Gurdjieff is never mentioned by name in the anthology. In the real world, Gurdjieff claimed that people can be sorted based on their psychology into levels 1 or 2 if they are acting on animal instincts, or 3 if their intellect was functioning and in control, then people who habitually remember themselves are in level 4, then higher levels 5 through 7 or so describe people with better internal organization that they acquired after learning to self remember. Ordinary healthy people without special training are generally level 3.
In this anthology, there are parallel universes with the same numbers as the Gurdjieff levels. In each universe most of the inhabitants have a personality matching the corresponding Gurdjieff level. People could work hard to make it possible to get to a higher level, or could voluntarily debase themselves to decrease their level. Moving levels might also require dying and reincarnating.
Artifacts can be created at a higher level and moved with great difficulty to a lower level, or perhaps they have existed forever in the lower level. People in the lower level could use artifacts but not make new ones. Kind of like cellphones in the real world for the majority of people who have no role in manufacturing cellphones, except the function of these artifacts was more abstract, and artifacts are too rare for most people to know about and they tend to be hoarded instead of bought and sold.
In one of the stories, one level, probably level 3, resembles the real world I'm posting from right now. The protagonist is from a higher level and has a plan and gets reincarnated into level 3. The plan involves organizing a group of ordinary people and then telling everyone to relocate to certain cities and not others for no reason anyone other than the protagonist could understand. Some people trust the protagonist and move, some don't.
The protagonist says at one point that the most important thing is geometry. This meant living in a place that had approximately the right latitude and longitude.
Spoiler: The importance of geometry turns out to be that the higher level does a massive air strike or something similarly destructive that destroys some places but not others. The protagonist knew about this. People who believed the protagonist and moved mostly survive. People who lived in the good places by luck also survive, but most other people don't. The intent was to bias the population of the survivors toward the sort of person who was receptive to the message from the protagonist.
The protagonist starts organizing his group by giving a bland speech that was positively received by everyone who heard it. The novel called this an "everyman speech". We don't get to see the text of the speech.
At one point there is an antagonist who looks like an ordinary person (Chinese, IIRC). He doesn't speak much or do anything physically meaningful, but whenever he's present in a meeting the people in the meeting start arguing with each other. This is an obstacle to the protagonist's plan to get people organized and living in the right locations. There is some strange contest where artifacts that cause mental clarity are used as an antidote to the quiet creator of discord. IIRC the heroes working for the protagonist lose some irreplaceable artifacts, and some of them die.
The protagonist writes a letter to a friend who isn't willing to move. The letter is never sent but the text is included as a chapter or section of the book. The protagonist can't say why people should move because nobody would believe him and the loss of credibility would decrease his ability to get people relocated.
The friend dies in the air strike, of course. Lots of grief.
Another story has a level 3 woman with a personality similar to what most humans in the real world have. She visits level 2 on some errand I can't remember and falls in love with a level 2 man who lives there and has only basic animal instincts as one would expect. I'm sure the drama was how she adjusts to being in love with someone who was incapable of being intellectual, but I don't remember how she deals with it.
One of the stories has a scene where a high-level person has some low-level friends who die. After the friends die, they are waiting in line to get reincarnated, and this waiting happens in a place that biases the minds of the people there toward waiting in line. The high-level person somehow visits them while they are waiting in line and gets them to do something more constructive than wait in line, I can't remember what. The high-level person is able to retain his sense of purpose in this place because he is high-level, otherwise he'd be waiting in line too.
I remember the cover being off-white with an abstract red decoration. I borrowed this book from a US library when it was new, 20 to 30 years ago, so it was published maybe between 1995 and 2005.
Can anyone tell me the title or author?
This is different from the Zones of Thought novels by Vinge (Fire upon the Deep, Deepness in the Sky, Fire Somewhere Near the Vast Deep Sky, Sky Around the Deep Fire, maybe I made some of those up). Some of the differences are:
- ZoT has interesting technology but the novel in question doesn't aside from the incomprehensible artifacts.
- ZoT is galaxy-wide but the novel in question takes place on various versions of the same planet. Earth level 3 has familiar city names from the real Earth.
- ZoT has interesting aliens but in the novel in question we only get to see physically ordinary humans. I don't remember whether plants and animals were mentioned.
- Vinge is much more famous than the author of the book in question.
Failed past searches include:
- Asking Google for "novels mentioning artifacts geometry and gurdjieff"
- Gurdjieff related fiction at GoodReads
