G. I. Gurdjieff

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

Our Common Father Endlessness created the universe and suffers for it

A personal GodStated explicitly

G. I. Gurdjieff speaks of God chiefly in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950), a cosmic allegory in deliberately strange language. There the creator bears names such as Our Common Father, His Endlessness or Our Lord Sovereign Endlessness; He dwells on the Sun Absolute and creates the universe to counter the destructive action of time, the Heropass, establishing a system of reciprocal exchange of substances. This God has purpose, sends messengers to humanity and, according to the tale, grieves over the state of beings. The aim of inner work is partly to help Him: the conscious human being can lighten the burden of his Creator. Unlike the abstract account transmitted by Ouspensky, here the Absolute is someone with will and feeling, though wrapped in a myth designed to disconcert the reader.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

Man is born without a soul or an I: work must form them

There is no permanent selfStated explicitly

According to G. I. Gurdjieff's teachings as recorded by Ouspensky, ordinary man lacks individuality, a single I and will: he is a plurality of I's following one another mechanically. In one of the Moscow talks reproduced in chapter 2 of In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff compares the human being to a carriage, a horse, a coachman and a master who is absent, and states that man is not born with an immortal soul: he may come to form higher bodies, and with them a permanent I, only through intense work. In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson he develops this idea in mythic language, speaking of bodies that a being may or may not crystallise. The self, then, is not a given substance but a possibility that most people do not realise.

Why do we suffer?

The legacy of the organ Kundabuffer: man lives asleep and suffers senselessly

Ignorance of what we areStated explicitly

G. I. Gurdjieff offers in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson a mythic explanation of human suffering. According to the tale, at the dawn of humanity higher powers implanted in human beings an organ, the Kundabuffer, which made them perceive reality upside down and prevented them from seeing their true situation; although it was later removed, its properties — vanity, self-love, suggestibility, egoism — were passed down from generation to generation. Hence war, reciprocal destruction and mechanical life, which plunge people into a sleep of which they are unaware. In the teachings transmitted by Ouspensky, this state appears as identification and sleep. Gurdjieff distinguishes mechanical suffering, which serves no purpose, from intentional suffering, consciously accepted, which together with conscious labour is the means of the being's evolution.

What happens after death?

Immortality is not possessed: it is acquired by first dying to oneself

Dying each day to the knownStated explicitly

Gurdjieff denies that ordinary man possesses an immortal soul. According to the teaching recorded by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous, man is a machine without a permanent I, and the only thing that could survive death are the higher bodies — the astral and those beyond it — which are formed only through conscious work and voluntary suffering; whoever has not formed them dies completely. In Beelzebub's Tales he speaks of the Kesdjan body and the higher being-body as achievements, not gifts. Hence the importance of an earlier death: Gurdjieff taught that to be born again one must die, and to die one must awaken; what must die is false personality, with its vanity and self-love. The decisive question is not what happens after death, but whether there is already someone capable of surviving it.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Awakening through conscious effort and voluntary suffering: the Fourth Way in ordinary life

Through conscious inner workStated explicitly

George I. Gurdjieff taught that human beings are born without a finished soul and, unless they work on themselves, remain asleep and mechanical. According to Ouspensky's testimony, he distinguished four ways: the fakir's, working on the body; the monk's, on the emotions; the yogi's, on the mind; and a Fourth Way working on all three at once without leaving ordinary life. Its means are self-observation, self-remembering, the movements and dances he designed, and what Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson calls conscious labours and intentional sufferings. The work requires a teacher who knows and a group; the result is the formation of a real and permanent «I».

Is a teacher necessary?

Only one who knows can wake the sleeper: teacher and school are necessary

IndispensableStated explicitly

According to Ouspensky's testimony, George I. Gurdjieff taught that ordinary human beings cannot escape their sleep alone, because the very means they would use to wake up are asleep. They need someone who is awake, or more awake, who knows the way and enables them to work on themselves; and that knowledge is not invented but received from a source that possesses it. Gurdjieff played that role demandingly, often disconcertingly, with his pupils in Russia and later at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau. In Meetings with Remarkable Men he presents his own formation as a search for teachers and ancient knowledge through Central Asia and the Near East.

Is the world real?

A hierarchical cosmos of laws and matters, where everything feeds on everything

Planes of existenceStated explicitly

George I. Gurdjieff taught a cosmology in which the universe is a hierarchy of worlds governed by two fundamental laws, the law of three and the law of seven (the octave). According to Ouspensky's testimony, everything in it is material, though with different degrees of density and vibration, and everything forms part of a reciprocal exchange of substances in which each level feeds others. In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson he develops it in mythic form, with a Sun Absolute at the centre and the Earth as a peripheral place where mechanical humanity serves cosmic purposes it does not know. The world is fully real, but ordinary human beings do not see it as it is, because they live asleep.

What is love?

