Part of the Casswiki article series Books
Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ is the third volume, however incomplete, of the All and Everything trilogy written by G.I. Gurdjieff, first published privately in 1974. The All and Everything trilogy also includes Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950) and Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963).
The book contains a foreword by Jeanne de Salzmann, a prologue, the author’s five “talks” (delivered on five nights starting 28 November 1930 and ending 19th of December the same year) and a final essay entitled “The Outer and Inner World of Man”. The book is unfinished.
In its Foreword by de Salzmann:[1]
“My last book, through which I wish to share with other creatures of our Common Father similar to myself, almost all the previously unknown mysteries of the inner world which I have accidentally learned.”
Gurdjieff wrote these words on the 6th of November, 1934, and immediately started to work. For the next few months he devoted himself entirely to working out his ideas for this book.
Then suddenly, on the 2nd of April, 1934, he completely stopped writing.
One is bound to ask: why did he abandon the project at this point and never return to it again?
Why did he leave this Third Series unfinished and apparently give up his intention to publish it?
It is not possible to answer these questions unless one has been oneself engaged in the intensive work which Gurdjieff undertook in the last fifteen years of his life with a certain number of pupils, creating for them day after day the conditions necessary for a direct and practical study of his ideas.
He let it be clearly understood, on the last page of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, that the Third Series would be accessible only to those who would be selected as capable of understanding “genuine objective truths which he will bring to light” in this Series.
It is very possible that Gurdjieff was going to discuss about a “man without a soul”, mechanical man, or using C’s terminology, Organic Portals.
Further readings
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References
- ↑ Gurdjieff, G. I. Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’, p. ix-x. New York: Penguin Compass, 1999.