ANTHONY STORR
FEET OF CLAY
A STUDY OF GURUS

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1996

Copyright © Anthony Storr 1996

Anthony Storr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006384236

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007382026

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Dedication

For my friend and colleague Kay Redfield Jamison,

and in memory of our mutual friend and publisher Erwin Glikes.

Epigraph

The wisest men follow their own direction

And listen to no prophet guiding them.

None but the fools believe in oracles,

Forsaking their own judgement. Those who know,

Know that such men can only come to grief.

EURIPIDES, Iphigenia in Tauris

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

I: Paranoid Enclosures

II: Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

III: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

IV: Rudolf Steiner

V: Carl Gustav Jung

VI: Sigmund Freud

VII: The Jesuit and Jesus

VIII: Sanity and Insanity

IX: Chaos and Order

X: Delusion and Faith

XI: To Whom Shall We Turn?

Keep Reading

References

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF GURUS

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT GURUS. The Sanskrit word guru means ‘heavy’. When applied to people, it means someone who commands respect. Professor R. F. Gombrich informs me that, in Sanskrit, the word is ‘normally applied to one’s father, and most commonly of all to a teacher.’ He suggests that the closest English equivalent is ‘respected teacher’. Today, anyone regarded as an expert in any field, from football to economics, is liable to be deemed a guru. In this book, I am restricting the term to teachers who claim special knowledge of the meaning of life, and who therefore feel entitled to tell others how life should be lived. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary defines guru as ‘a spiritual teacher: a venerable person’. Not all gurus are venerable; but the definition ‘spiritual teacher’ is sufficiently accurate to indicate what is meant by the term in this book.

Gurus differ widely from each other in a variety of ways, but most claim the possession of special spiritual insight based on personal revelation. Gurus promise their followers new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation. Since there are no schools for gurus, and no recognized qualifications for becoming one, they are, like politicians, originally self-selected. Anyone can become a guru if he or she has the hubris to claim special spiritual gifts. Both recent and earlier history demonstrate that many gurus are, or become, unscrupulous wielders of power who exploit their followers in a variety of ways. Yet there have also been gurus whose holiness, lack of personal ambition, and integrity are beyond question. Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha were gurus who are still venerated and whose teachings have changed the lives of millions of people. Some of Muhammad’s injunctions concerning legal punishment and the treatment of women, as recorded in the Koran, are repugnant to modern Western ideas, but both Jesus and the Buddha compel our admiration, even if we are neither Christians nor Buddhists.

Since this book is concerned with some gurus who were less than admirable, I want to affirm at the outset that I recognize that morally superior individuals exist whose integrity, virtue, and goodness are far beyond the reach of most of us. Such people, unlike gurus, usually influence others by their examples in daily life rather than by swaying crowds with rhetoric, surrounding themselves with adoring disciples, or claiming access to esoteric wisdom which the ordinary person cannot reach unaided. Most of us have encountered people who can be described as ‘good’ without being priggish. Perhaps they visit the sick, or adopt deprived children, or devote themselves to charitable enterprises without hope of reward or public recognition. They do not preach; they do. Genuine virtue is usually unobtrusive, although it may be perceived as something less admirable when exposed to the glare of publicity, as happened with Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa.

Gurus are in a different category. I do not mean to suggest that all gurus have feet of clay. Yet many gurus have been entirely unworthy of veneration: false prophets, madmen, confidence tricksters, or unscrupulous psychopaths who exploit their disciples emotionally, financially, and sexually. In the light of history, we may think it easy to distinguish the saints from the madmen and the crooks; but it is clear that those who seek a guru to give their lives meaning find it difficult to make this distinction. This is partly because their urgent need blinds them to the true characteristics of the guru; a distortion familiar to psychoanalysts who are accustomed to the phenomena accompanying transference. It is also because the best and worst prophets, though varying greatly in intelligence and personality, have a number of characteristics in common.

A person becoming a guru usually claims to have been granted a special, spiritual insight which has transformed his own life. This revelation is sometimes believed to come direct from God or from his angels; but may also be attributed to mysterious beings residing in the Himalayas or even to the inhabitants of other planets. Often, this purely personal revelation is claimed to be universally, or at least widely, applicable. In other words, gurus generalize from their own experience. Some gurus are inclined to believe that all humanity should accept their vision: others allege that, when the last trump sounds, their own followers will be saved, whilst the majority of mankind will remain unredeemed. This apparently arrogant assumption is closely connected with certain features of personality displayed by a variety of gurus.

Many gurus appear to have been rather isolated as children, and to have remained so. They seldom have close friends. They are more interested in what goes on in their own minds than in personal relationships, perhaps because they do not believe that anyone else really cares for them. In other words, they tend to be introverted and narcissistic. As Freud wrote:

The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships to other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes.¹

Many painters, writers, and composers are narcissistic in that they value their own creative pursuits more than human relationships, and are often predominantly solitary. I wrote about such people in my book Solitude.² But, although they may spend much of their time alone, most creative artists want to communicate with others through their work and gain self-esteem from those who appreciate it. They may be very sensitive to criticism, but many are prepared to learn from it, and to exchange ideas with people who do not wholly agree with them.

Gurus tend to be intolerant of any kind of criticism, believing that anything less than total agreement is equivalent to hostility. This may be because they have been so isolated that they have never experienced the interchange of ideas and positive criticism which only friends can provide. It is also because revelations are in a different category from works of art, in that they cannot be criticized, only accepted or rejected.

Gurus tend to be élitist and anti-democratic, even if they pay lip-service to democracy. How could it be otherwise? Conviction of a special revelation must imply that the guru is a superior person who is not as other men are. Gurus attract disciples without acquiring friends. Once established, gurus must exercise authority, which again precludes making friends on equal terms. Indeed, friendship may undermine the guru’s power. One of the favourite sayings of Gurdjieff’s father was: ‘If you want to lose your faith, make friends with the priest.’ The relationship which the guru has with his followers is not one of friendship but of dominance. This again derives from a previous lack of friendships on equal terms. A guru’s conviction of his own worth depends upon impressing people rather than upon being loved. Gurus seldom discuss their ideas; they only impose them.

It is frequently the case that the guru’s new insight follows a period of mental distress or physical illness, in which the guru has been fruitlessly searching for an answer to his own emotional problems. This change is likely to take place in the subject’s thirties or forties, and may warrant the diagnosis of mid-life crisis. Sometimes the revelatory answer comes gradually; at other times, a new insight strikes like a thunderbolt. As we shall see, the distress of chaos followed by the establishment of a new order is a typical course of events which takes place in all creative activity, whether in the arts or the sciences. This Eureka pattern is also characteristic of religious revelation and the delusional systems of people we label insane. Relief comes with the solution of problems; and I shall argue that both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent.

When the guru’s ‘dark night of the soul’ has been ended by his new vision of reality, he usually appears to become convinced that he has discovered ‘the truth’. The fervent certainty with which he proclaims this accounts to a large extent for his powerful effect upon others; his persuasiveness, his charisma. Gurus must possess charisma. The Greek word χάρισμα (charisma) originally meant the gift of grace. Max Weber introduced it into sociology to denote a special magical quality of personality by virtue of which the individual possessing it was set apart from ordinary men and women, and treated as if endowed with supernatural or superhuman powers. Such people have the capacity of immediately impressing and influencing others and of attracting devoted followers. Charisma is closely linked with intensity of conviction. The ability to speak fluently in public and good looks are helpful additional assets. Some of the gurus discussed in this book were so fluent that, without reference to notes, they could hold an audience entranced for hours at a time.

Eileen Barker, a leading expert in the sociology of religion, has written: ‘Almost by definition, charismatic leaders are unpredictable, for they are bound by neither tradition nor rules; they are not answerable to other human beings.’³ If a leader is accepted as having charismatic authority, he is often accorded the right to direct every aspect of his followers’ lives. For example, he may dictate where they live, with whom they form sexual relationships, and what should be done with their money or other possessions.

Intensity of conviction is necessary if a guru is to attract disciples. This is not to say that all gurus believe everything they preach; but an initial conviction of having special insight is probably necessary if a new sect is to be born. Many people go through conversion experiences and hold strong religious or other convictions without being impelled to preach or to convert others, but gurus require disciples just as disciples require gurus. We must consider the possibility that the conviction expressed by gurus is less absolute than it appears in that their apparent confidence needs boosting by the response of followers. As we shall see, some gurus avoid the stigma of being labelled insane or even of being confined in a mental hospital because they have acquired a group of disciples who accept them as prophets rather than perceiving them as deluded. Some historians have proposed that all messianic characters have secret doubts about their missions, and that this is why they strive to gain disciples. It is difficult to sustain a belief in the authenticity of a new revelation if no one else shares it.

Because they claim superior wisdom, gurus sometimes invent a background of mystery. Travels to parts of Central Asia or Tibet inaccessible to ordinary mortals have, in the past, been promoted as prologues to the acquisition of esoteric knowledge and mystical experiences. Now that most of the world is mapped, explored, and, like Everest, cluttered with western rubbish, it is harder to find places which are sufficiently remote to be mysterious. But there are always other worlds. Perhaps other planets are inhabited by creatures of infinite wisdom who send messages to selected mortals? Some gurus appear to believe so.

Like other humans, gurus risk becoming corrupted by power. Although a guru may begin his mission in ascetic poverty, success often brings about a revision of values. It is intoxicating to be adored, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the guru not to concur with the beliefs of his disciples about him. If a man comes to believe that he has special insights, and that he has been selected by God to pass on these insights to others, he is likely to conclude that he is entitled to special privileges. For example, he may feel, along with his followers, that he cannot be expected to carry out his exhausting spiritual mission if he has to worry about money, and that he is therefore entitled to demand and make use of any money which his followers can raise. Gurus sometimes end up living in luxury.

Gurus who feel entitled to be relieved of financial responsibility also often engage in sexual behaviour which would be condemned as irresponsible in an ordinary person. If a man is surrounded by adoring and attractive women, it is difficult for him to avoid sexual involvements. But the guru who seduces disciples who look up to him as a spiritual guide may do them as much harm as the psychoanalyst who seduces his patients, or the father who sexually assaults his children.

Gurus not infrequently exploit their followers in other ways. Subservient disciples are all too willing to undertake the chores of life, so that the guru may be spared involvement with trivia. Gurus often get pleasure from this exercise of power, and some carry it to the point of making their followers perform meaningless and unnecessary tasks, ostensibly as spiritual exercises, but in fact as a proof of the guru’s power over them. Some enjoy inflicting cruel punishments upon transgressors. Gurus vary greatly in personal integrity and the ability to resist the corruption which power over others usually brings with it.

Because a guru professes a bizarre cosmology or becomes corrupt it does not necessarily follow that all his insights are nonsense. I have never believed R. D. Laing’s theory that psychosis is a path to higher wisdom, but the period of intense distress or mental illness which so often precedes a new revelation may open doors of perception which are closed to the ordinary person. Manic-depressives sometimes claim that their experiences of the depths of despair and the heights of elation have so intensified their lives that, if offered the choice, they would choose to have their illness rather than suffer the tedium of conventional normality. Even those who passed through an acute episode of schizophrenia and who have emerged intact are sometimes grateful for this experience. I shall often refer to Ellenberger’s concept of ‘creative illness’ which is applicable to a number of gurus.

Some gurus pass through a period of definable mental illness from which they recover: others deteriorate to the point at which most psychiatrists would diagnose them as psychotic; that is, insane rather than neurotic or suffering from temporary emotional instability. Still others remain socially competent and reasonably well-balanced throughout their lives. Critical examination of the lives and beliefs of gurus demonstrates that our psychiatric labels and our conceptions of what is or is not mental illness are woefully inadequate. How, for example, does one distinguish an unorthodox or bizarre faith from a delusion?

In what follows, I want to examine a few gurus who differ markedly from each other, but who all display some of the features which I have just described as characteristic. No guru exhibits all these features; but even the best and worst of gurus have something in common which distinguishes them from ordinary human beings. Contemporary cults like the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), and the Children of God have been extensively studied and written about during the last twenty years because so many parents and others became anxious about the effects that membership of these new religious movements was having on their children. My particular interest is in the personalities of the gurus themselves, although some characteristics of their followers will be mentioned in passing. I have deliberately chosen to study a number of gurus who, ranging as they do from saints to crooks, appear to be quite dissimilar. I hope to show that they have more in common than meets the uncritical eye.

