Kathleen Speeth learned at Gurdjieff’s knee as a child and later studied under his successor, Mme. Jeanne de Salzmann. She discusses Gurdjieff’s spiritual teachings, offers a brief profile of the philosopher, and assesses his influence on the modern world.
The Alchemy of Stones presents an inspired breakthrough in Robert Simmons’ thirty-five-year career of exploring and revealing the spiritual qualities and potentials of minerals, crystals, and gemstones. This holistic, Earth-based framework for understanding stones and their energies initiates readers into an alchemical worldview that leads to spiritual healing, transformation, and transcendence.
The late Jean Houston was at the cutting edge of the work on realizing the fullness of our human potential, which is as mainstream and pervasive in our culture as computer technology. A Mythic Life presents Jean Houston’s real, magical story and her true teaching. Here, she draws on her personal history and vast cultural knowledge to show how we can experience in our own lives the greater human story revealed in myths and discover our real potential.
First printed on 26 August 1933 by La Société Anonyme des Editions de l¿Ouest, this is the 75th anniversary edition, a reprint of the first edition. This edition has been digitally retypeset and is not a facsimile.
Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (Armenian: Գեորգի Իվանովիչ Գյուրջիև, Georgian: გიორგი გურჯიევი, Greek: Γεώργιος Γεωργιάδης, Russian: Гео́ргий Ива́нович Гюрджи́ев, Georgiy Ivanovich Gyurdzhiev, or Gurdjiev) was an influential Greek-Armenian mystic, spiritual teacher of the early to mid-20th century, and a self-professed ‘teacher of dancing’.
He taught that the vast majority of humanity lives their entire lives in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep,” but that it was possible to transcend to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff developed a method for doing so, calling his discipline “The Work” (connoting “work on oneself”) or “the Method.” According to his principles and instructions, Gurdjieff’s method for awakening one’s consciousness is different from that of the fakir, monk or yogi, so his discipline is also called (originally) the “Fourth Way.” At one point he described his teaching as being “esoteric Christianity.”
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. 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.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jun 20, 2024 Psychology and Psychotherapy Gary Lachman is the author of over twenty books about the history of esotericism and its influence on politics and society. He has written biographies of Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, P. D. Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson. His newest book is Maurice Nicoll: The Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way. His website is https://www.gary-lachman.com/ Here he weaves a fascinating tapestry involving the ferment in the early twentieth century, including the emergence of depth psychology and a burgeoning esoteric culture including theosophy, anthroposophy, ritual magick, and – particularly – the Fourth Way movement of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Maurice Nicoll was in the center of this world. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:53 The Fourth Way 00:18:13 Maurice Nicoll and depth psychology 00:28:36 Fourth Way paradoxes 00:44:12 Fusion of psychology and esotericism 00:57:38 Gurdjieff movements 01:06:56 Maurice Nicoll’s significance 01:16:46 Conclusion Edited subtitles for this video are available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, and Swedish. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on June 6, 2024)
First published in 1975, this book has established itself as an authentic source for those interested in Gurdjieff’s ideas and his approach to practical “work on oneself”.
Ebayed • Jan 18, 2024 • Explore the life and teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, a mystic and spiritual teacher whose profound philosophy, known as the Fourth Way, has inspired seekers of self-realization. This video delves into key aspects of Gurdjieff’s life, his transformative teachings, and the impact of The Work on spiritual development. ? Key Points: Gurdjieff’s early life in the Russian Empire. The Fourth Way: A unique spiritual teaching integrating mysticism, psychology, and esotericism. The Work: Emphasizing self-observation, self-awareness, and breaking free from mechanical behavior. Influences from Eastern philosophies and extensive travels in the East. Notable books like “Meetings with Remarkable Men” and “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson.” The establishment of spiritual communities and schools. Gurdjieff’s lasting legacy and diverse interpretations of his teachings.
One of the most seminally important and enigmatic spiritual figures of the twentieth century was Greek-Armenian philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949). His essential teaching is that man lives in a state of sleep — not metaphorically but actually.
Human existence, the teacher observed, is not only passed in sleep but man himself is in pieces, at the passive bidding of his three brains or centers: thinking, emotional, and physical, all of which function in disunity leaving a “man-machine” incapable of authentic activity.
“Man cannot do,” Gurdjieff said. He meant this in the fullest sense.
Nearly all of Gurdjieff’s statements — including his 1950 literary giant Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson — were intended to disrupt rote thought. He instructed that the magisterial allegory be read three times.
Author P.L. Travers, best known for the Mary Poppins books, noted aptly, “In Beelzebub’s Tales, soaring off into space, like a great, lumbering, flying cathedral, Gurdjieff gathered the fundamentals of his teaching.”
There is no neat summarizing the breadth of Gurdjieff’s system, which extended to sacred dances, self-observation, rigorous and challenging training and confrontation with obstacles, and what might be considered a cosmological-existential-spiritual psychology, explored by one of his greatest students, P.D. Ouspensky (1878–1947), who produced an invaluable record of his experiences with Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous, posthumously published in 1949. A brief, though daunting, analysis also appears in Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, published in 1950.
Gurdjieff, 1922 (Wikimedia Commons)
Appearing in Russia shortly before World War I, Gurdjieff assembled a remarkable circle of students, some of whom followed him in a harrowing escape across the continent amid the chaos and danger of war and revolution.
A sense of Gurdjieff’s relationship to his students and manner of teaching appears in an episode from Fritz Peters’ haunting and powerful 1964 memoir Boyhood with Gurdjieff.
In Peters’ book, the author recounts the commitment Gurdjieff exacted from Fritz at age eleven. The young adolescent met Gurdjieff in June 1924 when he was sent to spend the summer at the teacher’s school, the Prieuré, a communal estate in Fontainebleau-Avon outside of Paris.
1972 edition of Peters’ memoir.
Speaking to Fritz on a stone patio one day, Gurdjieff banged the table with his fist and asked, “Can you promise to do something for me?” The boy gave a firm, “Yes.” The teacher gestured to the estate’s vast expanse of lawns. “You see this grass?” he asked. “Yes,” Fritz said again. “I give you work. You must cut this grass, with machine, every week.”
Fritz agreed — but that wasn’t enough. Gurdjieff “struck the table with his fist for the second time. ‘You must promise on your God.’ His voice was deadly serious. ‘You must promise that you will do this thing no matter what happens.’” Fritz replied, “I promise.” Again, not enough. “Not just promise,” Gurdjieff said. “Must promise you will do no matter what happens, no matter who try stop you. Many things can happen in life.”
Fritz vowed again.
Very soon, in the lives of Fritz and his teacher, something seismic and upending did occur. Gurdjieff suffered a severe car accident and for several weeks laid in a near-coma recovering at the Prieuré.
Fritz, feeling that the whole thing seemed almost foreordained, honored his commitment to keep mowing the lawns. But he met with stern resistance. Several adults at the school insisted that the noise would disturb Gurdjieff’s convalescence and could even result in the master’s death.
Fritz recalled how unsparingly the promise had been extracted and how fully it had been given. He refused to relent. He kept mowing — no one physically stopped him. One day while Fritz was cutting the lawns, he spied the recovering master smile at him from his bedroom window.
Gurdjieff, 1925. (Wikimedia Commons)
One of the greatest benefits students receive from Gurdjieff’s teaching (to which I can personally attest) is how it punctures, immediately and sometimes devastatingly, one’s cherished images of self.
We in the modern West are suffused with contradictions. People are filled with puffed up views of themselves. They are also filled with the opposite. But take one person and give him or her an unfamiliar task at an inconvenient hour and you will see how powerful or special we are. Not very.
Gurdjieff constantly pushed people to surpass their limits of perceived strength. In his posthumous memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men, the teacher described episodes from when he and a band of students fled civil war-torn Russia. In an epilogue, “The Material Question,” he addressed their need for money.
In the summer of 1922, after a dangerous flight across Eastern Europe, Gurdjieff and his students reached Paris with razor-thin resources. Procuring an estate, the Prieuré, to function as living quarters and school, Gurdjieff used every means possible to foster his circle’s financial survival.
“The work went well,” he wrote, “but the excessive pressure of these months, immediately following eight years of uninterrupted labours, fatigued me to such a point that my health was severely shaken, and despite all my desire and effort I could no longer maintain the same intensity.”
Seeking to restore his strength through a dramatic change in setting as well as fundraise for the institute, Gurdjieff devised a plan to tour America with forty-six students. The troupe would put on demonstrations of the sacred dances they practiced and present Gurdjieff’s lectures and ideas to the public. Although intended to attract donors, the ocean voyage and lodgings entailed significant upfront expenses. Last-minute adjustments and unforeseen costs consumed nearly all the teacher’s remaining resources.
