Gurdjieff, Exorcism and the Christian Battle for Consciousness

Christianity has never regarded the problem of evil as merely psychological. From the Gospels onward, the Christian tradition has maintained that human beings can be influenced, deceived, oppressed and, in extraordinary cases, dominated by personal spiritual intelligences opposed to God.

Yet much of modern Christianity has become uncomfortable with this dimension of the Gospel. Accounts of demons and exorcism are frequently explained away as primitive descriptions of mental illness, cultural phenomena or psychological disturbance. At the other extreme, some forms of contemporary deliverance ministry can become preoccupied with demons, treating almost every difficulty as evidence of spiritual attack.

There is another possibility.

We can take the Gospel's teaching about spiritual evil seriously without abandoning psychological discernment, and we can take seriously the extraordinary claims of Christian demonology without imagining that every human difficulty is caused by a demon. In this respect, Gurdjieff's teaching about human sleep provides an unusually useful anthropology for understanding the question.

He does not give us a Christian demonology in the conventional sense, and he does not provide a systematic theology of exorcism. What he does provide is a remarkably detailed account of the condition that makes human beings susceptible to external influences in the first place.

The Problem of Human Sleep

Gurdjieff begins with an extraordinarily uncompromising diagnosis: "Man is a machine." In In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky records Gurdjieff explaining that man's actions are the results of external influences and external impressions (p. 21).

This does not mean merely that people are occasionally influenced by their surroundings. It means that ordinary human consciousness is not nearly as autonomous as it imagines itself to be. Thoughts arise, emotions arise, desires arise, impulses arise, and the ordinary person generally experiences all of these movements as "I."

Yet Gurdjieff's central claim is that there is no permanent and unified "I" behind them. Instead, "Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion" (In Search of the Miraculous, p. 59).

This language is particularly interesting when considered alongside the Christian account of demonic possession. It would be a mistake to simply equate Gurdjieff's "legion" of competing I's with the demons of the Gospel.

Gurdjieff is describing the fragmentation and mechanicalness of ordinary human personality, whereas the Gospel describes a man genuinely afflicted by a plurality of unclean spirits. Nevertheless, the comparison becomes much more significant when we consider what Gurdjieff means by sleep.

For Gurdjieff, sleep is not simply the condition of being unconscious during the night. It is the normal condition of humanity. A person may be physically awake while remaining psychologically asleep, unable to control his thoughts, imagination, emotions or attention. He is therefore extraordinarily susceptible to whatever impressions and influences happen to reach him.

Gurdjieff makes the point even more sharply when he says that it is impossible to become free from one influence without becoming subject to another: "The whole thing consists in choosing the influence to which you wish to subject yourself" (In Search of the Miraculous, p. 25).

This is one of the places where Gurdjieff's teaching intersects unexpectedly with Christian spiritual warfare. The important point is not that every influence is demonic. It plainly is not. Human beings are influenced by parents, culture, education, advertising, political movements, other people, memories, biological drives, habitual patterns and their own imagination.

Gurdjieff's point is more fundamental: the ordinary human being does not possess the degree of interior freedom that he assumes he possesses. His consciousness is permeable. He can be acted upon.

From Influence to Domination

Christian demonology adds another possibility to this anthropology. Among the many influences capable of acting upon a human being, Christianity maintains that there are also personal spiritual intelligences whose purposes are hostile to God and to human flourishing.

The question, therefore, is not whether human beings can be influenced. Gurdjieff has already established that they can. The Christian question is what kind of influence is operating, how it is received, how it becomes established, and at what point an influence becomes a form of spiritual domination.

This gives us a useful way of thinking about the traditional categories of infestation, obsession, oppression and possession. These terms should not be treated as a universal biblical taxonomy, because different Christian traditions use them somewhat differently and the New Testament itself does not present them as a four-stage system. They are better understood as pastoral and theological categories for describing different forms or degrees of spiritual disturbance.

Infestation generally refers to an external disturbance associated with a place, object or environment. Obsession traditionally describes an intrusive or persistent influence upon the mind, imagination, emotions or behaviour. Oppression refers more directly to persistent adverse influence upon a person without necessarily implying possession. Possession represents the extraordinary extreme in which a demonic intelligence exercises an unusual degree of control over a person's faculties or behaviour. These categories therefore concern degrees and forms of influence and domination; they should not be confused with Gurdjieff's technical vocabulary.

Nevertheless, Gurdjieff's doctrine of sleep provides a way of understanding why such influence could become progressively more serious. If ordinary man is asleep, he is already radically susceptible.

An influence does not have to seize control of a fully conscious and integrated individual. It encounters instead a fragmented personality whose thoughts, emotions, desires and impulses are continually moving without a permanent centre. The first problem is therefore not possession. It is the absence of sufficient consciousness to recognise what is happening.

This is where Gurdjieff's concept of identification becomes especially important. The sleeping person does not merely experience thoughts and emotions; he identifies with them. A thought becomes "my thought." An emotion becomes "my emotion." A desire becomes "what I want." An impulse becomes "what I have decided."

