Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
Author: Maurice Nicoll
Publisher: Weiser Books
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1996-08-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780877288992

When Maurice Nicholl was studying in Zurich, he met Jung, and Ouspensky. He went on to study with Gurdjieff, and from 1931 to his death in 1953, he began at Ouspensky's request, a programme of work devoted to passing on the ideas he had received. Reissued in hard cover, these five unedited commentaries are taken from the weekly lectures and talks Nicoll gave to his students in England and which were recorded verbatim; the sixth volume is an index produced by the Gurdjieff society Washington DC. These differ from Nicholl's more polished works - they are more concerned with directly applying certain deep ideas to daily life.

In Search of the Miraculous

In Search of the Miraculous
Author: P. D. Ouspensky
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780156007467

"The classic exploration of Eastern religious thinking and philosophy"--Cover.

Gurdjieff Reconsidered

Gurdjieff Reconsidered
Author: Roger Lipsey
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1611804515

From a master biographer and longtime Gurdjieff practitioner, a brilliant new exploration of the quintessential Western esoteric teacher of the twentieth-century. The Greek-Armenian teacher G.I. Gurdjieff was one of the most original and provocative spiritual teachers in the twentieth-century West. Whereas much work on Gurdjieff has been either fawning or blindly critical, acclaimed scholar and writer Roger Lipsey balances sympathic interest in Gurdjieff and his "Fourth Way" teachings with a historian's sense of context and a biographer's feel for personality and relationships. Using a wide-range of published and unpublished sources, Lipsey explores Gurdjieff's formative travels in Central Asia, his famed teaching institution in France, the development of the Gurdjieff Movements and music, and, above all, Gurdjieff's fascinating continuous evolution as a teacher. Published on the 70th anniversary of Gurdjieff's death, Gurdjieff Reconsidered delves deeply into Gurdjieff's writings and those of his most important students, including P. D. Ouspensky and Jeanne de Salzmann. Lipsey's comprehensive approach and unerring sense of the subject make this a must-read for anyone with a serious intention to explore Gurdjieff's life, teachings, and reputation.

Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff
Author: John Shirley
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781585422876

A dramatic and literate introduction to one of the twentieth century's most influential and intriguing spiritual teachers. Born in the shifting border between Turkey and Russia in 1866, G. I. Gurdjieff is a man who would continually straddle borders-between East and West, between man and something higher than man, between the ancient teachings of esoteric schools and the modern application of those ideas in contemporary life. In many respects-from the concept of group meetings to the mysterious workings of the enneagram to his critique of humanity as existing in a state of sleep-Gurdjieff pioneered the culture of spiritual search that has taken root in the West today. While many of Gurdjieff's students-including Frank Lloyd Wright, Katharine Mansfield, and P. D. Ouspensky-are well known, few understand this figure possessed of complex writings and sometimes confounding methods. In Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, the acclaimed novelist John Shirley-one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre-presents a lively, reliable explanation of how to approach the sage and his ideas. In accessible, dramatic prose Shirley retells that which we know of Gurdjieff's life; he surveys the teacher's methods and the lives of his key students; and he helps readers to enter the unparalleled originality of this remarkable teacher.

The Reality of Being

The Reality of Being
Author: Jeanne de Salzmann
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2011-12-06
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1590309286

An important book on liberating ourselves from the state of “waking sleep” in which we live our lives, as taught by one of the most influential spiritual teachers of the 20th century As the closest pupil of the charismatic spiritual master G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949), Jeanne de Salzmann was charged with carrying on his teachings of spiritual transformation. Known as the Fourth Way or “The Work,” Gurdjieff’s system was based on teachings of the East that he adapted for modern life in the West. Now, some twenty years after de Salzmann's death, the notebooks that she filled with her insights over a forty-year period (and intended to publish) have been translated and edited by a small group of her family and followers. The result is this long-awaited guide to Gurdjieff's teaching, describing the routes to be traveled and the landmarks encountered along the way. Organized according to themes, the chapters touch on all the important concepts and practices of the Work, including: • Awakening from the sleep of identification with the ordinary level of being • Self-observation and self-remembering • Conscious effort and voluntary suffering • Understanding symbolic concepts like the Enneagram • The Gurdjieff Movements, bodily exercises that provide training in Presence and the awareness of subtle energies • The necessity of a "school," meaning the collective practice of the teaching in a group Madame de Salzmann brings to the Work her own strong, direct language and personal journey in learning to live that knowledge of a higher level of being, which, she insists, “you have to see for yourself” on a level beyond theory and concept. De Salzmann consistently refused to discuss the teaching in terms of ideas, for this Fourth Way is to be experienced, not simply thought or believed.

