As “Ushe Narzunoflf,” Gurdjieff would have been intimately concerned with Tibet, at least until 1904. According to extracts from the Third Series quoted by J. G. Bennett, it was in Tibet that he was accidentally wounded for the second time. This happened in 1902, and Gurdjieff was taken by fhends to convalesce at the edge of the Gobi Desert near Yangi Hissar. We know little about his movements for the next two years. Like the Buryat agent Tserempil, he might have joined the party of Dordjieff and the Dalai Lama as they withdrew northward into the Gobi. Certainly, by the end of 1904—about the time when the “Collection G . . .” went on sale in Paris—
GurdjiefiF was back in the Caucasus, where he had his contretemps with the tiiird stray bullet. On this occasion the disaster took place at Chiatur, on the southern slopes of the Caucasus between Tiflis and the Black Sea. When he had recovered, GurdjiefiF wandered back through the Transcaspian toward Central Asia and returned to the place near Yangi Hissar to which he had been brought two years before.
Apparently it was here, on the southeastern fringes of the desert, that he reached his conclusions about the important role played by hypnotism in human afi^rs. Tliis train of thought was directly associated with the turbulent nature of his career to date. Bennett suggests that the skirmish in which GurdjiefiF was hit for the third time was connected vwth the social unrest which culminated in the abortive Russian revolution of 1905. He
7 5
argues that GurdjiefF had penetrated the revolutionary movement on behalf of the authorities, and was possibly even acting as a double agent. Although he may have spied for the Tsarist Government, Gurdjieft’s political sympathies were later known to be at the opposite end of the spectrum to those of his more aristocratic Russian pupils, and the boy from the deprived background could have played the part of a social revolutionary with some conviction. But by Gurdjieff’s own account, the chief result of his close acquaintance with political intrigue was to surfeit him with rhetoric and fill him with horror at the ease with which ordinary people allowed themselves to be led by the nose. Partly in reaction against the violence he had seen and partly as a result of conversations with “various revolutionists” he had met in Italy, Switzerland, and the Caucasus, Gurdjieff decided that he
“must discover, at all costs, some manner or means for destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility which causes them to fall easily under the influence of‘mass-hypnosis.’”
Hypnotism had come increasingly to occupy the forefront of his thoughts.
His quest for meaning had halted before the blank conclusion that no existing knowledge could help him. The sole remaining possibility was the discovery of something new, not in the sense of “lost wisdom,” but new facts about the nature of man, resulting from a pioneering analysis of the psyche. He decided that “the answers for which I was looking . . . can only be found, if they are at all accessible to man, in the sphere of ‘man’s subconscious-mentation. ” In search of a key to the subconscious mind, he began to collect all the data he could on Asiatic theories of hypnotism.
In Bennett’s view, this reorientation was the result of an important change in Gurdjielf’s psychological attitude. No longer was he seeking knowledge or power for himself, but he was proposing to liberate humanity from the illusions under which it labored. This is true so far as it goes, and perhaps GurdjiefF’s decision does represent a newfound altruism. But his conclusions bore the same relation to his search for wisdom as the chicken to the egg. They also—given GurdjiefF’s unusual tenacity—represented the only possible outcome.
In Herald of Coming Good there is a skeleton chronology which covers the half-dozen years following 1904; but the wording is so ambiguous that little can be made of it, and the whole sequence of events may well be spurious. Gurdjieff claims that for two years he stayed in a Central Asian monastery, occupied in a theoretical study of hypnotism. He then decided to carry his investigations into the sphere of practical experiment. 1 began to give myself out to be a ‘healer’ of all kinds of vices and to apply the results of my theoretical studies to them, affording them at the same time real relief.” For the next few years he was experimenting with actual purpose in order to explain the psychological questions which interested
him personally, and to discover a satisfactory way of freeing people from their liability to suggestion. The experimental nature of his activities created certain moral problems, and in Herald of Coming Good GurdjiefiF was concerned to justify himself:
To make use of people, who display a special interest in an Institute founded by me, for purely personal ends would surely strike those around me as a manifestation of “egotism,” but at the same time the people, who had anything to do with such an Institute . . . could in this way alone, profit by the result of knowledge amassed by me due to exceptional circumstances of my life and which had regard to nearly all the aspects of reality and objective truth, and thus use them for their own benefit.
