Gurdjieff Work

The Gurdjieff Work is a system of ideas and practical indications, which provide a gradual and hard-earned path towards self-development. Gradual because there can, according to this system, be no quick means to ease the grip of that in ourselves which has taken a lifetime to form. Hard-earned, because it is true that we only value that which we have paid for in "hard cash", by the sweat of our own brow. Everything has a price, despite what some of our contemporaries might urge us to think. The Work costs in terms of efforts made repeatedly over a very long period of time. It demands persistent and indefatigable efforts in the midst of other people who are making efforts, working upon themselves, according to the same principles. Gurdjieff once remarked that people are hardly likely to willingly make strenuous efforts over a long period of time in order to get something they already think they have, namely "will" and "individuality"

The Work can lead us to an attitude of impartiality - impartially noting one's being - not what one would like to be or what one would like to think one is at the time - but what one is, without judgemen and without thinking good or bad. To become aware of one's manifestations, to pay attention and to pay really good attention we have to learn to look until we have seen the deceptions. When we have seen the deceptions with impartiality then that day the truth will be born in ourselves. This is extraordinary. We begin to wake up a little and find we are very different from what we had supposed. We begin to use attention in a different way, and then become aware of something quite different, something in us that we cannot remember meeting before.

There is in us an awareness of something higher, greater. If we have power over our attention we can , if we wish, make room for something higher. If our attention is not taken by outside events we can look at what is going on and create a picture of ourselves. More than this we can make room for a higher level. When there is room then light will come - the bud opens on the bough.

Mr Gurdjieff's message is that man's place, if not asleep, is to struggle to hold his attention, to make a place for influences which can help him to be as he ought to be. The system is a practical method of how we can learn to begin to take our place. We can only find it for ourselves, but we cannot work alone, we need the work of others with the same aim around us. Mr Gurdjieff's work made it possible for man to discover his real place in the scheme of things in order that he may receive the help a teacher may give him.