A Return to Tradition an Interview With Frank Sinclair

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TOTRADITIONA RETURN

An Interview with Frank Sinclair

PARABOLA: The Gurdjieff Work shares certain elements with

all the major traditions. Is the Work then a synthesis created

by Gurdjieff? And if so, from where does its authority

derive? Or did Gurdjieff, as some believe, inherit a teaching

that has existed either alongside or within the traditions,

albeit secretly, for millennia?

FRANK SINCLAIR: Please understand that I am not some ulti-

mate authority on the Gurdjieff teaching. I did not know

Mr. Gurdjieff. But the deeper I have explored his ideas and

his principles as they have been conveyed to me by those

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Born and raised in South Africa, Frank Sinclair settled in the United

States in his 20s to pursue his interest in the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff

(18661949), primarily by working with some of Gurdjieff s fore-

most students. During subsequent decades he enjoyed a successful

career in the business world while becoming increasingly engaged in

the activities of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. He was

named co-president of the Foundation in 2000 and president in

October 2005.

There is, as Sinclair said during PARABOLAs conversation with him,

so much misunderstanding about the Gurdjieff teaching. It was

to help situate Gurdjieff more properly in the light of tradition

that PARABOLAvisited Sinclair this past summer in his home on the

Hudson River some twenty miles north of Manhattan.

JEFF ZALESKI AND TRACY COCHRAN


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who studied with him, the more I am

convinced that he has indeed brought

us fragments of an unknown teaching.

Clearly, he embodied an extraordinary

knowledge, and he was in that sense

a real Master. All the evidence is that

he was a man of real being. A man of

Presence.

It wasnt that he collected bits and

pieces from the great traditions and con-

trived some proprietary teaching. Rather,

he seems to have been able to gain access

to several primary sources and to make

their knowledge authentically his own.

If every real teaching derives from some

overarching revelation, he must also

have had some centering experience or

experiences that connected him to the

Source, to what is central. I dont think

he was bringing a new religion, as some

have suggested. He was returning to

the source of the perennial wisdom.

He called it the Great Knowledge, the

powerful ancient stream of true knowl-

edge of being.

I can only say that his is an extraordi-

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nary teaching. And for me, the proof is,

as it were, in the pudding: that through

his teaching people canchange, that

they can grow in being, that there can

be openings to the Higher. There have

been really extraordinary examples in ourtime. I think, for example, of people like

Madame de Salzmann, Gurdjieff s fore-

most student.

P: Is the Gurdjieff Work a tradition in

the making?

FS: I think of it rather as a returnto

Tradition. It is Tradition. Gurdjieff is

mining the mother lode, if you wish.

To me its a renewal or a revivification

of the Christian lineage. Gurdjieff

himself said his teaching was esoteric

Christianity. Even a great Church Father

like St. Augustine could say, That which

is today called the Christian tradition

existed among the ancients and never

ceased to exist from the origin of the

human race. And in our time, Dr.

Conge, one of Madame de Salzmanns

closest circle of students, declared that

Gurdjieff made it clear that there is a

source teaching at the root of what hetransmitted.

That to me is the point: the Gurdjieff

teaching is in its essential core a source

teaching. It points one to, it calls one to,

the very source from which the traditions

derive, the source on which the great

orthodoxies are based. It leads one,

measured perhaps in moments only,

to the unmanifest and indivisible reality

behind all forms. Each tradition takes

a particular conformation, depending

upon the individual through whom it

aroseChrist, the Buddha, Muhammad

in the surrounding in which he appeared

among humanity. What I have become

personally convinced ofand not

through blind faithis that Gurdjieff

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ranks in that special lineage of people

who, like Meister Eckhart, have tran-

scended known forms, and penetrated

to what is hidden.

P:Yet some basic tenets of the teachingof Gurdjieff seem to contradict the

teachings of major traditions. One

example is Gurdjieffs emphatic state-

ment that everything is material, includ-

ing the Absolute.

FS: But no one can accuse Gurdjieff

of being a Cartesian. I am struck by

the fact that theoretical physicist Basarab

Nicolescu, a member of the scientific

establishment, and a man who has

appeared in the pages of PARABOLA, is

drawn to Gurdjieffs philosophy of

nature. He points out that Gurdjieff

speaks of levels upon levels of materiality

related to ever finer energies. If you

wish, reality is plastic. And there arelevels that we in our ordinary states can-

not fathom or comprehend.

P: It does seem that Gurdjieff calls us

to respect the immensity of creation

and the mystery of who we are.

