The Fourth Way

Information on Gurdjieff & Ouspensky
Home | Gurdjieff | Purpose | Tools | z | Recommended Reading | Community Houses | Directions | Contact | Stories | The Mill | Training | Videos | Links

Information on Gurdjieff & Ouspensky

gurdjieff2.jpg

"The present period of culture is, in the whole process of perfecting humanity, an empty and abortive interval."
— G.I. Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men

GEORGE IVANOVITCH GURDJIEFF
(
1872–1949) a seminal spiritual figure, introduced to the West an ancient yet unknown esoteric teaching of development and awakening, one that taught how to creatively use the diverse impressions of ordinary life to come to
real life.
         
Humanity, Gurdjieff realized, had entered a precarious new period in its evolution. The world would be destroyed, Gurdjieff warned, unless the
'wisdom' of the East and the 'energy' of the West were harnessed and used harmoniously. To effect this Harnelmiatznel, Gurdjieff gave the necessary shock: he introduced to the West a unique and powerful esoteric teaching of self-transformation. Gurdjieff called it The Fourth Way.
         
An original teaching, The Fourth Way is neither a mixture of spiritual lines nor a modern eclectic concoction. It is, as Gurdjieff declared, "completely self-supporting and independent of other lines and it has been completely unknown up to the present time."
         The teaching of The Fourth Way is
the last esoteric message of the present cycle.

 

For more information on G. I. Gurdjieff’s teachings click on the following links.

http://www.gurdjieff-legacy.org/

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/1181/

Also his pupil P.D. Ouspensky 1878–1947 who wrote the books The Fourth Way, In search of the Miraculous and The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution 

http://www.gurdjieff.org/ouspensky.htm

A good Summary of Fourth Way Teachings is by Kathleen Riordan-Speeth  The Gurdjieff Work (Libary of Spiritual Classics) Available for $3-$6 on  http://www.abebooks.com/

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1877?-1949) was born in Alexandropol (modern Gyumri, Armenia), near the Persian frontier, where ancient traditions of patriarchal life were still a living influence. Following his tutelage by Dean Borsh of the Kars Military Cathedral, he began, with other 'Seekers of Truth', an unremitting search for real and universal knowledge.

In 1921, Gurdjieff settled in France, where he founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He continued to transmit what he had learned in the East, elaborating his teaching in two principal works: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, a cosmological epic fertile with paradoxes, and Meetings with Remarkable Men, a narrative with the undeniable ring of authenticity and a sense of the mystery surrounding the truths he had discovered.

Gurdjieff, who was virtually unknown in his lifetime, is becoming recognized as a great spiritual philosopher, a true revolutionary, who saw clearly the direction modern 'civilization' was taking, and set about preparing people to discover for themselves, and eventually to diffuse among mankind, the certitude that 'Being' is the only indestructible reality.