I PARANOID ENCLOSURES

THE INFAMOUS DICTATORS of the twentieth century, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Ceausescu, and Mao Tse-tung were all unscrupulous in the pursuit of power and ruthless in eliminating enemies. Dictators cannot afford the luxury of friends. Although they may marry and rear families, they depend primarily upon the plaudits of the unknown multitude rather than on true affection from intimates to maintain their self-esteem. It is not surprising that leaders of this type become suspicious, often to the point of paranoia. The crowd is fickle and easily swayed. Dictators who depend upon popular acclaim and propaganda alone can be unseated by the adverse events which plague all political leaders. If a dictator is to hold on to power even when the country is in trouble, he must ensure that he is totally in control and that no rival has a chance of supplanting him. To do so requires the apparatus of informers, secret police, and spies which is so characteristic of dictatorial regimes. The number of people who have been banished, imprisoned, tortured, or executed for no reason other than that a dictator perceived them as possible threats to his position is beyond computation. Moreover, it is those who are high in the dictator’s hierarchy who are most likely to be seen as threatening. Paradoxically, the ‘friends’ and allies on whom a normal leader might depend for advice and support during crises, often constitute the greatest threat to the paranoid dictator. Hitler’s purge of Ernst Röhm and his Stormtrooper lieutenants in 1934 is a typical example. Hitler owed a great deal to Röhm, who had supported him from his earliest days in Munich, but this did not save him when he became a threat. Both Stalin and Mao Tse-tung disposed of their closest associates without hesitation.

As we shall see, some gurus are dictators on a small scale. Although their message is ostensibly religious rather than political, they behave like dictators, thrive on adulation, have no true friends, attempt to exercise absolute power, and are afflicted by the same kind of paranoid suspicions. Let us look at two gurus who fit this description.

On November 18, 1978, over nine hundred people, including two hundred and sixty children, drank or were injected with cyanide in Jonestown, Guyana. This self-annihilation of the members of the People’s Temple was ordered by its founder, Jim Jones, who himself died of a gunshot wound to the head. On April 19, 1993, eighty-six people, including twenty-two children, perished in the flames of Ranch Apocalypse, Waco, Texas. This self-immolation was at the instigation of the cult leader David Koresh, who also died of a gunshot wound to the head.

There are other remarkable resemblances between the two gurus. In childhood, both were rather isolated boys who had few friends amongst contemporaries. Both became eloquent, fluent preachers who could harangue their listeners for hours at a time, battering their audiences into submission by the apparently endless flow of words. Both were entirely unscrupulous sexually; Jim Jones with both sexes, David Koresh with young children as well as with adults. Both were physically cruel, inflicting vicious punishments upon any member of their respective cults who was deemed guilty of infringing the arbitrary rules which they had instituted. Both did all they could to prevent their disciples leaving the cult, by undermining family ties, by threatening dire punishments, and by posting armed guards who were as much concerned with keeping people in as with protecting the enclosures from intruders, although very few disciples wanted to leave. Both exhibited obsessional traits of character and paranoid anxieties which led to their stockpiling weapons against the attacks which they were expecting. Both hovered on the brink of insanity for a considerable part of their lives, and both ended up as demonstrably psychotic.

I have no doubt that, in the course of history, there have been other gurus as repellent as these two, but it is difficult to imagine any who were more so. The fact that so many people worshipped them to the point of being prepared to commit suicide at their behest is terrifying. Their aim was absolute power, and the ultimate expression of power over others is to bring about their death. Perhaps a closer look at these two monsters can teach us something about gurus and the fanaticism which they inspire.

Jim Jones was born in Lynn, Indiana on May 13, 1931. His early childhood was somewhat isolated, since his father was a partial invalid, and his mother had to go out to work. He described himself as always being alone, and he became a fanatical reader. A neighbour, Mrs. Kennedy, acted as a mother substitute and inculcated the boy with religious ideas from an early age. At high school he did well, and was rated as having an IQ of 115–118. He developed an extraordinary verbal fluency. When he was still quite young he abandoned Methodism and joined the Pentecostal Church. This may have been because of some crisis of faith of the kind characteristic of gurus, but it seems equally likely that Jones believed that the Pentecostal Church would offer him more opportunity to display his talents as a preacher and ‘spiritual healer’. He was allowed to address the congregation of the Pentecostal church when he was still quite young. As he was handsome as well as persuasive, he soon discovered that he could hold an audience. He was reported as appearing entirely certain of himself, with an air of authority and complete conviction. Even as a schoolboy of ten, Jones claimed special powers. In Indianapolis, he became known as a charismatic preacher who championed the rights of the underprivileged. In 1953, he said: ‘I’ve come into the realization of the Holy Spirit’; but his beliefs were anything but orthodox.¹ Although Jones claimed divine inspiration and was a persuasive preacher, his actual message was more political than religious, being principally concerned with racial integration and what he called socialism. He did promise a new way of life to his followers; but this was based upon a primitive Marxist vision rather than upon religious revelation. In fact he attacked the Bible as an aggressive text supporting capitalism, slavery, and racial discrimination. He also poured scorn upon the ‘sky God’ of conventional Christianity, claiming that his followers had no need of such a God when he came as ‘your socialist worker God’. ‘The only thing that brings perfect freedom, justice and equality, perfect love in all its beauty and holiness, is socialism.’² He prided himself on having delivered the goods to his followers which the ‘sky God’ had failed to deliver.

No doubt his powers of oratory went some way to compensate him for his isolation, but Jones remained pathologically anxious about being deserted by such friends as he had, and later by his disciples. As a youth, he invited an acquaintance for dinner. When the lad said that he must leave before Jones wished him to do so, Jones fired a gun at him, narrowly missing him.

Jones, who was always a neat dresser, was obsessionally preoccupied with cleanliness, and avoided anything which might make him sweat. Like many people of obsessional personality, he had a strong wish to bring everything under his own control, including those around him. His wife Marceline, whom he married in June 1949, soon regretted her choice because she found him so dominant and overbearing.

In 1956, he set up his People’s Temple in Indianapolis. The emphasis was on racial equality. Jones and his wife were the first white couple in Indianapolis to adopt a black child. At the time, mixed congregations were a rarity, and many of his black congregation felt that their status had been enhanced by Jones’s refusal to discriminate. Much of his early preaching was concerned with calling up individuals from the congregation and ‘touching them in the name of the Lord’, at which point some entered a trance-like state. In the early days of the People’s Temple, Jones undoubtedly did some good. He established soup kitchens for the poor, and also provided coal and clothes for them. When he moved the Temple to Redwood Valley in California in 1965, Jones operated a ranch for mentally handicapped boys, nursing homes for the elderly, homes for foster children, and a day-care centre. These enterprises apparently provided excellent services. Jones was skilful at cultivating important people, and succeeded in impressing Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, Daniel Ellsberg, and Rosalynn Carter, with whom he once shared a platform.

Jones claimed divinely inspired clairvoyance, which he invoked as explaining his knowledge of the personal histories and secrets of those whom he called up. In reality, he employed spies who discovered these secrets by passing on information gleaned from personal enquiries, unauthorized entries to homes, and even from combing through dustbins.

Jones specialized in services of healing, for which he claimed he had a divine gift. Many of his so-called cures were faked. People brought in in wheelchairs would be told they were healed and could walk. In fact, these were disguised members of the People’s Temple who had been trained for the role. Jones had no hesitation in claiming to cure cancer. An individual would be told that he had cancer of the bowel and instructed to go to the lavatory. Then, a bloody mass of animal intestine would be produced as evidence that the cancer had been miraculously evacuated. Complicity in his deceptions as a healer was one way in which Jones gained control over the members of his cult. Sexual confessions were another. Some were compelled to sign confessions to crimes which they had not committed. Members of the Temple had to abrogate anything which ministered to their sense of individuality: possessions, children, spouses, and ownership of their own bodies. Everything was to be held in common. Jones, like many other gurus, was good at raising money. By 1975 the Temple’s assets were rated at $10 million.

Jones was more obviously a confidence trickster than many gurus, but this did not prevent Eugene Chaikin, a Californian attorney who became a member of the Temple, from describing him as the most loving, Christ-like human being he had ever met. Another law graduate, Tim Stoen, called Jones ‘the most compassionate, honest and courageous human being the world contains’. In 1972, Stoen signed a paper requesting that Jones sire a child by his wife, since he himself was unable to do so. As lawyers are not generally noted for being particularly gullible, these opinions are impressive testimony to Jones’s powers of persuasion. Jones acceded to Stoen’s request, and a later legal conflict about the custody of the ensuing child was one factor leading to the exposure and downfall of Jonestown. Because Jim Jones would not give up John Victor Stoen, as a San Francisco judge ordered, the little boy perished in Jonestown along with the others.

In 1972, Jones again moved the Temple, this time to San Francisco; but disquieting rumours about his claims to heal the sick and raise the dead, combined with accusations of misappropriating funds, soon made him think it advisable to leave California. By 1974, an advance team was clearing an area of jungle in Guyana which Jones had bought from the government for what he called an agricultural project. In May 1977 a massive exodus of Temple members from San Francisco and Los Angeles resulted in the establishment of Jonestown, a settlement so remote from the coastal capital, Georgetown, that it took thirty-six hours to reach it by steamer and river boat. Guyana was chosen because it had a history of offering sanctuary to a variety of fugitives, including a number of criminals and the black leader, Michael X.* Jones himself became permanently resident there from July 1977. About seventy per cent of those who followed Jones to Guyana were black; about two-thirds were female. As Eileen Barker has pointed out, the membership of the People’s Temple was unlike the typical membership of most contemporary cults. Jonestown was originally called an agricultural commune, and the People’s Temple was not classified as a new religious movement until after the mass death of its members.³

The settlement which Jones established was publicized as utopian; a place from which disease had all but vanished because of Jones’s efforts as a divinely-gifted healer: a paradise of racial equality, economic equality and communal bliss. In fact, as some reported it, it was more like a concentration camp presided over by a cruel and ruthless commandant. Jones’s need to bring everything and everyone under his own control came near to fulfilment in this remote place.

According to Deborah Blakey, a former financial secretary of the Temple, who managed to get out in April 1978, the commune lived under a reign of terror. She told Shiva Naipaul that most people were required to work in the fields for eleven hours a day on grossly inadequate rations.⁴ As a result, extreme loss of weight, chronic diarrhoea, and recurrent fever affected half the inhabitants. Medical treatment was practically non-existent. One middle-aged ex-merchant seaman was forced to work until his shoulder was raw from humping lumber and he broke down sobbing. He was beaten up and forced to crawl in front of Jones to beg forgiveness. The settlement was constantly patrolled by armed guards. Jones threatened that anyone who tried to escape would be killed, forbade telephone calls to the outside world, ensured that mail was censored, and confiscated passports and money. He also told them that the settlement was surrounded by mercenaries or by the Guyanese Army, who would capture and torture any defectors and castrate any males who attempted escape.

Jones himself, together with some favourites, enjoyed a varied and more than adequate diet from foods stored in his personal refrigerator. He considered himself entitled to have sexual relations with anyone of either sex, although it was noted by his son Stephan that nearly all his father’s partners were white. Some were undoubtedly given drugs to make them more amenable. Jones affirmed that he was the only truly heterosexual male in the settlement, and alleged that many of the other males had not come to terms with their homosexual feelings. To demonstrate this, he found it advisable to bugger some of them. One such victim is reported as saying: ‘Your fucking me in the ass, was, as I see it now, necessary to get me to deal with my deep-seated repression against my homosexuality’.⁵ This man seems to have had no realization of being exploited, no consciousness that Jones might be exercising power over him and, at the same time, gaining personal sexual satisfaction. ‘Father’ could do no wrong, and sex with Father was generally reported as an incomparable experience.

