3: The arch-absurd

Link to part 1: The arousing of thought
Link to part 2: Cult versus belief

Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said: “one can't believe impossible things.” 

“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

How did I come to believe so many doubtful and even unprovable things? 

Forty-four invisible conscious beings—angels—watching over our School and its students. They signal to us in co-incidences, messages on billboards and car licence plates (the interpretation of which is largely by the Teacher, although sometimes by us in imitation of him). Past conscious beings have encoded the secrets of awakening not only in scriptures but in the bridge in the background of the Mona Lisa, in the square trouser leg of Diego Rivera’s self-portrait, and in potsherds and wall-paintings from Neolithic times. The spirit of Leonardo da Vinci, an ascended conscious being, guides our Teacher. Students will become permanently conscious in our ninth lifetimes (and we are mostly on our eighth). If we do not develop a permanent tendency to awaken (or lose the School) we shall become food for the moon. The School is an ark for the preservation of civilisation from a coming catastrophe, variously the fall of California and nuclear war. At one time I believed all this, more or less.

In fairness to the fourth way of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, the Fellowship deviated more and more from the original teaching. Later I shall give a brief overview of the history and fundamental teachings of the fourth way, before looking at the ideas in more detail, trying to separate the plausible from the bizarre. 

Robert Burton frequently said that he did not innovate but was merely uncovering what had been hidden, newly revealed to him by Influence C. However the idea of Influence C as ‘angels,’ the idea of nine lifetimes and most recently the Sequence are all innovations not present in the basic texts of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. The most egregious innovation, and the one that was the final straw for me, was the claim that in 2018 the Absolute had personally visited Robert in the rose garden.

Question: I cannot recapture the faith of my childhood.

Gurdjieff: That is not necessary. You have lost that possibility. You are no longer a child, you are big now. You should have logic and not search automatically. To have direct contact with God is impossible. Millions and millions of nonentities wish to have relations with Mr God direct. This is impossible.

(Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1941-46, p. 106.)

No doubt apologists for Mr Burton would say that Mr Burton is not a non-entity at all, but is special: as he himself claims, a goddess in a man’s body. However Ouspensky said that the Absolute cannot interact directly with humans:

...it is impossible for the will of the Absolute to enter our level. In order to do that the Absolute would have to destroy all the intermediate worlds, since everything depends on the laws governing them. (Fourth Way chapter 8)

…and Robert Burton once agreed:

Mr Gurdjieff said the Absolute’s influence does not reach us directly, and he is correct. Influence C help us. We do not need God—the Absolute—he is too big for us and has more important matters to attend to. (Self Remembering, p.159)

The fourth way begins with some verifiable observations and some plausible ideas. With Ouspensky it merges into the tacit acceptance of the speculative and unverifiable, and in the Fellowship to the utterly fantastical. 

As a child sometimes for fun I would walk on a wall which, because of a slope in the pavement would start close to the ground, but by the other end was too high to jump down from without getting hurt. In such a way a plausible idea is added to in small increments, until one is very far from any kind of solid ground.

So how did I get to the wrong end of the wall?