FS: In the great traditions, like Islam,

it is said that God created the universe

because He felt He was a hidden treasure

or a hidden jewel, and He wished to be

known. But Gurdjieff brings a rather

audacious extra dimension. He says that

God needed to create the universe out

of a cosmic necessityto counter and

overcome the merciless Heropass,

the inexorable flow of time that leads

inevitably to entropy and death. The

Creator brought the universe into

being in order to regenerate Himself.

Moreoverand this is a very extraordi-

nary ideaGurdjieff says that we have

a role to play in this endless regeneration

of the universe. But not as we are. And

for that vertical exchange, there has to be

a movement between levels.

For example, Gurdjieff emphasizes the

need to practice remorse; intentionally togo over ones life in order to suffer, con-

sciously, as part of this extraordinary

exchange that is called by the Higher.

Except for Gurdjieff, I am not aware

that any of the great teachings tend to

say much about that. But for me, that

exchange of energies is the deep necessi-

ty to which the Gurdjieff Work calls one.The full meaning and significance of our

lives resides in that.

P: Gurdjieff called conscience the most

sacred of all human faculties and the

most refined of our modes of intelli-

gence. What is conscience?

FS: There are some who profess to tell

you exactly what conscience is. I can

only say that its a very high thing. It

doesnt come from me. I have come

to see it as a force that descends from a

high source, and is experienced when

the inner alignment corresponds with

that possibility.

Generally, Im not touched by con-

science. But there are moments when

all of my parts come togetherthe

thought, the body, the feeling are

mobilized, as it were, in the awesome

realization that I am indeed incomplete,

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THE GURDJIEFF TEACHING IS IN ITS

ESSENTIAL CORE A SOURCE TEACHING.


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not whole. And through that acceptance,

that surrender, this other energy is able

to pass.

Gurdjieff speaks of His Endlessness

[God] in anthropomorphical terms,

which is perhaps all that is ordinarily pos-sible for us. But what is central to his

teaching is this verticalexchange of ener-

gy, for which we are needed. Andto

repeat myselfI am needed not as I

ordinarily am. I need to be in conformity

with that need. To me thats why were

alive. This is the sacred service to which

we are called.

P:What indications does Gurdjieff give

about this high service?

FS: Gurdjieff has intentionally buried

the dog very deep, as he keeps remind-

ing us. Yet there are undeniable indica-

tions of his meaning in his famous

Obligolnian Strivings. Take, for

instance, the fourth striving: The striv-

ing from the beginning of their existence

to pay for their arising and their individ-

uality as quickly possible, in order after-

wards to be free to lighten as much as

possible the Sorrow of our Common

Father. What could this conceivably

mean: To work to alleviate the sorrow

of His Endlessness? There must be some

need, then, which the Creator feels

anthropomorphically, to be sureas

suffering. Clearly, this means that His

Endlessness needs what only we human

beings can deliver. What then is the sor-

row of His Endlessness? And what is this

vertical exchange that takes place

through remorse of conscience?

What the brothers have found, if I

may express the experience with some

ecclesiastical overtones, is that there isan energya conscious energythat

comes from On High to meet my

remorse. And thus it is that in moments

of great, great suffering, joy appears, like

the phoenix rising from the ashes. Its

not that I create the joy. Surely this is

the conscious force that descends; it

meets the suffering that I experience in

realizing my own imperfection. Both the

creature and the Creator are nourished

through the process and the outcome

of this exchange.

P: One can have an experience of

remorse, and of the joy. Thats different

than stating that this is something thats

needed by His Endlessness. It seems thatis knowledge that I cant come to on my

own. That is something that is revealed.

FS: Its revealedor, if you wish, it is

realized. As the Scriptures put it, No

man by taking thought can add a cubit

to his stature. Gurdjieff could not mere-

ly have invented that understanding.

P: Because in the end, youfeelthat it

is true.

FS:You knowwith absolute certitude

through thefeeling.

P: So who was Gurdjieff that this revela-

tion worked through him?

FS:Who indeed. One comes to appreci-

ate that in Gurdjieff s teaching, as in the

great Abrahamic traditions, and also in

Vedanta, for example, the pivotal under-

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WHO IS THE TEACHER?

"I AM" IS THE TEACHER.


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standing is non-dualisticthat there is

only One who incarnates. It is I Am

that incarnates. Who is the Teacher? I

Am is the Teacher. Remember Exodus

[3:14]: And God said unto Moses, I

AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shaltthou say unto the children of Israel, I

AM hath sent me unto you.

The centrality of this great understand-

ing is indicated by the statement

Gurdjieff would make in his Paris meet-

ings, that the exercise of I Am is the

first exercise in the work for self-

remembering. And he evidently commu-

nicated many variations on that theme.

In the end, the title of Gurdjieff s third

book conveys the pivotal place that this

revelation plays in his teaching: Life is

real only then, when I Am.

