Eating The Moon

G. I. Gurdjieff defined understanding as a fusion of knowledge and experience. Over the years, the author has personally confirmed that knowledge alone is mental, while experience connects intellect with emotion and sensation. This creates a three-brained experience, shifting perspective and deepening understanding.

Most original Work literature beyond Gurdjieff's writings comes from his first-generation students. It either restates aspects of his system, often with suggested practices, or recounts personal experiences with him outside group settings.

Though born too late to meet Gurdjieff, the author shares his four-decade relationship with The Work, including struggles, discoveries, and insights into this approach to developing Being. He argues that storytelling and personal reflection and emotion, transforming knowledge into understanding. He hopes these examples resonate, inspiring readers to directly confront their own experiential understanding.

Focused on Gurdjieff's spiritual development approach, this book may interest any seeker of Truth.

Stephen Aronson is a psychotherapist, now retired, after forty years of practice, with an eclectic background ranging from cognitive behavioral therapy to the alchemical approach of Carl Jung. His spiritual life has been a search for verification of a deeper reality underlying the ordinary world of our senses. His personal aim has been to find a reconciliation between science and spirituality which would also allow reconciling the concept of Universal intelligence with rationality. After a dozen years in Jungian analysis and four decades of study and practice in the system of transformational psychology introduced to the West by G. I. Gurdjieff, he has sought to find an approach to illustrate these deep and complex ideas and methods in common language and universally shared experiences. He believes the arcane language of specialized methods, although necessary for advanced training, is often a barrier for those seeking an initial understanding. He received a B.S. from Penn State University in 1965 and an M.A. and PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1970. After initially teaching at Arizona State and Alfred University, he left academia to pursue immersion in clinical practice. He co-authored a pioneering book on the management of stress, The Stress Management Workbook: An Action Plan for Taking Control of Your Life and Health, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1981, with physician Michael Mascia. In 2022 he released The Search for Meaning and the Mystery of Consciousness: A Psychologist's Journey through Gurdjieff and Jung and As Above, So Below: Reconciling Science and Spirituality through Consciousness in 2024. He has published on the contributions of G. I. Gurdjieff in the Proceedings of the annual All and Everything International Humanities Conference, and Parabola, a magazine dedicated to Myth, Tradition and Search for Meaning. Steve lives in rural Maine where he retired in 2013.