Who was George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff?

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866 – 1949) was a master of understanding the difference between information and knowledge. He identified the roadblock to realising our true and full potential as a ‘waking sleep’, caused largely by an imbalance in the different parts or centres that make up a human being – physical, emotional and intellectual.

According to Gurdjieff, most people were incomplete because their behaviour was weighted toward only one of these three centres. The difficulty for a primarily intellectual, emotional or physical type was that incoming impressions and life experience went only in one direction, instead of nourishing an all-round, balanced development.

Gurdjieff’s teaching – called ‘the work’ – was an attempt to awaken the dormant potential of his students using awareness exercises, music, dance, and physically demanding tasks. These were designed to administer ‘shocks’ that Gurdjieff claimed were necessary to stimulate a state of ‘self-remembering’ – the first step in acquiring raised levels of consciousness.

Gurdjieff’s wrote the book Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson to be purposefully difficult or even impossible to understand. He invented a vocabulary of long, unwieldy expressions and names that didn’t exist in any dictionary. His aim was to shock the mind’s habitual understanding and, through the effort required to read and understand the book, stimulate an enhanced state of awareness. The medium truly was the message: don’t assimilate this as you do everything else, mechanically in your sleep. Instead make an effort and break through into something new.

In today’s world of information overload, the ideas Gurdjieff demonstrated in the early part of the 20th century are increasingly relevant. His insights and methods dedicated to self-remembering are a practical toolkit for inner development. They show us how to transform incoming life impressions, situations and demands into the lifted chemistry of new being.

Gurdjieff’s teaching calls us to remember ourselves and the true gift of our soul potential, and embark upon the quest to become creators in our own right.