Customer Reviews

The Teachers of Gurdjieff

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

 

 

This is a very good book for those people who are interested in the teachings of Gurdjieff. It is a story about a young man from Paris who is studying in a Gurdjieff group. After being in the group and realizing that he is making little progress and that some of the group's main principles contradict much of what Gurdjieff himself taught, he becomes disillusioned. Selling everything he decides to travel to the Middle East in order to find the men who taught Gurdjieff. After interchanges with fellow pupils and teachers of Gurdjieff (some very old) he begins to realize that what Gurdjieff learned was transmitted to him by certain people, in a certain form, at a certain time and for a specific purpose. He learns that the same thing Gurdjieff learned cannot be transmitted to him in the same way because he is a different man, in a different time and from a different culture. As his search continues he realizes that what he began searching for is not necessarily what he needs and what he needs is not necessarily what he wants.

A very interesting, funny and illuminating book for the reader who can set aside his assumptions about Gurdjieff.

For those who do care, Gurdjieff did study in Sufi orders. However, this book is not as specific in giving all of the details about when, where, what and with whom that Gurdjieff studied, but there are plenty of other facts in other books that do tell. For instance, all of the following longstanding Sufi physical and mental exercises were employed by Gurdjieff: the Sufi Quiff or "stop" exercise(see In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky & see The Sufis by Idries Shah or Among the Dervishes by OM Burke), the heart to heart method of teaching or "the talk of angels" -- a form of instruction where the teacher's voice speaks inside the disciple's chest (see In Search of... and Shah's "Dermis Probe"), eastern hypnosis combined with a breathing exercise used to cure physical illnesses ---Gurdjieff used this to cure cancer, alcoholism and smoking, this technique came from the prophet, is referenced in the Koran and has been used by Sufi doctors since (see In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspenksy and The World of the Sufis edited by Idries Shah), the enneagram or nine angle figure is a symbol that has been used in the Sarmoun Brotherhood and by Sufis of all orders for a very long time (see In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men, Idries Shah's Commanding Self and OM Burke's Among the Dervishes), the wisdoms of the Sufi teaching master Mullah Nasrudin are used repeatedly by Gurdjieff in his opus Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson (see Beelzebub's and Idries Shah's the Adventures of Mullah Nasrudin '3 books of tales'), the teaching that man is asleep and a machine is a very eastern, particularly Sufi concept to be found in almost all Sufi books in one form or another (see In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky and Hakim Sanai's The Walled Garden of Truth and Idries Shah's "The Sufis", chapter 1 entitled "The Islanders") and The Fourth Way is what the Naqshbandiyya order of dervishes, founded around the memory of Bahuddin Naqshband, has been called for a long time....Gurdjieff was a member of this order. in addition to these, there are many other facts that point to Gurdjieff employing Sufic techniques.

This book will give you some facts about Gurdjieff, but it is by no means all true and to be taken literally. The Sufis make no claims on Gurdjieff as some people believe. They even go so far as to say that Gurdjieff's pupils did not progress because he had not learned the Sufi dictum "time, place and certain people" before he began to teach (see Idries Shah in The Way of the Sufi). Nevertheless, his life and this book are very interesting from the standpoint that HE did progress as hopefully we all can.

pick it up!

Written by Omar Shah, Idris Shah's brother, this book has nothing to do with Gurdjieff. The intention was to "collect" lost sheep after J.G. Bennett gave Coombe Springs to Idris Shah. So the basic message of this book is: Gurdjieff is dead, long lives sufism. Which basically is a kind of advertisement. The question arising: Advertising for what? Who is in need for advertisment? Or is this spiritual competition? Some claim, that Gurdjieff was a member of a certain sufi order, and this sufi order is now represented by I. Shah. This is nonsense. And it throws a strange shadow onto whoever is in need to spread rumors of this kind.

The title of this book is a lie. Kind of conning instead of cunning.

This book is obviously a fable and uses the same allegorical format that Gurdjieff employed in his works. The pseudonym Rafael Lefort, an anagram for "A REAL EFFORT", is quite obvious and further points clearly to this.

Those who dismiss fables and their message because "fables aren't true" miss the point entirely. Readers, disappointed by not finding information and factual data on Gurdjieff's teachers in this book, are prevented from benefiting from the book's central message. Likewise, "4th way" followers, attached to their system, feel threatened by the author's basic asserion -- that the teaching of Gurdjieff was limited and had at best temporary value for real development.

I read this book more than 25 years ago at a time when I was immersed in the books of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Unlike some reviewers' protests, the book, which never mentions Idries Shah, did not point me in that direciton whatsoever (I didn't discover that author until years later), so hardly a comercial for the man. The average reader wouldn't get this at all, and it is but the usual sort of claim perpetuated in 4th Way circles, despite Shah's practice of rejecting most applicants (including many Gurdjieffians). However, what this book did provide me at the time was a sensibility or counterbalance in assessing the Gurdjieff legacy. The tale simply reminds seekers to look elsewhere.

In addition, the book is peppered with surprising observations -- from the underlying enneagon design of Baghdad to the analysis of such terms as "kundabuffer"-- which made the reading lively. Other insights and perspectives offered were part of the book's corrective impact, and I took the one-dimensional flavor of the book's characters and conversations as serving this overall function. Certainly, I wouldn't expect this or any work to "uncover" the missing "facts" of Gurdjieff's life and training when Gurdjieff himself avoided disclosing that and went out of his way to obscure many details. Yet some of his followers persist in trying to correlate dates or comb through biographies for inaccuracies, none of which is ultimately useful unless one is in the museum business.

Whether or not Shah (or someone connected to him) wrote this needn't concern everybody not obsessed with conspiracy theories. I would recommend this book for those who can absorb a different perspective and who may welcome the reassurance that an intact Teaching survives and is accessible to those who can "empty the glass."

This is an excellent book for anyone who has entered into the "Gurdjieff Work" or a P.D. Ouspensky "Fourth Way" group and is disillusioned. The title is ciphered in the standard Sufic format, the auhor's name Rafael Lefort is an encryption for "A Real Effort".

That Gurdjieff studied with Sufi teachers in the East is no great secret. This has been commonly documented in his own numerous references to dervishes and Sufi schools in "Meetings With Remarkable Men". The Sarmoun Brotherhood itself, is a Sufi stronghold in Afghanistan (or still was in 1970, see Burke's "Among The Dervishes") near the Oxus river. The main symbol of the brotherhood was the nine-angled enneagon that Gurdjieff employed, which the school referred to as The Impress. Furthermore, though students and "teachers" involved in the current Gurdjieff work are unable to decipher it, "Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson" is practically filled from page to page with Sufi technical terms and teachings. He even quotes the great Sufi Master Mullah Nasruddin throughout the entire work. The introduction to Beelzebub's entitled "the arousal of thought" has the Nasruddin tale "Eating My Money" in it (see Idries Shah, "The Pleasantries of Mullah Nasruddin). Many of Ouspensky's followers today still do not have any idea that the name of their system they acquired from Gurdjieff, The Fourth Way, has been the name of The Naqshbandi Order of Sufis for over 700 years at least.

Before I wrote this review I read some of the reviews here in order to see if I could add anything that had not been covered. In doing so, I found a cluster of people (mostly Gurdjieff followers it seems) who hated this book with a passion. It is not hard to see why, since it says that all legitiment teachings die with the teacher and that another teacher "who knows" has to be found in order for any understanding, learning or development to take place. The main objective of this book is to make this point clear. That learning has to follow the dictum "time, place and certain people". People who are reading it for anthropological or historical information will only receive small puzzles to a vague mystery of the details about exactly what, when and how Gurdjieff studied. This has angered people who want "proof" that Gurdjieff studied with dervishes and which ones, but it is the exact same thing Gurdjieff would have done--most of his works were allegorical to inhibit automemtic thinking.

I encountered this book shortly after I had pursued studies in Gurdjieff work groups and it was a blessing. I was disillusioned in the work groups because I realized that something was missing......GURDJIEFF! I was asking questions to people who didn't know the answers, only thought they knew or who quoted Gurdjieff as an answer. I was involved in a masquerade of charlatanism! As the author of this book says, (not verbatim) "what a fate for a teaching, that constantly reiterated the dangers of automatic thinking and indoctrination, to be left with no teacher and a handful of mechanical exercises intended for the psyches of pupils 50+ years ago".

All I can say, is for those who are involved in Gurdjieff study groups or fourth way groups, ask yourselves what Gurdjieff was trying to do for his pupils. He proposed a way to get beyond conventional understanding by developing new organs of perception. Now ask yourselves, have any of you developed new organs of perception yet other than an expanded intellect or a slightly enhanced capacity for self-observation? If you haven't, what are you doing? What would Gurdjieff say about all of these groups that are carrying on 50 years after his death if he was here now (on his deathbed he told his pupils "I leave you all in a fine mess")? Why not try looking somewhere else? This book is a very good place to start.

Godspeed,
dt

If you are reading this review and its towards the end of a long string of them then you will probably feel somewhat like I did. Exhausted. I could not believe that people interested in the work of a great mystic like Gurdjieff could possibly be so narrow minded and also try to rage a "computer war" against Idries Shah (who I only knew of by name before reading here). Anyway, the purpose of this review is to do just that - provide a subjective opinion on my feelings of the book, which is just what I will do.

I started reading Ouspensky & then Gurdjieff. I have spoken to many people engaged in the Gurdjieff Foundation as it is called and was getting ready to check out a meeting - though all the while I was somewhat hesitant. Many things distressed me about my conversations with the Gurdjieffians I had spoke to. I thought, how could anything "secret" and "difficult" be so easy to find? And once found, taught by people who are of no higher a level of understanding than myself? Ceretaintly a room full of pupils with no masters is far worse than a room full of people who aren't searching at all. In other words the blind leading the blind, will get no one anywhere. This cannot be productive I thought. I still didn't know where to turn. What should I do? Go to find the teachers of Gurdjieff in the way off East? This I had finally decided to do, and then a miracle happened, The Teacher's Of Gurdjieff fell into my hands.

When I came across this book I was in my second reading of Gurdjieff's All & Everything. I enjoyed reading the books, even the second time around, but all the while I felt that I could only understand them on a surface level and could not penetrate their deep allegory. I felt somewhat confused, was this my shortcomings? Certaitnly it wasn't that of a great mystic like Gurdjieff? These questions's all boggled me until I discovered this book. What a relief! It answered all my questions and more. I have read it four times, and would recommened it to any seeker, not just Gurdjieffians.

I will now search for the living tradition as it is applied for today, and hopefully in my native country! My search may be long and hard, but many ?'s have been answered. And I personally don't care who wrote this book? Who would? Its contents are what are important. It is a fun fact that the name Rafael Lefort is a pseudonym for "A Real Effort" and after pondering it, while reading, it did make more sense that it would have been written by a great teacher or master. Either way, its a great book and not hard to read at all.

A last note. I can understand someone not knowing that this book existed and going into the monotonious Gurdjieff work at the "foundation" as they call it, but its beyond my understanding how anyone who has read Gurdjieff and grasped 1/10 of his message could have discovered this book and not been infintley greatful. I will end this ramble and quote a speech for Gurdjieff's lecture in Essentuki in 1918 that might be of some use to the reader.

"Perhaps the only positive result of all wanderings in the winding paths and tracks of occult research will be that, if a man preserves the capacity for sound judgment and thought, he will evolve that special faculty of discrimination which can be called flair. He will discard the ways of psychopathy and error and will persistently search for true ways."

-Jurjizada or George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

Goodluck!

Luken Patruff

By now it seems almost certain that the author of this book was actually Idries Shah, who went on to make a name for himself as one of the most visible proponents of Sufism in the West (the recommended reading list at the end of the book lists twenty-two books by Idries Shah and no one else). Although Idries Shah's bona fides as a teacher have been questioned in various forums (see for example Peter Washington's "Madame Blavatsky's Baboon") he seems to have been accepted by many as a legitimate teacher - that is to say, someone who is who carrying on an authentic time-tested spiritual tradition which has been passed on to him by teachers who themselves had been accepted as authentic bearers of a spiritual tradition. Whether he was in fact an authentic teacher of a pre-existing tradition I myself am not qualified to say. I will say that "The Teacher's of Gurdjieff" is not only a highly readable book but also one from which is it possible to extract a few worthwhile nuggets of insight. Brief - 146 pages of large type - and written in a deceptively simply style, the book purports to be a search for and interviews with Sufi teachers who claimed to have taught the great twentieth century magus George Gurdjieff. As with Gurdjieff's own book, "Meetings with Remarkable Men" it is not quite clear if the characters introduced are real living men who the writer actually met and conversed with or simply creative inventions serving his didactic purposes. Whichever, in the course of the author's meetings with these purported teachers of Gurdjieff in the souks, bazaars, tea houses, shops, and mosques of Adana, Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Istanbul, Tabriz, Konia, Meshed, Kandahar, Peshwar, Jelalabad, and elsewhere, he eventually comes to a final conclusion about Gurdjieff's teachings, of which he had been a follower. "Upon anguished reflection," he tells us, "I could no longer belief that Gurdjieff's message was a complete one. That he was sent to prepare an area for a certain purpose I did not doubt." The purpose was to inject, or perhaps reinject, Sufi teachings into the mainstream of Western thought. The purpose of this book was to finally put Gurdjieff to rest and set the stage for the appearance of the next big Sufi-oriented teacher in the West - Idries Shah himself. As such it was a masterstroke, as witnessed by the continuing popularity of Idries Shah's teachings. Definitely worth reading, but keep a few grains of salt handy.

Rafael LeFort, a.k.a. Idries Shah, takes the reader on a whirlwind adventure, not unsimilar to Gurdjieff's "Meetings" to discover, theoretically, the source of Gurdjeff's teaching. For the most part, I really enjoyed the book for what it was, but LeFort's hidden arrogance and confusion got to me after a while.

His implicit critique of Gurdjieff as a "failed Sufi" (as one reviewer put it) made me wonder where LeFort was really coming from. What is his point? I'm not a Gurdjieff follower trying to defend him, but there was an undercurrent in Lefort's writings that sort of bothered me.

Was LeFort simply jealous of Gurdjieff in some way? It often seemed like a classic sour-grapes type scenario where LeFort felt the need to somehow discredit Gurdjieff because his own journey was not as rich and powerful.

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate Shah's writings on Sufism and the contribution he made. I don't mean to criticize him, but something about his view on Gurdjieff bugged me.

I do recommend this book.

Here is a book which presents the psychology of a modern day spiritual seeker attempting to approach the teachings of Gurdjieff and the Sufis. In the process, the seeker is forced to question some of the beliefs, assumptions, behaviors, and attitudes he carries regarding the realm of so-called higher consciousness and its manifestations. The reader, consequently (hopefully), also engages in the same process.

Worrying about whether the story is completely factual or not is a natural reaction, but also slightly superficial. Gurdjieff himself was not exactly a straightforward, honest, direct kind of guy, but is widely known for trickery, cryptic references, and bizarre, amoral behavior. His statements and books, like Meetings with Remarkable Men, often garner the same reactions as this book. Why should those who subscribe to Gurdjieff's teachings be so outraged if it were true that Idries Shah wrote this as a teaching tool in a similar vein?

If someone wants to judge Shah, I suggest they look not only at his person, but at what he taught. People who criticize Shah generally don't look at the content of what he taught, or the ideas (eastern and western) which he promoted (see the work of Robert Ornstein and the ISHK, as well as the Institute for Cultural Research, and the Octagon Press, which publishes classic Sufi texts from Saadi, Rumi, Sanai, Jami, al-Ghazzali, al-Qashani, the Suhrawardis, etc., in addition to books about the cultures of the Middle East and other parts of the world). Critics focus on whether or not he was "the qutub" or whatever, as if any of us could tell.

There are some who do not see the essential connections between Gurdjieff and his teachings and the Sufism presented by Idries Shah. There are those who do. Reading the texts can help a person make a decision, and this book is one of the texts which should be read. Another book which may aid in this, with plenty of factual detail, is J.G. Bennett's Gurdjieff: Making a New World.

People who need nice easy answers all packaged and straightforward and given by smiling bald men in robes will probably not like the Sufism presented by people like Lefort and Shah (I suspect they wouldn't like Gurdjieff either). People who are looking for pure academic scholarship could also be disappointed (Shah himself points out from the very first pages of The Sufis that his work is part of a program for Sufi impact on society, not primarily for the world of Orientalist Academia.) And those who are superficially attached to certain forms might have trouble appreciating the essential identity of various esoteric teachings.

But those who appreciate the complexity and potential of the human experience (as well as its patterns and distortions) might, however, enjoy this work, and the Sufism which it reflects.

In the guise of a Sufi teaching tale Idries Shah(aka: LeFort and Arkon Daraul) this book contains a story of a seeker who sought out Gurdjieff's(who by the way left many hints of the Sufic origins of his teachings.) teachers. But does it live up to it's name? No. It is a complete fabrication whose main goal is to lure 4th Way students away from various 'groups' and into Shah's version of Sufism. It comes across at times as commericial for Shah and does not really deal with G or his teachings in informative manner. In fact most of what is written about G in this book contradicts publicly availible information on him and his teachings.

Remember this book was originally written during the period when Shah was recruiting 4th Way people during the mid 1960's.

On the plus side though the story does contain information on the pitfalls of approaching so-called 'esoteric teachings' with your everyday kind of thinking. How we in the west end up treating a SpiritualTeacher like some esoteric vending machine because of our consumeristic mentality. Of confusing your wants with what you need and mistaking the container with the content. Though it does not outweigh the negatives and such information can be found in his other books like "Learning how to Learn."

Shah had a great opportunity to clear away the mystique surrounding the origins of G's teachings and instead under a pen name writes a self-serving piece to recruit students. As such I cannot recommend this book.

Kathleen Speath's book "The Gurdjieff Work' has IMO a much more honest appraisal and informative of the man and his legacy and would appeal to anyone interested in the subject.

Like the last reviewer I too have read many of Shah's books but after reading this one I no longer have much respect for the man.

No women anywhere, but loads of anti-west propaganda, laced with anti-secularist, anti-science, authoritarian blather. It's the usual misleading Idries Shah take on Sufism (he's the real author). Don't bother with it. Read something substantial instead, like maybe Henry Corbin or Seyyed Hossein Nasr or William Chittick . This isn't Sufism or Islam or spirituality. It's not a real effort.