Gurdjieff's Father's Thoughts on Soul

and the wish to help one another.
Owing to his inherent capacity for finding inspiration in the beauty
of the details of life, my father was for us all, even in the most dismal
moments of our family life, a source of courage; and, infecting us all
with his freedom from care, he engendered in us the above-mentioned
happy impulses.
In writing about my father, I must not pass by in silence his views on
what is called the 'question of the beyond'. Concerning this he had a
very particular and at the same time simple conception.
I remember that, the last time I went to see him, I asked him one of
the stereotyped questions by means of which I had carried on, during
the last thirty years, a special inquiry or quest in my meetings with
remarkable people who had acquired in themselves data for attracting
the conscious attention of others. Namely, I
asked him, of course with the preliminary preparation which had
become customary to me in these cases, to tell me, very simply and
without any wiseacring and philosophizing, what personal opinion he
had formed during his life about whether man has a soul and whether it
is immortal.
'How shall I put it?' he answered. 'In that soul which a man
supposedly has, as people believe, and of which they say that it exists
independently after death and transmigrates, I do not believe; and yet,
in the course of a man's life "something" does form itself in him: this is
for me beyond all doubt.
'As I explain it to myself, a man is born with a certain property and,
thanks to this property, in the course of his life certain of his
experiencings elaborate in him a certain substance, and from this
substance there is gradually formed in him "something or other" which
can acquire a life almost independent of the physical body.
'When a man dies, this "something" does not disintegrate at the same
time as the physical body, but only much later, after its separation from
the physical body.
'Although this "something" is formed from the same substance as the
physical body of a man, it has a much finer materiality and, it must be
assumed, a much greater sensitivity towards all kinds of perceptions.
The sensitivity of its perception is in my opinion such as—you
remember, when you made that experiment with the half-witted
Armenian woman, Sando?'
He had in mind an experiment I had made in his presence many
years before, during a visit in Alexandropol, when I brought people of
many different types into various degrees of hypnosis, for the purpose
of elucidating for myself all the details of the phenomenon which
learned hypnotists call the exteriorization of sensitivity or the
transference of sensations of pain at a distance.
I proceeded in the following way:
I made from a mixture of clay, wax and very fine shot a figure
roughly resembling the medium I intended to bring into the hypnotic
state, that is, into that psychic state of man which, in a branch of
science which has come down to our day from very ancient times, is
called loss of initiative and which, according to
the contemporary classification of the School of Nancy, would
correspond to the third stage of hypnosis. I then thoroughly rubbed
some part or other of the body of the given medium with an ointment
made of a mixture of olive and bamboo oil, then scraped this oil from
the body of the medium and applied it to the corresponding part on the
figure, and thereupon proceeded to elucidate all the details that
interested me in this phenomenon.
What greatly astonished my father at the time was that when I
pricked the oiled place on the figure with a needle, the corresponding
place on the medium twitched, and when I pricked more deeply a drop
of blood appeared on the exactly corresponding place of the medium's
body; and he was particularly amazed by the fact that, after being
brought back to the waking state and questioned, the medium
remembered nothing about it and insisted that she had felt nothing at all.
And so my father, in whose presence this experiment had been
carried out, now said, in referring to it:
'So, in the same way, this "something", both before a man's death and
afterwards until its disintegration, reacts to certain surrounding actions
and is not free from their influence.'
My father had in connection with my education certain definite, as I
have called them, 'persistent pursuits'.
One of the most striking of these persistent pursuits of his, which
later produced in me an indisputably beneficent result, acutely sensed
by me and noticeable also to those with whom I came in contact during
my wanderings in the various wilds of the earth in the search for truth,
was that during my childhood, that is, at the age when there are formed
in man the data for the impulses he will have during his responsible life,
my father took measures on every suitable occasion so that there should
be formed in me, instead of data engendering impulses such as
fastidiousness, repulsion, squeamishness, fear, timidity and so on, the
data for an attitude of indifference to everything that usually evokes
these impulses.
I remember very well how, with this aim in view, he would
sometimes slip a frog, a worm, a mouse, or some other animal likely to
evoke such impulses, into my bed, and would make me
take non-poisonous snakes in my hands and even play with them, and
so forth and so on.
Of all these persistent pursuits of his in relation to me, I remember
that the one most worrying to the older people round me, for instance
my mother, my aunt and our oldest shepherds, was that he always
forced me to get up early in the morning, when a child's sleep is
particularly sweet, and go to the fountain and splash myself all over
with cold spring water, and afterwards to run about naked; and if I tried
to resist he would never yield, and although he was very kind and loved
me, he would punish me without mercy. I often remembered him for
this in later years and in these moments thanked him with all my being.
If it had not been for this, I would never have been able to overcome
all the obstacles and difficulties that I had to encounter later during my
travels.
He himself led an almost pedantically regular life, and was merciless
to himself in conforming to this regularity.
For instance, he was accustomed to going to bed early so as to begin
early the next morning whatever he had decided upon beforehand, and
he made no exception to this even on the night of his daughter's
wedding.
I saw my father for the last time in 1916. He was then eighty-two
years old, still full of health and strength. The few recent grey hairs in
his beard were hardly noticeable.
His life ended a year later, but not from natural causes.