George Ivanovich Gurdjieff ( – 29 October 1949) was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer, and movements teacher.
Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness to "remember ourselves" and serve our purpose as human beings. The aim of his teaching is that people should become aware of the meaning of their presence on earth and of their place in the scale of being. His student P. D. Ouspensky referred to Gurdjieff's teachings as the "Fourth Way".
Gurdjieff's teaching has inspired the formation of many groups around the world. After his death in 1949, the Gurdjieff Foundation in Paris was established and led by his close pupil Jeanne de Salzmann in cooperation with other direct pupils of Gurdjieff, until her death in 1990; and then by her son Michel de Salzmann, until his death in 2001.
The International Association of the Gurdjieff Foundations comprises the Institut Gurdjieff in France; The Gurdjieff Foundation in the USA; The Gurdjieff Society in the UK; and the Gurdjieff Foundation in Venezuela.
Early life
Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol, Yerevan Governorate, Russian Empire (now Gyumri, Armenia). His father Ivan Ivanovich Gurdjieff (born Ioannis Georgiades: "Gurdjieff is a Russian variant of the Greek G[e]orgiades, his actual surname at birth. His full Russian name was Georgei Ivanovich Gurdjieff.... Gurdjieff was born in the small Russian-Armenian city of Alexandropol, son of a well-to-do owner of extensive herds of cattle and sheep, Ioann[i]s G[e]orgiades, a Greek.) was a Greek and a renowned ashugh under the pseudonym of Adash, who in the 1870s managed large herds of cattle and sheep. The name Gurdjieff represents the Anglicized Russian form of the Greek surname (). According to Gurdjieff himself, his father came from a Greek family whose ancestors had emigrated from Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, with his family initially moving to central Anatolia, and from there eventually to Georgia in the Caucasus.: "Archival Records: Hearst columnist and old friend of Aleister Crowley William Seabrook, in reporting Gurdjieff's arrival in New York in 1924, gave the family name as Georgiades, a familiar name to Greek immigrants in the United States. Whence Seabrook got what he took to be the original Greek form of the Anglicized Russian Gurdjieff is unknown. Georgos means "farmer" in Greek and is the origin of Gurdjieff's Christian name, Georgii. Georgeades means "son of George" but as far as we know, Gurdjieff's father's name was Ivan Ivanovich (or son of Ivan).... There was, however, a village called Gurdji, part of Armutlu on the Turkish Armutlu peninsula by the Sea of Marmara just south of Constantinople (Istanbul), no longer listed, the scene of Greek army atrocities against Turks during the 1920–1921 Greco-Turkish war waged in western Turkey. Gurdjieff maintained in Meetings his family had been Byzantines before the Turks conquered Constantinople (capital of the Byzantine Empire) in 1453, migrating to central Anatolia due to Turkish persecution around Constantinople. The Marmara peninsula had certainly been part of what was left of Byzantium before the capital's overthrow in 1453.": "Gurdjieff is a Russian variant of the Greek G[e]orgiades, his actual surname at birth. His full Russian name was Georgei Ivanovich Gurdjieff.... Gurdjieff was born in the small Russian-Armenian city of Alexandropol, son of a well-to-do owner of extensive herds of cattle and sheep, Ioann[i]s G[e]orgiades, a Greek.": "According to Gurdjieff himself, his father came of a Greek family whose ancestors had emigrated from Byzantium after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. At first, the family moved to central Anatolia, and from there eventually to Georgia in the Caucasus. The name Gurdjieff gives some colour to this account, since 'Gurji' in Persian means 'a Georgian', and the Russian-style surname Gurdjieff would mean 'the man from Georgia'. However, the late John G. Bennett, who knew Gurdjieff intimately for many years, believes that Gurdjieff's father was called John Georgiades." The long-held view is that his mother was Armenian, although some scholars, on the basis of recent research, have proposed that she too was Greek.
There are conflicting views regarding Gurdjieff's birth date, ranging from 1866 to 1877. The bulk of extant records weigh heavily toward 1877, but Gurdjieff in reported conversations with students gave the year of his birth as , which is corroborated by the account of his niece Luba Gurdjieff Everitt. George Kiourtzidis, great-grandson of Gurdjieff's paternal uncle Vasilii (through Vasilii's son Alexander), recalled that his grandfather Alexander, born in 1875, said that Gurdjieff was about three years older than him, which would point to a birth date ; this is the same date inscribed in a plate on the grave-marker in the cemetery of Avon, Seine-et-Marne, France, where his body was buried. Although official documents consistently record the day of his birth as 28 December, Gurdjieff himself celebrated his birthday either on the Old Orthodox Julian calendar date of 1 January, or according to the Gregorian calendar date for New Year of 13 January (up to 1899; 14 January after 1900).
Gurdjieff spent his childhood in Kars, which, from 1878 to 1918, was the administrative capital of the Russian-ruled Transcaucasus province of Kars Oblast, a border region recently acquired following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. It contained extensive grassy plateau-steppe and high mountains, and was inhabited by a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional population that had a history of respect for travelling mystics and holy men, and for religious syncretism and conversion. Both the city of Kars and the surrounding territory were home to an extremely diverse population: although part of the Armenian Plateau, the Russian-ruled Transcaucasus province of Kars Oblast was home to Armenians, Caucasus Greeks, Pontic Greeks, Georgians, Russians, Kurds, Turks, and smaller numbers of Christian communities from eastern and central Europe such as Caucasus Germans, Estonians, and Russian Orthodox sectarian communities like the Molokans, Doukhobors, Pryguny, and Subbotniks.
