7

The Soil Preparing Exercise from the

Third Series

7.1  Introduction

The Third Series, or Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am,” was first published in
an edition of 170 pages, in 1975, by Triangle Editions, although the book was
printed by the firm E. P. Dutton. Apparently there was a second edition printed
in 1978. Although no copy is available to me, the 1981 edition by Routledge &
Kegan Paul is thought to reproduce the second edition.1 The 1981 edition seems
to most differ from the 1975 in that in it the final essay, “The Outer and Inner
World of Man,” is almost eight pages longer, but the foreword by Jeanne de
Salzmann is approximately two pages shorter.
Beneath the details of publication, the 1981 edition bears a note, the last sen-
tence of which reads: “This second edition includes the additional ten pages from
the end of the final chapter of the French (Paris 1976) edition.” Those additional
pages, numbering only eight in English, have been of great value in this study,
especially in understanding Gurdjieff ’s idea of Transformed-​contemplation, and
in dealing with the Color Spectrum Exercise. As there is no publicly available
collection of Gurdjieff ’s surviving manuscripts, there is no certainty that all the
material he wanted to include in this series has been published, even now.
Opposite the table of contents in each volume is found the following note:

No one interested in my writings should ever attempt to read them in any other
than the indicated order; in other words, he should never read anything written
by me before he already well acquainted with the earlier works.—​G. I. Gurdjieff

The paperback edition of 1999 published by Penguin Arkana, and first

published in the United States by Viking in 1991, is practically identical to the
1981 hardcover, except that it lacks a photograph of Gurdjieff, and beneath the
“No one interested” note appears this additional quotation from Beelzebub,
which was, one could infer, added to indirectly advise the reader to seek instruc-
tion in using the within material from first-​generation pupils of Gurdjieff (i.e.,
his personal pupils). It reads:

Gurdjieff. Joseph Azize, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064075.001.0001
138  Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises

[A]‌s regards the real, indubitably comprehensible, genuine objective truths

which will be brought to light by me in the third series, I intend to make them
accessible exclusively only to those from among the hearers of the second series
of my writings who will be selected by specially prepared people according to
my considered instruction.2

Who these people were was not indicated, although Gurdjieff did nominate
certain people as responsible for the promotion of Beelzebub, and he gave
indications that Jeanne de Salzmann was his senior pupil.3 Despite what appears
to be Gurdjieff ’s clear statement that the Third Series was to be kept private, and
used only under the direction of “specially prepared people,” de Salzmann wrote
the foreword for this book and had it published.
Although Gurdjieff had stated that the Third Series would be in four books,
the published book comprises only one volume, which is not even the size of any
of the three comprising Beelzebub. My own conjecture is that he had intended it
to be longer, but when he lost the assistance of Orage, he had to be less ambitious.
It is not certain that de Salzmann is correct in saying that the Third Series was un-
finished; although the longer version of the chapter “The Outer and Inner World
of Man” finishes in midsentence, this may be deliberate.4 It was advertised that
Life Is Real would “contribute to the arising, in the mentation and feeling of man
of an authentic and correct representation of the World existing in reality and
not that illusory one, which . . . is perceived by all people.”5 Some of its contents
do not seem to measure up to that, while some of the material does.
In the form we have it, the Third Series comprises a very lengthy prologue
of some fifty-​six pages, five talks totaling some eighty-​six pages, and a final
thirty-​five-​page essay, “The Outer and Inner World of Man.” Neither the pro-
logue nor the final essay is obviously connected to the five talks, which purport
to be lectures given in the United States to the former Orage groups. Some of
the material in the final essay is of value in understanding the rationale of the
Color Spectrum Exercise, and so is dealt with in Chapter 15. In this and the next
chapter, we shall chiefly be concerned with the third and fifth talks.
Some of Gurdjieff ’s chief biographers have made little or no use of the Third
Series, Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am.” Webb writes that the chapter on
“The Four Bodies of Man” that Gurdjieff had written for it was said to have been
destroyed by Gurdjieff himself, and says: “What remains of the Third Series is too
incomplete to give any real idea of Gurdjieff ’s intentions for the book.”6 James
Moore evinces a somewhat casual treatment of the book. His verdict on it was:

[He] breaks off “The Outer and Inner World of Man,” and jettisons his prom-
ised and eagerly anticipated revelations as to the Sarmoung Monastery and the
secret needs and possibilities of man’s body, spirit, and soul—​the very kernel of
 Soil Preparing Exercise  139

his esotericism. His own narrative freezes and the frame collapses—​Gurdjieff
simply disappears.7

Apart from the confected drama “Gurdjieff simply disappears,” to say that “the
very kernel of his esotericism” was lost is to display an incomprehension of the
exercises of the third and fifth talks. I note, too, that Taylor makes a fair argument
for seeing a deliberate ploy in the incomplete final sentence of this book, just at
the moment of promising to reveal a secret.8

7.2 The Talks

Taylor has shown the following:

1. The talks found in Life Is Real cannot have been delivered in 1930, as stated
there. If they ever were given, then the earliest plausible date will have
been 1931, but as some of those who were present in the groups Gurdjieff
purports to have addressed have no recollection of these talks, it is more
likely that they were not given as stated.9
2. In Life Is Real, Gurdjieff deliberately changes significant details, making
it impossible to align what he says with what is otherwise known of his
life. Bennett, who saw typescripts of the book, stated that these particular
chapters were marked as having been written in 1933.10
3. Gurdjieff probably last put pen to paper for Life Is Real in April 1935.11

Before coming to the Soil Preparing Exercise itself, some features in the
previous lectures set the stage for it. According to the headnote, the first talk
was “delivered by me on November 28th, 1930, with free entrance . . . [to] the
followers of my ideas.”12 There, Gurdjieff explains, inter alia, that at his Institute
for the Harmonious Development of Man, pupils were sorted into three groups,
exoteric or outer, mesoteric or middle, and esoteric or inner.13 The members of
the third group “were to be initiated not only theoretically . . . but also practically,
and to be introduced to all the means for a real possibility of self-​perfecting.”14
Significantly, he goes on to state that with the members of the third group: “[I]‌
intended to devote myself to the searching for means already accessible to eve-
ryone and to the applying of all that was learned thus and minutely verified for
the welfare of all humanity.”15 That is, as I have been suggesting, even while at the
Institute in the 1920s, Gurdjieff had not determined which methods were best
for his purposes.
The discourse continues in rather complex sentences, but Gurdjieff states that
the program he had prepared for the Institute pupils would have shortly been
140  Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises

put into practice, when he suffered his motor accident.16 He then sets out what
he considers to be central concepts in his system, the need to practice “self-​
observation” and to “remember oneself.”17 If one can work conscientiously and
with intensity, says Gurdjieff, a man need no longer remain what “in moments of
self-​sincerity he knows himself to be—​an automatically perceiving and in every-
thing manifesting himself domestic animal.”18
In the second talk, which is undated, and is said to have been addressed to
“a much increased assemblage,”19 Gurdjieff relates his view of Orage’s con-
duct of the US groups and requires each of those present to sign a document
declaring that they will have nothing to do with Orage or former members of
his group, excepting those whose names would be on a list of the members of
the “newly formed exoteric group.”20 There is evidence that there was such a
meeting.21

