Essence is Single, Personality is Legion

Turning now to Gurdjieff’s ‘Everyman’; his model of the individual human being, we encounter the same poignant ambivalence, the same sense of potentiality betrayed.

 

The infant is born in hope and in ‘essence’. Essence is what is essential. It is the self: not the little body in the cradle, but what the being innately and really is; his true, inexpungeable, and fate-attracting particularity. It is mysteriously predetermined, perhaps by the stars and planets while he is in embryo or at his birth; thenceforth it is meant to grow and mature, fed by real experiences.

 

Alas! Essence is quickly overtaken and arrested by personality; it is enveloped and suffocated as Laocoon was by writhing serpents. ‘Personality’ is what we pick up; it is a mask (Latin persona) or societal veneer. It is the crystallization in us of those ‘A’ and ‘B’ influences which happen to prevail wherever and whenever we were ‘educated’. We unconsciously copy ‘our’ personality from our parents and from various little tin gods – and later randomly reimpose it on our children. Personality is indispensable, and at its best incorporates a valuable portion of man’s linguistic and cultural heritage. At its worst it is a hodge-podge of prejudices, dreams, tones of voice, body-usage, manipulative stratagems and pitiable neuroses, quite arbitrarily aligned to essence.  Personality is other people’s stuff made flesh in us.

 

Worse is to come. For although essence is single, personality is legion. The idea of hysterical multiple personality was popularised only recently in Thipgen and Cleckly’s well-attested case history, The Three Faces of Eve. Gurdjieff’s version, put forward in 1916, entails marginally less disassociation among personalities, but escalates the condition from a clinical oddity to universal malaise. All men and women, he warns, play host to scores if not hundreds of different parasitic identities, each with its blinkered repertoire of behaviour. A snub, a flattering letter, a no-smoking sign, a slow queue, a come-hither look – and we are strangely altered. We have one personality with subordinates, another with superiors, one with our mother, another with the tax man – each is Caliph for an hour.  One scatters promissory notes which others must redeem: ‘certainly. See you in the morning. Only too delighted.’ One despairing humourless personality may even take an overdose or jump off a cliff – crazily destroying the habitat of all the others. To sum up, our professed citadel of individuality is common as a barber’s chair. Very few men are strong enough to confront this impression emotionally and to work within the compass of its appalling implications.

 

Confounding confusion, all these personalities share behavioural ‘norms’ which Gurdjieff (in an indictment that ranks with Hieronymus Bosch’s  ‘Seven Deadly Sins’) reveals as tragically abnormal. He speaks more in sorrow than in anger; one may almost feel the weight of his suffering as he concludes that his bleak picture is ‘a photographically exact snapshot from life’.

 

Chiefly to blame, in Gurdjieff’s eyes, is man’s irresponsibility towards his godlike faculty of attention: he dopes not reverence it, he does not mobilize it, he does not govern it; and what little he finds access to, he casts to the dogs. Unsurprisingly man’s enfeebled attention has no autonomy but is always attached, glued, surrendered to this or that ‘identification’: here for example it hardens into sharp configurations of self-pity, irritability, anxiety, resentment, envy, vanity, hatred, and every sort of ‘negative emotion’; there it softens into treacherous interior fantasies, ‘imagination’, daydreams and delusional systems; here it supports a complacent judgement on other poor devils, and here, paradoxically, a squirming fear of their verdict on us; here it embellishes ignorance to seem like knowledge…and invariably it provides voltage for the despotic associations which flit ceaselessly through our weary brain.

 

– James Moore. Gurdjieff (1999, p 52-4):