If you're interested in Gurdjieff - and you must be, if you're reading this - then you will surely have noticed that in the last few years there's been an enormous glut of Gurdjieff materials on the internet.
Is this a good thing? And how can we judge the value of each article, website or book?
Of course, more genuine material about Gurdjieff is always welcome. We need as many notes of meetings, accounts of personal encounters with the great teachers, and serious, well-thought-out articles on the Work as we can find. Books by real Work students and teachers on their own experiences on the Fourth Way are a valuable accompaniment to our personal Work journey.
The problem with the internet is that anyone can publish anything at all on it, and the reader is hard put to distinguish the false from the real.
So how can we decide whether something's worth reading or not? We need guidance, especially if it concerns something relatively expensive, such as a new book on the Work. Enormous sums of money can be thrown away on worthless matter unless we're very careful and discriminating.
And even the free websites and articles can do a lot of damage. People can get a wrong impression of the Work from reading something by an individual or group who's left the Work, either of their own free will or because they were thrown out of it - not to mention the pieces written by those who've had no real experience of a Work school at all, but are Fourth Way wannabees, writing from theory only.
And this falseness damages the Work as a whole. It lures away students who have Magnetic Centre and hinders them from finding the real teaching they seek.
I've always maintained that the only safe path to learning about the Work is to join a real group. By "real", I mean a group in the lineage of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Nicoll. And to verify the lineage of any group or individual, you need to know whether they're connected with any of the Gurdjieff Foundations around the world, which promote only genuine Gurdjieffian material, or with the Study Society based in London, when the material concerns Ouspensky.
The Nicoll line of groups still exists - that is my own lineage - and any Nicoll Work teacher will at some time have been connected with the Foundations and will maintain good relations with them. If you come across a site purporting to be of the Nicoll line, contact the teacher and find out his or her lineage and current affiliations. Don't be fobbed off by clever window dressing. If there is a real group with a real teacher they will be only too happy to tell you their credentials.
Books are much harder to judge. One sure guide, if you can find it, is of course to ascertain the lineage of the author. Many books out there now, available from Amazon and elsewhere, are genuine and worthwhile. The authors are affiliated with one of the three lines I've mentioned above, and the materials they publish are well worth reading.
Others, however, are useless - or worse than useless, because they give quite wrong ideas about the Work. These come from individuals who've left the Foundation, or been thrown out; who have seen a chance to make money out of their limited experience of the Work; and are unscrupulous enough to try to gull innocent readers into buying their products. Some may actually believe what they write, and if so, they can be even more dangerous, because more persuasive!
There are some excellent websites out there, and some very worthwhile publishing houses. If you buy something from the Eureka press, you're in safe hands. Websites such as my personal favourites, which include the wonderful zenyogagurdjieff, are definitely worth checking out. I always try to read his latest post, and have also found much to stimulate my intellectual centre on the websites of Charles Tart and other Foundation-linked men and women. Well-known publishing houses, with a good reputation, are usually reliable. Self-published books may be very good or they may be quite worthless - I speak as one who's published a book myself, which I obviously think is worth reading! But my experience of this process showed me just how easy it is these days to get into print, and why it's a case of "caveat lector" on the internet and elsewhere.
Some authors who claim to write about the Work seem to be just self-seeking, self-justifying liars. They make untrue assertions and give wrong ideas. Some may even be hasnamusses. The Work has always taught that we need to check everything out and verify it for ourselves, but the huge glut of materials now available makes that very, very difficult, if not impossible.
So - use your judgement. Consult the rest of your group and your teacher, if you have one. And if you don't - then try to find one, as that is the only way you can really, fruitfully work on yourself. Books and articles alone won't do it. Nor will discussion groups, useful though they are in counselling and therapy. They operate at a life level and can't raise the members to a higher level than life.
Beware of websites that advertise Fourth Way groups, but don't have a lineage, or won't say what it is. To produce results, a Work group must have a teacher, someone whose Being is at a higher level than that of his or her students. Without such a teacher, a group is merely a counselling, self-help group, and although that can be useful in many ways, it won't teach anyone the Work or provide the conditions for individuals to work on themselves.
The teaching cannot arise from the mass of people; it comes from above, from a level higher than life. Just as our normal state of waking sleep consists of warring factions of different I's until Deputy Steward or Steward begins to organize them, so a group without a Work teacher has no way out of life-level conflicts. Discussions go round in circles. No progress is made, and much energy is wasted.
As the original teachers are now passing away, an increase in efforts is very necessary for the Work to maintain its standards. We are passing through a difficult interval in the Work, when new shocks are needed. The addition of new, genuine materials is very, very welcome to all of us who try to work on ourselves in the great Tradition of the Fourth Way, in a lineage that descends from the Messengers themselves, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and Nicoll. But don't be misled by people claiming to be of this tradition but having no antecedents in this lineage. They aren't Work groups at all, and they won't help you. They may ruin your chances of ever meeting the Work in its genuine form, or of staying with it if you do.
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