Gurdjieff makes particular mention of the Yazidi community. Growing up in a multi-ethnic society, Gurdjieff became fluent in Armenian, Pontic Greek, Russian, and Turkish, speaking the last in a mixture of elegant Ottoman Turkish with some dialect. He later acquired "a working facility with several European languages".
Early influences on him included his father, a carpenter and amateur ashik or bardic poet,Meetings with Remarkable Men, Chapter II. Gurdjieff uses the spelling "ashok". and the priest of the town's cathedral, Dean Borsh, a family friend. The young Gurdjieff avidly read literature from many sources and influenced by these writings and witnessing a number of phenomena that he could not explain, he formed the conviction that there existed a hidden truth known to mankind in the past, which could not be ascertained from science or mainstream religion.
Travels In early adulthood, according to his own account, Gurdjieff's search for such knowledge led him to travel widely to Central Asia, Egypt, Iran, India, Tibet and other places before he returned to Russia for a few years in 1912. He was never forthcoming about the source of his teaching, which he once labelled as esoteric Christianity, in that it ascribes a psychological rather than a literal meaning to various parables and statements found in the Bible.p.109 from "In Search of the Miraculous": for the benefit of those who know already, I will say that, if you like, this is esoteric Christianity. The only account of his wanderings appears in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men, which is not generally considered to be a reliable autobiography. One example is of the adventure of walking across the Gobi desert on stilts, where Gurdjieff said he was able to look down on the contours of the sand dunes while the sand storm whirled around below him.S. Wellbeloved, Gurdjieff, Astrology and Beelzebub's Tales, pp. 9–13 Each chapter is named after a "remarkable man", some of whom were putative members of a society called "The Seekers of Truth".
After Gurdjieff's death, J. G. Bennett researched his potential sources and suggested that the men were symbolic of the three types of people to whom Gurdjieff referred: No. 1 centred in their physical body; No. 2 centred in their emotions and No. 3 centred in their mind. Gurdjieff describes how he encountered dervishes, fakirs and descendants of the Essenes, whose teaching he said had been conserved at a monastery in Sarmoung. The book also has an overarching quest involving a map of "pre-sand Egypt" and culminates in an encounter with the "Sarmoung Brotherhood".Mark Sedgwick, "European Neo-Sufi Movements in the Inter-war Period" in Islam in Inter-War Europe, ed. by Natalie Clayer and Eric Germain. Columbia Univ. Press, 2008 p. 208.
Gurdjieff wrote that he supported himself during his travels by engaging in various enterprises such as running a travelling repair shop and making paper flowers; and on one occasion while thinking about what he could do, he described catching sparrows in the park and then dyeing them yellow to be sold as canaries;Gurdjieff, G.I: "The Material Question", published as an addendum to Meetings with Remarkable Men It is also speculated by commentators that during his travels he was engaged in a certain amount of political activity, as part of The Great Game.Moore, pp 36–7
Career From 1913 to 1949, the chronology appears to be based on material that can be confirmed by primary documents, independent witnesses, cross-references and reasonable inference. On New Year's Day in 1912, Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow and attracted his first students, including his cousin, the sculptor Sergey Merkurov, and the eccentric Rachmilievitch. In the same year, he married Julia Ostrowska, a Pole, in Saint Petersburg. In 1914, Gurdjieff advertised his ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, and he supervised his pupils' writing of the sketch Glimpses of Truth.
Gurdjieff and Ouspensky In 1915, Gurdjieff accepted P. D. Ouspensky as a pupil, and in 1916, he accepted the composer Thomas de Hartmann and his wife, Olga, as students. He then had about 30 pupils. Ouspensky already had a reputation as a writer on mystical subjects and had conducted his own, ultimately disappointing, search for wisdom in the East. The Fourth Way "system" taught during this period was complex and metaphysical, partly expressed in scientific terminology.
During the revolutionary upheaval in Russia, Gurdjieff left Petrograd in 1917 to return to his family home in Alexandropol (present-day Gyumri in Armenia). During the October Revolution, he set up a temporary study community in Essentuki in the Caucasus, where he worked intensively with a small group of Russian pupils. Gurdjieff's eldest sister Anna and her family later arrived there as refugees, informing him that Turks had shot his father in Alexandropol on 15 May. As the area became increasingly threatened by civil war, Gurdjieff fabricated a newspaper story announcing his forthcoming "scientific expedition" to "Mount Induc". Posing as a scientist and wearing a red fireman's belt with brass ringsOlga de Hartmann: Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff p. 112 Gurdjieff left Essentuki with fourteen companions (excluding Gurdjieff's family and Ouspensky). They travelled by train to Maikop, where hostilities delayed them for three weeks. In the spring of 1919, Gurdjieff met the artist Alexandre de Salzmann and his wife Jeanne and accepted them as pupils. Assisted by Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff gave the first public demonstration of his Sacred Dances (Movements at the Tbilisi Opera House, 22 June).