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 in balanced ways if barriers to their appearance 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 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 are "outside" are inside of us 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 confronts extraordinary cross-roads. Can any development be more crucial than the capacity to see how the conflicting forces of life play out in our individual thoughts, emotions, and actions?

The need is great. In our group the beginning point is seen as internal: within ourselves, working to develop 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 suggests great depths of hope, stating that deep within are benevolent, objective factors, based on universal influences. At that level, he says, nothing is missing. The problem is here on the surface, where we live and dream. The first task is to see our true situation with more and more clarity. These efforts are aided by an interior taste for truth that is unspoiled by all our contradictions.

Alone we can accomplish almost nothing. Together, perhaps we can find not only "living water," but an active thirst that points toward 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 realized 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, page 145.

I have the power to rise above myself and to see myself freely. . . to be seen. My thought has the power to be free. But for this to take place, it must rid itself of all the associations which hold it captive, passive. It must cut the threads that bind it to the world of images, to the world of forms; it must free itself from the constant pull of the emotions. It must feel its power to resist this pull; its objective power to watch over this pull while gradually rising above it. In this movement thought becomes active. It becomes active while purifying itself. Thereby its true aim is revealed, a unique aim: to think I, to realize who I am, to enter into this mystery.

—Jeanne de Salzmann

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, page 145.