Punishments were generally carried out in public on the stage of the church. Beatings were inflicted with a three-foot paddle, and some beatings lasted half-an-hour. Grace Stoen saw her son John Victor beaten in public, but when she finally escaped from the settlement in July 1976, she had to leave the child behind. Victims of beatings had their cries amplified by microphones held to their lips. A child who soiled his pants was forced to wear them on his head, forbidden food, and made to watch others eating. Children were sometimes tossed into a well near Jones’s bungalow and pulled down into the water by aides who were already swimming there. Their screams of fear could be heard all over the settlement. Another punishment was a boxing match in which the offender was made to fight with a much stronger adversary who beat him semi-conscious. Other offenders were forced to eat hot peppers, or had a hot pepper stuffed up the rectum. Jones’s son Stephan recalled that his sixteen-year-old friend, Vincent Lopez, was forced to chew a pepper. To save him from being compelled to chew another, Stephan caught his friend’s vomit in his hand so that he could swallow it again. Another punishment was to be confined in a crate too small to permit standing for days at a time. Some offenders were given electric shocks from a machine known as Big Foot. As Jones himself deteriorated, both mentally and physically, Jonestown appears to have come close to resembling Belsen.

Yet, as Shiva Naipaul indicates in his book Journey to Nowhere, there was another side to Jonestown. Some reported that their lives had been radically changed for the better; that Jonestown, because of its insistence on racial integration, had removed the stigma of being black, and had given them a new dignity. Others who had previously been alcoholic or drug addicts claimed to have been ‘saved’ by the Temple or by Jones himself. Dr. James S. Gordon, a psychiatrist who interviewed a number of survivors over a period of ten years, was impressed with the fact that none regretted their stay in Jonestown. It is evident that some people who had been alienated from conventional society felt themselves part of a new community in which they were for the first time accepted and valued. Naipaul writes that some experienced Jonestown as a paradise, while others found it a nightmare.

Jim Jones’s confidence in himself was not based, as it is with most of us, on feeling loved and appreciated by friends and family, but on his ability to impress others with his fluent oratory. I have no doubt that this isolated youth early convinced himself, as he convinced others, that he was endowed with special powers and spiritual insight. Like the dwarf Alberich in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Jones abandoned the search for love in favour of the acquisition of power. The savage punishments described earlier are a demonstration of his misuse of power. It is hardly credible that mothers could have tolerated such physical abuse of their children, or that adults would submit to such public pain and humiliation; but, as we shall see, Jones was not unique in his punitive methods. His sexual behaviour indicates that he used sex as a way to dominate others rather than as an expression of love. His corrupt sexual behaviour went hand in hand with his elitist conviction of his own superiority. Jones felt entitled to be well fed when his followers were half-starving, and was better housed than they were; but, although the People’s Temple accumulated considerable funds, he does not seem to have been attracted by conventional trappings of wealth in the shape of Rolls-Royces, yachts, or gold trinkets. What fascinated him was the exercise of power over other people.

Jones perfectly illustrates the difficulty in defining the borderlines between conviction, delusion, confidence trickery, and psychosis. Perhaps more overtly than any guru with whom I am concerned except Gurdjieff, Jones was a confidence trickster. He had no scruples about faking cures of illness, or himself pretending to collapse when it appeared desirable, or in inventing attacks from imagined enemies. He once broke a window and claimed that a brick on the floor had been thrown at him. Unfortunately for him, the absence of broken glass within the room demonstrated that the window had been broken from inside. In Jonestown, he claimed that enemies had fired at him, and produced bullets in evidence. In fact, his adopted son Jimmy had fired the shots, and was seen to do so by Vincent Lopez, whose punishment by forced eating of a hot pepper was referred to earlier. Jones was always inclined to suspect that he was being persecuted by agents of the United States Government including the Internal Revenue and the CIA, no doubt because he was in reality guilty of financial misdemeanours, and also because he outspokenly condemned the administration as fascist and racist. However, as he got older, his suspicions took on more and more the colouring of paranoid delusions, until, in Jonestown, his tediously long broadcast harangues amounted to the ramblings of a psychotic. This mental deterioration was undoubtedly promoted by the large quantities of drugs, including both amphetamines and anti-depressants, which he took for a variety of ailments, both real and imagined. During the 1970s, Jones drove home his paranoid message with increasing force. He alleged that the San Francisco authorities were preparing concentration camps for ethnic minorities and, by the mid-1970s, he had accumulated at least two hundred guns. In Jonestown, he added to this armoury by smuggling more weapons in crates containing machinery. These were generally obtained from the San Francisco Gun Exchange (or ‘Bible Exchange’ as it was known in Jonestown).

Jones began to announce himself as God around 1974. Before this, he had generally claimed to be a messenger from God with a divine gift of healing: later, he said, ‘I come as God socialist’. Drugs made him more inclined to claim divine status but how far he believed in his own divinity is an open question. According to the New Yorker of 22 November 1993, his wife Marceline tried to persuade their son Stephan to talk his father into giving up drugs. Stephan replied: ‘You’re talking about going to God and telling him he’s a drug addict?’

The inhabitants of Jonestown were well prepared in advance for their eventual death. Jones kept on telling them that he expected the settlement to be attacked by a variety of foes, and that if this happened, the only way out might be suicide. He announced that the community must exist together or die together rather than be split up. If death was to be the final solution, this would not be in vain, for it would vividly demonstrate to the world the evil nature of the U.S. Government. In spite of this, there is some doubt about how many people actually committed suicide and how many may have been murdered. Reports by survivors, and examination of the site of injection in the corpses suggest that more were murdered than was originally supposed. The sheer scale of the Jonestown disaster shocked the world; but tragic events of a similar kind have occurred since and more can certainly be expected.

Let us turn from Jonestown to Ranch Apocalypse. Vernon Howell, as Koresh was originally named, was born on August 17, 1959 to a fourteen-year-old girl. When her lover left her two years later, she placed the baby in the care of her mother and sister. In 1964, she married a former merchant seaman and reclaimed Vernon, telling him for the first time that she was his real mother. According to his own account, Vernon Howell did not get on with his stepfather, who frequently thrashed him. He did poorly at school, where he was put into a special class, and teased for being ‘retarded’. He also claimed that a group of older boys had raped him. He was said to have been dyslexic rather than mentally handicapped; but this does not seem to have prevented him from reading the Bible, since his mother stated that he knew the whole of the New Testament by heart by the age of twelve. Later, this slow learner was to boast that he had more knowledge than all the great scholars could learn in a lifetime.

This is certainly an unfortunate background, but others have suffered worse childhoods without becoming psychotic or monsters of cruelty. By the time he dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, Howell had attained success as an athlete and had overcome his early unpopularity. His reaction was to become arrogant and patronizing; attitudes which precluded his keeping many of the odd jobs which he attempted. Howell was always hypersensitive to rejection, as was Jim Jones. At the age of nineteen, a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had got pregnant refused to live with him on the grounds that he was unfit to bring up a child. This shattered his confidence, and he began to suffer from mood swings of pathological intensity, sometimes believing himself to be uniquely evil, sometimes thinking that he was especially favoured by God. After various abortive attempts to find consolation in religion, Howell joined the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Tyler, Texas, and was baptized in 1979. He became infatuated with the pastor’s daughter, claiming that God had spoken to him in a vision and said that he would give the girl to him. Howell’s behaviour became so outrageous that, in 1981, the pastor and his congregation expelled him.

Howell’s reaction to these rejections is interesting, and follows the pattern of stress or illness succeeded by a new vision which is characteristic of most gurus. His initial periods of depression were succeeded by an ever mounting confidence that he had been specially selected by God; a conviction which may have been reinforced by the drug LSD, which he started to use in his late teens. Following his expulsion from the official Seventh Day Adventist Church, Howell joined a splinter group called the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists. The story of how he became leader of this sect can be read in David Leppard’s book, Fire and Blood, but need not detain us here. In 1988, Koresh managed to establish himself and his followers on a site originally called the New Mount Carmel Center, which occupied some seventy-seven acres ten miles east of Waco, Texas. Within four years, Howell, who had now changed his name to David Koresh, had established a regime closely resembling that instituted by Jim Jones in Guyana. With the aid of his associate, Marc Breault, whose home was in Hawaii, a number of rich businessmen were persuaded to finance the cult. The funds raised were used by Koresh for two main purposes: musical equipment to further his ambition of becoming a rock star, and weapons to protect his cult against enemies. By the time the cult was being investigated by the U.S. authorities, Koresh had spent around $200,000 on weapons.⁶ His annual income amounted to about $500,000. It was because a delivery man reported that pineapple hand grenades were being delivered to Koresh’s commune that the train of events which culminated in its siege by the FBI and its ultimate destruction by fire was set in motion.

Koresh resembled Jim Jones in being a fluent speaker who could hold his listeners for hours at a time. Jones’s vision was of a communist society in which private property was abolished and racial equality established. Koresh’s vision was apocalyptic. As other apocalyptic prophets have done, Koresh laid hold upon the Book of Revelation and claimed that he alone could interpret it correctly. He especially emphasized his unique insight into the Seven Seals. According to David Leppard, Koresh said: ‘If you don’t know the Seven Seals, you really don’t know Christ … The Seven Seals are the acid test for who knows God and who doesn’t.’⁷

The Book of Revelation was probably written around 95–96 A.D. In it, Jesus is portrayed as a warrior who leads a host of angels to defeat the Satanic forces ranged against him. Following the final defeat of evil, a Kingdom is established in which selected human beings, rendered immortal, live for ever in perfect peace and harmony. The opening of the book or scroll, which is sealed with seven seals, heralds a series of terrible events which, as in other apocalyptic visions, are bound to precede the final establishment of peace and order. When the first seal is broken, a white horse appears ridden by a rider armed with a bow and given a crown, who goes forth to conquer. The breaking of the second seal heralds a red horse and rider who is given a great sword and the power to make men slaughter each other. Breaking the third seal releases a rider on a black horse who carries a pair of scales and who appears to be the herald of famine. When the fourth seal has been broken, a sickly pale horse appears whose rider is Death. He is given power over a quarter of the earth, with the right to kill by sword, famine, epidemics, or wild beasts. After the fifth seal has been broken, the souls of those who have been slaughtered for the faith complain; but they are reassured, provided with white robes and told to wait until the tally of those destined to be killed for Christ’s sake is complete. The breaking of the sixth seal is followed by a violent earthquake. The sun turns black, the moon red, and the stars fall out of the sky. Following the breaking of the seventh seal by the Lamb of God, silence reigns in Heaven for half-an-hour. Then comes the destruction of a third of mankind, followed by the final defeat of the powers of darkness.

Koresh seems to have convinced his followers that he himself had the power to break the seventh seal, thus precipitating the catastrophes described in The Book of Revelation. He taught that God would return to earth with fire and lightning and establish a new kingdom in Israel, with Koresh on the throne. He persuaded his followers that death was only a prelude to a better life to come, in which they would be among the army of élite immortals who were destined to slaughter all the wicked on earth, beginning with the Christian church.

Koresh’s delusional system, like that of Jim Jones, took time to develop. At first, he alleged himself to be no more than a prophet, armed with special understanding of the Seven Seals. As his power increased, so did his claims for himself. When his defected disciple Marc Breault was asked whether Koresh believed himself to be the Son of God, Breault was emphatic that he did. When asked what control this gave Koresh over his followers, Breault replied: ‘Absolute control. I know it’s hard for you to understand this. But just imagine you believe someone is Jesus Christ. He can tell you anything. If you argue, you go to Hell. He’s the Son of God. Who wants to fight against God?’⁸ By the time that his Texan prairie retreat was undergoing its terminal siege in April 1993, Koresh was claiming that he was God, and signing his letters Yahweh Koresh.

