“For a man of Western culture, it is of course difficult to believe and the accept the idea that an ignorant fakir, a naive monk, or a yogi who has retired from life may be on the way to evolution, while an educated European, armed with “exact knowledge” and all the latest methods of investigation, has no chance whatever and is moving in a circle from there is no escape…..

What do you expect? People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious, they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything.

“Progress” and “civilization” in the real meaning of those words, can appear only as the result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as the result of unconscious efforts. And what conscious efforts can there be in machines? And if one machine is unconscious, then a hundred machines are unconscious, and so are a thousand machines, or a hundred thousand, or a million. And the unconscious activity of a million machines must necessarily result in destruction and extermination. You do not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you will understand.”

—  G. Gurdjieff, quoted in “In Search of the Miraculous,” P. D. Ouspensky

My Comment

I’ve been fascinated with the influence of Gurdjieff on western artists in the early part of the twentieth century – pianists, painters, and writers (Katherine Mansfield and Aldous Huxley among them), including a large number belonging to the Harlem Renaissance.

Scholars generally dismiss Gurdjieff as a charlatan, or at best, obscurantist. Quotes like the one above don’t help.  What can Western science (which wasn’t solely Western, of course, but that’s another story) possibly have to learn from “fakirs, monks, and yogis” ?

More later.