Abstract:
From his appearance in Moscow in 1912, the Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff created a unique contribution to Peace Studies discourse, obscured by second generation interpreters and derivative movements. Gurdjieff drew upon an extensive study of early neuro-physiology, hypnosis and religious traditions to construct a perspective (dubbed "the Work" or "the Fourth Way" by participants) on self-work and cultural recovery. His 'action research' was a precursor to the current interest in the Gaia hypothesis, memetics, ethno-political conflicts and transpersonal psychology. Gurdjieff's legacy offers a re-evaluation of the cultural history of Peace Studies and how contemporary activists can fall prey to group dynamics, technophilia, excessive role-identification and other forms of "consensus trance" (Charles T. Tart). Gurdjieff's techniques, in the tradition of Plato's cave allegory, offer contemporary peace activists an "unmasking psychology" to dis-identify from external events and attitudes, even when these "norms" are part of activist discourses.

I am not interested in who wins war. Not have patriotism or big ideas about peace. Americans with ideals, kill millions of Germans. Germans kill--with own ideals--English, French, Russian, Belgian--all have ideals, all have peaceful purpose, all kill.
~~ George Gurdjieff, Paris, 1944

Introduction: The Unknowable Gurdjieff?

The Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff has had an influential impact on transpersonal psychology, cosmology, and metaphysics through Jacob Needleman (Needleman and Baker, 1997), Charles T. Tart (Tart, 1986), Robert Fripp (Tamm, 1991), and many others. In this essay, I briefly examine Gurdjieff's contributions to peace studies: his model of cultural wisdom and self-work as a way to resolve ethno-political and identity-based conflicts; his astrobiological explanation for warfare causality; his 'action research' (Rothman & Olsen, 2001: 295) into the predictive modeling of revolutions and wars; and his transmission of Bektashi and Naqshbandi Sufi perspectives regarding macrohistory (Galtung and Inayatullah, 1997) and cultural recovery (Slaughter, 1995).

Gurdjieff's legacy has been obscured for many reasons. After his death in 1949, the Work split along denomination-like lines into the orthodox Gurdjieff International Review and heterodox Others. Some pupils became transfixed with their idee fixe at the expense of the whole picture (Patterson, 1997). For Alred Richard Orage it was the practice of self remembering; for Peter Damienovich Ouspensky the concepts of a fourth dimension and eternal recurrance; for John Godolphin Bennett, the deep religious sources of the Work (demiurgic/psychecentric intelligence) and the coming crisis for Humanity; for Maurice Nicoll, the revitalization of Gnostic Christianity. This fragmentation was the outcome of individual struggles, but from Gurdjieff's perspective, it diluted the power and effectiveness of the Work as a whole.

The Work was further obscured by personality cults such as Robert Burton's Fellowship of Friends (Renaissance), and identifications with Gurdjieff at the expense of his ideas. 'Pretenders to the Throne' hijacked the Work by bookmark 'viral marketing' and distorted the Enneagram psycho-spiritual tool into a marketing typology (Patterson, 1998). The vast Work literature emphasized 'psychologising' rather than Gurdjieff's complex cosmology and long-term views (Driscoll, 1985: xv-xxv). Second-generation interpreters 'read' Gurdjieff as a "giggling guru" (Leary, 1990) or "spiritual 'cyborg" (Lilly, 1972), embedding the Work within a Western techno-determinist framework and empirical-rational worldview (Davis, 1999: 132-137). While Gudjieff observed that "contemporary culture requires automatons" (Ouspensky, 1957: 309), this statement was a provocation to psychological evolution by "conscious labour and suffering voluntarily undertaken" (Zuber, 1980: 38), and not an endorsement of the dehumanising military-information systems (Levidow & Robins, 1989; Naisbitt, Philips & Naisbitt: 65-98) that he explicitly warned against (Gurdjieff, 1963: 192).

The most observable face of Gurdjieff's legacy is a 'super-psychology' (Anderson, 1962: 21) that transcended Behaviorism to anticipate Transpersonal Psychology. Peter Brook's film adaptation Meetings With Remarkable Men (1978), the extensive secondary literature, and the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music (Bambarger, 1999: 60) have had a small-scale cultural impact. Despite memorable descriptions by pupils, such as that "his impressive calm never deserted him" (Zuber, 1980: 2), Gurdjieff 'the man' has been obscured. "His path is not of this world, but through it," John Bennett observed (Bennett, 1973: 291), echoed by Henri Tracol's comment that Gurdjieff was a Master who "awakens those who themselves wish to wake up. He rouses them from their sleep, awakens them to Being, to reality, to Life." (Tracol, 1994: 111). Margaret Anderson was more cryptic: "But Gurdjieff is not only unknown. Perhaps he is unknowable." (Anderson, 1962: 6).

Gurdjieff's War on the False Self

Many of Gurdjieff's ideas have infiltrated popular culture, but through the wrong form. The Russian journalist and philosopher Peter Ouspensky described how Gurdjieff differentiated between three strata of influences: the desire for riches and fame; literature, philosophy, and religion; and the spiritual 'Path' or 'Way' (Ouspensky, 1957b: 21-22). Gurdjieff stressed the importance of exact language in transmitting ideas: "an inexact speech cannot serve an exact knowledge." (Gurdjieff, 1984: 60) Yet most language and philosophy--hence peace studies--was "based on associative thinking." (de Hartmann, 1983: 28). Self deception occurs when "one imagines something, then believes it and forgets that it was imagination." (Ouspensky, 1957b: 7). The fusion of imagination, associative thinking, human suggestion, and social roles (Ouspensky, 1957a: 239) contributes to "why no one understands anyone else." (Ouspensky, 1957a: 69). Because human memory was like "the coating of a recording tape", Gurdjieff warned of the epidemiological propagation of suggestion across our 'ecologies of mind'. Our beliefs and ontology can be penetrated, even if we are consciously aware this is happening (Gurdjieff, 1950: 262).

This hypnotic social trance--"a state of associative existence"--is why individuals don't have true self-agency: they are unable to 'do' (Gurdjieff, 1950: 70). Gurdjieff likened human existence to existing under laws: the Law of Accident ("when an event happens without the lines of the events we observe") (Ouspensky, 1957b: 89), the Law of Seven ("no process goes on in the world without interruptions") (Ouspensky, 1957b, 17), the Law of Three ("every phenomenon is the result of the combination or the meeting of three different and opposing forces") (Ouspensky, 1957a, 77), and the cosmological Law of Octaves ("each note of every octave appears, from another point of view, as a whole octave: the same was true everywhere") (Gurdjieff, 1984: 19). Gurdjieff also distinguished between 'having' and 'being' modes of existence, the "no-being-conscience" of fame (Gurdjieff, 1950: 1069), the "magnificent disease 'tomorrow'" (Gurdjieff, 1950: 363), and "buffers-of-prejudice" (Gurdjieff, 1950: 26).

Exposing the Unreality Industries

Gurdjieff reserved his most scathing critique for the early 20th century's Unreality Industries: the occult schools of Theosophy and Anthroposophy; and flourishing movements like Freudian psychoanalysis (Ouspensky, 1957a: 227-228; Gurdjieff, 1970: 26) that attracted early peace activists. He called these "workshops-for-the-perfection-of-psychopathism" (Gurdjieff, 1970: 22). The revered kundalini was really the "power of imagination and fantasy" (Ouspensky, 1957a: 220). These initiates were like "moving sources of an evil radiation" (Gurdjieff, 1981: 76). These 'pseudo-esoteric' schools (Ouspensky, 1957a: 314) were created when abstract imagination encountered the artefacts from truly esoteric and mesoteric schools (Ouspensky, 1957a, 310-11) and created cultural detritus. These schools flourished because although many people outwardly adhered to scientific positivist worldviews, they held several theories, searching for alternatives when life became too pessimistic (Gurdjieff, 1984, 71).

An example of Gurdjieff's technique to expose these societies was included in the portable mythos Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950), which used the conventions of early science fiction literature to attack pseudo-knowledge, satirized the foibles of the Western civilization and psyche, and developed deeper esoteric themes drawn from Sufi, Zoroastrian, Sumer, and Egyptian literature. Although he disliked 'bon ton' literature, Gurdjieff used this book to encode his worldview for future generations (Gurdjieff, 1950: 1072) and evaded the entropy that spiritual movements succumb to. He worked with a team of translators to create an outer layer of artificial language, often compared with James Joyce, which bypassed turgid intellectual thought to speak directly to the subconscious mind. Beelzebub's Tales was designed, through the visionary quality of speculative literature (Slaughter, 1995: 84-85) to compel a trans-valuation of all the reader's values: "it may destroy your relish for your favourite dish--your pet theories, for example, or that form of art you happen to follow." (Nott, 1961: 127).