G.I.Gurdjieff: The Core Teaching

In today’s world of information overload, it is easy to overlook the meaning and significance of ancient wisdom and arcane knowledge. In the last century, a unique individual intuited that behind orthodox knowledge and academia lies a hidden corpus of wisdom; he went in search of this knowledge in the East, visiting such places as Tibet, the Solomon Islands, India, Siberia, Egypt, Crete, Turkmenistan, and a host of other remote destinations.

He formed a specialized group in order to search many places simultaneously and afterwards share what they had found. His name was G.I. Gurdjieff.

What was different about Gurdjieff, was that he was a practical man, unlike many mystics and saints who went before him. He had studied medicine and also religion in his youth but their theories and modus operandi did not satisfy his thirst for answers. His interest was in the ancient knowledge of the Earth!
He was ‘a man on a mission’ and he shared his love of wisdom with others in his group; called The Seekers of Truth.

Gurdjieff possessed great powers of discernment, practical life skills and an unusual ability to unearth arcane materials – such as ancient parchments, old and valuable artefacts, and individuals who could help him on his quest. After many years of search and great hardships; which is now recounted in the movie 'Meetings with Remarkable Men', Gurdjieff found what he was looking for … a chain of initiated teachings handed down from antiquity via an unbroken line of secret schools – what the Sufis call 'The Chain of Transmission'.

In 1912 he brought this wisdom to the West, meeting P.D. Ouspensky and others in Moscow and St.Petersburg; creating the conditions for transmitting this knowledge to western people. He was now a very powerful man, with hypnotic eyes and cognitive abilities way above the average person; he brought with him a seminal teaching which he said belonged to antiquity and existed in Pre-Pharaonic-Egypt. Gurdjieff in fact, claimed that this ancient and powerful wisdom was not hidden, but modern people are not interested; we merely pass over it; considering it to be worthless or just ‘fairy tales’ not worthy of investigation.
 
                                      “The truth is no longer hidden; now people hide from the truth!”
                                                                     -The Free Thought Project. com

He explained a simple but forgotten concept to his Russian students; our intellectual capacity and our cognitive ability are two very different faculties. This is a definitive blind-spot in the understanding of contemporary peoples.

One may have a high intellectual capacity, yet at the same time possess a very low cognitive ability. This is a paradox to the understanding of modern peoples. Neither does profane science and academia notice this!!

He said, modern man has increased his intellectual capacity somewhat but his cognitive ability has diminished dramatically. In other words, we have a great capacity for intellectual thought, calculation, business, inventions, learning by rote vast quantities of information and data, but our ability to see deeply into things, to core a situation, a person, the meaning of life – has vanished! We no longer carry wonder in our hearts when we gaze out into the Cosmos; we merely think in terms of light-years, space-exploration, calculations, chemistry and physics. Our thinking is linear and also infantile – we view things from the perspective of a very limited paradigm. Life is much bigger that our dwarfed terrestrial thinking!!

He explained to his students further, that the scope and depth of our minds are insufficient; our minds are cognitively limited – something modern scientists and psychologists are just becoming aware of. When we rely on our minds alone, we get a limited and false view of reality … and because we do not understand this basic principle, lies are invented to fill the gaps in our knowledge and thus we end up going in circles much of the time. Lets not forget, all contemporary science and academia are based on the mind!
                 
“The mind is nourished by fictions – ordinary or occult. The mind always hankers for beautiful stories. The mind lives through lies. The mind is afraid of the truth but it is a great lover of lies. To satisfy the mind, down through the ages, thousands of lies have been invented. When one lie becomes too old, rotten, it is dropped and a new lie is invented. Man is very inventive. But all inventions of this kind prevent you from seeing the truth, and your energy becomes engaged in a futile dimension.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  -Osho.