The Practice of “Harmonious Development of Man”

Abstract

Practically, what did Gurdjieff propose to be a way out of the primarily inner, but also social, human fragmentation and hypnotic slavery? In this chapter I will present a commonly held account—based on what has been reported in Gurdjieff’s (especially B: 1185–1238, Meetings, and Herald), and Ouspensky’s (1949) writings—of what practical strategies Gurdjieff proposed and undertook in favor of advancing his project of harmonious human development.

To make use of people, who display a special interest in an Institute founded by me, for purely personal ends would surely strike those around me as a manifestation of “egoism”, but at the same time the people, who had anything to do with such an Institute established by me, those, namely, whom I had previously mentioned and in whom the predisposition proper to all men,—that of acquiring data and of preparing in their being the soil for the impulse of “objective-conscience” and for the formation of so-called “essential-prudence”—had not yet been entirely atrophied, could, in this way alone, profit by the results of knowledge amassed by me due to exceptional circumstances of my life, and which had regard to nearly all the aspects of reality and objective truth, and thus use them for their own benefit.

—H:24