76 Facts About George Gurdjieff

George Gurdjieff then settled in France, where he lived and taught for the rest of his life.

George Gurdjieff's teaching has inspired the formation of many groups around the world.

George Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol, Yerevan Governorate, Russian Empire.

George Gurdjieff spent his childhood in Kars, which, from 1878 to 1918, was the administrative capital of the Russian-ruled Transcaucasus province of Kars Oblast, a border region recently acquired following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.

George Gurdjieff later acquired "a working facility with several European languages".

The young George Gurdjieff avidly read literature from many sources and influenced by these writings and witnessing a number of phenomena that he could not explain, he formed the conviction that there existed a hidden truth known to mankind in the past, which could not be ascertained from science or mainstream religion.

George Gurdjieff was never forthcoming about the source of his teaching, which he once labelled as esoteric Christianity, in that it ascribes a psychological rather than a literal meaning to various parables and statements found in the Bible.

One example is of the adventure of walking across the Gobi desert on stilts, where George Gurdjieff said he was able to look down on the contours of the sand dunes while the sand storm whirled around below him.

George Gurdjieff describes how he encountered dervishes, fakirs and descendants of the Essenes, whose teaching he said had been conserved at a monastery in Sarmoung.

George Gurdjieff wrote that he supported himself during his travels by engaging in various enterprises such as running a travelling repair shop and making paper flowers; and on one occasion while thinking about what he could do, he described catching sparrows in the park and then dyeing them yellow to be sold as canaries; It is speculated by commentators that during his travels he was engaged in a certain amount of political activity, as part of The Great Game.

On New Year's Day in 1912, George Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow and attracted his first students, including his cousin, the sculptor Sergey Merkurov, and the eccentric Rachmilievitch.

In 1914, George Gurdjieff advertised his ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, and he supervised his pupils' writing of the sketch Glimpses of Truth.

In 1915, Gurdjieff accepted P D Ouspensky as a pupil, and in 1916, he accepted the composer Thomas de Hartmann and his wife, Olga, as students.

In March 1918, Ouspensky separated from George Gurdjieff, settling in England and teaching the Fourth Way in his own right.

George Gurdjieff concentrated on his still unstaged ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians.

George Gurdjieff's appearance was striking enough even in Turkey, where one saw many unusual types.

George Gurdjieff's head was shaven, immense black moustache, eyes which at one moment seemed very pale and at another almost black.

The once-impressive but somewhat crumbling mansion set in extensive grounds housed an entourage of several dozen, including some of George Gurdjieff's remaining relatives and some White Russian refugees.

The intellectual and middle-class types who were attracted to George Gurdjieff's teaching often found the Prieure's spartan accommodation and emphasis on hard labour on the grounds disconcerting.

George Gurdjieff was putting into practice his teaching that people need to develop physically, emotionally and intellectually, so lectures, music, dance, and manual work were organised.

George Gurdjieff was standing by his bed in a state of what seemed to me to be completely uncontrolled fury.

George Gurdjieff was raging at Orage, who stood impassively and very pale, framed in one of the windows.

However, James Moore and Ouspensky argue that Mansfield knew she would soon die and that George Gurdjieff made her last days happy and fulfilling.

George Gurdjieff continued to develop the book over some years, writing in noisy cafes which he found conducive for setting down his thoughts.

George Gurdjieff's mother died in 1925 and his wife developed cancer and died in June 1926.

George Gurdjieff was to make six or seven trips to the US, but alienated a number of people with his brash and impudent demands for money.

Diana Huebert was a regular member of the Chicago group, and documented the several visits George Gurdjieff made to the group in 1932 and 1934 in her memoirs on the man.

George Gurdjieff became acquainted with Gertrude Stein through its members, but she was never a follower.

George Gurdjieff had completed the first two parts of the planned trilogy but then started on the Third Series.

George Gurdjieff's teaching was now conveyed more directly through personal interaction with his pupils, who were encouraged to study the ideas he had expressed in Beelzebub's Tales.

George Gurdjieff suffered a second car accident in 1948 but again made an unexpected recovery.

George Gurdjieff visited the famous prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux, giving his interpretation of their significance to his pupils.

George Gurdjieff died of cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on 29 October 1949.

George Gurdjieff's funeral took place at the St Alexandre Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral at 12 Rue Daru, Paris.

George Gurdjieff is buried in the cemetery at Avon.

George Gurdjieff had a niece, Luba George Gurdjieff Everitt, who for about 40 years ran a small but rather famous restaurant, Luba's Bistro, in Knightsbridge, London.

George Gurdjieff taught that people cannot perceive reality as they are, because they are not conscious of themselves, but rather live in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep" of constantly turning thoughts, worries and imagination.

George Gurdjieff asserted that people in their ordinary waking state function as unconscious automatons, but that a person can "wake up" and become what a human being ought to be.

