Secret Talks with Mr. G
About This Book
Secret Talks with Mr. G is one of the most intimate and paradox-filled documents in the Gurdjieff literature — a compilation of informal teaching exchanges in which Gurdjieff (identified as 'Mr. G') addresses students on the practical realities of inner work, cutting through the formulations of his public teaching with a directness and an irreverence that the more official texts preserve only partially. The book has a somewhat murky editorial history and its relationship to the actual historical Gurdjieff is contested within the Gurdjieff Work community, but it is widely read and regarded as conveying something genuine about the quality and style of his informal teaching.
The exchanges cover the full range of what concerned Gurdjieff in his teaching: the distinction between essence (what one actually is) and personality (what one has been conditioned to perform), the specific nature of 'sleep' as he understood it (not the absence of consciousness but the illusion of being awake while actually being entirely mechanical), the role of suffering in awakening (the difference between the suffering that deadens and the suffering that, properly used, produces genuine development), and the harsh and compassionate realism about human nature that characterised his whole approach. The informal register of the exchanges allows Gurdjieff to say things that the more formal presentations avoid — to be blunt about the human tendency toward self-deception in ways that the polished literary forms of his major books cannot quite achieve.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the essence-personality distinction as it appears in informal teaching: how Gurdjieff's direct address to students about the difference between what they actually are (essence) and what they have been made to be by conditioning (personality) differs in quality from the more systematic presentations of this distinction in the formal texts
• Grasp the specific nature of 'sleep' as Gurdjieff addresses it directly: the particular quality of waking sleep he is pointing to — not the absence of intelligence but the illusion of presence and choice in beings who are entirely controlled by mechanical reactions — and why he regards this condition as the primary obstacle to any form of genuine development
• Recognise the role of suffering as Gurdjieff presents it in these informal exchanges: the specific distinction between the suffering that the mechanical self avoids (and therefore keeps one asleep) and the conscious suffering that, when voluntarily accepted rather than mechanically resisted, provides the friction necessary for genuine awakening
• Learn the teaching on buffers: Gurdjieff's concept of the psychological mechanisms that prevent an individual from perceiving the contradictions between their different 'I's — and why the removal of these buffers, though painful, is an essential stage in the development of genuine conscience and therefore of genuine development
• Appreciate the informal register as a teaching vehicle: how the direct, unadorned, sometimes shocking quality of these exchanges conveys dimensions of the Gurdjieff teaching that the elaborate literary forms of Beelzebub's Tales were deliberately designed to obscure — and how the two forms of presentation complement each other in giving a more complete picture of the teaching
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