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BiographyGurdjieff was born in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia. The exact year is unknown; anything from 1866 to 1877 has been offered. James Moore's biography ("Gurdjieff: The Anatomy Of A Myth") argues persuasively for 1866. Gurdjieff grew up in Kars, 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 changed and the old order was crumbling, they walked by foot to Batumi on the Black Sea coast, and then Istanbul. There Gurdjieff rented an apartment on Koumbaradji Street in Péra and later at 13 Abdullatif Yemeneci Sokak near the Galata Tower[1]. 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 Istanbul 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.
Starting from 1930, Gurdjieff made visits to North America where he took over as the teacher of the pupils that were at that time being taught by A.R. Orage. In 1935 Gurdjieff stopped writing All and Everything having completed the first two parts of the trilogy and only having started on the Third Series (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 was held at the St. Alexandre Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral at 12 Rue Daru, Paris. He is buried in the cemetery at Fontainebleau-Avon.[1] The TeachingsThe Fourth Way is the most commonly used name for Gurdjieff's teachings when directly attributed to him, and they continue to be taught by schools founded by Gurdjieff as well as other institutes and individuals whom his works continue to influence. Some of those who had contact with Gurdjieff saw him as a spiritual Master[2] – someone who possessed what Gurdjieff himself called objective consciousness – a form of consciousness gained by the practice of self-remembering and work on oneself; in other words a human being who is fully awake or enlightened. Others saw him as an esotericist or occultist. Gurdjieff widely admitted his teaching was esoteric but he claimed that none of it was veiled in secrecy. Rather, Gurdjieff claimed that many people either don't have an interest or the capability to understand certain ideas. Gurdjieff referred to those capable of receiving the work as "five of twenty of twenty" - only twenty per cent of all people ever think seriously about higher realities. Of these, only twenty per cent ever decide to do anything about it. And of these, only five per cent ever actually get anywhere.[citation needed] Gurdjieff's teaching mainly addresses the question of people's place in the Universe and their possibilities for inner development. He also emphasized that people live their lives in a form of waking sleep, and that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies,[3] and various inner abilities are possible.[4] 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 the one which is commonly attributed to them, and that the real meaning of these texts points in the same direction as his teaching. 'Know thyself'[5] and the 'Lord's Prayer' are the basic examples. 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, whose aim is to transform a man into what Gurdjieff believed he ought to be.[6] Distrusting "morality," which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and superficial, he greatly stressed the importance of conscience. This he regarded as the same in all people, buried in people's subconsciousness, thus both sheltered from damage by how people live and inaccessible without thorough "work on oneself". To provide conditions in which attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements" which they performed together as a group, and he left a body of music inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, which was written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann. Gurdjieff used the "Stop" exercise as one of his means to prompt his students. Suddenly and without notice a pre-arranged signal would be made, and all students would 'freeze' whatever they were doing to hold the position they found themselves in when this signal was made. The students were encouraged by this exercise to notice their habits, sense their tensions, and observe thoughts – in a word, to become able to strengthen their attention so as to remember themselves. Later another signal would be made and ordinary movement would recommence.[7] Other shocks to help awaken his pupils from constant day-dreaming were always possible at any moment. His teaching has been continued by various groups originated after his death, some under the umbrella of the Gurdjieff Foundations in New York, London, and Paris. 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 they may not have been developed via a teacher-student relationship originating with Gurdjieff himself. Much has been written about Gurdjieff, and many anecdotes about his life have been recorded. According to Gurdjieff's autobiography and what was written by him, he traveled through countries and continents most of his life, and witnessed many miracles and came in contact with various secret groups. Also, because of his traveling he had to learn many different languages (according to himself he spoke 18 languages fluently in the end). In some of the works associated with Gurdjieff it is claimed that Gurdjieff was an expert on hypnotism, and that at one time he was working as a professional physician-hypnotist.[8][9] From all of Gurdjieff's work it is evident that he was well aware of countless functions and possibilities of the human body. Origins of Gurdjieff's teachingsGurdjieff refused to divulge the origins of his system. Various intellectual and spiritual debts have been suggested:
ReceptionGurdjieff's writings and activities have divided opinion. Sympathizers regard him as a charismatic master who brought new knowledge into Western culture, a psychology and cosmology that opened up new and fruitful avenues of thought, enabling insights beyond those provided by established science.[11] Critics assert he was simply a charlatan with a large ego and a constant need for self-glorification.[12] However one regards Gurdjieff's teaching, or Gurdjieff personally, he appears to have introduced certain esoteric ideas into Western society (for instance, the enneagram) which were previously unknown to western culture. Gurdjieff had a strong influence on many modern mystics, artists, writers, and thinkers including Keith Jarrett, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Fripp, Jacob Needleman, John Shirley, and Frank Lloyd Wright. His influence has spread out from a "mainstream" of Gurdjieffianism to variants with no clear cut relationship to his teaching apart from the use of his name or certain teachings. Example of this would be the teaching of Robert Burton, and the marketing of the "Enneagram of Personalities", a personality typology system sometimes attributed to Gurdjieff which has been shrugged off as inauthentic by members of the school Gurdjieff started and which appears to have been contrived through a "channeling" process by Oscar Ichazo. CriticismCriticism of Gurdjieff's system largely focuses on his insistence that most people live in a state of "waking sleep." Gurdjieff said, even specifically at times, that a pious, good, and moral man was no more "spiritually developed" than any other person. The primary criticism of Gurdjieff's work frequently is that it attaches no value to almost everything that composes the life of an average man. According to Gurdjieff, everything a man possesses, accomplishes, everybody he calls a friend, and even his own thoughts and feelings are not his own except by accident. What follows is a large quote from Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which is a rather concise reduction of the principles of Gurdjieff's work, which concepts most commonly evoke criticism: Contemporary 'exact-positive science' says that a man is a very complex organism developed by evolution from the simplest organisms, and who has now become capable of reacting in a very complex manner to external impressions. This capability of reacting in a man is so complex, and the responsive movements can appear to be so far removed from the causes evoking them and conditioning them, that the actions of man, or at least part of them, seem to naïve observation quite spontaneous. But according to the ideas of Mr. Gurdjieff, the average man is indeed incapable of the single smallest independent or spontaneous action or word. All of him is only the result of external effect. Man is a transforming machine, a kind of transmitting station of forces. Thus from the point of view of the totality of Mr. Gurdjieff's ideas and also according to contemporary "exact-positive-science," man differs from the animals only by the greater complexity of his reactions to external impressions, and by having a more complex construction for perceiving and reacting to them. And as to that which is attributed to man and named "will," Mr. Gurdjieff completely denies the possibility of its being in the common presence of the average man. Note that "average man" here encompasses everyone who has not made distinct and purposeful attempts at spiritual development. Someone who goes to church on Sunday, or even a rather strict adherent to Buddhism (unless he had received special instructions), almost certainly falls under Gurdjieff's category "average man," as would of course almost all atheists, agnostics, and similar people. These claims by Gurdjieff have been interpreted by many to be a total disregard for the value of mainstream religion, philanthropic work, and the value of doing right or wrong in general. While Gurdjieff himself had said that his teachings were no substitute for faith or philanthropic works, his teaching necessitated the understanding that these "things of this world" are at the very least of a "different" value than those that his teaching hopes to develop in people. But as with so much surrounding Gurdjieff and his teaching, other views are possible. For example, during the Russian period he spoke with respect of the obyvatl, the simple householder or peasant, salt of the earth, who lives by traditional values and slowly makes his way to Heaven. Much later in Paris, he gave encouragement and financial help to a multitude of people who were hard up for one reason or another. His Paris flat had, people say, one of the world's worst art collections--purchased from indigent artists as a cover for providing them with funds without humiliating them. What really to think, then, about his teachings concerning "the average man"? Diogenes, the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher whom Gurdjieff resembles, once said of himself that like the chorus master, he set the note a little high so that the chorus would hit the right note. For his pupils and in his writings, Gurdjieff set the note "a little high" as a goal and inspiration, while in his personal conduct, he was generous to "the average man." Many of them attended his funeral at the Russian cathedral, rue Daru. Gurdjieff's pupils didn't know them. See alsoReferences
BibliographyGurdjieff is 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 regard as a crucial introduction to the teaching. Others refer to Gurdjieff's own books (detailed below) as the primary texts. Accounts of time spent with Gurdjieff have been published 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 were drawn to his 'ideas table': Frank Lloyd Wright, Kathryn Hulme, P.L. Travers, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Toomer. 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 written by Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook, directed by Brook, and stars Dragan Maksimovic and Terence Stamp. Works by Gurdjieff
Books about G. I. Gurdjieff and The Fourth Way
Videos/DVDs about G. I. Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way
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