Gurdjieff #3

Division of Attention. Gurdjieff encouraged his students to cultivate the ability to divide their attention, that is, the ability to remain fully focussed on two or more things at the same time. One might, for instance, let half of one's attention dwell in one's little finger, while the other half is devoted to an intellectual discussion. In the division of attention, it is not a matter of going back and forth between one thing and another, but experiencing them both fully simultaneously. Beyond the division of attention lies "remembering oneself" - a frame of mind, permanent in the hypothetical perfected person, fleeting and temporary in the rest of us, in which we see what is seen without ever losing sight of ourselves seeing. Ordinarily, when concentrating on something, we lose our sense of "I," although we may as it were passively react to the stimulus we are concentrating on. In self-remembering the "I" is not lost, and only when we maintain that sense of "I," according to Gurdjieff, are we really awake. Like mastery on a musical instrument, such forms of heightened self-awareness can be developed only with years of practice.

Hands, Head, and Heart. With many variations and complications over the years, Gurdjieff's theoretical picture of the human organism boils down to a tripartite model consisting of three "centers": the moving, the emotional, and the thinking. Becoming a genuine person involves coordinating the three centers and becoming capable of conscious labor and intentional suffering.

Abstract Symbolism. Gurdjieff was fond of elaborate theorizing - the construction of intricate symbolic systems embodying or representing the relationships between phenomena at all levels of existence from the atom to the universe. Ouspensky devotes pages and pages to Gurdjieff's concept of "octaves" {Thus one must study the Pythagorean connection with Abaris the Druid.}- the musical scale do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do taken as a sort of universal yardstick for determining the measurements and proportions of all of nature's parts. (The theory of octaves had a tremendous impact on pianist Keith Jarrett, who read about them in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff's longest, most allegorical, and most difficult book.) Some Gurdjieff students and groups gloss over the octaves or dispense with them entirely. My own feeling is that the theory of octaves has a lot in common with medieval Western musical theorists' preoccupation with theo-numerological speculation based on interval integer ratios and their symbolic significance. In point of fact, Gurdjieff had studied the medieval alchemists and on occasion was prone to speak of the human organism as a sort of alchemical factory for the transformation of various material and psychic substances.

It seems that where there is music, and where there are people who philosophize about it, there will be some form of numerology and arcane quasi-mathematics. Since both musical pitch and musical rhythm are readily represented in numerical forms, the urge to find primal mathematical significance in music is almost impossible to resist. A contemporary example of this perennially seductive train of thought is Peter Michael Hamel's book Through Music to the Self.

Another symbolic thought-form Gurdjieff worked with was the enneagram, a circle with nine points around its circumference. Said Gurdjieff,