“When I was 17, I had fasted, I had not slept for 24 hours, and I put staples in a wall to pull ropes through in the outline of my body…I started lashing myself to the wall, legs and torso tight…I wanted an experience right on the edge of death…I had a conscious out-of-body experience…You have a body but it’s fluid.”  Extract from the RE/search interview with Fakir Musafar in “Modern Primitives”.

Having spent a fair amount of time musing over the significance that the Gurdjieff work might have for the contemporary magician, I thought I’d take a bit more time unpacking each of the paths that combine to make up the 4^th Way. If awakening within the 4^th way entails the activation of the body, heart and mind within “the usual conditions of life”, in my mind it’s essential that we look at what working with these aspects of Self might look like. At the outset, I’d also add that while using Gurdjieff ’s language, I don’t feel that artificially distinguishing between body, emotions and mind fits well with most of our experiences of reality.

Gurdjieff describes the way of the body as being that of the “Fakir”. Perhaps not a term that familiar to the average westerner, but given his extensive travels throughout the middle-east (Cf. “Meeting with Remarkable Men”), one that was very familiar to Gurdjieff  The Fakir was generally a contortionist who through training, dedication and a fair degree of masochism, performed amazing feats with their bodies. The way of the Fakir is one in which the starting point of one’s journey is the physical body and the use of austerity and asceticism in order to harness its potential. For Gurdjieff the Fakir learns from observation-like a hatha yoga class or five rhythm’s dance workshop, we learn best by seeing others seeking enlightenment through the body.

The story of how we relate our physical selves seems critical to our age. Much ink could be spilt on the way in which the Judeo-Christian and Decartean traditions have led to many of us in the west having an experience of being cut-off or ostracised from our bodies. We can feel like “ghosts in the machine”-disembodied drivers of unruly vehicles that struggle to stay on the road. So many of us want more, and as we struggle with the sense of psychic fracture, we turn to the body as a possible route for a more visceral, earthy connection.

This need to connect has birthed a multiplicity of approaches and responses: martial arts, a multitude of bodywork therapies, tattooing and body modification being just a few examples of how we are seeking to recapture our journeys by marking them on our bodies.  This impulse drove the 17 year old Roland Loomis to become Fakir Musafar the father of modern primitivism. Shamanic lore is rich with examples of technologies that use the body as a means of seeking gnosis. Whether via application of weights and constriction or through consciously seeking bee stings, these animist psychonauts sought a multiplicity of means for inducing consciousness change via the body. I would argue that the stereotype of the pierced chaos mage is as much about this need as it is our love of cyber-punk aesthetics!

Magickal modifications

This re-visioning of the body as a means of enlightenment fits well with the tantric axiom of “Samsara as Nirvana” i.e. the realm that others see as illusion or impediment is actually the avenue via which the “higher” centres of emotion and cognition are accessed. To my mind the tantric endeavour is primarily concerned with using the senses and the body as a means of awakening. The primary technologies of mantra, yantra, mudra and nyasa challenge us to find God in the body. These technologies are techniques of extending and intensification-we more fully access the natural by using applying “non-natural” or ultra-natural means.

Make mention of tantra to most people and it conjures images of endless orgies and Sting’s long-suffering wife. Whatever the value to be found in neo-tantric practice as a contemporary sex therapy, unless these techniques challenge our conditioning and loosens the blocks to liberation, they are apt to become little more than another hobby (albeit a highly pleasurable one!). Why limit bodily ecstasy to the genitals? The technologies of occult tantric challenge us to open every pore as Shiva/Shakti in union-each moment then becoming a means for accessing Freud’s polymorphous perversity.

The Gurdjieff Work’s means for engaging with the body similarly challenges the participant to work with the natural in a non-natural manner. The “Movements” are a series of gestures which when put together become dances that pretty much stand alone in captivating the viewer with their mesmerising strangeness HERE If the goal of the Work is to awaken from a machine-like sleep state, the movements are designed to force the body out of slumber via their running contra to “natural” tendencies.  While an attempt to awaken via the body alone may have limited results in Gurdjieff ’s schema, if we integrate it with both the heart and mind, it can become the work of the cunning man.

