SPACE GALLERY


Neu! Mysterious Cults
Charlie Wooleys Radio Show SPACE GALLERY, LONDON, 2011


The Eternal Return of Doctor Black, Bearer of Bad News. 
Part of a series of partial re-enactments of lectures by Georges Gurdjieff and cohorts in the 20s, pertaining to the hidden school of mysticism known as the Fourth Way. The lectures present(ed) the tradition of ‘abstract cores’ – ideas, narratives and theories relating to and accompanying exercises set forward in the esoteric school. They perform the function of ‘tricking’, or inducing prospective initiates into a movement of the assemblage point of their constructed reality in order to develop a magnetic ‘attraction’ to the school and its influences while simultaneously ridding the school of those with no magnetic potential.
The character of Doctor Black, taken from folklore, a version of the archetypal ‘Sly Man’ and akin to Hermes was assumed by Gurdjieff to exemplify, among other things, the upsetting discovery of our multi-dimensional personae and their endlessly recurring nature.
The aim of this partial re-enactment is to continue the fourth way initiatory task to represent the abstract cores to a new audience. As such attempts are made to remember and recreate ideas presented within an existing fourth way school of mysticism. 
Why do individuals recur ‘eternally’, while a school does not recur?  And, why do we never ‘remember ourselves’?
“… he has a very different sense of time. He makes the distinction between mythical time in which activities accord with pre-existent archetypal models, and profane time, which has no particular meaning. The latter is hardly reality. Important deeds, work, are all done in conformance to patterns. The individual identifies himself during these functions with the ‘god’ who set the pattern “at the beginning of time”…this man sees himself as real only to the extent that he ceases to be himself …”