Gurdjieff International Review

The Human Place

An Interview with Pauline de Dampierre

Much has been written about a certain spot in Paris where a kind of inner fire was kept burning throughout the dark days and nights of the German occupation. In a small and crowded apartment in the rue des Colonels Renard, a strangely assorted group of people met nightly to listen with absorbed attention to an Armenian Greek named Gurdjieff, to eat the amazing meals he cooked for them, and to hear read aloud the still-unpublished Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson.

Pauline de Dampierre was one of the circle. She was a young attorney who turned journalist after the war was over; but like many another of the gifted young, she was not destined to follow either of the careers she had originally chosen for herself. Her meeting with Gurdjieff was definitive. After it, her professional work continued only as a means for living and a ground for self-study. After Gurdjieff’s death in 1949 and until the present, she has continued, in company with others of that same circle, the process of work on his teaching, for herself, and with the many new people who have come asking to know more about the enigmatic Master and the ideas he expressed.

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PARABOLA: I have been very much interested in the definition at the end of the introduction to Gurdjieff’s book, Meetings with Remarkable Men. He says, “He can be called a remarkable man who stands out from those around him by the resourcefulness of his mind, and who knows how to be restrained in the manifestations which proceed from his nature, at the same time conducting himself justly and tolerantly towards the weaknesses of others.”

PAULINE DE DAMPIERRE: Yes. He can be just in front of the weakness of the other, because by having learned to contain his own manifestation, he knows what he is; and he knows what the difficulty is. There is a Zen story that I think illustrates this very well. A blind man was listening to a conversation going on near him, and suddenly he cried out: “Oh, what an extraordinary man! I have never heard anything like it!” When he was asked what he had heard that was so remarkable, he explained: “You know that blind people always develop a very fine sense of hearing. Now, in my entire life, I have never heard someone congratulate another for some good fortune without hearing in his voice at the same time a note of jealousy; and I have never heard anyone sympathize with misfortune without hearing in his voice a shade of superiority or of satisfaction because he himself was spared. But in the voice of this man who just spoke, when he spoke of happiness I heard only happiness, and when he expressed sorrow, I heard nothing but sorrow.…”

The man he had listened to was in fact a monk, a great Buddhist saint. Maybe you could say he was a “whole man.”

But I don’t mean by this to say that only people who reach this degree should be called “real”; because between the fully realized man who has attained the greatest development possible, and the ordinary contemporary man—“a slave entirely at the disposal of tendencies which have nothing to do with his true individuality”—there is room for another category of mankind: those who search for a way toward truth. In other words, one might say that these are people who have discovered a truth in the words of the blind man that goes far beyond a mere clever observation, which concerns them very deeply. They have seen that these almost unconscious states of feeling into which they let themselves fall are just one aspect of a much more serious problem—a fundamental problem, basic to their whole life. So they have decided to put everything they have into confronting it.

How do you feel the “whole man” relates to the idea of sin?

What interests me is what is at the source of what we call sin. Usually we see sin as a manifestation of a certain intensity, or as an action which is exaggerated, bad, harmful. But what is at the source of that action? Compared to the source, the action is only an excrescence—something that bursts through from an undercurrent which is always acting in human beings.

The undercurrent of tendencies from which these impulses arise is a part of the whole man.

These are motivating forces?

Usually these tendencies have a much greater influence on our behavior than we imagine. They are always moving, and they are at the root of what has been called our automatism. If a person were to stop all his outer and inner movements at a given moment in order to see what is acting in him, he would nearly always feel a tendency which has about it something narrow, something heavy, something with a negative aspect that tends to be against, to be egoistic. All that is usually going on unseen. But if he tries to awaken to what is going on in himself, to be sincere, he will be able to witness, in addition to what could be called the “coarse” life in him, another life of another quality—much subtler, much higher, lighter—that is also a part of himself. The contact with this other quality of life helps him to have a quieter presence, a deeper vision. And he feels an urge at that moment to be open to a quality of this sort that would have a force, that would be a center of gravity. He begins to search for a way to serve what he feels would be his real being.

Then he begins to really know that if he lets his attention, his interest, to be taken by his automatic tendencies, it deprives him of contact with that other source of life he is searching for. It could be said that there is a continual tendency to sin, in that sense. When these sins are spoken of as deadly, it means that these tendencies—if they are allowed to rule—at every moment deprive the human being of the possibility of turning towards this real life.

When you speak of this undercurrent, do you mean the passive?

Passive.… To let oneself be continuously led by these automatic, nonconscious tendencies is indeed to be passive. And when a person is passive, the automatic begins to take the initiative, to direct him. When he turns towards something else.…

When he makes a contact between the two?

