Wise Man from the East

VENTURE WITH IDEAS (212 pp.)--Kenneth Walker--Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3.25).

Kenneth Walker, eminent British surgeon, put his faith in the gods of Harley Street: scientific method and a good bedside manner. Off duty, he indulged his yen for the fanciful in a voyage to India, a flyer in Paraguayan railway shares, a children's book about Noah's Ark. The strains of 20th century life left him wishing, now & then, for a good latter-day ark. In 1923, a friend startled him by announcing that "a small group of people now in London . . . has started building one." When Walker asked for the new Noah's name, he was told: "Gurdjieff."

Dr. Walker was curious to learn more about George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and the more he learned the more fascinated he became. He decided that Gurdjieff was one of the most gifted philosopher-psychologists of modern times. Convinced of the value of Gurdjieff's teachings, Author Walker has now written Venture with Ideas in the hope that others will benefit as he has himself. With this approach, he naturally focuses on the master's ideas at considerable expense to the master's personality, which clearly deserves fuller treatment.

Sex Is Hydrogen 12. Gurdjieff seems to have been a remarkable blend of P. T. Barnum, Rasputin, Freud, Groucho Marx and everybody's grandfather. To his disciples, he was a great man, a modern saint. To doubters, he was an astute phony peddling intellectual narcotics to spiritual neurotics. But all sides seemed to agree that he had picked up, as he acknowledged himself, an astonishing amount of useful information.

He was born of Greek parents in Alexandropol, Russia in 1872. But Alexandropol was too confining. Young Gurdjieff ranged into Persia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Tibet. On these journeys, Gurdjieff sat at the feet of fakirs, dervishes, "holy men" and temple dancers, sopping up unwritten lore. By 1915 he was creating a minor stir in Moscow with an oriental ballet troupe and proclaiming himself master of a "system" of "esoteric knowledge."

Some Muscovites decided that there was inspiration in his cabalistic utterances, e.g., that the universe is governed by "the law of three and the law of seven," and that the proper source of sexual energy is "Hydrogen 12." Gurdjieff picked up followers, funds, and his chief disciple, a stocky journalist and mathematician named P. D. Ouspensky. The Russian Revolution soon sent Gurdjieff and Ouspensky scurrying. Near Paris, at a Fontainebleau estate, Gurdjieff founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Ouspensky ended up in London and established the Gurdjieff Institute. It was this "ark" that Author Walker helped to build, and it was under Ouspensky that he began to study Gurdjieff's teachings.

Sour Cream & Vodka. One line of his teaching was an intricate extension of the old Greek injunction: "Know Thyself." The self, said Gurdjieff, is a chameleon, altering with each whim and impulse. "A man decides in the evening to reform his habits and to get up earlier in the morning. But the 'I' that wakes up next day knows nothing about any such plan and has no intention of rising any earlier than usual." The self is a sleepwalker reacting blindly to external impressions. "Everything happens in us in the same way that changes in the weather happen." The self is locked in the prison of habit, and the chief habit is self-deception. One form of self-deception is "considering" other people. "We are entirely preoccupied with what they are thinking of us, whether they like us, whether they dislike us, whether they are giving us our due or not ... It is a form of inner servitude."

To strip to his essential self, starch his will, and reform his character, a man must be awakened from "perpetual twilight" and "attain self-awareness." But the self, insisted Gurdjieff, is a very sound sleeper. It needs the rousing pinch of intensive self-observation, the alarm-clock shock of irritating tasks. At Fontainebleau, Gurdjieff put his followers through stiff paces. It was not unusual for a disciple to be routed out in the middle of the night, told to pack his things and move to another room. Frequently, no one was in bed at that hour, for Gurdjieff liked to keep his disciples up most of the night. During the day, tree-chopping might be assigned as a task, or intricate dances performed. Gurdjieff himself weighed more than 200 Ibs., but he moved with the grace of a cat; he composed his own tunes to accompany the dances.

Dinner usually began with vodka toasts "to the 21 varieties of idiot." Gurdjieff liked to get new disciples sozzled, if only to get them relaxed and in a self-revealing mood. A fine cook, the master would sit at the head of the table doling out spicy vegetable concoctions dunked in sour cream. Years later, when Dr. Walker went to Paris to meet Gurdjieff and was admitted to his private room, he found the walls covered with tiers of groceries, boxes of candy, bottles of brandy and vodka. The master, himself, sat jammed against the shelves with a large chocolate fish sheathed in tinfoil swinging just above his enormous head.

Shearing the Sheep. At times, Gurdjieff would petrify his disciples by simulating fierce tantrums; then he would laugh like a hyena. To learn more of "the system" and keep the grocery stack high, the disciples dug deep into their bank balances. Gurdjieff referred to this process as "shearing" and rocked with mirthful spasms whenever the subject came up. On a 1931 trip to the U.S., reporters asked the master about his mission. Said he, deadpan: "I have come to shear sheep."

Gurdjieff happily went on shearing the sheep to the day of his death at the age of 77 in 1949. Long separated from his mentor, Ouspensky had died two years before. Today, dedicated groups continue "the work" on at least two continents, hold readings from Gurdjieff's All and Everything, a mammoth mishmash of allegory, impish jest and bad writing. But it is not quite the same as when Gurdjieff was alive.

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