Gurdjieff International Review

A Passion for Understanding

Notes from an Orage Group, New York, 1927

by Frederick Schneider

Edited with commentary by Allan Lindh

The material that follows is drawn from the notes and letters of Frederick Schneider (1883–1933), who was a student of A. R. Orage in New York in the late 1920’s. While Schneider’s notes overlap some of the material in C. S. Nott’s book Teachings of Gurdjieff and the C. Daly King book, The Oragian Version,¹ they have the advantage of being a contemporaneous report of Gurdjieff’s teaching—as transmitted by Orage—by a student who makes no pretensions of great understanding, but is simply attempting to record what he has heard and seen. In addition, this material is from the period when Orage was editing an early version of Beelzebub’s Tales, and thus may provide insights into Orage’s understanding of the book.

An interesting aspect of this material is the light it sheds on the apparent differences between the “food diagram” outlined by Ouspensky in Chapter 9 of Fragments and the description of human digestion in Chapter 39 of Beelzebub’s Tales. Schneider’s notes outline what appears to be a third version of this symbol, with some differences from the other two. It portrays the thinking, feeling and instinctive “minds” as each having a plus and a minus part, and describes the movement of attention among these six “centers” with and without the effort of self-remembering. These differences raise in a concrete form the question of whether such discrepancies are a consequence of a too literal interpretation of the diverse external forms by which an “internal teaching” has been portrayed.²

As to the material’s authenticity, there are two questions to deal with. First is the question of whether the original manuscript is genuine. Mr. Schneider’s daughter clearly remembers meeting Mr. Gurdjieff in New York as a teenager, and also remembers the letters her father sent from the Prieuré. Some of these notes are copies of letters by Mr. Schneider to an unidentified cousin, others are his brief summaries of lectures, and some contain references to other students, as if they were sharing their notes. There is no doubt in my mind that the old and faded carbons I worked from were Mr. Schneider’s copies of his own notes, and that he was a member of one of Orage’s groups in 1927.

However there is a second and much more difficult question, and that is whether Mr. Schneider accurately recorded Mr. Orage’s lectures. On this matter, people must exercise their own judgment. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”³ In addition, one should remember that in the third series of his writings, Mr. Gurdjieff discusses his trip to New York in 1931 and his public renunciation of the form of the Work that Orage had presented to his New York students.

Schneider’s original notes are rough and unedited, necessitating extensive cutting and rearrangement. Approximately 50% of the material has been deleted to remove redundancies, personal notes, and hopelessly obscure fragments. In addition, a very small amount has been added to clarify indefinite pronouns and the like, although I have chosen to preserve, for the most part, the agrammatical immediacy of the originals.…

[The complete text is available in the printed copy of this issue.]

Notes

¹ King, C. Daly. The Oragian Version, New York: Privately printed limited edition of 100 copies, 1951, 289p.
² “They do not consider that at that period ‘being-mentation’ among the beings of this planet was still nearer to that normal mentation, which in general is proper to be present among three-brained beings, and that at that time the transmission of ideas and thoughts was in consequence still what is called ‘Podobnisirnian,’ or, as it is still otherwise said ‘allegorical.’” Beelzebub’s Tales, p. 738.
³ Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616). Don Quixote, translated by Peter Anthony Motteux (d. 1718), New York: Modern Library Giant Edition, Part I, Book IV, Chap. 10, p. 322.