G. I. Gurdjieff – a powerful and nonconformist spiritual master

He was an unusual spiritual master

Strong and nonconformist, he forces you by his presence to be as strong, capable and attentive.
He spoke directly and did not shy away from life.
At one point, he also met Brancusi.

Those who followed him and endured in his team achieved spiritual achievements.
Before the beginning of the First World War, a man of Armenian-Greek origin, who had fully lived the experience of travels and profoundly esoteric feelings, returned to Russia, the country where he was born, bringing with him the priceless mystical teaching of the East.

“He was striking by his great inner simplicity and his natural air with which he made us completely forget that he represented for us the world of the miraculous and the unknown. It was also felt in him, very strongly, the total absence of any kind of affectation or desire to impress those around him in any way. In addition, I felt him completely disinterested, totally indifferent to luxury, to his comfort and able to spare no effort in his work.”

P.D.Uspensky, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

The first part of life

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1877-1949) was born in the city of Alexandropol, near the Russian-Persian border.
His family, of Greek origin, lived for a period of time in Turkey, later settling in Armenia.
Gurdjieff’s father, the person with the greatest influence on his childhood and adolescence, was a carpenter by profession. At his workshop, countless people gathered in the evening to discuss religion and, above all, to tell countless Asian legends. These stories greatly impressed Gurdjieff and made him passionate about the fantastic and the supernatural from a very young age.

“His early years were spent in an atmosphere of stories, legends and traditions. Around him, the miraculous had been a real fact. Predictions that he had heard and to which his entourage gave total confidence had come true and had opened his eyes to many things. The intertwining of all these influences had created in him, from an early age, a thought oriented towards the mysterious, the incomprehensible and the magical.”

P. Uspensky, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

He received a very good education, being closely supervised by the bishop of the locality, who trained him to become a doctor and priest.
Gurdjieff left home when he was still a teenager and returned after 20 years. It is said that during this period he traveled to Asia, Europe and Africa, being a member of an esoteric group called the “Seekers of Truth”, which aimed to find the Ultimate Truth.

He met fakirs and dervishes, authentic spiritual masters, studied yogic practices, visited the famous Tibetan monasteries

The leaders of the group to which he belonged sent him from one master to another, each of them giving him part of his knowledge, as well as their profession. Thus, he learned the art of weaving, calligraphy, brass processing, breathing techniques, dervish dances, Sufi music, and fast-moving yogic techniques.

He had a very adventurous nature and showed extraordinary inventiveness

He told his disciples how, in order to raise funds for books and for the trips of the “Seekers of Truth” group, he caught sparrows that he painted and sold to rich people as American canaries, how he bought carpets from the Caucasus and sold them in Moscow claiming to be from India, being convinced that it is not a sin to take advantage of the snobbery and stupidity of rich people.

He returned to Russia having very well developed the “System” that he taught to his disciples for the rest of his life

System that aimed to explain the nature of man and the Universe. The language he used was that of a scientist. Even as a teenager he sought to approach the Western way of life, being fascinated by medicine, physics, mechanics, chemistry – so the information he collected in his travels was combined with the most recent Western discoveries of that period.
Gurdjieff returned to Moscow in 1912, where he sought to form a group of his disciples. Among his first disciples were: Dr. de Stjoernval, the composer Thomas de Hartmann, the sculptor Vladimir Pohl.
In 1915, he wrote and directed a “Hindu” ballet entitled “The Battle of the Magicians”, an occasion that would mediate the meeting with his most famous disciple, Peter Demianovitch Uspensky.

His most famous disciple, Peter Demianovitch Ouspensky

He was a well-known mathematician, journalist and a great lover of esotericism. He had written a successful book, called “Tertium Organum” – in which he argued the idea of approaching time as a fourth dimension. In 1914 he embarked on a journey around the world, wanting to find a teaching that would fulfill his aspirations to discover the Truth, an esoteric school that could be followed and verified step by step, not the kind of school in which man had to sacrifice everything before he could begin, before he knew if he really possessed the desired Knowledge.
The paradox made him find in his country what he had been looking for for a long time elsewhere.

At the heart of the system taught by Gurdjieff are the following ideas:

• man is in a state of sleep, in which he uses only a tiny part of his affective, mental and spiritual strength;
• man is so conditioned by his habits and prejudices that all his reactions are totally predictable, he functions like a machine, which led Gurdjieff to introduce the concept of man-machine;
• the man-machine is subject to a multitude of laws that determine his existence;
• man must become his own master using his free will and this can only be achieved through a process of self-observation and awareness;

This understanding of existence is based on two fundamental laws of the Universe: the Law of Three and the Law of Seven.

Law of Three

He argues that everything that exists in manifestation is the result of the interaction of three forces called positive-active, negative-passive, and neutral. Most often man is only aware of the existence of positive and negative forces, and we ignore the existence of the third.

Law of Seven

It shows that there is no process that goes smoothly. Just as in the music range there are two semitones or hiatuses, so any process begun will be diverted from the intended purpose, unless it is provided with sufficient additional energy to “fill” the two hiatuses.

Another basic idea of Gurdjieff’s system is the eneagram

The Enneagram is a fundamental symbol that condenses into a synthetic form the fundamental laws of the Universe, the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. It consists of a circle divided into 9 equal parts and a series of lines. These lines form an equilateral triangle with the tip upwards, an expression of the Law of Three, and the six points constitute a dynamic, procedural expression of the Law of Seven. The eneagram was first revealed in the West by Gurdjieff, who very often applied this diagram within his methods of spiritual awakening.

Gurdjieff called his system “the fourth way”

He called his system the fourth path to differentiate it from the first three paths of evolution that he considered: the path of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.

