G. I. Gurdjieff - Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am

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Table of Contents

LIFE IS REAL ONLY THEN, WHEN I AM

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (18771949) was born in Alexandropol and trained in Kars as both a priest and a physician. For some twenty years Gurdjieff travelled in the remotest regions of Central Asia and the Middle East. These years were crucial in the moulding of his thought On his return, he began to gather pupils in Moscow before the First World War and continued his work with a small party of followers while moving, during the year of the Russian revolution, to Essentuki in the Caucasus, and then through Tiflis, Constantinople, Berlin and London to the Chteau du Prieur near Paris, where he opened his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in 1922 on a larger scale.

The story of his unremitting search for a real and universal knowledge is unfolded, and his ideas are expounded, in his major works: Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson, Meetings withRemarkable Men, Life is Real Only Then,When I Am and Views from theReal World.

ALL AND EVERYTHING

Ten Books in Three Series

FIRST SERIES: Three books under the title of Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson or, An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man.

SECOND SERIES: Three books under the common title of Meetings with Remarkable Men.

THIRD SERIES: Four books under the common title of Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am.

All written according to entirely new principles of logical reasoning and strictly directed towards the solution of the following three cardinal problems:

FIRST SERIES: To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world.

SECOND SERIES: To acquaint the reader with the material required for a new creation and to prove the soundness and good quality of it.

THIRD SERIES: To assist the arising, in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, nonfantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality.

No one interested in my writings should ever attempt to read them in any other than the indicated order; in other words, he should never read anything written by me before he is already well acquainted with the earlier works.

G. I. GURDJIEFF

... as regards the real, indubitably comprehensible, genuine objective truths which will be brought to light by me in the third series, I intend to make them accessible exclusively only to those from among the hearers of the second series of my writings who will be selected by specially prepared people according to my considered instructions.

G. I. GURDJIEFF,
Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson
(Third Book, p.428)

PREFATORY NOTE

Although this text is no more than a fragmentary and preliminary draft of what G. I. Gurdjieff intended to write for the Third Series, Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am, his family feel obliged to obey our uncles wish, as he emphasized in his introduction, to share with creatures similar to himself everything he had learned about the inner world of man.

We consider we are being faithful to his intention when he wrote the introduction and thus are also meeting the expectations of very many people interested in his teaching.

On behalf of the family,

VALENTIN ANASTASIEFF

FOREWORD

My last book, through which I wish to share with other creatures of our Common Fathersimilartomyself, almost all the previously unknown mysteries of the inner world of man which I have accidentally learned.

Gurdjieff wrote these words on the 6th of November, 1934, and immediately started to work. For the next few months he devoted himself entirely to working out his ideas for this book.

Then suddenly, on the 2nd of April, 1935, he completely stopped writing.

One is bound to ask: why did he abandon the project at this point and never return to it again?

Why did he leave this Third Series unfinished and apparently give up his intention to publish it?

It is not possible to answer these questions unless one has been oneself engaged in the intensive work which Gurdjieff undertook in the last fifteen years of his life with a certain number of pupils, creating for them day after day the conditions necessary for a direct and practical study of his ideas.

He let it be clearly understood, on the last page of Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson, that the Third Series would be accessible only to those who would be selected as capable of understanding the genuine objective truths which he will bring to light in this Series.

Gurdjieff speaks to the man of today, that is, someone who no longer knows how to recognize the truth revealed to him in different forms since the earliest timesto someone with a deep sense of dissatisfaction, who feels isolated, meaningless.

But, given such a man, how to awaken in him an intelligence that can distinguish the real from the illusory?

According to Gurdjieff, the truth can be approached only if all the parts which make up the human being, the thought, the feeling and the body, are touched with the same force and in the particular way appropriate to each of themfailing which, development will inevitably be one-sided and sooner or later come to a stop.

In the absence of an effective understanding of this principle, all work on oneself is certain to deviate from the aim. The essential conditions will be wrongly understood and one will see a mechanical repetition of forms of effort which never surpass a quite ordinary level.

Gurdjieff knew how to make use of every circumstance of life to have people feel the truth.

I have seen him at work, listening to the possibilities of understanding in each of his groups and also to the subjective difficulties of each pupil. I have seen him deliberately putting the accent on a particular aspect of knowledge, then on another aspect, according to a very definite planworking at times with a thought that stimulated the intellect and opened up an entirely new vision, at times with a feeling that required giving up all artifice in favor of an immediate and complete sincerity, at times with the awakening and putting in motion of a body that responded freely to whatever it was asked to serve.

So what did he have in mind in writing the Third Series?

The role he assigned to it cannot be disassociated from his way of teaching. At the precise moment he found it necessary, he would have a particular chapter or a particular passage read aloud in his presence, bringing suggestions or images to his pupils which put them suddenly in front of themselves and their inner contradictions.

It was a way that did not isolate them from life but passed through life, a way that took into account the yes and the no, the oppositions, all the contrary forces, a way that made them understand the necessity of struggling to rise above the battle while at the same time taking part in it.

One was brought to a threshold to be crossed and for the first time one felt that complete sincerity was required of one. It might appear to be a difficult passage but what was being left behind no longer had the old attraction. In front of certain hesitations, the picture Gurdjieff gave of himself was a measure of what it was necessary to give and of what had to be given up in order not to take a wrong turn.

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