Gurdjieff, and the work of waking up.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol, now Gyumri in Armenia, to a Greek father and an Armenian mother. Even his followers don’t agree on the year: the dates given run from 1866 to 1877. He told of long travels through Central Asia and the Middle East with a band he called the Seekers of Truth. None of them has ever been traced, and historians read that part of his life as his own story.

From about 1912 he taught small groups in Moscow and St Petersburg. In spring 1915 the writer P. D. Ouspensky met him in Moscow and began writing down what he said. Through the Russian Revolution he moved his pupils south, to Essentuki in 1917 and Tiflis in 1919, then west. On 1 October 1922 he opened his Institute at the Prieuré, a house at Fontainebleau-Avon outside Paris.

He taught through work on the house and land, through sacred dances he called Movements, set to music he wrote with his pupil Thomas de Hartmann, and through talk. After a near-fatal car accident in July 1924 he closed the Institute and turned to writing. He stayed in Paris through the German occupation and died at the American Hospital in Neuilly on 29 October 1949.

We don’t do, things happen

Asked early on what a person should do, he turned the question round. Doing, in his sense, is the one thing we mostly can’t.

“As I have said before, man's chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 1, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

Asleep with our eyes open

He called ordinary waking life a kind of sleep, lived inside what we like and don’t like, want and don’t want.

“He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination. He lives in sleep. He is asleep.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 8, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

Many small I’s

There is no single self in his account, only a run of passing I’s, each speaking for the whole person while it lasts. His plainest example is the alarm clock.

“A man decides to get up early beginning from the following day. One I, or a group of I's, decide this. But getting up is the business of another I who entirely disagrees with the decision and may even know absolutely nothing about it.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 3, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

Watch first, explain later

His method begins with noticing what happens as it happens, and recording it, before asking why. He added that a habit stays out of sight until we push against it.

“Self-observation, especially in the beginning, must on no account become analysis or attempts at analysis. Analysis will only become possible much later when a man knows all the functions of his machine and all the laws which govern it.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 6, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

“It has been said before that a man cannot change anything in himself, that he can only observe and 'record.' This is true. But it is also true that a man cannot observe and 'record' anything if he does not try to struggle with himself, that is, with his habits.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 6, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

The work happens in ordinary life

He called his teaching the fourth way, set against the ways of the fakir, the monk and the yogi, which each begin by leaving ordinary life.

“On the fourth way it is possible to work and to follow this way while remaining in the usual conditions of life, continuing to do the usual work, preserving former relations with people, and without renouncing or giving up anything.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 2, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

The enneagram symbol came through Gurdjieff. In Ouspensky’s record he taught it as a circle of nine points standing for any process, a way of seeing how a whole thing unfolds. Nobody has traced the figure to anyone earlier.

“In order to understand the enneagram it must be thought of as in motion, as moving. A motionless enneagram is a dead symbol; the living symbol is in motion.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 14, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

He didn’t teach personality types with it. He did speak of a “chief feature” at the center of each person’s character, but in a different chapter, with no enneagram. Even the Enneagram Institute, which teaches the types, says Gurdjieff did not teach a system of types. The nine types came from the Bolivian teacher Oscar Ichazo, who taught nine “ego fixations” in Arica, Chile, in 1970 and 1971. The psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo took them to his students in Berkeley in the 1970s, and from there they reached Helen Palmer, Jesuit teachers in the Midwest and, in 1987, Don Riso’s Personality Types.

What does the research say about the types? A 2021 systematic review of 104 samples found mixed evidence of reliability and validity. Some Enneagram scales line up with the Big Five traits in ways that make sense. But studies usually find fewer than nine distinct factors, no one has recovered the nine types from data, and the wings and arrows have little support. The reviewers, who are sympathetic to the Enneagram, call its theory largely untested.

On self-observation, the nearest research is on mindfulness, which psychologists describe as attention kept on what is happening now, a skill of noticing our own thinking. That comparison is ours. We found no study that tests Gurdjieff’s method itself.

In the Psychology Library: The Enneagram · The Big Five · The family tree

Lines shared under his name, checked against the talks and books.

1. “If you are first, you are first. If you are second, you are nothing.”

   Someone else’s

   Where it’s from

   A saying of his father’s, which Gurdjieff recorded in Meetings with Remarkable Men, in the chapter “My Father”.

   What the source says

   If you are first, your wife is second; if your wife is first, you had better be zero: only then will your hens be safe.

   What changed

   A father’s joke about marriage became a line about winning.

2. “A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.”

   His, as said

   Where it’s from

   In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 13, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky.

   What the source says

   The next sentences: Man is made in such a way that he is never so much attached to anything as he is to his suffering. And it is necessary to be free from suffering.

   What changed

   The words are as reported. The point usually drops off: he was listing what we have to give up, and our suffering is on the list.

3. “Remember yourself always and everywhere.”

   His, as said

   Where it’s from

   One of the sayings written on the walls of the Study House at the Prieuré, recorded by his pupils in Views from the Real World.

   What the source says

   Listed there as the fourth saying, word for word.

   What changed

   Nothing in the words. It was written on a wall for the people living and working at the Institute.

4. “The worse the conditions of life the more productive the work.”

   Reworked

   Where it’s from

   Another of the Study House sayings, in Views from the Real World.

   What the source says

   The worse the conditions of life the more productive the work, always provided you remember the work.

   What changed

   The last clause is cut, and the whole line rests on it.

“If a man really knows that he cannot remember himself, he is already near to the understanding of his being.”

In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 7, as reported by P. D. Ouspensky

His pupils came back from their first attempts at remembering themselves and reported that they kept failing. He said the failure was the finding.

Almost everything on this page reaches us through In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky’s account of his years with Gurdjieff, written from memory and published in 1949. We matched each line to two separate scans of the 1950 printing, and every line says it is Gurdjieff as Ouspensky reported him.

The Study House sayings come from Views from the Real World, talks and sayings recorded by his pupils, and the father’s saying from Gurdjieff’s own Meetings with Remarkable Men. We read both in scans, not in printed copies. Anyone with a better source for a line can send it to us.