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Gurdjieff and Mind Controllers 1

Article by Robert Bruce Baird

The dance that Gurdjieff saw the people of Tibet use to enhance their spiritual discipline became almost the only tool he used to teach his French and other students from his Parisian École which includes the name Priory. That leads me to wonder about the Protocols used by his Russian patron the Czar; and his involvement in giving Hitler the Swastika. I have also considered the involvement of Bernard Baruch as a Gurdjieffian student and his Merovingians who benefited so much from the wars of the 20th Century in other books. In this excerpt from another researcher I enjoy, we find insight to modern music and the Red headed or Crimson King. You will have a lot of research to do if you are going to understand these connections as this author properly notes. Gurdjieff was a spy and a lot like St. Germain. “British rock, particularly British progressive rock (whatever “progressive” may mean or not mean), is like a club or select society: the more you find out about it, the more you realize that practically everybody in the club has played in practically everyone else’s group at one time or another… It would be silly to say that Fripp, or anyone other single person, was at “the” center of this tangled mass of perpetually mutating strands of double-helical do-re-mi. Yet the Crimson King was inarguably one of the ribosomal focal points of creative synthesis, touching, in his eccentric way, all the musicians he worked with, and leaving his decisive stamp on the history of rock in the early 1970s and beyond. Of the classic heavyweight progressive rockers, who had laid down a more convincing legacy than King Crimson? By 1974 Yes had lost themselves in grandiosity beyond all reasonable bounds (though continuing to play to huge popular acclaim); Emerson, Lake and Palmer were grandstanding with thirty-six tons of equipment and labored flashes of lasers and psychedelic music-hall brilliance; Procol Harum were drifting into repetition and stagnation with Exotic Birds and Fruit, less than a mere shadow of their one-time life and soul. Faced with such examples of dinosaur burnout, and listening to the records of all these groups today, I come away with a feeling that King Crimson’s music of the period sounds infinitely less dated… He was clearly in it for the music… But then, one of the marks of the superior creative talent is precisely knowing when to quit, when to seek out a new vision. As hinted at in the previous chapter, particularly grating to Fripp was the commercial/music-industry aspect of the whole progressive rock spectacle. In the October 1974 Melody Maker interview where he explained his reasons for disbanding King Crimson, Fripp said that successful rock bands often “originally start out to service a need but you now have a situation where, being creative, they have to create needs in order that they may continue to exist. In other words, they’ve become vampiric {This is the proper word to use and readers of many of my books that address the Dragons or Pendragons and the work of Sir Laurence Gardner will see this is true.}.’ On the subject of the music itself, in 1987 Fripp dismissed early progressive/art-rock music as ‘a badly cobbled pastiche of a number of badly digested and ill-understood music forms.’ A sense of no new worlds left to conquer, of the exhaustion of a particular set of possibilities. For an artist, to stay in the same place is to go backwards, to stop growing is to die. As for Robert Fripp – who disbanded King Crimson in the face of what seemed to him insurmountable cosmic, business, and personal obstacles, and who effectively erased himself from the musical scene – for the moment, late 1974, he was indeed gone, top of head blown off, wandering around without a sense of ego. The Faustian pact was over, just like Lennon’s dream. Music itself had stymied him, the presentation of meaningful music no longer seemed a real possibility. Fripp wanted to wrap up his unfinished business, however, and did so in a number of projects, among them putting together The Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson, a double-album “greatest hits” package which pointedly omitted “Schizoid Man.” The album included a detailed chronology of King Crimson I-III compiled by Fripp from record and concert reviews, conversations with musicians, and Fripp’s own journal entries… On the break-up of King Crimson III, Fripp calculated that he had enough money to pay his bills for three years. And indeed, even in his disoriented frame of mind, he was hatching a personal three-year plan consisting of preparation, withdrawal, and recovery. His activities of the first year – winding up his affairs – would prepare him for a decisive withdrawal from the music industry – and effectively from the outside world – at J.G. Bennett’s International Society for Continuous Education at Sherborne House, following which he would survey the inner and outer landscapes and decide what to do next. It is quite possible that Fripp’s transformational experience at Sherborne – which is, if obliquely, the subject of this chapter – cannot be understood by anyone who has not undergone something similar. It is just possible, however, that some inkling of what was involved may be got by reviewing the historical backdrop of his experience. Since Fripp’s subsequent music and public posture was deeply affected by his encounter with the Gurdjieff/Bennett tradition, and since only the most superficial information on that tradition was dispensed by the music press in the course of reviewing Fripp’s work, I offer here a somewhat more substantial summary for the interested reader. In recent years Fripp has publicly distanced himself from the Gurdjieff/Bennett tradition, preferring to claim only that he speaks for his own school, Guitar Craft. It was not so long ago, however, that he was splicing Bennett tapes into his albums and quoting Gurdjieff in his articles. It may in part have been the rock press’s open hostility and ridicule of Fripp’s apparent conversion to a “mystical cult” – though as far as I can make out, the Gurdjieff work is neither mystical nor a cult – that led him to his present position of reserve. Gurdjieff Who was George Ivanovich Gurdjieff? It appears that, even when he was alive – he died in 1949, his date of birth is uncertain, probably 1877 – if one asked ten people who knew him, one would receive ten different answers. Bennett wrote a biography of Gurdjieff, and his ultimate assessment of the man was that he was ‘more than a Teacher and less than a Prophet. He was a man with a true mission and he devoted his entire life to it. He needed people who could understand his message and yet he was compelled to make the message obscure and hard to understand. Therefore, he had to look for those who could acquire the required perspicacity and also the singleness of purpose to carry his work forward. Today [1973], twenty-four years after his death, there are thirty or forty people in different parts of the world who are capable of transmitting the teaching, but there are very few who can look beyond the man to his message.’ Since Gurdjieff’s death, work with his methods has continued in formally and informally organized groups scattered across many countries. Any attempt to penetrate the real meaning of Gurdjieff’s work leads to the inescapable conclusion that such meaning can be grasped only through sustained personal effort over a period of months and years – through self-observation, certain exercises carried out under the instruction of a qualified teacher, and a commitment to work on oneself in the context of a supportive community of fellow-seekers. Gurdjieff taught not so much a doctrine or creed as a method or a way, and it was a way whose transmission through mere books was deemed impossible. Nevertheless he wrote a number of books himself, and a fair number of his followers, often after considerable gnashing of teeth and soul-searching – given the admittedly ineffable nature of the subject-matter – have over the years committed their thoughts on Gurdjieff, his ideas, and his methods to the printed page. In 1985 J. Walter Driscoll, in collaboration with the Gurdjieff Foundation of California, published Gurdjieff: An Annotated Bibliography, a remarkable listing of over 1,700 books, articles, reviews, unpublished manuscripts, and other items in English, French, and other languages. Through this source one can gain some considerable insight into the identity of this enigmatic figure and the profound impact he had on any soul so fortunate or unfortunate as to grapple with him. Gurdjieff was born in the Armenian town of Alexandropol. With a Greek father and an Armenian mother, he had what one might call a flexible Middle Eastern appearance – one he would learn to shift, chameleon-like, at will, impersonating one or another race according to the demands of the moment. (With shaved head and groomed moustache, in his youth he looked perhaps not unlike the majestic Tony Levin.) Gurdjieff’s father was a successful, even rich, cattle herder until his animals were wiped out by a pestilence; after the loss of all his wealth he worked as a carpenter and at other jobs. Most important to Gurdjieff, however, was his father’s avocation as an asokh, or story-telling bard, for which he was widely known, having at his command hundreds of songs, poems, legends, and folk-tales. From him Gurdjieff inherited not only treasures of ancient wisdom from a rapidly vanishing oral tradition, but a tendency to view the world in allegorical terms, as a surpassingly rich drama with elements both tragic and comic. Gurdjieff was trained privately in medicine and Orthodox religion, but at some point around the age of twenty, driven by a need to seek answers to life’s ultimate questions, he left his home environment and embarked on a lengthy series of travels around the Middle East, Central Asia, Tibet, India, and Egypt, at times alone and at times in the company of a number of other singularly committed individuals who called themselves “The Seekers of Truth.” Tales of Gurdjieff’s many expeditions and wanderings over this twenty-odd year period are told in his autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men. The modern Western reader is bound to find much in this spiritual travelogue astonishing and almost literally unbelievable. Miracles, prodigious psychic feats, exotic customs, and a faraway fairy-tale or medieval atmosphere pervade the book. Gurdjieff portrays a fluid, teeming life at the mythical center of the world, the cradle of civilization – a life in which currents of the great organized world religions mix with esoteric teachings, in which traditional Asian cultures run up against the forces of modernization – a world in which contemporary Europeans are viewed almost universally as soulless fools, a world in which Western dividing lines between body and spirit, matter and psyche, the mundane and the paranormal blur and vanish under the searchlight of the seeker’s unremitting will to know. Enduring the harshest physical hardships, learning to be a trader, carpet dealer, businessman, fix-it man, con man, and consummate actor, drawing on his knowledge of some sixteen languages and dialects, Gurdjieff spent these years studying himself and the world, accumulating convincing evidence for the existence of higher powers, and meeting many, as he put it, “remarkable men” – gurus, yogis, fakirs, story-tellers, teachers, holy men, healers, monks – some situated in fantastically remote areas, hidden in monasteries unknown to the world and completely inaccessible to Westerners, where esoteric teachings had been transmitted orally for centuries, even millennia. In 1912, convinced that he had discovered and mastered a certain knowledge whose core of truth is found in all genuine religious traditions, and whose lineage went back to pre-Babylonian ages, Gurdjieff went to Moscow, where he began the teaching efforts he would pursue the remainder of his life. One of his students was P.D. Ouspensky, with whom he would split in the 1920s, but who wrote a systematic account of Gurdjieff’s early ideas and methods, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, a book which Gurdjieff approved and cleared for publication shortly after Ouspensky’s death in 1947. The practical philosophy that Fripp was developing during his three-year retreat from the music industry, which he would put into practice in his musical work of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and which would turn up in full bloom in his Guitar Craft courses after 1985, owes much to Gurdjieffian ideas that Ouspensky relates in In Search of the Miraculous. The overarching theme of the book is the idea that in our normal state we human beings are asleep, unconscious, running on automatic. Our ideals, morals, ideologies, religion, art, and lofty philosophizing are all a sham, the product of instinctual groping in the dark, automatic mental associations, wishful thinking, bloated egotism, laziness, shallow romanticism. ‘It is possible to think for a thousand years,’ said Gurdjieff. ‘It is possible to write whole libraries of books, to create theories by the million, and all this in sleep, without any possibility of awakening. On the contrary, these books and these theories, written and created in sleep, will merely send other people to sleep, and so on.’ The individual human organism is merely an animal, according to Gurdjieff, a self-deluded machine, following the course of least resistance, slipping unconscious day by day to its ultimately inevitable death. Occultist students would ask Gurdjieff about life after death, reincarnation, and so on, and he would reply that for most people, death is indeed the ultimate end, you go out like a light and that is it. Only for those who had persistently labored to develop a soul, a real, permanent, unchangeable “I,” was there any possibility that some essential quality of their being would survive the death of the physical body.

About the Author

Author of Diverse DruidsColumnist for The ES Press MagazineGuest ‘expert’ at World-Mysteries.com