In this way, something that initially arises within the contents of consciousness can acquire authority simply because the person identifies with it. The influence becomes indistinguishable from the self.

From this perspective, a useful Christian-Gurdjieffian model might be described as a movement from sleep, through susceptibility and influence, toward identification and eventually domination. Possession would represent the extreme Christian possibility at the far end of this spectrum.

This should not be mistaken for a doctrine taught explicitly by Gurdjieff. He does not formulate possession as the culmination of his psychology (though it could be implied). Rather, his doctrine of sleep provides the anthropology within which the Christian claim about possession can be understood: the human being is capable of being acted upon because ordinary consciousness is profoundly permeable.

Watchfulness and the Battle for the Mind

The Philokalic tradition provides an important Christian parallel to this understanding. The practice of nepsis, or watchfulness, involves learning to observe what enters the mind and heart without immediately consenting to it.

The Fathers speak of logismoi, thoughts or thought-patterns that arise within consciousness and which must be discerned rather than automatically accepted. Some may arise from ordinary psychological processes; others may arise from the passions; and the Christian ascetical tradition also recognises that certain thoughts can be suggested or provoked by demonic intelligences.

The practical task is therefore one of watchfulness, discernment and prayer. Hesychios, for example, describes watchfulness as a continual attentiveness to what enters the inner life and associates this vigilance with resistance to evil thoughts and invocation of Christ.

In the Philokalic understanding, the Christian is not simply supposed to believe every thought that appears in consciousness. He learns to distinguish between the thought and the self, between suggestion and consent, and between what leads toward God and what leads away from Him.

This is remarkably close to what Gurdjieff is trying to accomplish through self-observation and non-identification. The Christian tradition, however, places the practice within a similar metaphysical and theological framework. The goal is not simply to observe the contents of consciousness more accurately. It is to become watchful before God, to acquire discernment, to resist evil and ultimately to become transformed in Christ.

This distinction is important because it prevents two opposite mistakes. The first is psychological reductionism: assuming that every experience described as spiritual attack must therefore be nothing more than mental illness or emotional disturbance. The second is spiritual reductionism: assuming that every disturbing thought, compulsion, illness or psychological difficulty must have a demonic cause.

The Christian tradition itself has generally resisted such simplistic conclusions. The Catholic Church, for example, requires careful discernment and recognises the importance of medical and psychological assessment before an authentic case of possession is established. Exorcism is understood as an exercise of Christ's authority rather than as a psychological technique or magical procedure.

Gurdjieff's teaching helps explain why discernment is so necessary. The ordinary human being is already living within a dense field of influences, most of which he does not recognise. He is therefore poorly positioned to distinguish between an ordinary psychological impulse, a habitual pattern, an emotional reaction, an external social influence and something genuinely spiritual.

The first requirement is consciousness. Without consciousness there can be little reliable discernment, because the person simply becomes whatever influence is strongest at the moment.

Possession as an Extreme Possibility

This also helps clarify the relationship between possession and Gurdjieff's doctrine of sleep. Gurdjieff himself does not, so far as I am aware, formulate the proposition that "sleep leads to demonic possession," nor does he present possession as the culmination of his four-way psychology. That would go beyond his explicit teaching.

But his doctrine does establish something that makes the Christian possibility intelligible: the ordinary human being is profoundly susceptible to external influences because he lacks a stable and unified consciousness.

From a Christian perspective, therefore, possession can be understood as an extreme possibility within a much broader anthropology of susceptibility. Not everyone who is asleep is possessed, just as not everyone who experiences an intrusive thought is under demonic attack.

But possession, if it occurs, presupposes a human being who can in some extraordinary way be acted upon. Gurdjieff's teaching describes the condition of radical susceptibility; Christian demonology identifies one possible source of hostile influence and describes the extreme case in which that influence becomes extraordinarily dominant.

The Gospel account of the demoniac in Mark 5 becomes particularly interesting in this light. The man's condition is not presented simply as a collection of symptoms. He is described as being under the influence of a plurality of spirits, who identify themselves collectively as "Legion." Yet after Christ delivers him, the man is found "clothed and in his right mind." The movement is from fragmentation and domination toward restored agency and wholeness.

It would nevertheless be too simplistic to reduce the story to a psychological illustration of Gurdjieff's "many I's." The Gospel is making a stronger claim: there are spiritual intelligences that are not simply aspects of human psychology. The man is not merely fragmented; he is afflicted. Christ does not merely teach him to observe his inner states. He confronts and expels the spirits.

Gurdjieff's psychology and Christian demonology therefore overlap at the level of human susceptibility and fragmentation while remaining distinct, in some respects, in their explanation of spiritual agency.

Deliverance is Not the End

This is also why the Gospel's teaching about deliverance cannot be separated from discipleship.

In Matthew 12, Christ describes an unclean spirit leaving a person and subsequently returning to find the house "swept and put in order." Because it remains empty, the spirit returns with others more wicked than itself, and the final condition becomes worse than the first.

Whatever else this difficult passage means, it clearly warns against understanding spiritual liberation merely as the removal of something negative. The interior life must subsequently be occupied by something positive.

