Gurdjieff

G. I. Gurdjieff is probably the most important mystic of this century.

His teaching derives mainly from Islamic mysticism, as well as from Tibetan mysticism; it is also based on the teaching of the Source Teacher in India.

Gurdjieff expounded his teaching in the trilogy of "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson", "Meetings with Remarkable Men" and "Life is Real Only then, When 'I am'."

Some of his concepts, such as the "Law of Three" and the "Law of Octave", which are closely related to Enneagram, are rather abstruse, but fortunately, Ouspensky, one of his important disciples (though he parted from his master), elucidated them in his books, including "In Search of the Miraculous".

It is very interesting to know that, according to Ouspensky, Gurdjieff propounded the "Fourth way" which comes after the "Way of the fakir", the "Way of the monk" and the "Way of the yogi". To Guhen's own understanding, these three "lower" ways correspond to Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Jnana Yoga of "Four Yogas" classified by Vivekananda, respectively; the "Fourth way" would correspond to Raja Yoga. It is further interesting to know that Gurdjieff appears to indicate that the Fourth way is connected with "consciousness-altering chemical substances". We read Gurdjieff discussing this in "In Search of the Miraculous":

"[The substances that a man who follows the Fourth way needs for his aims] can be introduced into the organism from without if it is known how to do it. And so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises like the yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month in self-torture like the fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all the substances he wants, and, in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required results."

Guhen Kitaoka's unique claim with regard to this subject is that Gurdjieff's above position had been relevant only until the advent of NLP; that is to say, a mystic who follows the Fourth way (viz. "Raja Yoga") would now not need even to rely on such outer chemical substances to "obtain the required results", but can practise the purely psychological techniques of NLP, which utilise "naturally occurring entranced states of consciousness", just for seconds, to achieve the same results.

Also, it needs to be remembered that Gurdjieff's very practical and effective techniques (like the so-called "Stop" technique) were extremely powerful ones, which were designed to achieve an effect of "pattern interruption" in the mind of the participants of the exercises, so that the process of inbuilt Samskara may be broken so as to generate more desired new behavioural patterns.