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This brings us to one of Gurdjieff’s concepts about Work, where he says, essentially, there are three lines of Work. There is Work on oneself; then there is Work with others, and then there is Work for the Work.

If we do struggle into that world of relationship, telling ourselves that we want to be real, so that means I have to expose myself. I can’t go around inventing all of these personages that jump out on stage and then play the defensive role that I hide.

There is a cute story in that direction. After I had spent the first ten days in a seminar–a very intense ten days with Mrs. Popoff, when I first met her and she introduced a host of new ideas and so forth, I was then 32-33. I had been reading the Tales since I was 17, but she was my first real contact. So, here I am at the end of these ten days, it was very hot, in the high 90’s, and everybody was soaking wet outside working, doing physical stuff. I had marvelous opportunities to see how privileged I thought I was, such as a doctor should not be doing this! I’m scraping paint off a porch. It was great. So, we come to the end of this ten days, I had this question. I thought, “I have to ask this important singular question.” So, I finally got my opportunity with Mrs. Popoff, and I said, “Mrs. Popoff, can you tell me what I can work on, specifically, clearly; give me some clear cut instructions?” She hesitated for a few moments and she said, “Well, I don’t know, Keith. Ten days is not a very long time, and you hide very well.”

I never caught up to that comment for months, maybe years. And, I finally said, “My God, that’s what she was talking about!” I hide very well in my professional life, in all of the personas that I assume, I had put right down in front of her. So, when she said, “You hide very well,” this was a real gift. Yet, I missed it for a while. Hopefully, I caught up with it. But, that’s what I mean. In relationship, we’ve got to be like that; we’ve got to care deeply about the future for others.

Three Lines of Work

This brings us to one of Gurdjieff’s concepts about Work, where he says, essentially, there are three lines of Work. There is Work on oneself; then there is Work with others, and then there is Work for the Work. So, there is in this a kind of compilation: Work on oneself involves a host of methods that are applied to the physical body, the emotional body and the intellectual body; the challenge of ideas, the challenge of the enneagram, understanding rule of law, of understanding so many of the concepts in In Search of the Miraculous and in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. That is, essentially, an intellectual exercise, although, it very quickly enters into other parts of us. You’ve got to get through the door with your mind, trying to understand ideas and concepts and so forth.

Then there is all of the emotional suffering that I do when you point out to me what a stupid SOB I’ve been. Then I have to work on myself. I don’t work on you. I have to suffer the recognition that I can really be a dumb ass, and I am–I am like this; Ok. What am I going to do about that? In my emotional world, I have to suffer that.

Then, in my physical body, there is not just scraping paint on the porch, but there is an arena, a magnificent arena of the Gurdjieff Movements and Sacred Dances, where the discipline in the body and what the body, then, begins to symbolize in the positions that the body assumes, one begins to symbolize ideas and relationships. Then, one begins to speak out words–love, trust, etc., while you are doing these movements. So, you reach a point where there is a compression of all three brains, and the physical body becomes the instrument in the expression of these ideas and these feeling states.

All of that has a large dimension of Work on oneself. But, when I’m standing in line in a movements hall, that’s Work with others, also. So, I have this Work on myself that I’m going through in the moment, but at the same time I am now aware of the people I am in line with. When we get into something like what is called a “multiplication exercise,” where suddenly the line moves in fragments back and forth, but changing each time it does this, you’ve got to be aware of your neighbor. Sometimes you have to help your neighbor; you have to move and say, “Are you lost? Well, follow me,” or whatever. But, you can’t do that, so you have to do it by simply being in position and sometimes hoping for that person. I’ve stood beside many people in line, when I thought I was really quite familiar with the multiplication, and the person next to me I knew had not done this multiplication before. And, you suddenly feel for them, you know; you want to do this together.

So, this is the second line of work. It is also when we sit in a group and share impressions. Let’s say they have been given a task for a week to make the effort every time with the first mouth full of food, when you sit down to eat, or when you flush the toilet, or a hundred other circumstances. Then, at the end of the week, you come together, say eight or ten people, and you share impressions on that: How often did I go to sleep? How often did I remember? When I did remember, how did I feel? What did I see inside of myself?

So, we begin, in that context, to help each other. When I see–and this has happened with me so many times–that somebody in the group would share an impression with such honesty something that I have in me that I haven’t been honest enough to share in the past. Suddenly they have reached into my world, and they forgive me because they speak about this part of their inner world.

This second line of Work, Work with others, also feeds back into work on oneself. Then, there is Work for the Work. There are many dimensions to this. For instance, with Mrs. Popoff, we would go once a month, regularly, down to a monastery nearby and clean up the garden and work to simply put it back in order, because the monks didn’t have time. They had many other responsibilities. So, we would go down silently, with never a comment on what we were doing. The monks simply saw us out there, and they did comment on it at first. But then, they just saw that we’d come back. We would be working in the garden and so on.

So, it is Work that is not for you and it is not for the group that is working, but it is for something outside. I hope there is an aspect of my work in writing books that this is not for me. Long after I am dead and gone, the books will be there, and maybe they will be helpful. Then they will be helpful in both first and second lines of work. And I hope, Work for the Work.

There are also many efforts; the effort to establish a school for young children. This takes a lot of group work and a lot of individual effort. So, you have the first and the second line dedicated into work for the Work, into the future of manifestation. So, work for the Work is a very broad arena. Talking about the three lines of work is one way to approach the question that you raised.