7.3  The Soil Preparing Exercise

We now come to the third talk, which purports to have been “delivered by me to a
pretty rarefied assemblage.”22 It appears that the previous talks had not been cal-
culated to inspire auditors to return. Gurdjieff states that if their gatherings were
not to be merely “meetings for collective titillation,”23 they should read the three
books of his first series, which he refers to as “An Objectively Impartial Criticism
of the Life of Man.” This is necessary, he says, so that they can achieve “prac-
tical attainments” as they are now “seriously striving to take in what you have
cognized . . . to [acquire] . . . your own real individuality, in order to manifest
afterwards in everything in a way corresponding to a Godlike creature.”24 Then,
painting a dire picture of their present situation, he avers that “even for you, eve-
rything is not yet lost.”25 They still have the possibility of entering “the new path
of ‘evolutionary movement,’ . . . [having] at least some data for the acquisition
of [your] own I.”26 For this fortunate result, Gurdjieff says, there are “seven psy-
chic factors proper to man alone,”27 but he shall now speak only of three. After
some lengthy comments, including a warning that to understand these words is
a subtle matter, he denominates the three factors as “can,” “wish,” and “the entire
sensing of the whole of oneself.”28 After elaborating what is meant by “I can” and
“I wish,” Gurdjieff states:

[T]‌he difficulty of a clear understanding of all this without a long and deep
reflection and, in general, the complication of the process of standing on
the right path for the obtaining in one’s common presence of factors
for engendering even the first three, from the number of seven, impulses
 Soil Preparing Exercise  141

characterizing genuine man, derives, from the . . . fact that, on the one hand,
these impulses can exist almost exclusively when one has one’s own genuine
I and, on the other hand, the I can be in man almost exclusively when he has
in him these three impulses.29

Gurdjieff now declares that he will teach them some of the exercises he had
intended to explain to the mesoteric group. For these exercises it is necessary,
he says, to concentrate one’s attention on three diverse objects for a definite
time, and to assist in this, he teaches a “soil preparing exercise.”30 The exercise
is, he states, but number four from a series; however, “on account of several
misunderstandings in the past” he has to teach them this one.31 There are many
such digressions in this book. The only discernible purpose for this tangent
would be to provide a trap for the curious. I set out the exercise in smaller and
numbered paragraphs for more convenient commentary:

1. First, all one’s attention must be divided approximately into three equal
parts; each of these parts must be concentrated on one of the three fin-
gers of the right or the left hand, for instance, the forefinger, the third and
the fourth, constating in one finger—​the result proceeding in it of the or-
ganic process called “sensing,” in another—​the result of the process called
“feeling,” and with the third—​making any rhythmical movement and at
the same time automatically conducting with the flowing of mental associ-
ation a sequential or varied manner of counting.

Gurdjieff then states that “sensing” and “feeling” are often confused, but that they
can be distinguished as follows:

2. A man “feels”—​when what are called the “initiative factors” issue from one
of the dispersed localizations of his common presence which in contem-
porary science are called the “sympathetic nerve nodes,” the chief agglom-
eration of which is known by the name of “solar plexus” and the whole
totality of which functioning, in the terminology long ago established by
me, is called the “feeling center”; and he “senses”—​when the basis of the
“initiative factors” is the totality of what are called “the motor nerve nodes”
of the spinal and partly of the head brain, which is called according to this
terminology of mine the “moving center.”32

Gurdjieff then declares that the listeners do not distinguish “the nature
of . . . these two independent sources.”33 He then sets out the exercise:
142  Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises

3. [F]‌irst it is necessary to learn with what exists in you now only as a substi-
tute, so to say “fulfilling the obligation” of what should, in a real man, be
“self-​willed attention” and in you is merely a “self-​tenseness,”
4. simultaneously to observe three heterogeneous results proceeding in you,
each coming from different sources of the general functioning or your
whole presence:
5. namely, one part of this attention of yours should be occupied with the
constatation of the proceeding-​in-​one-​finger process of “sensing,” an-
other with the constatation of the proceeding-​in-​another-​finger process
of “feeling,” and the third part should follow the counting of the automatic
movement of the third finger.
6.  . . . And for cognizing its importance and indispensability for you, as well
as its real difficulty, it is necessary to do it many, many times. At the begin-
ning, you must try all the time only to understand the sense and signifi-
cance of this exercise, without expecting to obtain any concrete result.
7. As only an all-​round understanding of the sense and significance of this
fourth—​and for you, first—​exercise, as well as the ability to carry it out,
will perforce make it easier for you to cognize the sense and significance, as
well as the carrying out, of all the subsequent exercises which are required
for the acquisition of one’s own individuality.

