“I don’t pretend to understand George Ivanovitch,” said Ms. Ouspensky. “For me he is X.” It was January 1924 and her husband had just left Gurdjieff. Her departure, with the added warning to her students not to see or talk about Mr. Gurdjieff, highlighted the then perennial question: who was Gurdjieff? Many people have tried to answer that question, but in many ways it still is, and will continue to be, X. The reason has to do with scale. Attempts to see it invariably lower it both to the level of the inquiry and to that of the inquirer. In fact, more is known about Gurdjieff than any of the other seminal spiritual figures, but beyond a certain point one remains in question. Mrs. Ouspensky said, “It is useless for us to try to know him,” and while in the essential sense that is true, it is useful to keep going back to what we know about Gurdjieff’s life, because his life was a life. demonstration of someone who embodied and lived the teaching. In doing so, focusing on the facts and applying our reason to the point where intuition speaks, uplifting glimpses arise here and there.
The usual focus is on what an individual does, not what they don’t do. This is often overlooked, not as a result of a conscious decision, but because the approach itself is not considered in sufficient depth. To know what is left out, we must first know what is put in; but we get so focused and entangled with it that the question of what has been left out, what has been denied, never comes up.
Greek and Armenian ancestors
A notable example is the Gurdjieff legacy. That his father was Greek, his mother Armenian is well known. We know that his family suffered at the hands of the Turks and Kurds, but in none of his writings does he criticize them. He, too, expresses no personal grievance for the murder of his father. He, too, does not speak of the genocide of the Armenians, the people of his mother. Only when Gurdjieff tells us about the “skeletons” that arrived at his door in Essentuki in July 1918, does he give us an idea of what he felt. In February 1918 he had sent for his family in Alexandropol to come to him in Essentuki to escape the impending Turkish invasion. His mother, his brother Dimitri, and his wife, younger sister Sophie Ivanovna, and her fiancé Georgilibovitch Kapanadze came, but Gurdjieff’s older sister, Anna Ivanovna Anastasieff, had stayed in Alexandropol with her father, who refused to flee.
That May, with the advance of the Turks, she and her husband Fyodor and six small children fled, along with twenty-two other relatives, losing their home and country, and, cold and hungry, they walked barefoot over tortuous mountains. In mid-July, like skeletons, they arrived in Essentuki bringing the news of the assassination of Gurdieff’s father by the Turks. Said Gurdjieff: “The enemy, stronger and better armed than his own troops, will inevitably slaughter mercilessly and indiscriminately not only men, but also women, the elderly and children, as was the order of things there.”
Gurdjieff’s only reference to this persecution is in the “Armenian” chapter of Meetings with notable men. “The Aisors suffered greatly in the last war, having been a pawn in the hands of Russia and England, with the result that half of them perished in the revenge of the Kurds and the Persians…” In this chapter he also talks about the destruction by invasion and earthquake of Ani, the ancient Armenian city of churches, and then makes a curious statement, that this is the only time it has, or will take, “officially recognized information taking on earth.”
If we look at the ordinary information, one fact is obvious: after centuries of enduring murder and persecution by the Turks, the Armenians suffered two horrible genocides, first in 1895 and again in 1915-16, under a policy annihilation officer of the Turkish government. On April 24, 1915, during World War I, the Armenian Holocaust began. At that time, more than 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians and 400,000 Greeks had lost their lives.
We know that shortly after the 1915-16 genocide, from March to July 1917, Gurdjieff stayed with his family in Alexandropol and then went to Essentuki. The events of the Russian Revolution took a turn for the worse, in August 1919 Gurdjieff left his family in Essentuki and set out on the perilous journey of leading his students between the Red and White armies and then through the bandit-infested Caucasus Mountains. Arriving in Sochi, they took a boat to Poti and then went overland to Tiflis, where they arrived in January 1920. That Easter, Dimitri arrived in Tiflis to say that his mother, sisters, and their families had survived a harsh winter with famine and rampant typhoid fever. . In June, with the Red Army conquering the areas north of the Caucasus and threatening to take Georgia, northern Armenia, and Azerbaijan, Gurdjieff left for Constantinople, where he arrived in early July. Meanwhile, with her mother and her family in Essentuki, Anna and her family returned to Armenia. In November 1920, when the Turks invaded Armenia once again, Anna and all her family members were killed except for a son, Valentin, one of 30 people who escaped from 400 villagers.
No refuge in Turkey
In Constantinople, the Greeks were only marginally accepted, the Armenians not at all. Just five years earlier, most of the city’s Armenians had been sent to concentration camps to die or were driven to the desert where they were beaten to death. With what Gurdjieff called the “wisdom” of the “Young Turks” – Kemal Attaturk and other young military officers and reformers hell-bent on making Turkey a secular state – becoming more virulent, he says that since the situation began to “smell particular, I decided, without waiting for the various delights that were to develop in connection with these sages, to go out with my people as quickly as possible, with the whole skin”. Leaving for Europe in August 1921, the following year he was able to establish the Institute in France and bring his mother and the rest of his family to safety.
Years later, when living in France, Gurdjieff said that the Armenians were “a wonderful people of great antiquity. They had not allowed their country to be invaded by Western civilization. They kept their old ways, particularly the roots of their language, which was full of old sayings, old ways of the past, and this kept his people clean and free from the slime of the West.” Family was important to Gurdjieff and he understood the objective meaning of war and destruction. Alluding only to the immense suffering endured by the Armenian people, and the personal suffering he and his family endured, Gurdjieff never vilified the Turks. In the true Christian meaning, he turned the other cheek. Of this he said in Looking of the miraculous:
Suppose a man decides according to the Gospels to turn his left cheek if someone hits him on his right cheek. But an ‘I’ decides this either in the mind or in the emotional center. One ‘I’ knows it, one ‘I’ remembers it, the others don’t. Let’s imagine that it really happens, that someone hits this man. Do you think he will turn the left cheek? Never. He won’t even have time to think about it. He will punch the face of the man who punched him, or start calling a cop, or just run away. His motor center will react in its usual way, or as it has been taught to react, before the man realizes what he is doing.
It takes a long instruction, a long training to be able to turn a cheek, and if this training is mechanical, again it is worth nothing because in this case it means that a man will turn his cheek because he cannot do anything else.
Gurdjieff turned the other cheek many times in his life. As he said many times, “the outside plays a role, the inside never.”
This can be seen at the time of Gurdjieff’s death. When Attaturk and the Young Turks came to power in 1923, they immediately banned men from wearing the traditional fez and women from wearing the veil. Although outwardly dressed in Western clothing, Gurdjieff remained traditional. In 1949, dying of cancer, Gurdjieff was carried on a stretcher from his apartment to American Hospital. He was sitting down, smoking a cigarette, and on his head he was wearing a red fez.
Ratings
1. I do not pretend. JG Bennet, Witness, p. 158.
two. skeletons G. I. GurdjieffEncounters with Extraordinary Men, p. 278.
3. The enemy. Ibid., p. 278.
4. after centuries. Robert D. Kaplan, East to Tartary (New York: Random House, 2000); Christopher J.Walker, Armenia: the survival of a nation. rev 2nd edn (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
5. Take of. meetings, p. 88.
6. have a particular smell. Ibid., p. 283.
7. wonderful people. Cecil Lewis, All my years of yore: an autobiography (Rockport, Maine: Element, 1993), pp. 174-76.