George Gurdjieff argued that many of the existing forms of religious and spiritual tradition on Earth had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality and so could no longer serve humanity in the way that had been intended at their inception.

In parallel with other spiritual traditions, George Gurdjieff taught that a person must expend considerable effort to effect the transformation that leads to awakening.

George Gurdjieff referred to it as "The Work" or "Work on oneself".

George Gurdjieff taught that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies, inner growth and development are real possibilities that nonetheless require conscious work to achieve.

George Gurdjieff believed that such texts possess meanings very different from those commonly attributed to them.

George Gurdjieff taught people how to strengthen and focus their attention and energy in various ways so as to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness.

Distrusting "morality", which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and hypocritical, George Gurdjieff greatly stressed the importance of "conscience".

George Gurdjieff left a body of music, inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann.

George Gurdjieff used various exercises, such as the "Stop" exercise, to prompt self-observation in his students.

The practices associated with George Gurdjieff's teachings are not an intellectual pursuit and neither are they new concepts, but are rather practical ways of living "in the moment" so as to allow consciousness of oneself to appear.

George Gurdjieff used a number of methods and materials to wake up his followers, which apart from his own living presence, included meetings, music, movements, writings, lectures, and innovative forms of group and individual work.

Since each individual is different, George Gurdjieff did not have a one-size-fits-all approach and employed different means to impart what he himself had discovered.

George Gurdjieff instead advocated "the way of the sly man" as a shortcut to encouraging inner development that might otherwise take years of effort and without any real outcome.

The "second period" music, for which George Gurdjieff arguably became best known, written in collaboration with Russian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann, is described as the George Gurdjieff-de-Hartmann music.

The "last musical period" is the improvised harmonium music which often followed the dinners George Gurdjieff held at his Paris apartment during the Occupation and immediate post-war years to his death in 1949.

George Gurdjieff sometimes referred to himself as a "teacher of dancing" and gained initial public notice for his attempts to put on a ballet in Moscow called Struggle of the Magicians.

George Gurdjieff gave new life and practical form to ancient teachings of both East and West.

The Socratic and Platonic emphasis on know thyself recurs in George Gurdjieff's teaching as the practice of self-observation.

The Hindu and Buddhist notion of attachment recurs in George Gurdjieff's teaching as the concept of identification.

George Gurdjieff inspired the formation of many groups around the world after his death, all of which still function today and follow his ideas.

George Gurdjieff said, even specifically at times, that a pious, good, and moral person was no more "spiritually developed" than any other person; they are all equally "asleep".

In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, George Gurdjieff expresses his reverence for the founders of the mainstream religions of East and West and his contempt for what successive generations of believers have made of those religious teachings.

George Gurdjieff has been interpreted by some, Ouspensky among others, to have had a total disregard for the value of mainstream religion, philanthropic work and the value of doing right or wrong in general.

George Gurdjieff met Gurdjieff in 1915 and spent the next five years studying with him, then formed his own independent groups in London in 1921.

George Gurdjieff wrote In Search of the Miraculous about his encounters with Gurdjieff and it remains the best-known and most widely read account of Gurdjieff's early experiments with groups.

Between July 1925 and May 1927 Thomas de Hartmann transcribed and co-wrote some of the music that George Gurdjieff collected and used for his Movements exercises.

George Gurdjieff authenticated Gurdjieff's early talks in the book Views from the Real World.

George Gurdjieff was originally a dancer and a Dalcroze Eurythmics teacher.

George Gurdjieff was, along with Jessmin Howarth and Rose Mary Nott, responsible for transmitting Gurdjieff's choreographed movement exercises and institutionalizing Gurdjieff's teachings through the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, the Gurdjieff Institute of Paris, London's Gurdjieff Society Inc.

George Gurdjieff established Triangle Editions in the US, which imprint claims copyright on all Gurdjieff's posthumous writings.

George Gurdjieff began attending Ouspensky's London talks in 1921 and then met Gurdjieff when the latter first visited London early in 1922.

George Gurdjieff was a charter member of the NY branch of Gurdjieff's Institute, participated in Orage's meetings between 1924 and 1931, and was a charter member of the Gurdjieff Foundation from 1953 and through its formative years.

George Gurdjieff met Gurdjieff during his 1924 visit to New York, and set up a Gurdjieff study group at her apartment in Greenwich Village.

George Gurdjieff was a member of Ouspensky's London group for decades, and after the latter's death in 1947 visited Gurdjieff in Paris many times.

George Gurdjieff visited Gurdjieff regularly in Paris in 1949, then was appointed as President of the Gurdjieff Foundation of America by Jeanne de Salzmann when she founded that institution in New York in 1953.

George Gurdjieff established the Gurdjieff Foundation of California in the mid-1950s and remained President of the US Foundation branches until his death.

George Gurdjieff's views were initially promoted through the writings of his pupils.

George Gurdjieff wrote a trilogy with the Series title All and Everything.