George Gurdjieff, dance teacher

I distinctly remember the astonishment I experienced when I first read the books of George Gurdjieff. By the strength of influence, by the concentration of psychological truth in them, they are not comparable with any other psychological texts. Gurdjieff’s teaching is a reworking of Eastern esoteric knowledge about the human psyche. Not understood and underestimated by the psychology of its time, even now it does not fit into the scientific mainstream. But for me, this is the psychology that for 100 years has been striving to be expressed by Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Antonio Meneghetti.

The environment in which Gurdjieff grew up was a bizarre mixture of cultures and religions. Having not received a systematic education, from his youth he was looking for answers to “eternal questions”. These searches took him to the secret Sufi brotherhoods of the Hindu Kush and the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet; the route of his travels passed through Central Asia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, India, Palestine, Ethiopia, Egypt, Turkey. The seeker of truth returned to his homeland as a teacher.

Psychology is considered by Gurdjieff in the context of cosmogony; man (“miniature universe”) acts as a link in cosmic processes, and the link is largely imperfect. Ordinary people make up only a part of humanity, its outer, “exoteric” circle. As he gains inner unity, a person can move first into the “mesoteric”, and then into the “esoteric” circle of humanity.

Gurdjieff did not create a unified psychological doctrine (the credit for systematizing his ideas and ideas belongs to P. Ouspensky). Perhaps avoiding conceptual clarity, Gurdjieff tried to lead a person away from the mechanically superficial assimilation of his ideas in order to achieve a deep comprehension of them. Changing the whole system of values ​​and orientations of a person, this comprehension should lead to the renewal of life, which was the main meaning of Gurdjieff’s efforts.

Keys to Understanding

Achieve awakening

In Gurdjieff’s teaching, man appears as a being possessed by external and internal destructive forces. An ordinary person is in the captivity of mental dissociation: he is deprived of a true “I” and at the same time fenced off from reality by the fruits of his imagination and his habitual reactions to external influences. His usual wakefulness is a variant of the dream state, in which it is impossible to think or act for real. Gurdjieff knew how to touch his interlocutor to the quick, to find the main nerve of his interests, fears and desires. He sought to create a situation of tension in the conversation, so that the violation of expectations and the encounter with the unusual awakened conscience and consciousness – the two most important elements of truly human nature.

The student needs a teacher

A disciple is one who has had an “awakening” experience but is unable to move on on his own. The task of the teacher is to provide the student with the conditions for obtaining the experience of confrontation between the essence (his true “I”) and the personality (the totality of his “pseudo-I”). “Personality is an accidental thing,” Gurdjieff believed. – It’s like the clothes you wear; the result of your upbringing, the influences of your environment…” The teacher is the one who has subordinated his personality to his essence, has a true “I” and his own will. The teacher is a necessary condition for the inner development of the student. It involves overcoming such traits of the ordinary state as lying, dialectical thinking, excessive speaking, imagination, inability to love, and, finally, negative emotions. In his work with his students, Gurdjieff used, in particular, the enneagram

A new way of self-development

In opposition to the three traditional paths of self-development (the development of the motor-instinct center, or the path of the fakir; the development of the sensory-emotional center, or the path of the monk; the development of the rational-mental center, or the path of the yogi), Gurdjieff proposes a fourth path, in which the experience of inner realization is achieved not in due to the predominant development of one of the three mental centers of a person, as in the framework of traditional teachings, but thanks to the constant work of self-observation and self-remembering of one’s states. Its purpose is to perceive oneself as an arena of confrontation between personality and essence. An integral part of the method is dances and movements that help to enter a state of awareness and presence. Dancing promotes harmony between the inner centers of a person, maintains relaxation and vigilance at the same time. Learning dance is a journey to the essence, the center of one’s being.