| Full name | George Ivanovich Gurdjieff |
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| Born | January 14, 1866? Alexandropol, Russian Empire |
| Died | October 29, 1949 (aged 83) Neuilly-sur-Seine, France |
| Era | Esotericism |
| Region | 20th century mystic |
| School | Fourth Way or the "Gurdjieff Work" |
| Main interests | Psychology, philosophy, science, ancient knowledge |
| Notable ideas | Fourth Way, Fourth Way Enneagram, Centers, Ray of Creation, Self-remembering |
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George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (Armenian: Գեորգի Իվանովիչ Գյուրջիև, (Georgian: გიორგი გურჯიევი, Greek: Γεώργιος Γεωργιάδης, Russian: Гео́ргий Ива́нович Гюрджи́ев, January 1, 1877? – October 29, 1949) was an influential spiritual teacher of the early to middle 20th century. Gurdjieff called his discipline "The Work"[1] (connoting "work on oneself") according to his principles and instructions,[2] or (originally) the "Fourth Way"[3] and at one point described his teaching as being "esoteric Christianity".[4]
At different times in his life, Gurdjieff formed and closed various schools around the world to teach the work. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and early travels expressed the truth found in ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives and humanity's place in the universe.[5] The title of his third series of writings, Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', expresses the essence of his teachings. His complete series of books is entitled All and Everything.
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Gurdjieff was born to a Greek father and Armenian mother in Alexandropol (now Gyumri, Armenia), then part of the Russian Empire.[6] The Turks & Persians called Georgia "Gurjistan", which may account for the root of the name "Gurdjieff".
The exact date of his birth remains unknown (conjectures range from 1866 to 1877). Some authors (such as Moore) argue persuasively for 1866, others (like Patterson) for 1872; a passport gave a birthdate of November 28, 1877, but he stated that he was born at the stroke of midnight at the beginning of New Year's Day (Julian calendar). Gurdjieff grew up in Kars and traveled to many parts of the world (such as Central Asia, Egypt and Rome) before returning to Russia for a few years in 1912. He later said: "Begin in Russia, end in Russia."[7]
The only account of Gurdjieff's early life, before he appeared in Moscow in 1912, appears in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men. This text, however, cannot be read as straightforward autobiography.[8] In the period before 1912, Gurdjieff went on the voyage outlined in Meetings with Remarkable Men where he came upon a map of "pre-sand Egypt" which led him to study with an esoteric group, the alleged Sarmoung Brotherhood.
From 1913 to 1949 the chronology appears to be based on material that can be confirmed by primary documents, independent witnesses, cross-references, and reasonable inference.[9] On New Year's Day in 1912, Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow and attracted his first students. In the same year he married the Polish Julia Ostrowska in St Petersburg. In 1914, Gurdjieff advertised his ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, and supervised his pupils' writing of the sketch "Glimpses of Truth". In 1915, Gurdjieff accepted P. D. Ouspensky as a pupil, while in 1916 he accepted the composer Thomas de Hartmann and his wife Olga as students. At this time he had about 30 pupils.
In the midst of revolutionary upheaval in Russia, Gurdjieff left Petrograd 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 in 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 March 1918, Ouspensky separated from Gurdjieff. Four months later, Gurdjieff's eldest sister and her family reached him in Essentuki as refugees, informing him that Turks had shot his father in Alexandropol on 15 May. As Essentuki became more and more threatened by civil war, Gurdjieff put out a fabricated newspaper story announcing his forthcoming "scientific expedition" to Mount Induc. Posing as a scientist, Gurdjieff left Essentuki with fourteen companions (excluding Gurdjieff's family and Ouspensky). They traveled by train to Maikop, where hostilities delayed them for three weeks. In spring 1919, Gurdjieff met the artist Alexandre Salzmann and his wife Jeanne and accepted them as pupils. Assisted by Jeanne Salzmann, Gurdjieff gave the first public demonstration of his Sacred Dances (Movements at the Tbilisi Opera House, 22 June).