Mechanical man cannot love: only one who is conscious truly loves

What appears when the self ceasesStated explicitly

Gurdjieff denies that ordinary man is capable of loving. According to the teaching recorded by Ouspensky, mechanical man can do nothing, and cannot love either: what he calls love is a mixture of attraction, habit, identification and self-love, which changes with circumstances and easily turns into its opposite. In a talk collected in Views from the Real World he distinguishes love of the body, which depends on type and polarity; love of feeling, which evokes its opposite; and conscious love, which evokes the same in response. In Beelzebub's Tales, vanity and self-love appear as consequences of the organ Kundabuffer and as the main obstacles to development. Real love is possible only for one who, through conscious labour and intentional suffering, has ceased to be governed by those forces.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

No one does anything: only one who works on himself gains a will

We are machines until we awakenStated explicitly

The thesis of human mechanicalness is the core of Gurdjieff's teaching as his pupils recorded it. Man has no self but a multitude of contradictory «I»s; he is not conscious but lives asleep, and what he calls his decisions are reactions of a machine driven by external influences. In his talks collected in *Views from the Real World* and in his major work, *Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson*, he adds that humanity, being mechanical, serves cosmic purposes it does not understand. Only conscious labour and intentional suffering can create a permanent self and a real will. Freedom is not a birthright but something that must be manufactured.

Why meditate or pray?

Remembering oneself amid life, through conscious effort

Being presentStated explicitly

For Gurdjieff the human being lives asleep, and all practice has a single aim: to wake up. The main instrument, according to his pupils' testimony, is self-remembering, divided attention that includes the perceiver along with the perceived, exercised amid ordinary activities and not in retreat. To this he added practices of his own: the Movements, sacred dances requiring simultaneous attention of body, emotions and mind, exercises in sensing the body, hard physical work and what he called intentional suffering. In *Life Is Real Only Then, When «I Am»*, his last book, he describes that effort of presence as the condition for a real «I» to arise in man.

Can reason know the ultimate?

Real knowledge is scarce, material and transmitted; knowledge without being is useless

Esoteric knowledgeStated explicitly

According to Ouspensky's testimony in *In Search of the Miraculous*, Gurdjieff held that there is a true knowledge, preserved by an esoteric circle of humanity and transmitted through schools, and that this knowledge is in a certain sense material and limited: it cannot be shared out to everyone. He insisted on distinguishing knowledge from being: a man may know a great deal and be unable to do anything, and knowledge that grows without the development of being produces only theories. In *Meetings with Remarkable Men* he narrates his youthful search for that knowledge across the East, with the «Seekers of Truth». Ordinary reason belongs to the man-machine; real understanding requires transformation.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Wars cannot be stopped from outside: mechanical man cannot do

The revolution is innerStated explicitly

Gurdjieff holds that ordinary man cannot do anything: everything happens to him, as rain happens. According to the 1915 conversation recorded by Ouspensky, when asked in the midst of the world war whether war could be stopped, he answered that it could not, because it is the result of cosmic influences and of the mechanicalness of millions of people, and that only men who had ceased to be machines could change things. In Beelzebub's Tales the periodic «reciprocal destruction» of the beings of the Earth is the most terrible symptom of their lack of consciousness. That is why he proposes no social reforms but work on oneself. Nor withdrawal: his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon, was a community of intense physical work, sacred dances and deliberate friction between people, that is, life in the world used as a school.

Nueva York (Upper East Side) · Estados Unidos

Gurdjieff Foundation of New York

The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York

The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York belongs to the network of foundations established after Gurdjieff's death by his pupil Jeanne de Salzmann, together with the Institut Gurdjieff in Paris and the Gurdjieff Society in London. Its first president, Lord Pentland, had been a pupil of Ouspensky before working with Gurdjieff, and many of Ouspensky's pupils joined this work. It offers weekly group meetings led by senior students, classes in the Movements, the sacred dances and exercises Gurdjieff taught, meditation and retreats. Access is gradual and begins with introductory events.

San Francisco y Guerneville (Sonoma), California · Estados Unidos

Gurdjieff Foundation of California

The Gurdjieff Foundation of California

The Gurdjieff Foundation of California was founded in 1955 under the direction of Lord John Pentland, whom Gurdjieff himself had entrusted with the early American groups, and describes itself as the oldest group in California devoted to his teaching of inner development. It is a non-profit voluntary community based in San Francisco, with a second property in Guerneville, Sonoma County, where practical work takes place. It offers group meetings, Movements, sittings, study of the ideas and music, and belongs to the International Association of the Gurdjieff Foundations alongside Paris, New York and London.

Londres · Reino Unido

Gurdjieff Studies, London

Gurdjieff Studies Ltd (organización benéfica registrada)

Gurdjieff Studies is a London charity devoted to the Fourth Way that offers group meetings, reading groups, practical activities, Movements classes and intensive residential stays. It holds that the teaching is passed on from teacher to pupil in direct lines of transmission, and maintains two reference websites: one on Gurdjieff's life and work, with his music, dances and chronology, and another devoted to P. D. Ouspensky, reconstructing his work in England, including the Lyne Place period. It is independent of the network of foundations established by Jeanne de Salzmann.