In Search of Being

In Search of Being
Author: G. I. Gurdjieff
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 161180082X

Over one hundred years ago in Russia, G. I. Gurdjieff introduced a spiritual teaching of conscious evolution—a way of gnosis or “knowledge of being” passed on from remote antiquity. Gurdjieff’s early talks in Europe were published in the form of chronological fragments preserved by his close followers P. D. Ouspensky and Jeanne de Salzmann. Now these teachings are presented as a comprehensive whole, covering a variety of subjects including states of consciousness, methods of self-study, spiritual work in groups, laws of the cosmos, and the universal symbol known as the Enneagram. Gurdjieff respected traditional religious practices, which he regarded as falling into three general categories or “ways”: the Way of the Fakir, related to mastery of the physical body; the Way of the Monk, based on faith and feeling; and the Way of the Yogi, which focuses on development of the mind. He presented his teaching as a “Fourth Way” that integrates these three aspects into a single path of self-knowledge. The principles are laid out as a way of knowing and experiencing an awakened level of being that must be verified for oneself.

The Herald of Coming Good

The Herald of Coming Good
Author: George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 146550592X

Before venturing to unfold the very substance of my first appeal to contemporary humanity, I count it essential and even in every way my duty, to set forth—even if only approximately—the motives which compelled me to assume the whole burden of such an artificial life. This protracted and, for me, absolutely unnatural life. absolutely irreconcilable, too, in every way with the traits that had entrenched themselves in my individuality by the time of my maturity, was the direct consequence of my decision, founded upon the results of my previous study of a whole series of historic precedents with a view, first of all,—to preventing, by to a certain degree unnatural outward manifestations of myself, the formation, in relation to me, of that already noted from ancient times ” something “, termed by the great Solomon, King of “ Juda, ” Tzvarnoharno , which, as was set out by our ancestors, forms itself by a natural process in the communal life of people as an outcome of a conjunction of the evil actions of so-called ” common people ” and leads to the destruction of both him that tries to achieve something for general human welfare and of all that he has already accomplished to this end. Secondly, with a view,—to counteracting the manifestation in people with whom I came in contact of that inherent trait which, embedded as it is in the psyche of people and acting as an impediment to the realization of my aims, evokes from them, when confronted with other more or less prominent people, the functioning of the feeling of enslavement, paralysing once and for all their capacity for displaying the personal initiative of which I then stood in particular need. My aim at that time was concentrated upon the creation of conditions permitting the comprehensive elucidation of one complicated and with difficulty explicable aspect of the question which had, already long before the beginning of this my artificial life, inhered in my being, and the necessity of whose final solution has, whether by the will of fate or thanks to the inscrutable laws of heredity, become and would, at the moment, appear to be the fundamental aim of my whole life and of the force motivating my activity. I find myself obliged—in this, so to say, definitive statement as a writer, which will also have to serve among other things as a sort of ” prospectus ” of the new phase of my unremitting activity for the welfare of my neighbours,—to give a brief outline of the history of the rise and development of those events and causes which were responsible for the formation in my individuality of the unquenchable striving to solve this question, which had, in the end, become for me what modern psychologists might term an ” irresistible Mania “ This mania began to impose itself upon my being at the time of my youth when I was on the point of attaining responsible age and consisted in what I would now term an ” irrepressible striving ” to understand clearly the precise significance, in general, of the life process on earth of all the outward forms of breathing creatures and, in particular, of the aim of human life in the light of this interpretation. Although a multitude of very specific factors, conditioned by my upbringing and education, had served as the primal cause for the formation in my being of the ground giving rise to such, for contemporary man, unusual striving, yet, as I understood later upon giving thought to the matter, the principal cause must in the end be attributed to those entirely accidental circumstances of my life which coincided precisely with the aforesaid transition from preparatory age to responsible age, and which may all be summed up in the fact that all my contacts at the time were almost exclusively with such persons of my age or my seniors who were either in the process of being formed themselves or who had already been formed into precisely that, of late increased amongst us, ” psychic typicality ” of people, the formation of which, as I myself have statistically established during the existence of my foundation, “The Institute For Man’s Harmonious Development” , is due to the fact that the future representatives of this ” typicality ” have never, either with a view to the real understanding of actuality, or in the period of their preparatory age, or, again, in the period of their responsible life, absolutely never, and in spite of the obvious necessity of such a step, laid themselves open to experience, but have contented themselves with other people’s fantasies, forming from them illusory conceptions and, at the same time, limiting themselves to intercourse with those like them, and have automatised themselves to a point of engaging upon authoritative discussions of all kinds of seemingly scientific, but, for the most part, abstract themes.

Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff
Author: Kenneth Walker
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Australia
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1979
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: