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George Gurdjieff

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Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff

Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (January 13, 1872 - October 29, 1949), was a Greek-Armenian mystic and 'teacher of dancing'. The teachings were about working on oneself to awaken conscience and create a soul to withstand death. The teaching is preserved by Gurdjieff's and his pupils' books and many groups for practicing and disseminating his teachings.

Biography

Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol, Armenia (now Gyumri, Armenia), traveled to many parts of the world (such as Central Asia, Egypt, Rome) before returning to Russia and teaching in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1913.

In the midst of revolutionary upheaval in Russia he left Petrograd (St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd on September 1, 1914) in 1917 to return to his family home in Alexandropol. During the Bolshevik Revolution he set up temporary study communities in Essentuki in the Caucasus, then Tuapse, Maikop, Sochi and Poti, all on the Black Sea coast of Southern Russia where he worked intensively with many of his Russian pupils.

In mid-January 1919 he and his closest pupils moved to Tbilisi. In late May 1920 when political conditions in Georgia deteriorated, they walked by foot to Batumi on the Black Sea coast, and then Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). There Gurdjieff rented an apartment on Koumbaradji Street in Péra and later at 13 Abdullatif Yemeneci Sokak near the Galata Tower. The apartment is near the tekke (monastery) of the Mevlevi Order of Sufis (founded by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi) where Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Thomas de Hartmann experienced the sema ceremony of The Whirling Dervishes. In Constantinople Gurdjieff also met John G. Bennett.

In August 1921 Gurdjieff traveled around western Europe, lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work in various cities such as Berlin and London. In October 1922, he established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man south of Paris at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Fontainebleau-Avon near the famous Château de Fontainebleau.

In 1924 he nearly died in a car crash. After he recovered, he began writing All and Everything originally written by him in Russian and Armenian. He stopped writing in 1935 having completed the first two parts of the trilogy and only having started on the Third Series which had been published under the title Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'.

In Paris, Gurdjieff lived at 6 Rue des Colonels Rénard in Vichy France where he continued to teach throughout World War II.

Gurdjieff died on October 29, 1949 at the American Hospital in Neuilly, France. His funeral was held at the St. Alexandre Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral at 12 Rue Daru, Paris. He is buried in the cemetery at Fontainebleau-Avon.

Timelines, facts and whereabouts of Gurdjieff's early biography before he appeared in Moscow in 1913 are found in his text Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Teaching

Those who had contact with Gurdjieff saw him as a master of wisdom able to practice self-remembering, external considering and work on oneself, ideas discussed in many of the works cited here.

About his teaching, Gurdjieff himself said, "The teaching whose theory is here being set out is completely self supporting and independent of other lines and it has been completely unknown up to the present time." The teaching is about the struggle of working on oneself to awaken conscience. Gurdjieff taught that man has no soul but must create one while incarnate, whose substance could withstand the shock of death. Without a soul, man would "die like a dog."

Gurdjieff taught that the ordinary waking consciousness of humans is a form of sleep and that higher levels of consciousness are possible, namely subjective and objective consciousness. In developing these, one develops higher being-bodies (astral, mental, and causal) within the physical body, in which ordinary consciousness is found. Developing these higher being-bodies requires work on oneself guided by a teacher trained in the science and practice of the teaching.

Gurdjieff is best-known through the published works of his pupils, such as P.D. Ouspensky (author of In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching), A.R. Orage, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Fritz Peters, René Daumal, John G. Bennett and Maurice Nicoll among others. His students included Frank Lloyd Wright, Kathryn Hulme, P.L. Travers and Katherine Mansfield. One of Gurdjieff's many notable students is pianist and composer Keith Jarrett.

Three books by Gurdjieff were published after his death: Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, Meetings with Remarkable Men, and Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'. This trilogy is Gurdjieff's legominism known collectively as All and Everything. A legominism is, according to Gurdjieff, "one of the means of transmitting information about certain events of long-past ages through initiates." A book of his early talks was also collected by his student and personal secretary, Olga de Hartmann, and published in 1973 as Views from the Real World: Early Talks in Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London, Paris, New York and Chicago, as recollected by his pupils.

The feature film Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), based on Gurdjieff's book by the same name, depicts rare performances of the sacred dances taught to serious students of his work known simply as the movements. The film was was written by Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook, directed by Brook, and stars Dragan Maksimovic and Terence Stamp.

Gurdjieff's teachings have been called The Work or The Fourth Way, which is also the title of a book by P.D. Ouspensky. The teachings are preserved in Gurdjieff's legominism and various groups formed after his death, including the Gurdjieff Foundations in New York and Paris under direction by Lord John Pentland and Jeanne de Salzmann. Gurdjieff founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man to train what he called "helper-instructors" to help disseminate and practice his teaching. Today many groups use Gurdjieff's name and ideas, but many of them were not initiated into the teaching through a teacher-student relationship originating with Gurdjieff.

Short bibliography

  • Works by Gurdjieff
    • Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson by G.I. Gurdjieff (1950) ISBN 0919608124
      • In Russian: ISBN 0919608116
      • Audio recording (in mp3 format) as read by William J. Welch: ISBN 0919608167
    • Meetings with Remarkable Men by G.I. Gurdjieff (1963)
    • Life is only real, then, when "I am" by G.I. Gurdjieff (1974)
    • Views from the Real World Talks of G.I. Gurdjieff (1973)
    • The Herald of Coming Good by G.I. Gurdjieff (1933, 1971, 1988)
  • Videos/DVDs about G.I. Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way
    • Meeting with Remarkable Men
  • Books about G.I. Gurdjieff and The Fourth Way
    • In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky (1949)
    • The Oragean Version by C. Daly King (1951)
    • Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky by Maurice Nicoll (1952, 1955. 1972, 1980, 6 volumes)
    • The Fourth Way by P.D. Ouspensky (1957)
    • A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching by Kenneth Walker (1957)
    • Teachings of Gurdjieff by C.S. Nott (1961)
    • Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff by Thomas and Olga de Hartmann (1964, Revised 1983 and 1992)
    • Boyhood with Gurdjieff by Fritz Peters (1964)
    • Gurdjieff Remembered by Fritz Peters (1965)
    • Undiscovered Country by Kathryn Hulme (1966)
    • Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma by J.G. Bennett (1969)
    • Gurdjieff: Making a New World by J.G. Bennett (1973)
    • Mount Analogue by René Daumal (1974)
    • On Love by A.R. Orage (1974)
    • Psychological Exercises by A.R. Orage (1976)
    • The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution by P.D. Ouspensky (1978)
    • Idiots in Paris by J.G. and E. Bennett (1980)
    • The Harmonious Circle by James Webb (1980)
    • Toward Awakening by Jean Vaysse (1980)
    • The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff by Colin Wilson (1980)
    • Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? by René Zuber (1980)
    • Gurdjieff; An Introduction To His Life and Ideas by John Shirley (2004)
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