Armenian/Greek philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer. Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings.

The practice of his teaching has become known as "The Work" (connoting work on oneself) and is additional to the ways of the fakir, monk and yogi, so that his student P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as the "Fourth Way".

Three books by Gurdjieff were published in the English language in the US after his death

• Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson → 1950 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
• Meetings with Remarkable Men, → 1963 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
• Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', printed privately by E. P. Dutton & Co. and published in 1978 by Triangle Editions Inc. for private distribution only.

This trilogy is Gurdjieff's legominism, known collectively as All and Everything. A legominism is, according to Gurdjieff, "one of the means of transmitting information about certain events of long-past ages through initiates".

Resources

• youtube, Beelzebub`s Tales to His Grandson
• youtube, Meetings with Remarkable Men
• youtube, In Search of the Miraculous. Chapter 1 → reading of P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous which recounts his meeting and subsequent association with Gurdjieff.
• Richard Heath, Gurdjieff's Law of Seven in Beelzebub's Tales