George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) was born of a Greek father
and an Armenian mother in Alexandropol in Russian Armenia, a region where
Eastern and Western cultures mixed and often clashed. To his questions:
Who am I? Why am I here? he found no answer either in religion
or in science. He suspected knowledge may lay hidden behind some religious
traditions and those strange myths and legends which he learned from his
father, a traditional bard or 'ashokh'.
Inspiring like-minded companions, he set out to find in Central Asia and
North Africa the answers he sought, learning many languages, and acquiring
many practical skills to earn the money for his journeys. In 1912 he brought
to Moscow an unknown teaching, a teaching that was not a religion, nor
a philosophy, but a practical teaching to be lived. To follow the way
he proposed, nothing is to be believed until verified by direct experience.
It is a way in life, on which - gradually, for it cannot be done all at
once - everything has to be questioned; one's beliefs, assumptions, attitudes,
one's whole outlook on the life of man on this Earth.
Gurdjieff’s system is designed to point man toward a central and
simple power of apprehension which Gurdjieff taught is merely latent within
the human mind and which is the only power by which man can actually understand
himself in relation to the universe.
Man is asleep, said Gurdjieff, he has no real consciousness. He is not
free; he lives in only a small part of himself. He can become conscious
and find his true place as a human being in the creation, but this requires
a profound transformation, “a transforming search,” rather than
“a search for transformation.”
