G. I. Gurdjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol (now Gyumri) to a Greek father and an Armenian mother; the year is disputed, often given as 1866. He grew up on the meeting-ground of empires, churches, and oral tradition, and as a young man joined what he later called the Seekers of Truth — journeys through Central Asia, the Middle East, and Egypt in search of a knowledge that had not been reduced to religion or science.

By 1912 he was teaching in Moscow and St Petersburg. P. D. Ouspensky became the best-known recorder of those years. The Russian Revolution scattered the work. Gurdjieff led a group of pupils by a hard route through the Caucasus and Constantinople, and in 1922 opened the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau. There the Fourth Way was lived as a house: labour, music, sacred dances (the Movements), meals, and merciless observation of sleep in oneself.

A near-fatal car accident in 1924 closed the Institute as it had been. He turned to writing All and Everything — Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson first among them — and to teaching smaller circles in Paris. The method did not change: man is a machine; he cannot do; he must remember himself, observe without lying, and pay for being through conscious labour and intentional suffering.

He died in Paris on 29 October 1949. The Work he left is not a belief. It is a demand that you verify, in ordinary life, that you are not one, not awake, and not free — and that a different attention is possible.