In the autumn of 1919, Gurdjieff and his closest pupils moved to Tbilisi, formerly known as Tiflis. There Gurdjieff's wife, Julia Ostrowska, Mr and Mrs Stjoernval, Mr and Mrs de Hartmann and Mr and Mrs de Salzmann gathered a lot of the fundamentals of his teaching. Gurdjieff concentrated on his still unstaged ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians; Thomas de Hartmann (who had made his debut years ago before as the Czar of All Russia) worked on the music for the ballet; and Olga Iovonovna Lazovich Milanoff Hinzenberg (who years later wed the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright) practiced the ballet dances.[10] In 1919, Gurdjieff established his first Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He was thought to be greatly influenced by Nikolai Marr, a Georgian archaeologist and historian.
In late May 1920, when political conditions in Georgia changed and the old order was crumbling, his party traveled by foot to Batumi on the Black Sea coast and then to Istanbul. Gurdjieff rented an apartment on Koumbaradji Street in Péra, and later at 13 Abdullatif Yemeneci Sokak near the Galata Tower.[11] The apartment is near the kha’neqa’h (monastery) of the Molavieh 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 Istanbul, Gurdjieff also met Captain John G. Bennett, then head of British Military Intelligence in Constantinople. Later, Bennett would become a follower of Gurdjieff and of Ouspensky.[12]
In August 1921 and 1922, Gurdjieff traveled around western Europe, lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work in various cities, such as Berlin and London. He attracted the allegiance of Ouspensky's many prominent pupils (notably the editor A. R. Orage). After he lost a civil action to acquire Hellerau possession in Britain, Gurdjieff 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. Gurdjieff acquired notoriety as "the man who killed Katherine Mansfield" after Katherine Mansfield died there of tuberculosis under his care on 9 January 1923.[13] However, James Moore and Ouspensky[14] convincingly show that Katherine Mansfield knew she would soon die, and that Gurdjieff made her last days happy and fulfilling.[15]
Starting in 1924, Gurdjieff made visits to North America, where he eventually received the pupils taught previously by A.R. Orage. In 1924, while driving alone from Paris to Fontainebleau, he had a near-fatal car accident. Nursed by his wife and mother, he made a slow and painful recovery against medical expectation. Still convalescent, he formally "disbanded" his institute on 26 August (in fact he dispersed only his less-dedicated pupils) and began writing All and Everything.
In 1925 Gurdjieff's wife contracted cancer; she died in June 1926 in spite of radiotherapy and Gurdjieff's magnetic treatments. Ouspensky attended her funeral. According to Fritz Peters, Gurdjieff was in New York from November 1925 to the spring of 1926, when he succeeded in raising over $100,000.[16]
In 1935 Gurdjieff stopped writing All and Everything. He had completed the first two parts of the trilogy but only started on the Third Series. (It was later published under the title Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'). In Paris, Gurdjieff lived at 6 Rue des Colonels-Rénard, where he continued to teach throughout World War II.
Gurdjieff died on October 29, 1949 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. His funeral took place at the St. Alexandre Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral at 12 Rue Daru, Paris. He is buried in the cemetery at Fontainebleau-Avon.[17]
Gurdjieff claimed that people cannot perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic "waking sleep."
"Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies."[18] As a result of this condition, each person perceives things from a completely subjective perspective. Gurdjieff stated that maleficent events such as wars and so on could not possibly take place if people were more awake. He asserted that people in their typical state function as unconscious automatons, but that one can "wake up" and become a different sort of human being altogether.[19]
Gurdjieff argued that many of the existing forms of religious and spiritual tradition on Earth had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality and so could no longer serve humanity in the way that had been intended at their inception. As a result humans were failing to realize the truths of ancient teachings and were instead becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to control from outside and increasingly capable of otherwise unthinkable acts of mass psychosis such as the 1914-18 war. At best, the various surviving sects and schools could only provide a one-sided development which did not result in a fully integrated human being. According to Gurdjieff, only one dimension of the three dimensions of the person — namely, either the emotions, or the physical body or the mind — tends to develop in such schools and sects, and generally at the expense of the other faculties or centers, as Gurdjieff called them. As a result these paths fail to produce a proper balanced human being. Furthermore, anyone wishing to undertake any of the traditional paths to spiritual knowledge (which Gurdjieff reduced to three — namely the path of the fakir, the path of the monk, and the path of the yogi) were required to renounce life in the world. Gurdjieff thus developed a "Fourth Way"[20] which would be amenable to the requirements of modern people living modern lives in Europe and America. Instead of developing body, mind, or emotions separately, Gurdjieff's discipline worked on all three to promote comprehensive and balanced inner development.
In parallel with other spiritual traditions, Gurdjieff taught that one must expend considerable effort to effect the transformation that leads to awakening. The effort that one puts into practice Gurdjieff referred to as The Work or Work on oneself.[21] According to Gurdjieff, "...Working on oneself is not so difficult as wishing to work, taking the decision."[22] Though Gurdjieff never put major significance on the term "Fourth Way" and never used the term in his writings, his pupil P.D. Ouspensky from 1924 to 1947 made the term and its use central to his own teaching of Gurdjieff's ideas. After Ouspensky's death, his students published a book titled The Fourth Way based on his lectures.
Gurdjieff's teaching addressed the question of humanity's place in the universe and the importance of developing latent potentialities — regarded as our natural endowment as human beings but rarely brought to fruition. He taught that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies,[23] inner growth and development are real possibilities that nonetheless require conscious work to achieve.[24]
In his teaching Gurdjieff gave a distinct meaning to various ancient texts such as the Bible and many religious prayers. He claimed that those texts possess a very different meaning than what is commonly attributed to them. "Sleep not"; "Awake, for you know not the hour"; and "The Kingdom of Heaven is Within" are examples of biblical statements which point to a psychological teaching whose essence has been forgotten.[25]
Gurdjieff taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy in various ways and to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness. According to his teaching, this inner development in oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of change, the aim of which is to transform people into what Gurdjieff believed they ought to be.[26]
Distrusting "morality", which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and superficial, Gurdjieff greatly stressed the importance of conscience. This he regarded as the same in all people, buried in their subconsciousness, thus both sheltered from damage by how people live and inaccessible without "work on oneself".
To provide conditions in which inner attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements", later known as the Gurdjieff movements, which they performed together as a group. He also left a body of music, inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann. Gurdjieff also used various exercises, such as the "Stop" exercise, to prompt self-observation in his students. Other shocks to help awaken his pupils from constant day-dreaming were always possible at any moment.
The Work is in essence a training in the development of consciousness. During his lifetime Gurdjieff used a number of different methods and materials, including meetings, music, movements (sacred dance), writings, lectures, and innovative forms of group and individual work. Part of the function of these various methods was to undermine and undo the ingrained habit patterns of the mind and bring about moments of insight. Since each individual has different requirements Gurdjieff did not have a one-size-fits-all approach and adapted and innovated as circumstance required.[27] In Russia he was described as keeping his teaching confined to a small circle,[28] whereas in Paris and North America he gave numerous public demonstrations.[29]
Gurdjieff felt that the traditional methods of self-knowledge — those of the fakir, monk, and yogi (acquired, respectively, through pain, devotion, and study) - were inadequate on their own and often led to various forms of stagnation and one-sidedness. His methods were designed to augment the traditional paths with the purpose of hastening the developmental process. He sometimes called these methods The Way of the Sly Man[30] because they constituted a sort of short-cut through a process of development that might otherwise carry on for years without substantive results. The teacher, possessing consciousness, sees the individual requirements of the disciple and sets tasks that he knows will result in a transformation of consciousness in that individual. Instructive historical parallels can be found in the annals of Zen Buddhism where teachers employed a variety of methods (sometimes highly unorthodox) to bring about the arising of insight in the student.