This exercise corresponds to what Ouspensky reported about the need to develop
the lower centers, for it seems aimed at bringing the working of the three “lower”
centers into a conscious harmony. There is no indication whether this exercise
was to be performed seated, or in isolated conditions, or with eyes closed. Rather,
Gurdjieff seems to have deliberately left it open to perform it in diverse manners—​
walking, running, resting, with eyes closed or open. Some comments are in order.

7.3.1  Distinguishing Sensation from Feeling

The importance of being able to distinguish sensation from feeling is essential to

Gurdjieff ’s exercises, not because the difference in itself is critical, but because
a distinct consciousness of each is necessary. Conscious “impulses” of sensa-
tion and feeling are necessary to facilitate a balanced presence, one not overly
dominated by one of these or by the head.34 On January 20, 1923, in order to
help his pupils at the Prieuré understand the difference, Gurdjieff addressed this
question, but using an illustrative approach, and then differentiating sensation
and feeling by reference to the “center” in which they are based. He gave six dif-
ferent examples of inner states:
 Soil Preparing Exercise  143

• The sensation of his muscles caused by his sitting in an unaccustomed

posture
• The sense of warmth on his back from the stove behind it, as contrasted
with the sensation of the cool air on the front of his body
• The sensation of his full stomach and his heavy breathing from having
eaten a large meal
• A feeling that came up while he was cooking, recalling how his mother
used to do so
• The feeling of self-​satisfaction in seeing how his projected plans for a lamp
were successfully realized
• The “pang of conscience” he felt when associations recalled to him an occa-
sion when he had unjustifiably struck someone in the face.35

Gurdjieff then continued:

Three of them [the examples] relate to the moving center and three to the emo-
tional center. In ordinary language all six are called feelings. Yet in right clas-
sification those whose nature is connected with the moving center should be
called sensations, and those whose nature comes from the emotional center—​
feelings. There are thousands of different sensations which are usually called
feelings. They are all different, their matter is different, their effects different and
their causes different.36

This is equivalent to what is said in this third talk about the place of origin
of sensations and feelings, for the feeling center was there said to be based in
the solar plexus and the moving center in the spine and head. The examples
in this 1923 passage are arguably more helpful and accessible than the later
exposition.
Gurdjieff went on to say:

For primary exercises in self-​remembering the participation of all the three

centers is necessary. We began to speak of the difference between feelings and
sensations only because it is necessary to have simultaneously both feeling and
sensation.37

This has the corollary that to remember oneself is to have an increase in con-
scious function, so that more is held within the sphere of one’s awareness. The
exercitant’s thought will participate in this state without having to make any
further effort than that of having an intention and a desire to undertake the
work.38
144  Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises

7.3.2 Controlled Attention

It is important in Gurdjieff ’s exercises that the attention be controlled. Although

some of his comments on this topic are recounted in Miraculous,39 the most im-
portant treatment is probably that in The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution
and The Fourth Way. Ouspensky says that each of the centers is, generally, di-
vided into two broad parts: the positive and the negative. For example, when we
eat, the positive part of the instinctive center responds with pleasure if the food
is good, but the negative part of that center rejects rotten food. When we hear a
proposition propounded, the positive part of intellectual center may agree, and
the negative part disagree.40
Overlaying this division, the centers are further subdivided into higher (in-
tellectual), middle (emotional), and mechanical (lower) parts. I will not repeat
here the examples given.41 Controlled attention takes us into higher parts of each
center. As the higher parts of centers are more closely connected, if the higher
part of one center begins to operate, the higher parts of others may be more easily
engaged.42 Ouspensky said:

Mechanical parts [of centers] do not need attention. Emotional parts need
strong interest or identification, attention without effort or intention, for atten-
tion is drawn and kept by the attraction of the object itself. And in the intellec-
tual parts you have to control your attention.43
. . . if one could control the intellectual parts of all centers and make them
work together, that would be a way to higher centers.44

This explains why the control of attention for a consciously formulated aim is
basic in Transformed-​contemplation.

7.3.3  Importance of Counting

The counting has the effect of occupying the mind, as we saw in Section 5.2.
Further, Gurdjieff places these ideas in the mouth of his friend Pogossian in
Meetings with Remarkable Men:

He never sat, as is said with folded arms, and one never saw him . . . reading
diverting books which give nothing real. If he had no definite work to do, he
would either swing his arms in rhythm, mark time with his feet or make all
kinds of manipulations with his fingers. . . .
 Soil Preparing Exercise  145

[Pogossian said,] “I do this because I like work, but I like it not with my
nature, which is just as lazy as that of other people and never wishes to do any-
thing useful. I like work with my common sense.
“Please bear in mind,” he added, “that when I use the word ‘I,’ you must
understand it not as the whole of me but only as my mind. I love work and have
set myself the task of being able, through persistence, to accustom my whole
nature to love it and not my reason alone.
“Further, I am really convinced that in the world no conscious work is
ever wasted. . . . I also work because the only real satisfaction in life is to work
not from compulsion by consciously; this is what distinguishes man from a
Karabakh ass, which also works day and night.”45

The reference here is not to counting per se, but rather to intentional
occupations such as making rhythmic movements; however, the principle is the
same. Gurdjieff returned to counting exercises in 1943 (see Section 11.13).

7.3.4  Importance of Exercises

The need to practice these exercises often is returned to later in the chapter on
the Third Series (see Chapter 8) and in the transcripts of Gurdjieff ’s later Paris
meetings (see Chapter 11). Clearly, the Soil Preparing Exercise would be more
aptly called an “internal” exercise for use in the social domain of life, rather than
one that required secluded conditions, yet it could still be called “intentionally
contemplative,” given our examination of the meaning of “contemplative” in
Section 0.4. Although the exercise for aim and energy (see Chapter 10) requires
strict seclusion for a period, and the Genuine Being Duty Exercise needs, I would
suggest, the opportunity to be without distractions, Gurdjieff did not, so far as we
can tell, give many exercises to be done in seclusion, before the mid-​1930s with
the Rope, and maybe not until a little later. However, after that period, he did
fashion a good number.

7.4 Conjectured Sources

In Section 9.4, I suggest that the other two Gurdjieff exercises from Life Is Real
were adapted from two exercises found in the Philokalia. If that thesis is correct,
then it is possible that this one, too, has a monastic origin. If it does, I would sug-
gest the use of beads with the Jesus Prayer as a possible source. Both exercises,
the Jesus Prayer and the Soil Preparing Exercise, involve an occupation for the
intellect and counting.
146  Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises

The rosary is specifically mentioned in The Way of a Pilgrim: The narrator states

that he was told to pray three thousand, then six thousand, and finally twelve
thousand times a day. When he did, “The thumb of my left hand, with which
I counted my beads, hurt a little. I felt a slight inflammation in the whole of that
wrist, and even up to the elbow, which was not unpleasant.”46 That is, the beads
were used as an aid when the Jesus Prayer was found problematic: They helped,
perhaps, to train the attention, keeping it focused. Ouspensky recommended the
use of beads “because by counting in this way it cannot escape attention.”47 This
is probably because running beads through the fingers requires some conscious-
ness of sensation. Interestingly, the words of the Jesus Prayer with the rosary
provide the feeling element that Gurdjieff demands for his exercise. That is, the
elements in the two sets of exercises match, although one is overtly religious and
the other is not.
As foreshadowed in Section 3.4, the evidence that Gurdjieff used beads in the
1930s is presented here. Hulme states:

One day Gurdjieff gave to each one of us on the Rope a chaplet made of large
black beads of some curious substance, upon which we were to do a special
sensing exercise as we passed the beads between thumb and index finger.
He told us how in the old times such chaplets were known as the Inanimate
Helper, and that many kinds of inner-​world work, far more difficult than our
current exercises, were done with their aid. “You see men—​Turk, Greek, Arab,
Armenian—​siting all day in the coffee house with such chaplets. To you they
make a picture of the lazy man, but what they do with these beads creates an
inner force you cannot imagine. Even some special holy men, initiate, of course,
could move mountains if they wished, just sitting still, working with their
chaplets, seeming half asleep.”
He advised us to carry the chaplets with us everywhere, but not to make
spectacles of ourselves doing the exercise visibly in public. “Carry in your
pockets,” he counseled. “Such exercise as I have given, you can do anywhere in
life—​while sitting in café, theatre, on autobus . . . but do not let people see you
do it. They do not understand.” So now we were doing the Work in the outside
world, missing no opportunity to finger those beads hidden in purse or pocket,
as if every minute counted.48

They were not the Catholic type of rosary. When Hulme showed them to
Gurdjieff twelve years later, he gave her “quite the most lovely smile I have ever
seen,” then, “as if caressing them, he passed a few beads through his fingers,” held
them up for all to see, and said: “Is moth-​er thing.”49 I do not know whether he
means that his mother used them, or that faith is a mother, or something else
again. No conclusive proof that the Soil Preparing Exercise is an adaptation of
 Soil Preparing Exercise  147

the beads is possible. One’s assessment of the likelihood of this conjecture will
very much depend on what one makes of my thesis in Chapter 9.

Notes

1. Taylor (2012) 73 and Driscoll (1985) 3–​4.

2. Gurdjieff (1950) 1238; to like effect, Gurdjieff (1933) 57.
3. Yet, according to Gurdjieff, genuine authority should be “in accordance with . . . ob-
jective merits . . . personally acquired, and which [can] really be sensed by all the
beings around them.” Gurdjieff (1950) 385.
4. Gurdjieff (1975) xi–​xiii and 177.
5. Gurdjieff (1933) 48.
6. Webb (1980) 544.
7. Moore (1991) 257.
8. Taylor (2007a) 121.
9. Azize (2016b) 151–​152.
10. Azize (2016b) 151–​152.
11. Taylor (2014) 105.
12. Gurdjieff (1975) 73.
13. Gurdjieff (1975) 77.
14. Gurdjieff (1975) 77.
15. Gurdjieff (1975) 77–​78.
16. Gurdjieff (1975) 80–​81.
17. Gurdjieff (1975) 82.
18. Gurdjieff (1975) 83.
19. Gurdjieff (1975) 89.
20. Gurdjieff (1975) 90–​101, citing 101.
21. See Section 1.5, and Gurdjieff (1975) 92–​96.
22. Gurdjieff (1975) 102.
23. Gurdjieff (1975) 102.
24. Gurdjieff (1975) 103.
25. Gurdjieff (1975) 107.
26. Gurdjieff (1975) 109.
27. Gurdjieff (1975) 109.
28. Gurdjieff (1975) 109–​111.
29. Gurdjieff (1975) 112.
30. Gurdjieff (1975) 113.
31. Gurdjieff (1975) 113.
32. Gurdjieff (1975) 114. Note the clearer example in Early Talks.
33. Gurdjieff (1975) 114.
34. Ouspensky (1949) 282.
35. Gurdjieff (2014) 204.
148  Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises

36. Gurdjieff (2014) 204–​205.

37. Gurdjieff (2014) 205.
38. Gurdjieff (2014) 205.
39. Ouspensky (1949) 56, 109.
40. Ouspensky (1957) 61 and (1950) 108.
41. Ouspensky (1957) 61–​66 and (1950) 108–​114.
42. Ouspensky (1957) 61, 64 and (1950) 108 and 110.
43. Ouspensky (1957) 62.
44. Ouspensky (1957) 64.
45. Gurdjieff (1963) 107.
46. Anonymous (1930) 14.
47. Ouspensky (1952) 298.
48. Hulme (1997) 90.
49. Hulme (1997) 224.