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[YinYang]

Gurdjieff Methods - Negative Effects on Students- Ignacio Darnaude

The methods and techniques employed by Gurdjieff in his teaching, especially the difficult physical and emotional demands he made on his students, adversely affected many of them. Some students experienced psychological breakdown, others the dissolution of their marriage. Gurdjieff was even accused of contributing to the suicide of certain students, although a causal connection was never ultimately proven.

As early as 1922, reports circulated in the press that Gurdjieff was a ‘black magician’ who hypnotized his students and caused them irreparable harm. The most sensational stories were more imagination than fact, but there is evidence from more credible sources that some of Gurdjieff’s followers experienced serious psychological damage. John Bennett was a student at Gurdjieff’s Institute at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau in 1923, and at the time witnessed an extraordinary state of tension there: “Some people went mad. There were even suicides. Many gave up in despair.” (2) In 1948, Bennett returned to study with Gurdjieff in Paris after an absence of more than twenty years. Again, the atmosphere surrounding Gurdjieff was charged and intense, with the effect being too powerful for many students. Bennett reports that several pupils were so shattered by their experiences with Gurdjieff that they required treatment in mental institutions.

Gurdjieff grew increasingly impossible, and the final straw was a terrifying experience when the couple were leaving Paris for New York in February 1929. Gurdjieff transfixed Jessie Orage with his gaze. He seemed to immobilize her, and she could not breathe; for a moment she was convinced that he was going to make her lose consciousness altogether. Then he spoke: “If you keep my super-idiot from coming back to me, you burn in boiling oil.”

In my own mind lies no longer any faintest doubt about Gurdjieff and his Institute. Signs of hoofs and horns are all over the place, and my deep and instant distrust, which increased with every day I spent there, find confirmation now wherever I turn. Much, of course, remains inexplicable, and will always remain so. Gurdjieff, with reason, is aloof and inaccessible, and the full truth of his motive we shall never know. That it is wholly a self or selfish motive, I am convinced . . . The note of fear, rather than love, is too conspicuous to miss.

Sufi teacher Omar Ali-Shah writes: “The amount of confusion and damage which was caused and still is being caused by Gurdjieff and his followers can be measured only in terms of human suffering and pain.”