The Gurdjieff music divides into three distinct periods. The first period is the early music, including music from the ballet Struggle of the Magicians and music for early Movements, dating to the years around 1918.
The second period music, for which Gurdjieff arguably became best known, written in collaboration with Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, is described as the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music.[31] Dating to the mid 1920s, it offers a rich repertory with roots in Caucasian and Central Asian folk and religious music, Russian Orthodox liturgical music, and other sources. This music was often first heard in the salon at the Prieure, where much was composed. Since the publication of four volumes of this piano repertory by Schott, recently completed, there has been a wealth of new recordings, including orchestral versions of music prepared by Gurdjieff and de Hartmann for the Movements demonstrations of 1923-24. Solo piano versions of these works have been recorded by Cecil Lytle[32] and Keith Jarrett.[33]
The last musical period is the improvised harmonium music which often followed the dinners Gurdjieff held in his Paris apartment during the Occupation and immediate post-war years, to his death in 1949. A virtually encyclopedic collection of surviving recordings was recently released. A detailed booklet includes thoughts from producer Gert-Jan Blom and a preface by Robert Fripp.[34] In all, Gurdjieff in collaboration with de Hartmann composed some 200 pieces.[35] And most recently in May 2010, 38 minutes of unreleased solo piano music on acetate was purchased by Neil Kempfer Stocker from the estate of his late step-daughter Dushka Howarth.
Movements, or sacred dances, constitute an integral part of the Gurdjieff Work. Gurdjieff sometimes referred to himself as a "teacher of dancing" and gained initial public notice for his attempts to put on a ballet in Moscow called Struggle of the Magicians.
Films of movements demonstrations are occasionally shown for private viewing by the Gurdjieff Foundations and one is shown in a scene in the Peter Brook movie Meetings with Remarkable Men.
Gurdjieff taught that group efforts both enhance and surpass individual efforts preparing them to practice a new psychology of evolution. To accomplish this, he needed to constantly innovate and create new alarm clocks to awaken his sleeping students, as Jesus did 1900 years before. Students regularly met with group leaders; both separately and in group meetings, and came together for "work periods" where intensive conscious labor, connected with the forms mentioned above. Work in the kitchen was a special task and sometimes elaborate meals were prepared. This food was the lowest of the three being foods, food, air and impressions. Air and impressions being even more important, special exercises were given for them.
According to Gurdjieff, the work of schools of the Fourth Way never remains the same for long. In some cases, this has led to a break between student and teacher as is the case of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. The outward appearance of the School and the group work can change according to the circumstances. He believed that the inner individual expression, such as the practice of self-remembering with self-observation and the non-expression of negative emotions, always remains the same and could never change, for that is the guarantee of ultimate self-development.
A follower of Gurdjieff, former American Fabrics magazine publisher William C. Segal, tells of periods of hard labor around the clock which in the Gurdjieff System are known as "super-efforts". According to Gurdjieff, only super-efforts count in the Work.[36] In 1948 and 1949, Segal was sporadically in contact with Gurdjieff, who had been the teacher of avant-garde lesbian Jane Heap. In 1951, at 26, Peter Brook became a pupil of Heap in London and Segal published the magazine Gentry.[37] As Segal would write in the poem "Silence Clarity", "... It is through the body that sits here/ that I go to my true nature." A voice at the borders of silence would conclude, "... It is through the mind that stands still/ that I experience my true nature."[38]
Gurdjieff wrote and approved for publication three volumes of his written work under the title All and Everything. The first volume, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, is a lengthy allegorical work that recounts the explanations of Beelzebub to his grandson concerning the beings of the planet Earth. There are two English Translations of this unique work, one carried out under his strict supervision (Beelzebub 1950-1999) when still alive and the other after his death first published in 1991 without notifying the readers. Gurdjieff deliberately tried to increase the effort needed to read and understand the book. As a result the book is perhaps not the best introduction to Gurdjieff's ideas since part of the book's intention is to frustrate and usurp the normal patterns of thought. The second volume, Meetings with Remarkable Men, is written in an accessible manner, and purports to be an autobiography of his early years, but also contains many allegorical statements. His final volume, left intentionally unfinished, shows the Master's hand. Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' contains a fragment of an autobiographical description of later years, as well as transcripts of some lectures.