If the idea of establisliing an Institute had crossed Gurdjieff’s mind by the late 1900s, that prospect must have been distant. For the moment he confined himself to observation and experiment. The passage in Beelzebub’s Tales which describes his activities as a “healer” is one of those in which the character Beelzebub represents GurdjiefF himself. He became, says Gurd- Jieff, a “professional hypnotist” in the towns of Chinese Turkestan.
Turkestan is the area which extends roughly from the Aral Sea eastward into China. East or Chinese Turkestan corresponds to the present-day Chinese province of Sinkiang, which separates Mongolia from Tibet. At the westernmost end lies the city of Kashgar, and the central area is occupied entirely by the desert of the Takla-Makan. To the south are the Himalayas and north of the desert, the Mongolian Altai. It is even now a very isolated part the world, with the few communities pinned to river valleys and oases. It was even more isolated when Gurdjieff lived there. In 1905 the American traveler, Oscar Terry Crosby, found only “half a dozen Russian telegraph engineers, two small garrisons in Russian Turkestan, one small garrison in Chinese Turkestan,” in the 200 miles between Osh and Kashgar.
In feet, GurdjiefiF simply used the area as a base. In Beelzebub’s words, he “also travelled a good deal, visiting almost all the continents, and during these travels I encountered beings of most, as they say, ‘peoples.’ During these travels of mine I remained nowhere for long excepting in certain independent countries on the Continent Asia called ‘China,’ ‘India,’ ‘Tibet’
and, of course, also that lately largest half-Asiatic, half-European com
munity called ‘Russia.’” J. G. Bennett’s fnend, the Turkish Prince Sabaheddin, told him that he had met Gurdjieff in 1908 when he was returning from Europe to Asia. It is quite possible that Gurdjieff visited America as well as Eurtq)e, and no doubt he kept up his contacts with Agwan Dordjieff, Shamzaran Badmaieff, and Esper Ukhtomsky. The
photograph of “Ushe Narzunoff” and his Chinese wife was taken by a photographer named Kosarev in Verknie-Udinsk—DordjiefiF’s MongoUan headquarters and the chief Russian garrison town for the area—on November 6, 1908.
If GurdjiefF’s travels were as Beelzebub describes them—in India, Tibet, and China—it is possible that he continued to work for the Tsarist Intelligence Service. In “The Material Question” he represents himself as a businessman specializing in the antique trade, but able to turn his hand to a multitude of other projects.
I engaged in the most varied enterprises, sometimes very big ones.
For instance: I carried out private and government contracts for the supply and construction of railways and roads; I opened a number of stores, restaurants and cinemas and sold them when I got them going well. I organised various rural enterprises and the driving of cattle into Russia from several countries, chiefly from Kashgar; I participated in oil-wells and fisheries; and sometimes I carried on several of these enterprises simultaneously.
Gurdjieff always refers vdth the greatest affection to Turkestan, “con
cerning which place there are and will be preserved in my common presence the data then fixed for pleasant memories.” Perhaps his pleasant memories were of family life with the lady of the photograph. Whether or not he still acted as a secret agent, his government connections cannot have hindered his business activities—^which would have harmonized nicely with BadmaiefiF’s economic war—although those to which he refers in “The Material Question” are said to have taken place as a concentrated effort to raise a large sum of money before he left for Moscow. For once, he was probably in easy circumstances, and able to devote time to his occupation as a “physician-hypnotist.”
