Gurdjieff’s “Medical Exercises”

Joseph Azize, PhD

rom Dean Borsh, his first tutor, G. I. Gurdjieff learned that: “the duties of a priest should be combined with those of a physician. He said: Just as a physician who does not have access to the soul of his patient cannot be of any real help to him, so also one cannot be a good priest without being at the same time a physician, because the body and soul are interconnected and it is often impossible to cure the one when the cause of the illness lies in the other.”[1]

Gurdjieff evidently accepted both duties: those of priest and physician, attending to the entire health and well-being of his pupils and clients, researching and innovating, ever developing his organic system of ideas and methods. As a physician, he employed exercises, medicines, massage, hypnotism, fasting, and divers means, including what he called “conjury.” Nick Putnam (a longtime American pupil) was cured of lameness, alcoholism, and a liver problem.[2] The literature is replete with references to Gurdjieff’s impressive healings and cures.[3] In the last fifteen years of his life, he had at least one assistant in his medical endeavors (Solita Solano) and taught some of his pupils this “conjury” and even more abstruse methods in his Aiëssirittoorassnian-contemplation or “contemplation like exercises.”[4]

Indeed, from one perspective, how Gurdjieff discharged his duties as doctor is less open to question than his fulfillment of the role of priest. Perhaps one could say that he accepted both charges as obligations of his being; and united them in his system: first, as a whole, but more specifically in the remarkable “medical exercises” which he taught during World War II.

His efforts in these two vocations, priest and physician, were invested, so to speak, in his pupils. As Gurdjieff wrote in Beelzebub, using the neologism “Zirlikner” for physicians:

These Zirlikners are those responsible individuals who voluntarily devote the whole of their existence to helping any being of that region to fulfill his being-obligations, if this being for some reason or other, or simply thanks to a temporary irregular functioning of his planetary body, ceases to be able to fulfill his inner or outer being-duty by himself.[5]

Thus, Gurdjieff said to Dorothy Caruso, who had long been suffering from cancer: “I can prevent pain and therefore prepare the ground for something else.” To this she added: “I know that he means a special work in which the tempo of the spirit will keep pace with the physical recovery.”[6]

For Gurdjieff, then, good health serves the purpose of fulfilling duties, and being a Zirlikner is not merely an employment but the vocation of responsible individuals who voluntarily devote not just substantial time and effort, but “the whole of their existence” (italics added). Those duties might be what Gurdjieff called Being-Obligolnian-Strivings. Further, Gurdjieff implicitly suggests that to be a good physician, one must be able to choose to be selfless. Gurdjieff said much about medicine and the healthy life, and though it would be a worthy study, my focus here is on his contemplative exercises undertaken in the interest of improving physical health or to treat illness.

The Medical Exercises

The avowedly medical exercises take three chief forms, although there may be others which I do not know of. The first is the method of “magnetizing” water, the second is in “sending help” to others through what Gurdjieff sometimes called a “magnetic chain,” and the third is a suite of three sub-exercises, each building on the one before, which his pupils called “The Medical Exercise.” These sub-exercises do not exist in a vacuum, but because they are less well known, I’ll venture only general comments here. They cannot, I suspect, be properly actualized unless one’s being has been prepared, in all three centers, by the requisite education, including the exercises which Gurdjieff taught before he showed these.

Gurdjieff sometimes provided pupils with a bottle of liquid that appeared to be water containing substances which he said were too fine for contemporary scientific instruments to detect. He claimed to have thirty-three “qualities of liquid” to dispense,[7] which suggests that he may have done different things to the water on different occasions, but so far as I am aware, details were never recorded. He also taught a method for “magnetizing” water. This method is still taught in some groups.

The principles of that exercise are consistent with those of his contemplative exercises as a whole: it requires a three-centered effort, with the conscious direction of attention. The exercitant has to be prepared, then divides his attention, collecting certain energies, and transmitting them to the water. The water has to be protected from the sun in a dark glass bottle and wrapped in rubber or something like a dark cloth.

Gurdjieff told the “Ladies of the Rope” the somewhat implausible story that he was at school when Galvani “invent electricity. Was holiday in school. Such excitement was for electricity. And from this I begin my doctor business. With leg of frog.”[8] Given that Galvani’s experiment was conducted in 1771, Gurdjieff must have been indulging his sense of humor in one respect at least.

But there is reason to believe that he was truly impressed by the discovery that a limb could be mobilized by an external impulse. Solano disclosed two examples of his facility with such impulses. First, probably in 1936, he had her stand by a window while he stood at a distance. He told her to relax and to let any part of the body move if it wished. Her head began to move from side to side and up and down, until: “a wide hot ray or wave struck my neck with force and moved down, then up my spine. Startled, I said, ‘Oh, you’re touching me!’ But Gurdjieff replied ‘No,’ his voice coming from the door.”[9]

Her second example is equally unprecedented and clearly relates to certain contemplative exercises he would teach within a decade and also provides a clue about the limits of what can be expected from the medical exercises. Solano brought him a woman with “creeping paralysis.” Doctors in London and Switzerland were unable to help and gave a prognosis of death within twelve months. She could walk, but with great difficulty, dragging her feet. Gurdjieff said that while he could not cure her because a “screw” was broken, he could save her life. Daily, for some unstated period, either Gurdjieff or Solano would give her unspecified injections, and: “he taught me how to treat her with a complicated electric machine that had to be polarized differently on different days.” Then, one day, when the preparation was done, Gurdjieff had Solano bring her in. The patient took a chair. Gurdjieff swiftly raised his arm towards her and commanded her to sleep. Then:

Her eyes closed at once. For perhaps three or four minutes he stood before her, passing his hands from her head to her feet, at the distance of two feet or less. Then he called, “Madame!” and she opened her eyes…. I went to assist her, but she rose from her chair and walked quickly to the door, to the front door, down the stairs and into the street. I caught up to her….