Gurdjieff's own writings are generally not considered the best introduction to his thought. His own writings do not present any sort of systematisation that clearly existed in his private teachings. Several of Gurdjieff's students kept records of these teachings and published their own accounts. The most highly regarded of these accounts are considered to be those of P D Ouspensky .
As Gurdjieff explained to Ouspensky ... "for exact understanding exact language is necessary."[39] In his first series of writings, Gurdjieff explains how difficult it is to choose an ordinary language to convey his thoughts exactly. He continues..."the Russian language is like the English...both these languages are like the dish which is called in Moscow 'Solianka', and into which everything goes except you and me..."[40] In spite of the difficulties, he goes on to develop a special vocabulary of a new language, all of it his own. He uses these new words particularly in the first series of his writings. However, in The Herald of Coming Good, he uses one particular word for the first time: "Tzvarnoharno", allegedly coined by King Solomon.[41]
Opinions on Gurdjieff's writings and activities are divided. Sympathizers regard him as a charismatic master who brought new knowledge into Western culture, a psychology and cosmology that enable insights beyond those provided by established science.[24] On the other hand, some critics assert he was simply a charlatan with a large ego and a constant need for self-glorification.[42] Gurdjieff is said to have had a strong influence on many modern mystics, artists, writers, and thinkers, including Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), Frank Lloyd Wright,[43] Keith Jarrett, George Russell (composer), Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Fripp, Jacob Needleman, John Shirley, Carlos Castaneda, Dennis Lewis, Peter Brook, Kate Bush, P. L. Travers, Robert S de Ropp, Walter Inglis Anderson, Jean Toomer, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Louis Pauwels, James Moore and Abdullah Isa Neil Dougan. Gurdjieff's notable personal students include Jeanne de Salzmann, Willem Nyland, Lord Pentland (Henry John Sinclair), P. D. Ouspensky, Olga de Hartmann, Thomas de Hartmann, Jane Heap, John G. Bennett, Alfred Richard Orage, Maurice Nicoll, Lanza del Vasto, George and Helen Adie, Rene Daumal and Katherine Mansfield. The Italian composer and singer Franco Battiato was sometime inspired by Gurdjieff's work, for example in his song "Centro di gravità permanente" - one of most popular modern Italian pop songs. Aleister Crowley visited his Institute at least once and privately praised Gurdjieff's work, though with some reservations.[44] During WWI, Algernon Blackwood took up spying while reporting to John Buchan, author of The Thirty Nine Steps. After the war, during the Roaring Twenties, Blackwood studied with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.[45]
Gurdjieff gave new life and practical form to ancient teachings of both East and West. For example, the Socratic and Platonic emphasis on "the examined life" recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the practice of self-observation. His teachings about self-discipline and restraint reflect Stoic teachings. The Hindu and Buddhist notion of attachment recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the concept of identification. Similarly, his cosmology can be "read" against ancient and esoteric sources, respectively Neoplatonic and in such sources as Robert Fludd's treatment of macrocosmic musical structures.
