[In the following essay, Bennett discusses Gurdjieff's theory of the "inner circle of humanity."]

Reports of brotherhoods whose members possess wisdom and powers that are different from and more significant than those of ordinary people suggest that they may be founded in fact and should be taken seriously. The supposition that such people have existed in the past, and that they decisively influenced human life in ways that ordinary people cannot understand, is the hypothesis that an Inner Circle of Humanity existed in the past. If we extend the idea to include the present and the foreseeable future, we have the hypothesis in the form of a perpetual hierarchy. This tradition is common to most Sufi teachings, and it was affirmed by Gurdjieff himself. He associates it with the idea of esoteric schools. He defined "schools" as organizations that exist for the purpose of transmitting to the Outer Circle—that is, ordinary people—the knowledge and powers that originate in the Inner Circle.

The conclusion that schools do exist is by no means the same as a belief in the existence of an Inner Circle of Humanity. The latter can be regarded either as a dogma to be believed or as hypothesis to be tested. We shall follow the second line. The hypothesis can be understood in a "strong" sense or in a "weak" one. The strong sense holds that there are people who possess incomparably greater knowledge and powers than ordinary men and women, including those who occupy positions of authority in church, state, and centers of learning. These people constitute a hierarchy at the head of which are superhuman beings who may or may not live in human form, but who, in any case, have a direct insight into cosmic purposes and processes, and who can exercise powers that are entirely beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. Such are, for example, the Masters described by the theosophists, anthroposophists, and other arcane schools. These are, as we saw in the last chapter, very different from the historical Masters in central Asia, the Khwajagan, who were not at all mysterious. In recent years, the strong hypothesis has been extended to include visitors from extraterrestrial regions who visit the earth in "flying saucers" as part of a plan to "save" mankind.

The strong view is very attractive to writers of fiction, and it has been debased to such an extent that few people would be inclined to think it worth serious examination unless they were already convinced that superhuman beings do exist and take an interest in our welfare. A trite objection to the belief in supernatural beings who are responsible for the welfare of humanity is that they do not seem to be doing their job very well. A more serious difficulty is that we should expect such a significant factor in human history to be better known. There is no obvious reason why the Inner Circle of Humanity—if it is as powerful as the strong view suggests—should hide itself. Presumably, it requires cooperation from the uninitiated, and one would expect that this cooperation would readily be forthcoming if only people were made aware of the help offered them and told what was required of them.

The objection "if they existed, we should know them" conceals the fallacy that they must be "knowable" to us. We can picture wise men exercising extraordinary powers and being able to influence the immediate course of events. It must be conceded that human history as we know it during the past seven to ten thousand years is quite incompatible with this interpretation of the strong view. In any case, the strong view would violate the law of probability, which asserts that the time required for a change to occur is a parabolic function of the number of interacting factors that require to be changed. We cannot, however, exclude a different interpretation according to which the Inner Circle is not concerned with short-term events but surveys human affairs on a time scale of centuries or even millennia.

In several passages in Beelzebub's Tales, Gurdjieff made it clear that "care for one's remote descendants" is one of the obligations of a man who has attained "objective reason." He also refers to the errors made by individuals of high reason that resulted in misfortunes that afflicted mankind for thousands of years. Nevertheless, it must be said that there is no hint in Beelzebub's Tales of a permanent hierarchy that has influenced history. I myself have suggested in The Dramatic Universe (vol. 4:360, 413) that influences guiding human affairs may intervene directly in the form of a hidden directorate, surveying the human scene from epoch to epoch. Now, ten years later, in light of my subsequent work, I regard it as more likely that the method of intervention is indirect. Though more than ever convinced that there is a conscious guidance in human affairs, I believe that this comes from a level of being quite unlike that of people as we know them. It does not seem at all probable that there is a group of living people who have the power to influence human affairs on a grand scale. There is a certain naiveté in the strong view that a higher level of being is describable in the language of the everyday world. If we accept Gurdjieff's dictum that ordinary man "perceives reality in his attention upside down," it may well be that the characteristics of a true Inner Circle would be exactly the opposite of what we should expect. I will return to this suggestion after considering the "weak" view. We need not examine the "strong" view of the Inner Circle in terms of visible history.

The weak view attributes superior wisdom and powers to the Inner Circle but does not regard it as all-powerful. This weaker view might take various forms, ranging from simple confidence that there are good and wise people who are working in some kind of concert for the welfare of mankind, to belief in a traditional teaching transmitted by people who have attained a higher level of being by their own efforts and who use their knowledge and powers to the extent that world conditions permit. The second version corresponds to the picture of the Khwajagan as it emerged in the last chapter. Virtually any form of belief in the possibility of man attaining higher levels of being implies acceptance that such men have lived in the past and may be living in the present and have, because of their transformation, a clearer understanding of human destiny and a greater capacity for concerted action than ordinary people. If there are people on a higher level of being, we could reasonably expect that they would recognize one another and share between them the burden of helping the world. The objection to this supposition is that it appears to lead back to the strong view that we have rejected.

The objection rests on the assumption that the way in which higher beings work can be deduced from the methods that are adopted by ordinary people and their societies. Now, a most striking feature of all ordinary human activity is its shortsightedness. Crisis government—one that stumbles from one awkward situation to another—characterizes all the political systems of the world. There are very few departments of human life in which decisions are made with regard to the foreseeable but remote future. It is the immediate present that dominates. We never catch up with ourselves, because our activity is so often directed toward targets that are no longer there when we reach them. Furthermore, our decision making is always too narrowly based. We evaluate situations in terms of the factors that we believe we understand, and disregard those that are outside our competence. We do not see that events are governed by laws that are quite different from "causality" as we suppose it to operate. These observations will be examined in depth when we come to study Gurdjieff's cosmology. The point to be made here is that we have no means of evaluating an activity that uses techniques of which we are totally ignorant. We can "judge by results" only if we know how to recognize what results were aimed at. A townsman sees a farmer plowing a field and concludes that his aim is to destroy vegetation. Six months later, he sees that the result is a crop of wheat. The next year, he sees the fanner leaving the field unplowed and accuses him of negligence, never having heard of the need from time to time to let land lie fallow. We suffer from a far deeper disability than the townsman on his first visit to the country. We look at events in the wrong time scale, but we do not even recognize die processes mat must be set in motion if mankind is to go forward along the path of creative evolution.

In order to put the notion of an Inner Circle into perspective, we need to introduce categories that are foreign to ordinary thinking. Three areas of human experience may be distinguished:

The Area of Fact: This comprises all mat is in communication wim our bodies by sense perception and mechanical interaction. This is preeminently die domain in which science, technology, and economics operate. For materialistic and mechanistic theories of the world, it is the sole reality.

