'Lineage' and New Age Grifters
'Wiseacring' and the transmission of the Gurdjieff Work
Recently, there’s been a bit of online drama and hysteria over the question of ‘lineage’ in the Gurdjieff Work, and who is authorized to discuss or present information about the Work. The most interesting feature of these discussions is that those who crow loudest about their lineage are also those whose presentation of the Work has little resemblance to the ideas presented by Mr. Gurdjieff himself. So lineage, presented as a badge of legitimacy, has become somehow more important than fidelity to the Work itself.
To illustrate just how wrongheaded this idea is, let’s consider an example from outside the Work:
In 1992, John Shelby Spong wrote a big titled Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus, in which he denied the Virgin Birth and Divinity of Jesus Christ. Over the course of his career, he would go on to deny the Resurrection of Jesus, the idea of a personal God, the moral teachings of the Church, and the validity and importance of the Nicene Creed.
What’s interesting about this is that Mr. Spong was an Anglican bishop, claiming direct apostolic succession going back to the early Church, a tangible, documented lineage. And Mr. Spong frequently appealed to this lineage as a source of legitimacy, featuring it prominently in titles like Resurrection: Myth or Reality? A Bishop's Search for the Origins of Christianity; Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile; Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality; and the previously mentioned Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus.
So here we have someone claiming an impeccable lineage, going back to Pentecost, using that position to undermine and contradict the central beliefs of the faith.
But Mr. Spong didn’t stop there. He used his position and ‘lineage’ to attack believers who held to the beliefs and practices of traditional Christianity. His lineage was nothing more than a prop to legitimize his personal political and social agenda.
It’s pretty clear that in a case like this, lineage doesn’t mean anything at all. Real lineage involves fidelity and custodianship of the teachings of the source of that lineage. Without this, claims of succession of any type are dishonest at best.
Keeping Mr. Spong’s notorious example in mind, let’s look at those who talk loudest about ‘lineage’ in the Gurdjieff Work, usually found haunting social media groups.
A cursory examination of their output shows the same kind of disregard for the source of their lineage. You’ll find a truly bizarre mishmash of quotes from Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Carlos Casteneda, Osho, and Coleman Barks’ fraudulent translation of Rumi, none of which are compatible with the ideas of George Gurdjieff. When challenged, they will appeal to their lineage and a supposed “oral teaching” that is really just a combination of 1960’s humanistic psychology and warmed over Theosophy, a movement specifically denounced multiple times by Mr. Gurdjieff.
What makes this worse is that they claim to be presenting Gurdjieff’s teaching, because their imagined lineage comes via individuals who themselves did not faithfully pass on his ideas, chiefly PD Ouspensky, Madame DeSalzmann, and JG Bennett.
Ouspensky was a failed student of the Gurdjieff Work. He broke with Mr. Gurdjieff in 1924 and for the next two decades, told people that Gurdjieff was either dead or had gone insane, all while profiting from the fragments of the teachings that he was able to remember, mixed in with his idiosyncratic ideas.
As his work did not succeed in producing the expected results, Ouspensky became increasingly discouraged and he more and more turned to his beloved vodka for escape. In 1947, he told his followers that he had failed. His System didn’t work. He died shortly after, on October 2.
And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? - Luke 6:46
Jeanne de Salzmann is mistakenly seen by many as the heir of the Gurdjieff legacy, and until her death she headed the Gurdjieff Foundation, an organization she created after Mr. Gurdjieff’s passing. In this context, it’s important to note that Gurdjieff didn’t establish any organization after he closed the Prieuré and he appointed no successor.
Madame’s initiative might be seen in a positive light if she had remained true to the teachings of Mr. Gurdjieff. Beginning in the 1960s, Jeanne de Salzmann began to introduce a “new work” which differed significantly and fundamentally with Gurdjieff. I’ve included some links below to discussions of this deviation, but here is a clear example, from Jeanne de Salzmann’s notes, collected in the book, The Reality of Being - The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff:
The highest form of intelligence is meditation, an intense vigilance that liberates the mind from its reactions, and this alone, without any willful intervention, produces a state of tranquillity. This requires an extraordinary energy, which can only appear when there is no conflict in us, when all ideals have completely disappeared, all belief, hope and fear. Then it is not contemplation that arises, but a state of attention in which there is no longer a sense of "I,” someone present to participate in the experience, to identify with it. So there is no experience. Understanding this at the deepest level is important for one who wishes to know what truth is, what God is, what is beyond the constructions of the human mind. [emphasis mine]
This flatly contradicts the teachings of Mr. Gurdjieff on several points, but the most obvious difference is this idea that the highest form of intelligence requires the disappearance of the sense of “I”. Self-remembering and the development of a real “I” are core ideas constantly repeated and emphasized by Mr. Gurdjieff to the extent that teaching which denies these ideas can no longer be called the Gurdjieff Work. This isn’t the “Fourth Way.” It is rehashed Theosophy.