An aspect of Gurdjieff's teachings which has come into prominence in recent decades is the enneagram geometric figure. For many students of the Gurdjieff tradition, the enneagram remains a koan, challenging and never fully explicated. There have been many attempts to trace the origins of this version of the enneagram; some similarities to other figures have been found, but it seems that Gurdjieff was the first person to make the enneagram figure publicly known and that only he knew its true source. Others have used the enneagram figure in connection with personality analysis, principally in the Enneagram of Personality as developed by Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, Helen Palmer and others. Most aspects of this application are not directly connected to Gurdjieff's teaching or to his explanations of the enneagram.
The science-fiction and horror novelist John Shirley has written an introductory work on Gurdjieff for Penguin/Tarcher, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas.
Gurdjieff inspired the formation of many groups after his death, all of which still function today and follow his ideas.[46] The Gurdjieff Foundation, the largest organization directly influenced by the ideas of Gurdjieff, was organized by Jeanne de Salzmann during the early 1950s, and led by her in cooperation with other pupils of his. The main four branches of the Foundation.
Various pupils of Gurdjieff and his direct students have formed other groups. Willem Nyland, one of Gurdjieff's closest students and an original founder and trustee of The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, left to form his own groups in the early 1960s. Jane Heap was sent to London by Gurdjieff, where she led groups until her death in 1964. Louise Goepfert March, who became a pupil of Gurdjieff's in 1929, started her own groups in 1957 and founded the Rochester Folk Art Guild in the Finger Lakes region of New York State; her efforts were closely linked to the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. Independent groups were formed and led by John G. Bennett and Mrs. Staveley. In 2005 Alan Francis, after co-founding the Gurdjieff Foundation in Oregon in 1999, formed the as yet unaffilated Russian Center for Gurdjieff Studies in Moscow.
Gurdjieff student Lord Pentland connects the Gurdjieff group-work with the later rise of encounter groups. Groups also often meet to prepare for demonstrations or performances to which the public is invited.
Louis Pauwels among others[47] criticizes Gurdjieff for his insistence on considering people as "asleep" in a state closely resembling "hypnotic sleep." Gurdjieff said, even specifically at times, that a pious, good, and moral man was no more "spiritually developed" than any other person; they are all equally "asleep."[48]
Henry Miller approved of Gurdjieff's not considering himself holy but, after writing a brief introduction to Fritz Peters' book Boyhood with Gurdjieff, Miller wrote that man is not meant to lead a "harmonious life," as Gurdjieff claimed in naming his institute.[49]
Critics note that Gurdjieff gives no value to most of the elements that comprise the life of an average man. According to Gurdjieff, everything an "average man" possesses, accomplishes, does, and feels is completely accidental and without any initiative. A common everyday ordinary man is born a machine and dies a machine without any chance of being anything else.[50] This belief seems to run counter to the Judeo-Christian tradition that man is a living soul. Gurdjieff believed that the possession of a soul (a state of psychological unity which he equated with being "awake") was a "luxury" that a disciple could attain only by the most painstaking work of over a long period of time. The majority—in whom the true meaning of the gospel failed to take root[51]—went the "broad way" that "led to destruction."[52]
In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (see bibliography), Gurdjieff expresses his reverence for the founders of the mainstream religions of East and West and his contempt (by and large) for what successive generations of believers have made of those religious teachings. His discussions of "orthodoxhydooraki" and "heterodoxhydooraki"—orthodox fools and heterodox fools, from the Russian word durak (fool)—position him as a critic of religious distortion and, in turn, as a target for criticism from some within those traditions. Gurdjieff has been interpreted by some, Ouspensky among others, to have had a total disregard for the value of mainstream religion, philanthropic work and the value of doing right or wrong in general.[53]
