George Gurdjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1866 to 1877, according to conflicting sources; died 1949) was a philosopher, mystic and spiritual teacher born in the Russian Empire, in what is now Armenia. He is best known for teaching a method of self-work that his pupil P. D. Ouspensky called the "Fourth Way". He was also a composer and a teacher of movement, but his legacy rests mainly on his thought and on the groups his teaching inspired.

He was born in Alexandropol, in the Yerevan Governorate. His father, Ivan Ivanovich Gurdjieff, was a Greek and a well-known ashugh, a travelling bardic poet, who managed large herds of cattle and sheep. According to Gurdjieff himself, his family descended from Greeks who had left Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. His mother was traditionally regarded as Armenian, though some scholars now suggest she was Greek too. The family moved to Kars, a border region of mixed peoples and faiths where Armenians, Russians, Greeks, Georgians, Turks and Kurds lived side by side, along with dissident Christian communities. There he learned several languages and grew up amid a tradition of respect for wandering mystics. His birth date is uncertain: official records give 28 December, while he celebrated the New Year according to the Julian calendar, and the gravestone at Avon, France, carries a different year.

In his own account, he undertook long journeys in his youth through Central Asia, Egypt, Persia, India and Tibet, searching for a hidden knowledge that science and mainstream religion could not provide. The book in which he describes these travels, Meetings with Remarkable Men, is not generally regarded as a reliable autobiography: each chapter is named after an unusual figure, and many episodes cannot be verified. He spoke of an esoteric Christianity, reading the parables of the Bible in a psychological rather than literal sense.

His teaching holds that most people live in a kind of waking sleep, automatic and hypnotic, unaware of themselves. Set against the three traditional paths of the fakir, the monk and the yogi, he proposed a fourth that does not require leaving the world: work on the intellect, the emotions and the physical body at once, from the responsibility of an ordinary householder. He gave great weight to sexual energy, which he regarded as the most powerful force in the organism and which, in his view, had to be sublimated to reach a higher state.

In 1912 he arrived in Moscow and gathered his first pupils. That year he married Julia Ostrowska in Saint Petersburg. In 1915 he met Ouspensky, who became his most prominent pupil, though their relationship was ambivalent and they eventually parted. During the revolution and civil war he moved to the Caucasus, then to Tbilisi, and later to Europe, where he presented his Sacred Dances and the ballet The Struggle of the Magicians.

His influence endures in the work groups that formed after his death in France in 1949. The Gurdjieff Foundation in Paris, led first by his pupil Jeanne de Salzmann and then by her son Michel, carried on his teaching, which is now passed on through an international association of foundations.