The Area of Value: This includes all those intangible influences that determine our judgments and our motives. This is preeminently the domain of morality, aesthetics, and jurisprudence. Its content is all that ought to be. Usually "values" are regarded as ideas or attitudes held by human beings. We should treat them as having their own reality, independent of our experience. The domain of value is the "ideal world," and for the idealist who regards mere fact as illusion, the domain of values is the "real" world.

The Area of Realization: The notion of a nonfactual domain in which reality is constantly being created is foreign to ordinary thinking, but it is implicit in all that Gurdjieff taught and did. It is indeed the central concept of all work that, by definition, proceeds exclusively by creative activity that cannot be reduced to fact and value or even to a combination of the two.

Two great illusions by which mankind is enslaved are the belief that the domain of fact is real and the belief that values can exist without being realized. We have sense experience and we have emotional impulses from which we construct in our "minds" pictures of the world. We take mese pictures for representations of reality. Gurdjieff was never tired of denouncing as self-deception such attitudes mat effectively block the way to self-realization. "Real" men are those who can create their own "reality," but this takes them into a domain that is incomprehensible for those who believe in facts and values as "real" in themselves.

The hypothesis of an Inner Circle can now be stated as the supposition that there are people who have discovered the secret of realization. Since we do not look upon these as incarnations from another world, they must have attained their place by their own efforts. But, since they also have access to supernatural knowledge, they must have been chosen and given special help. They are the "elect" upon whom the destiny of the world depends.

Such people, if they do indeed exist, must be able to see more deeply into the way the world works than ordinary people. Among ordinary people in this sense we include philosophers, scientists, sociologists, historians, economists, and the leaders of church and state whose perceptions and powers have been exercised solely in the domains of fact and value. In principle, artists and religious people should be creating values, but for the most part they are content to base their vocations upon acts of faith. Because they do not know how to change their perceptions, tiiey are obliged in their conduct of practical affairs to rely upon the same methods as everyone else. They claim to rely upon the inspiration and guidance of the spirit, but they seldom have the courage to throw away the calculations of human reason that cannot transcend the domain of fact.

By eliminating what would not qualify as the Inner Circle of Humanity, we have come a little closer to answering the question of whether such groups of people have existed in the past and do exist today. A fairly strong version of the hypothesis must be considered if we are to reach significant conclusions. This can now be expressed as the presence on earüi of self-realized people who are working in the domain of realization in order to redeem humanity from the consequences of excessive reliance upon the power to manipulate facts. Such people are strong, but not in the sense of being powerful or influential. They are also wise, but not in the sense of being learned. They are, therefore, likely to attract little attention from those who assess their fellow men in terms of their visible attainments.

It is probable that Gurdjieff's searches convinced him that people with such higher powers have lived on the earth and mat they are active in our day. But, apart from what he told Ouspensky in 1916, he does not seem to have made this a central feature of his teaching. Various explanations for this have been given. Some people say that he was never admitted to the innermost groups and was obliged to put together, as best he could, fragments collected from a variety of sources. Others believe that he was accepted as a missionary or messenger to prepare the way for a more decisive entry of the guardians of the tradition into the life of the West. We should certainly expect mat he would have left sufficiently clear indications to enable us to reconstruct the true position. The purpose of the present book is to examine this expectation.… [In] none of his own writings does Gurdjieff explicitly assert that there is an Inner Circle or that he met with any evidence of it. It is true that he refers to "world brotherhoods" particularly in Meetings with Remarkable Men—but he presents them as closed orders, withdrawn from the world and concerned wim the personal salvation of the few fortunate souls who happen to find their way to them. It is, however, possible to put together a more encouraging picture if we follow some clues he left in various places.

One such clue given by Gurdjieff is his mention in several passages of the Sarmoun or S arman Society. The pronunciation is the same for either spelling, and the word can be assigned to Old Persian. It does, in fact, appear in some of the Pahlawi texts to designate those who preserved the doctrines of Zoroaster. The word can be interpreted in three ways. First, is the word for "bee," which has always been a symbol of those who collect the precious "honey" of traditional wisdom and preserve it for future generations. A collection of legends, well known in Armenian and Syrian circles with the title The Bees, was revised by Mar Salamon, a Nestorian Archimandrite in the thirteenth century—about the time of Jenghis Khan. The Bees refers to a mysterious power transmitted from the time of Zoroaster and made manifest in the time of Christ.

A more obvious interpretation of the word is to take man in its Persian meaning as "the quality transmitted by heredity" and hence a "distinguished family or race." It can also refer to the repository of an heirloom or tradition. The word sar means "head," both literally and in the sense of principal or chief. The combination of sarman would thus mean "the chief repository of the tradition," which has been called "the perennial philosophy" passed down from generation to generation by "initiated beings," to use Gurdjieff's description.

Still another possible meaning of the word sarman is "those who have been enlightened"; literally, "those whose heads have been purified." This gives us a possible clue to Gurdjieff's intention. In the chapter "Beelzebub's Opinion of War," he refers to a fraternity existing in central Asia under the name of the Assembly of the Enlightened. He adds that in those days the brothers of this fraternity were very much venerated by other three-brained beings around them, and hence their brotherhood was sometimes called The Assembly of All the Living Saints of the Earth. This is the nearest Gurdjieff comes to specific mention in his own writing of a group that could correspond to the Inner Circle of Humanity.

Gurdjieff says that this brotherhood had already been formed long before by a group of beings who had noticed in themselves the properties of the organ kundabuffer and had banded together to work collectively for their deliverance from these properties. The narrative goes on to describe the initiative taken by the Assembly to set up a society to prevent war. Gurdjieff carefully places this event by referring to the center of the society as Mosul, which is across the River Tigris from the ruins of Numrud and Nineveh. He says it occurred several centuries ago, and fixes the date by saying that the society included the personal representatives of the famous conqueror Tamerlane. Tamerlane certainly passed through Mosul and, as we saw in the last chapter, he was a patron of the Sufis and a devotee of Khwaja Ahmed Yesevi of Tashkent.

The reader can reasonably infer that Gurdjieff is referring to historical events of special importance. This is confirmed by the surprising list of communities represented in the society: Mongols, Arabs, Kirghizes, Georgians, Little Russians, and Tamils. These cover most of the main religious groups—shamans, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus—with the notable exception of Zoroastrians and Jews.

Now, it is a historical fact that, after two centuries of wars and civil wars, Asia had a period of relative peace in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I suggested in the last chapter that the Khwajagan may have played some part in this. It does not seem in the least likely that the Assembly of the Enlightened can be identified with the Khwajagan, for the simple reason that there is no evidence that the latter ever assembled to act in concert. The Masters were highly independent individuals who accepted and supported one another but did not form a society until the dervish brotherhoods, such as the Naq'shbandis, began to be organized in the sixteenth century.

Even if the Khwajagan and the Sarman were not identical, it is possible that individual Khwajas were associated with the Sarman Brotherhood. This is suggested by Gurdjieff, and by comparing dates and activities, we may identify his Brother Olmantaboor as Ubeydullah Ahrar. Ahrar's biographer, Mevlana Djami, the greatest literary figure of central Asia, was evidently aware that Ahrar's influence went far beyond his immediate environment. It will be remembered that he made a strong point of his concern with the prevention of war. This was something of a departure for the Sufis, who had until that time tended to regard the world and its wickedness as an evil to be avoided rather than a field of beneficent activity.

It is likely that the original custodians of the traditions were the Sarman Brotherhood, and we must find out all that we can about their origins and activities. Gurdjieff provides here another astonishing clue. He says that the society entitled. The Earth is Equally Free for All set out to establish in Asia a single religion, a single language, and a single central authority. The religion they selected was "to be based on that of the Parsis, only changing it a little." The language was to be Turkmen, the Turkish dialect spoken in Turkmenistan from Samarkand to Balkh. The central authority was to be established at Margelan, the capital of the Ferghanian Khanate. No reference to the Parsis, the religion founded by Zoroaster, appears elsewhere in Gurdjieff's writings. It is particularly remarkable that there is no reference to Zoroaster in the chapter on religion; nor does his name appear among the wise men who assembled in Babylon and formed the Society of Adherents of Legominism. The date of the latter is easily fixed at 510BC because Cambyses is known at that date to have brought learned men from Egypt to Babylon. According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras was one of them. This agrees with Beelzebub's tale.

Gurdjieff must have known the Greek traditions referring to Zoroaster or Zaratas. Apuleius refers to Zoroaster as the spiritual guide of Cyrus the Great and the teacher of Pythagoras, and there are many similar references in Greek literature. Iamblichus, in his Life of Pythagoras (chapter 4), states that Pythagoras spent twelve years in Babylon consorting with the Magi. These are passages remarkably reminiscent of Gurdjieff's description of the Society of Adherents of Legominism (Beelzebub's Tales, chapter 30). Gurdjieff certainly had read his Iamblichus and to some extent modeled his Institute upon the Pythagorean schools. Unless Zoroaster is to be identified with Ashiata Shiemash, he does not appear in Beelzebub's tales of the Babylonian period. Why, then, should this religion be referred to—in a much later chapter describing events two thousand years after the time of Zoroaster—as the best foundation for a creed in which all Asiatic communities could share?

We should note here that in 1911 Rudolf Steiner wrote a book called The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind in which he claims that, by clairvoyant insight, he was able to reconstruct the history of the Zoroastrian influence in human life over a period of eight thousand years, or from the origins of the Aryan culture. As Gurdjieff makes several references to anthroposophy in Beelzebub's Tales, we may assume that he was aware of the importance that Steiner attached to the Zoroastrian traditions. Gurdjieff invariably refers to anthroposophy in slighting terms as an aberration of the same order as theosophy and spiritualism. It does not, by any means, follow that he rejected all the conclusions reached by Rudolf Steiner. From his attitude in conversation, I would surmise that he objected to the uncritical acceptance of statements that were unsupported by historical evidence.

It has been suggested that the "cosmic individual incarnated from Above," who is called Ashiata Shiemash in Beelzebub's Tales, is Zarathustra (Zoroaster). Gurdjieff certainly spoke of Ashiata Shiemash in three different ways. He was a historical character who had lived in Asia thousands of years ago. He is also the prophet of the New Epoch who is still to come, and he is also Gurdjieff himself. Gurdjieff said more than once, "I am Ashiata Shiemash." It has also been asserted that these chapters are purely allegorical and refer to no historical situation past, present, or future. In my opinion, all four interpretations are valid, and we should therefore examine the first to see if it helps us with the search for an Inner Circle.

After his enlightenment, Ashiata is said to have gone to "the capital city Djoolfapal of the country then called Kurlandtech, which was situated in the middle of the continent of Asia." If this refers to Zarathustra's journey in his thirtieth year, after receiving enlightenment, the city must have been Balkh, where Kave Gushtaspa was king. Here Zarathustra found two men, counselors of the king, Jamaspa and Frashaostra, who were seeking wisdom. He enlightened them and initiated the king. There is a remarkable verse in the Avesta, fifth Gatha, verse 16 that says:

 The leadership of the Maga mysteries has been
  bestowed on Kave Gushtaspa.
At the same time he has been initiated into the
  path of Vohu Manah by inner-vision.
  This is the way that Ahura Mazda has decreed ac-
  cording to Asha.

In later Persian sacred literature, Asha becomes Ashtvahasht, which is strangely suggestive of Ashiata Shiemash.

According to the legend, Kave Gushtaspa placed himself entirely under the direction of Zarathustra, and this inaugurated the reign of the "good law". It is obviously possible that Gurdjieff had all this in mind, but he left no clear indication. The name Ashiata Shiemash could have been derived from the Turkish word ash, meaning "food," and the words iat and iem, which refer to eating. According to this interpretation, Ashiata Shiemash personifies the principle of reciprocal feeding. This is very interesting because of the conclusion I reached on other grounds that the principle had a Zoroastrian origin.

The nearest Gurdjieff comes to describing a society that influenced history is in the "Organization for Man's Existence Created by the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash." The society, called the Brotherhood Heechtvori, developed from the society he found in Djoolfapal (Balkh?). He interprets the name to mean "only he will be called and will become the son of God who acquires in himself conscience." This society was not occupied with social organization and reform nor with the exercise of power. It was a training establishment to which people went to have their "reason enlightened": first as to the real presence of conscience in man, and, second as to the means whereby it can be "manifested in order that a man may respond to the real sense and aim of his existence." The external, social consequences of the training are depicted as deep and far reaching. New kinds of relationships came into being; men looked for guidance rather than for authority. Social and political conflicts disappeared. This was not the result of reform or reorganization, but solely of a change in people. I think Gurdjieff uses the story of Ashiata Shiemash not only to underline the central significance of conscience in his message to humanity but also to suggest that he has no confidence in any kind of occult "action at a distance." People are to be helped by actions that they can understand and, in due course, produce for themselves.