Ranch Apocalypse, as Koresh now re-named the Mount Carmel property, was a squalid enclosure. There was hardly any heating and no running water or proper plumbing. Members of the cult had to excrete into chamber pots and bury the contents in the ground. Water was supplied from a container brought in by truck. As in Jonestown, cult members soon developed a variety of ailments, including Hepatitis B. Koresh considered that seeking medical help was a threat to his authority, and forbade visits to doctors. He constantly imposed a string of varied dietary injunctions of an irrational kind. During one month, bananas were the only fruit allowed. It was forbidden to eat oranges and grapes at the same meal. On some days only vegetables were allowed; on others, food was restricted to fruit and popcorn. There was no hot food, and buying food from outside without Koresh’s direct permission was forbidden. Koresh used starvation as a punishment, and many members of the cult suffered from malnutrition, as members of Jones’s cult had done in Guyana. And, as in the case of Jones, Koresh himself was exempt from all dietary restrictions. His ridiculous rules and prohibitions were merely an added proof of his almost absolute power; on a par with the senseless and meaningless tasks which other gurus require of their followers. Another arbitrary exercise of power was Koresh’s practice of waking the entire compound at night, and compelling them to listen to his protracted expositions of the Bible, which sometimes went on for as long as fifteen hours.

The punishments instituted by Koresh were as savage as those employed by Jones. He taught that children as young as eight months old should receive corporal punishment for misbehaviour, and told their mothers that they would bum in hell if they refused to beat their children. Children were punished for the slightest misdemeanour by being beaten with a piece of wood known as a ‘helper’. Each child had his own ‘helper’ with his name written on it. A special room was set aside for these beatings. Koresh beat his own three-year-old son Cyrus so severely that it sickened Marc Breault, and no doubt contributed to Breault’s eventual disillusion. Several of the twenty-one children who were eventually released bore the marks of recent beatings. Another punishment was to immerse the offender in sewage and not allow him or her to bathe. Derek Lovelock, an English survivor of the terminal siege, nevertheless insisted that Koresh was ‘a very caring compassionate man,’ and denied the accusations of cruelty and sexual abuse, although he did admit that parents sometimes beat their children.⁹ He told William Shaw that the months he spent at the ranch were the happiest days of his life. ‘“We were one big family,” he says. “We all believed in the one belief, and agreed on the same points. We were all one community.”’¹⁰

Koresh was as sexually rapacious as Jim Jones, but his tastes were different. In 1983, Koresh married Rachel, the daughter of an official of the Branch Davidian Church. She was only fourteen years old, but no one objected. She bore him three children. In 1986, Koresh began sleeping with her younger sister, then twelve years old. When Koresh took command of Ranch Apocalypse, he split up families by ensuring that the men slept on one floor, the women on another. Severing family ties was one way of reinforcing allegiance to himself, and also made it easier for him to seduce the women he wanted. Koresh considered himself entitled to have sexual relations with any of the females in the compound, including girls of twelve and thirteen. One child who was too small for penetration was urged to use large tampons in order that her vagina might become able to accommodate him.¹¹

Koresh, like Jones, deteriorated mentally. He took a variety of vitamins and herbal remedies to cure what he called impotence, but drugs cannot be blamed for the development of his delusions as they can in the case of Jones. He was less obviously a confidence trickster than Jones; but when Breault was asked whether Koresh really believed what he was teaching or was just a con man, Breault replied: ‘I think a little of both. Vernon gets a craving. Then he finds the theology to justify that craving. When others buy into his doctrine, he starts believing it himself.’¹²

By 1986 he was teaching that he was entitled to a hundred and forty wives. When Ranch Apocalypse finally went up in flames, 17 of the 22 children who perished had been fathered by Koresh, who claimed that only he was allowed to procreate, and that part of his mission was to fill the world with righteous children.

At the beginning of the FBI siege, Koresh allowed those children who were not fathered by him to be released. The psychiatrists who interviewed them repeatedly heard stories about dead babies. Some children alleged that the bodies of babies were stored in a freezer until they could be got rid of. It is possible, though unproven, that Koresh sacrificed the children of cult members because he himself was not their father. He certainly tried to persuade his followers that ritual sacrifices of children might be necessary. It is fair to add that reports about the condition of the children who were released varies. In his book The Ashes of Waco, Dick J. Reavis is chiefly concerned with attacking the clumsy way in which the ATF* and the FBI handled the siege, which he considered entirely unjustified. He claims that there is evidence that the children within the compound were well cared for and quotes one psychiatrist who examined the released children as saying that there was no evidence of sexual abuse. When the FBI blasted holes in the compound buildings, they assumed that the mothers of small children would take the opportunity to escape with their offspring. None did so. The final holocaust was initiated by members of the cult, who used kerosene lamps to start the blaze. Not everyone who died was burned alive. Twenty-seven cult members, including Koresh himself, were shot.

Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God’s prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity.

It seems almost incredible that either of these gurus could have retained the allegiance of their followers for so long. Koresh made some ineffective attempts to conceal the identity of the children whom he took to bed, but most of the outrageous sexual behaviour and the appalling cruelty of each guru were paraded rather than concealed. There were very few defectors from either camp. It appears that once a guru has convinced a follower of his Messianic status, his actual behaviour, as judged by ordinary human standards, becomes largely irrelevant. Belief in a guru, while it persists, entirely overrules rational judgement. Dedicated disciples are as impervious to reason as are infatuated lovers.

There is a well-known psychiatric phenomenon called folie à deux. If two people live together and one is mad, the other may become convinced by at least some of the delusions expressed by the psychotic partner. If the psychotic partner is removed to hospital, the other partner usually recovers his or her sanity. Shared delusions are mutually reinforcing, and membership of a sect led by a psychotic leader reassures both the leader and the disciple who has fallen under his spell of the truth of their beliefs. Both Jim Jones and David Koresh kept their followers under close surveillance and made it difficult for anyone to leave. Fortunately, this is exceptional. Contrary to popular belief, most of those who join ‘New Religious Movements’ are not subject to coercion, and many leave such movements without difficulty. But communities like Jonestown which are isolated from normal sources of information become more dependent on whatever information is given them by their leaders, and are less able to question what they are told. Research into so-called ‘sensory deprivation’ has shown that individuals who are cut off from most varieties of sensory input by being placed in sound-proof, light-proof rooms become more suggestible, and tend to be less critical of any information which is fed to them. The same is true of isolated communities. In addition, anyone within the community who dares to doubt the pronouncements of the guru is likely to be treated as a traitor by his fellows. Jones and Koresh, to all except their disciples, appear to have been evil madmen. They exhibited, in exaggerated form, with very few redeeming features, all the worst possible characteristics of gurus. Fortunately, the majority of gurus are not as bad as they were. We need to examine some other varieties.

II GEORGEI IVANOVITCH GURDJIEFF

GURDJIEFF CLAIMS OUR INTEREST because he, or his doctrines as propounded by his disciple Ouspensky, bewitched so many interesting and intelligent people, including the writer Katherine Mansfield, A. R. Orage, the distinguished socialist editor of The New Age, Margaret Anderson, the editor of the Little Review, and her friend and co-editor Jane Heap; the surgeon and sexologist Kenneth Walker; Olgivanna, the third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright; John Godolphin Bennett, later to become something of a guru himself. The psychiatrists James Young and Maurice Nicoll, and the psychoanalyst David Eder were also followers. T. S. Eliot, David Garnett and Herbert Read intermittently attended Ouspensky’s meetings. Ouspensky, who first encountered Gurdjieffin 1915, became chiefly based in London and was therefore more accessible to interested English people than the guru himself.

The date of Gurdjieff’s birth is uncertain. Some say 1866; others quote one of his several passports, which showed December 28, 1877. James Moore,¹ Gurdjieff’s latest biographer and the author of Gurdjieff and Katherine Mansfield, argues that the earlier date is the more probable. Gurdjieff was secretive about this as he was about so many features of his background. He died on October 29, 1949. His birthplace was Alexandropol (formerly Gumru) in Russian Armenia, in the land lying between the Black Sea on the West and the Caspian Sea on the East, south of the Caucasus mountains. His father was Greek, his mother Armenian. Armenian was spoken at home, but he also learned some Greek, some Turkish, and the local dialects. In his autobiographical memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men, he claimed to know eighteen languages, but there is no evidence to support this. Throughout his life, he continued to speak both Russian and English incorrectly.

Gurdjieff was the eldest of six children; he had a brother and four sisters. One of the sisters died young. In Gurdjieff’s early childhood, the family moved to the near-by city of Kars, shortly after the defeat of the Turkish forces there in 1878 by the Grand Duke Michael Niklayevich, brother of the Russian Tsar. The boy Gurdjieff was accepted as a chorister at Kars military cathedral, and being obviously intelligent, attracted the notice of Father Dean Borsh, who helped to educate him. He developed a passion for learning, read widely in Greek, Armenian, and Russian, and began to harbour a wish to find some answer to the problem of ‘the meaning of life’. He resembles other gurus in going through a period of doubt which was succeeded by the revelation which manifested itself in his new cosmogony and his teaching. Why his perplexity was so extreme as to propel him into a search for truth which lasted twenty years is not apparent.

Gurdjieff’s esoteric knowledge and status as a guru were attributed to his discoveries during his travels in Central Asia, but we are entirely dependent upon his own inaccurate account. The period 1887–1911 remains unsubstantiated and mysterious. Gurdjieff claimed to have learned much from a three months’ stay in ‘the chief Sarmoung monastery’, belonging to a brotherhood which he said taught him secret wisdom derived from traditions dating back to 2500 B.C., including physical techniques for self-transformation, and sacred dances. Gurdjieff was careful never to be specific about the exact location of these teachers of secret knowledge, although he later stated that he had a teacher from whom he was never separated, and with whom he constantly communicated, presumably telepathically. The Sarmoung monastery cannot be identified, and even disciples of Gurdjieff regard his account of it as an allegory rather than literal truth. His own autobiographical account, in Meetings with Remarkable Men, is contradictory and chronologically unreliable. What does emerge from that book is his resourcefulness and his capacity to survive, both physically and financially. He sold carpets and antiques; repaired sewing-machines; bought quantities of old-fashioned corsets and remodelled them to suit current taste; traded in oil and fish, and claimed that he cured drug addicts by hypnosis. His prowess as a healer was, he wrote, unprecedented (Gurdjieff never exhibited false modesty). When asked by Ouspensky about his studies and discoveries, he said that he travelled with a group of specialists in various subjects who eventually pooled their knowledge; but he did not vouchsafe their names or say where they were, nor did he answer direct questions about where he had been. ‘About schools and where he had found the knowledge he undoubtedly possessed he spoke very little and always superficially.’² It is hardly surprising that there were rumours that he was a secret agent employed by the Russians.

Gurdjieff established himself as a guru in Moscow in 1912. His principal contention was that man does not know himself, and is therefore not what he should be. He considered that modern civilization had made it difficult to co-ordinate the physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of personality, which he believed were controlled by three separate centres. He thought that the majority of people were ‘asleep’, and behaved like machines reacting blindly to external forces. His training was designed to awaken selected followers to a higher level of consciousness and a new perception of reality.

A modem man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies. About sleep, its significance and its role in life, we will speak later. But at present just think of one thing, what knowledge can a sleeping man have? And if you think about it and at the same time remember that sleep is the chief feature of our being, it will at once become clear to you that if a man really wants knowledge, he must first of all think about how to wake, that is, about how to change his being.³

By participating in what became known as ‘The Work’, the fortunate few might become more able to co-ordinate the three centres through self-observation. Instead of living in a dream in which a series of fleeting ‘I’s’ succeeded one another, the awakened individual would cease living ‘in quotation marks’, achieve a new unity, and, by means of this, direct his own destiny, or become able to do, as Gurdjieff phrased it. ‘To do means to act consciously and according to one’s will.’⁴ This change in consciousness, like everything else, has a material basis, which in this case manifests itself as a trace chemical compound in the brain.

The keystone of his teaching, of course, was that no progress – no human progress, that is – can be accomplished except on an individual basis. Group work is valuable only in the sense that it helps the individual to achieve individual self-perfection.⁵

J. G. Bennett, who died in 1974, first met Gurdjieff in 1920. In his book Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Bennett devoted three chapters to Gurdjieff’s travels and search for esoteric wisdom. Both J. G. Bennett and James Moore have to admit that it is impossible to trace Gurdjieff’s travels with any degree of accuracy. Although careful never to commit himself whole-heartedly, Bennett clearly believed in the literal truth of the tradition that, somewhere in Central Asia, there is a group of wise men or ‘Masters of Wisdom’ who watch over the destiny of mankind and intervene from time to time to alter the course of events by introducing new ideas and new modes of thinking. Bennett suggests that Gurdjieff made contact with such a group; an ‘Inner Circle of Humanity’, perhaps the Sarmoun brotherhood, whose members were highly developed spiritually and able to generate higher energies. Bennett wrote:

The true significance of such a group must lie in its mission. The more that one becomes aware of the spiritual realities, the more convinced does one become that a very great action is now proceeding in the world. The task before us is to help mankind to make the difficult and dangerous transition to a new epoch. If we find evidence that Gurdjieff was concerned in this task and moreover that he opened the way for us to participate in it, we shall have gone a long way to connecting him with the ‘Inner Circle’.⁶

We shall again encounter the idea that mankind is on the threshold of a new epoch when discussing the ideas of Jung.

