Gurdjieff - His Life and His Work
in the Enneagram

Nathan Bernier

       When we try to pass our understanding on to others, we always decompose it. Nobody describes the obvious; the exceptions draw our attention. The normal doesn't impress us too much and it becomes as tacit as health. But when we see something bad or wrong, we hurry to talk about, to research, and to describe. Therefore, records tend to be tendentious: detailing an exception stands out besides a non explicit obvious.
       This is the western attitude, where medicine is oriented to pathology, law to crime, knowledge to exception.
       Many books have been written on the Teaching and the Master. But, as a law, the teaching is being diluted and the master's history is fading out.
       The biographies of Gurdjieff are incomplete and contradictory, nobody really met him and nobody was able to describe him — if a being of his level can ever be described in words. The descriptions of Gurdjieff left to us are like the impressions of blind men who touch partially an elephant: one describes the loin, other the trunk and other a paw... They try to convey a point of contact as if it was the whole. No matter how much you heard or read about, the whole and real image is broken into pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.

"If you ask a fish to describe its environment,
the last thing it'll talk about is water." (1)
Before a clean white wall we find nothing to say;
but if there is a small stain there, soon we became experts in stains.
 

(1) How to Be Your Own Best Friend, by Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz, 1971

See a diagram from the book:

   
ISBN 85-87154-01-X Forthcoming
IN ENGLISH