1.4 A Great Work
Last modified 06/28/2008
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The term 'the great work' occurs in various occult traditions, and a
variant 'the work', inherited in fact from the Sufi tradition, is used by
Gurdjieff to refer to his activities and also to their purported place in a
cosmological scheme resembling the lore of the 'great chain of being',
with the cooptation of an 'evolutionary' idea whose exact basis is never given
any kind of empirical or scientific foundation. It is all assertion on
Gurdjeff's part, and, as presented in his writings, a very obscurely stated
metaphysics. J. G. Bennett has attempted to present all of this in works such as
'Making Of A New World'.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the 'Gurdjieff work' is the wild, and likely false claim, that the spiritual action or effort of the individual is somehow required by greater nature in the transformation of energies. It is hard to see how Gurdjieff arrives at this, but a suspicion arises as we examine his activities with 'disciples', and already with certain of his most cunning 'successors', or interlopers, that this formulation is altogether convenient at the point where the financial needs of the 'work' approach the red ink level. Whatever the significance of Gurdjieff's metaphysics his references to the work show a curious bias indeed. A wheeler-dealer and accomplished capitalist who has a stumbling block on the issue of abolition, and a barely disguised distaste for liberal rights, proposes a psychological system with an unfortunate set of metaphors about factories, and the energies of 'personal' transformation, their extraction, and final destination. Perhaps one of the reasons the 'work' never goes anywhere is that its 'workers' are suffering from the extraction of surplus value in a bad factory job! Maybe Marx was onto something. This is union busting on the grand scale. It seems Marx had a point. Be wary of the haute bourgeoisie and their 'make work' schemes. For all its vaunted resurrection of ancient and sacred teachings the 'work' shows a strange resemblance to an industrial metaphor.
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