“I wonder why he didn’t do anything for me today.” … She did not know she had slept, she did not notice she was walking. In the taxi she scarcely spoke, left it without my aid (usually it was necessary for me and the chauffeur both to get her in or out of a car) and at her hotel she easily climbed the stairs.[10]

Note, first, the preparation; secondly, the use of hypnotism; and third, although the “complicated electric machine” with its mysterious polarizing action was integral to the preparation, the final and decisive treatment was the passes Gurdjieff himself made with his hands. From unpublished transcripts, we can be fairly sure that he was sending his own “hanbledzoin” or “blood of the astral body” into her. The woman survived for a further eighteen years. I would conjecture that this hanbledzoin, which he sometimes called “magnetism” (although his use of that term varied) was, for Gurdjieff, either a form of electricity or the manifestation of an analogous force but comprised of higher or finer hydrogens.

The same higher force is required in magnetizing water and among individuals attempting to produce a sort of “magnetic chain,” “network” or “web” linking each other together. I have dealt with the network exercise in Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises.[11] Especially relevant here is that Gurdjieff said energy sent through this chain could help someone who was ill,[12] and:

I have constated, I have witnessed it, that in groups which have done it, whenever someone was sick, (or) if something happened, being together cut through the illness like a knife … even with a seriousness illness, it is as if they were mutually magnetized. There are ten or fifteen magnetisms for each person. You see how strong the action is. All sicknesses go away in an astonishing way.[13]

The third type of medical exercise consists of the three cumulative sub-exercises I mentioned above. Again, venturing only a general description, I can say that together they form an individual work in which higher hydrogens are consciously elaborated, blended in a certain order, and sent to the ailing part, all assisted by a continuous prayer. It is a three-(or more)-centered effort in which a division of attention must be maintained.

Observations

I have often pondered the extent to and conditions in which the medical exercises can be effective. Perhaps their greatest value is for the development of the exercitant’s being. It is not easy to say much about this except that people who have worked with them have said they have found the results to be significant. For example, a number of people have told me that they have found the medical exercises effective for many conditions, ranging from the common cold to muscular issues. I have yet to hear of any case where the exercises had no effect whatsoever, even if the results fell short of a complete cure.

I learned by private communication of two remarkable cases in which magnetized water appeared to be curative. In one case, a baby of the age of about one month was, according to the physicians, about to experience the crisis of a certain prevalent illness among neonates. Someone went down to the hospital the night before and gave the parents magnetized water, which they administered. The next morning, the doctors were surprised to find that the baby was better. The expected crisis phase had not materialized, rather, the child had felicitously skipped that one and achieved recovery. In such a case, there can be no question of a placebo effect—not that placebos are to be despised.

In the second case, a person who suffered migraines was told that the water was “holy water” which had been blessed by a Catholic Patriarch. The cure was immediate. The patient could feel the migraine coming on, took the water, and the danger passed. It has, apparently, been a lasting result. Recently, I received this report (personal details omitted) from someone in one of my groups: “X’s surgery went well without complications and … is recovering nicely. I am convinced that the prayers and well wishes of others and those of us who did the medical exercise for X’s benefit have contributed substantially to X’s healing process. I continue to do the medical exercise for X on a daily basis.” Finally, I have been recently told that positive results, for both health and being-state, have resulted from an exercise related to the network exercise, in circumstances where people were living together for a period and able to meet in person.

So, I do not doubt that the medical exercises can be beneficial, but perhaps some conditions can only be mitigated. It may be that where a “screw” is broken, a new creation would be needed for a complete cure, and so the exercises cannot have sure physical results beyond a certain relaxation, consolation, and lengthening of life. After all, Gurdjieff did die with cancer, “gas,” and other conditions. But if all the “screws” are in place and only their mutual working is disharmonized, I cannot see where the limit should be. Of course, the healing effected by these exercises is not limited to the physical body, but then this is a much larger inquiry.

Yet, I cannot help but feel that the highest meaning of Gurdjieff’s medical exercises and methods must be found in the quest for self-perfection. All the ideas and methods arguably serve the purpose of developing real I (equally, one could say, to “manifest” real I, or use another formulation—it is impossible to be precise here.) And then, as Gurdjieff said, “behind real I lies God.”[14]

Why did Gurdjieff not leave behind him a school of medicine, as Steiner did? I would conjecture that, as a general principle, Gurdjieff contemplated that, as his students began to attain to being more conscious men and women, they would develop every science, craft, and trade in which they were employed simply because they were now more rational, less suggestible, and would desire to progress in whatever their vocation might be. His highest priority was not to teach them all he had learnt of medicine but of the “art of becoming,” so that they might make their own discoveries. I hope that what Gurdjieff brought in this respect will be developed by his pupils of the later generations. □

Joseph Azize is a priest in the Maronite Catholic Church, an Honorary Associate, Studies of Religion, University of Sydney and for twenty-three years was an attorney for the Commonwealth of Australia. He was a student of George Adie and Helen Adie after they emigrated to Australia where they formed and led a large Gurdjieff group. Having published a full-length study of J.G. Bennett’s visions, Joseph has begun research on Dr Maurice Nicoll. He is also preparing a volume which will feature exchanges with Helen Adie.