Life is Real Only Then, When I Am by G.I. Gurdjieff

Life is Real Only Then, When I Am Reviews

• 
  Fergus, Quondam Happy Face

  George Gudjieff believed in a spiritually-minded group of folks whom he calls "The Conscious Circle of Humanity." Though he obviously thought he belonged, we who know him better now, don't.
  
  The title belies its confusion. Gurdjieff remained throughout his life a man of rapidly changing egotistical dreams, up and down in his mood swings throughout a life spent in a haze of demagoguery and alcohol.
  
  But the man's got a point, at least as applies to folks like him who put themselves first. They have chosen to ignore the straight and narrow way of the law, in order to assert themselves and their rights in lawlessness. And they are now everywhere.
  
  The truth, as traditional philosophers tell us, is in the Primacy of Being. None of us can count on anything but Grace in the big picture, and our only choice is to tread the narrow line and avoid brute facticity. We must always put ourselves second.
  
  I learned all this one windy October evening, from one of my wife’s old university cronies, Esan. For that night she gave the comeuppance to my wild bipolar me-first attitude.
  
  That was the very night of the awful advent of my workplace burnout.
  
  Esan trod the straight and narrow way in her Coptic faith, and that night she saw through me to the very Daemon that dominated my chthonic bipolarity. Thank Heaven. That night, however, I was trying pretty darned doggedly to emulate my workplace in-crowd.
  
  The power elite. Their signs and gestures. She later called me a devil within my wife’s hearing. Abjectly convicted, I resolutely mended my ways. I henceforth did as the bosses said, not as they did (as the old joke goes). I reached full retirement in burnt-out peace.
  
  Gurdjieff chose a traditional Middle Eastern venue - dear to the ancient Mages - to trumpet the vanity of his own ego. And he always had the old daemon, facticity, to breakfast with in his hungover weakness the morning after.
  
  Facticity is the result of gaining a false control over your self by boycotting all high daydreams and ideals from it. You’re on the hard ground of disappointing experience, so you use the benchmarks you’ve learned as leverage for further control.
  
  What dreams of power you enjoy will always have “the bitter taste of shadow fruit.” So you dig your spurs farther into the sides of your galloping egotism.
  
  But: G. raises some excellent points here. Are you so stressed out and hot and bothered you can't move? Point one: apply ice to your bodily pressure points; THEN, vigorously exercise what he calls your Moving Centre. Works for me.
  
  On a much more ethical plane, though, I have found facticity's opposite, the freedom of sheer isness, to be infinitely more centrist, and therefore more assuring in its relatedness to common sense. It thrives on challenges to its self-worth, which become meaningless in the big abstract picture. So work with your Muscles!
  
  At first I found it rather terrifying - it initially drove me to the monkey house - but I later found that if I attuned myself to their constant variability, it in the end made me aware that life for every one of us is change. So, by conforming my beliefs to established sense I became blandly ordinary in my mid-age.
  
  Or did I? We are still bound tightly by life and death. So death being a dissolution, it follows the same pattern as life. Everything is entropic. As I was becoming that night with Esan.
  
  But don't be fooled. This series, of which this book is the point final, is a loose, meandering fool's game on how to make your ego endure.
  
  Really?
  
  What about the inevitability of the cynical, dusty undertaker, then, George?
  
  Face it, man: your system failed you in the end as it will fail us too, if we don't work with it outside of your system.
  
  Ironically enough, P.D. Ousepensky later turned Gurfjieff's system into a wonder of No-self. So go figure… and I know that works much better.
  
  Because Esan turned me around in much the same way…
  
  She collapsed my pole-vaulting ego into shamed nothingness -
  
  And dashed cold healing water onto my raging libido -
  
  That long-ago blessed October night when I finally started to Wake Up to Goodness again!
• 
  robin friedman

  A First Reading Of Gurdjieff
  
  I became interested in learning about the teachings of George Gurdjieff (1877? -- 1949) after reading philosopher Jacob Needleman's memoir "What is God?" (2009), a book I admired a good deal. Needleman is one of many Western thinkers and artists who has been deeply influenced by Gurdjieff. I tend almost invariably to prefer original sources over commentaries or summaries. Thus, I turned to this short, final book of Gurdjieff, "Life is real only then, when 'I am'" published many years after his death by his student Jeanne de Saltzman. Needleman also speaks highly of his experiences with Madame Saltzman. The book is the third series of Gurdjieff's arrangement of his books into three series. There is some suggestion that the book is to be read only after the reader has read the first two series, which I haven't done. On the other hand, the lectures suggest that they were written to be an accessible introduction. In any event, I had the book at hand and it served my purpose of getting an introduction to Gurdjieff in his own words. Needleman's discussion of his teachings helped greatly. Although the book is difficult to read and obscure, it is no more so than many other philosophical or religious works. I am skeptical at the outset of books that require an initiation to understand. And I took the book that was ready to hand.
  
  The enigmatic title of this book itself suggests something of Gurdjieff's thought in its emphasis on the self and on the relationship between self-understanding and understanding of reality or God. The book is incomplete and is a collection of different kinds of writings, well organized. Autobiographical information and information about the Gurdjieff and his schools in interspersed and related well to his teachings. Madame de Saltzman's Foreward which discusses the history of the book and its place in Gurdjieff's teaching is valuable.
  
  The most immediately apparent feature of the book is the writing style which is in non-idiomatic English and which probably was deliberately done in this matter to discourage skimming or casual reading. Most of the book is arranged in short paragraphs consisting of long sentences. Gurdjieff is wordy, repetitive, with sentences full of long awkwardly constructed clauses and an inveterate use of the passive voice. It is verbose and to my reading shows in itself a strong personality. Perseverance is needed to read this book. The final portion of the book, an incomplete essay, is written more directly. In this review I assume that most of my readers, like myself, have little exposure to Gurdjieff. I will summarize briefly the sections of the book rather than to explain or assess the doctrine. Broadly speaking, I found valuable insights in this book and was glad to have read it. Gurdjieff's path and spiritual teachings are not matters I would likely follow or pursue in detail.
  
  The longest section of this book is the introductory "Prologue" in which Gurdjieff discusses his early life wandering through Asia, his several illnesses and wounds, his establishment of a school in pre-revolutionary Russia and his move to Paris. In 1924, Gurdjieff nearly died as a result of an auto accident. He changed his approach and determined to write. This section is a difficult, cryptic account of his life and of the background to his teachings.
  
  The second section of the book is called "Introduction". This section introduces probably the heart of the book, the five lectures Gurdjieff gave upon his second visit to the United States in 1930. There is further autobiography, and explanation of his reasons for coming to America, commentary on American culture, and brief but broad notes on his teachings.
  
  Next, Gurdjieff gives transcripts of five lectures he delivered in New York City in 1930. He describes a purging and a reorganization of his American followers. He became discontented with the way the American movement was headed under the first American leader, a man named Orage. He required all Orage's followers to disclaim association with him and to sign a pledge to take instruction only from Gurdjieff himself or his designee. Orage himself signed the pledge which moved Gurdjieff to tears. The latter portions of these talks give instruction in doctrine and practice to Gurdjieff's reconstituted American followers. Thus, it seems to me, they are valuable material in getting an overview.
  
  The final work in this collection is a lengthy, incomplete essay titled "The Outer and Inner Worlds of Man" which I found difficult but valuable in understanding Gurdjieff and his basic approach. The essay combines what are said to be quotations from ancient sources with newspaper articles, with Gurdjieff's reflections on the death of Orage, which came to his attention when he was writing the essay. The core of the essay is that most people tend to be driven by the external and internal demons. They come to selfhood only through reflection on their outer and inner worlds and coming to a third world of autonomy and independence which it is the goal of Gurdjieff's teachings to provide. The teaching holds little or know hope for people in their common state, without the understanding of esoteric spiritual wisdom.
  