Like some of his European contemporaries—Freud and Jung among them—^he was trying to use hypnosis to break through man’s “normal waking consciousness” to the subconscious mind, “which ought in my opinion,” Gurdjieff wrote, “to be the real human consciousness.” He saw the appalling situation of humanity as caused by the division of human consciousness into waking consciousness and subconsciousness. Human beings, thought Gurdjieff, had largely lost the capacity for faith, hope, and love, but buried in their subconscious was what he called “Objective- Conscience.” This was for Gurdjieff the characteristic which alone dis
tinguished man from lower creatures. To Ouspensky he explained that the idea of “conscience” was equivalent in the realm of the emotions to the idea of consciousness in that of thought. “Conscience is a state in which a man
feeb all at once everything that he in general feels or can feel. ” It became the basic aim of Gurdjieff’s Method to prod this conscience into operation.
If a man whose entire inner world is composed of contradictions were suddenly to feel all these contradictions simultaneously within himself, if he were to feel all at once that he loves everything he hates and hates everything he loves; that he lies when he tells the truth and that he tells the truth when he lies; and if he could feel the horror of it all, this would be the state which is called “conscience.”
Man, Gurdjieff taught, has developed mechanisms called “buffers” to prevent his ever entering such an intolerable state of contradictions. They keep him in the state of “normal waking consciousness” and suppress conscience altogether.
In Gurdjieff’s view, the normal waking consciousness operates under continuous hypnotic influence, noticeable only in particularly intensified cases. Man is almost always asleep. This is because in adolescence, when his consciousness divides into two—and the “real” part of this consciousness becomes the subconscious—the human being is subject to great pressure from his parents and teachers to adopt the state of consciousness “normal”
for man; that is, to fall asleep. At the same time, so Gurdjieff declared, an alteration in the blood circulation results in a new tempo of circulation developing for the normal waking consciousness as well as that which corresponds to the functioning of the subconscious or real consciousness.
He claimed to have invented a new method of hypnosis—an advance on the method by which the subject is hypnotized by staring at a bright object—
whidli ctmsisted in altering the tempo of the blood circulation “by means of a certain hindering of the movement of the blood in certain blood vessels.”
The result was that although the circulation continued at the normal mechanical tempo, he could evoke the properties of the buried sub
conscious as well.
Only the story of Gurdjieff’s relations with his pupils can explain what his new form of hypnosis in fact was, or how he went about breaking down man’s normal waking consciousness and encouraging the growth of con
science instead. As for the circulation of the blood, his uncompromising materialism naturally extended to explanations of hypnosis. He approved wholeheartedly of Mesmer and the early theorists of animal magnetism, and poured scorn on James Braid, Charcot, and other specialists who denied the material basis of hypnotic phenomena. Medically speaking, this may be ridiculous, but Gurdjieff never claimed to be an orthodox doctor.
According to Beelzebub, he chose to adopt the disguise of a “healer” in order to further his psydbiological researches. He had observed that people
speak frankly only to doctors and priests, and he had no desire to restrict his liberty by impersonating a holy man. Although he joined the medical profession in a spirit of experiment, he acquired considerable skill at his new calling. In Chinese Turkestan the chief disabilities which came within his province were opium addiction and the chewing of hashish. When, in about 1910-11, he transferred his activities to Russian Turkestan, he concentrated on the equivalent Russian vice: addiction to vodka. “This maleficent means,” explains the sagacious Beelzebub to his grandson, “is obtained there chiefly from the surplanetary formation they call the
‘potato.’”
Gurdjieff’s skill as a hypnotist was to stand him in good stead when he was forced to earn money in the West; and it was probably in Turkestan that he acquired his knowledge of the effect of drugs on human beings. His later use of alcohol is well known, and the nature and composition of opium remained one of his interests up to the time when he was writing Beelzebub’s Tales. Western medicine was for Gurdjieff an object of contempt. He afterward identified only three useful drugs from the whole pharmacopoeia—opium, castor oil, and a substance obtained fi'om a certain tree.
There are several reasons for linking Badmaieff with Gurdjieff ’s activities as a “physician-hypnotist.” For someone interested in non-European medicine, the Badmaieff dispensary would have been a natural port of call in St. Petersburg, particularly if that someone were associated with DordjiefiF. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff introduces his fnend “Soloviev” as a patient whom he cures of alcoholism in Central Asia.
