What Part of “No” Do You Not Understand?”

Field Report #1 on the Paris Factfinding Mission

It was an ambush pure and simple, even though I didn’t initially catch the iron fist hidden in the velvet glove. But it shortly became clear to me that the two most senior people in the Gurdjieff Foundation were not about to break rank over my clearly (to their ears) arch-preposterous proposal that the Foundation step up to the plate and take the initiative in publishing a reputable scholarly edition and commentary on the 88 Gurdjieff wartime exercises quietly sequestering for nearly 40 years now among the papers contained within the Vera Daumal collection at the Bibliotheque Jacques Doucet in Paris. As the initial pleasantries quickly stonewalled, the one I was seated before studiously scrolling through the email chain sent to him on the subject by the other, I soon had the sinking feeling that I might as well have stayed on at Bonnevaux, where the late summer green fields and gentler contemplative silence at least allowed a small bit of breathing room. My presence at this Paris meeting was completely irrelevant.

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 The one felt strongly that “some unpublished material is better left unpublished”; that there is impropriety if not outright danger in making essentially high-voltage esoteric material heretofore transmitted under tightly controlled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.

Daumal manuscript

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.

DML Pp 5 (3) Cahier d’exercices