Magnetism and Love
For full citation of sources, please see Introduction and Bibliography.
In spite of the fact that it may not always seem at the forefront, love plays a important role in Gurdjieff’s teaching. However, as recorded in Teachings of Gurdjieff by C.S. Nott, Gurdjieff said,
“To know about real love one must forget all about love and must look for direction...”1
Gurdjieff speaks of the divine impulse of genuine love in compelling terms in his writings, and yet also very witheringly about the degenerate forms that it has taken.2 Love is an evocative word, yet one that is prone to sentimentality. Gurdjieff spoke of the necessity of being first a conscious egoist before one can really be a good altruist,3 and we can recall Orage’s description, “the disease of altruism.”4 Daly King in The Oragean Version, representing Orage, talks too of,
...those parodies of genuine love called altruism and sentimentality, in which the poor, the weak and the unfortunate are coddled ostensibly for their own benefit (although coddling has never benefited anyone) but really for the self-glorification or for some other purely selfish advantage of the sentimentalist. Emotional love is somewhat unlovely.5