Retrospective 2021-02

This is a brief summary of my reading the last two weeks. I haven’t painted anything.

I have been reading Anthony Blake. Blake’s The Supreme Art of Dialogue is an excellent book which I read two years ago.

Anthony Blake has many references to Gurdjieff in his book about the enneagram, which lead me to the following books:

• In Search of the Miraculous by Peter D. Ouspensky,
• In Search of Being by George I. Gurdjieff, and
• The Reality of Being by Jeanne de Salzmann.

Peter D. Ouspensky studied with Gurdjieff’s from 1915 to 1924. In Search of the Miraculous recounts what he learned from Gurdjieff during those years. Jeanne de Salzman worked with Gurdjieff from 1919 until his death in 1949.

So, what are my impressions of Gurdjieff? Ouspensky writes in In Search of the Miraculous that:

“In general, many things which G. said astonished me. There were ideas which I could not accept and which appeared to me fantastic and without foundation. Other things, on the contrary, coincided strangely with what I had thought myself and with what I had arrived at long ago. I was most of all interested in the connectedness of everything he said. … I asked myself whether I had indeed found what I was looking for.“

I agree with Ouspensky that there are many things which Gurdjieff says that astonishes me. Some ideas appear to me without foundation, and other coincide with what I have thought myself. However, I would never have followed Gurdjieff myself. I doubt his ideas and perceive him as manipulative.