Yes, then the undercurrent is able to play its normal role—its very necessary role.

Without a search, is there any sin? Is there responsibility without an aim?

It is often said that man in his state of illusion about himself is not responsible, and perhaps in that sense it could be said that there is no sin. But to what extent is he absolutely not responsible?

Is he held responsible at some level?

What we know is that every time we let ourselves go strongly into one of these tendencies, the tendency is strengthened. After a time it becomes very difficult to be free of it. It is in that way I see that one pays for his actions. And what about the harm that has been done to others through us? It is a very serious question.

I’m interested in what you say about these tendencies being natural. If they are natural tendencies, always there as an undercurrent, what are they there for? And what is the difference when they are there as an undercurrent and when they are acted out? Do they become sins only when they are expressed?

One can feel these tendencies as inescapable parts of one’s nature which to a certain extent bring data about oneself and the external world. I have to sustain my life. Many demands come to me from external life and I must sustain my outer life with the ego—as I am, I have nothing else. So it is through these tendencies that the ego is informed.

Take anger, for example. With a little vigilance, it is possible at the beginning of a movement of anger to surprise in oneself the sudden, short upsurge of an instinctive impulse that tends to immediately reject whatever is irritating us, making us suffer. This impulse is necessary—how could we get along without it? We would be inert—we could let our hand stay in a fire without reacting.

Take envy. There exists a law according to which when two masses of unequal size are near one another, the larger provokes a tension in the smaller. I should add that I know nothing about physics and do not know if this law prevails in that domain. But it is indubitably among the psychic influences that act on us, whether we like it or not. Very probably it is thanks to this law that the child instinctively educates itself, seeking to imitate an older person. He admires him, wants to be like him, wants to draw his attention, and if he doesn’t succeed in doing so, he is frightened. For adults, it is exactly the same.

And pride—don’t we teach a child to be proud of his successes, of his strength? Lacking this pride, he wouldn’t respect himself and wouldn’t make himself respected by others.

In a way each one of these tendencies is there to sustain my life at a certain level; they are necessary and healthy. But if I live with them alone, I am an animal. A human being has to stand in between and not allow himself to be taken by these things; not to let them raise opposition and justification. For this he must not let himself identify with them, and this means he must not let them make him forget the one and only thing important for him.

These sins, then, are engines of the ego? They drive the ego?

I would even say that they are engines of our nature, because we can always find these tendencies acting in us. But if one can see them, one can be informed by them instead of being blindly taken.

You were speaking of the ego.… On the portals of certain cathedrals, one can see sculptures representing the vices and, above them, sculptures of the virtues. But between the vices and the virtues, there is something intermediary. And this is not shown. In fact, what remains hidden in the middle is man’s wish to be sincere, to try to understand the meaning of his life. But for this, the underlying current must be perceived, and respected. Then the virtues take on form on their own. It isn’t necessary to seek them directly. They appear.

The rest of the time, it is ego speaking. There is no other alternative.

These virtues do not judge, do not reject, have no violence. They emanate; they radiate. Certain exceptional human beings prove that this is so, and even in someone who is very far from that, the existence of such a possibility can make itself felt.

In a way, it is like saying that only a person who knows fear can be courageous. There is no need of virtue if you don’t have vices!

What is vice? There are many ways to look at the subject—psychologically, analytically, theologically. I have no intention of adding to what has already been said along these lines. I simply want to emphasize one aspect that is rarely brought to light: the role of an inner search in relation to these underlying tendencies. Then the “vices” become simpler. You don’t so much think of them as bad, but you feel strongly, painfully, that they are harmful to what you are searching for. They are there and you don’t allow them to take too much place. You don’t reject them, but you don’t let yourself be engulfed by them, either. Through this process, something can be developed in us.

That brings a note of hope—and it bears on our earlier question about why the undercurrent is there.

What is important is to begin to be able to hold oneself at the source. I heard during my Catholic upbringing that even a saint sinned seven times a day. But I would say that the tendency to sin is at every second.

And it is not one’s fault that it is there?

It is my human place. The power to act is in the body. The wish for evolved being comes from another source. And the two parts must meet. They do not often meet by accident; they meet only when something is acknowledged and held in respect.

These impulses, then, if held at the source, can actually contribute to a continued sense of presence?

My sense of presence will only be real if I take these impulses into account. I may try to open only to something higher—perhaps it is possible in a posture of meditation, but even then not so easy. But the moment I begin to act these impulses are necessarily there, and must be taken into account.

