Thread: G.I. Gurdjieff and His Work

I went ahead and decided to start a new thread, because Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way have no topics of their own in the forums - according to my searches. I want to be concise with this - and so I'm going to leave out a large amount of material.

First, Gurdjieff is a fairly strange figure. He was a real rogue - he admits to living much of his life through various forms of charlatanry and fraud. He was also very mischievous, and had a very deep sense of humor. Further, he said in more than one of his autobiographical writings that his real job was, "a teacher of modern dance."

One of the big confusions has to do with Ouspenskii. Ouspenskii was a student of Gurdjieff's, and eventually split up to start, "the Fourth Way School." Gurdjieff used the Fourth Way as an analogy in his teaching, but he despised Ouspenskii as a different sort of fraud. The two were not related in their teaching at the end of Ouspenskii's life.

Gurdjieff's real heir was a brilliant teacher of ballet named Jeanne de Salzmann. Gurdjieff's, 'modern dance,' was a series of complex movements, similar in a way to Tai Chi or hatha yoga. Jeanne de Salzmann continued the teachings of the movements, as well as Gurdjieff's philosophy.

Last piece, Jeanne de Salzmann's husband, Thomas de Salzmann, had composed music to accompany the Gurdjieff movements. There are a small few recordings of this music on smaller record labels.

So here is a link to the New York Gurdjieff foundations website, which is a quality website, and includes most of the, "Salzmann material." The French Foundation's website is better, but is not currently offered in a translation. At least I couldn't figure it out. Many people have a bad impression of Gurdjieff, and I'd be interested to hear what people have to say.

Gurdjieff Foundation New York

Excuse me, excuse me... I love Gurdjieff as much as the next guy; I own "The Fourth Way", seen "Meetings With Remarkable Men", and read "Talks with a Devil", but what exactly does this have to do with metaphysics? Gurdjieff's work focuses primarily on "the self", and while he does have that whole "Ray of Creation" nonsense, that's generally not his most respected contribution to esoteric philosophy (except when integrated with his other works, which only further proves my point). This really belongs in "General" or similar.

That said, yes, indeed, Gurdjieff is an awesome guy. You can read a lot of his (or should I say, Ouspensky's) work at http://www.holybooks.com/ . As a matter of fact, you can find almost every kind of occult book there. Enjoy!