G. I. Gurdjieff

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (ca. 1870-1949)

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol in the Caucasus. He spent the first part of his life undertaking anthropological and archaeological research in Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. His search took him to the lamaseries of Tibetan Rimpoches, to the libraries and mosques and monasteries of Asia, and to the great religious centres of Echmiadzin, Jerusalem and Bokhara.

After visiting many countries he reached the conviction that his researches had led him to a valid conception of the meaning of human existence, and having discovered methods, some ancient, others new, for the development of the powers latent in the human psyche, he founded in 1912 in Moscow the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. After the Russian revolution, this was moved to France.

Publications

All and Everything, First Series

After a lifetime spent in the teaching of a system of knowledge which he gave only to a small circle of pupils, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff decided shortly before his death in October 1949 to publish the first of a series of his books which expresses his ideas in the form of a ‘cosmological epic based upon the legend of ‘Beelzebub’ — whose banishment to our solar system brings him into contact with mankind whose strange customs and problems he describes with deep compassion and at times with superb humour’.

This ‘all-wise Beelzebub’, with profound understanding of the weakness of humanity, points the way towards the regeneration of mankind through the development of the inner possibilities of man and presents a teaching of exceptional value for the world.

All and Everything is of special significance now, when the world is helplessly struggling to control the intensification of technical achievement which threatens to destroy the essential values and purpose of life. This book rediscovers the path which man was destined to follow in the universal scheme and from which he has gone so far astray.

Meetings With Remarkable Men

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.

Life Is Real, Only Then When ‘I Am’

This book is the Third Series of Gurdjieff’s trilogy, ‘All and Everything’. It is rather different from what Gurdjieff had intended, which was to be a primary source for his ideas, and to include instructions received from various holy men. The form that the book eventually took was to be mainly autobiographical followed by a series of talks given by Gurdjieff to his New York Group in 1930, offering guidance to his ‘community of seekers’.

Views From the Real World

Early talks in Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London, Paris, New York and Chicago, as recollected by his pupils. The final section of the book includes ‘The Aphorisms’ which were inscribed in a special script above the walls of the Study House at the Prieure.