Bennett was a long-term disciple of Ouspensky, and was therefore at one remove from the master himself. But he remained intermittently in touch with Gurdjieff, and saw him frequently during the last two years of his life. Bennett believed that Gurdjieff’s ideas and teaching had transformed his own life, and himself ran groups along Gurdjieffian lines in London, sometimes with dire effects upon participants, as I remember from seeing one or two of them as psychiatric patients. Nevertheless, Bennett followed a path characteristic of those who constantly search for esoteric wisdom without ever quite finding what they want.

Bennett … broke from the Gurdjieffian mainstream in 1955 to pursue eclectic affiliations (being inter alia ‘opened’ into Subud by Hosein Rofé, initiated by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, received into the Roman Catholic Church, and introduced to the ‘Invisible Hierarchy’ by Idries Shah).⁷

The Russian revolution of 1917 caused Gurdjieff to move to Tiflis in Georgia and then to Constantinople and on to Berlin. His exhausting and sometimes dangerous journeys are chronicled by his biographer, James Moore. His close associates Thomas and Olga de Hartmann joined him in one of his stopping places; Essentuki in the Caucasus. This was in August 1917, not long after Kerensky had been announced as Prime Minister of the coalition government which followed the abdication of the Tsar. Gurdjieff then suddenly announced that he was going to Tuapse, on the Black Sea. The dutiful de Hartmanns followed. Their account of an exhausting nocturnal walk forced on them by Gurdjieff in spite of the fact that they were unsuitably clad and also dead tired is a striking example of the autocratic and unreasonable demands which Gurdjieff made on his followers which they nevertheless slavishly obeyed. Olga de Hartmann’s feet were so swollen and bleeding that she could not put on her shoes and had to walk barefoot. Thomas de Hartmann had missed a night’s sleep because he had been ordered to stay on guard. Their limbs ached and they were both exhausted; but they went on nevertheless.

Mr. Gurdjieff demanded from us a very great effort, especially difficult because we did not know when it would end. We suffered and would have been only too happy to rest; but there was no protest in us, because the one thing we really wished to do was to follow Mr. Gurdjieff. Beside that, everything else seemed unimportant.⁸

It was a recurrent pattern of behaviour. The de Hartmanns claim that these demands were made upon them as a way of teaching them to overcome emotional and physical difficulties. Gurdjieff certainly pushed people to the limit of their physical capacities; and some discovered that they had more powers of endurance than they had ever suspected.

When short of money, he survived by dealing in caviar and carpets. He had hoped to settle in England, but the Home Office were suspicious of him and would not permit him to stay unless he did so as a private individual, which would have meant abandoning his nucleus of followers. Eventually, the generosity of Lady Rothermere, the estranged wife of the newspaper magnate, together with funds from other wealthy supporters, made it possible for him to set up his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Château du Prieuré, a large estate near Fontainebleau, in France.

‘The Work’ was carried out in groups and included special exercises and dances, exhausting physical work, training in memory and self-observation, together with lectures given by Gurdjieff at irregular intervals. Some of those who participated in the so-called ‘Sacred Dances’ found them more valuable than Yoga or any other training affecting physical awareness. Complete concentration on whatever was being carried out at the time was an essential part of Gurdjieff’s message and of his own behaviour. Insistence on living intensely in the present moment and discarding the concern with past or future which interferes with fully experiencing the here-and-now, is not confined to Gurdjieff’s teaching. Zen also treats the past and future as fleeting illusions. It is only the present which is eternally real.⁹

Gurdjieff was a dictator. He had the capacity so completely to humiliate his disciples that grown men would burst into tears. He might then show the victim special favour. He demanded unquestioning obedience to his arbitrary commands. For example, he once suddenly announced that none of his followers might speak to each other within the Institute. All communication must be by means of the special physical movements he had taught them. Gurdjieff sometimes imposed fasting for periods up to a week without any lessening of the work load. His authority was such that his followers convinced themselves that these orders were for their own good. Those less infatuated are likely to think that, like other gurus, Gurdjieff enjoyed the exercise of power for its own sake. There were also dinners at which large quantities of alcohol were drunk, and large sums of money extracted from the diners.

Gurdjieff also developed an elaborate cosmology. His picture of the universe and man’s place in it is complex, and unsupported by any objective evidence. It is deliberately obscure and often incoherent. Yet, because Gurdjieff was a powerful guru whose followers included some sophisticated, intelligent people, attempts have been made by his followers to make sense out of what appears to the sceptical reader to be a psychotic delusional system. The task is rendered more difficult by the numerous ludicrous neologisms which Gurdjieff introduced. It is appropriate to remind the reader that chronic schizophrenics often invent words which carry a special meaning for them but which others find hard to understand. Eugen Bleuler, the famous director of the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich and the originator of the term ‘schizophrenia’, quotes a patient who wrote:

At Apell plain church-state, the people have customs and habits partly taken from glos-faith because the father wanted to enter new f. situation, since they believed the father had a Babeli comediation only with music. Therefore they went to the high Osetion and on the cabbage earth and all sorts of malice, and against everything good. On their inverted Osetion valley will come and within thus is the father righteousness.¹⁰

Another patient referred to being tormented by ‘elbow-people’. As Bleuler notes, wording is preferably bombastic. ‘The patients utter trivialities using highly affected expressions as if they were of the greatest interest to humanity.’¹¹ I am not suggesting that Gurdjieff was schizophrenic, but his use of language resembled that employed by some psychotics.

For example, Gurdjieff is said to have believed in God, to whom he referred as ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endlessness’.¹² This description may fairly be described as bombastic. In the beginning was the ‘Most Most Holy Sun Absolute’ in space which was also endless, but which was charged with a primordial cosmic substance Etherokilno. ‘Because this nebulous Etherokilno was in static equilibrium, the super-sun existed and was maintained by our Common Father, quite independently of outside stimulus, through the internal action of his laws and under the dispensation termed Autoegocrat (I keep everything under my control).’¹³

However, Time, that villain who attacks us all, appeared in the shape of the merciless Heropass, which so threatened to diminish the volume of Sun Absolute that steps had to be taken to forestall this action. Thereupon Common Father issued from himself a creative Word-God named Theomertmalogos which interacted with Etherokilno to produce our universe Megalocosmos. This creation is maintained by a principle or law named Trogoautoegocrat – by eating myself, I am maintained: ‘In the cosmic sense, God feeds on the Creation and the creation feeds on God.’¹⁴ So God and his creation become separate entities, which are only distantly related to each other, and creation is maintained by new laws; Triamazikamno, the law of Three, and Heptaparparashinokh or Eftalogodiksis, the law of Seven.

The law of Three is relatively straightforward. ‘The higher blends with the lower in order to actualise the middle.’ For example, sperm and ovum merge to create the embryo. This formula can be applied to many situations in which opposites require a third – Moore gives as an example a judge resolving a case between plaintiff and defendant.

The law of Seven is more complex, and, in my view, incoherent. Gurdjieff tried to relate cosmology with the musical scale, believing that every completing process has seven discrete phases corresponding to an ascending or descending series of notes, including the two semitonal intervals, which constitute necessary irregularities. Gurdjieff represented the universe in a diagram called the Ray of Creation which begins with the Absolute and ends with the moon.

Gurdjieff taught that a collision between a comet named Kondoor and the earth gave rise to two orbiting bodies, Loondeiperzo (later known as the moon) and Anulios, After the shock ‘a whole commission consisting of Angels and Archangels, specialists in the work of World-creation and World-maintenance, under the direction of the Most Great Archangel Sakaki, was immediately sent from the Most Holy Sun Absolute to that solar system “Ors”.’¹⁵ Gurdjieff’s beliefs about the moon were even more eccentric. He claimed that the moon was still an unborn planet which was gradually becoming warmer and more like earth, just as the earth was becoming warmer and more like the sun. Anulios became forgotten, but the moon required energy to assist its evolution. Sakaki therefore arranged that the planet earth should send to the moon the ‘sacred vibration askokin’. Askokin was liberated when organic life on earth dies. According to Ouspensky’s report in In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff said:

The process of the growth and the warming of the moon is connected with life and death on the earth. Everything living sets free at its death a certain amount of the energy that has ‘animated’ it; this energy, or the ‘souls’ of everything living – plants, animals, people – is attracted to the moon as though by a huge electromagnet, and brings to it the warmth and the life upon which its growth depends, that is, the growth of the ray of creation. In the economy of the universe nothing is lost, and a certain energy having finished its work on one plane goes to another.¹⁶

He then went on to say that the moon influences everything that happens on earth.

Man, like every other living being, cannot, in the ordinary conditions of life, tear himself free from the moon. All his movements and consequently all his actions are controlled by the moon. If he kills another man, the moon does it; if he sacrifices himself for others, the moon does that also. All evil deeds, all crimes, all self-sacrificing actions, all heroic exploits, as well as all the actions of ordinary life, are controlled by the moon.¹⁷

And J. G. Bennett wrote:

At a certain point in the history of the earth it was perceived by the Higher Powers that a very undesirable and dangerous situation was developing on the planet earth which could endanger the equilibrium of the entire solar system and, in particular, the evolution of the Moon.¹⁸

If men realized that, because they were controlled by the moon, their personal efforts were unavailing, might they not be tempted to mass suicide, and so deprive the moon of the askokin needed for its development? To guard against this possibility, the Higher Powers implanted an organ at the base of man’s spine delightfully named by Gurdjieff ‘the organ Kundabuffer’.* This had the effect of ensuring that man would base his values solely on satisfying his own desires and the pursuit of happiness by making him perceive reality as topsyturvy. So man would serve the moon blindly, unaware that, by embarking on the path of self-development, he could free himself from the moon altogether. Once the moon crisis had passed, the organ Kundabuffer was removed; but the majority of mankind still behave blindly, selfishly, and without insight as if the organ was still there. This is actually necessary if the purposes of nature are to be fulfilled. According to Ouspensky, Gurdjieff said that the evolution of humanity as a whole might be injurious.

For instance, the evolution of humanity beyond a certain point, or, to speak more correctly, above a certain percentage, would be fatal for the moon. The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity.

Humanity is part of organic life; this means that humanity is food for the moon. If all men were to become too intelligent they would not want to be eaten by the moon.¹⁹

The majority of human beings provide askokin for the moon after death, and are then condemned to obliteration. However, some few who follow the path of self-development and self-realization prescribed by Gurdjieff create askokin during life. Such people may finally develop a soul which can survive and may even reach Objective Reason and attain a form of immortality by being reunited with the Most Most Holy Sun Absolute.

How can anyone ever have taken this kind of thing seriously? Some have referred to Gurdjieff’s teachings as myths, and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh claimed that Gurdjieff was joking about the moon, but J. G. Bennett wrote that Gurdjieff certainly intended his account of the historical appearance and disappearance of the organ Kundabuffer to be taken literally.²⁰ He also quotes the author Denis Saurat, then Director of the French Institute in London, as believing that Gurdjieff’s teaching ‘could not be of terrestrial origin. Either Gurdjieff had revelations vouchsafed only to prophets or he had access to a school on a supernatural level.’²¹ Although writers about Gurdjieff tend to distance themselves from his most extravagant propositions, Philip Mairet, an intelligent literary figure who was editor of the New English Weekly, and who was also well acquainted with the works of Freud, Jung, and Adler, is reported as saying: ‘No system of gnostic soteriological philosophy that has been published to the modern world is comparable to it in power and intellectual articulation.’²² Having read Ouspensky’s exposition of Gurdjieff’s teaching in his book In Search of the Miraculous, and having attempted to read Gurdjieff’s own book All and Everything, I can only wonder at Mairet’s opinion. Perhaps I have extracted enough to give the reader some idea of Gurdjieff’s picture of the cosmos, and to demonstrate that Gurdjieff’s own writings are both voluminous and obscure. Even his devotees say that All and Everything has to be read several times if its meaning is to be grasped; and some claim that Gurdjieff’s obscurity was deliberate; a device adopted to ensure that the disciple would have to make a considerable effort at understanding on his own account rather than be spoon-fed with clear statements and doctrines.

At first sight, it is difficult to believe that Gurdjieff’s elaborate cosmology was anything other than a planned, comical confidence trick designed to demonstrate how far the gullibility of his followers could be tested. His own account of how he survived his early wanderings reveals how expert he was at deception. Gurdjieff wrote that he coloured sparrows with aniline dyes and sold them as ‘American canaries’ in Samarkand. He tells us that he had to leave quickly in case rain washed the sparrows clean. When people brought him sewing machines and other mechanical objects for repair, he was often able to see that the mere shift of a lever would cure the problem. However, he was careful to pretend that such repairs were time-consuming and difficult, and charged accordingly. He also wrote that he found out in advance which villages and towns the new railway would pass through, and then informed the local authorities that he had the power to arrange the course of the railway. He boasted that he obtained large sums for his pretended services, and said that he had no pangs of conscience about doing so.²³

We know from J. G. Bennett that, when he and his followers were in danger from the conflict between the Cossacks and the Bolsheviks, Gurdjieff managed to get transport from the Provincial Government by spreading a rumour that he knew of enormously rich deposits of gold and platinum in the Caucasus mountains which would fill the Government’s coffers. Bennett wrote:

In all this, he was also demonstrating to his pupils the power of suggestion and the ease with which people could be made to ‘believe any old tale’.²⁴

Fritz Peters recounts an elaborate hoax in which Gurdjieff diluted a bottle of vin ordinaire with water, and then covered it with sand and cobwebs. Two distinguished women visitors were tricked into believing that Gurdjieff was serving them with wine of a rare vintage, and dutifully pronounced it the most delicious which they had ever tasted.²⁵

Fritz Peters recalled an occasion on which a rich English lady approached Gurdjieff as he was sitting at a café table and offered him a cheque for £1,000 if he would tell her ‘the secret of life’. Gurdjieff promptly summoned a well-known prostitute from her beat in front of the café, gave her a drink, and proceeded to tell her that he was a being from another planet called Karatas. He complained that it was very expensive to have the food he needed flown in from this planet, but urged the prostitute to taste some which he gave her. When asked what she made of it, she replied that he had given her cherries, and went on her way with the money Gurdjieff pressed upon her, obviously believing that he was mad. Gurdjieff turned to the English lady and said: ‘That is the secret of life.’ She appeared to be disgusted, called him a charlatan, and went off. However, she reappeared later on the same day, gave Gurdjieff the cheque for £1,000, and became a devoted follower.²⁶

He became skilled at extracting money from Americans to support his enterprises at the Château du Prieuré, and referred to this activity as ‘shearing sheep’. For example, an American woman travelled from the United States to the Prieuré to seek Gurdjieff’s advice about her chain smoking, which she said was a phallic activity connected with her marital sexual difficulties. After a pause for thought Gurdjieff suggested that she should change her brand of cigarette to Gauloises Bleus, and charged her a large fee for this advice, which she gladly and gratefully paid. There is no doubt that Gurdjieff could be a convincing confidence trickster when he so wished and that he did not hesitate to mislead the gullible when it suited him. He was always a wonderful story teller who held his audiences entranced.

He told Peters, ‘I not make money like others make money, and when I have too much money I spend. But I never need money for self, and I not make or earn money, I ask for money and people always give and for this I give opportunity study my teaching.’²⁷ However, he contradicted himself a moment later by saying that he owned a business making false eyelashes and another business selling rugs. When he went to New York in 1933, he demanded coaching in the use of four-letter words in English from Fritz Peters before giving a dinner for some fifteen New Yorkers. When the diners had drunk a certain amount, Gurdjieff began to tell them that it was a pity that most people – especially Americans – were motivated only by genital urges. He picked out a particularly elegant woman and told her in crude terms that she took so much trouble with her appearance because she wanted to fuck. The guests were soon behaving in an uninhibited fashion and becoming physically entangled with each other. Gurdjieff then announced that he had proved his point that Americans were decadent and demanded that he be paid for his lesson. According to Peters, he collected several thousand dollars.

Yet confidence trickery cannot be the whole explanation of Gurdjieff’s teaching. If Gurdjieff could support himself so easily by deception, why should he bother to invent a cosmogony? Gurdjieff found writing a burden. He was much more impressive as a lecturer than he was as a writer. All and Everything is enormously long, and, although it was dictated to Olga de Hartmann rather than written, it must have demanded considerable dedication to complete. Gurdjieff began his dictation on 16 December 1924. He completed the dictation of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson (the first part of All and Everything) in November 1927. Could anyone devote so much time and energy to creating something in which he did not believe himself, with the deliberate intention to deceive? We hover on the borderline between confidence trickery and psychosis. Gurdjieff’s propositions about the universe were totally at variance with the discoveries of astronomers and other scientists, and can only be compared with science fiction, but I think he believed in them, just as paranoid psychotics believe in their delusional systems.

Gurdjieff’s arrogance and disregard of established experts were extraordinary. When he visited the caves of Lascaux, he told J. G. Bennett that he did not agree with the Abbé Breuil’s dating of the rock paintings at thirty thousand years ago because he had concluded that the paintings were the work of a brotherhood that existed after the loss of Atlantis some seven or eight thousand years ago. He also told Bennett that he intended that his Institute would become ‘a centre of training and research not only into the powers of man himself, but into the secrets of the solar system. He said he had invented a special means for increasing the visibility of the planets and the sun and also for releasing energies that would influence the whole world situation.’²⁸

Gurdjieff’s complete disregard for science and for the views of generally accepted experts is narcissistic in the extreme. But he did, at times, show considerable interest in other people, and compassion for those who were suffering. He sometimes exhibited a capacity for intense concentration upon individuals, which was certainly one component of his undoubted charisma. Fritz Peters, whose parents were divorced, was legally adopted by his mother’s sister, Margaret Anderson and her friend Jane Heap, who were mentioned earlier as adherents of Gurdjieff. Peters, who was brought to Le Prieuré when he was a boy of eleven and stayed there until he was fifteen, described Gurdjieff’s behaviour to himself.

Whenever I saw him, whenever he gave me an order, he was fully aware of me, completely concentrated on whatever words he said to me; his attention never wandered when I spoke to him. He always knew exactly what I was doing, what I had done. I think we must all have felt, certainly I did, when he was with any one of us, that we received his total attention. I can think of nothing more complimentary in human relations.²⁹

This intense concentration, as we have seen, was an important part of Gurdjieff’s teaching. It entered in to everything he did. His ability to mobilize and direct attention may have accounted for his extraordinary effect on other people.

When you do a thing, do it with the whole self. One thing at a time. Now I sit here and eat. For me nothing exists in the world except this food, this table. I eat with the whole attention. So you must do – in everything … To be able to do one thing at a time … this is the property of Man, not man in quotation marks.³⁰

In movement, he gave the impression of complete co-ordination and integrated power. ‘His gait and his gestures were never hurried, but flowed in unison with the rhythm of his breathing like those of a peasant or a mountaineer.’³¹ Peters writes that Gurdjieff’s presence and physical magnetism were ‘undeniable and generally overwhelming’. When, in the late summer of 1945, long after he had left the Prieuré, Peters suffered from severe depression with insomnia, anorexia, and loss of weight, he sought Gurdjieff in Paris. Gurdjieff realized that he was ill, forbade him to talk and at once offered him a bedroom for as long as he needed it. He made Peters drink strong, hot coffee, and concentrated upon him intensely. It seemed to Peters that a violent electric blue light emanated from Gurdjieff and entered himself. Whatever the reason, Peters promptly recovered from his depression.

However, not everything about Gurdjieff was so impressive. His personal habits could be disgusting. One of the jobs that Peters was given when he was still resident at the Prieuré, was to clean Gurdjieff’s rooms.

What he could do to his dressing room and bathroom is something that cannot be described without invading his privacy; I will only say that, physically, Mr. Gurdjieff, at least so I gathered, lived like an animal … There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls.³²

Gurdjieff generalized from his own experience in that he set himself up as a teacher who could train others to attain the wisdom and autonomy which he believed himself to possess. But such teaching could only be assimilated by the chosen few. As we saw earlier, Gurdjieff did not believe that mankind as a whole was capable of development, or that it was desirable that any attempt should be made in this direction, lest the development of the moon might suffer. Gurdjieff, like many other gurus, was unashamedly élitist and authoritarian.

Gurdjieff’s sexual behaviour was unscrupulous, in that he coupled with any female disciple whom he found attractive, and not infrequently made her pregnant. When Fritz Peters went to the Château du Prieuré at the age of eleven, there were about ten other children there, some of whom were undoubtedly fathered by Gurdjieff.

Like other gurus whom we have encountered, Gurdjieff enjoyed the exercise of power. We saw earlier what physical demands he made on the de Hartmanns. He was not directly cruel, but the regime he imposed upon his disciples was rigorous to the point of physical exhaustion.

The daily routine was exacting in the extreme. We woke up at five or six in the morning and worked for two hours before breakfast. Afterwards there was more work: building, felling trees, sawing timber, caring for the animals of almost every domestic species, cooking, cleaning, and every kind of domestic duty. After a quick light lunch and a period of rest, one or two hours were devoted to ‘exercises’ and ‘rhythms’ accompanied by music usually played by Thomas de Hartmann on the piano. Sometimes there would be fasts lasting one, two, three or even up to seven days during which all the work continued as usual. In the evening, there would be classes in rhythms and ritual dances which might go on for three, four or five hours until everyone was totally exhausted.³³

It is not surprising that one disciple who was fixing trusses twenty-five feet above the ground fell asleep whilst precariously balanced on a narrow beam and had to be rescued by Gurdjieff.

Bennett does not point out that, whether or not this regime assisted spiritual development, it was certainly a convenient way of obtaining free labour to run the Prieuré. Moreover, Gurdjieff, as an experienced hypnotist, would have realized that physical exhaustion makes people more suggestible, although one of his avowed aims was to discover some means of ‘destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility’.³⁴ He once ordered Orage to dig a ditch to drain water from the kitchen garden. Orage worked extremely hard for several days. He was then told to make the edges of the ditch quite equal, and did so after more labour. Immediately after he had finished, Gurdjieff ordered him to fill in the ditch because it was no longer needed.

One of Gurdjieff’s disciples was Olgivanna Ivanovna Lazovich, who became the third wife of the American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. She first encountered Gurdjieff in Russia in 1917 at a time of crisis in her life. She was nineteen years old and was just about to have a child. Her first marriage was failing, her father was ill, her mother far distant. When Gurdjieff moved to the Prieuré, she joined him, became one of his best dancers, and an assistant instructor in The Work. In 1924, Gurdjieff suggested that she join her brother in America for no obvious reason. Shortly after her arrival, she encountered Frank Lloyd Wright at a ballet performance in Chicago and fell in love with him. Gurdjieff visited the Wrights on more than one occasion. Finding that Wright was seriously worried about his digestion, Gurdjieff invited them both out to dinner and served a series of extremely hot and indigestible dishes followed by the inevitable draughts of Armagnac. Wright felt terrible, but woke the next morning to find that his fears about his digestion had disappeared.³⁵ On another occasion,

Wright grandly remarked that perhaps he should send some of his pupils to Gurdjieff in Paris. ‘Then they can come back to me and I’ll finish them off.’

