Ten years after Gurdjieff’s death his pupils decided to make known the whole body of Gurdjieff’s ideas, until then only accessible to themselves. Such is the history of this book which presents what Gurdjieff called ‘the second series’ of his writings, first published in France in 1960. As Gurdjieff said, his task in this series was to furnish ‘the material required to create a feeling of a new world’, – a feeling which throws a new light on one’s own life. At the same time this book is written in the form of autobiography with information relating to Gurdjieff’s early life and the sources of his knowledge.