Zoroaster was associated in the minds of central Asian communities with the struggle that endured for thousands of years between the Turanian nomads and the Aryan settlers. The Avestan Gathas often identify the Turanians with evil spirits in spite of the fact that more than one Turanian prince became a follower of Zoroaster. The society mentioned by Gurdjieff, The Earth is Equally Free for All, was to adopt the ancient Turanian language, and combine it with the Aryan religion of the Parsis, and establish its main center in Ferghana. The only possible interpretation of such a combination is that it refers to a society that was on such a high level that the conflicts that divide religions and peoples did not touch it. No higher society could be imagined than the Assembly of All the Living Saints of the Earth.

The connection between this society and the Sarman Brotherhood is given both by the name and by the location, first in Mosul and then in Bokhara. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff describes how he and his Armenian friend, Pogossian, found ancient Armenian texts, including the book Merkhavat, that referred to the "Sarmoung" society as a famous esoteric school. According to tradition, this school had been founded in Babylon as far back as 2500 BC and was known to have existed in Mesopotamia up to the sixth or seventh century of the Christian era. The school was said to have possessed great knowledge containing the key to many secret mysteries. The date of 2500 BC would put the founding of this school several centuries before the time of Hammurabi, the greatest lawgiver of antiquity, but this is not impossible. It is an interesting date, because it coincides with the migration that brought together a Semitic people, the Akkadians, and the older Indo-European race of the Sumerians. It is quite plausible to suppose that a school of wisdom could then have been established that guided the course of events toward the wonderful achievements of Sargon I and Hammurabi. If such a school existed, it would have abandoned Babylon after the time of Darius II, about 400 BC, and could very well have moved north into the upper valley of the Tigris where the Parthians were about to begin their long period of dominance in the mountains of Kurdistan and the Caucasus. The Parthians brought with them a pure Zoroastrian tradition. The Armenian hegemony bridged the gap until the arrival of the Seljuks at the end of the first millennium AD. This was a time when caravan routes in all directions passed through the upper valleys, and it was possible to collect and concentrate traditions from China to Egypt.

This leads us to the next phase of Gurdjieff's contact with the Sarman Brotherhood. He reports that in the course of a sojourn at Ani, one of the capitals of the Bagratid Armenian kingdom, he and Pogossian found a collection of letters written on parchment some time in the seventh century AD. One of these letters contained a reference to the Sarman Brotherhood as having one of their main centers near the town of Siranush. They had migrated to the northeast and settled in the valley of Izrumin, three days' journey from Nivssi. Gurdjieff goes on to say that their further research led them to identify Nivssi with Mosul, which was already connected with the Society of the Enlightened. By the date mentioned, Nineveh had ceased to be inhabited, but Nimrud, the ancient capital of the Assyrian king, Assurbanipal, was still a great trading center due to its location at a point where the Tigris begins to be navigable all year round.

Three days' journey by camel from Nimrud through almost desert country leads to a valley green with trees, in the midst of which is Sheikh Adi—the chief sanctuary of the Yezidi Brotherhood. Now, the Yezidis are certainly inheritors of the old Zoroastrian tradition, and Gurdjieff specifically refers to them among the groups of Assyrians he found in the region surrounding Mosul, which was the heart of the old Assyrian Empire. I visited Sheikh Adi in 1952 and was convinced that the Yezidis possessed secrets unsuspected by Orientalists, who classify their faith as a relic of paganism. Their connection with the Mithraic tradition is generally accepted because of their chief festival of the white bull, which takes place at Sheikh Adi in October every year. They are even more directly descended from the followers of Manes, whose influence spread very widely all through Asia in the third and fourth centuries of our era, only two hundred years before the Sarman Brotherhood was reported as having its headquarters at Izrumin.

It seems probable that a very strong tradition did exist in Chaldaea from very early times. Gurdjieff, both in his writings and in his conversations with his pupils, constantly referred to this ancient tradition. We can assume that, during the great upheavals of history, the guardians of the tradition responded in the way described in the last chapter: it divided into three branches, one of which migrated, one of which was assimilated into the new regime, and one of which went into hiding.

At the time of the Muslim conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries, groups like the Yezidis and the Ahl-i-Haqq were formed. They presented more or less acceptable doctrines to the Arabs, who could not understand the subtleties of Persian spirituality. There was relatively little forced conversion of Nestorian Christians, whose beliefs were substantially compatible with the teaching of the Qur'an. Our main concern is with the third group, who withdrew into central Asia. This is the group that corresponds to Gurdjieff's account of the Sarman Brotherhood.

Gurdjieff himself makes no attempt to explain the migration. In writings of his adventures with Pogossian, the "Sarmoung" Brotherhood is located in Chaldaea. In the story of Prince Yuri Lubovedsky, they have moved to central Asia, twenty days' journey from Kabul and twelve days' journey from Bokhara. He refers to the valleys of the Pyandje and the Syr Darya, which suggest an area in the mountains southeast of Tashkent. He discloses at the end of this chapter that this particular brotherhood had another center in the Olman monastery on the northern slopes of the Himalayas. The word Olman is a link with Olmantaboor, who was the head of the Assembly of the Enlightened. The northern slopes of the Himalayas connect with the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers.

We must now closely examine the slender clues that Gurdjieff has left us to reconstruct the teaching that he found at the monastery between the Amu and Syr Darya rivers and that was described both directly and obliquely in Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Gurdjieff provides us with no direct information about what he learned during his three-month stay at the Sarman monastery. For a man as quick in perception as Gurdjieff, three months is a long time, and he could have acquired all that the sheikh chose to make available, once he was accepted there. He does not make it clear, by the way, how long he remained after the departure of Prince Yuri. Reference in another place to a two years' stay at a sanctuary in central Asia may refer to the same place. In any case, he leaves the reader in no doubt that his contact was of the greatest importance to him and that he learned secrets of a different order of significance from those he found in the various Sufi communities he visited.

By drawing attention to the "apparatuses" used to train priestesses, Gurdjieff fixes in the mind of the reader the central importance occupied by the "Law of Sevenfoldness." These apparatuses were of very ancient workmanship, made of ebony and inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Since ebony was brought from Africa and mother-of-pearl from India, this suggests that such an apparatus represented a synthesis of Semitic and Aryan teachings. Associated with the apparatus were plates carrying the pattern of the message to be conveyed. The plates were of gold, and they and the apparatus were of great antiquity. They had a vertical column to which were fitted seven movable arms, and each of these arms was provided with seven universal joints similar to those of the human shoulder. Each of the forty-nine joints and the ends carried a sign. The positions were read from the plates and were interpreted in the postures and gestures of the dancers. The dance thus became an utterance, the language of which was known to the brethren and enabled them to read truths placed there thousands of years before. There is no indication that the dances served any other purpose than the transmission of truths and Gurdjieff underlines this by comparing them to our books.

According to Gurdjieff, experts had determined that the plates were at least forty-five hundred years old. This corresponds to the date 2600 BC given in the Pogossian chapter for the founding of the Sarman Brotherhood in Babylon. It also agrees with the date given in Beelzebub's Tales for the Tikliamishian Civilization, which refers to the kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad in Mesopotamia prior to the Hittite invasions at the end of the second millennium BC. The dating would suggest the time of Sargon I, the first Semitic ruler. He did much to promote intercourse with other countries and, in his time, Kish, only thirty miles from Babylon, became one of the first centers of culture. Although Gurdjieff specifically associates Tikliamish with the Sumerians, he distinguishes between a legendary period—before the destruction of cultures by the dry sandstorms of die fourth millennium BC—and the historical period of the third and second millennia. The word Tikliamish, as so many others in Beelzebub's Tales, must be read both in an allegorical and historical sense. When definite dates are given and means of relating to known historical events are inserted, I assume that Gurdjieff intends the reader to undertake the historical research needed to elaborate the meager details he provides.

I asked Gurdjieff in 1949 whether some of the stories in Beelzebub's Tales were to be taken in a strict historical sense. He was most emphatic in his affirmation, saying, "Everything in Beelzebub is historical." He added that it is indispensable to seek for reliable knowledge of longpast events, not only to help us to understand die present, but because we are connected with the past and must learn to make use of this connection.

In all his descriptions of what he found in this and other monasteries, Gurdjieff makes no reference to any higher powers or to the control of energies that could produce external results in the world. It seems likely that if Gurdjieff had regarded the Sarman Brotherhood as the Inner Circle in the strong sense discussed at the beginning of this chapter, he would have said so or at least left some hint to this effect.

The episode mat suggests a widely spread influence is the story of Prince Yuri's invitation. He meets an old man in the house of the Aga Khan whom he suspects of being connected with a visitor who came to him in Russia many years earlier and set him upon the path of his subsequent search. The Ishmailis, of whom the Aga Khan is die hereditary spiritual leader, were then a widely spread brotherhood with remarkable influence in all parts of the world. Gurdjieff never mentions them by name, but he must certainly have met many Ishmailis in the course of his travels.

It seems to me that Gurdjieff neither expected to find nor looked for an Inner Circle of Humanity in the strong sense. He did, however, unquestionably believe in a traditional wisdom that is not preserved in books but in the experience of people. Indeed, die collection, preservation, and transmission of "higher knowledge" occupies such a central position in all Gurdjieff's writings and in his conversations with his pupils and friends that it would be absurd to suggest that he did not take it seriously.

What did Gurdjieff mean by "truths" transmitted from the past? He sometimes refers to true information about past events and the difficulty of finding it except through legominisms, to be interpreted by initiates. This information is necessary for subsequent generations to enable them to meet the difficulties that arise in the rise and fall of cultures, difficulties that people never believe will occur again because "the world is now different." Gurdjieff, on the contrary, believed that diere is a pattern of events that is destined to lead man along the path of evolution but is constantly disrupted by our own egoistic foolishness and "unbecoming conditions of existence."

In order to understand what is required of us, we must not only know ourselves, but also die "laws of world creation and world maintenance." Ashiata Shiemash is said to have given his disciples five principles of right life. They should strive:

To have in their ordinary being-existence
  everything satisfying and really necessary for
  their planetary body.
  To have a constant and unflagging instinctive
  need for self-perfection in the sense of being.
To know ever more and more concerning the laws
  of world creation and world maintenance.

To pay for their arising and their individuality as
  quickly as possible, in order afterwards to be
  free to lighten as much as possible the sorrow
  of our Common Father.
Always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other
  beings, up to the degree of self-individuality.

The third principle was certainly manifested in Gurdjieff's own life's search. From childhood, he had reached the conviction that, at different times in the past, men had made significant discoveries about the way the world works, and that these discoveries were subsequently, for the most part, lost or distorted. Since knowledge of man and the world is necessary for right living, a part of our own effort should be directed to rediscovering these laws.

I think it is fair to suppose that during his stay at the Sarman monastery Gurdjieff was brought into contact with the extraordinary system of thought that he represents with the aid of the enneagram symbol. I shall discuss the symbol and its significance in a later chapter, but here will only say that it makes use of the properties of the numbers three, seven, and ten in a way that makes its Chaldean origin almost certain. The Sumerians, or possibly their Semitic neighbors, the Akkadians, were the first to use an arithmetic based on the first six numbers, with sixty as the base, and to observe that the number seven would not fit into it. We are then taken back to the period forty-five hundred years before the present to which Gurdjieff attributes the formation of the Sarman Society. The science of numbers, in the widest sense, originated in Mesopotamia and developed over a period of four thousand years, from 2500 BC to 1500 AD. By this time, it had moved north into Sogdiana, that is, the region of Samarkand and Bokhara. We should have no difficulty in accepting the suggestion that the Sarman were founded in Kish by agreement between the guardians of the Aryan (Sumerian) and Semitic (Akkadian) traditions about 2400 BC, at the time of Sargon I. They moved to Babylon a few centuries later and became active during the most glorious, if not the most magnificent, period of Babylonian history, which was crowned by the reign of Hammurabi.

This period has remained in Middle Eastern tradition as the Golden Age of Peace and Justice. When it ended, the Sarman Brotherhood moved north to Khorsabad and only later returned to Babylon. The strange powers exercised by Nebuchadnezzar and his final breakdown may have been associated with a period of contact with the Brotherhood that was broken by the jealousy of the regular priests of Ishtar. The Sarmani may have, during this time, retired into the mountains and come forward much later when Cyrus the Great destroyed the Assyrian power and inaugurated a rare period of spiritual activity. This period included the return of the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity, the promulgation of the "new law" (Deuteronomy), and probably the incorporation into the beliefs of the Israelites the Babylonian account of the creation of the world and man. It included the time that Pythagoras and Epaminondas, two of the founders of Greek philosophy, spent in Babylon. The Achemenean Dynasty, founded by Cyrus, was the first since Hammurabi, thirteen hundred years earlier, to have a genuine spiritual basis, although unfortunately after a few generations very little remained. When Cyrus's grandson Cambyses conquered Egypt in 524BC and destroyed the center of culture that had existed there for thousands of years, he took into captivity all the technicians and artists who could serve to enrich and beautify Babylon.