For more on the ongoing revision and decline in the Foundation’s presentation of the Work, see:
In addition to the revision of the teaching to conform to a New Age mindset, Jeanne Jeanne de Salzmann and the Gurdjieff Foundation attempted to deprive readers of the opportunity to read Mr. Gurdjieff’s own words. Gurdjieff’s magnum opus, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, along with Meetings with Remarkable Men and Life is Real, Then, Only When I Am, are the most complete and accurate presentation of Mr. Gurdjieff’s teaching. He labored over Beelzebub’s Tales for more than two decades, reading and revising until finally receiving the proof of the finished text on his deathbed.
Jesus said: Woe to the Pharisees, for they are like a dog lying in the manger of the cattle; for he neither eats nor does he let the cattle eat. - Gospel of Thomas
If the Gurdjieff Foundation had its way, you would not be allowed to read Beelzebub’s Tales. In 1992, they released a heavily edited edition alongside their ongoing efforts to promote the “New Work.” If you have access to the original text of this important book, it is despite the Foundation, because Mr. Gurdjieff had the foresight to make sure that the approved text wasn’t copyrighted.
A “lineage” that carelessly disregards and alters the writing of the founder, isn’t a lineage at all, but a betrayal.
Finally, we come to JG Bennett. Mr. Bennett spent very little time with Mr. Gurdjieff. He visited him briefly in Istanbul in the closing days of the First World War, and then for a short time in Paris some 25 years later.
In 1956, Bennett converted to Subud, a type of Indonesian Pentecostalism. Unlike the Gurdjieff work, which emphasizes conscious labor and intentional suffering towards the end of developing a real “I”, Subud teaches salvation through the laying on of hands, similar to what one would find in an Oral Roberts crusade.
But he didn’t stop there. In the 60’s, Bennett began to incorporate the ideas of Idries Shah into his work. Shah wrote on Sufism and claimed to be a Sufi teacher, despite never having been initiated into a Tariqa. Shah, whose earliest publications focused on “Wicca”, a phony religion invented by Gerald Gardner, now presented a type of Sufism based on New Age teachings and his own speculations, bearing little resemblance to any real Sufi traditions.
Whatever Bennett passed on was a strange brew consisting of fragments of Gurdjieff’s teaching, alongside Subud, imitation Sufism, Transcendental Meditation, and his inventions.
Where then, is an authentic lineage? Certainly not in the confused and incoherent ramblings of the followers of DeSalzmann, Ouspensky, or Bennett who misuse the name of Gurdjieff to promote New Age teachings.
Fortunately, Mr. Gurdjieff was aware of and predicted this sort of development. He wrote several times in Beelzebub’s Tales about how teachings are inevitably ‘wiseacred’. This was his term for the process by which teachings are corrupted by the generations that follow teachers like Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed, eventually becoming an inversion of the original.
The transformation of the Gurdjieff Work into a New Age counterfeit by those who claim to be the bearers of the tradition followed the same pattern. This would not come as a surprise to Mr. Gurdjieff. He wrote about, explained the mechanism by which it happened, and probably anticipated it.
He appointed no successor, nor did he establish a Foundation. What he did was anticipate the deviation and hurl a corrective shock into the future. Careful readers will note that he called the first book in his All & Everything series, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Not son, grandson.
Foreseeing the wiseacrings that would follow his death, he took the initiative to ensure that his teachings would survive by writing a book addressed to the generations that would follow after the failures of Ouspensky, Bennett, and de Salzmann.
At the end of Chapter 39 of Beelzebub’s Tales, the narrator recounts a story dating from the period following the destruction of Atlantis, a time when “the majority of them again began—as it usually happens there in general after these terrifying excesses—often to see reality and to be less satisfied with the conditions of their ordinary existence.” Some individuals, using only surviving fragments of teachings, “began to think and to strive persistently somehow to understand what was necessary to be done,” and were able to partially reconstruct the methods necessary for the “struggle for self-perfection.”
If this was possible using only fragmentary survivals, combined with sincere efforts and thought, then it is certainly possible using the written works of Mr. Gurdjieff, which present a complete teaching and path of development.
This would be a legitimate ‘lineage’ - not the ramblings of people who met someone who met someone who briefly met Mr. Gurdjieff, but the sincere efforts of students who are willing to engage in the necessary efforts to understand and practice. This is the only method explicitly indicated by Gurdjieff for the continuation of the Work.
Additional Reading: