Hiding in Plain Sight

Secret Teaching or Secret-Keeping?

It’s time to speak directly about the elephant in the room.

“……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 I had tried to be a bit more evasive, speaking about “unpublished,” “private,” or “controlled access.”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.