G didn’t seem to go in for explaining. His style seemed to be more about showing. It seems evident from his writings and all that has been written about him, that he possessed some sort of a natural psychic ability. His powers reportedly ranged from autosuggestion and hypnosis to more advanced powers like telepathy and clairvoyance.

Gurdjieff claimed that in 1912 he took a personal oath to renounce the use of hypnotism to further his aims. He admitted that he found it very difficult to control his hypnotic power, which he called an “automatic influence over people.” As he told his student Jean Toomer in 1933: “Twenty-one years ago I vowed never to use hypnosis to effect my aims. Recent circumstances have made me struggle with myself to keep my vow . . . I do not want to break it.”

In the summer of 1916, Gurdjieff worked closely with a small group of students in a country house in Finland. P.D. Ouspensky, one of the students at the time, describes an incident of telepathy in which he was able to hear Gurdjieff’s thoughts:

Suddenly I noticed that among the words which he was saying to us
all there were “thoughts” which were intended for me. I caught one of these thoughts and replied to it, speaking aloud in the ordinary way.
G. nodded to me and stopped speaking. There was a fairly long pause. He sat still saying nothing. After a while I heard his voice inside me
as if it were in the chest near the heart. He put a definite question to me. I looked at him; he was sitting and smiling.

In some metaphysical circles Gurdjieff was regarded as a ‘black magician’ who used supernatural powers to manipulate his followers. Gurdjieff claimed that he employed a substance related to animal magnetism that he called ‘hanbledzoin’ which he then transmitted to others through the force of his concentration.

In a conversation in 1915 with P.D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff explained the theoretical premises to support the use of psychoactive substances such as opium and hashish by students of esoteric schools to aid their inner development:

There are schools which make use of narcotics in the right way. People in
these schools take them for self-study; in order to take a look ahead, to know the possibilities better, to see beforehand, ‘in advance,’ what can be attained later on as the result of prolonged work. When a man sees this and is convinced that what he has learned theoretically really exists, he then works consciously, he knows where he is going. Sometimes this is the easiest way of being con- vinced of the real existence of those possibilities which man often suspects in himself.

Gurdjieff’s consumption of spirits clearly played an important role in the dissemination of his teachings and interactions with students. He reportedly could drink very large amounts of alcohol without showing obvious signs of inebriation. According to A.R. Orage: “Gurdjieff, who had an unusual capacity for drink, made a careful distinction between ordinary drinking and conscious drinking which could free the ‘I’ to think, feel, talk and act; that is, to expose ‘essence’.”

Dr. Kenneth Walker, a longtime student of Ouspensky, visited Gurdjieff in 1948 at his Paris apartment and was fore- warned about the importance Gurdjieff gave to drinking alcohol at his dinner table:

A great many people are passing through Gurdjieff’s hands at the flat, and if they’ve had a drink or two they are much more ‘open,’ and I mean by this that Gurdjieff is able to see them much more readily after they have had a drink or two. There is a great deal of truth in that old saying of the Arabs: ‘Wine makes a man more so.’ Alcohol uncovers a man so that he is much more readily perceived by those who are observing him.

I imagine his experiments with the separation of essence and personality used a combination of his own personal mesmerism (The manipulation of ‘hanbledzoin’), and the use of some sort of narcotic preparation.

One can certainly see, even with the use of regular psychedelics, a reversal of the pecking order, as the personality is stripped away and something else is left to deal with the ‘uncanny’.

Previous leading lights can turn into ‘frightened children’ and conversely, the seemingly quiet and timid can suddenly step forward to become the towering presence.