Here Gurdjieff's teaching again provides an illuminating comparison. His programme is not simply about getting rid of unwanted thoughts, emotions or influences. Self-observation, self-remembering, intentional suffering and conscious labour are intended to produce something that was previously absent: a more stable centre of consciousness and, ultimately, a transformation of being.

The Christian tradition expresses the same problem in different language. Deliverance without conversion is incomplete. Exorcism without discipleship is insufficient. The house cannot remain empty.

This is why the Christian answer to possession cannot ultimately be understood as the achievement of psychological autonomy. The goal of Christian transformation is not to make the individual completely independent of all influence.

In fact, Gurdjieff himself observes that one cannot simply become free from one influence without becoming subject to another. The Christian therefore seeks not absolute independence but rightly ordered dependence: freedom from domination by evil and increasing conformity to Christ.

The distinction becomes particularly important when we consider exorcism itself.

In the Gospel, Christ does not teach a technique for manipulating demons. The authority belongs to him. The account in Acts 19, where the sons of Sceva attempt to invoke the name of Jesus as though it were a formula, makes the point vividly: the spirit knows Jesus and knows Paul, but does not recognise their authority. The Christian tradition consequently understands exorcism not as a spiritual technology but as prayer exercised under the authority of Christ.

Gurdjieffian conscious work occupies a different but complementary level. It addresses the human side of the problem: mechanicalness, identification, fragmentation, suggestibility and sleep.

Christian exorcism addresses the possibility of an objectively hostile spiritual intelligence. Christian discipleship then addresses what must happen to the person after deliverance: the mind must be renewed, the heart purified, the passions transformed, and the life increasingly ordered toward God.

From Sleep to Indwelling

Seen in this way, Gurdjieff's teaching may offer something valuable to Christian discussions of spiritual warfare because it refuses to allow the human being to become passive in the face of his own condition. It is tempting to blame every difficulty on an external spirit because doing so removes responsibility from the individual. Gurdjieff's teaching will not allow this escape. Even when external influences are powerful, the human problem includes our extraordinary tendency to identify with them, reproduce them and mistake them for ourselves.

At the same time, Christianity prevents Gurdjieff's anthropology from being reduced to a purely psychological system. There may be influences that are not simply psychological. There may be forms of evil that cannot be adequately explained by conditioning, trauma, social pressure or the fragmentation of personality. The Christian tradition insists that the universe contains personal spiritual intelligences, both good and evil, and that the battle for the human person is therefore not merely an internal psychological struggle.

The result is a more comprehensive picture of spiritual warfare.

Gurdjieff's "sleep" describes the condition in which the human being is insufficiently conscious and therefore extraordinarily susceptible to influence. Identification allows influences to become incorporated into the person's experience of self. Persistent influence can become increasingly dominant, and Christian demonology allows for the extraordinary possibility that a hostile spiritual intelligence can exercise an abnormal degree of control over the person.

Exorcism confronts that hostile intelligence under the authority of Christ, while conscious labour, prayer and discipleship seek to establish within the person the conditions in which genuine freedom can develop.

Ultimately, however, the Christian answer is not merely to become more conscious. Nor is it simply to become empty of unwanted influences. The Gospel points toward something far greater: the transformation of the human person through communion with God. Paul speaks of Christ living in the believer; the New Testament speaks of the human person as a temple of the Holy Spirit; the Christian mystical tradition speaks of purification, illumination and union with God.

This gives Matthew's image of the empty house its deepest significance. The objective of deliverance is not an empty human being who has successfully expelled every external influence. The objective is a human being whose interior life has become ordered toward God. The house must not merely be swept clean; it must become inhabited by the right presence.

Here, perhaps, the deepest connection between Gurdjieff's Christianity and the Christian doctrine of deliverance becomes visible. Gurdjieff's great question is how a sleeping, mechanical and fragmented human being can become genuinely human, first, and Christianity's is that a genuine human being is called to become a dwelling place of God.

The battle therefore concerns far more than demons. It concerns consciousness, freedom, attention, discernment, identification and the formation of the person. The Christian doctrine of spiritual warfare and Gurdjieff's doctrine of sleep meet at this point: the human being must awaken to the reality of what is acting upon him, learn to distinguish what he is identifying with, and cease surrendering his interior life mechanically to whatever influence happens to possess his attention.

And yet Christianity finally offers something that Gurdjieff's language alone cannot provide. The answer to possession is not simply autonomy. The answer to fragmentation is not merely integration. The answer to sleep is not merely wakefulness.

The Christian hope is that the human person may become sufficiently awake, sufficiently free and sufficiently transformed that Christ himself becomes the organising centre of his life.

The opposite of possession is therefore not emptiness. It is indwelling.

That is the deeper Christian movement: from sleep to wakefulness, from susceptibility to discernment, from identification to freedom, from fragmentation to wholeness, and finally from domination by alien influences to participation in the life of Christ. Gurdjieff's teaching helps us see the extraordinary depth of the human problem. The Gospel reveals the extraordinary depth of its solution.