What is the real Gurdjieff Work?

"Are you in the Work?"

For many years in the traditional Gurdjieff groups, I heard one phrase more than almost any other: being in the Work. It was said with a certain weight. Someone was "in the Work" or they weren't. A meeting was Work. The Movements were Work. A Saturday spent undertaking chores in silence was Work.

Beneath the phrase sat an assumption that was rarely examined. Some things belong to the Work, and some things don't. Your job, your marriage, your mortgage, your children's homework, the argument at the petrol station, the tax return: these were "life". Life was what happened between meetings. At best it was raw material to be brought back and reported on, exchanged. At worst it was a distraction from the real thing.

I want to put forward something simple and, I think, faithful to Gurdjieff himself that may have been forgotten by Fourth Way practitioners. Everything is in the Work. There is no outside. And if that is true, then much of what passes for "being in the Work" needs review.

Work must become life, life must become work

Gurdjieff called his teaching a Fourth Way because it does not ask a person to leave ordinary life. The fakir goes to the mat, the monk to the monastery, the yogi to the ashram. The Fourth Way stays in the city, at the desk, in the kitchen. According to Ouspensky's record, Gurdjieff held that the conditions of life a person finds themselves in are the best possible conditions for their work, because those are the conditions that reveal them.

If that is so, then to divide experience into "Work" and "life" is to reinstate the very monastery the Fourth Way set out to dissolve. We simply build it inside a weekly meeting instead of on a mountain.

So I put it this way: Work must become life, and life must become work. Not two activities held in balance, but one movement seen from two sides.

When I am trying to remember myself in a group exercise, that is life. When I am negotiating a difficult contract or sitting with a dying friend, that is Work. The question is never which activity I am in. The question is whether I am present in it, and what I do with what I see.

Gurdjieff titled his final book series Life is Real Only Then, When "I Am". Note where the emphasis falls. It is life that becomes real. Not the meeting, not the method. Life.

The ideas, the music, the Movements

None of this diminishes what Gurdjieff left us.

The ideas are extraordinary: the law of three, the octave, the centres, the many "I"s, self-remembering, conscious labour and intentional suffering. The music, written with de Hartmann, can open the heart in a way words cannot. The Movements can show me, in five minutes, how little command I have over my own body and attention. I have given much of my life to these things and I would not give them back.

But they are supports. Good ones, perhaps some of the best ever devised. Their purpose is to help me understand my life: to see how I actually function, where I am asleep, and what it would mean to work there. But a support that has become the thing it supports has stopped doing its job. Scaffolding is not the building.

Gurdjieff was blunt that the Fourth Way demands understanding above faith or obedience. Understanding, though, is not the same as knowledge. I can know the enneagram by heart and still be eaten alive by resentment at my business partner. I can execute the Multiplication exercise perfectly and still be cold to my wife at dinner.

Knowledge stored up in a group is like money left in a drawer. It only becomes understanding when it is spent, in life, at a cost.

So the only test that counts is this: can I apply what I have understood, in life? If I cannot, then however refined my vocabulary and however many years I have served, it is of no avail.

When the Work becomes a world of its own

What happens when the line between "Work" and "Life" is drawn too firmly? In earlier posts I set out the dangers for seekers in spiritual work and the dangers for spiritual groups. And almost every one of them grows from the same root: the Work turned into a separate world, sealed off from life.

The seeker. The person who constantly affirms being "in the Work" is, as I wrote then, often disguising a rooted narcissism. The phrase becomes a badge rather than a description. Then there are the Pontificators, who believe that the more they talk about the Work, the more they become it, and that time served equals wisdom gained. There are the Huff and Puff seekers, mistaking activity for being. There are those who hide in plain sight, coasting within the group because no one is asking how they treat their colleagues on Monday. And most painful of all, the Hypocrites, who guard the sacredness of the Work while their lives outside it fall apart in dishonesty and betrayal. Each of these is possible only because "the Work" has been allowed to mean something other than "my life".

The group. Groups suffer the same split at a collective level. Group think fixes on ideas at the expense of living inquiry. Keeping up appearances puts the pageantry, the language and the ritual of the Work ahead of its inner life; when that happens, I wrote, things become worse than if the group did not exist at all. And the test of group relations asks plainly: does this group isolate itself from life, or integrate itself into it? Does it serve, or expect to be served?

As I put it then, one thing a spiritual group cannot give you is the experience of not being in one. Life outside the group is not a lesser field. It is where the group's work is proven or exposed.

Faith made flesh

None of this is new. It is the oldest test in the Gospels. "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:20). Christ did not judge people by their doctrine or their membership, but by what their lives bore.

The Pharisees were, in their way, very much "in the Work": exact in observance, fluent in the law, certain of their standing. And it was to them that the hardest words were spoken.

St James puts it plainly: "faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone" (James 2:17). St Paul goes further. Though I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Substitute the Fourth Way's vocabulary and the warning is unchanged. Though I know the laws of world creation and world maintenance, and can sing every note of the sacred hymns, if I cannot love my neighbour in the moment he irritates me, I have gained nothing.

This is why I named this site Faith Made Flesh. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The pattern of the Incarnation is the pattern of real Work: what is understood above must descend and take bodily form below, in this world, among these people, today.

A Work that stays in ideas, however lofty, has not yet been incarnated. It is still waiting to be born.

So what is the real Gurdjieff Work?

The real Work is not a set of activities. It is not a membership, a lineage, a vocabulary or a calendar of meetings. It is the effort to be present, honest and of use, in whatever life I have actually been given, and to let what I see there change how I act.

The groups, the ideas, the music and the Movements are there to help with that. Use them. Love them, even. But do not mistake them for the destination.

If you want to know whether you are "in the Work", don't look at your attendance. Look at how you spoke to the person who served your coffee this morning. Look at your marriage, your business dealings, your patience with your own failures and others. That is where the Work is, because that is where you are.

Everything is in the Work. Work must become life, and life must become work. The only thing that counts is whether what we have understood can be lived. Otherwise, what is the point?

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Matthew 7:21 KJV