To pursue the work of the magician via ritual and the use of ecstatic technologies means to be in the body. Whether via dance, yoga or sacred sexuality practices, as we bring greater consciousness to bear on the kinaesthetic so the body transitions and mutates to become expansive and mysterious. Whether via kundalini awakenings or Holy Ghost shaking, the hidden potentialities of the body loosen the armour of our outdated personas, so that we might risk the new vistas of our future Selves.

SD

A few days ago I was staying with a friend who has a delightful house hidden in what, at least in British terms, is a vast forest. Surrounded by the green and grey of the summer season, the air filled with many layers of bird song, I found myself captivated by the spirit of place. Tomorrow I’ll be going into the woods again, this time in the company of two score magicians, to do our Work.

Woodland of course occupies a mythic place in the western folk cannon – Goldilocks wanders off into an uncharted area of the forest. In the dark spaces beneath the trees lurk all manner of monsters, wild beasts and outlaws. Woodland is emblematic of Mystery, the occult, the hidden.

Sometimes I wonder about the belief systems that emerge from wooded landscape, or the jungles of the tropics and how these insights differ from those encountered in the desert.

I love deserts too. I once spent three days walking alone in the Sahara and have travelled into the bush of Australia. In such places it seems to me it’s quite natural to come up with monist beliefs. Alone, with nothing but the sky and the dry land for company, we are stripped of relationships. Imagining an immovable Self or One True God is really easy in that situation. When we meet other beings they appear as strange ghosts; lizards that scuttle out of the way, tiny mammals who only emerge, wide-eyed and blinking, in the night time. Death lays out the bones of larger creatures on the dusty earth.

But surrounded by trees, by vegetation, by birds and others we are held more obviously in relationship with other life. We are clearly part of a matrix, rather than isolate selves we need to negotiate, navigate, sometimes cut through and sometimes climb over, the living mass of verdant ecology.

After a hard day of fornication the spirit of the woods is jus’ chiilin’

Speaking with a Sister and reflecting on the differences she has seen between incoming western culture and that of the indigenous Amazonian tribes, I wonder if much of the tension between these ways of being arises from our distinct landscapes. The Middle Eastern forest was destroyed aeons ago and climatic changes opened up the dry crack of desert across Africa in the pre-history of our species. From these desolate places of desert came The Holy Books and One God – definite, one-pointed, discrete, unique monomania. Monoculture farming, monoculture herding and monoculture social systems arose, with a linear chronology; a creation story, and a Fall with messianic, apolocalyptic punch line.

What religions come from the jungles? Those syncretic ayahuasca cults who believe that Jesus has already returned as the Vine of the Soul, those ‘shamanic’ belief systems which underpin many tribal cultures. Perhaps the nature of the jungle, of the woods, is such that the emerging beliefs don’t appear as ‘revolutions’ or radical new faiths. So while we can expect the Evangelistic missions to continue their work in places like South American, bringing the Good News of sexual shame, oil exploitation and legalism, perhaps something else may be happening too. Perhaps the damp wet of the forest, the green and grey of vine covered trees and pregnant rain clouds, may be soaking back into the soul of the west.

The eruption of the modern Pagan movement which, in a sense, is a direct reaction to in the rapacious industrialisation of the Victorian age, is an indigenous European species of this forest rot. A realisation that no Holy Book or Magick Tablet or Sacred Scroll can ever teach as much as direct experience of the world. An emphasis on the rhythmic passage of the seasons, an appreciation that animal and plant spirits are teachers, an awareness of ourselves as part of, not above or beyond, Nature.

May we all nurture woodlands, both inner psychological ones and physical ones in our landscapes. Not necessarily as pristine wilderness, from which humans are forbidden, but as a places that, especially for us in the west, may act as a corrective to our culture which unconsciously seeks to replicate the monotony of the desert across the globe.

May we all spend some time, in deep relationship with other beings, in the confusing, life-affirming, riotous world of the green and grey.

JV

Check out Damh The Bard’s tune in praise of the green and grey here