George Gurdjieff

George Gurdjieff
Gurdjieff between 1925 and 1935
Born	George Ivanovich Gurdjieff 1866 - 1877 Alexandropol, Russian Empire (now Gyumri, Armenia)
Died	October 29, 1949(1949-10-29) Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Era	20th century
Main interests	Psychology, perennial philosophy, science, ancient knowledge
Notable ideas	Fourth Way, Fourth Way enneagram, Centers, Self-remembering
Influences Officially unknown; but according to his Meetings with Remarkable Men: his childhood and adult teachers and his father; his book Beelzebub's Tales also mentions Mullah Nassr Eddin
Influenced P. D. Ouspensky, Olga de Hartmann, Thomas de Hartmann, Jane Heap, John G. Bennett, Alfred Richard Orage, Jean Toomer, Maurice Nicoll, Frank Lloyd Wright, P. L. Travers, Peter Brook, René Daumal, Katherine Mansfield, Keith Jarrett, James Moore, Philip Mairet, Henry Miller, Arnaud Desjardins, Julius Evola, John Anthony West

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (/ˈɡɜːrdʒiˌɛf/; 13 January 1866/1872/1877? – 29 October 1949), also commonly referred to as Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff and G. I. Gurdjieff, was an influential early 20th-century mystic, philosopher, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent, born in Armenia under Russian rule. Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified mind-body consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to transcend to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff described a method attempting to do so, calling the discipline "The Work" (connoting "work on oneself") or "the Method". According to his principles and instructions, Gurdjieff's method for awakening one's consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk or yogi, and thus he referred to it as the "Fourth Way".

Gurdjieff (Russian: Гео́ргий Ива́нович Гурджи́ев, Greek: Γεώργιος Γεωργιάδης, Armenian: Գեորգի Գյուրջիև) was born to a Caucasus Greek father, Ἰωάνης Γεωργιάδης (Yiannis Georgiades), and an Armenian mother, Evdokia (according to biographer Paul Beekman Taylor), in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire in the Transcaucasus. The name Gurdjieff represents a Russified form of the Pontic Greek surname "Georgiades" (Greek: Γεωργιάδης). The exact year of his birth remains unknown; conjectures range from 1866 to 1877. Some authors (such as Moore) argue for 1866. Both Olga de Hartmann, the woman Gurdjieff called "the first friend of my inner life", and Louise Goepfert March, Gurdjieff's secretary in the early 1930s, believed that Gurdjieff was born in 1872. A passport gave a birthdate of November 28, 1877, but he once stated that he was born at the stroke of midnight at the beginning of New Year's Day (Julian calendar). Although the dates of his birth vary, the year of 1872 is inscribed in a plate on the gravemarker in the cemetery of Avon, Seine-et-Marne, where his body was buried.[1]