Word: gurdjieff
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...20th century life left him wishing, now & then, for a good latter-day ark. In 1923, a friend startled him by announcing that "a small group of people now in London . . . has started building one." When Walker asked for the new Noah's name, he was told: "Gurdjieff...
...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...
...Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, enjoyed his peak vogue among highbrows in low spirits during the '203 when he operated an "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" at Fontainebleau, France. Crux of his medical doctrine: that man has three natures, intellectual, emotional and instinctive, and gets ill when he develops one at the expense of the other two. Cures practiced at Fontainebleau included tree-chopping and complicated "dance-exercises" to any of 5,000-odd tunes composed by Gurdjieff. For Katherine Mansfield, he prescribed a stay in a cowloft, so that she coftld inhale the air the cows...