Word: gurdjieff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Author Wilson, just turned 25, shows a staggeringly erudite grasp of the works and lives of Bernard Shaw, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William Blake, George Fox, H. G. Wells, Henri Barbusse, Hermann Hesse, Van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, Nijinsky, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Gurdjieff and Sri Ramakrishna, not to mention many lesser figures. But what makes The Outsider a compelling intellectual thriller is that Author Wilson uses bits and pieces of these men and their literary progeny as pigments for his portrait of a kind of invisible man, an invisible man who has shaped...
...Walker was curious to learn more about George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and the more he learned the more fascinated he became. He decided that Gurdjieff was one of the most gifted philosopher-psychologists of modern times. Convinced of the value of Gurdjieff's teachings, Author Walker has now written Venture with Ideas in the hope that others will benefit as he has himself. With this approach, he naturally focuses on the master's ideas at considerable expense to the master's personality, which clearly deserves fuller treatment...
...Hydrogen 12. Gurdjieff seems to have been a remarkable blend of P. T. Barnum, Rasputin, Freud, Groucho Marx and everybody's grandfather. To his disciples, he was a great man, a modern saint. To doubters, he was an astute phony peddling intellectual narcotics to spiritual neurotics. But all sides seemed to agree that he had picked up, as he acknowledged himself, an astonishing amount of useful information...
...born of Greek parents in Alexandropol, Russia in 1872. But Alexandropol was too confining. Young Gurdjieff ranged into Persia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Tibet. On these journeys, Gurdjieff sat at the feet of fakirs, dervishes, "holy men" and temple dancers, sopping up unwritten lore. By 1915 he was creating a minor stir in Moscow with an oriental ballet troupe and proclaiming himself master of a "system" of "esoteric knowledge...
Some Muscovites decided that there was inspiration in his cabalistic utterances, e.g., that the universe is governed by "the law of three and the law of seven," and that the proper source of sexual energy is "Hydrogen 12." Gurdjieff picked up followers, funds, and his chief disciple, a stocky journalist and mathematician named P. D. Ouspensky. The Russian Revolution soon sent Gurdjieff and Ouspensky scurrying. Near Paris, at a Fontainebleau estate, Gurdjieff founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Ouspensky ended up in London and established the Gurdjieff Institute. It was this "ark" that Author Walker helped...