“To set out on such a long journey with such a number of people,” he wrote, “and not have any reserve cash for an emergency was, of course, unthinkable.”
The trip itself, so meticulously prepped and planned for, faced collapse. “And then,” Gurdjieff wrote, “as has happened to me more than once in critical moments of my life, there occurred an entirely unexpected event.” He continued:
What occurred was one of those interventions that people who are capable of thinking consciously — in our times and particularly in past epochs — have always considered a sign of the just providence of the Higher Powers. As for me, I would say that it was the law-conformable result of a man’s unflinching perseverance in bringing all his manifestations into accordance with the principles he has consciously set himself in life for the attainment of a definite aim.
As Gurdjieff sat in his room pondering their troubles, his elderly mother entered. She had reached Paris just a few days earlier. His mother was part of the group fleeing Russia but she and others got stranded in the Caucasus. “It was only recently that I had succeeded,” Gurdjieff wrote, “after a great deal of trouble, in getting them to France.”
She handed her son a package, which she told him was a burden from which she desperately wished to be relieved. Gurdjieff opened the package to discover a forgotten brooch of significant value that he had given her back in Eastern Europe. He intended it as a barter item used to pass a border or secure food and shelter. He assumed it was long since sold or otherwise traded and never again thought of it. But there it was. At the precipice of ruin, they were saved.
“I almost jumped up and danced for joy,” he wrote. This was the lawful result of “unflinching perseverance.”
As with all Gurdjieff wrote and said, there is at the back of his statement a level of gravitas and lived experience that makes this teaching warranting of deep pause. Things that might appear homiletic in the mouth of a lesser figure took on life-and-death seriousness from this teacher.
Iclose this brief consideration with a statement of Ouspensky’s. It is not, perhaps, considered one of his most remarkable observations, but it is useful and instructive insofar as it demonstrates how his and Gurdjieff’s ideas cannot be contextualized within familiar categories.
Philosopher Jacob Needleman (1934–2022), a student of the Gurdjieff work, remarked, “It’s not like anything.”
Ouspensky made a valuable observation about the nature of a “positive attitude” in a talk reproduced in the posthumously published book, A Further Record: Extracts from Meetings 1928–1945. In its lowest and least useful iteration, Ouspensky told students,
. . . a positive attitude does not really mean a positive attitude, it simply means liking certain things. A really positive attitude is something quite different. Positive attitude can be defined better than positive emotion, because it refers to thinking. But a real positive attitude includes in itself understanding of the thing itself and understanding of the quality of the thing from the point of view, let us say, of evolution and those things that are obstacles. Things that are against, i.e., if they don’t help, they are not considered, they simply don’t exist, however big they may be externally. And by not seeing them, i.e., if they disappear, one can get rid of their influence. Only, again it is necessary to understand that not seeing wrong things does not mean indifference; it is something quite dif- ferent from indifference.
What the teacher is saying, albeit on a great scale, is that the individual must seek to understand forces that develop or erode his or her humanity, itself an immense question.
We are unconcerned with coordinates of good or bad, happy or sad, but rather with questions of developmental forces and what they mean to us.
This article is adapted from the author’s Modern Occultism (2023):
127,085 views • Jul 1, 2023A documentary on George Gurdjieff with Armenian sub-titles. Contains original and rare footage of the Gurdjieff movements and music from the 1920’s and covers the basis of his teaching in his own words. George Gurdjieff was born in 1867 in Gyumri (formerly Alexandropol) in Armenia. His father Ivan was Greek and his mother Yeva was Armenian. The film was made by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, a close associate of Madame de Salzmann, with the support of the Gurdjieff Institute in France and is best viewed in full screen on a television or laptop. Osho described Gurdjieff as one of the most significant spiritual masters of this era and indeed this is a film well worth watching. Gurdjieff’s teaching is fully described in the book called “In Search of the Miraculous” which can be read at http://www.gurdjieff.am Your comments are welcome. We live on a wonderful and possibly unique planet in the universe and can only be grateful for every second of life that is granted to us.
In the summer of 1947, Ouspensky retires to Lyne Place with a small circle of followers, embarking on a series of excursions to landmarks of significance during his life in England, with the apparent aim to retrace and reconstruct his memory of all of the episodes to which they were connected. Those who join Ouspensky on these trips view it in the air of an expedition which requires that they continually work to string together meaning by his enigmatic clues and hints in order to navigate.