Soloviev was “an authority on what is called eastern medicine in general, and on Tibetan medicine in particular, and he was also die world’s greatest specialist in the knowledge of the action of opium and hashish on the psyche and organism of man.” He probably never existed, but the Hst of his specialities is significant: “Eastern and Tibetan medicine, opium and hashish.” As far as is known, Shamzaran Badmaieff was the greatest expert on such subjects in the Western world.
BadmaiefiT had consolidated his position at the Russian court with a prescription which cured the Tsar’s stomach complaint—this was said to be a mixture of henbane and hashish. The ill will stimulated by his privileged position gave rise to an absurd legend that he, Rasputin, and the Tsaritsa’s confidante, Anna Virubova, were trying to poison the Tsarevitch with “a yellow powder.” A memorandum of Badmaieff’s survives, dated October 9, 1912, which recommends treatment for the sick child. “Europe has no treatment against internal or external blows,” he wrote, “except ice, iodine, and massage. ... If you succeed in persuading them to try my medicine, please ask them to give no other medicine, either internally or externally, this includes ice. As food, only oatmeal, bouillon and milk.” The remedies
themselves were enclosed in small envelopes. There were “boiled Dabsen- Tan, against knocks,” a stomach medicine for constipation, and a prepara
tion called “Gabir-Nimga,” a specific against high fever.
Badmaieif was therefore still closely in touch with the court about the time that Gurdjieff returned to Russia, and it is likely that Gurdjieff was in contact with him throughout his career as a hypnotizing doctor. GurdjiefiF describes a visit which Beelzebub pays to Russia in his capacity as a
“physician-hypnotist,” which is supposed to have taken place well before the First World War. The incentive is given by an elderly Russian, who invites him to St. Petersburg to help in the unending war against alcoholism. The Russian explains that he is the head of a foundation to combat the problem, and hopes that the specialist Beelzebub will join, to help consolidate the organization. Beelzebub accepts the invitation.
One of his motives is that he has already decided “to set up in one or another of their great inhabited spots a ‘something’ of the kind they call there a ‘chemical laboratory ”—^with Gurdjieff, “chemistry” always meant his special brand of alchemistry—“in which I intended, by means pre
viously decided beforehand to proceed with special experiments on several deeply concealed aspects of their ever the same strange psyche.” This is very much what he said in plainer language in Herald of Coming Good.
Making allowances for the fact that Gurdjieff may here be fusing two or more visits to the Russian capital to provide background for Beelzebub’s caustic remarks about the folly of Russians and of humanity in general, his story is not unbelievable. Beelzebub travels to St. Petersburg with the elderly Russian but finds himself left much to his own devices. He decides to use his free time to try to secure a permit for his projected “laboratory,”
but becomes lost in the impenetrable jungle of Russian bureaucracy.
Eventually, Beelzebub balks at undergoing an examination by a doctor—
which would, of course, reveal his tail. This is a stock metaphor in Gurdjieff for a tricky situation in which he would be forced to reveal his real purposes unwillingly. Beelzebub accordingly abandons his “foolish bustlings around.”
During his stay in St. Petersburg he has also been giving his elderly acquaintance various suggestions on running the foundation. At first these are accepted and put into practice, but when the news leaks that Beelzebub is the source of such proposals—^“some foreign doctor or other, not even a European”—a serious dispute arises. Without a laboratory of his own, and unable to use the foundation for his experiments “on the psyche of the terrestrial beings en masse,” Beelzebub decides to go elsewhere. However, news of his work on alcoholism reaches the Tsar, and Beelzebub is first subjected to a long ceremonial presentation which leaves him quite blank as to what the Tsar even looked like.
Gurdjieff had probably been presented to the Tsar as a member of the
DordjiefiF Mission of 1901, but it is quite possible that the idea of a foundation to combat alc»holism had Imperial approval. Pavlov’s colleague, V. M. Bekhterev (1857-1927) had long been interested in using hypnotic
DordjiefiF Mission of 1901, but it is quite possible that the idea of a foundation to combat alc»holism had Imperial approval. Pavlov’s colleague, V. M. Bekhterev (1857-1927) had long been interested in using hypnotic