Notes on Music and Artifice: Rolling Some Stones in Various Directions, Sometimes Uphill, part I

The search for a path through life

Detail from a Tantric painting, Rubin Museum, New York

Not so long ago, a friend of mine indicated that he felt the Gurdjieff music was composed, somehow, by "beings" — or perhaps being — from a higher level in someway that made it more special than other things.

I have other other friends, some of them musicians, who are in the Gurdjieff work themselves, and think that the music is fairly uninteresting and mundane.

The situation highlights how opinionated we all are, and also illustrates how confirmation bias affects people in general. Inside an organization such as the Gurdjieff work or its equivalent, everyone is expected to agree with one another. The cohesion of any community—which is essentially a tribal feature, despite how ”modernized“ we think we are—depends on people agreeing with one another on what are perceived as “the” essential facts.

What happens in confirmation bias is that everyone says "such and such is like this," and then proceeds, everywhere, they look, for evidence that supports that. Of course they find it; confirmation bias causes one to determine one in advance what is true and then paint all the walls of around them with that color. At that point, voila! The room is blue, just like we said it was. This particular disease is neatly illustrated by the way in which, for example, people imitate the language in The Reality of Being in order to reciprocally validate JDS, ”the ideas,”

…and themselves.

The Paris Gurdjieff Foundation is, I am told, not quite so enamored of the book. Consequently they don’t use it to prop their work up on stilts and refer to it like a bible the way some other groups do. The French no doubt feel this way because the (American, wouldn’t you know) editors fundamentally interfered with her notes by rearranging them into grouped remarks that were never originally juxtaposed with one another in essays. They have thereby perhaps avoided the confirmation bias which is… well, biasing, US groups.

Americans always think they can improve things by adding new features to them. I expect there will be a new issue of The Reality of Being in the future that says on the cover,