In 1917, the Russian Revolution interrupted the work of Gurdjieff and his group. Gurdjieff returns to his parents’ home in the Caucasus, followed by many members of the group. He founded the “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man” in Tbilisi, where he continued the work he had begun in St. Petersburg.
The chaos created by World War I was used by Gurdjieff to carry out expeditions to regions that were shaken by internal strife, to increase the physical and mental resistance of his disciples.

He made his disciples perform various very hard physical labors, to face certain life situations that created difficult psychological moments. Gurdjieff sent ladies from high society to sell various objects in the market. All these somewhat bizarre situations were aimed at creating certain conjunctures that determined the individual to confront himself, his limitations and prejudices.

By the early 1920s, life had become so difficult in Russia that Gurdjieff and his disciples had to leave for Constantinople. Uspensky had some disagreements with his master, which led him to leave for London. Here he formed study groups to which he transmitted the teaching he received, always recognizing that the source of his teachings is Gurdjieff.

After two unsuccessful attempts to establish an institute similar to the one in Tbilisi in Germany, Gurdjieff arrived in Paris in 1922, where, with the help of his disciples (including Uspensky), he bought a castle in Fontainbleau, Prieure. Here Gurdjieff restarts the work of the institute in Tiflis, elaborates new activities that remind his disciples of the conflict that exists between their conscience and their way of acting. He insisted on hard physical labor: during the day, his disciples made roads, felled trees, built houses, cleared swamps, planted orchards, and at night they rehearsed dances elaborated by Gurdjieff.

Gurjieff’s dances

They were dances inspired by the Sufi tradition of whirling dervishes and which he considered an essential part of their spiritual training.
The dances were based on the belief that man operates through three centers:

the intellectual center – the one that ensures the thought process,
emotional center – the center of feelings,
the instinctive center – the one that ensures the movement and the creative process.
In any human being, one of these centers manifests itself predominantly.

The purpose of the dance was to teach the dancer how to harmoniously integrate all these centers, without giving free rein to his imagination and emotions. These dances, which seemed to an uninitiated man to be rather strange movements, took place to music composed by Gurjieff together with the composer Thomas de Hartmann.

Also related to the importance of awareness of movement, Gurdjieff developed the “stop technique”.

The moment he says “stop”, the disciples “froze” exactly in the attitude (inner and outer) they had at that moment, without allowing any muscle to move or any thought to manifest.

In 1923, Gurdjieff sent one of his disciples, Orage, as an ambassador of his teaching in America

The following year, he went there with a few disciples. In New York they gave several performances with the sacred ballet. One of these remained memorable. Gurdjieff gave the order that all his students who were on stage come running to the hall. The stage was five meters high from the floor of the performance hall. Everyone thought that at some point the master would say “stop”. But Gurdjieff turned his back to talk to someone, so all the dancers fell on top of each other in the horror screams of the spectators. But the moment when, at the master’s command, all those who had collapsed to the ground rose without a scratch, the hall began to applaud frantically.

At the end of 1924, Gurdjieff returned to France

But due to a serious car accident, the activity at Prieure is much slowed down. Gurdjieff decides that he cannot fully put his ideas into practice and that he must ensure that at least theoretically these teachings will remain for posterity. His three books date from this period : “Everything and All”, “The Stories of Beelzebub to His Nephew” and “Encounters with Remarkable People”.

His most important disciple, Uspensky, wrote about Gurdjieff and his teaching, in “Fragments of an Unknown Teaching” and “The Fourth Way”.
During World War II, Gurdjieff remained in France, where he continued to teach relatively small groups of disciples.

He died in October 1949, leaving behind a system that transformed the lives of many people as well as the fields of art, theater and psychoanalysis.

Wise words

“Gurdjieff, following the instructions of the Order, spent several months writing only the sentence: Lord, have mercy on me!”

Edmond Andre, “In the footsteps of a great initiate”

“Gurdjieff bore all the signs that indicated that he would be among those who were sent to learn, to be formed, and then were guided and sent to instruct in turn.”

Edmond Andre, “In the footsteps of a great initiate”

“Man does not have a single big ‘I’, but is divided into a lot of ‘I’s’. But each of them is capable of proclaiming themselves to be “the Essence,” of acting in the name of the Essence, of making promises, of making decisions, of agreeing or disagreeing with what another “I” would have to do. This is the tragedy of the human being, that every little “I” thus has the power to sign treaties, so that afterwards man, that is, the Essence, is the one who has to cope.”

“The fundamental method for the study of one’s own being is self-observation.”

“Inner unity is achieved when there is in being the inner struggle between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. If a person lives without any inner struggle, if everything that happens to him unfolds without any opposition, if the being always goes to which way the tide takes him, which way the wind blows, then he will never progress, he will remain as he is.”

“What people have to sacrifice is their suffering: nothing is more difficult to sacrifice. A man will give up all pleasure rather than give up his own suffering. Man has degenerated in such a way that he cares about this more than anything. And yet, it is indispensable to free oneself from suffering.”

“Understanding the symbol of the enneagram and the ability to use it gives man a very great power. It is the perpetual motion, it is the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists. It should be understood that the enneagram is a universal symbol. Any science has its place in the enneagram and can be interpreted thanks to it. A man only truly understands what he is capable of locating on the enneagram.”

“A ceremony is a book in which thousands of things are written. Whoever understands can read. A single ritual often has more content than a thousand books.”

“In objective, genuine art, nothing is accidental, everything is mathematical. The artist knows and understands the message he wants to convey and his work cannot produce a certain impression on one person and a completely different impression on another – this in the case of people on the same level of consciousness.”

“An inner growth, a spiritual transformation of the being depends entirely on the work that each one puts in, alone, in this regard.”