"Wake Up from this Sleep"

At 15 years old, I was very interested in all kinds of eastern and existential philosophy.  It seemed like the world was waking up to exploring different cultures (after all it was the late Sixties!!)

I would bring home all sorts of esoteric books and just devour them. Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Ram Dass, Shah, Tillich, The Bhagavad Gita, Hesse, Skinner…..  I just couldn’t get enough of them. Then I stumbled upon a book entitled “In Search of the Miraculous” by P. D. Ouspensky. The book was about the author’s experiences with mysterious Russian mystic referred in the book as “G”.  The essence of this man’s teaching was that we are all asleep and that we have to wake up and realize we are prisoners of this sleep state. This book stopped me in my tracks. I was pulled into its pages like a moth to a flame. After almost every paragraph, I would be saying to myself, “Yes! yes!!”

Some quotes of Gurdjieff that emphasize that point - 

“In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. 

“Let us take some event in the life of humanity. For instance, war. There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep.”

These teachings came from secret esoteric schools in Georgia and Armenia. He referred to this system as “The Work” and that someone engaging in it was “working on oneself”. My own sense was many seemed to be of Sufi origin. Gurdjieff often referred to himself as a dance teacher and spoke of dances he called “The Movements”. He described the dances as a means of non-verbally transmitting this precious knowledge from generation to generation. He presented a seemingly somewhat scientific approach to all of this but this book is written pre-Russian revolution, so what happened to these people?

It was the kind of book where you start highlighting every few lines on every page. All of it made so much sense to me. But who was this “G” character?  And was there an actual school that followed this path? 

As years passed, I became more and more fascinated with this man’s approach. Eventually I figured out that his name was George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and he had schools that evolved from his teachings even here in America. 

I was so impressed with the book that I bought another one and gave it to a close friend that was formerly a Jesuit priest as a gift. He fell in love with the book and promised that if he ever came across a group that explores this method that he would let me know.

Years later, I received a letter from him telling me that he had found such a group and that they had a farm up in Sussex, NJ and that I should come up and experience it for myself. And that started a 15 year adventure that radically changed my life……

Robert