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somebody who hated manual work Gurdjieff would give manual work. He had a great insight into finding what people hated -- and he would immediately find out what it was.... And sometimes very surprisingly.
Just a few days before, I was reading a memoir.... A doctor -- Gurdjieff's doctor, his own private physician -- has written in his memoirs that the first time he came in contact with Gurdjieff the thing that impressed him was his tremendous insight.
A woman had come with this doctor to Gurdjieff for the first time. Gurdjieff used to see people only at the dining table every evening -- thirty, forty, sometimes fifty and sometimes one hundred people in a small room, crowded. This woman had come with the doctor for the first time -- a young beautiful woman -- and she was sitting by the side of a very old woman... must have been like our bhakti (italian and elderly, she is an ashramite), white-haired.
Gurdjieff used to prepare plates, and he would say to whom a plate should go. He prepared a plate and said, 'It goes to the mum.' So the people who took the plate thought he was indicating the old woman -- naturally, because she was the oldest woman there and he had said, 'This goes to the mum.'
But when the disciple took the plate to the old woman, Gurdjieff said, 'No, the other one.' The young woman was by the side of the old woman and nobody could believe why he was calling her 'mum'. That young woman started crying! The doctor was also puzzled.
Only later on did he come to know that that woman was really a mum -- she was a mother to her children, she was a mother to her husband too! She was mothering everybody... she was even mothering her own father. Her whole life was concentrated on that point.
Gurdjieff had an insight into where people were. In fact a master can work only when he has that insight, otherwise there is no work possible. And he will immediately bring out the thing that you don't like. The woman started crying because that was the one thing she never liked to be told. Mm? that was one thing that used to hurt her very much. She knew it -- it was like a wound. She had come for the first time and this man had
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