Cambyses also took the priests and scientists—in those days the two were the same—whom Gurdjieff describes in Chapters 24 and 30 of Beelzebub's Tales. One very significant hint is dropped where it is said that "the highest school existing on earth at that time was found in Egypt and was called the School of Materializing Thought. Materializing of thought, or the creation of thought forms, is one of the principal techniques whereby events can be influenced and forces transmitted from one place and time to another. Gurdjieff refers to it in an earlier chapter in connection with the Society Akhaldan, which migrated to Egypt. The "sympathetic Assyrian," Hamolinadir, who discourses on the instability of human reason, was trained in the "school of materializing thought," but evidently recognized the uselessness of the acquisition of mental powers in the absence of an established set of convictions. This indirectly suggests that the Sarman Brotherhood had a more practical understanding of human needs than the Egyptian sages. This agrees with an often-quoted statement of Gurdjieff's that different kinds of schools have, from very early times, existed in different regions. "In India, philosophy; in Egypt, theory; in central Asia and the Middle East, practice."

This is not to say that the interaction of different cultural streams in Babylon, in the middle of the first millennium BC, was not highly significant. On the contrary, it was one of the turning points of human history, and its effects are still with us. Babylon continued to be the headquarters of the Sarman Brotherhood until the dispersal of 320BC. They then moved north again to avoid contact with Alexander of Macedón—that "vainglorious Greek" as Gurdjieff calls him—and the degrading Hellenistic period that preceded the time of Christ. Their role in the gospel drama is an unrevealed mystery, unless we associate them with the "wise men from the East" of St. Matthew's Gospel.

It seems that Manes, that remarkable prophet of the third century AD (born 216, martyred 276), was in some way associated with the Sarman Brotherhood, for, at that time, according to Gurdjieff's account, the Brotherhood was at Nivssi, which corresponds roughly to the ancient Nimrud, the modern Mosul. Manes was such an important figure in the transmission of the traditional wisdom that we must ask why Gurdjieff never mentions him by name. The Manichean teaching was upon all levels. Manes was the first to bring art and music fully into the service of sacramental religion. The liturgy of the Christian church created by Gregory and his school in Cappadocia was taken directly from the form of worship that comes from the Aryan tradition and is found with its fourfold ritual in the Avestan Gathas. It is probable that Manes drew upon Mithraic and Christian sources for his own liturgy. His ideas had a powerful influence in spite of his premature death.

All over Europe, including Britain, we can find evidence of the widespread penetration of Manichean ideas between the third and fifth centuries of our era. His influence spread northward across the Oxus into central Asia. When Gurdjieff was traveling in those regions in 1907, a Russian expedition to the center of the Gobi Desert discovered at Turfan a collection of manuscripts attributed to Manes himself and certainly emanating directly from his school. I have not been able to trace the translation of these manuscripts, which were published in Russia, but they must have been known to Gurdjieff, as they were highly relevant to his own research. According to the extracts I have seen, they contain teachings about world creation that have significant points in common with what we find in Beelzebub's Tales, particularly the doctrine of reciprocal maintenance. Now, Gurdjieff writes that this latter doctrine was rediscovered by a Kurdish philosopher in the fifteenth century. It was in an ancient manuscript, written by "some ancient learned being," which contained the hypothesis that "in all probability there exists in the world some law of the reciprocal maintenance of all that exists" Since this discovery is directly connected with the Assembly of the Enlightened, which I have suggested may stand for the Sarman Brotherhood, we have a possible link with Manes, who had lived twelve hundred years earlier in the region of the upper Tigris where Kurd Atarnakh is said to have been born. One could follow up such clues by the legion; they cannot be called evidence, and it was not Gurdjieff's purpose to "prove" anything, but rather to make the reader search and think for himself.

The conundrum Gurdjieff sets before us here is to account for the place of Manes in the esoteric tradition and to see if he was likely to be connected with the Sarman Brotherhood. Manes declared that, in two spiritual experiences at the ages of sixteen and thirty, he had been called to be the prophet of Christ sent into the world to bring about the unity of religions. He accepted the Pauline doctrine of the redemption, but he saw that much that was of vital importance to mankind in the teaching of Zoroaster had been left out of Christianity. In particular, the dualism of the worlds of matter and spirit—the idea that they have nothing in common—had entered Greek thought and been taken over by Christian theologians, and was evidently leading to the eventual collapse of religion. Manes saw that the Israelites, in taking over the doctrine of die Saoshyant or Divine Savior, had converted it into a quasi-political expectation of the Messiah who was to restore the kingdom of Judah. The more serious error has been that of dividing man on the same dualistic basis into an immortal, spiritual soul and a mortal, physical body. This false dualism, in spite of its obvious absurdity, has never been eradicated from Christian doctrine.

All this was clear to Manes, who seized the essence of the Zoroastrian and Mithraic psychology and succeeded in converting a very large following. Gurdjieff castigates the "Babylonian dualism" in terms reminiscent of Manes. An even closer correspondence is to be found between Gurdjieff's teaching of conscience and Manes' "call from Above," described in a manuscript discovered in Egypt and reputedly from his own hand. The "call of conscience" is the message sent by the good spirit, Ahura Mazda, to awaken man from his prevailing state of delusion.

Some connection between Manes and the Sarman is suggested by his life story, his teaching, the geographical location, and by the indication given by Gurdjieff that the society existed in Nivssi from the fourth to the tenth century. During the early period, Manicheanism was the accepted religion of the region between Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Caucasus until the rise of the Armenian power that dominated from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. Once again, we have the phenomenon of threefold preservation. One part of the Manichean heritage was directly assimilated into Armenian Christianity, which made it so distinctively different from that of the west. A second part migrated to the north. A third part went underground and reappeared later in the form of the Yezidi community and other sects that persist to this day as a spiritual force in die region. The interest taken in the Brotherhood by the Armenian monk whose letters were discovered by Gurdjieff and Pogossian in the ruins of Ani is a good indication that the Sarmani were not regarded as alien by the Armenian Christians as late as the twelfth or thirteenth century. They were, however, driven out by the "Byzantines" who, during the time of Paleologue II, erupted into Assyria and drove Assyrian Christianity into the mountains.

