IRRITATING IDIOTS CAN BE USEFUL

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Another story I read recently,

Gurdjieff used to go out of his way to stimulate his students' emotions. He had a training center in France for some years, an old chateau, the Chateau de Prieure. Students came to live there regularly and would end up working in the gardens, painting the walls, cleaning out the gutters, and so on as well as attending classes and otherwise getting instructions.

Gurdjieff also had some Russian immigrants living there, this being shortly after the Bolshevik Revolu­tion. One of these immigrants, a man who we shall call Bekterev, though this is not his real name, was particularly annoying to those who had come as spiritual seekers. He was not a student of Gurdjieff. Indeed, Bekterev thought everything spiritual was total nonsense. His personal habits drove everybody up the wall. He seemed the most inconsiderable, egotistical, irritable man alive.

Gurdjieff's students hated Bekterev: they were there for serious spiritual work, and this idiot was constantly irritating and distracting them. They started playing practical jokes on him, and they eventu­ally played such nasty practical jokes that he was driven to leave. I
can't recall precisely, but they finally did something like steal his false teeth and roll them in cow manure—something like that. He left in a rage.

As soon as Gurdjieff heard, he immediately got in his car, went to Paris, where Bekterev had gone, and begged him to come back, offering to pay him a magnificent salary just to live at the Prieure. He later explained this to his students, saying something along the lines of, "This man is one of the most valuable teaching instruments I have. You are here for self-study, and this man steps on your emotional corns every day, giving you marvelous opportunities to see how your psychological machinery is constructed. His absence would be a great loss to the gaining of real self-knowledge—real as opposed to the fantasies you have about yourself and your lofty spiritual aims."

I am not suggesting that you go out and deliberately find somebody like that. Life will probably provide, actually.

It is the shift in attitude that you can make that is most valuable. You begin to recognize that you do not know your own psychology; that you are caught up in automatized, unconscious reactions that you do not understand and that cause you trouble. You come to realize that you must understand what is going on in you before you can effectively do something about it, and that you need to engage in self-study, self-remembering, and self-observation. Then the stresses and strains of life become gifts. They give you opportunities to see things that it might take you years to see otherwise.

This is another reason why Gurdjieff was not enthusiastic about monasticism and spiritual retreats. Retreats are arranged to be very calm and peaceful, and so all your nasty problems go dormant. No one steps on your corns. You do not really solve your problems.

You are in an artificial situation that is advantageous in some ways, but which can allow you to get lost in what amounts to fantasies about your level of spiritual development. Get out and work on yourself in life, where these annoying things keep happening, providing rich material for study.

Again, you should not misinterpret this statement to mean that you should try to make your life more miserable. Life will provide sufficient misery. You do not need the hair shirts.