‘You finish! You are idiot,’ said Gurdjieff angrily. ‘You finish! No. You begin. I finish.’ It was clear that Wright had met his match.³⁶

Wright had many guru-like characteristics himself, so that it is not surprising to learn that these two autocrats found themselves in competition. Even so, Gurdjieff won Wright over. Shortly after Gurdjieff’s death, when Wright was receiving a medal in New York, he interrupted proceedings to announce: ‘The greatest man in the world has recently died. His name was Gurdjieff.’³⁷

Olgivanna appears to have acquired or developed a number of Gurdjieff’s less engaging traits. Draftsmen, apprentices and their wives were supposed to sit at Olgivanna’s feet whilst she gave them instructions and mercilessly criticized their failings. They even had to undergo the ordeal of listening to Wright reading from Gurdjieff’s writings.³⁸ As she became older, she became more and more dictatorial, and, after Wright’s death, became a ‘despotic and jealous’ widow with whom scholars and institutions preferred not to negotiate.³⁹

Adherents of Gurdjieff’s teaching recount with satisfaction that he did not bring pressure upon followers to stay with him, and in fact often dismissed them. This is interpreted as indicating his desire that they should become independent of him. In some cases, it may rather have been his perception of impending apostasy: gurus generally prefer to rid themselves of potential dissidents rather than be deserted. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s most devoted disciple and interpreter, began to lose confidence in him as a person as early as 1917. This seems to have been precipitated by Gurdjieff’s arbitrary dispersal of the group he had assembled around him in Essentuki. Ouspensky continued to believe in the authenticity of Gurdjieff’s vision and teaching which he accepted as having been handed down from some ancient, esoteric source, but found the man himself more and more intolerable. Ouspensky formally broke off relations in January 1924, and forbade his own pupils to communicate with Gurdjieff or refer to him.⁴⁰

A. R. Orage, the talented editor of the New Age, had abandoned literary life in London for life at the Prieuré, and later moved to New York, where he set up his own Gurdjieffian groups, and whence he sent large sums of money to Gurdjieff. During the seven years of his close involvement with Gurdjieff, he produced practically no work of his own. As John Carswell puts it: ‘The most notable English editor of his time had become a mysterious exile owing obedience to an Armenian magus.’⁴¹ Orage’s devotion was tested to the limit by Gurdjieff’s incessant demands for money, and by the abuse heaped upon him when he did not instantly obey. His allegiance was further undermined by his wife, Jessie Dwight, whom he married in 1927, and who had hated her visit to the Prieuré. Eventually, Gurdjieff, realizing Orage’s disillusion, turned up in New York when Orage was temporarily absent, assembled Orage’s group, denounced Orage and required each member to sign a written declaration that they would have nothing further to do with their instructor. Some did so; others refused. Orage, summoned back from England, demanded to see Gurdjieff, and, after remarking that he too repudiated the Orage created by Gurdjieff, signed the document denouncing his own teaching.

J. G. Bennett gives a list of close adherents whom Gurdjieff deliberately dismissed. Bennett himself left the Prieuré in 1923 and did not see Gurdjieff again until 1948, the year before he died. Even Fritz Peters, who had been greatly influenced by Gurdjieff in childhood, and who, as we have seen, turned to Gurdjieff when he was seriously depressed as an adult, wrote: ‘He began to seem to me in a very excellent phrase “a real, genuine phony.”’⁴³

By the beginning of 1932, it became clear that the Château du Prieuré was no longer financially viable. Gurdjieff habitually overreached himself financially and American support fell away after the crash of 1929. The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man finally closed in May. But Gurdjieff himself continued to flourish. He lived in Paris throughout the German occupation of the city during the Second World War. Characteristically, he obtained credit from various food shops by persuading them that an American pupil had given him an oil well in Texas which would ensure that their bills would be settled as soon as the war was over.

Gurdjieff’s cosmogony can only be described as fantastic. Reviewing his picture of the universe, it is hard to understand that any intelligent, educated person could believe in it. Yet disciples struggled to read All and Everything as if its incoherence must contain esoteric wisdom; as if it was their fault if they did not understand it rather than the author’s inability to construct a credible picture of man and the universe or to write intelligibly. When Gurdjieff had a car accident in July 1924 which nearly killed him, he said that this accident was ‘the manifestation of a power hostile to his aim, a power with which he could not contend’.⁴³ This suggests an underlying paranoid belief system. In reality, he was so dangerous a driver that his followers avoided being driven by him whenever possible. Perhaps he was referring to the adverse planetary influences which, he claimed, had caused the First World War. Gurdjieff had the bizarre notion that, from time to time, planets might approach each other too closely. The resulting tension would cause human beings to slaughter each other without their realizing that they were merely pawns in a cosmic game.

Although Gurdjieff’s picture of the universe can confidently be dismissed as rubbish, it is possible to salvage a few valuable ideas from what he taught. Gurdjieff believed that man had obligations as well as rights. He did not think that the world was made for man, or that progress consisted in further technological domination of the environment. He considered that man had lost touch with the meaning of his existence, which was to fulfil a cosmic purpose rather than merely to satisfy his desires. Now that we realize that we are destroying the earth we live on, Gurdjieff’s view that man should serve the world rather than exploit it seems apposite. His notion that most people are ‘asleep’ and are driven by their instincts to behave automatically rather than with conscious intention is probably true of the majority. Some of the charisma which Gurdjieff undoubtedly manifested sprang from his own capacity to live intensely in the moment. One pupil recalled his saying:

You live in the past. The past is dead. Act in the present. If you live as if you have always lived, the future will be like the past. Work on yourself, change something in yourself, then the future perhaps will be different.⁴⁴

Some of those who practised Gurdjieff’s techniques for awakening people and transforming them into beings who could direct their own destinies certainly claimed benefit, but Claire Tomalin, in her biography of Katherine Mansfield, is almost certainly right in her summing up.

Whether Gurdjieff’s methods for righting the internal balance of his disciples had much, or any, merit is another matter. Since the whole thing depended on his personality, and made no scientific claims (as psychoanalysis did) or cosmological and moral claims (as most brands of Christianity did), it remained an amateur, ramshackle affair, and although Gurdjieff aroused passionate hate as well as love, his system seems to have done little lasting damage, and obviously allowed some people to change direction in a way that seemed helpful to them.⁴⁵

As we have seen, Gurdjieff was, by his own admission, an accomplished confidence trickster who had no hesitation in deceiving other people and extracting money from them when he needed to do so. Confidence tricksters are successful at deception because they are more than halfway to believing in their own fictions. Was Gurdjieff anything more than this? I suggested earlier that he could not have constructed his elaborate cosmogony merely in order to deceive. Gurdjieff’s picture of the universe, whether learned from esoteric sources or constructed by himself, provided him with his own myth, his own answer to the problem of the meaning of life for which he had sought a solution during his twenty years of travel. This myth was akin to a religious revelation. It gave him the certainty of faith. It was his own conviction that he had discovered the answer which made him charismatic and persuasive. Even if some of his followers could not accept or understand all his cosmic doctrines, they still believed that he knew; a phenomenon which we shall encounter when discussing other gurus.

III BHAGWAN SHREE RAJNEESH

RAJNEESH IS BEST KNOWN TO the general public as the guru who owned ninety-three Rolls-Royces and who celebrated sex as a path to enlightenment. Any guru who promotes technology, capitalism, and free love is likely to win support, and Rajneesh was hugely successful in attracting followers, especially from the white middle class. Eileen Barker wrote that, in the early 1980s, there were between three and four thousand disciples in the UK alone in ‘what was possibly the most fashionable and fastest-growing alternative spiritual/religious movement in Britain.’¹ Rajneesh resembled other gurus in many particulars which we shall explore, but differed from them in being so eclectic that what was personal in his teaching is hard to determine. He was certainly influenced by the writings of Gurdjieff, to whom he frequently referred, and whom he partly resembled. Both gurus affirmed that it was their mission to rouse people from sleep, and both relied more upon personal charisma than upon any coherent body of doctrine.

Rajneesh, like Gurdjieff, was personally extremely impressive. Many of those who visited him for the first time felt that their most intimate feelings were instantly understood; that they were accepted and unequivocally welcomed rather than judged. He seemed to radiate energy and to awaken hidden possibilities in those who came into contact with him. Professor Ralph Rowbottom wrote that he found in Rajneesh ‘a teacher whose words made sense of all the basic issues of life, one whose presence touched me deeply.’² Hugh Milne, a Scottish osteopath who became his bodyguard, wrote of his first meeting: ‘I had the overwhelming sensation that I had come home. He was my spiritual father, a man who understood everything, someone who would be able to convey sense and meaning into my life.’³ In her introduction to Rajneesh’s book The Supreme Understanding, Ma Yoga Anurag wrote: ‘Only a Master to whom you can entrust your very being – physical, mental and spiritual – is capable of taking you on such a journey. Listening to Bhagwan, I gradually came to realize that he knows, he has the power, that if I can only say, “Yes, I leave everything to you,” everything will be taken care of.’⁴ The psychiatrist James S. Gordon, who has written the best book on Rajneesh, said that the phrase which his disciples repeatedly used of him was ‘This man knew.’⁵

Yet Rajneesh, like so many other gurus, became corrupted by wealth and power and deteriorated both physically and mentally. He was finally imprisoned in, and then expelled from, the United States. After being refused entry by various countries, he eventually returned to India. He died in 1990. It is a sad story; for it appears from his discourses that, at the beginning of his career, he had much to offer.

Rajneesh was born on December 11, 1931 in the small town of Kuchwada in the state of Madhya Pradesh at the house of his maternal grandparents with whom he spent much of his childhood. They seem to have adored him, and it is alleged that he was so graceful and beautiful a child that his grandfather believed that he must have been a king in some previous existence. This is why he was called ‘Raja’ which later became ‘Rajneesh’. When he was five years old, a younger sister died. He was distressed by her death, but by far the most traumatic event of his early childhood was the death of his grandfather in 1938, when he was seven. The grandfather’s terminal illness, which followed a stroke, was prolonged and painful; and Rajneesh claimed that it had the effect of persuading him never to form any more close attachments for fear that a similar tragedy would follow. It is reported that after watching his grandfather die, Rajneesh refused to eat or leave his bed for three days. After this bereavement, he moved back to live with his parents in Gadarwara and went to school there.

As a boy, Rajneesh was isolated, self-absorbed, and obviously clever. It is typical of gurus to attract followers rather than make friends; and this characteristic manifested itself very early. He led other children into mischief and constantly challenged authority. He was also a sickly child who suffered from asthma and who came close to death on several occasions. He played with death, taking risks in order to come to terms with his fear of it. For example, he would dive into whirlpools in the river Shakkar and let himself be sucked down until, at the bottom of the whirl, he was thrown free. Like other intelligent isolates with poor health, he read enormously widely and continued to do so for many years. He became familiar with both the sacred scriptures of the East and with the major philosophers of the West. But his search for religious truth always ended in rebellion and mockery. He was as incapable of accepting any ideology as he was of obeying authority. He was turbulent, aggressive, and arrogant. A contemporary described him as being very bright, but also as being an habitual liar. There were also early doubts about his financial honesty. He toyed with socialism and atheism, and joined the youth branch of the Indian National Army. In 1951 he graduated from high school and went to Hitkarini College in Jabalpur. He was so argumentative and difficult that he was asked to leave. He was admitted to another college, but preferred to stay at home rather than attend classes.

He then appears to have experienced an extended period of mental illness in which he suffered from disabling headaches, anorexia, depersonalisation, and severe loss of confidence. On one occasion he felt as if the connection between his body and his spiritual being had disintegrated. He ran up to sixteen miles a day in order to try and feel himself again, and started to meditate. His parents, believing that he was mentally ill, took him to see a number of different doctors; but an Ayurvedic physician, in R. D. Laingian fashion, reassured them that he was passing through an important personal crisis from which he would emerge.

On March 21, 1953, when he was twenty-one years old, Rajneesh’s illness terminated with what he called ‘enlightenment’. This was the end-point of seven days during which he ceased to strive, seek, or struggle, but passively let go and waited. He entered an ecstatic state in which ‘everything became luminous, alive and beautiful,’ and he himself felt ‘mad with blissfulness’. He sat under a Maulshree tree, as the Buddha, reputedly, had sat under the bodhi tree; but the ecstatic enlightenment which he experienced seems very different from the calm, composed, dispassionate state of mind in which the Buddha came to his conclusions about the human condition.

