2025: The International All & Everything Year
A New Year's Eve Call to Reclaim the Gurdjieff Work
"For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food." - Hebrews 5:12
January 1, 2025 will mark 100 years since GI Gurdjieff began writing Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. After observing the failure of experimental work with students in St. Petersburg and at the Prieuré, he determined that it was necessary to produce a definitive logominism so that the Work would not be lost to future generations.
However, a century after Gurdjieff began writing Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, the cornerstone of his "All & Everything" series, his legacy faces a profound crisis. The very organizations that claim to represent his work have deviated far from the path he intended, diluting his teachings into a bland cocktail of New Age platitudes and self-help clichés.
Instead of the rigorous system working towards Objective Conscience and Objective Reason that Mr. Gurdjieff envisioned, these organizations offer a watered-down, palatable version of the Work, designed to appeal to a wider audience. They avoid confronting their own nullity and degeneracy, and posing any challenge to the worldview of what Gurdjieff called "power-possessing beings" and their pet "learned beings of new formation."
This distortion of Gurdjieff's teachings, a phenomenon he himself predicted and termed "wiseacring," has placed the Work in a precarious position. By replacing the challenging, transformative aspects of the Work with comforting platitudes and exercises in self-calming, these organizations undermine the very essence of Gurdjieff's message. They offer a soothing balm for their (non-existent) soul rather than a rigorous path of initiation and struggle, a comfortable illusion of spiritual progress rather than a sincere confrontation with our nullity and weaknesses.
The question now is: can we reclaim the spirit of Gurdjieff's work? Can we rescue his evolutionary teachings from the clutches of misguided New Age hustlers? Can we rediscover the challenging, transformative path that lay at the heart of his vision?
The Work itself is at an inflection point, and requires a conscious shock.
The answer, Gurdjieff himself suggested, lies in a conscious and concerted effort to return to the text that he wrote for this time and this purpose. Note that he called the book "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson", not "..to his son."
The book itself is Mr. Gurdjieff's corrective, hurled into the future to provide the essential necessary shock. The question is: is there anyone who will take up this challenge? Will you?
The future of the Gurdjieff Work hangs in the balance. Will it succumb to the forces of distortion, fading into obscurity as another failed spiritual experiment? Or will we rise to the challenge, embrace the difficulty, and rediscover the transformative power of Gurdjieff's original vision?
The choice, ultimately, is ours.
Over the next year, the Spiritual Sun School of the Gurdjieff Work will be hosting a series of seminars, workshops, and forums on important aspects of the Tales. But these efforts are not an end to themselves, but rather a call for sincere students of the Work to struggle, work, and suffer to become the sort of men capable of preserving, transmitting, and embodying this Work. What will you do to help provide the conscious shock this year?