  I found it valuable to explore this book for what it shows about a pattern of modern spiritual search. Adventurous, critical readers with a strong interest in spirituality may benefit from exposure to Gurdjieff.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Maureen

  Gurdjieff's aim in writing the Third Series was, "to assist the arising in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, nonfantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality."
  
  Just from that quote, one can tell two things: first: Gurdjieff aimed high. Second, he is an abstruse writer. Add on top of that, that his writings in the three series were written in Russian, Turkish, and who-knows-else-what, and it is easy to see why his books have not gained a wider audience.
  
  In the first portion of the book, much space is given to Gurdjieff's relations with Orage and the New York groups. In the fifth talk, two useful exercises are given. One is based upon using the "I am" in a particular way, and the other is on dividing attention. Although these exercises look deceptively simple, the reader can obtain substantial results with sincere practice. The sixth talk, The Outer and Inner World of Man, was unfinished at the time of Gurdjieff's death. Still in all, this is a primary source for the Gurdjieff work, and it is worth the effort of reading it.
• 
  Edwin Wolbers

  Is spiruality that difficult to understand? This book is nothing more than the rants and suffering of a crazy person. He constantly thinks and analyses his situation to understand his suffering. He constantly sets goals to write and teach what he has learned in live. But he didnt learn anything! He suffers his whole life because of his thinking and analysing and the goals he thinks he must set for himself to give his suffering a purpose. These rants of this crazy person wil teach you how your thinking and analysing wil sustain your suffering till the end. Extra motivation not to do the same!
  Ill bet you no one even understands what we are supposed to learn from this great man with al his followers. (Poor people)
• 
  Feliks

  Near entirely codswallop; gibberish. Some of the most ineffectual religious writing I've ever endured. The writing is so childish that you can barely restrain yourself from skimming through it in disgust.
• 
  Mitch Olson

  1. OMG! What a load of verbiage! It looks like English but there is no sense in any sentence of the 3x-too-long sentences.
  2. Disappointing. Gurdjieff was a profound man, but there is zero profundity in this book.
  3. Its not a book. Its like a letter written to someone who he imagined presumably cared about what he had to say
  4. It's slightly self-obsessed, and without any utility.
  5. If this was your first exposure to Gurdjieff then you'd never bother reading anything else he had to say. Which is a massive shame as he an important contributor to understanding and mastering the human experience.
  6. Don't bother reading this book. I don't understand why he bothered writing it. Dick book Gurdjieff!
• 
  Ricardo Acuña

  Este es un libro "incompleto" que pretendía ser parte de la serie original de 5 libros que escribiría Gurdjieff. En realidad, se trata de esbozos y fragmentos del libro que llevaría justo este título: "Tercera Serie: La Vida es Real solo cuando 'Yo Soy`". Las secciones de la primera a la quinta conferencia contienen muchas anécdotas biográficas y solo algunas ideas importantes que se encuentran dispersas a lo largo del texto, que forman parte del conjunto de las enseñanzas principales del cuarto camino. La idea principal que rescato es: Solo cuando el hombre dice conscientemente "Yo Soy", es porque es realmente "Yo puedo", puedo realmente porque "Yo Quiero", es decir quiero realmente. El "Yo" solo puede aparecer en el hombre cuando tiene los tres impulsos de Yo Quiero, Yo Puedo, Yo Soy.
  
  La última parte de “El mundo exterior y el mundo interior del hombre” contiene enseñanzas sobre los tres mundos del hombre: el exterior, el interior y el propio. "Un hombre que no posee su propio mundo no puede hacer nunca nada por iniciativa propia, todas sus acciones ´se hacen´´ en él". Es una descripción del "libre albedrio" que solo puede ser realizado cuando se alcanza un nivel de ser en un hombre verdadero con un auténtico "Yo".
  
