The Gurdjieff Journal—Fourth Way Perspectives

Book Review
Gurdjieff and Hypnosis:
A Hermeneutic Study

In his resolute and densely argued Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study, Mohammad H.(Behrooz) Tamdgidi admits to being drawn to the Work ideas, as he sees the need for an understanding that goes beyond mere "knowing." Recognizing that "alone [one] can do little," he attended a number of spiritual retreats (though, strangely, given his interest, none are Gurdjieffian). At one such retreat he suddenly "awoke" to its hypnotic influences. He uses this to justify his not joining a group because he must "maintain distance to avoid being trapped" in what he calls the "Yezidi circle" of hypnosis. Therefore he believes he writes from an independent scholastic stance, the unstated assumption that he is unbiased, and, of course, that he is not one of the hypnotized.

As an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, holding a Ph.D. in Sociology with a graduate certificate in Middle Eastern studies, Tamdgidi certainly has the scholastic credentials to apply a theory of interpretation known as hermeneutics to Gurdjieff's texts (oddly, he waits until the last page of his book to mention Gurdjieff's first writing, The Struggle of the Magicians, a ballet scenario which gives a many dimensional representation of the depth behind what Gurdjieff brought). Hermeneutics is an analytical approach traditionally used with the study of scripture, the intent is "both to conduct an in-depth textual analysis and to interpret the text using its own symbolic and meaning structures." His sole purpose, Tamdgidi says, is to "engage with Gurdjieff's life and teachings in his own terms . . . considering not only what is included but also what is excluded . . . as being equally significant." Further, he writes: "It is not a question of merely what is included and what not, but a question of where and when one or another data, thought, and idea is inserted inside a text. It is not that the data is necessarily omitted, but that it is omitted from this place and yet is then inserted in that place."

As to what Gurdjieff includes, that can certainly be known, but what is excluded and why is open to judgment. As to the way he wrote, he purposely used what is commonly known as a "salting technique" (not mentioned by Tamdgidi) by which he "buried the dog." Tamdgidi's main thesis is that Gurdjieff's writings "themselves were conscious, intentional, and systematic efforts in literary hypnotism." That the same might be said of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran doesn't seem to occur to Tamdgidi. But beyond that he misses Gurdjieff's saying that the ideas in All and Everything have three meanings and seven aspects. That the ideas are salted throughout the three series of books demands that the reader be active, not passive, toward the material and so, their intellectual intuition engaged, suddenly see the connections, thus being moved from what Gurdjieff calls the "reason of knowledge" to the "reason of understanding."

Given his careful exposition of the approach of hermeneutics, it is odd to see Tamdgidi regularly deviating from its strictures. For example, he references supportive material external to Gurdjieff's writings, such as Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, to address concepts such as the enneagram and self-remembering, but even more intellectually entrapping, introduces new words and concepts, such as a discussion of food "circuits." At one point he even proposes that The Herald of Coming Good and "The Material Question" are in fact books of the Third Series, hardly concepts presented in the material itself, and on the face of it rather laughable. No less so the idea that Gurdjieff was hypnotized by his father. This he attributes to Gurdjieff's adult understanding but it is pure Tamdgidi projection.