It is probable that the Sarman Brotherhood went across the Amu Darya in the twelfth century, at die time of the rise of the Khwajagan, with whom they must have had some link. They are not likely to have settled in the troubled region of Transoxiana, which was for two centuries to be ravaged by war, but further norm on the Syr Darya, where die almost limitless limestone caverns have been inhabited for the past ten thousand years. It is quite possible that the legend brought back by Helen Blavatsky of the hidden Masters living in the great caves of central Asia may have originated in stories of the Sarman Brotherhood. Gurdjieff (Meetings with Remarkable Men, p. 148) says that a brotherhood was "known among the dervishes by me name of Sarmoun." I should here mention a clue given in the name of the dervish Bogga Eddin, through whom Gurdjieff learned in Bokhara of the Sarman monastery. Gurdjieff invariably rendered die letter h as a g, for there is no appropriate h in Russian, Armenian, or Greek. Bogga Eddin would, therefore, have been Bahauddin; the founder of the Naq'shbandi dervishes was also a native of Bokhara. In Beelzebub's Tales, another dervish with the name Hodje Zaphir Bogga Eddin appears. Hence, the name is evidently derived from familiar Muslim names and should read Hodje Zafer Bahauddin. The combination of Hodje, which derives from Khwaja, and Zafer, which means conqueror, suggests that Gurdjieff wishes to contrast the outwardly successful Khwajagan with the hidden S arman. The "caves" in which Beelzebub meets the "last really great terrestrial sage," Khwaja Asvatz Troov, are probably the caves of the Syr Darya, which runs about two hundred miles to the north of the Amu Darya and is a part of Turkestan, with which Gurdjieff was personally familiar. The caves were accessible, as he describes them himself, by horse from Bokhara.

I think we should accept that Gurdjieff himself does wish to convey, in his chapter "The Bokharian Dervish," something of his own personal experience of contact with a source of knowledge. He disguises this source in various ways: first of all, in this Bokharian dervish chapter, by making the source an individual who was living in caves to the northwest of Bokhara; and, in the chapter on Prince Lubovedsky in Meetings with Remarkable Men, where he makes it a monastery to the southeast of Bokhara in the regions of the Pyandje River, which is one of the tributaries of the Amu Darya. The whole of that extraordinary country, which lies above the central plateau where Bokhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent are situated, is and has been for a very long time the home of a number of remarkable communities. There was a town called Sarmanjan or Sarmanjin, between Tirmidh and Balkh, which flourished from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries AD. This is the only reference I have been able to find to a place containing the name Sarman. It was visited by Chinese and Indian travelers, and it is just possible that it was the place of one of the Sarman monasteries at that time (W. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, 1958, pp. 73-4). In the midst of these communities, there are also monasteries of brotherhoods who occupy favorable situations so remote from the general movement of trade and travel that they may very well have remained undisturbed to this day. Reviewing the evidence I have been able to collect, I must admit that the very existence of a brotherhood with the name Sarman or Sarmoun remains speculative; but this does not invalidate the belief that there has been a very ancient tradition linking many different teachings, and that this tradition has, for more than a thousand years, been situated in Turkestan.

If we now proceed on the assumption that there has been a tradition that was for a very long time associated with central Asia, and that from time to time has spread outward into different parts of the world—north, south, east, and west, and that at other times has drawn back again toward the source, we have to ask ourselves the questions, What is this tradition? and What part has this tradition played in the general history of mankind? There are two points to be made: first, the generation of ideas, and, second, the generation of energy.

I will illustrate the generation of ideas by looking at the period of about 500 or 600 BC, when there was a profound change introduced into the thinking of people about the significance of the human individual. It had previously been held that immortality, giving unique significance to the individual human soul, was the privilege of the few, and that the many did not participate in this. This concept was clearly held in Egypt; it belonged also to the earlier Sumerian teachings. This is what I call the Heroic or Hemitheandric Age, when it was believed that there were beings on earth who were already half-divine and whose destiny was totally different from that of ordinary people. This, on the one hand, created a sense of security that there were such people who had higher powers, who had the ability to communicate directly with the gods, and that this was their chief privilege. In that sense, they were the descendants of the magicians or the shamans who were able right through that period to communicate with the higher or spiritual powers. But, on the other hand, this idea was capable of terrible abuse, as occurred when the privileged spiritual position was associated with despotic political power in the external sense. It reached the height of its wickedness with the Assyrian kings who dominated southwest Asia, and finally with Nebuchadnezzar and his immediate successors until they were overthrown by the Persians when a different regime was inaugurated.

It is true that in much earlier periods, for example in the time of Hammurabi the lawgiver, or in Sumeria, or in the time of the great Egyptian reformers, there were edicts protecting and safeguarding the welfare of the individual; but it still remained true that these privileges were conceded by the favor of the king or pharaoh or the representative of the gods, who alone had rights. No rights inhered in the people; but, chiefly because they were helpless, and were an inferior race, there was an obligation to protect them and see that they were not unjustly treated. So long, however, as it was believed that this was a grace conceded by the semidivine rules, there was always the possibility of its being revoked; the semidivine ruler himself could then become a ruthless despot, as happened a number of times in all parts of the world.

The new idea referred to arose in China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome about the sixth century BC, with such names as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Gautama the Buddha, the Mahavira, the Jain, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets of the Exile, Solon, Pythagoras, and other Greek philosophers. This extraordinary set of men preached the right of every man to find his own salvation, to look directly for his own completion. It was implied that the possibility of completion and liberation was inherent in every human soul. Hence arose the idea of the sacredness of the individual, which gradually emerged and has dominated the last two thousand years. However often we depart from it, and however much brutality and savagery there is in the world, we now have an attitude which is totally different from that which existed before about 600 BC.

We saw earlier that there was a contact between all these prophets and founders of the new religions, taking place, according to some, in Babylon, and according to others, in the city of Balkh in northern Afghanistan. At any rate, there was some kind of concerted action by men of wisdom and foresight to introduce a new mode of thinking into the world. Whether or not we accept this as historical fact, it does represent a way in which we can look at the working of the Inner Circle of Humanity. If there is an Inner Circle of Humanity, this is how we should expect it to operate. The point here is that, at the time these events occurred, they were insignificant as compared with the greater political events that were taking place in the realms of conquest, and of opening up of trade routes, of the scientific and technical progress that so marked the period between the twelfth and seventh centuries BC. These new ideas that were injected into the world were, at first, accepted only by small groups, but they gradually began to spread, partly by force of the ideas themselves and partly by the strength conveyed by the transformation of the people who were responsible for spreading them. This is why the entry of new ideas has always been accompanied by a religious and spiritual revival.

Those who study the origins of the great religions generally direct their attention primarily to the message and manifestation of the founder, to the activity of the apostles who were left behind to spread the message, and to the subsequent social and political activities that made the message effective. Conventional history regards the takeover of Christianity by the Roman Empire, the launching of Buddhism by King Asoka in India, and the success of the Abassid caliphs in establishing Islam as a world power with its center in Baghdad as the important milestones in religious thought.

But these accounts of the origin of religions miss one essential point: that the transition from the activity of a small, esoteric group to that of a great public organization, a church, is made possible because a certain kind of energy is at work. This energy is required to be concentrated, and must be controlled by those who understand how it is to be channeled. This we dimly suspect when we see the martyrs and early apostles of the great religions—when we see what they were able to do and how they were ready to suffer for the cause for which they stood. However, we tend to regard this as a personal matter, something which they did because of their own faith and integrity. There was more to it than this, for they became centers for the production of energy of a very high level. Gurdjieff understood this very well. It is inherent in his approach to the problem of human transformation and of human history that there is an invisible action of the higher energies that makes the work of evolution possible.

Here we have to look again at this concept of an Inner Circle, not only as a source of new and powerful ideas that will eventually change the course of human thinking, but also as the generator of high-level energy. Gurdjieff, in Beelzebub's Tales, and particularly in the first book, says categorically that the role of man on earth is to be an apparatus for transformation of energy; that certain energies that man has to produce are required for cosmic purposes, and that those who understand how these energies are produced are the ones who truly fulfill the purpose of human life.

This brings us back again to the question of whether Gurdjieff himself was in contact with people who not only understood energy transformation but practiced it at a high intensity. Everything he has written in his books indicates that he not only believed this to be man's destiny but also that he had learned a great deal about the practical methods and the practical significance of this energy transformation. If this is so, it is probably the most convincing evidence that Gurdjieff did come, during his travels in the East, in contact with a higher source. We can identify this source with what we may call either the Masters of Wisdom or the Inner Circle of Humanity. It does not mean, of course, that he reached the innermost circle of this source; but it shows that he had access to the essential teaching and was able to draw upon the methods emanating from it. We must ask whether the belief in energy transformation is something characteristic of Gurdjieff's system or whether it has a wider range, for example, in the great religions of the world.

There is an old Christian doctrine of the transfer of merits. According to this, an individual who has already reached a certain degree of sanctification can, either by his or her prayers and austerities, or by the purity of his or her life, be a means for helping those who cannot help themselves. In the first method, the monk or nun can help sinners toward repentance even without their knowledge and perhaps even without their own wish. The second method is a means of transferring effectual grace, by which the work of sanctification is possible to those who are at an earlier stage in their spiritual evolution. Similar beliefs are held in India and in Buddhism, where it is particularly taught that it is sufficient to enter into the darshan of a sanctified individual to receive permanent and enduring help in one's own spiritual progress. Similarly, in Islam, there is the doctrine that the simple contact, sohbat, with a man of a high level of spiritual development is sufficient to bring about a transformation of the fortunate person.

These doctrines, however, do not give the same interpretation as Gurdjieff gives to the mechanism by which this help is transferred. As taught by Gurdjieff, the transfer is by a particular substance or combination of substances that are generated by the being who is already more fully developed and can be transmitted to others. In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, this substance is liberated by the work of conscious labor and intentional suffering; these are the same qualities taught in religion: work, austerity, sacrifice, and prayer.

The question is whether Gurdjieff himself had access to a source or generating center for such energies. About this he says nothing very specific, but he told me in 1923 about those who were able to produce a certain substance that could help individuals accomplish in their work what they could never accomplish by their own unaided efforts. He said that those who had this power were regarded as "a special caste of the Inner Circle of Humanity." It is interesting to compare this with the belief of Christian Monasticism that it is possible under certain circumstances for this transfer of merits to take place. Again, particular monasteries or orders exist whose work is directed specially to praying for others, and particularly for those who recognize and know themselves to be sinners.

Similar doctrines are present in different traditions throughout the world. The difference is that Gurdjieff appears to have come across some concrete evidence of the way in which this process works, and even to have learned himself how to generate such energy. He used to speak himself, for example, about what he called hanbledzoin, or the life energy of the second body, the kesdjan body of man. He also called it the blood of the kesdjan body. He referred to himself as being able to produce this hanbledzoin in quantities that were in excess of his own needs for his own spiritual development. It could, therefore, be lent to others. Sometimes, when people could not perform the difficult tasks he set them, he would tell them to "draw on my hanbledzoin and you will be able to do this work." In that sense, Gurdjieff held himself out to be a source of higher energy upon which people could draw. He also, though not so specifically, referred to himself as being in contact with a higher source, and said that by drawing upon this higher source, the work for which he was responsible would be able to spread and gain strength in the world.

In one very remarkable conversation, a few months before he died, he referred to this in a cryptic but unmistakable manner. He said that at this time an organization of a higher order was being established in the world that would be able to accept only those who had reached such a stage of spiritual development that they were able to generate higher energies. Those who were able to communicate with and draw upon this organization would themselves have to be able to participate in this work of generating and transmitting higher energies. He certainly did not refer to this organization as being of his own creation. He spoke of it in an objective way, as something that was being done of which he was aware and with which he was associated, but not in a central capacity—not as the leader or originator. I think he wished to convey to us that we should, after his death, have the opportunity, if we were prepared and able to work as required, to become connected ourselves with this source and in turn to become a means for the transmission of this higher energy to those who require it.

I have left to the end of this survey the most significant reference to the way in which the Inner Circle is said to operate. This is by the Fourth Way, mentioned many times in Ouspensky's book but not once in any of Gurdjieff's own writings. Gurdjieff gave a special meaning to the word "way": namely, the transformation that leads a man from the Outer Circle to the Inner Circle. Most people are familiar with the Buddhist marga, which is the path of liberation, but the Noble Eightfold Path is entirely different from Gurdjieff's Fourth Way. The contrast lies precisely in the absence in Buddhism of an Inner Circle of Humanity doctrine. The Fourth Way would have no meaning if there were not an Inner Circle to which it leads. Even more important is the reverse notion that the Fourth Way alternates between activity and repose according to the decision of the Inner Circle as to the needs of mankind. If this is accepted, we are involved in a fairly strong version of the Inner Circle hypothesis. Those of us who in the early 1920s accepted Gurdjieff and Ouspensky as our teachers had no doubt that we were entering a Fourth Way school. Our only doubt was whether we were sufficiently prepared for the opportunity.