The Harvard Gurdjieff Conference

Notes from a Centennial, December 4-5, 2024

“There are periods in the life of humanity—often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character—when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge, which would otherwise be lost.”

G.I. Gurdjieff
Context

In the days leading up to the conference, philosopher and author Jacob Needleman and the lecture series he delivered at the Sorbonne in 1992 were much on my mind. His opening remarks are worth quoting: “I am honored to be here to speak to you about a subject, a theme, a teaching that is very close to my own interests, and that has had a great influence on my own thinking. I don’t know about France, but in the USA the atmosphere in the academic world is beginning to change, and particularly where I come from in California, and particularly in this field of Philosophy, Comparative Religion and Religious Studies. More than before, students come to these kinds of subjects not only for academic training, but for reasons that have to do with their own personal search—their own personal need.”

When I’d first read the transcript of my friend Jacob’s lectures, I would never have imagined finding myself late in the afternoon on Dec. 3, 2024 leaving Boston’s Logan Airport with a loquacious Uber driver and bound for a two-day conference on Gurdjieff’s legacy and teachings co-sponsored by Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR, a unit of Harvard Divinity School) and the Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts. In spite of our driver’s broken English, our conversation in some unfathomable way found its way to a Coptic Orthodox Church in Cairo, dating to the third century—his church of worship before coming to the U.S.

Darkness had fallen and traffic was heavy. Our route seemed as complex as a passage through his old city. With a little prayer I commended us all to God and trusted that fate would be kind. It was. At the hotel, as our driver was unloading our bags and facing me, he declared with unabashed enthusiasm, “I love you!” (Fishing for a tip? Maybe. But how many fares had in spirit entered that church with him?) In a split-second version of Pascal’s wager, I met him in that spirit, and exclaimed, “I love you, too!” And forthwith a great hug followed, setting its seal on this charmed beginning for the journey ahead.

Finding the Center

Are we on campus yet? I asked my wife as we walked toward the conference venue. She had lived in Cambridge in her early twenties. “This might be Harvard Square,” she said. There were no clear lines—this is Harvard, this is not. The university and town seemed to overlap. “You mean, we’re actually here? At Harvard?” I’m a Californian; this was unusual.

It was December 4th, cold, with a gray sky overhead and autumn’s leaves still underfoot. Being there, walking among the old buildings, I had never felt anything quite like it—the sense of place and history, and actually being present there. (Harvard College was established in 1636; the Divinity School in 1816.) We were among the lucky ones promised in-person attendance, and were headed toward an event that I sensed was destined to generate more than lasting memories. 

Preparation

Palpable from the very beginning was the care that went into every aspect of this event, each activity and presentation; it was a steady influence each step of the way. Planners from Harvard’s CSWR had partnered with the Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts—with Roger Lipsey, Charles Langmuir, and Cynthia Reeves—to create the two-day conference. Reeves, a leader in the Cambridge group’s outreach initiative, had contacted Harvard four years earlier as the pandemic took hold, and had proposed G. I. Gurdjieff as a subject for their consideration. Would it be possible, she asked, to get past some of the myths about Gurdjieff himself and look at the veracity of the teaching? She had envisioned an event in which Gurdjieff’s teaching would be paired with other traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism. When she learned about the Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions, she reached out to its director Professor Charles Stang, a specialist on Early Christian thought with a wide range of scholarly interests. He was immediately receptive. “In fact,” Cynthia Reeves continued, “he suggested that the focus be squarely, and only, on Gurdjieff’s teachings.” 

This embrace led her and her colleagues to think of the possibility of including Gurdjieff’s Movements in the conference. To that end, she gave Professor Stang a copy of Oriental Suite, a well-documented study of the Gurdjieff Movements and related music, published by Gert-Jan Blom (2006). “He read the book!” she reported. “He was the one who pointed out that 2024 was not only going to be the centenary of Gurdjieff’s visit to the United States, but also of his coming to Harvard.” It proved impossible within the limits of the conference to include a Movements demonstration, although an ongoing seminar on the Gurdjieff legacy at CSWR throughout the fall semester included a biweekly Movements class for beginners led by instructors from the Gurdjieff Society. 

A centennial with Harvard’s collaboration would lend the conference status as a world event. A further hope took shape as conference planning advanced: members of different Gurdjieff groups in attendance—different lineages that have largely kept to themselves—might develop new and fruitful dialogue. The speakers to be chosen equally by CSWR and the Gurdjieff Society would include scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners, some of whom had known each other for decades, others who would meet for the first time. 

As CSWR Executive Director Gosia Sklodowska said in her opening remarks, two years of meticulous planning went into preparing the event. CSWR events have generally been intimate affairs, involving 20 to 40 attendees. “This one will be different,” Reeves advised Professor Stang. When all were duly assembled, I was told that there were 385 attendees at the Divinity School, while the Gurdjieff Society hosted another 150 at a nearby leased venue, the Norton’s Woods conference center belonging to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where a livestream of the conference was available. The Zoom livestream was also globally available: the limit of 500 quickly maxed out the first evening and, adjusted the following day for 1000, that limit maxed out, too. There may have been 1500 present online, some guessed 2000. 

The Conference

Sklodowska’s opening remarks mapped the run up to the conference, beginning with history. “[The 1920s] were a time when the avant-garde and the intelligentsia were interested in the oriental, the exalted, the mystical.” During this period Gurdjieff made his first visit to America (1924), where with the help of his distinguished pupil, A. R. Orage, well known in Anglo-American literary circles, he found it possible to hold numerous public talks and Movements demonstrations. Sklodowska quoted from Roger Lipsey’s book Gurdjieff Reconsidered (2019). A close pupil traveling with Gurdjieff to Chicago was not pleased by what she had witnessed at a public gathering. “‘After the meeting, I looked out at the audience and saw that half of the people looked quite asleep. Why do you allow all these people? Wouldn’t it be better to have fewer people who are interested?’ Mr. Gurdjieff answered me, ‘How can you judge? Perhaps those who seem asleep today, in 20 years something will be awakened in them. And those who now seem so eager will forget in ten days. We have to let everyone come. The rest does not belong to us.’”

This story was more than a telling detail, it was somehow a call to those now attending, and an example of why one would want to learn more about this man’s teaching. That it was being said from the podium on behalf of the CSWR was no small contribution to the buoyant atmosphere that infused the entire conference—as was Sklodowska’s acknowledgment: “I believe that all of us here today, whether in person or online, have awakened to Gurdjieff’s teachings. For many of our speakers and our scholars, and many of you in the audience, the Fourth Way is not merely a philosophy or a passing curiosity, but a way of life.” 

Citing resonances in Gurdjieff’s ideas with Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Orthodox Christianity, Sufi mysticism and alchemy, Sklodowska shared that “these traditions are central to the core mission at the Center, and our interests and Gurdjieff’s influence naturally intertwine.” Illustrating this further, she cited two recent programs at the Center: “Adventures in the Imaginal—Henri Corbin for the 21st Century” and “Platonism as a Living Tradition.” In addition, there was an upcoming program on Philip Sherrard, and his work on an English translation of the Philokalia and efforts to introduce the Hesychastic monastic tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church to wider audiences. It followed that “hosting this conference at the Center for the Study of World Religions is profoundly fitting.” 

Context, part two

A search on YouTube took me to a Charles Stang interview with John Vervaeke, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto. The subtitle read, “Academic Religion was used to replace Theology and it hasn’t worked.” Speaking about the recent focus at CSWR, Stang said, “We’re in the second year of a new initiative at the Center called ‘Transcendence and Transformation.’ That initiative is premised on the idea that the study of religion has, if not entirely lost its way, not attended to some very important features of existence that both students and the literate public are eager to hear about, having to do with transcending our accustomed states of mind, being, embodiment and consciousness.” He said further, “When we worry that ‘transcendence’ might be an escape from our here and now, I want to ask whether we should be so confident we know our here and now. Perhaps the first thing to be transcended is that very confidence.” He continued, “Let’s start here and now recognizing that both here and now, like us, have always been much more than we let them be.” Indeed.

