affirming, denying, reconciling) is truly mine to occupy? I am naturally attracted to the denying line, of course, the groundswell of “RESIST” rising spontaneously from the hearts and minds of American citizens, galvanizing conscience and rekindling resolve. I do not want to break the momentum; I want to join it. But what if the place where I might serve more usefully is on one of those other lines?

I do have some continuing sense that my primary responsibility is to help tend the ground from which the paradigm shift will gradually acquire critical velocity. Gebser himself had his eye on the cultural creatives of his era (the artists, intellectuals, and “out of the box” thinkers) as the true bellwethers of the new Integral emergence. But Gebser died before the spiritual reawakening of the 1980s was fully out the gate, and even before the massive transfusion into the Western cosmovision of mindfulness and integrative modalities of the East, so he may well be underestimating the force that the spiritual quarter is now contributing to the new arising. I myself am more than convinced that the displacement of Tibetan Buddhism westward following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1961, the launch of the Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation movements within the Christian mainstream, and now the growing public recognition of the Gurdjieff teaching with its powerful evolutionary toolkit are all unmistakable signs of the Integral structure of consciousness already seeding itself well among the shards of the decaying Mental structure; it might be a matter of simply waiting it out while continuing to do the inner work.

While Gebser did not gravitate to esoteric paradigms, it’s a fairly easy translation for me to infer that the new structure of consciousness will arise out of World 24 and not World 48. These two stations on Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation closely dovetail, respectively, with Gebser’s “Integral” and “Mental”; the qualities of perception and the range and mode of agency correspond almost one-for-one. And this hits home for me emotionally, because it is also the area where my own spiritual interest and expertise most closely match the implied job description. Some of my Teilhardian colleagues like Ilia Delio and John Haught interpret this to mean that the new arising will come from the future—i.e. from what hasn’t yet manifested in flesh and blood here on this earth. Gebser would say it arises out of Origin—the primordial source of divine creativity and inspiration that is, as he says, “ever-present.” It lies neither in the past nor in the future, but in the activation of a human consciousness subtle enough to be able to perceive it.

If this is true, then the way I can most help is to keep tending this growing consciousness as best I can as it seeds itself in the human species and to keep my eye on the Origin, letting the present social perturbations recede into the backdrop. I do know that the quality and agency of imaginal action (i.e., action originating in World 24) far exceeds the capacities of the Mental structure of consciousness, still running the older mechanical and linear/causal energy that Teilhard called “tangential” energy. When the new structure fully kicks in, it is capable of non-localized action, spontaneous transmission of powerful spiritual substances (like faith, hope, and love), the formation of imaginal webs and ley lines that span the planet and beyond the grave, and the direct invocation of logically impossible synchronicities. I have seen all this happen before my eyes, and I know what it means when Jesus says, “Destroy this East Wing, and in three days I will rebuild it.” He is not kidding around. Why not bet on the faster racehorse?

But such a decision—to follow what I know more than what I want—is a gamble, and it comes at a certain risk and the willingness to bear white knuckle loss. For an even more disquieting realization that emerges out of this Gebserian line of inquiry is that democracy itself may be aging out; the problem is not simply the increasingly corrupted two-party system on which it now rests, but the fact that democracy itself might be inextricably tied to a dying structure of consciousness. I do not say this lightly, but intellectual honesty compels me at least to entertain the idea. Founded at the height of the Enlightenment, at the highwater mark of what Gebser calls the “hypertrophied ego,” it is possible that this cherished American dinosaur simply cannot make the leap into Integral perception. Nobly as it has served the American people over these two and a half centuries, it may nonetheless be incapable of exceeding its own hull speed: still incapable of thinking from the whole to the part, still ontologically an assemblage of “states” rather than an autopoietic unity capable of self-stabilization and self-regeneration. And if so, the hard path of tough love might be not to rush in and try to save it, but to step aside and let it die, trusting that the new structure of consciousness will in due course birth a new structure of governance fully synchronous with its more inclusive mode of perception.

At any rate, no matter how hard the “ouch” it inflicts upon my impetuous will, the Gebserian analysis seems to suggest that the qualities needed right now might have to do with impartiality and stoic forbearance. It asks me to acknowledge the limitedness of my own perspectival cone. To acknowledge that I do not know how much further things need to go down before healing can truly begin. I do not even know for certain what in me is the voice of conscience and not simply nostalgia and kneejerk reactivity. I do know that my impartiality is as of yet only of a provisional nature; I can wriggle out of the narrowness of my own perspectival seeing, but not yet through a direct seeing from the eye of the heart, only by overlaying multiple perspectival cones to try to create a composite view. What may be most called for at this moment is indeed just that stoic forbearance: to look on as things you have known and loved being shattered before your eyes and not flinch or turn away, but simply to breathe it all in in a kind of pebble-thrown-into-the-ocean tonglen, and somehow to stay the course. Through a broken heart, to bear witness.

The Mental structure of consciousness has been in the driver’s seat now for more than two thousand years. Its relatively swift and ubiquitous emergence into cultural ascendancy around 500 BCE has sometimes been characterized as “The Axial period,” and it’s not unfair to say that Western Society has risen on its back. Its early heralds were Pythagoras and Plato; its precepts were reason, strategic thinking, and a powerful sense of the individual. Its golden age was antiquity, its even more portentous second wind the European enlightenment.

The new rising star on the horizon of evolutionary consciousness is known as Integral. Jean Gebser named it “integral” because its most distinctive characteristic is that it does not merely add another high-powered new rung to the ladder of consciousness; instead it integrates and harmonizes all the preceding structures of consciousness (Archaic, Magic, Mythic, and Mental) in a deeper capaciousness that allows all the structures authentic room to be. That is why he insisted on calling them structures, not levels of consciousness. They do not transcend and include; they co-exist like the faces of a prism, each one reflecting the light of Origin through its own shape and individuality.

What I’ve just written above is probably the world’s shortest summary of Jean Gebser’s 508-page masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin, published in the early 1950s and the fountainhead from which would pour Ken Wilber, Thomas Keating on the Human Condition, and most recently Spiral Dynamics. But for our purposes this brief synopsis will have to suffice; it’s enough to get us through the gate. I hope you can see that even in barebones form it puts in our hands a powerful analytical tool for getting to the root of what may be driving the seeming systemic collapse of our political and cultural institutions.

It also clears the way for some rather unsettling new takes on the direction in which the solution to our present impasse might lie. More on that in the next post.

While in some ways far more sweeping and pessimistic than the historical perspective; this view does bring with it (at least for me) a certain initial sense of relief. I spoke in my last post of a wrong turn having been made somewhere along the line, for which a course correction is now being painfully applied. But when approached through a Gebserian filter, the need for “blame” and “rectification” subsides; viewed at its proper scale, all is on track and unfolding normally. New structures of consciousness do not simply slip into place like tumbler locks; they grind against each other like tectonic plates until the transition is accomplished, which can take centuries. One has to expect a certain amount turmoil as of part of the process; in it we are witnessing both the slow disintegration of the waning structure of consciousness as it dashes itself against the rocks of its own endemic shortcomings and, simultaneously, a chaotic interregnum in which newness is clearly in the wind, but no one yet quite knows the direction from which the wind is blowing.

That pretty much matches what I am seeing out my bedroom window as I view the chaos swirling around me right now. It is clear and generally agreed upon by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum that the conflict playing out in our world is much more than a contest between two political parties; it is a clash between two cosmovisions, two sweepingly different ways of looking at the world, which in turn, according to Gebser, rest upon on two significantly different structures—two different operating systems, if you prefer—of conscious perception.

One structure still views the world through the older mental hardware, the hardware we have been using for two and a half millennia now, upon which Western Civilization is built: substance ontology (i.e., “things” have real existence and permanent essence qualities); perception through differentiation; the reification of the both the object perceived and the perceiver; perspectival thinking (seeing only within one’s own cone of perception), and the familiar direction of causality, thinking from the part to the whole (“WE is simply “I” writ large.)