By September 4, 1947, much preparation is underway on both sides of the Atlantic for Ouspensky’s return to America, with his people at Lyne Place arranging for his departure while those at Franklyn Farms make ready for his arrival. Yet at the very point of boarding the ship, Ouspensky cancels the whole voyage and requests to return to Lyne Place, a decision that immediately reveals itself to have been his plan all along.
[OUSPENSKY] You know I never intended to go to America – not for a minute.xiii
This sudden reversal of plans makes room for a sequence of extraordinary and strange events in which Ouspensky’s companions accustom themselves to meet with near unconditional acceptance, no matter how unusual the request or unreasonable the demand. He compels the household to break all routines, blurring day with night, continuing the scavenger hunt throughout England as he demonstrates an astonishing command of will over his frail and severely weakened state.
[OUSPENSKY] Do you understand that everything can only be done by effort, or do you think that things can happen right?xiii
[STUDENT] How do I find real “I”? [OUSPENSKY] By making demands on oneself. I show you the way.xiii
Those among his inner circle account of continual supernatural phenomena taking place amid these last days. They ascribe to Ouspensky the faculty to orchestrate people and events by means of telepathy, how he is able to induce special conditions and scenarios as if directing and producing a theatrical performance with his own conscious death as the central plot, and by which each of his peers, through the part they play, is instructed on the future of their own personal work.
[OUSPENSKY] This is not a dress rehearsal. This is not miracle. This is preparation for preparation for a miracle.xiii
Ouspensky dies on October 2, 1947 in Lyne Place, with those with him at the end left with the steadfast conviction that he continued onwards, in the spirit of his lifelong adherence to the Theory of Recurrence, to find himself returned once again a newborn infant in Moscow on March 5, 1878. The conscious design of this final period serves as a testament to his embodiment of the teaching to which he dedicated his life.
[OUSPENSKY] Think about death. You do not know how much time remains to you. And remember that if you do not become different, everything will be repeated again, all foolish blunders, all silly mistakes, all loss of time and opportunity — everything will be repeated with the exception of the chance you had this time, because chance never comes in the same form.xiv
When Ouspensky arrives in London in August 1921, he is greeted with the popularity of the English translation of Tertium Organum, which, unknown to him, was published a year earlier in New York and England. Some key members of London’s intellectual circles find his work spellbinding and through their influence and financial support he has a platform to expound Gurdjieff’s teaching.
The final break with Gurdjieff in 1924 marks the point at which Ouspensky resolves to establish his own independent school. But in spite of his access to ample material resources and receptive audiences, he intentionally keeps growth in check during the 1920s, restricting the number of students to be admitted, and focuses much of his time on his publications, often including the London group in the writing process.
[OUSPENSKY] The system is waiting for workers. There is no statement and no thought in it which would not require and admit further development and elaboration. But there are great difficulties in the way of training people for this work, since an ordinary intellectual study of the system is quite insufficient; and there are very few people who agree to other methods of study who are at the same time capable of working by these methods.viii
The 1930s ushers in a new climate of expansion. Ouspensky publishes A New Model of the Universe in 1931, restrictions are removed which allows more students to join the school, and larger properties are secured where they can live and work together. The farm at Lyne Place is purchased in 1935, and Colet Gardens in London in 1938, which prompts the establishment of the school’s outer form, the ‘Historico-Psychological Society’.
The society’s constitution outlines the chief aims of the Ouspensky school:
The study of problems of the evolution of man and particularly of the idea of psycho-transformism. The study of psychological schools in different historical periods and in different countries, and the study of their influence on the moral and intellectual development of humanity. Practical investigation of methods of self-study and self-development according to principles and methods of psychological schools. Research work in the history of religions, of philosophy, of science, and of art with the object of establishing their common origin when it can be found and different psychological levels in each of them.ix
At the same time that a momentum is building in the school with more activities and more ambitious plans – his students now numbering over one thousand – there is also an escalation of the war in Europe, which by 1939 forces Ouspensky to bring all the school’s work to an abrupt halt and make the decision to move to the United States. By 1941, he begins holding meetings in New York, and Franklin Farms, a large house and estate in New Jersey, is acquired the following year to serve as his new home and a teaching center for the students who followed him from England and for the American students he will attract.
