28.07.08

Ouspensky and Gurdjieff the rapist

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:20 pm by nemo

A lot of ink has been spilled on Ouspensky’s break with Gurdjieff, in fact, whole books have been written, with a lot of backdated kitbitzing about how Ouspensky was some kind of betrayer of the cause, or that he should have persisted in the great teaching to the end, etc, etc…
The reality would seem a bit different. Consider this from James Webb’s The Harmonious Circle, p.384,

Orage’s explanation of the split is therefore of great interest. He always maintained that it was Gurdjieff’s near rape of Mrs. Y in1923-24 that finally decided Ouspensky. The date tallies and the scandal was of such proportions that the explanation is very plausible. If Orage were right this would explain Ouspensky’s obsession with Gurdjieff’s ‘integrity’ in his conversation with Boris Mouravieff after Gurdjieff’s crash, and why–out of loyalty to his teacher as a ‘member of the same family’ he refused to tell Mouravieff why he had decided to work alone.

Ouspensky suffered a great disappointment, and saw that the whole game was going to suffer failure and collapse, and he was right, although the immense proliferation of Gurdjieffianity he did not foresee.
The ‘work’ was a failed enterprise by 1924, and it is no use blaming Ouspensky.

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