"The Gurdjieff Book"

I am currently on the road. Heading to Denver, Colorado to present at the ICON “Future Human” summit. Then lead the Metamodern Spirituality Lab in Vermont. When I get back I’ll publish the next Substack article (about the problems of purity).

Meanwhile, I just launched this book:

Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds (available for purchase now through the Amazon Beast) is the first volume from Sky Meadow Press. A collection of peculiar, playful, and very personal essays on the remarkable spiritual philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff.

His teachings (a cluster of wisdom lineages known collectively as The Fourth Way or The Work) are unique and intriguing but seldom explored. The material is demanding. No one can master it all. And its advocates do not tend to proselytize.

In this book, I am trying to do four things:

• introduce Gurdjieff & many of his key teachings

• provide my own insights & practices through my interpretation of Gurdjieff

• encourage a thematic bridge between Gurdjieff’s work and the various metamodern, liminal, Game B, integrative, developmental & regenerative communities.

• cultivate an alternative context for Gurdjieff studies that emphasizes ecology, sincere irony, metashamanics, archaic futurism, evolutionary spirituality, subconscious intelligence & the further reaches of embodied existential practice.

I did not write this as a card-carrying member of an official Gurdjieff lineage. I strongly support both the mainstream Fourth Way currents & the proliferating and interweaving complexity of outliers and rogue teachers. These are the right and left hands of the Work.

My goal is to invite people into the aspects of these teachings that have had the most personal impact. What have I gone back to again and again? What has actually changed my thinking & altered my way of being-in-the-world? This is what is important to me. And the hope is to communicate with playful seriousness, idiosyncrasy & a form of phrasing and emphasis that is not otherwise found in stand introductions and summaries on this important topic.

There has been lively debate, in some circles, as to whether Gurdjieff’s shorthand version of three inner intelligence systems (heart, mind and body) corresponds to the Syntheist notion of three narrative modes — logos, pathos, and mythos.

One can assert this from certain angles and challenge it from others. A third way, depicted in the image above, is to locate the Syntheist triad at the interstices between the primary subjective modes of the Gurdjieffian “system.”

That picture isn’t in the book. Just for Substack!

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I love Gurdjieff and hope to pay him back (however meagrely) with this unique “book object.” He gave the world multiple versions of a high-powered wisdom teaching. He preferred students who were critically minded, worldly, competent, and creative.

Although critical of all superficial gullibility and human immaturity, he did not ask people to give up or switch their religious traditions. His teaching was to change the existential quality of certain individuals in ways that could be organically adapted, through embodied metacognitive effort, to any external forms of life.

Without getting into self-indulgent mythologization, many of the people who knew him best — even many who disliked him — reported feeling as though he was the most potent, peculiar, and wise “being” they had ever encountered.

And unlike most prophets, saints or bodhisattvas, he was very practical, funny, mature, well-traveled, multilingual, artistic, avant-garde, countercultural, deeply versed in critical theories of language & strongly oriented toward the need to reframe spirituality and change modern education — to face the metacrisis and serve the ecological function of humanity that was intuited by the shamanic predecessors of the fragementary wisdom lineages of the human historical period.

Overall, a pretty dandy fella.

• Also (subscribers to the Xagick substack will have seen this) here’s Gurdjieff’s famous enneagram with an octopus superimposed: