What is behind the ideas in Layne Negrin’s Gurdjieff in Tibet? In an earlier post, I explained in broad outline the radical flaws in the book, and I shall say a little more about those later in this post. [see http://www.josephazize.com/2025/03/07/gurdjieff-in-tibet-a-review/]

However, I had not appreciated, when I wrote that review, what is behind this book. I mean, the arguments are so weak and the evidence so poor, that I literally thought at first that it might be a hoax. It was only as I continued to ponder the volume that it struck me that Layne’s own book provides the answer: it is that the Foundation has been so deeply impressed by Tibetan Buddhism. This is the substance of Part Two of his book, the longest of the three parts. This also explains why Jeanne de Salzmann’s appreciative comments on Chogyam Trungpa are included: she encouraged and was herself a part of the drift from Gurdjieff to Buddhism, a drift which has to a significant extent hollowed out the “Gurdjieff” some ostensibly Gurdjieff groups. It explains the bizarre chapter on Shambhala, an obsession of Trungpa’s. Sufficient to say, my own impression of Trungpa’s work finds support in Butterfield’s Double Mirror. In my humble opinion, swapping Gurdjieff for Trungpa is giving up on the closest thing we have to the truth of inner development.

As I was following up some of Layne’s references, I recognised in some of Trungpa’s comments the very sentiments, even the very terms, which one of the Group 1  leaders had expressed when he came to Australia. I recall quite well, because even at the time I was wondering: why is he one of the main people in a Gurdjieff group if he thinks that? One of these matters came to mind when I read Trungpa’s comment that it doesn’t matter why we are here, but rather, given that we are here, what shall we do? This astonished me even when I heard it 30 years ago, because the sense and significance of human life was the object of Gurdjieff’s search. And his answer to why we are here also provides the answer to how we can live in order to achieve the highest purpose of our life.

This is my main issue with this sort of book – it is one more step in the undoing of Gurdjieff’s work – it is assisting the Work to become other than what it is, even its opposite, as happens when the right shock is not brought to the development of an octave. I know Layne has good intentions, but if the Work has been betrayed, this volume is another step in that direction.

I had already realised that if Layne was serious – and he assures me he is – then he must have begun with his conclusion and doggedly worked back to it, let the facts be what they will. I do appreciate that Layne, has – in measured and civil terms – advised me that he considers my review to be “projecting” my own views on his book in one specific way: he is not saying that his thesis is correct, only that it deserves consideration. He wrote: “Joseph, you’re missing my point. I want my readers to make their own conclusions and I have no problem with you having the doubts you express. What I object to is you projecting that I believe and present the possible identifications I make as fact when I don’t. I suppose you think that because there is no hard evidence that these possibilities are not worthy of publishing. I disagree. I think being open to them is valuable, and that they merit further research. Whether at some point it is proven or disproven that Petrie is Skridlov is all the same to me. But without such leads being put out there how is that to happen? Suggesting that Gurdjieff may have been known as Urgyen Tag in particular may eventually lead to more concrete evidence surfacing.”

I am happy that Layne does not mind my expressing doubts, not least  because he is not, to that extent, identified with his book, taking my critique personally. I am also happy that my review has resulted in people purchasing the volume, for as I said, it is worth it if only for the remarkable ink drawing by Gurdjieff. But it is not that I think it should not be published because there is no hard evidence. Whether to publish or not had never occurred to me. I am saying that the purported evidence is farcical.

I was always of the view that Gurdjieff had been in Tibet. I had never ever doubted it before I read this book, and especially read that Yahne Le Toumelin came to believe that he had never set foot there. I will add that, on several occasions, I began to read in Tibetan Buddhism, and even attended a Tibetan Buddhist Centre in Sydney, thinking that there might be parallels between Tibetan Buddhism and Gurdjieff’s system. But I never found anything except significant differences, and no similarities beyond the superficial.

But there is a difference between rhetoric and reality. When Layne says I am projecting onto the book that he believes it, the truth is this – I am not. On p.3 he writes: “… there is an abundance of evidence showing that Gurdjieff spent time in Tibet …” It is no  projection of mine to say this is a belief that there is an abundance of evidence. I deny that there is presented in this book, or anywhere else I know of – other than Gurdjieff’s own assertions – a skerrick of evidence that he had in fact gone there. When he writes about two different trips to Tibet (74) it is because he thinks Gurdjieff might have gone there twice. When he writes of two illustrations that they are “similar to the ones Gurdjieff showed his dinner guests” (104) he is not saying they might have been similar: he is asserting that they are.

While many, perhaps the great majority of Layne’s statements are couched in tentative terms, overall, there is no doubt except that he is affirming a Tibetan Buddhism origin for Gurdjieff’s teaching, and that it is a form of “nonduality.”

My own view, for what it is worth, is that is naive to think of Gurdjieff going somewhere and receiving a teaching. First, whatever he heard or saw, he logically confronted it and considered it as impartially as possible. He was no one’s parrot. This sort of book underestimates his originality, even his revolutionary nature. As I said in my recent USA talk, Gurdjieff’s aim and purpose are traditional – he is a mystic – but his methods were not. Second, I take quite seriously the possibility that Gurdjieff had direct access to what he called the Teleoghinooras which are the molecules, so to speak, of Korkaptilnian thought tapes (Beelzebub, 293), which are, I think, what he described to Ouspensky as the “great accumulator of knowledge.” In other words, people are looking in the wrong place for what he discovered – and I tend to think – could only have discovered, on rather higher levels even than the Himalayas.

Miscellaneous Details

I will just deal with a few details, but in my academic review, I will set out what Gurdjieff told Orage and said elsewhere about his visit(s) to Tibet, and why they show that, in so far as Gurdjieff’s word counts for anything, Tibet was not a source for his system.

First, touching Gurdjieff’s saying, in his 1949, the year he died, that he would go to Tibet; James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 309, writes: “The whole pace must accelerate, explained Gurdjieff, because he needed to go in a day or two to Tibet. “Tibet, monsieur?” asked a perplexed disciple. “Or Dieppe?” Mr G. gave a particularly wicked and sly smile and said, “Either way very expensive,” as though apart from that the destination did not matter much.” That is, he was not nostalgically thinking of a return voyage to his spiritual spring, he was saying that he had to go, i.e. die – hence he told Solange that he had to go “far away” and  (as Moore recounts at p.308) in the summer of 1949, he spoke of making “new and more heroic journeys …” to London and by car across the USA.

Second, in  Gurdjieff Reconsidered, Lipsey states that in the mountains “rimming Kathmandu Valley,” some adolescent girls jumped in and danced to “lively dance music … Apart from a few details, their dance was one that my wife and I had been learning in a Movements class in New York two weeks earlier.” He opines that G. must have “later reconstituted it as part of the dance repertory at the Prieure.” Tibet was just 70 miles away: “If Gurdjieff had come this far – a point that looked to us inarguable – then surely he toiled on, into Tibet, or exited Tibet by way of Nepal and India.” So, Gurdjieff may well have been in Nepal, although, what Lipsey does not address is (a) was that dance known anywhere else? (b) is it impossible that someone who had learnt it in the Gurdjieff groups took it to Nepal? (c) How do we know that whoever was teaching Movements in NY had not themselves taken it from Nepal or somewhere else? I have been in Movements classes where snatches from various modern types of dance were taught – and these were classes taken by Foundation people. But Lipsey’s “surely” is worth nothing at all to me.

Then, Lipsey goes on to write: “What then of Tibet? So far, we have one fragment of evidence: the dance in back-country Nepal. … (and) [when Alexander de Salzmann repainted the Monks’ corridor in crimson and saffron yellow], “These are the most beautiful colours,” he commented to de Salzmann.” I am sorry, Roger, but that is not “evidence” (Roger’s word): the logic of this is that a person could not think that crimson and saffron yellow were the most beautiful colours unless he had been Tibet. One only has to state this to see how flimsy it is. Roger is one of the old people of the NY Foundation. He is correct in manners, and learned, but I do find his strength is in scattered insights, not in logical thought. I think that weakness is at the base of the modern dilemma so many Gurdjieff groups find themselves in – not enough being-logical-confrontation.

This post was revised on the morning of 1 April 2025.