Present Need

The feeling, broadly expressed, that we were present at a groundbreaking event was echoed in a number of presentations and mirrors the deep sense that something in contemporary culture is being lost, has been lost. Could there be, not only a path of return, but one aligned with spiritual traditions? As such, it would be hard to think of a better subject of study than G.I. Gurdjieff and his ideas. 

The conference owed much to Carole Cusack, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney, who spent the fall semester as a visiting fellow at CSWR, responsible among other things for the ongoing Gurdjieff seminar. Her morning keynote presentation, “G. I. Gurdjieff, the Work, and the Academic Study of Religion and Esotericism,” will, I think, long serve as a map for further academic work. She concluded: “I believe this is a landmark event. And I am so happy and grateful that the Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts and Harvard’s CSWR saw fit to make this happen.”

Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault, in her presentation “Gurdjieffian Scholarship As Third Force,” said, “I want to again signal the extraordinary character of what’s happening right now. We’re in a groundbreaking conference in one of the world’s most prestigious universities acknowledging thereby that Gurdjieff and his work are an area of study worthy of academic response and of true respect.” Another characteristic that made the conference so vital, she observed, was the “pairing of renowned scholars with practitioners—including some of the most senior, formed members—to talk, to exchange, to accomplish something that we all sense is being asked of us.” 

Her irrepressible spirit gave us all an energetic boost. Let me quote from her website: “Wisdom isn’t knowing more. It’s knowing with more of you.” 

Harvard University’s Higgins Professor of Geochemistry, Charles Langmuir, began his presentation “Knowledge of the West” thus: “Each religious teacher, when they appear, faces the challenge of how to bring Truth to their time. Gurdjieff appears in the early 20th century when already science was viewed as one of the important aspects of understanding reality. In this way, he differs from all previous teachers. So when he first presents his ideas, he presents them in a ‘scientific package.’ One example is his idea of ‘objective self-observation’—assume nothing, believe nothing. Only know what you know from your own self-verification.” 

Langmuir continued, “When you talk to lay people and you have in mind to write something, they say, ‘There aren’t going to be diagrams, are there?’ No numbers! But Gurdjieff uses diagrams and numbers. Here’s a diagram [the food diagram from In Search of the Miraculous].” Clearly at home speaking to an audience, he paused with a slight enigmatic smile. It was, I thought, an elegant moment. I imagined his self-awareness, especially as a scientist, and imagining how quaint the diagram would likely appear to other scientists. 

Next, he led us on a cosmological and evolutionary tour de force and delivered us to the question of our present situation, given the material power we possess today. “We’re a potential instrument of planetary consciousness or we’re a potential planetary cancer. Is this development of planetary consciousness the next stage in planetary evolution? And what would be the role of the individual be in trying to help that happen? He reminded us of what Jeanne de Salzmann often said, “Without the necessary efforts, the planet will go down.”

A question was asked to Professor Langmuir from the audience: “Something that led me into the work was Bennett saying, ‘There’s going to be a huge world crisis and some of us have to learn how to be, and how to take responsibility.’ Then decades passed of people saying, ‘It’s just going to be ego and your own ideas if you try to engage directly.’ But now perhaps it’s not ego to recognize that there really is a world crisis such as has never existed before. How can we approach this with a sense of the unknown and humility, to address it?”

 Langmuir replied in part: “It seems to me that what would be needed is the evolution of human feeling, feeling for the world, and if we were to live with that sensibility, maybe it would be a guide for our actions that would lead to constructive change. I don’t think it’s ‘throw a billion dollars at this or that.’ It’s really the struggle that Gurdjieff calls us to against egotism and towards the discovery of—words that one hesitates even to say—of ‘objective conscience.’ It is that influence that could transform the world.”

 Throughout the conference, Alexandre de Salzmann’s quiet presence and participation brought an unmistakable quality. Several people I spoke with made reference to this underlying current. There was something both shattering and inspiring in what he brought to the conference, and in his bearing. He authored a long moment of truth. Expectations and old assumptions fell aside—but the immense promise and beauty of Gurdjieff’s example and teachings became freshly evident. His topic was “Mr. Gurdjieff’s Original Approach to Life.” He began: “It is difficult to speak of Mr. Gurdjieff when you haven’t known him directly, and difficult perhaps even for those who have. I’m not here as a historian or academic, but simply as a seeker committed to this way, although all paths are preparation for a Single Universal Way.

“This Work suffers from a reputation of secrecy or exclusivity. Far from being elitist, this is perhaps due to the concern of those who came before us to preserve the intimate nature required by this search, to prevent a reductive and misguided understanding of it. Today it seems to me that the greatest danger on this path is not a dilute transmission of ideas, but the risk of settling into a certain comfort, of fixing a dogma and being satisfied with knowing better states. Gurdjieff, on the other hand, would allow none of this; he calls for something else. His own life bears witness to this.”

That is how Dr. de Salzmann began. And here is how he ended his keynote: “No, we have not understood, but he left living material, Movements to dance with the laws, music for an experience related to the indefinable, and group work to help each other. To live, despite the atrophy of the authentic impulses of Faith, Love and Hope, and even with the fragility of our conscience, to live as part of the Whole, of great Nature.” 

Next, it was Cynthia Bourgeault’s turn to speak. Instead of simply going forward with her presentation, she improvised: “Okay. Stop for a moment. And before it fades, look inside yourself. Look at where you are right now, and where you had to move in yourself to receive the extraordinary teaching you just received.” 

It was like that. And set this conference apart. 

The 18th Commandment 

The full title of Roger Lipsey’s talk was “The 18th Commandment—What are the Values of the Gurdjieff teaching?” Uncovering these values, in his concise review of Gurdjieff’s central ideas, we were invited into deeper territory. It was a remarkable meditation. At the conclusion of his talk, he arrived at the commandment. “What is that commandment? It appears in the Tales, where Beelzebub advocates fiercely against animal sacrifice in ancient civilizations, no doubt speaking also to our need to respect the human body, its untapped potential and legitimate needs. ‘The 18th personal commandment of our Common Creator: ‘“Love everything that breathes.”’ Elsewhere in the chapter, Beelzebub explains that we humans need all species on this planet for our development, as if they are all mirrors and teachers. It’s an odd thing, but characteristic, that Gurdjieff doesn’t fill in the blank between the ten Biblical commandments and this 18th. Who knows why? Are we to write them as we live?”

Music

I cannot conclude this “eye witness, heart witness” journey without mentioning the magnificent concert of the Gurdjieff / de Hartmann music which concluded the conference, performed by Charles Ketcham and Cecilia Ignatieff. A video archive is already available online, or will be soon available. Owing to an occupancy restriction at the church where Ignatieff and Ketcham performed, the Gurdjieff Society sponsored a brilliant concurrent concert at Norton’s Woods, performed by Elan Sicroff. He will be known, I hope, to many readers of Parabola as the virtuoso pianist, musical archivist, and entrepreneur responsible for bringing back to public notice the “other music” of Thomas de Hartmann, written before and after his collaboration with Gurdjieff. There was music in Cambridge that day. 

Postscript

On my flight home, as the plane landed, I had no idea how I could possibly do the conference justice in an article. Much has had to be left out. While the buoyant atmosphere and cordiality among attendees and presenters will be missing, we are told that the full texts of the sixteen speakers on the program will be available as an anthology sometime in 2025 and a video record of the full conference will remain available. ◆

This piece is excerpted from the Spring 2025 issue of Parabola, THE MYSTERY OF TIME. You can find the full issue on our online store.

By Richard Whittaker

Richard Whittaker is the West Coast Editor of Parabola and is the founding editor of works & conversations. A collection of his interviews, The Conversations, Interviews with Sixteen Contemprary Artists, is available from the University of Nebraska Press.