In this, our nineteenth issue, we explore what it means to speak of the Gurdjieff teaching as an oral tradition. Looking at our teaching from this perspective has helped us to discover riches in the concept that go far beyond the everyday association of the phrase “oral tradition” with the act of communicating by word of mouth.
Richard Hodges compares Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. “Nietszche’s übermensch has usually been rendered in English as “superman,” but that term has connotations that do not correspond with Nietzsche’s thought. What he meant, I think, is that the New Man must rise above the unconscious addictions and beliefs inherited from millennia, see them for what they are, and become free of them, and that, with this freedom, he will be able to have powers of action in the world that man is meant to have. This is not so different perhaps than the project and the promise at the source of religious traditions, but without the accumulated baggage. Nietzsche’s idea is similar, I feel, to Gurdjieff’s idea of “man number four,” a man who is working to develop beyond what he is born as and what ordinary culture develops in him.”
Jeffrey Werbock, a performer of the Azerbaijani music known as mugham, looks into the method of transmitting ancient music from generation to generation. “Ancient eastern sacred music embodies a legacy of knowledge which can put us in touch with a current of energy that originated during an epoch when the transmission of wisdom was passed on exclusively in the oral tradition, with no coded symbols to intervene and insulate the listeners from the intent of the masters: transcendence.”
Jack Cain, a long time follower of the Gurdjieff teaching and a certified consulting hypnotist, explores the subject of our subconsciousness and its relationship to our work. “We are not accustomed to think of the work as belonging to the realm of the subconscious... Within the first 25 pages of his 1,200-page opus, Gurdjieff informs us that he will be speaking to both our consciousnesses. In his inimitable, provocative way, he says that our pure waking consciousness is fictitious and that our other consciousness which we call the subconscious is our real human consciousness.”
“After more than a half century since its conception, the very first Index to All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson is at last emerging from obscurity and making its well-deserved entrée into the literature relating to the Gurdjieff Work... Few people know about the first Index. Begun over 50 years ago, and published in mimeographed format, it was developed by Willem Nyland and his groups. For those who have had access to it, it has proven to be an invaluable help for studying Gurdjieff’s teaching.”
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