  A pesar de ser un "libro incompleto" que Gurdjieff no pudo terminar, sirve muy bien de corolario a los otros libros de la serie "Del Todo y De Todo". Es sabido que los libros y enseñanzas de Gurdjieff pueden resultar polémicos, extraños o absurdos para unos o valiosos, profundos y trascendentes para otros. Yo creo que este libro vale la pena leerlo para aprender sobre las enseñanzas del cuarto camino, y hacer cada uno un juicio y una crítica de este tomando del mismo lo que cada uno considere valioso para sí.
• 
  X

  Gurdjieff really seems to have been a man full of contradictions. He writes his theories and methods down in a deliberately opaque and cryptic manner, and then proceeds to get filled with rage and suicidal because nobody understands his writings. He repeatedly failed at attempts to set up organizations to teach and practice his theories, yet blamed everyone else for his failures. He appears totalitarian, bordering as a cult leader, yet teaches freedom for man.
  
  The first part of the book are anecdotes from his early life. Especially interesting are his statements about being able to kill a yak with his mind and teleport. The next part follows his life in the 1920s and 1930s as he sets up organizations in the USA. Much of this is his seeming political purges of pre-existing organizations and his establishment of his authority. Intermixed are occasional descriptions of meditative exercises. The last part discusses the topic of death and society, physical health and his theory of forces.
  
  I don’t know what to think of this book. It seemed like the memoirs of a man with frustrated ambitions, blaming others for his failures. It was light on practical advice, but the way he expressed himself, he didn’t seem like a man who followed his own teachings.
• 
  Brendan

  again, not as fascinating as "meetings with remarkable men," but an excellent and worthwhile read.
• 
  Nikusha

  Გურჯიევის გაცნობის მსურველებმა ეს წიგნი მის სხვა ნამუშევრებზე უფრო ადრე არ უნდა წაიკითხონ, თორე შეიძლება საერთოდ აღარ მოიხედონ ამ მისტიკური ისტორიებითა და დაუდასტურებელი ამბებით სავსე კაცის ცხოვრებისაკენ.
  Აქ მოცემულმა ლექციებმა საერთოდ ვერ "ჩამითრია". Თემა საინტერესოა, თუმცა, მთხობელზე ჯერ ამას ვერ ვიტყვი. Რაღაც "მარილი" აკლია. Ავანწურისტის შთაბეჭდილებას უფრო ტოვებს ვიდრე განსაკუთრებული გონებისა და ცოდნის მქონე კაცისას ))
  ბოდიში, გურჯიევ, მაგრამ ეგრეა!
• 
  Desmatron

  Il libro è scritto male, soprattutto se paragonato ad "Incontri con uomini straordinari". Non lo consiglio come prima lettura poiché il significato della lettura, oltre ad essere esoterico, dunque nascosto è anche a mio parere esposto male. Non si può non essere colpiti dalle eccessive lamentele dell'autore sul suo stato di salute, lamentele che però sono volte a far comprendere marcatamente un insegnamento e non invece ad esternare futilmente una condizione di salute a posteriori. Dopo un'introduzione dell'autore vengono esposte delle conferenze tenute sempre per i suoi allievi, dalle quali si evincono una serie di esercizi (molto pochi) e una serie di nozioni già accennate in "Incontri con uomini straordinari". Tuttavia le aspettative create in quest'ultimo libro sono disattese. Vengono però trattati esempi di "coincidenze fortuite" vissute dall'autore e l'annoso tema della libertà dell'uomo.
  
  Lettura consigliata se si è già letto molto di Gurdjieff, ma non indispensabile.
  
