One of the puzzles of this encounter is its lead up, in terms of Ouspensky's autobiographical account of his long search, and its failure to result in anything. We suspect at once a set up here. It surpasses belief that Ouspensky could have navigated to India and Ceylon and not found a spiritual path. Tens of thousands of New Age seekers have found a cornucopia of ways, methods, ashrams, and so-called spiritual paths in their travels to India and the East. We are left to wonder if we are seeing the first stage of Gurdjieff's predatory targeting of celebrities to serve his own purposes. At what point Ouspensky came on his radar is not clear, but to land the author of Tertium Organon was a considerable coup.  Lost in all the discourse on this history is this obvious fact: a series of prospects are suddenly snared for promotional purposes, and we are left to wonder if this is an interference in the natural spiritual biography that emerges in all individuals (hopefully!) to bend that individual to a transient exploitation. One must ask this question, since a host of commentators have remarked on what was said to have been Ouspensky's inability to complete some putative series of stages in his development. An as likely explanation is that having gotten a perfect public communicator, Gurdjieff terminated the relationship in  order to veil the deeper purposes behind what was to become a very considerable public attraction point, the materials given in the series of lectures and activities beginning in Moscow in the period of the lead up to the Russian revolution. Gurdjieff didn't quite do a clean job here, since Ouspensky smelled a rat and compounded his expositions with a clear ambivalence. 

We can't finally resolve this issue, but it has to be said that few claimants to the title of spiritual teacher have ended up with an advertisement as effective as Ouspenky's literary productions expounding Gurdjieff's so-called 'fourth way'. 

Let us note that Ouspensky began to harbor suspicions about Gurdjieff rather quickly, and, while it is not clear just what this was about, it seems clear that the charlatanesque flavor sometimes said to be acted out by Gurdjieff  as deliberate put-on is the most obvious symptom of something amiss in the depiction of a hidden teaching. If this teaching is so important, why do it that way? The point is not that Gurdjieff was a charlatan but that he was involved in a deception of some kind. From hindsight, the verdict is obvious. Much of the teaching was a series of 'brochure' materials, partly coming from Gurdjieff's own searches, but partly made up, or considerably embroidered. Ouspensky sensed that Gurdjieff wasn't on the level. It is not too hard for an outsider  to see the problem! If you say the enneagram is the source of all knowledge you are either an idiot, or about the business of promoting gimmicks that can play on people's suggestibility. To be sure, the lore of this question of the enneagram deserves a respectful historical or anthropological account in a sufi context, but then what are the facts. None are available. This example is significant because it is always difficult, if not impossible to challenge the ideas of Gurdjieff: his public statements refer to something that is not available 'at the moment'. The enneagram is a reference to something else, the 'real thing', and as such is merely exoteric perhaps. Thus the material on the enneagram isn't really what the issue is about, because that is esoteric, and its meaning will come later. These loans on credibility are played over and over again by Gurdjieff. With hindsight we can see that balderdash went a long way here. We should play a straight card here: by their fruits ye shall know them. The material on the enneagram, and the associated material, is evidence of what is really a weak rehash of some kind of 'hermetic flotsam', material of no particularly deep character, but of the type that the contemporary New Movement has been flooded with, to no avail. We can reserve judgment up to a point here, but the issue is merely that gambling your fortunes is not called for in the context of such loans of credibility. It is significant that Bennett, the second mathematician snared by this agenda, quietly saw through the enneagram figure and shifted his considerations to something else. Yet he never said so in public. Thus much of the material in Ouspensky is of this character. From the cosmic hydrogens to the doctrines of the cosmoses we suspect Gurdjieff was making it up as the game proceeded. This may be false, but at some point a resolution must come in the form of development or clarification, and that never came. We should interject that in one case we can find the coordinates of Gurdjieff's pronouncements, the classical Samkhya. The resemblance to the Ray of Creation is obvious. Hollywood Samkhya with a dash of theistic interpretation, or cooptation. And we can thus compare source and result, and we see an extraordinary pastiche of classical Samkhya disgorged with much added on in feverish mystical haste. Whatever the case, this example shows us the way Gurdjieff treated his materials. Such issues should be settled by proper scholarship, and telling of the truth, but we can see that has been made impossible, and the same rehash of gibberish simply goes on and on. In all  fairness an attempt to make classical Samkhya intuitive for modern man was a 'bon idee', one that somehow got scrambled in the mind of Gurdjieff into a concoction, wiseacring to use his own phrase. 

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