Gurdjieff's astrobiological model of war causality was connected with his complex holonic cosmology of the universe (Gurdjieff, 1984: 19), depicted by his Law of Octaves. This aspect makes Gurdjieff "one of the inspirers of the ecological movement" (Zuber, 1980: 52), since Gurdjieff wrote of Heptaparaparshinokh: the Law of Reciprocal Maintenance between the world and humanity (Gurdjieff, 1981: 79). His ethics were comparable to Mahatma Gandhi: "Never must you offend one thing on earth. Even if you offend one worm-one day . . . one day . . . he will you repay." (Anderson, 1962: 34). Gurdjieff also anticipated James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's Gaia cosmology: "The evolving part of organic life is humanity." (Ouspensky, 1957a, 306).

The connection between Gurdjieff's cosmology ('reciprocal maintenance') and war was his notion that Earth was an "apparatus for transforming energy" (Bennett, 1973: 191), and that this energy could be created by self-striving or by death. Fritz Peters related that while Gurdjieff didn't explicitly condemn nuclear weapons, he hinted that "an impartial and objective Nature" was using natural events and humanity's self-destructive urges to solve overpopulation (Peters, 1978: 42). He likened humanity to being sheep, which Nature keeps. "But when it is hungry it kills a lot of them." (Gurdjieff, 1984: 198). This dark allegory highlights our lack of purpose: "that we kill one another aimlessly, without rhyme or reason." (Bennett, 1973: 267). Gurdjieff's self-Work was an escape clause from this manifestation of the Law of Accident: he made an oath "consciously to acquit myself with great nature." (Gurdjieff, 1981: 59).

Gurdjieff's 'Action Research': The Way of Golgotha

Gurdjieff's pedagogy revealed he had anticipated Kurt Lewin's 'action research'. He attempted to establish an Institute for Man's Harmonious Development in Russia, Turkey, Germany, England. He established the Institute at Fontainebleu in France and visited America. His secret aim was to study the 28 human "categories of types" (Gurdjieff, 1970: 22), but when his pupils were unable to overcome their ingrained cognitive defects (the 'Chief Feature'), Gurdjieff realised that his 'initiatory laboratory' would ultimately suffer the worst traits of 'guru' spiritual movements. He disbanded the Institute because his pupils had "automised themselves to a point of engaging upon authoritative discussions of all sorts of seemingly scientific, but for the most part, abstract themes." (Gurdjieff, 1970: 14).

The Institute succeeded, however, in providing a haven from the Bolshevik Revolution's maelstrom (de Hartmann, 1983: 58) for 200 people. Gurdjieff called this technique, which used the social upheavals created by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, the "Way of Golgotha" (Gurdjieff, 1963, 277). Ouspensky saw this as conveying specific ideas during historical times (1957b, 391), whereas historian James Webb thought it provided a proxemic environment to overcome "violent emotions" (Webb, 1980: 480). But Rene Zuber observed that Gurdjieff often provoked these situations himself to practice metis (Zuber, 1980: 15).

More successful was the 1918 expedition by the "International Idealistic Society" from Essentuki to the Caucasian mountain range (Gurdjieff, 1963: 276; Webb, 1980: 161). The expedition was an allegorical journey that created the external conditions for self-striving, and also a search for dolmens: heavy stone boxes that Gurdjieff thought "might have been road signs, showing the way to places of initiation." (de Hartmann, 1983: 72).

Cultural Recovery and High Civilizations

Take the 'wisdom' of the East and the 'energy' of the West and then seek.
~~ George Gurdjieff, Paris, 1921

Gurdjieff was deeply interested in archaeology, so he may have been searching for Paleolithic art that would signify Riane Eisler's Dominator/Partnership paradigm of societies (Eisler, 1995: 137) and the "patterns to these historic fluctuations." (Eisler, 1987: 135). Gurdjieff hinted throughout his allegorical writings that he was searching for palaeontology artefacts to recreate High Civilisations (Eisler, 1995: 79) and Wisdom Cultures (Slaughter, 1995: 156) in the future. Eisler contended that the Goddess-oriented Minoan-Mycenaean culture (Eisler, 1987: 36) which flourished during Crete's Middle Minoan period (Eisler, 1987: 30) was one example of an historical High Civilisation. Gurdjieff told his pupil Alfred Richard Orage that many key historical periods--"the building of the Gothic cathedrals, the Renaissance, Shakespeare's plays"--resulted from conscious humans who understood the flows of macrohistory and the principles of cultural recovery. Tracol observed that culture perpetuated itself by adaptation and renewal: it was becoming (Tracol, 1994: 40).