George Gurdjieff: biography and literary activity

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:55

Georgy Gudzhiev is one of the most mystical figures of pre-revolutionary Russia, whose fame as a seeker of truth in Sufism, Buddhism and Christianity grew even in Soviet times among rare people who combined the construction of communism with a passion for the occult. He is now known in the same way as Helena Blavatsky and the Roerichs, who were characterized by immersion in the same "demonic".

Travel

George Gurdjieff visited many countries, the Middle East explored especially carefully. Was in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and many other places. These were expeditions organized by the Seekers of Truth community, in which the spiritual traditions of different peoples were studied and compared, fragments of knowledge found that came from antiquity were collected, even in the form of sacred music and dances.

How it started

In 1912, George Gurdjieff opened his own school of spiritual knowledge in Moscow, and in 1915 he met the esoteric P. D. Uspensky, who was not only a philosopher, but also an active journalist andavid traveler. Gurdjieff managed to interest Ouspensky's friends and acquaintances with his theories of the search for truth and created a fairly large group of bored representatives of the creative intelligentsia. Even a branch was set up in St. Petersburg.

Uspensky helped Gurdjieff to adapt his ideas for the people of the European vision of the world, that is, to translate them into an understandable language accessible to the psychological culture of the West. At the same time, Gurdjieff's teaching was called the "Fourth Way." So the years went by, but everything did not grow together with the main dream of the spiritual teacher, with the Institute for Harmonious Development it did not work anywhere: neither in Moscow, nor in Tiflis, nor in Constantinople. It turned out in Paris, already in 1922.

Uspensky

Pyotr Demyanovich Uspensky, who by that time had become a philosopher of the highest order, helped again. The British, with whom he settled, were afraid to contact the world's leading esoteric and occultist, therefore, in order not to expand the circle of sorcerers and other cosmologists, Gurdjieff was not allowed into England.

In 1921, he moved to Germany, and then, with the money collected by the English neophytes of Uspensky, he bought a castle near Fontainebleau, where the institute flourished for several years. George Gurdjieff, whose biography is reverently studied by supporters of ecumenism today, was satisfied for a short time.

Sacred dances

Many esotericists even today claim that George Gurdjieff influenced not only individual people he met on his way, but also quite strongly - on public life and politicsindividual countries. Here are just the methods used by Gurdjieff at the same time (his sacred dances known to everyone, for example), remained not fully studied and not understood even by his closest followers.

In the spring of 1915 in Moscow, in a small, medium-sized cafe, two people were drinking coffee and talking quietly. One of them was swarthy in the Oriental fashion, with a black mustache, with a piercing and unpleasant look. His presence here even somehow strangely did not fit with the atmosphere of a Moscow eatery. As if mummers, moreover, unsuccessfully dressed. It's like he's not who he claims to be. And the interlocutor, who later recorded the course of this meeting, had to communicate and behave as if he did not notice anything strange. The second gentleman was Ouspensky. And the first - mummers - George Gurdjieff. The real-world views of this man were repulsive at first.

In a very short time, Ouspensky will become an ardent supporter of the teachings of Gurdjieff, but for now they are talking about travel, the topic of which is close to both of them, then about drugs that help in understanding the very nature of all mystical phenomena. In the second, Gurdjieff turned out to be much stronger, although Ouspensky managed to try many substances in order to consider himself sufficiently sophisticated. Nevertheless, Ouspensky was imbued, captivated and ripe for teaching sacred dances.

Caucasian mystic and the battle of magicians

Approximately a year before the meeting described above, Ouspensky read in the newspaper that a certain Hindu was staging the ballet "Battle of the Magicians". It didn't cost much to make inquiries.labor. It was George Gurdjieff, who always planned meetings with remarkable people in this way: an article of the most irrational content is ordered in the newspapers, and the esoterically inclined intellectual elite will come running by itself. Of course, no ballet - in the general sense of the word - was planned.

After the first coffee drinking, Gurdjieff managed to charm Ouspensky, and after a couple of weeks he even received telepathic orders. Moreover, Ouspensky was convinced that Gurdjieff knew everything in the world and could do anything, even to interfere with the cosmic course of events. The project of the ballet "Battle of the Magicians" concerned precisely cosmology: it was supposed to be sacred dances, where each movement is calculated by a "knowledgeable person" and corresponds exactly to the movement of the sun and planets.

Building a biography

And now there are people who are gifted enough to, for example, write good poetry, but who lack some spice to make readers look at the poet with astonished adoration. Then legends help fame, and even actual exploits, designed for PR and rightfully included in the biography.

Where did this "Hindu-Caucasian" come from, who he was - no one knew for sure. But there were rumors - one more eloquent than the other. George Gurdjieff, whose quotations from books were passed from mouth to mouth, did not refute the rumors about himself, but, on the contrary, let in a little more fog here and there. He did not even construct an autobiography - he carefully erased it. You can tryto compose his biography according to the works that remained after him. Many did just that. But Georgy Gurdjieff, whose books are a historically extremely unreliable source, deceived grateful humanity here too. The rest of the sources available to us are even less reliable.

Rumored

They say that Georgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in the Armenian city, which is now called Gyumri. His mother was Armenian and his father was Greek. In some books written by George Gurdjieff, you can find quotes that tell about the author's childhood and adolescence. Not a single date, location, not a single name could be found in reality. The following is written there briefly.

As a teenager, Gurdjieff allegedly became interested in supernatural phenomena, wanted to comprehend their nature and even learn how to control them. Therefore, he began to read a lot, communicate with Christian priests, and when he did not receive all the desired answers to his extraordinary questions, he went traveling.

In search of sacred knowledge

Twenty years of wandering gave the very odious sacred knowledge that, according to Ouspensky, the mystic, of course, possessed. Knowledge led him along the roads of Transcaucasia, Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, Tibet. He wrote about specific schools, sometimes speaking extremely vaguely, in passing, mentioning Tibetan monasteries, Mount Athos, Chitral, Persian and Bukhara Sufis, dervishes of various orders. Georgy Gudzhiev described all this very vaguely. Therefore, it is difficult to understand where he really was.

According to information received from a variety of sources, George Gurdjieff led excursions in Egypt, then in Jerusalem, was a tax collector from peasant villages with Tibetan lamas, worked on the railway in Turkey, painted sparrows like canaries for sale, kept repair shop, even owned oil wells and fishing boats, and also sold carpets. Always and everything that Gudzhiev managed to earn, he spent only on travel.

Between business and earnings, during his wanderings, as the legends say, he mastered some techniques of hypnosis and telepathy, as well as other supernatural tricks, Sufi and yogic techniques. He was wounded, because he was often brought into war zones, he was seriously ill for a long time, after which he decided to stop using any exceptional force. Among the students, Georgy Gudzhiev was known as a prophet and a magician. He called himself a dance teacher. This is basically true.

Accident

In the summer, the car of the magician and the prophet unexpectedly crashed into a tree. The teacher was found unconscious. The students wondered: well, the rain was not the cause of the incident, the accident was probably set up by enemies, of whom Gudzhiev had accumulated enough. According to the students, Georgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff, whose books were read to holes, was in his knowledge and skills equal to Blavatsky and all the Tibetan sages put together. He could not help but foresee this tree in the path of the car! If Hitler himself consulted with Gurdjieff, choosing a swastika for the party emblem of the nationalof socialism, if George Gurdjieff and Stalin together developed a method of remaking human consciousness!

Among the frankly funny, there were moments of true meaning. It is true that Gudjiev was an exceptionally talented hoaxer. He was omnivorous, and flies of various sizes came across in his spider webs. Gudzhiev could find like-minded people in any stratum of society. Among the poor and the rich, Jews and anti-Semites, communists and Nazis, he did not care at all. Definitely an extraordinary personality.

Books written for us

Recovering from the accident, Gurdjieff paid great attention to the revision of already written books and the creation of new ones. "Everything and Everything" - ten books divided into three series: "Stories of Beelzebub …", "Meetings with wonderful people", "Life is real …" He wrote this for posterity, that is, for us. Whether Gurdjieff's books are needed - everyone will decide for himself.

Many researchers with philosophical education start to laugh out loud already on the first pages. Ministers of different faiths unanimously say that much in these books is demonic, and that when burned, even paper scatters sparks that are completely different from ordinary ones, and a devilish hiss is heard from the fire devouring the pages. Judging by the details, believers in God have already tried to do all this.

"Views from the real world" is one of the first books of this psychic. From there, the reader will draw some philosophical doctrines: that a person is not complete, that he can become like a god(Are not the speeches of serpents? be like gods…), but nature develops it barely above the level of the animal. Further, he must develop himself, knowing himself and his hidden possibilities. Nature has four separate functions: thinking (intellect), sensual (emotions), motor and instinctive. Well, yes, even Aristotle wrote about this - in the most detailed way. At the same time, a person has a certain essence - something with which he is born, as well as a personality - something introduced, artificial. Further, not according to Aristotle: upbringing gives a person too many unnatural habits and tastes, because of this, a false personality is formed that suppresses the development of the essence.

And now the most that neither is the "creed" professed by Gurdjieff in all forms: whether it is a writer, choreographer, philosopher, and so on. Attention. A person does not know and cannot know his essence - neither preferences, nor tastes, nor what he really wants from life. In man, the real and the false dissolved into each other and became almost inseparable from each other. Therefore, each person needs transformation through suffering. And if for some reason life does not send suffering, then it is very right to make a person suffer, so to speak, in a man-made way (“it is necessary, Fedya, it is necessary …”).

And a postscript from Gurdjieff ("Meetings with wonderful people"): the main tools for a person working on himself are divided attention, self-remembering and the transformation of suffering. Self-remembering helps to accumulate all sorts of subtle matters in the body, andthe transformation of suffering crystallizes the subtle soul from subtle matters. Well, or the body - Gurdjieff does not know, therefore both words are in brackets: the soul and the body.

Moreover, the author stated that everyone has a soul, but only those who have earned it by voluntary suffering have a Soul. And every time the question arises again: "Maybe the priests are right when they talk about demonism?" And again - do normal people need all this? And the last thing - sorry for the kids who can "be led" to this.

Staging the long-awaited ballet

The dances taught to the students were also extraordinary. Dressed in white clothes, they moved with gestures that we can see in Indian films. The production involved people of various nationalities, but the teachers understood everything, and it is not clear in what language he explained the exercises. The British were also there, including those who sponsored the purchase of a palace near Paris to stage this cosmic ballet. And Gudzhiev looked at them as if they were slaves. There were no exceptions.

This is exactly what his follower K. S. Nott says in his book: this time meeting in a cozy Parisian cafe over a cup of coffee with Gudzhiev, Nott asked him a question about his former student, who was carried away by Gudzhiev, and then left without regret, to which the "great magician" replied with a sarcastic smile, "I've always needed rats for my experiments."

So, Gudjiev practiced dancing for literally decades, at which time the will of the followers was completely suppressed, and dissidents were ruthlessly expelled. After that, some concerts were shown to the Parisian, London and New York brothers, about which they talked about the most different things.

War and post-war times

Gurdjieff survived the occupation of France calmly and serenely. There were many Nazis among his students, including Karl Haushofer, whom Gudzhiev met back in the mountains of Tibet, where this ideologist of the Third Reich was looking for the roots of the Aryan race. After the collapse of fascist Germany, the "great teacher" began to have complications. The students almost all fled, many calling him offensive nicknames such as the Greek charlatan and the American master of magic. Also a miracle worker from the Caucasus…

The end of the road

But the remaining students still idolized him. He was believed to be able to predict the future (infrequently and by special request). There is a legend that Georgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff predicted the death of Lenin and the death of Trotsky, after which Stalin ordered Beria to deal with this guru. That's how his car met the tree. But everyone also knew that the Caucasian was a hot guy and an excellent driver, just a terrible, crazy driver. So, most likely, there was no intervention of Joseph Vissarionovich.

After the accident, Gudjiev recovered for a long time, but eventually returned to staging dances. But one day he fell in the classroom and never got up again. It was 1949. He took the inveterate hypnotist along his "fourth path" - the path of the cunning one.