Unquestionably, they have enormous force. It seems that something else of an equal force needs to be there. One can be aware of one of these impulses for a moment, and suddenly be swallowed by it. And then it is the only thing there.

I would say that what is needed is not an equal force but another kind of force, more subtle, more active. As in chemistry, one can take a stone and introduce a very active substance and the stone will dissolve. Well, the wish to be can be very active.

In fact it is not possible to experience an opening towards more freedom without obedience toward something higher. A human being has no other possibility. He may think he can be free, but he is either obedient and submitting to this higher, or a slave. But when he submits willingly, he may receive something of such a high quality that he will no longer be attracted to what enslaves him. Every time we are attracted, we think we find life in that attraction. But at the moment of submitting to this finer force, we feel life of such another kind that we are no longer tempted.

There is a very strong relation between the action of these tendencies and a certain automatism of the body. Of course, we all know how easily tempted we are by physical satisfactions—resting, moving about, food, sexual attraction. But what I’m speaking of is much more hidden, insidious, almost beyond uprooting by ordinary means. It’s a question of a certain “coarseness” inscribed in the body by everything that we have experienced, by the way in which we have allowed ourselves to be led along by these impulses. The body is accustomed to this heavy functioning even if outwardly it seems extremely light and free. The very texture of the body favors these impulses and is reinforced by them. It’s a vicious circle. When there is an opening to something higher, the body quietens, and begins to be impregnated with something more subtle. It finds a kind of inner behavior much more in accordance with this opening. And in that way these tendencies begin not to have such a strong action on the person.

What is the place of feeling, here? Does feeling have no action at all? Is this a struggle only between the head and body?

It is said that we have almost no contact with real feeling. Our emotions are very egoistic. There is no love in them. They always turn me to something other than what is there. When we feel emotions, there is a vibration so quick and tempting that it is difficult to resist. We always think it is our feeling, but it is not our feeling—it is our emotionality. If you observe yourself at that moment, you will recognize that that emotion is not yourself. You have no liberty; you are absolutely engulfed. Yet there is this mysterious power in the human being—to turn also towards a something else in himself that may be very weak, nearly inaudible, but of another quality that he respects more. One could say that real feeling appears at those rare moments when what is happening in the individual is of such quality that his only wish is to be able to remain there, and to serve it as best he can. It is only then that he has a positive feeling of the moment, with no wish to be somewhere else.

There seems to be a sense in which the impulses of envy, avarice, and so on seem to have to do with the future or the past—with images of something that I want, and fear that I will not be able to have. I am taken out of the present moment by wanting to insure something for the future. Do you think these impulses are based on fear?

In our usual state, we have nothing real in us to rely on, so it is necessary for us to create projections and ideas, to have desires of all kinds. We have no aim that would feed our presence. Every real search is about that—to find a place in oneself one could serve, where being could grow and play its role. Then it gives sense to life. When it appears, true relationship begins among the parts of the individual. One sees better, one is clearer at that moment, one is no longer afraid of living. Even outwardly, something is more balanced. Without that, there is never an aim which brings me in contact with the sense of my destiny. But at that moment, no matter how briefly, I see that I am in contact with the aim that I’ve sought. I know what to place my confidence in.

We are almost forced, then, to imagine some kind of reality for ourselves, because we are not in touch with a true reality. We have to create some sort of world to live in.

I would say that we haven’t been taught that we could be open to the growth of a reality in us. It is a great discovery to touch something real and tangible in us—it is the goal of all the traditions, to help the individual toward what is real in him.

There is very little in our society that lends support to a search of this kind. Why should anyone believe you when you say that something more is possible for human beings?

These ideas seem quiet alien, it’s true. Today, however, several great currents of spiritual search are trying to give them new reality.

For my part, I would say that one of the most remarkable aspects of Gurdjieff’s thought is that it allows us to start from where we are—from our mortal sins, one might say, or more simply from our predominant faults. It casts a vigorous, surprising, light of truth on our multiple weaknesses, our prison. And it shows us how to listen to another voice, enter into contact with another reality.

How to be touched? One can be deeply touched by contact with someone who has begun to develop this in himself. Or special events can happen in life—a great happiness, a great sorrow, an impression of nature, of sacred art of the past—that can give an extraordinary feeling of much more life in us, much finer, much broader, as if the horizon were opening.

It gives us a taste that life should always be like that. It doesn’t happen often and it comes through events outside of us. But the longing for it is always there. For we are speaking of a human need—the need that makes us alive.

To feel it is to feel that it is true and must be searched for.

A real search is a preparation for an opening to the taste of that life. Gaining knowledge of everything that opposes it is the first step on the path. And it is a great adventure.…