Gurdjieff's former students who have criticized him argue, despite his seeming total lack of pretension to any kind of "guru holiness," that the many anecdotes of his sometimes unconventional behavior display the unsavory and impure character of a man who was a cynical manipulator of his followers.[54] Gurdjieff's own pupils wrestled to understand him. For example, in a written exchange between Luc Dietrich and Henri Tracol dating to 1943: "L.D.: How do you know that Gurdjieff wishes you well? H.T.: I feel sometimes how little I interest him—and how strongly he takes an interest in me. By that I measure the strength of an intentional feeling."[55]
Louis Pauwels wrote Monsieur Gurdjieff (first edition published in Paris, France in 1954 by Editions du Seuil).[56] In an interview, Pauwels said of the Gurdjieff work: "... After two years of exercises which both enlightened and burned me, I found myself in a hospital bed with a thrombosed central vein in my left eye and weighing ninety-nine pounds...Horrible anguish and abysses opened up for me. But it was my fault."[57]
Pauwels claims Karl Haushofer, the father of geopolitics whose protegee was Deputy Reich Führer Rudolf Hess, as one of the real "seekers after truth" described by Gurdjieff. According to Rom Landau, a journalist in the 1930s, as reported to him by Achmed Abdullah: at the beginning of the 20th century, Gurdjieff was a Russian secret agent in Tibet who went by the name of "Hambro Akuan Dorzhieff" (i.e. Agvan Dorjiev), chief tutor to the Dalai Lama.[58] However, reports have it that Dorzhieff went to live in the Buddhist temple erected in St. Petersburg and after the revolution, he was imprisoned by Stalin. James Webb conjectures that Gurdjieff may have been Dorzhieff's assistant Ushe Narzunoff (i.e. Ovshe Norzunov) but this is untenable.[59]
Colin Wilson writes about "...Gurdjieff's reputation for seducing his female students. (In Providence, Rhode Island, in 1960, a man was pointed out to me as one of Gurdjieff's illegitimate children. The professor who told me this also assured me that Gurdjieff had left many children around America)."[60]
In the early 1930s Gurdjieff publicly ridiculed one of his pupils, Alfred Richard Orage. In response, his wife Jessie Dwight wrote the following poem about Gurdjieff:
"He call himself, deluded man, The Tiger of The Turkestan. And greater he than God or Devil Eschewing good and preaching evil. His followers whom he does glut on Are for him naught but wool and mutton, And still they come and sit agape With Tiger's rage and Tiger's rape. Why not, they say, The man's a god; We have it on the sacred word. His book will set the world on fire. He says so - can God be a liar? But what is woman, says Gurdjieff, Just nothing but man's handkerchief. I need a new one every day, Let others for the washing pay."
In The Oragean Version, C. Daly King surmised that the problem that Gurdfieff had with Orage's teachings was that the "Oragean Version" was not emotional enough and was not based on "incredulity" and faith. King wrote that Gurdjieff did not state it as clearly and specifically as this, but was quick to add that nothing Gurdjieff said was specific or clear.
According to Osho, the Gurdjieff system is incomplete, drawing from Dervish sources inimical to Kundalini. Some Sufi orders, such as the Naqshbandi, draw from and are amenable to Kundalini.[61]
Gurdjieff's views have arguably become best known through the published works of his pupils. His one-time student P. D. Ouspensky wrote In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, which some, Rodney Collins among others, regard as a crucial introduction to the teaching. Others refer to Gurdjieff's own books (detailed below) as the primary texts.
Published accounts of time spent with Gurdjieff have appeared written by A. R. Orage, Charles Stanley Nott, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Fritz Peters, René Daumal, John G. Bennett, Maurice Nicoll, Margaret Anderson and Louis Pauwels, among others. Many others found themselves drawn to his "ideas table": Frank Lloyd Wright,[62] Kathryn Hulme, P. L. Travers, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Toomer and Ethel Merston.
Three books by Gurdjieff were published in the English language in the United States after his death: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson published in 1950 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., Meetings with Remarkable Men, published in 1963 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., and Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', printed privately by E. P. Dutton & Co. and published in 1978 by Triangle Editions Inc. for private distribution only. 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. Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook wrote the film, Brook directed, and Dragan Maksimovic and Terence Stamp star, as does South African playwright and actor, Athol Fugard.[63]