  Sconsigliato come prima lettura.
• 
  Dean

  I once thought Gurdjieff’s series, and this book in particular, actually contained some worthwhile spiritual value and practical use. Upon rereading them years later after bing around the block, I can see the actual value lies in about 2 pages out of the whole book. The sensing of “I am” is of value, but so hopelessly explained here, that it will be of use only to the most ardent of Gurdjieff disciples. The remainder of the book reads exactly like someone’s half penned notebooks written while drunk on Armagnac and sitting in a Paris cafe. There’s better material out there. One wonders wtf was he thinking, or rather they thinking in even publishing this “work”.
• 
  Beka Sukhitashvili

  „ცხოვრება რეალურიას“ შესავალში გურჯიევი გვეუბნება: „მივმართავ ყველას, ვინც ჩემი ნაწერებით დაინტერესდება: არასოდეს არავინ არ უნდა ცადოს მათი წაკითხვა ზემოთ მითითებული რიგითობის დარღვევით; სხვა სიტყვებით რომ გითხრათ, მან არასდროს არაფერი არ უნდა წაიკითხოს ჩემი გვიანდელი თხზულებებიდან, ვიდრე უფრო ადრინდელ ნაწერებს არ გაეცნობა“. საინტერსოა რატომ ითარგმნა ქარულ ენაზე პირველად ჯერ სწორედ მესამე სერია, როცა არაა თარგმნილი პირველი და მეორე სერია.
  
  ვრცლად:
  https://bit.ly/34dXSeA
• 
  Rio

  Really struggled to engage with this. Forced myself through it for uni, and I don’t want to be snide about anyone’s spiritual beliefs, but... Maybe I’m missing something, but I stopped being able to take him seriously the moment he said he could kill a yak from ten miles using only the power of his mind. Honestly, this reads like the manifesto of a cult leader; rambling, obfuscatory, self aggrandising. It’s a no from me.
• 
  Pin

  I'm not much of a follower, or a seeker. And that makes it a lot easier to just find things that could be of use to me, in this lifelong process of creation. For those who seek answers, just wonder where the questions came from. Contemplation is a sweet word.
• 
  John

  philosophy,meditation,nonfiction
• 
  Lysergius

  The explanation of why life is only real when I am is what makes this an interesting book... You see it depends on what you mean by "real", of course.
• 
  Andrew Weiler

  Opens the eyes to other ways to see the world and ourselves
• 
  Chetan Narang

  Would've been able to appreciate it better if the text wasn't incomplete. An 'interesting' read nonetheless.
• 
  Fred Jenkins

  I have read Meetings with Remarkable Men more than once and Beelzebub (parts of it several times). Life has sat unread on my shelves until now. This a challenging book, both because it is by Mr G and because it is fragmentary. One reading is certainly only scratching the surface, so some initial observations. There is much about Mr G's life, especially his early life (prologue) and his relationship with Orage. The third talk has the clearest distinction of feeling and sensing that I have seen in any book on G's teachings. The fourth and fifth present practical exercises, on which see also Joseph Azize's Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises.
• 
  Nikita

  Gurdjieff’s style of writing takes a bit of work. Once you get the cadence of his voice...if one understands the fundamentals of “The Fourh Way”... he comes more familiar, and we see that he is always “working.”
• 
  Luis De Ita

  Si haz leído la obra entera de Gurdjieff, este libro es como dicen en Estados Unidos, "mind blowing"... Leer a Gurdjieff es apenas un inicio para comenzar el camino a una vida real, estoy feliz de haberlo leído a los 30 pero creo que todos deberíamos leerlo a los 20.
• 
  Hashim Sardar

  Mostly useless rambling. There are a few valuable things such as meditation techniques related to the division of attention. There's also a translation from an "ancient text"; it was difficult to understand what was written.
• 
  S.

  I just wated my time reading this one... Full of subjective truths, although lucidly explained but amount to no science! A good Russian existentialist book can replace this and far more...
• 
  John Goldsworthy

  There’s some great gems in here, but obviously unfinished (as mentioned in forward).
• 
  Susan Lewin

  A very important work
  
  Do not be confused by the apparent brevity or incomplete status of this book. The information it contains defines the heart of the Gurdjieff Work.