Toward Awakening
Fremantle, Anne
Training of the inner life TOWARD AWAKENING Jean Vaysse Harper & Row, $3.95, 192 pp. Anne Fremantle FOR SOME twenty-five years—from 1924 to 1949—the teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff...
...This training of our inner life is "just as large as, if not larger than, the training necessary for our outer life...
...The first thing is selfobservation, which, if we don't tire of it, may develop into self-remembering — which is a state of presence to oneself and self-consciousness...
...Neither must be denied: the Gurdjieff teaching is far from Manicheanism, whether St...
...To be myself begins with self-knowledge...
...23 May 1980:317...
...He worked with the Paris Gurdjieff Groups and helped lead them through the 1960's, and his book was published in French shortly before his death...
...We can all start, at least...
...This was shot largely in Afghanistan, with the help of Madame de Salzmann, to whom, Jean Vaysse wrote, "we owe everything that has reached us...
...Thus three facts—man's forgetfulness of his real self (the one that wants to be) his fabrication of imaginative constructs, and his constant identification with everything that happens to him, get in the way of his possible development...
...In 1949 Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales and Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous were published around the time of Gurdjieff's death...
...Thus we call it spiritual even universal...
...Dr...
...Since Gurdjieffs death over a hundred books have been published dealing with the man and his ideas, and last year Peter Brook made and has shown worldwide a film based on Gurdjieffs Meetings with Remarkable Men...
...Unfortunately, for his daily life, man has "no need for this second awakening...
...We become taken—the Gurdjieff word is `identified' — with each problem, each interest, and, being entirely taken by exterior events, we lose sight of ourselves, and see only the image we have formed of ourselves, which is the most powerful `identification' of all...
...Or, as Jean Vaysse puts it, "We forget ourselves almost uninterruptedly...
...Eliot pointed out: "We know all the answers, it is the questions that we do not know...
...And why, indeed, should he undertake the difficult work on himself...
...The questions he asks are pertinent for all human beings: How can man go through life without questioning himself...
...These two can seem contradictory, but "It is obvious that each corresponds to one of our natures, and that a complete man must live both at the same time: they are his human nature...
...In us, things do themselves—speaking, laughing, feeling, acting—but they do it automatically, and we ourselves are not there...
...The Gurdjieff 'System,' as its adherents call it, is very tidy—Jean Vaysse even admits that its ideas "may at first seem to us rather arbitrary" — and in Toward Awakening (quite admirably translated) the various postulates are put forward clearly, concisely, and with logical progression from one premise to another...
...Vaysse starts with questions—for, as T.S...
...the moving, which allows the sensations of our body, and permits the body to do what is required of it, and the instinctive which regulates and "automatically maintains" our physical life...
...Fac ut videarn' the blind man said to Jesus, and this is the opposite of Pilate's "what is truth...
...Anne Fremantle FOR SOME twenty-five years—from 1924 to 1949—the teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and of his most famous pupil, P. D. Ouspensky, were transmitted orally, by them and others, to carefully selected groups of students...
...But Dr...
...Before we can hope for answers, there are certain basic necessities, of which the first requirement is to see...
...Jean Vaysse (1917-1975) a doctor like his father and grandfather, was a successful Paris surgeon, a pioneer in the development of open heart surgery and transplantations...
...Essence is what man is born with...
...The only need is qualitative, and unless he has a strong `wish to be,' he will never see his real Common weal: 316 state...
...personality is what grows with him, what he acquires...
...The other is "experienced as our participation in something far greater than the individual...
...since Pilate would not stay for an answer...
...The response is mechanical, and what is elicited is a series of "I"s, or masks, which we produce without being aware of so doing...
...The first thing to see is that we are made up of two natures: one "personal and individual" both organic and psychic, or animal and animated...
...What is the specific characteristic of human life, which human life alone can develop...
...But it involves the entirety of the human being...
...It is...
...Paul's flesh-spirit dualism (Romans) or Jean Racine's Jansenism: "Je sens deux hommes en moi...
...And what, behind appearances, is true...
...What to do...
...Man's life is spent in three degrees of presence: sleep, dreaming, and waking...
...Most of man's time is spent in the first two—in fact, Heraclitus (500 BC) said—and Gurdieff agrees—that: "Men are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments as they are during sleep...
...He had met with Gurdjieffs ideas before any of the books were published...
...He writes of Gurdjieffs ideas that: "Whoever approaches them for the first time without prejudice feels touched to the core by a truth he cannot deny and called upon to put into question all the values his life has been based on until then...
...The fifth is the sex function, which "goes beyond the other four" "to be the support of the creative aspect of the human being at every level, with the proper polarity in each case...
...For man can develop, but "first of all, we need to be continuously and fully ourselves in front of and in the midst of life...
...Four of these are relatively independent: the intellectual, to which all mental functions belong...
...Yet both are essential, and their harmonious development is the basis of all further advancement...
...Vaysse ends on a positive note: "Conscience calls me to be myself...
...Generally, we only think of the organic aspect of this function...
...Man, in his everyday life, has five 'functions' each of which has its own center, or brain...
...Lord Pentland, designated by Gurdjieff to oversee the Gurdjieff Groups in the U.S., writes the introduction to Jean Vaysse's Toward Awakening...
...the emotional, which includes all emotion and feeling...
...On the contrary, one of the first requirements for a man who seeks to become `whole' is to understand "that he is dual—essence and personality...
...Sounds hard...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 10
