My sister made me a great present, a book about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. It’s written by his student P. D. Ouspensky and I just started to read. I’m very excited since I wanted to learn more about the teaching of this master for a long time.
He combines mystical elements of Sufism, Buddhism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism and the Kabbalah. His call was radical: “Wake up! Awake from your unsuspected hypnotic sleep to consciousness and conscience.” In his eyes most people don’t even reach the human state but lead a miserable existence as automata for life.
Kipling once said that these twins, it was referring to the East and the Occident, they could never understand each other. But in the life of Gurdjieff, in his work and his words, there is a philosophy from out of the depths of the knowledge of Asia, this is something that the man of Occident can understand. And in the work of this man and in his thought — in what he did and in the way he did it — the Occident finds truly the East.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Meetings with Remarkable Men, 1979. A film about the life of Gurdjieff.
Last but not least a German Gurdjieff documentary with English subtitles:
Journey to Inaccessible places