The other structure is beginning—still only at its headwaters—to display its newfound integral capacities: the capacity to grasp relationship directly and to grasp it in motion. Integral is what allows you to see in terms of movement within a unified relational field rather than as transactions between individual entities. The older mental worldview sees a bicycle as an object with two wheels standing locked on a bike stand. The new worldview sees a bicycle as an event in time and space, flying down the hill, wind at your back, companions at your side. Integral is what allows you to understand—truly understand—that “no man is an island, entirely unto himself.” Integral is what allows you to think from the whole to the part, to see the whole as containing emergent properties not attributable or reducible to the part. It is a whole new way of being in the world

Viewed from this wider evolutionary perspective, most everything that looks so terrifying to us right now from that narrower (and Mental-structure-generated) historical perspective is right on track. Even the worst of the fragmentation we’re seeing—the polarization, the siloes, the cognitive dissonance, the breakdown of reason and lack of an agreed upon social truth, the re-emergence of ethnic supremacy and tribalism—all this is what happens, Gebser predicts, when the mental structure craters. It is intensely painful to watch, but it is not a sign that the process is off-track; more likely a sign that evolution is proceeding apace.

I will follow up on the implications in my next post. But as a final word: please, please, listen very carefully to what I am saying here and don’t make the associative leap that I am explicitly not making. I am explicitly not saying that this clash of structures of consciousness aligns with our present political divisions as captured in those popular caricatures, MAGA and “wokeness”—or in other words, don’t assume that the jousting playing out on the political scene is a joust between two different levels of consciousness with “wokeness” carrying the baton of the new structure of consciousness. I am manifestly saying exactly the opposite. As my wise monastic mentor Fr. Bruno Barnhart once ironically commented, the fundamentalism of the left and the fundamentalism of the right are still both fundamentalism; they are simply the two ends of the same stick, operating out of the same structure of consciousness. Despite what pop spirituality sometimes likes to think, “wokeness” is not the herald of the new consciousness; it is simply the last paroxysm of the mental structure trying to feign thinking from the whole while still perceiving from the part; no wonder it is so easily hoisted on its own moral petard! In the end, both ends of the stick will go down together, as the new wind enters from an entirely different compass point.

The real job is to be on the lookout for the windshift.

For further exploration: You might read Cynthia Bourgeault’s blog series on Gebser or Jeremy’s Johnson’s short guide to Gebser via his book Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.

No, a response is surely required of me—if for no other reason than as a practicing Christian and contemplative teacher, that is at the heart of what I take the Gospel of John to be demanding of us when it proclaims: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” Like Jesus, we are “given” into this world, required to bear witness to it, to love and cherish it, to safeguard it as best we are able on our watch.

I gently push past the hesitations of colleagues both contemplative and Gurdjieffian, who essentially offer me mirror images of the same fear: that in taking a stand, I risk losing impartiality. I no longer float above the turmoil, but risk getting dragged under by it, becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

But Jesus himself took a stand at the temple when he threw out the money changers and taunted the Pharisees, in effect sealing his political doom. And Gurdjieff risked himself mightily to stay on in occupied Paris during the darkest days of World War II to bring food and solace to his neighbors and an imaginal transfusion of love to an aching world, carried principally through his esoteric work with his most advanced students. When impartiality gets played off against conscience, in my books conscience wins hands down; insofar as it directly reflects the heart, it points to the higher resolution.

So no, declining to engage is not an option for me. The real question is how to engage; On what level and through what interpretive frame can my particular post and spiritual skill set be offered to greatest effectiveness? And it is just here that the Wisdom path seems to fork, offering me not two but three viable options, which in these next few posts I would like to think through with you.

It seems manifestly clear that the ordeal currently playing out on our national and worldwide viewing screen is a massive reaction— or corrective—to an unfolding that has somehow wandered badly off-course. But on what timeline is this corrective playing out, and for what purpose is it being applied? It is that “for what purpose?” that leaves me stymied and scratching my head. Immediately my mind goes to those three interpretive lenses, each offering its own analysis of the present dilemma and its own optimal path of response. I call these three lenses “historical time,” “Gebserian time,” and “Teilhardian time.”

Historical time thinks in terms of decades, at best centuries. Gebserian time thinks in terms of “structures of consciousness,” which equate roughly with cultural epochs, or in other words, millennia. Teilhardian time thinks in terms of geological time and is measured in tens of thousands, even millions, of years. Each of these viewing lenses affords a significantly different take on where the original deviation occurred and what the corresponding course correction wants to be.

Historical time is arguably the lens through which most of us are seeing the political situation today. For most educated Westerners, it is arguably the only lens that exists. We Americans rehearse the founding of our democracy, whose 250^th birthday we will either be celebrating or “celebrating” less than six months away. We recall that our country was founded at the highwater mark of the 18^th century European Enlightenment based on principles of individual freedom, equality, and human rights still apparently well ahead of the human evolutionary curve. For 250 years it has been brilliantly articulated and passionately defended by our forbearers, of courage and conscience apparently greater than our own. Historians such as Heather Cox Richardson trace the roots of how the seeds of discontent got planted in this beloved vineyard and come up with obvious benchmarks in populism, civil rights, secularism, and “wokeness.” We see how these seeds were craftily woven together in some “higher up” collusion on a warp of populist sentiment and a weft of oligarchian greed, with Donald Trump emerging as its poster child and golden calf hierophant.

Viewed from this framework—along with most of the rest of my liberal-progressively minded confreres, I understand that a cherished structure of governance is under siege by a malignant collusion of greed, grandiosity, and deviousness. My job is to name, articulate, and defend—to “speak truth to power,” in the words of my own Quaker forbears, who shrank from involvement no less than Jesus himself. It is to use my speaking platform to support a continuous calling the question, naming over and over those gospel teachings on love of the stranger, inclusion, compassion, and justice, even at the risk of my personal comfort and safety, even at the risk of tangling with people’s projections of what a contemplative is supposed to be, even at the risk of my own life. That is the path I see and admire so deeply in people like Pope Leo, The Rt. Rev. Mary Anne Budde, The Rt. Rev. Robert Hirschfield, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, my own bishop here in Maine The Rt. Rev. Thomas Brown: those who have held our feet to the fire and pointed the Church unswervingly back to the cost of discipleship. And that is the path of engagement I would unquestionably walk down were it not for those other two time-grids that play in my mind even as my feet are strapping into their galoshes….

Stay tuned. Next post will be coming up shortly.

Part of the covert toxicity of these Cluster B relationships, as I have subsequently come to learn, lies in the ongoing cognitive dissonance incurred through prolonged exposure to the profoundly torturous and twisted logic that is a hallmark of this particular sector of pathology. Conventional word meanings are turned upside down, logical causality is stood end for end, and one wanders in a hall of mirrors in which all efforts to communicate, to understand, to defer, are dismissed as pitiable weakness and only serve to further inflame the already engorged ego of the afflicted person. The bottom line is that you cannot apply reason, empathy, or negotiation to an untreated “Cluster B.” It is like pouring gasoline on a raging fire.

If there is any remediating value to my difficult initiation, it’s that I learned some very hard lessons about psychopathology that most of us are simply too incredulous to face. As we enter now upon an eerily similar difficult initiation for our country and our world, my daily newsfeed reading like a déjà vu “writ large,” I can see that these lessons, painful though they were, have in certain respects prepared me well to look straight into the eyes of the beast and name it as I see it.

While Donald Trump’s erratic trajectory may be morally inconceivable, it is, I suggest, clinically predictable. “Narcissistic personality disorder” is not a literary metaphor; it is a clinical pathology with predictable behavior patterns, all of which our President models like a poster child. While the Cluster B disorders (narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder) all sit uneasily on the line between neurosis and psychosis, I would offer as a layman’s rule of thumb that neurosis is a psychologically dysfunctional response to an actual reality; psychosis is a logically appropriate response to a distorted reality—i.e., to a phantasmagoria of the disordered person’s mind or emotions. The distinction is essential. When Donald Trump says that he personally prevented eight-plus wars or insists he was cheated out of the 2020 election, he is not lying; that is how he actually perceives the situation. And his responses—rage, retribution, scorched earth vengeance—while emotionally primitive, are still logically consistent with his sense of being slighted and cheated. Once you stop feigning shock and horror and start looking at the world through his own Trumpian logic, his next moves become tragically predictable.

The other thing that needs to be taken into account when dealing with a narcissistic personality disorder (and which unfortunately, the original myth of Narcissus does not make sufficiently clear) is that the disorder does not really arise out of vainglory—an exaggerated sense of self-worth—but rather, out of a bottomless well of self-hatred and shame. The hole at the center of selfhood can never be filled, and the grotesque exhibitions of personal power and dominance are merely the frantic efforts to shore up the eroding inner castle, to extort something from the outside that can only truly be conferred from within. It’s a doomed pattern, and when it’s appeased rather than confronted, it tends to escalate manically, creating what’s known among the social sciences as a “positive feedback loop”—meaning not that it is beneficial, but that it is intensifying, spiraling rapidly out of control.

