Gurdjieff and Mesmer and the Idea of Reciprocal Maintenance (Gurdjieff Studies)

The material of this booklet was originally published as a paper in the Proceedings of the 2019 “All and Everything International Humanities Conference.” The contents do assume background knowledge from the reader in terms of Gurdjieff’s own writing and the secondary literature. Gurdjieff’s writing[1] is permeated through and through with certain questions that also occupied Mesmer, perhaps most notably, the question of influences, which reaches its highest expression, it seems to me, in Gurdjieff’s astonishing and powerful idea of reciprocal maintenance. This is an idea which runs through All and Everything as a constant theme in various forms. Mesmer, too, in his writings, was unceasingly occupied with the idea of reciprocal exchange between “bodies” - from celestial bodies, to human beings, to animals and plants - in the form of incoming and outgoing currents, as he saw it. And Mesmer’s last and largest work is entitled “Mesmerismus. Or System of Reciprocal Influences”.