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Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (Георгий Иванович Гюрджиев, Georgiy Ivanovich Gyurdzhiev,Gurdjiev; January 13, 1872? – October 29, 1949), was a Greek-Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher who initially gained public recognition as a teacher of dancing. After attracting pupils and disciples of whom some were already persons of considerable eminence, he established a school for spiritual development called The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and early travels expressed the truth found in other ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in one's daily life and humanity's place in the universe. It might be summed up by the title of his book: Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'. Biography Gurdjieff 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. 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. In 1924 he nearly died in a car crash. After he recovered, he began writing All and Everything originally written by him in Russian and Armenian. He stopped writing in 1935 having completed the first two parts of the trilogy and only having started on the Third Series which had been 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. Timelines, facts and whereabouts of Gurdjieff's early biography before he appeared in Moscow in 1913 are found in his text Meetings with Remarkable Men. Teaching Some of those who had contact with Gurdjieff saw him as a Master – able to practice self-remembering, and work on oneself; in other words a human being able to be conscious of himself. Others saw him as an esotericist or occultist. Gurdjieff himself widely admitted his teaching was esoteric, he claimed that none of it was veiled in secrecy for secrecy sake, it was simply to prevent the misinterpretation of the more advanced concepts Gurdjieff's system taught. Evidence of this can be seen today (as well as in other esoteric teachings such as Freemasonry) where advanced allegories, and especially symbols (e.g. the enneagram) are now taken out of context, causing great confusion as to the intended meanings. About his teaching, Gurdjieff once said, "What do I teach? I teach people how to listen to themselves." The teaching addresses the question of people's place in the Universe and their possibilities for spiritual development. He said that people live their lives in a form of waking sleep, and that higher levels of consciousness are possible. In developing the inner possibility of becoming more aware of ourselves in our daily lives, one is shown a fresh way of living which can enrich our experience of life, and our feeling of ourselves alive. 'Know thyself' takes on a more organic meaning rather than an intellectual pursuit. The ability to be 'present' more often (instead of being absent as we usually are), does not happen automatically and requires work on oneself over time, guided initially by a teacher trained in the practice of the teaching by those who were taught directly by Gurdjieff, or by one of his pupils. Gurdjieff taught that by making frequent efforts to activate their attention in small things, such as walking, speaking or sitting etc., people can gradually wish to become more aware of themselves as living beings through the development of their attention instead of spending their lives asleep in dreams. To provide conditions in which attention can be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught "sacred dances" or "movements" (which are performed as part of a class) as an aid, 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 a collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann. This presence to oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of transformation, whose aim is to change the whole nature of human beings, ultimately preparing them, speaking symbolically as is necessary in such matters, to be a conscious servant of the divine purpose behind the created world. Gurdjieff 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, and Louis Pauwels among others. Many others were drawn to his 'ideas table': Frank Lloyd Wright, Kathryn Hulme, P.L. Travers, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Toomer, and the pianist and composer Keith Jarrett. 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. 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. Gurdjieff used the "Stop" exercise 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. Other shocks to help awaken his pupils from constant day-dreaming were always possible at any moment. Much has been written about Gurdjieff, and many anecdotes about his life have been recorded. At one time in his life he set up a workshop to mend things in order to earn money for his work. Customers would bring Gurdjieff something broken to fix, and he would then find a way of fixing it – whatever it was. If he did not know how to mend a particular item he would set about learning enough to repair it. Reception Gurdjieff's writings of his activities and philosophies are divisive. Sympathizers regard him as a charismatic master who brought new knowledge into Western culture and whose "operational readiness" concept is valid and applicable in modern psychology. Critics assert he was simply a charlatan with a large ego and a constant need for self-glorification. Criticism 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 a common criminal. His teaching involved the development of what Gurdjieff called "higher bodies," and has very little to do with altering one's actions in what most would call everyday life. Distrusting "morality," which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and superficial, he wrote some of his greatest pages on conscience. This he regarded as the same in all people, deeply buried in our natures, thus both sheltered from damage by how we live and inaccessible without thorough "work on oneself." 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, accomplished, 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 most commonly evokes 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 is 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 fall under the category Gurdjieff's "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. 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 and thinkers including Timothy Leary, Peter Brook the celebrated British director and on many yet famous phychologists and artists and musicians. His influence is stil felt in the many established Fourth Way Schools throughout the world and even VaaDark acknoledges his debt to Gurdjief in the first web based schol transmision facility found on the Internet. Works by Gurdjieff Books about G. I. Gurdjieff and The Fourth Way Videos/DVDs about G. I. Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way The Gurdjieff Foundations Near the end of his life, Gurdjieff established three primary institutions to carry on his work, known as the Foundations: Connected to these three Foundations are numerous smaller groups around the world, collected under the umbrella of the "International Association of Gurdjieff Foundations": Affiliated American groups can be found here: Affiliated Canadian groups can be found here: Resources from the Gurdjieff lineage Other Sites Discussing Gurdjieff Critics | |||||||
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