This series of events sounds like a psychotic episode. It appears probable that Rajneesh suffered from a fairly severe depressive illness between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one which came to an end with a hypomanic state in the form of an ecstatic experience. Although this period of mental distress followed by revelatory recovery took place rather earlier in Rajneesh’s life than it did with other gurus, it still conforms to the characteristic pattern. There are strong hints that he suffered from further periods of depression after he had become established as a guru. Twenty-one years later, in March 1974, he withdrew from all activities and went into complete silence for the next few weeks. In 1981, he also went through a period of some months in which he failed to respond to those caring for him, and apparently did not even read. Rumour also suggested that from time to time he drank heavily, and took valium, hashish, and other drugs including nitrous oxide. These could have been used to alleviate or ward off periods of depression which, naturally enough, would have been concealed by those close to him. I think it reasonable to conclude that, as in the cases of many other leaders, his personality was both narcissistic and manic-depressive, manifesting itself in actual illness from time to time.

His physical health remained poor throughout his life. He suffered from diabetes, asthma, and a variety of allergies; and was also treated for a herniated intervertebral disc which caused recurrent back pain.

However, it appears that his youthful ecstatic experience led to a permanent change in that he became more content to live in and for the moment. He obtained a B.A. in philosophy in 1955, and an M.A. from Saugar University in 1957. By 1960, he was an assistant professor teaching philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. At the same time, he began to travel round India giving controversial lectures which gained him a reputation as a debater and iconoclast, although many Indians were shocked by his arrogance and by his attacks on traditional values. He instituted his first ‘meditation camp’ in 1964. In 1966 he resigned from academic life in response to pressure from the university administration at Jabalpur. When the centenary of Gandhi’s birth was celebrated throughout India in 1969, Rajneesh seized the opportunity to outrage conventional opinion by alleging that Gandhi’s fasting was masochism, and his abstinence from sex a form of perversion. Later, he would pour scorn on Mother Teresa, whom he called a charlatan.

By the end of the decade, Rajneesh had settled in an apartment in Bombay with a few followers. It remained his centre of operations until 1974. He began to recruit more disciples; sannyasins, as they called themselves. To qualify, the potential disciple had to engage in meditation, wear orange or red clothes, wear a mala, a necklace of 108 wooden beads carrying a picture of Rajneesh, use a new name given to him or her by Rajneesh, discard the past, and accept Rajneesh’s authority. By 1971, 419 people had become initiates.

Most gurus acknowledge a debt to previous teachers, living or dead; but Rajneesh, though clearly influenced by Gurdjieff, did not admit owing anything to anyone. He said that he had never had a master, although he claimed to have studied a great deal in past incarnations. His remarkable range of reading ensured that his teaching was a pot-pourri of all the great religious leaders of the past, including Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. He could quote – not always accurately – from every well-known western thinker from Plato to Freud. When Bernard Levin visited his ashram in 1980, he reported that Rajneesh talked for an hour and three-quarters without hesitation, repetition, pauses, or notes. His voice was ‘low, smooth and exceptionally beautiful’.⁶ He leavened the seriousness of his discourse with parables which were often funny. He also told sexually explicit and scatological stories of a rather childish kind.

Rajneesh wrote nothing himself; but devoted disciples recorded his discourses and commentaries and made books out of them. Assuming that the edited discourses are accurate, one can understand that Rajneesh must have been a riveting as well as a fluent speaker. Reading discourses given in 1974 and 1975, I began to understand that Rajneesh, in spite of his terminal decline and fall, did convey a vision which could bring new meaning to life for those who were in search of it. The main thrust of his teaching was what he called a ‘religionless religiousness’; by which he meant a religious attitude to life without commitment to any particular creed or church. Jung shared the same outlook. However, Rajneesh regarded religion as a luxury available only to those who had fulfilled their material needs and who could therefore afford to think about the meaning of life. ‘In a poor society religion cannot be meaningful because people have not yet failed’:⁷ that is, they have not yet discovered that getting a house or becoming rich or whatever material advantage they have set their hearts on will not bring happiness. Rajneesh always hated and despised poverty, and unashamedly claimed to be the rich man’s guru. On the other hand, in one of his discourses on the sayings of Jesus, he said: ‘The more things accumulate the more life is wasted because they have to be purchased at the cost of life.’⁸ He signally failed to follow his own teaching in this respect.

He divided people into three types: those who collect things and were outward-orientated; those who collect knowledge and who are less outward-orientated; those who cultivate awareness and who are inner-orientated. Their goal is to become more and more conscious. He announced that he wanted those aspects of human beings personified by Gautama the Buddha and Zorba the Greek to come closer to one another in his followers. The most basic requirement was to cast off the shackles of the past, live in the moment, and obey the most fundamental commandment; to love oneself. ‘You are not sent as beggars into the world, you are sent as emperors.’⁹

Drawing on Tantric doctrines which give spiritual significance to sex, Rajneesh affirmed that sex was a way to enlightenment. All inhibitions and possessiveness must be discarded and sexual experimentation and free love with different partners should be encouraged. The sexual act should be prolonged as long as possible in order to reach what he called ‘valley orgasm’ as opposed to ‘peak orgasm’. Orgasm of the whole body was incompatible with thinking, and so was one valuable experience in which the subject just existed, without thought for the morrow. This is one example of intense living in the here-and-now to which reference was made in the chapter on Gurdjieff. Sexuality could be a path to the divine, and religions which exalted celibacy and tried to suppress sexuality were, in his view, merely producing frustration and neurosis. Rajneesh once said that, of all the problems which people brought to him, 99% were sexual. But his teaching only applied to heterosexual encounters, since he regarded homosexuality as a disease. This seems a curiously old-fashioned attitude in one who was so intolerant of sexual restrictions. It was also possible to transcend sexuality by looking for the opposite within – for a man, the inner woman – but this could be done only under the guidance of a Master.¹⁰ This closely resembles Jung’s notion of the anima.

Rajneesh had no hesitation in asserting his own identity as a Master, although in one passage he denies being a guru. I think he meant by this that he was aware that he didn’t preach a coherent body of doctrine.

I have only devices – only psychological answers. And the answer does not depend on me; it depends on you. Because of you, I have to give a particular answer.

That is why I cannot be a guru – never! Buddha can become one, but I never can. Because you are so inconsistent, every individual is so different, how can I become consistent? I cannot. And I cannot create a sect because for this consistency is very needed …

So I am less a guru and more like a psychiatrist (plus something). ¹¹

Some of his remarks echo those attributed to Jesus. ‘While I am here, a little while more, don’t miss the opportunity.’¹² Repeatedly, he advises his hearers to be empty, loose, and natural. They must distinguish between action and activity. Action is goal-orientated and fulfils needs. It is comparable with Gurdjieff’s ability to do. Activity is a restless inability to be without engaging in futile pursuits like re-reading the same newspaper. Morality and religion must be separated, for morality is concerned with denial and fighting against impulses, whereas religion is concerned with increasing consciousness and awaking the light within. A man possessed with anger is no longer aware. Full consciousness and anger are incompatible. People should be able to detach themselves from their thoughts through increased consciousness, just as they can distance themselves from their emotions. It is possible to become a witness to one’s own thoughts if the right degree of consciousness is attained. A notice at the entrance of the hall in which he spoke read: ‘Shoes and minds to be left here.’ Conventional ways of thinking must be abandoned if the subject is to become open to God.

According to Rajneesh, there are three main approaches to reality: the scientific, based on experiment; the logical, based on reasoning; and the metaphorical, manifesting itself in poetry and religion. ‘Poetry is a golden bridge, it bridges the object with the subject.’¹³ Religion is essentially poetry. The Tantric teaching is always to say ‘Yes’ to life. ‘The real atheist is one who goes on saying “No” to life.’¹⁴ ‘Man is the only unnatural animal – that’s why religion is needed.’¹⁵ Rajneesh resembled Jung in thinking that some varieties of neurotic symptoms were valuable because they compelled the individual to look within, to face his real problems.

Rajneesh did not claim that his teaching was original, although he did say that his way of expressing it was modem. However, he introduced a technique of meditation based on hyperventilation which I have not encountered elsewhere. ‘Dynamic Meditation’ consisted of ten minutes of rapid, irregular overbreathing to repetitive music. This is followed by ten minutes of catharsis in which the subject is required to release tension by shouting, weeping, dancing – expressing whatever comes to mind in the most uninhibited way possible. Dr. Gordon found himself screaming abuse and obscenities against hated figures from the past; teachers, parents, nurses, playmates. The third ten minute stage is occupied by jumping as high as possible whilst shouting the Sufi mantra ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo’. Rajneesh described this. ‘As you jump, land hard on the souls (sic) of your feet so that the sound reaches deep into the sex center. Exhaust yourself completely.’¹⁶ Following this, the subject stops doing anything at all for another ten minutes during which physical cramps and pains induced by the overbreathing and violent exercise begin to subside. The last stage is dancing to more music until the mind becomes quiet and the body relaxed.

In 1971 Rajneesh adopted the title of Bhagwan. This alienated some of his Indian followers, because the appellation means The Blessed One and implies an incarnation of God. His disciple Laxmi told Bernard Levin that many of the sannyasins regarded Rajneesh as God, but that he himself only claimed to be a conduit transferring divine energy. I think it possible that Rajneesh came to believe in his own divinity. He used to give out boxes containing cuttings from his hair or nail clippings in case carrying his photograph was not enough to persuade his disciples that he was always with them. His narcissism also manifested itself in his insistent concern that any photographs of himself should be carefully posed and lit in order to bring out his best features.

In early 1974, Rajneesh sent some thirty or forty sannyasins to work on a farm belonging to his family in Kailash. This was an appalling place, overrun with rats and scorpions, extremely hot, and almost infertile. Gurdjieff’s technique of persuading disciples that exhausting, futile work was a path to enlightenment was employed and used as a test of commitment to Rajneesh. The sannyasins were grossly underfed and overworked. They were forbidden to leave the farm or take time off and many became ill with amoebic dysentery and other diseases, including hepatitis, tuberculosis, and dengue fever. Some suffered permanent impairment of their health. After some months the experiment was abandoned.

As more and more disciples joined the movement, more space was needed. Some Indian business men set up a trust which became the Rajneesh Foundation. They bought a six acre estate at 17 Koregaon Park, Poona, in which the Shree Rajneesh Ashram grew and flourished. From 1974 onward, around six thousand followers of Rajneesh would be living there at any one time. The ashram became so famous that thirty thousand people a year from all over the world came as visitors. Large donations had launched the ashram; charges for rooms and meals, sales of books, fees for admission to discourses, and fees for group and individual therapy generated a regular income of somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 per month which served to sustain it.

The ashram day started with dynamic meditation from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. This was followed by a spontaneous discourse given by Rajneesh lasting two hours, in English and Hindi alternately. In 1975, encounter groups of various kinds were introduced. So many varieties of group and individual therapies were employed that Frances Fitzgerald described the Poona ashram as ‘a spiritual garage for anyone with a method’;¹⁷ while Bernard Levin referred to it as a ‘spiritual supermarket’.¹⁸ The group techniques employed became notorious for the expression of uninhibited sex and aggression. In the course of expressing anger, so many fractures occurred that suspicious local hospitals were fobbed off with euphemistic tales that injuries had been caused by falling off ladders or bicycles. The sexual freedom offered in Poona is described by Hugh Milne as ‘quite phenomenal’. The girls wore transparent dresses with no underclothes, since Rajneesh had said that underclothes interfered with the passage of energy. There were groups in which people were forced to watch their beloved having intercourse with someone else, ostensibly to free them from over-attachment to sex. There were groups in which oral sex predominated. One favoured sexual activity was for males to eat ripe mangoes which had been introduced into the women’s vaginas.

Rajneesh himself seems to have been an indifferent sexual performer, in spite of claiming that he had had intercourse with more women than any man in history. Like some other gurus, he helped himself to any female delights which were on offer. Becoming Bhagwan’s sexual partner was, of course, a highly prized distinction. But the experience itself was usually disappointing, since he appears to have suffered from premature ejaculation. He was more of a voyeur than a lover. Sometimes a couple would be encouraged to make love in front of him. A new recruit might be told to strip naked and be closely inspected without necessarily being touched. Others would be masturbated without intercourse taking place.

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