I have more than had my fill of liberal politicians and commentators wringing their hands and lamenting, “When will we be rid of this madman?” “Madman” is way too romantic a term, way too imprecise; it conjures up the whole case lot from Captain Ahab and Othello to Machiavelli to The Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh who dreamed bigger dreams and dared to imagine a larger reality. There is a huge difference between the visionary dreamer, the coldly calculating but sane villain, and a mentally impaired person with an untreated Cluster B personality disorder. And the fate of our world may now hang on knowing this difference and being prepared to act on it.

No, our country is NOT being governed by a “madman.” It is being governed by a person whose behavior patterns are overwhelmingly congruent with a volatile and dangerous mental illness now in full manic overdrive. And if this is so, his likely future trajectory, however logically erratic and morally inconceivable, is still clinically predictable: the pathology will continue to intensify as he grasps more and more frantically for outward praise and power on his inward journey toward implosion.

It is beyond contest that this is a situation in which the 25^th amendment could be rightfully invoked—and should have been already. Had the man suffered a heart attack or a stroke, had he been emergency air-lifted on life support, the decision would have been effortless; physical incapacitation is clear and obvious. But mental incapacitation is still a murky path, particularly when it gets tangled up with that other well-documented consequence of prolonged exposure to a Cluster B personality toxicity: trauma bonding. In a reversal of all known logic, the victimized person, rather than running for dear life, becomes traumatically fixated on the victimizer, compulsively cycling back in the vain hope of clawing out of him that mutual understanding or mutual closure that the Cluster B person is psychologically incapable of delivering.

With the President’s cabinet, the Republican party, and now, lamentably, the Supreme Court largely traumatically bonded to their toxically maniacal leader, it is hard to say where help will come from. Which among these duly vested bodies will finally summon the moral gumption to exercise the agency duly entrusted to it and pull the plug on this escalating horror show? I am not holding my breath. Trauma bonding does not work that way.

Meanwhile, as we all collectively wait for Godot, we can at least stop romanticizing our plight, stop wringing our hands in theatrical lament. We can begin by naming the situation clearly for what it is: not some latter-day Shakespearean tragedy, but a tragic case of an entire nation held captive in a collective trauma bonding orbiting around a toxically disordered person. The paralysis that has overtaken our theoretically unassailable structures of governance is not a freakish moral aberration; it is the usual and even normative psychological outcome in such situations, extraordinary only in its scale, not its basic configuration. A realistic psychological assessment of what we’re up against, clinical though it may sound, at least establishes some quantifiable markers and points a way forward toward appropriate remediative strategies and longer range healing pathways. If we are serious about addressing our national plight, perhaps we should be looking less toward Shakespeare and Sophocles and more toward the DSM.

That conference packed a strong spiritual punch, bringing both scholars and practitioners alike to their feet. For scholars, the conference came as a powerful affirmation that the Gurdjieffian teaching, emerging at last from behind its long-imputed caricature as the work of a charlatan or crank, is in fact a serious, intellectually valid, and powerful spiritual lineage, worthy of serious academic consideration and research.

For practitioners, it offered an equally strong invitation to a new beginning, but one which I am far less confident was heard.

The message resoundingly received by the nearly two thousand people in attendance either on-the-ground or online, is that there is indeed living water in the Gurdjieff well: water that has now become fully synchronic with our own times and which people are hungry to explore further. The Work has been gratuitously offered a powerful new lease on life—if it is up to the challenge of receiving the ball and running with it. But to do so, I believe, will require nothing short of a fundamental reevaluation of the core message and purpose of the Work, coupled with a radical revisioning of the delivery systems used to transmit it.

Where does the heart of this teaching really lie? In recent decades, the most prominent emphasis among its devotees and prominent apologists has been on “the search.” The currents all set toward the Rosetta stone of inquiry: seeking, having a question, “seeing it for yourself.” These were the pedagogical emphases built into my own Fourth way initiation, delivered with a strong admixture of existentialist nihilism (“Man cannot do,” “Man is asleep,” “Man is a machine,” etc.,) a smattering (via Madame de Salzmann) of Zen “be here now” and quasi New Age “higher energies,” and a strong dollop (via its influential second generation Jewish interpreters such as Jacob Needleman and Roger Lipsey) of rabbinical skepticism and a pervasive sense of exile. Inquiry was in and of itself a pure and sufficient raison d’être; it was somehow inconceivable to actually arrive at one’s destination. Along the way, the chief function of a Fourth Way Work group was to hold each other’s feet to the fire and to serve as travelling companions in the collective search for that elusive snow leopard, “Real I.”

I believe that this is a seriously solipsistic and privatized distortion of Gurdjieff’s real intent.

When he arrived in Russia on the eve of World War I to set up shop with his radically new teaching on human purpose and destiny, it was not a question that he brought, but an answer. An answer, to be sure, arrived at after a long search, but now bearing a message heavy in content and urgent in import. The message is not that “man cannot do,” but that “man AS HE IS NOW cannot do”—and this is a catastrophic and tragic loss because we human beings (conscious or not) hold down a critical niche in the megalocosmos and a failure to play our required part puts the whole created order at risk. The intended aim of the Gurdjieffian training was not to embalm its students in an articulate Grecian chorus lamenting man’s sleep; it was to catalyze those higher being bodies inside ourselves that could actually begin to do this work, and then to shift our identity so powerfully to this new center of gravity (call it “Real I”) that we might at last be able to stand up and take our required place in the cosmos. His goal was not to emote on endlessly about “finer energies” and “active elements in the air” but to set in motion those evolutionary processes already latent within us that could actually catalyze the transubstantiation of these finer substances into to a kesdjan selfhood, the minimal baseline at which a human being could begin to act in alignment with the laws of higher worlds, informed by conscience and objective seeing.

If he had thought for a moment that it was “mission impossible,” he would never have undertaken it. He would never have opened shop in St Petersburg and Moscow. He would never have led his small band of followers on that daring escape across the Caucasus Mountains to Constantinople and ultimately Paris. He would never have experimented for the rest of his life with novel formats (writing, public performances, larger audiences) that might bring his message to a Western world trembling on the brink of extinction. He would never have chosen to remain behind the lines in occupied Paris during the darkest days of World War II, feeding the hungry while leading his disciples on a crash course in “second body building” to which the Daumal exercises I have mentioned in earlier posts stand as such a profound testimony. I have not mentioned yet that these exercises as the concentrated whole that they are stand trembling and suffused with kesdjan force and pure World 12 bodhisattva compassion, a profound transmission not only of what is possible for us human beings, but what is in fact required.

No, Gurdjieff did not come preaching existentialist nihilism à la Jean-Paul Sartre or Camus; nor did he come to enforce a “settling into a certain comfort, of fixing a dogma and being satisfied with knowing better states,” as Alexandre de Salzmann delicately alluded to in his Harvard keynote: the solipsistic wandering around in one’s own interior labyrinth of becoming, conflating the reluctance to transform with the purity of the search, consigning the elusive quest for Real I to rigpa-like moments of glimpsing something “qualitatively more real” between the breaths. It could be, as Joseph Azize asserts, that the self-calming tendencies implicit in Mme de Salzmann’s “New Work,” its emphasis on receptivity and tasting increasingly subtle inner states, knocked the edge off the more yang tendencies packed into Gurdjieff’s original concept of “aim” and “will.” My own take is that Gurdjieff, a Near-Easterner by heart and bloodline, simply missed the subtly insidious grasp of mid-twentieth century European literary modes of thinking on the traditional and ultimately collective spiritual teaching he was bringing. Beneath his very eyes, even during his lifetime but with accelerating force after his death, the teaching shifted its center of gravity subtly toward the individual and psychological. Particularly within the New York group, under the shaping leadership of former literary impresario A.R. Orage, the Work steadily migrated toward a more artsy milieu, effectively transmuting its blind, Shems y Tabriz original force into a much more manicured—and far safer—literary simulacrum of itself. Gurdjieff’s urgent call to a transformed heart in service of a world trembling on the brink was gradually smothered and then swapped out altogether for a subtle spiritual aestheticism, which I believe obtains to this very day and essentially freezes the Work dead in its tracks.

Could it be time to awaken from the sleep of “awakening?” Is it time to swap out the endless fascination of the search for the gritty reality of “Take up your cross and follow me?” The Work has a crucial message to share, the tools to deliver it, an audience hungry to receive it. What, pray tell is standing in the way?

This traditional ranking system still dominates our understanding of the esoteric terrain. An online dictionary search of the term “esoteric” yields up the following definition: “intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.” Synonyms include “obscure,” “occult,” “orphic,” “mysterious,” “arcane,” “recondite,”—and yup, “secret.” The definition further explains that esoteric teaching emphasizes an “inner meaning, chiefly conveyed in symbolic interpretations and mystic practices.” And that’s the picture that typically comes to mind for us when we hear the term: secret initiatic circles conveying cosmic pin codes to a privileged few.

Based on the Gurdjieffian schematic of three-centered awareness we explored in my last post, I propose an entirely different approach to the traditional classifying system:

An exoteric teaching is a spiritual truth of any degree of subtlety or abstruseness received and processed through one center only (typically the intellectual center).

An esoteric teaching is a foundational spiritual truth of any degree of subtlety or abstruseness received and processed through all three centers (and thereby permeable to and suffused by higher centers of wisdom and understanding).

Mesoteric is the path that runs between the two. It is how you get from here to there.

Let me try to illustrate by way of one of those notoriously hated gospel teachings, the much maligned John 14:6

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

At the exoteric level (one-centered processing), this teaching resounds as Q.E.D. exclusionary. Jesus is saying that his teaching is the only game in town, “my way or the highway.”

At the mesoteric level, the word “way” suddenly pops out. You begin to hear, “I am a path; walk me.” This “way” is no longer a set of propositional statements that the mind is expected to give its consent to; it is a way: a set of practices, attitudes, behaviors that begin to lay down new neural pathways connecting brain and heart. You may notice as well that the implicit “only” that was screaming so loudly at the exoteric level suddenly goes silent. You realize that Jesus is not saying “I am the ONLY way to get there;” he is simply offering a sturdy, trustworthy way, supported by his own presence. Start walking on this path, and it will eventually get you where you want to go.

At the esoteric level, all three of your centers are online and connected: prepared, finally, to receive the insights that begin to drop like trapeze artists into the awaiting net of your prepared lower centers. And in that moment the insight may finally dawn that all true paths are in each other. It doesn’t matter whether you start from Sufism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, Buddhism, from silent contemplation or robust inquiry, all true pathways lead through that same eye of the needle and bootstrap each other from that same higher truth they all bear witness to. Rather than being exclusionary, this small gospel teaching, when read with the eye of the heart, turns out to be the most inclusive of them all. “Just start,” it says, “Begin anywhere, on any path, and if it is truly a WAY, it will lead you there.

What has changed in this teaching across the levels? Absolutely nothing. Not a single word. The only difference is in how you hear it.

In my own life, that mesoteric watershed was finally crossed when I met up with Centering Prayer. Up to then I had been a slowly emerging Episcopal scholar-priest for more than a decade, peddling what I would call “high-end Christian exoteric teaching of a liberal-progressive slant.” Centering Prayer, with its simple, quiet patterning into my bones of the basic gesture of “letting go” (or as Thomas Keating delicately put it, “Taking a brief vacation from yourself”) allowed me to taste spiritual surrender from a moving center perspective—which in turn finally convinced me of the abundance of freedom and safety that lay in wait for me there. I relaxed, took a deep breath, and stepped deeper into my own being.

A parallel mesoteric awakening awaited me in the Gurdjieff Work the first time I stepped onto the movements floor. The thick curtains of intellectual abstraction that had thus far been my entire experience of the Work suddenly parted and I stood alone on the empty stage of my heart, surrounded only by a vast cosmic tenderness suffusing everything.

Thomas Keating took a lot of flak for tossing Centering Prayer indiscriminately into the hands of “ordinary lay people.” In the monastic contemplative tradition he had been formed in, contemplation was the holy of holies, the Eagle Scout of contemplative prayer. It was definitely the “esoteric” of the Christian monastic path, well-hedged by those familiar esoteric safeguards: an aura of hiddenness and a palace guard to protect it. Casting tradition to the wind, Fr. Thomas recognized that contemplative silence was not the apex but in fact the watering ground of all contemplation: the missing “way” that would let it grow from mere “mental prayer” to a genuine encounter with the infinite. His divine hunch launched a movement that by now has midwifed tens of thousands of budding mesoteric Christians, steadily growing in wisdom and understanding toward an authentic esoteric reclamation of the Christian faith.

In the same way, responsible spokespersons for the Gurdjieff tradition rail at the thought of upsetting the applecart of the traditional formality and sequencing of their formation program by throwing people directly and right off the bat into the real mesoteric elements in their tradition: the exercises and the movements. But it is right here—and not in the endlessly exoteric reading groups and study groups —that moving and emotional center get lurched suddenly online as the Work loses its tough intellectual carapace and begins to reveal the soft and tender heart quietly beating within it, lying in wait like those five loaves and two fishes for its full alchemical activation through a more widespread sharing.

For years (decades, in fact), as a loyal foot soldier along the path to inner awakening I gritted my teeth against those stories of spontaneous spiritual enlightenment. From Buddha under his Bodhi tree to Eckhart Tolle on his park bench in Vancouver, the literature abounds with stories of instant and permanent self-realization. Suddenly the clouds part, the heavens open, and one simply sees. Mu!!, as they call it in Buddhism—spontaneous, full-spectrum nondual awakening. But for myself, I could no more make this Mu moment happen than I could flap my arms and fly over the moon. The more I squinted to see, the more cramped and fragmented the view became. However sincerely I wanted to “mu,” I continued to quack.

Gurdjieff, at least, offered me a quantitative analysis of the conundrum in his teaching—and in that, a potential way forward. According to his teaching, human intelligence is in fact three-centered. Like a tripod, our human minds consist of three legs of perception, three discrete systems of intelligence: the “intellectual center,” “emotional center,” and “moving center.”

Intellectual center is our thinking brain; its skills are planning, conceptualization, symbolic logic, rumination, and self-reflection. Emotional center is our feeling brain. It explores the world through sympathetic vibration—i.e., the ability to entrain with another vibrational field (be it a fellow human being, a tree, or a rock), and hence to know that other field from the inside. Moving center is our sensing brain; it explores the world through rhythm, sensation, gesture, and mimicry. It’s the brain you use to stack wood, ride a bicycle, ski down a hill, learn a foreign language, or understand why self-surrender is an act of spiritual strength, not weakness.

Now here’s the quantitative part: According to Gurdjieff, all three brains must be “online” and in conscious communication with one another in order for a subject to qualify as awake. Anything less—no matter how brilliantly or passionately any one of these brains may be performing as a solo agent —the net result is sleep. Brilliant, impassioned sleep, quite possibly. Perhaps even “enlightened” sleep. But still sleep.

Over the years, three-centered awareness has proven to be my single most important takeaway from the Gurdjieff Work. The training to get there was brutal; I fought the gift all the way. I would be holding forth voluminously during some group discussion circle about a philosophical nuance I was trying to make, only to be interrupted by some senior group member: “And where are your feet?” I thought it was rude. I didn’t yet realize that they were actually directing me toward that proverbial first footstep that would actually launch the journey of a thousand miles.

Forget all those fantasies of spontaneous enlightenment, I slowly realized. Forget trying to figure out whether it is by grace or by works. Here—in this moment—I could empirically ascertain whether my three-centered awareness was out of balance (it nearly always was) and make a quick course correction by simply bringing attention to an underutilized part—in my case, not surprisingly, the feet. Instantly I felt more contained, more rebalanced, and could begin to regroup from a slightly more spacious center that I could dimly sense growing in myself. It was a small step, but it was at least something I could do. The duck could not yet “mu,” but it could at least begin to quack like a real duck, not a bovine wannabee.

I am not trying to set the Gurdjieff teaching on some pedestal here; like all spiritual teachings it has its strengths and weaknesses. I am sharing this reflection with you now because of the light it sheds on the topic we’ve been circling around these past few posts: question of “secret” or esoteric teaching and the appropriate protocols that need to be observed around them. Once these two key affirmations are in place—that there actually is a path to be tread, a way to get from here to there; and that this “way” has to do not so much with revealing increasingly more abstruse levels of information (the processing of which would chiefly involve the intellectual center), as with deepening and attuning the centers so that they can actually “run” the “enlightenment” program—then the spiritual journey begins to take on a whole new configuration. And the question of what constitutes an esoteric teaching can begin to be seen in a whole new light.

“Wachet auf,” y’all! Let the grand season of enlightenment be underway. G.I. Gurdjieff and J.S. Bach wish you a Happy Awakening!

🎵Bach - Cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme BWV 140 - Van Veldhoven | Netherlands Bach Society

That is the unanimous testimony of the esoteric teaching itself, spoken or alluded to in so many different ways. Strewn throughout the gospels both canonical and so-called “gnostic” are those constant reminders: to wake up, lighten up, be vigilant, be alert to the sudden onrush of the awakening moment. From the Gospel of Thomas: “Pay attention to the one in the presence before you, and all that is hidden will be revealed.” From the Gospel of John, in Jesus’s own words: “There are many more things that I could tell you, but you would not be able to bear them” —and a teaching un-borne remains a teaching unborn. The limiting factor lies not in the teaching itself, but in our capacity to receive it, integrate it—embody it—and ultimately, to act out of it with inner unanimity and force. The line of demarcation between exoteric and “esoteric” runs straight down the center of our being.

“As your being increases, your receptivity to higher meaning increases; as your being decreases, the old meanings return.” So states Maurice Nicoll, one of the first generation students of the Gurdjieff Work. Not only in the Work, however, but across a far broader spectrum of Wisdom teaching, it is widely acknowledged that we human beings in our usual state of consciousness come with two fundamental liabilities: (1) Our attention is scattered; we are all over the map, weathercocking between conflicting self-images and obligations. (2) We not only assent but actively collude in keeping ourselves in the dark about the inner fragmentation and cacophony that we proudly call our “waking consciousness.” To the extent to which we remain unaware of our inner dividedness, we provide esoteric teaching with its ready-made bodyguard: our own sham sense of “selfhood,” the conviction that there is a stable “I” at the helm in control of all of this. That phony I is the real gatekeeper. To the extent that it is in charge, nothing of real spiritual substance will penetrate.

The most profoundly transformative teachings of the gospel are not hidden. There are no gatekeepers. They are not reserved to some secret initiatic circle. They are right there in plain sight, unveiled and unequivocal:

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

He who would save his life will lose it, and he who will lose his life will save it.

The last shall be first and the first shall be last.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

But who among us is able to live them? They bounce off us as imperviously as raindrops off an oilskin parka until such time as something more fundamental—not an infusion of more advanced information, but a cavitation of the heart in sudden despair or remorse—briefly opens up that proverbial crack in which the light gets through.

“……Gurdjieff’s Secret Exercises.”

That’s how one of our Substack readers named it in the thoughtful comments following my last post. I had tried to be a bit more evasive, speaking about “unpublished,” “private,” or “controlled access.” She cut to the chase immediately.

So this officially opens up the larger issue we’ve all been dancing around—and which I admit, has been a longtime fascination of mine: the prominent place accorded not only in the Gurdjieff tradition but in nearly all spiritual traditions to “secret” teachings.

But what exactly is a “secret” teaching? What makes it secret? What purpose does it serve? Who benefits from this purpose?

When we hear the term “secret teaching,” what commonly comes to mind is “secret knowledge.” We picture it as privileged information—a more advanced level of teaching intentionally withheld from the beginners and conferred (most often initiatically) upon those deemed to be at a higher degree of spiritual proficiency. “Secret teachings” are hence the functional equivalent of “esoteric teachings,” that body of knowledge reserved for those at the top of their respective spiritual ladders. The Gospel of Thomas, flagship of the so-called early Christian “gnostic” writings recovered in the Nag Hammadi Desert in Egypt in 1945, unabashedly announces itself as a collection of the “secret sayings of Jesus,” making no bones about its esoteric pretenses. But frankly, the canonical gospels play right into this same dichotomy in their repeated emphasis that Jesus teaches “the crowds” only indirectly (through stories and parables), but to his disciples he reveals the full story. The crowds get 2 + 2 = 4; the inner circle gets calculus.

And that’s really the heart of it, isn’t it? The real “privilege” conferred by this privileged information is the privilege of power, the privilege of admission to the inner circle.

In recent decades the climate in progressive Christian theology has taken an increasingly hard-nosed look at the symbiotic relationship between secrecy and power. Whose purposes, indeed, do secrets serve? Those initiated into the inner circle, of course, but even more so those doing the initiation in the first place. Not only do secret teachings benefit the inner circle; they in fact create the inner circle. As soon as you create secrets, you immediately create a rudimentary caste system: inner and outer circles, initiates vs. uninitiated, disciples vs. “crowd.” In the process, you also create ritual—some sort of formal initiatic ceremony marking admission into the inner circle. And you create priests and gatekeepers to enforce the rules.

In other words, secret teachings function primarily to define and enforce the cult. Under the pretense (no matter how sincerely believed and altruistically enacted) of arrogating to itself the right to determine who is ready to “receive” the secret, the cult winds up controlling all the access routes.

So goes the contemporary argument, and I know from your posts that many of you out there are deeply sympathetic to it. And clearly this most recent kerfuffle we’ve been exploring—the growing public demand for more open access to the Gurdjieff “secret” exercises and the predictable consternation caused by its primary gatekeepers in the Gurdjieff Foundation—is in most ways a textbook enactment of exactly this scenario, its gatekeepers predictably in full defensive mode, as if forgetting the fundamental tenet of their cult’s own foundational Law of Three: that once the cat (a.k.a., “Holy Affirming”) is out of the bag, “Holy Denying” will never in the end be able to hold the floodgates against the force of the New Arising. The only way out is through.

In the end, however, I do not fully buy into this somewhat mean-spirited deconstructionist argument. Committed pilgrim that I am along the Ray of Creation, I know in my bones that hierarchy is not entirely rooted in power and domination, nor is cult simply a sleazy euphemism for institutional gatekeeping. That is another well-intended but metaphysically naive half-truth. There is a natural hierarchy to the structure of reality as it moves from inaccessible light to concrete manifestation, and at each station along the Ray of Creation there is a legitimate and truthful balancing of the tension between these contrary tendencies. In the end, this natural affinity between gnosis (the traditional designation in the Christian esoteric tradition for secret or privileged understanding) and cult (its institutional gatekeepers) is legitimate and in its own strange way even holy. To dismiss it out of hand simply because it tends to get tangled up all too easily in power and domination issues throws out the baby with the bathwater. There is something here that we need to be paying more attention to, listening into with what St. Benedict calls “the ear of the heart.” There is tension here, for sure, but the challenge is not to eliminate it by repudiating the whole set-up, but to navigate it by learning to ride the tension creatively.

As it turns out, the missing third force in this equation is right there where it’s been all along, coiled in that slippery little word “gnosis.” It does in fact mean “knowledge” and even “higher knowledge, but to argue from this that higher knowledge is therefore “secret” or that it needs to be protected (either to preserve its purity or to protect those not ready to bear its full force) is a serious misunderstanding of the ways of Wisdom. Real esoteric secrets do not need protecting; they have their own inbuilt camouflage: They hide in plain sight. They cannot be revealed before their time is ripe, nor can they be hidden once their moment has arrived. For the totally unexpected power they confer is not ultimately the information itself, but the inner capacity to receive and integrate it. Until that time, it is all playing ring-around-the rosy, and whether the rules of the game are imposed by external gatekeepers or internal ones makes no real difference. At the moment that “secret” morphs into “yes, I see!” the door opens and the new initiate walks through.

In five years of working with this exercise, I never once heard that this body rotation (at least as originally presented by Gurdjieff during his Paris wartime group meetings) was normatively accompanied by the prayer, “Lord, have Mercy,” or that the limbs were intended to serve as “accumulators” for the energy of this very same quality of Mercy, plentiful in the atmosphere around us: the free gift of a benevolent God to build up our strength and resilience for the formidable task necessarily placed on our human plates.

I learned these additional details only when a copy of the Daumal Exercises came my way in 2021, more than thirty years into my engagement with the Work.

Why had this rather important information not been disclosed to me? Granted, I was an outlier in the Work; what might have been being revealed to those who lived close at hand and could participate in the full weekly program (discussion groups, study groups, work groups, movements), would no doubt have been more extensive. Perhaps it was thought that I was not yet ready. Perhaps it was the marked tendency in the Foundation groups to transpersonalize everything, talking endlessly about “finer energy” and “finer attention”—anything but God! Or perhaps it was thought that somehow I would eventually make the connection on my own, and that it would be more valuable that way, emerging from my own being and not somebody else’s “formatory” knowledge. But somehow in five years (or twenty-five!) the connection never got made. Perhaps I was just dull.

I do not in this post intend to talk about Gurdjieff’s deep Christian mystical devotion and insight, a fact that seems to have been consistently downplayed by first generation Work teachers. I have explored this topic in other places, most recently in the paper I presented at the Gurdjieff International Conference in Armenia last September. That paper is available online for those interested, and a published copy will eventually be forthcoming among the proceedings of that Armenia conference.

My point here is much more immediate. It has to do not so much with what scholarship has discovered or confirmed here, but with the crucially helpful role that scholarship has to play in bringing fresh insights and important correctives to the received “orthodox” version of the Work (i.e., The Work as it understands itself within the cultic tradition within which it was originally transmitted.)

It would be overstated in the extreme to compare the rediscovery of the Daumal collection of exercises to the recovery of the “Nag Hammadi” codex with its treasure trove of so-called “gnostic gospels.” But I think it would not be out of place to compare it, cautiously, with the recovery of a single such recovered text—say, the Gospel of Thomas. This was a gospel which was known to have existed, but for which all traces seem to have been lost for more than 1500 years. When it was finally recovered in 1945, the work began in earnest of rolling out accurate transcriptions and critical scholarly commentaries on this primary Wisdom text. The overall impact has been to significantly shift our understanding of Jesus—who he was, how he taught, what his central preoccupations were—not only from a scholarly perspective, but within the cult as well. It has been a core text coming from outside the cult— not from within its devotional and theological presuppositions. It provides what Jean Gebser would call an apersectival second line of bearing on the standard version of the story, which somehow always winds up getting held a bit too preciously from within the tradition itself.

In the Foundation tradition taking shape under Jeanne de Salzmann in the years following Gurdjieff’s death, the exercises were never written down. They were introduced within well prepared and well vetted groups, with a pedagogical emphasis on a finer attention/sensation, and independent questing and discovery. The conscience-driven, socially engaged, collective aspects of the original Gurdjieffian teaching were intentionally muted—precisely the dimension at the forefront during Gurdjieff’s wartime years in Paris, as he labored with a superhuman intensity to feed the hungry around him (grain and supplies, wangled on the Black Market, were always available in an unlocked back pantry at his small apartment, no questions asked.) Meanwhile he was leading those willing and able on a full-immersion crash course in how to directly transmit and transfer what I would call “kesdjan energies” (emanating from World 24 and higher)—such as Faith, Hope, Love, and—yes, Mercy—to a planet literally staving for the lack of these nutrients.

To recover this unusual collection, then—the most extensive collection of exercises ever written down and available for inspection—literally creates a “Gospel of Thomas” moment for the entire Work, a chance to reappraise, to grow, to adjust self-image where needed, and to truly help create a collective new DO as the Work rises like a phoenix from its recent decades of solipsistic ashes to step forward once again in a world requiring objective knowledge and objective conscience in a way not called upon of us before, at least in the nearly 80-year-span of my own Baby Boomer life.

I have no interest in pointing fingers here. I have come to see that ALL cultic groups formed around a charismatic teacher (be it G.I. Gurdjieff or Thomas Keating) are to some degree blindsided by the very intensity of their devotion to their founder. It is the nature of cultic tradition that it is impossible to truly see objectively from the inside; the very energy that could be deployed for clarity is instead claimed by guru-reverence as idolatry becomes the inevitable shadow companion of devotion.

Rather than trying to deny or justify this lawful human limitation, it seems better simply to set a good strong backfire with the assistance of responsible scholarship. True, “inside the cult” people (at least the Gurdjieffian cult) may claim that this is an inferior kind of knowledge, intellectual-center driven only and hence a cheap simulacrum of the authentic impartiality they prefer to cultivate along the rarified paths of BEING. But when it comes to third force, a good backfire can do the trick, and what will emerge—through bearing with each other and with the process patiently—will be the authentic New Arising that might just set the whole thing moving forward again in the right direction for our own time and place.

This is my deepest hope as I engage in my own modest incendiary efforts: not to burn down anybody’s house, but to help tend the backfire from which the phoenix will ultimately arise.

The rules were clear: no pens; pencils only. No food. No photocopying (most pages were too fragile to take that treatment), clean hands. No photographs. No noise. A quiet spirit of contemplative reverence gently suffused the room as the scholars du jour worked with remarkably old, faded tomes connecting our present time and place with a history that sometimes seemed almost as ancient as the tree of life itself. These were not manuscripts; they were time capsules, each one a tiny bead on the flowing abacus of time.

The passing years have dulled that memory, replacing it with the the much livelier and less rarified sounds of family life in rural Pennsylvania, and then in coastal Maine, where beneath the constant whirr of diesel engines and flapping sails, it is all too easy to forget that bygone era of my life….

Until suddenly, the Daumal collection of Gurdjieff exercises showed up quietly on my radar screen about four years ago. It wasn’t even that I’d gone out of my way looking for it; my colleague Joseph Azize had been slipped a copy of a transcription of this manuscript made some years back by a senior person in the Work who had apparently happened on this “cahier d’exercices” randomly sequestered among the literary papers of Vera Daumal and thought the contents were interesting enough to make a very limited transcription for a few other senior people in the work. To the best of my knowledge, the exercises in the collection have never been systematically worked on by a standing contemporary Fourth Way group—at least, not en bloc, in this particular, concentrated format. Some of the individual exercises were of course already familiar to students of the Work, having been taught and passed on in slightly variant versions by Jeanne de Salzmann as well as a number of Gurdjieff’s other students. But there is no continuous pedagogical tradition attached to this body of material so far as I can tell, beyond what is suggested in the original delivery itself. I would be happy to stand corrected on this point.

How the collection made its way to the Bibliotheque Doucet is still not entirely clear. Vera Daumal, widow of the writer Rene Daumal (of Mount Analogue fame), was an established literary presence in her own right, and the bulk of the Daumal collection, is, as one would expect, a collection of her miscellaneous unpublished short writings and correspondence. But the Daumals were also committed Parisian wartime students of Gurdjieff, and before Rene’s passing in 1944, Gurdjieff evidently conscripted Vera to make rough notes of the experimental exercises he gave to at least the advanced group she participated in over a period of several years. The transcribed version dates the material contained in this particular manuscript as 1938-45, but that is clearly an editorial interpolation in the transcription, not replicated in the actual manuscript itself. The few dates specifically noted in the exercises themselves all fall between 1943 and 1945 and can be readily collated with discussions of these same exercises in the 1943 and 1944 Paris group meetings. The last specifically dated item I discovered in this particular collection was a movements exercise given by Jeanne de Salzmann in 1951, two years after Gurdjieff’s death. Vera Daumal herself died in 1963; the Bibliotheque Doucet collection lists the original date of acquisition of this manuscript as 1987.

The date at which the transcription was made, according to a reliable source within the New York Gurdjieff Foundation group, was, to the best of his recollection “about four or five years ago”—i.e., circa 2020 or 2021. He emphasized that this had been a private transcription, for the transcriber’s own use, not for general group usage, let alone wider circulation. Again, there is little evidence of an ongoing engagement with these exercises (as presented in this manuscript) among the various Foundation groups. Among the rank and file, there seems to be very little awareness that this collection even exists, let alone any demonstrated interest in pursuing it further.

For a period of time shortly after our own experimental group (see my last Substack post) had begun its hands-on work with the transcription, there were reports that the manuscript was no longer in the Doucet collection, if it in fact had ever been. Joseph Azize’s early efforts to access the manuscript ran into a brick wall, with the head librarian at one point querying him directly, “Sir, are you sure that this document is in the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet?” Whether that was simply a failure to push hard enough or some brief lacuna instigated by whomever and for whatever reasons, the problem no longer exists; the manuscript is indeed in its rightful place (once you know where to look for it), accessible for examination by qualified scholars—in other words, business as usual. A most helpful librarian and staff went out of their way to get me set up with the web links that would navigate me to the correct place in the manuscript’s cataloguing data and eventually to the rare book room of the Bibliotheque Jacques Doucet, where the manuscript was already laid out and awaiting me when I stepped across the threshold into that familiar “other world,” now come full circle more than a half century later. I do not need to tell you the profound sense of deja vu that washed over me. Somehow I knew I had been born for this moment.

Nor do I need to tell you, I trust, how radically this changes the ballpark. To have clearly, transparently available—even if only for scholarly examination—the most extensive collection of Gurdjieffian exercises ever heretofore assembled creates whole new concentric rings of information and insight. The implications for students of the Work are immediate and obvious; if anything, they are even more portentous for scholars. For as one really begins to dig into these exercises (a terrain formerly accessible only from within the Work), they radically upend much of our traditional take on Gurdjieff’s religiosity, the extent and subtlety of his Christian mystical insight, and the center of gravity of the Work itself. As in that famous Old Testament story of King Josiah, who weeps in remorse upon accidentally discovering the long-lost book of the Law as he suddenly grasps how far things have wandered off the mark…. well, yes, these exercises do re-establish a benchmark of sorts; perhaps they even invite us, should we feel so moved, to offer up those same tears on behalf of the Work itself.

The reasons being offered were slightly different, of course. The one felt strongly that “some unpublished material is better left unpublished”; that there is impropriety if not outright danger in making essentially high-voltage esoteric material heretofore transmitted under tightly controlled conditions more widely available.

The other took a different tack. Why call attention to this particular collection of exercises? Why single this one out? There were so, so many exercises over the decades, given in so many variant versions to so, so many different students, that to call singular attention to this small sampling of exercises given and written down under somewhat atypical Work conditions, misrepresents both the nature of the exercises and the classic transmission pedagogy of the Work itself.

Neither of these arguments is lacking in merit, but I believe that neither are any longer in and of themselves sufficient to carry the day.

To begin with, by no means all (or even a majority) of the exercises in this collection are in fact “high voltage esoteric material.” Most cover basic Kesdjan operational skills—breathing, mixing, pouring, sending, forming a web, becoming aware of the subtle currents already flowing through one’s body and how to be more precise in directing them—all resting on a solid and respectful foundation of Orthodox liturgical prayer (the Trisagion and the “Lord Have Mercy”), with reminders strewn throughout of the need for personal humility and devotion. Very little here upon which to construct a Nietzschian superman. With the right kind of guidance the bulk of the exercises in this collection can be readily shared with advancing Work students, even with well-prepared beginners with a basic spiritual practice under their belts.

More to the point, however: We, too, are living in exceptional times—not unlike the times in which these exercises were originally given; if anything, even a recapitulation and intensification. Once again the ugly face of totalitarianism and the collective insanity of “reciprocal self-destruction” threatens the image of humanity and seriously disrupts our human capacity to play our appointed part in maintaining the dynamic equilibrium upon which the overall stability of the Megalocosmos depends—by now, further eroded by an additional nearly hundred years of tampering with the inner fastnesses of things with our insatiable human cleverness and pride. In Nazi occupied Paris, Gurdjieff stood his ground, gathered his students and unabashedly led them on a seven-year total immersion course on growing their second bodies—so that they could be of some real use to the world; so that they could see and do, not merely emote and fantasize. So that they could act, not simply manifest, as he puts it in his exercises, the backbone of his transformational program.

A second body is not simply a merit badge one attains in the course of a long and leisurely search for “personal self-realization.” It is our essential instrument for navigating the mi-fa gap, the crucial shock point in the Ray of Creation of which we human beings are, like it or not, the appointed bookends. Gurdjieff did not mince words about his expectations, or the gargantuan challenge he was taking on, namely, to midwife human beings with an unshakable moral compass combined with the technical proficiency to participate consciously in rigorous subtle body exchange: within one’s own body, among other human beings, between the realms, between the living and the dead. Nothing less will truly serve when our planet itself is on the line.

I will not in this post fill in the details of how an authorized transcribed copy of this Daumal collection of exercises happened to fall into my lap about four years ago. For now, let’s simply say that the transcription arrived unsolicited on the doorstep of a colleague of mine, who instantly recognized the value of what he was seeing and called together a small experimental group to work our way sequentially through all 88 of them. I was invited to be a part of that group. That project occupied the better part of three years, pushed us to the wall more than once, and left every one of us deeply moved and forever changed. While a few of these exercises were known from elsewhere and even previously cited in published works, the majority were new to all of us, or filled in huge pieces of exercises we had previously only known in fragments. While our pace was perhaps a little more breakneck (by about half) than the original rate of delivery, nonetheless, a cross-comparison with several unambiguous references to certain of these exercises in the corresponding volumes of Paris group meetings for 1943 and 1944 suggests that our own pace was perhaps closer to the spirit of this original than the private and “customized” way exercises have tended to be delivered in subsequent decades of Foundation curacy. There was clearly an intensity to this transmission, if not in fact an urgency. The times demanded it.

Sometimes, Karl Popper once famously remarked, truth arises more swiftly out of error than out of confusion. The outcome of the meeting was bitterly disappointing to me, but my consolation prize was at least a certain lucid clarity. The Foundation is not in any significant way going to break new ground, shift course, or budge an inch from its accustomed modus vivendi. In that respect, my mission was a total failure. The door, for now, remains firmly closed.

In an insightful and strangely synchronous recent post in his own Substack series, however, my longtime Gurdjieffian colleague Lee van Laer commented to the effect that the Work basically contains its own mainspring. If it is kept artificially repressed like a Jack-in-the-Box, it will eventually boomerang forth and regather its own teaching around it. Time will tell. I have my own intuition that these exercises have not just randomly popped back into public attention at this particular point in time; there is a higher intelligence at work here that will eventually have its way. Meanwhile, the situation is stable. The Daumal collection is safe and accessible in the Bibliotheque Doucet, open for inspection five afternoons a week by qualified scholarly parties. I have held it in my own hands now and can personally attest to its existence, as well as its infrequent but sometimes significant discrepancies with the transcription we all originally worked with. The way is clear for both scholars and committed practitioners to dive deeper into this World 12 treasure—in a real way Gurdjieff’s parting love song to our broken and battered planet—and find the strength and the tools with which to begin again.

Even in the fading sunset light, before my eyes had adjusted, I could tell by the palpable energy that surrounded me that this was pure “tendresse”—that signature Marian blessing upon a beleaguered world. Then I looked up and my eyes spotted the theotokos window….well yes, of course!! The Mercy herself, the “diffuse shining of God,” as Thomas Merton once called her.

I am increasingly persuaded that it is only a massive infusion of this Marian/Paschal energy from World 12—The Mercy, La Tendresse, absolute gentleness and self-oblation—that will save our world at this point.

But save us it will, if only we are willing and able to bear it.

“Bear” it not in the sense of “enduring it” or “putting up with it,” but in that signature Marian way: by giving birth to it, by making it fruitful.

We are to become midwives of the infinite, of “the love that moves the sun and the stars.”

In this tiny chapel with its perfect acoustics, alone except before infinite, I offered her hymn, the Gregorian Salve Regina, which for so many years I sang at Saturday night Vespers side by side with the monks at Snowmass. A gentle but strong sense that they were there too, those now gone beyond, those now scattered to other monasteries, but somehow all reunited in that precious timeless moment of the Mercy.

*** *** ***

Latin:
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae,
vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
ad te clamamus
exsules filii Evae,
ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia, ergo, advocata nostra; illos tuos
misericordes oculos ad nos converte;
et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.
O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.

English:
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;
to thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate,
thine eyes of mercy toward us;
and after this our exile,
show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

I’m wordless not for lack of impressions, but for the strength and fearsomeness of the impressions themselves. As Rilke puts it in the very first line of his Duino Elegies, “For beauty is only the beginning of a terror we can just scarcely bear.” Something like that. I am struck by an insistent synchronicity, at first an impression and then a solemn imperative, a hope that sears to the very marrow of your heart.

When this pilgrimage was first proposed well over a year ago, the watershed election had not yet happened in America. Fate still hung in the balance as Harris-Walz signs jousted with Trump-Vance ones in the dooryards of my neighbors all across Maine. And then the verdict that nobody quite believed would happen did happen, and the new regime rolled in like a steamroller, wasting no time onlining the script of terror and retribution that everyone thought was just an exaggeration. That was the Advent, I remember, when everything went dark. No Christmas carols, not even schlocky ones, resounded in the shopping malls as silence hung heavy in a sort of mute collective liturgy of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And then in a roar, like the Alberta clippers of January, it rushed down upon us shattering the eerie darkness, and nine months later, here we are. We set off on our pilgrimage, ironically, on September 11, against the Kafkaesque-backdrop of the Charlie Kirk collective histrionics dancing a mad dance of death on the bones of a country I had once recognized as my own.

The ostensible motive for this pilgrimage was to visit the place of Gurdjieff’s birth and subject ourselves to the influences that shaped his life in this still mysterious and little known ancient Christian nation. The two wings of the tour bookend a major international Gurdjieff Conference in Yerevan on September 18-20, at which I was to present a talk. I came to this adventure sensing vaguely that something would be demanded or given, but clueless as to what.

The trajectory of our pilgrimage headed north first, moving directly from Yerevan, where the international flights all come in, to Gyumri (formerly Alexandropol), the place of Gurdjieff’s birth and early years. From there we headed northeast in a great circle route that took us at its high point up the Debed river gorge, rushing downhill out of the mountains in the direction of Russia, the only exit to the north in this landlocked country.

As we travelled, I was more and more struck by the vibrational (as well as geographical) similarity between Armenia and Bhutan, another country of landlocked mountains, rushing escapes, and a mysterious destiny, apparently, to hold a very high vibrational note before the face of unspeakable human brutality. The Armenian share of this bearing over the centuries has been intense. Almost from the start this country has been locked in a series of alien invasions, occupations, and sporadic genocides, punctuated by natural disasters reaching all the way back across the timeless deserts of human history to Noah’s Flood. For this very early Christianized country (301 a.d.), it was a millennium of living with Muslim rule, then a 200-year shuttlecock between warring Ottoman and Persian Muslim factions. Armenians have watched their country partitioned, their language and customs destroyed, their pristine ecology savaged by the brutalism of Soviet Russia with its mechanized industrial farming and mining schemes. And somehow they have contained it, “pondering it,” like the Virgin Mary, in the cave of their collective heart.

“AIEIOIUOA….” Such a strange word Armenian native son Gurdjieff invented to describe the powerful linchpin of his transformational program: “remorse of conscience.” But that sound—fundamentally a mother’s wail at the death of her child,—haunted me throughout the trip; increasingly it furnished the aural landscape against which our outer travels unfolded. The cry of lament reverberating through the mothers at the slaughter of the Innocents, the three Maries at the tomb of Christ, the Pieta tenderly holding her crumpled son on her lap. It is the blood staining our broken human dreams, the love song constantly singing in the heart of this land, counterposed by a quiet resilience of the land’s people, drawing strength and forgiveness from the land itself, and from an intuitive faith in the goodness of some purpose we as humans are called to do in the midst of all of this.

You ask my most powerful impression of the trip so far? At about five at night, after a long day of touring monasteries and historic sites, we are deposited before the standing ruins of the little monastic church at Odzun. After an endless session of black basalt stone churches, this one was pink, glowing in the soft evening sun. Clear and uncluttered, the lawn still green and untrampled around it, it felt like an oasis. And so strangely silent. The other tourists had gone home, and we Wisdom pilgrims recognize silence we meet it.

And yes, Mary was present. How could she not be? Mary is all over Armenia; She is its quiet iconographic center. Herein this ancient Christian land the central altar crosses are not crucifixes with a writhing Jesus, as in the emotion-tossed West; they are theotokos, the bearer of the Logoic Christ, and Mary, the bearer of this suffering of our common Father, through which all things came to be. In this little ancient church the impulse was particularly strong, since this sanctuary was refashioned from a church even two centuries earlier, and contained at its heart a 4th century bas relief of certainly one of the earliest theotokoi, a mother and wise man-child, fruitful in that Aieioiuoa, forgiving all, holding all.

I had not realized this was an anonymous Our Lady Site, unnamed but every bit as powerful as Lourdes, Medugorge, Guadeloupe. All those more famous places. Our Lady of Odzun. And as I knelt, the prayer of anguish I brought silently in my own heart came tumbling out, as I prayed for my country, this golden-retriever pup of a country I have always smiled over, about to be initiated into a river of sorrow on whose banks the rest of the world has silently kept vigil throughout the centuries.

I do not know exactly what answer emerged. Maybe only a question, held deeper, a question that could only be lived in the remaining years of my life, my own personal stake in that Aieioiuoa. But it was a real encounter, a timeless moment at that wellspring of mercy. I emerged, tears in my face, still and quietened in the immense, sunset pink calm, and with a new resolve to somehow play my part, as have for all these centuries, these quiet Armenians whose company I now keep.

🎵 Listen now:

"I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death
but an infinite ocean of light and love
which flowed over the ocean of darkness.
In that I also saw the infinite love of God
and I had great opening…..”
-Paulette Meier

In chronological sequence (running clockwise around the perimeter of the circle), the steps are as follows:

1. kitchen ready for work

2. kitchen at work

3. raw food brought in

4. preparing the food

5. cooking the food

6. the community is invited to the table

7. serving the meal

8. eating the meal

9. completion of meal

But a closer look reveals how it’s the inner line that’s really directing the smooth unfolding of the process. In order for the kitchen to move from a state of readiness for work (point 1, re) to fully “at work” (point 2, mi) with the right utensils for the job properly laid out, you first have to have some idea of what the menu is and how the food is to be prepared. So you must first imaginatively visit point 4 (fa, preparing the food) in order to navigate point 2 successfully.

From point 2, the line shoots directly across the enneagram to point 8 (si, eating the meal). You are literally invited to “taste” the meal being eaten; this taste will then rightly order and integrate the remaining steps. From 8, the line doubles back to 5, sol, the actual cooking of the food (now fully informed by the “taste” of the finish), which in turn is informed by 7 (la, serving the meal), so that the steps required for the completion of each individual dish, sauce, or garnish are smoothly coordinated and the meal comes together as a whole. Once the meal has been served, the work of the kitchen is completed, and the pots and utensils can be cleaned up and returned to readiness (point 1, re), the completion of the inner line of action.

Remember that only the steps on the Law of Seven line (the zigzag) have solfeggio counterparts. Re-fa-mi-si-sol-la: this is the “music of the spheres” carved in time by the Law of Seven as it zigzags its way from alpha to omega, from intention to actualization. [Listen to it here]

What about points 3, 6, and 9, where the corners of the triangle intersect the circle? These are the three shock points. They are the places where a genuine infusion of new energy becomes possible as the “Seven” line comes into direct contact with the ever-creating and renewing Law of Three. These “liminal” points both invite and require a different kind of attention—a more conscious attention—in order to keep the overall process on course.

This is admittedly a very brief introduction to a very complicated topic, but in terms of the succession question, it does make very clear why the step from re to mi is so treacherous for most young organizations to navigate: because, as the old timers like to say here in Maine, “You can’t get from ‘he-ah’ to ‘they-ah.’” Not directly, anyway. The only way to arrive at mi is by way of fa. You first have to go over mi’s head, reconnecting directly with that original founding energy awaiting you at the first conscious shock point. What’s more, you have to reconnect with it in a very specific way, by doing the exactly counterintuitive thing: by “killing the Buddha,” not suckling on him or her for dear life. By breaking the maternal bond with the founding teacher.

The hard but necessary truth to be learned at the mi-fa shock point is (to borrow the words of contemporary Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly) that “Continuously renewed immediacy, not a receding memory of the Divine Touch, lies at the base of religious living.” The grieving disciples, their hearts breaking with love and gratitude for their teacher, must nevertheless learn to see past the shining visage of their realized master and draw their water directly from the living well— "from the future” as John Haught and others in the Teilhard de Chardin school of thought like to language it. But in fact, it’s not really the future; it’s a reconnection/re-attunement with the original do that launched the octave in the first place and holds it throughout its entire temporal unfolding. That’s what awaits us at the mi-fa shock point, if we’re alert enough to pick it up and brave enough to live it out.

That tight turn being successfully navigated, the inner line of action then returns to mi, but from above now, not from below. Instead of heaviness, there is plenitude, a strength and surefootedness that comes from truly knowing what one is about. Instead of that mechanical thickening of process and staff in the service of institutional survival, there is instead the economy of means that comes from selecting only those utensils truly necessary to prepare the food according to the chosen menu. Instead of looking nostalgically backward toward the re of the organization’s childhood, one looks ahead to the si of its full consummation: the actual tasting of the meal that was there all along in the original design, but which only now begins to lie within one’s institutional means.

Do not fear mi! Approached from the wrong side, it can be quickly lethal. But approached rightly, mi alone is the point that catapults the whole process straight across the enneagram—the boldest leap on the whole zigzag journey—from dream to reality, from the righthand side, the sphere of preparation, to the lefthand side, the sphere of actual doing.