Customer Reviews

Gurdjieff: Cosmic Secrets

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is the only one among the plethora of post Gurdjieffian literature (with the exception of C. Daly King's "The Oragean Version") to take Gurdjieff's actual writings seriously. Smith has developed Gurdjieff's formulations in All & Everything, 1st Series to obtain exact mathematical explanations of all Life (No Less!) which aid one in finding objective meaning in daily life("All Life is Mathematics"-G.). This book definitely demands mental effort and provides objective benefit.

I have been sorting through my old Gurdjieff books and came upon this book that has been in my library for a long time. A friend of mine had talked to the author and was given a gift of this book. She got a copy for me at the same time. The book is unique in my Gurdjieff library and goes into more number crunching than any other author. I admire the author for doing his inquiry and organizing his findings in this book. Gurdjieff said that he would "bury the dog deeper". One person corrected him and said, "You mean the bone deeper." But Gurdjieff insisted he was right and said, "No, it is the dog, the bone is dead, the dog is alive." That is the last time I had heard about the dog buried in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson until Russel's book. He quotes enough of the text of Beelzebub to follow how he derives his mathematics, goes into the things that Gurdjieff said about the law of octave, the periodic table of the elements, and the musicial scale. The book gives exercises to follow his reasoning and double check that your math is up to the challenge. It reminds me of the joy I had found finding the law of seven and three in my daily life experience and learning where to do the "shocks" to keep the octaves unfolding in a straight line. The author, happily, shares my enthusiasm for the Gurdjieff chemistry which was the set of teachings that I felt were brilliant in the 4th way and were proof to me that the teaching came from "higher mind". This was especially so for me when I could feel my self-remembering producing Do 48 and actually changing the biological machine or chemical factory into a new something. There are enough correspondences in books like IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS (by Ouspensky) and THE GURDJIEFF WORK (by Speeth) to link with regular chemistry and anatomy, and understand the information even deeper.

In some sense, the book may be a overly mental, but it is an important mental piece. The author does mention the other parts of the work and even how he would like to go into them, but refrains from doing so to keep his focus continuous throughout the book (perhaps applying a conscious shock in order to do so).

Even though I give five stars for this book, there are some cautions I would give about this book. One is that it is definitely not the best first book on the Fourth Way. I would recommend reading THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MAN'S POSSIBLE EVOLUTION by Ouspensky, VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD by Gurdjieff, IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS by Ouspensky, and PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARIES by Nicoll (5 Volumes). There are other worthwhile books, like BEELZEBUB'S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON by Gurdjieff, which is refered to a lot in Russel's book, but with Beelzeb I would recommend first reading TALKS ON BEELZEBUB'S TALES by Bennett and then perhaps reading Beelzebub while using Russel's book to study from. Many of the Gurdjieff books are intellectually dense and take a bit of mental effort to wade through. Without building up some background with some easier books, Russel's book would be hard to appreciate. Mercifully, Russel does try to break it down so you can go step by step. Two is that this book does not give a flavor for the practical Gurdjieff work and gives nothing about the sacred dances that Gurdjieff labored much to create. I think it would be good to first get some experience of these sides, with at least the practical self remembering exercises and how to use negative persons as a help to our own spiritual path, before tackling Russel's book. It will be more relevant then and reveal more of its practical sides. Russel intentionally limits his inquiry to a certain chunk of the work and does not substitute for the other parts. All in all, it is a valuable book and not a beginner's book. It is about one valuable chunk that seasoned work students may find relevant at a certain stage in their process.

Approaching this book sceptically, I ended up enjoying it and finding it useful to my own struggle with Gurdjieff's ideas. Clearly Smith has a strong intelligence and a skill in communication. It is not clear that Smith necessarily understands much about the real heart of Gurdjieff's "Work." But that is not the focus of this book of ideas, and is left for another context. A cynical critic might label this exploration "formatory." But I feel it helps and encourages the reader to honestly consider what the ideas mean, not put them off for later as "too esoteric." A sincere student does indeed need caution against becoming overly intellectual about the Work, since the ideas--and especially these "cosmic" studies-- are only a very small level of the whole. But in my opinion, there is no benefit to avoiding this level. This book could help many people move a little closer to precision. There's nothing really secret in the book that's not already in the other literature. But Smith takes "fragments" and pieces them together. Thus the serious reader must remember to try to apply the inner work that was the whole point of the original fragmented presentation. Learning what is in this book still leaves the harder exercise of coming to understand it, which effort is not primarily intellectual.