One experiences the I Am at differ-

ent levels, in a vast spectrum or range of

actuality. The I Am encompasses the

entire scale of being from the finest to

the densest. There is no other. One

senses then the depth to the reality of

Gurdjieff s understanding when reflect-ing on his fathers death, that I am Thou.

Of course, so I can easily parrot the

words I am, and they will have no

more significance and no more relevance

than anything spoken by a simple person

on the street. Theres no fundamental

alignment, however remotely, with the

higher. But it slowly becomes a center-

ing element in ones wish to be. For

example, I can establish that Im here

in this space now by declaring silently

that I am. It may have a very limited

resonance in me, it may represent some-

thing so shallow, but it is a beginning of

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this movement towards wholeness,

of the return to the primordial perfection

that was sacrificed through the very act

of Creation itself. It was the great and

humble Meister Eckhart who made the

defining observation that the onlyone who can pronounce am with

absolute conviction is God. For the

rest of us, it becomes a conscious labor

a workto pronounce this formula

with meaning. If we are honest, we see

that we can pronounce this only with

relative authenticity, relative unity, rela-

tive certitude.

P:Are the so-called strivings merely a cat-

alog of desiderata, of remote possibilities,

or do they have a practical significance?

FS: The second striving, for example,

urges us to have a constant and unflag-

ging instinctive need for self-perfection

in the sense of being. For me this is a

movement of return. It is this movement

for which we are intended. It must be

this that eases the burden of the Creator.

I do not see how we can be of help inalleviating the sorrow of His

Endlessnessthe aim of the fourth

strivingif we are content to be frag-

mented, incomplete, indulging our lack

of unity. So long as we make no attempts

to work for unity and Presence, all the

higher energies can only pass us by. In

Gurdjieffs felicitous phrasing, possibili-

ties such as these can only beat their

wings in vain.

P: More than once Mme. de Salzmann

said that if there arent enough people

working, the Earth will fall.

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FS: I think she said that if certain energies

dont appear, the planet, the Earth, will fall.

P: How do you understand that?

FS: One feels that the Earth is beingviolated when one considers the enor-

mous numbers of human beings who

have been, and are being, slaughtered

in wars to end all wars, ethnic cleansings,

the senseless eradication of defenseless

species, the evident consequences of our

squandering of non-renewable resources,

and the ravages of global climate change.

Perhaps Gurdjieffs warnings about the

use of electricitythe whole planet is

wired nowarent just idle gestures.

Some of his early students recall how

he went around switching off lights,

saying, I will not be guilty. Perhaps

he knew something that we still fail to

recognize.

P: One key work in the Gurdjieff Work is

sitting practice. In many lines of

Buddhism, including Zen, sitting is

emphasized. If sitting is so important,

why dont Gurdjieffians sit all the time?

In Zen or Vipassana, people will sit for

days, weeks, months at a time.

FS: That is where Gurdjieff is so extraor-

dinarily normal. We have two natures.

On the one hand, we have this corporeal

presence that has to act. I have to be in

life, manifesting, moving, having to do

things, fulfilling certain needs of the

planetary body (yet another of

Gurdjieffs strivings). And for that I

need a healthy organism and a healthy

egoism. One of the remarkable aspects of

his teaching is the way he encouraged

people to be active in life. I have

known quite a number of people profess-

edly in the Work who, in the earlier

days, made strange personal sacrifices

from a totally misguided sense of going

against their natures.

And then there is this other, totally dif-

ferent, nature, which is impervious to my

temporal success or failure. It needs tobe embodied. It needs the creaturely

nature, and it needs the functional sheath

or surrounding in order to have an

action on the planet. One can experi-

ence, especially but not exclusively in sit-

tings, that a certain alignment can appear

through ones active participation but

only if there is no attempt at doing.

In that moment, the attunement, the

receptivity, is there and I can be in touch

with something higher. But we dont

truly understand that relationship, or the

need for the harmonious development

that is the indispensable prerequisite for

the movement between levels. Its not

just to be pleasant, socially acceptable,

warm and open. Its in order to allowthis other energy to act on the planet.

So for many of us, the sittings are a very

necessary and profound work. They are

not an escapefrom the realities of every-

day life.

P: There are Buddhists who go on silent

retreats for years. The Tibetan teacher

Gehlek Rinpoche says, A mole goes

into a cave, and three years later a mole

comes out.

William Segal, who loved to sit and

who loved Zen, once corrected a Work

leader who was trying to impose Zen sit-

ting on his students. Segal said, This is

not that. We try self-remembering here.

FS:Yes, as I have said elsewhere, some

group leaders have a lot to account

for. What is the Self that remembers? If

it is indeed, as the Great Knowledge

indicates, something abiding, something

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without beginning or end, something

at the source of life itself, it must encom-

pass action, it must include our having

to manifest. But it is the little self, the

small I, the creature, who fails in its

being-duty to be intentionally, con-sciously, engaged with the life that

is given.

P: One way the Gurdjieff Work seems to

differ from the traditions is that it has no

stated ethics or morality, no emphasis on

living with compassion, or with nonvio-

lence. How does what is cultivated by

the Work look to the rest of the world?

How does a person who has cultivated

intention or attention behave, so that we

may know it?

FS: P. D. Ouspensky recalled Gurdjieff s

famous response: We do not teach

morality: we teach how to find con-science. He did not say, Practice

immorality. In fact, Gurdjieff s one

great stated imperative was that we not

be parasites. These great virtues of love,

compassion, generosity cant appear in

an unprincipled surrounding. Many peo-

ple regarded the seeming abandon with

which Gurdjieff dealt with the massive

egoisms around him as a license to

behave likewiseto freely vent their own

selfishness and vanity and self-love when

they set out to bring the Work. My

wife recalls a moment in the Hotel

Wellington when Gurdjieff railed at

some luckless woman. And in the very

next instant, my wife felt that he was in

touch with something greaterGod?Everyone felt this other levelof love,

divine love, she said. I feel that when

Gurdjieff acted as he did, it was out of

the deepest compassion. It was for their

souls. Theres so much misunderstand-

ing about the Gurdjieff teaching. His

methods surely were totally appropriate

to his being. But they were not for aping.

P: Gurdjieff said that Christianity over

time had, quite lawfully, strayed from its

original aims. How do those in the

Gurdjieff Work meet the challenge of the

same laws causing the Work to stray from

Gurdjieff s intent?

FS: One has to continue working. Onehas to be faithful to what has been

revealed, and one must be discriminat-

ing. As in all the formal traditions, there

are a great many forces at play now in the

Gurdjieffian worldso many different

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FRANK SINCLAIR CLIMBING JACOBS LADDER

TABLE MOUNTAIN, SOUTH AFRICA, C. 1956


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visions, or lack of vision; so many differ-

ent agendas at so many levels, so many

opportunities to lose the thread, to

become identified with some confining

perspective; so many people who do not

see the scale of the difficulty but feel nev-ertheless that they are chosen to protect

the faith. But I recall Pope John Paul

IIs famous injunction to the activist

priests in Latin America: he told them

to get off the streets and to pray more.

P: So there is a work.

FS: To pray more. To be more inter-

iorized. To turn more actively to the

unplumbed reaches of our inner world.

The I AM is still not the Absolute,

and a realization such as that puts one

squarely before the mysteries of the

Great Knowledge, of which Gurdjieff

was such a resounding exemplar. Even

though Gurdjieff mercilessly scoffed atthe cassock as an empty symbol, he was

brought up in the orthodoxy of the

Eastern Church and he chose to be

buried in its ambience. He must have

done so for the esoteric meanings invisi-

bly embodied in the Christian tradition.

His whole extraordinary cosmological

teaching appears to me to point to the

timeless, perennial understanding that

beyond God is the Godhead, which is

the unfathomable source of all.

P: This takes us into deep territory.

FS: Here then one must speak with

great circumspection, and not as one

who presumes to know. Meister

Eckhart, for example, is emphatic that

the Godhead and God are as distinct

as heaven and earth. And a latter-day

Monk of the West* in the modern

Christian Church, writing cum permissu

superiorum, reminds us, the Supreme

Mystery infinitely transcends Its aspect

as The Creator. Speaking very loosely

then, when the Absolute does act, It

would appear to do so through the

agency or the aspect of the Creator.Gurdjieff himself appears to convey this

understanding when speaking of the

laws of world creation and world mainte-

nance. Nevertheless, he refers to one

comprehensive and infinite Source of all

that existsOur Almighty Omni-LovingCommon Father Uni-Being Creator

Endlessness. It seems to be this ultimate

Unknown that Gurdjieff calls us to fath-

om in our attempts to disinter the dog

he has buried so deep.

P: How then are we to approach these

vast imponderables?

FS: Surely not by taking more thought.

Insteadand here one speaks ahead

of oneselfwe are called to turn to the

Source, to the Silence at the very core

of our being, to the unmanifest that

informs all forms. To accept to be in

question. And to open to the unknown

transforming force.

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WE ARE CALLED TO TURN TO THE SOURCE,

TO THE VERY SILENCE AT THE CORE OF

OUR BEING.

* A Monk of the West, in Christianity and the

Doctrine of Non-Dualism (Sophia Perennis).

A Return to Tradition an Interview With Frank Sinclair

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