Word: gurdjieff
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...many people in the U. S. have ever heard of Georges Gurdjieff. Not many who have heard of him could repeat more than garbled rumors. Not many of those who know him know what to make of him. He is the strange head of a strange practical religion. Until two years ago his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was established in Fontainebleau, France. Then, an atrocious automobilist, he had an accident, closed the Institute. His subsequent movements have been obscure; always he has shunned publicity. Last week the few Manhattanites who knew he was in town gathered...
Once he fought a strange duel: he and his opponent hid themselves behind targets on an artillery range, lay there all day under the gunfire. At dusk Gurdjieff, unharmed, rescued his antagonist who was wounded, unconscious. He spent his youth wandering in the East, trying everything once. Say his followers, in the Tibetan mountains he found traces of a forgotten way of life, as old as Pythagoras (532 B. C..); he returned to Europe to teach it to a few. He bought the medieval prieuré at Fontainebleau. turned it into his Institute. Institutees lived simply, worked hard, learned complicated Eastern...
...Gurdjieff defined a normal person as one ''capable of actualizing his own potentialities." Great example: Leonardo da Vinci. The normal person, he declared, was developed to his biological limit. He believes, for instance, continual selfconscious attention to olfactory sensations would finally render a man's nose as keen as a dog's; that similar results could be obtained with other mental, physical, emotional potentialities. Most famed Institutee: the late Katherine Mansfield, who died of advanced consumption (1924) at the Institute. Other onetime Institutees: Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson (onetime editors of the late Little Review...