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The most important thing that Gurdjieff says over and over and over is, “you must verify this for yourself. If you don’t verify this in your own experience, it’s not worthwhile.

In this story, this man finds this deposit of great wisdom, this great food. He finds it in a very distant place. So, he draws out this very careful map of how to get from where he is then all the way back–he wants to bring this back to his people, to help them. Well, you know the rest of the story. He comes back and he draws up the map. Then people start asking him more details about the map. Then somebody, who is a professional cartographer comes along and says, “I could do a better job of that.” Then he draws a bigger map and a much more elaborate underpinning. The end result is that nobody takes the journey. Everybody sits down and wants to just study the map.

That’s the terror, really. Part of Gurdjieff’s terror of the situation is that we take the ephemeral for the real, and then we try to eat the ephemeral, and it won’t work.

The most important thing that Gurdjieff says over and over and over is, “you must verify this for yourself. If you don’t verify this in your own experience, it’s not worthwhile. You have eaten the map!” So, that’s it. In group work, it’s the same thing. Don’t believe anything that anybody puts forward here in the books or anything else. They are meant to simply open doors, to make you think. To say, “Here is an alternative way of seeing this. Have you ever looked at it this way? Maybe there are other ways of looking at it, but here’s a way of trying to appreciate experientially what this may be all about.”

When Gurdjieff is talking about a new concept of God, he has all these ways in: some of them physical, some of them psychological, some of them emotional, some of them . . . whatever. They are all roots and they all can be helpful, but only if you verify them for yourself.

This is part of what I meant by my rather constant references to Tchekhovitch (Tchekhovitch, Tscheslaw, Gurdjieff, a Master in Life: Recollections of Tscheslaw Tchekhovitch, Dolmen Meadow Editions, 1990) because in his stories, it’s all in the moment, now, what’s real. It always has a physical component, always an emotional component, always a thinking component, so it is whole. It is closer to reality, if you will because it is three-brained. If we have four brains, I suppose you have to get four brains into this.