The Situation We Face and the Hope We Are Offered

The Gurdjieff Foundation of Oregon seeks to help its members practice the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff, with emphasis on self-questioning and self-study.  Gurdjieff's method is based on the principle that deeply benevolent factors residing within us can emerge and help us in balanced ways if barriers to their appearance and proper influence are observed and understood.  In this process, we seek to apply a scientific attitude to our inner lives—observing, verifying, testing.  At the same time, we endeavor to open our hearts to profound spiritual questions touching on the miraculous nature of Life and the timeless questions:  Who am I?  What is my life for?

Efforts in our group take a variety of directions and are often based on the principle that the problems that we see "outside" are “inside,” as well.  This is not a cheerful picture, since it is clear that world culture is riven by conflicts of such depth and complexity that humanity now confronts an extraordinary crossroads.  Can any development in our lives be more crucial than the capacity to see how the conflicting forces of life play out in the arena that we could learn to understand and to influence:   our individual thoughts, emotions, and actions?  The world can only be altered one person at a time, beginning with ourselves.  Therefore, in our group the beginning point is seen as internal.  We work together to develop, within each of us, a new discipline of inner inquiry. 

On the path toward deeper levels of self, Gurdjieff tells us truths about our day-to-day selves that are hard to swallow.   At the same time, he points to great depths of hope.  At a deep, interior level, according to Gurdjieff, nothing is missing.  The problem is here on the surface, where we live and dream.  Our first task, therefore, is to see our existing situation, which is always in motion, with greater clarity.   These efforts can be aided by an interior taste for truth that is unspoiled by all our conditioning and contradictions.

Alone we can accomplish almost nothing.  Help is needed,and is available, toward finding ever-new beginnings of inquiry and hope.

Quotations from the Gurdjieff Work

...self-study and self-observation, if rightly conducted, bring man to the realization of the fact that something is wrong with his machine and with his functions in their ordinary state.  A man realizes that it is precisely because he is asleep that he lives and works in a small part of himself.  It is precisely for this reason that the vast majority of his possibilities remain unrealized, the vast majority of his powers are left unused.  —Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

As one begins to realize that the fundamental aim is to become aware of the whole of oneself, then the sacred quality of 'seeing' becomes as important as what is seen, and a balance begins to appear.  —Michel de Salzmann

Man's possibilities are very great.  You cannot conceive even a shadow of what man is capable of attaining. But nothing can be attained in sleep.  In the consciousness of a sleeping man his illusions, his "dreams" are mixed with reality.  He lives in a subjective world and he can never escape from it.  And this is the reason why he can never make use of all the powers he possesses and why he lives in only a small part of himself.  —Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous