Gurdjieff was a high initiate of an ancient esoteric school who took it upon himself to show the Western world that mankind is asleep, that there are higher levels of being, and that there are somewhere people who know. He certainly had the background and the gift to extract the essence of many teachings and to present it clean of cultural trappings or accretions in a way appropriate to the situation he was in. One of the enigmas about him is the contrast between his seeming mastery and his failure to elevate, in the course of his lifetime, any of his disciples to his level - and thus to found a tradition in the full measure of the term.

Yet he did not fail, as we judge him not by his teaching of the few but from his role in the history of psychic investigation and spirituality. As a single individual he managed to administer the European and American world a shock perhaps more significant than any other until the cultural wave of the sixties.

A contemporary of Crowley and Rasputin, Gurdjieff was born of Greek parents in Russian territory. Early in his life he was attracted to what he considered the secret teachings handed down generation after generation by word of mouth.

Contacting a nervous young man from his village proved interesting when made several early predictions about him which came true, including that he would be in a gun accident. As a consequence the life of this most modern and most groundbreaking of our occult philosophers was never far removed from the strange and the curious.

While visiting a moutain cult called the Yezidis he saw a young boy crying. Apparently he was unable to escape from a circle that had been drawn in the dirt around him by a few other mischievous children. Gurdjieff himself notes in his records that it took him and another strong man to wrestle a Yezidi woman out of a circle drawn around her, but as soon as she was pulled across the line of the circle she collapsed into a trance of sorts. Put back into the circle she regained normal consciousness. Through a series of an incantations the Yezidi priests were able to restore normalcy to those caught in a trance, or else the sleepwalking-like state would continue anywhere from twelve to twenty-one hours.

Soon Gurdjieff was devouring any scrap of text he could get his hands on in an attempt to explain the phenomena he saw. A friend had died and been buried after a fatal horseriding accident. The following night the corpse was seen approaching his own house, but was immediately seized, his throat cut, and returned to the cemetery. Townsfolk were persuaded that his body had been possessed by a vampire.

As was typical with most of our magicians, Gurdjieff made the most of his early life by traveling the whole of the continents seeking his secret knowledge, visiting monsteries of every persuasion and emphasis. It must be noted that of all the great charlatans of our study, Gurdjieff was able to convert his natural occult powers into a system that would work for even the most ordinary of people.

After meeting a series of mad doktors, shamans, dervishes, gleening bits of insight and direction from each, he was able to synthesize the essence of the teachings and combine this distilled wisdom with what a young man named Sarkis Pogossian taught him about the importance of work. Work in this sense means simple menial labor, work to the degree that a distortion of the normal comfort levels of the individual results in a sudden release of energy and refreshing insights, feelings of well-being, and a widened sense of reality.

Gurdjieff was immediately convinced of this unpretentious pathway to enlightenment. He believed that the normal waking state for most people is hardly a waking state at all, but barely more than a dim counterfeit of the sleeping state. This is because most people relax into a lifestyle of routine where the consciousness runs safely on auto-pilot, and therefore is less motivated to experience the fuller meanings of life in all its profundity of emotional and intellectual ripening.

He would frequently respond to the warblings of a new recruit by handing him a shovel and ordering him to dig a pointless ditch. As might be expected, the recruit would soon bore of the exhausting effort, and would threaten to quit. Gurdjieff would remain adamant, and the poor novice, sweating and cursing at the blisters on his hands would continue until finally the mental and emotional breakthrough Gurdjieff was predicting would be achieved.

The highly flamboyant mystic was not only convinced that the habitforming nature of civilization is the cause of human imbalance and disharmony, but that most people routinely indulge in conjuring up negative emotions, and these act on the psychological harmony of the individual to sabotage the best of merely "intellectual" intentions.

Gurdjieff was not merely a very talented inspiration to his pupils, he was also adept at keeping them in a state of agitation for their own benefit. One particular disciple was a notorious complainer. Finally one day when a handful of students were working with hoes and garden apparatus in the yard, this malcontent threw down his tool, insulted his teacher, and stomped off. Gurdjieff sent a young boy to retrieve him.

The same malcontent later decided he'd had enough once again and so marched off to Paris where Gurdjieff made him a personal visit to convince him to return. His explanation was that this fellow possessed one very valuable quality, that of irritating the bejesus out of everyone in his midst, which kept them from falling into a routine, and out of a heightened consciousness.

His methods of persuasion were quite contrary to the normal expectations of his students. In one incident, before going away on undisclosed business Gurdjieff put a young woman named Merston in charge of the institute. She and a young boy soon butted heads. The chickens he was tending had wandered into her garden and scratched up a few flowers. After threatening to wring the neck of the next bird to step foot in her flowerbed, she was soon forced to heed her own warning. The boy was not amused, and subsequently tore into some of her most beautiful blooms.

The whole incident was reported to the master when he returned. Instead of upbraiding the woman for her act of violence, he suggested to the boy that the chicken could and had been eaten, whereas the destruction of the flowers was pointless. But he also scolded the young woman for wasting his time with such frivolities.

Apparently this woman possessed somewhat of a mean if organizational streak, taking her advantage as chief in waiting when Gurdjieff was away, quite seriously. Once after she had compiled a lengthy roster of the group's transgressions, Gurdjieff upon returning, startled everyone by handing out money for each infraction. The controversial rebuff soon had achieved the desired effect of making everyone feel sorry for the woman taskmaster, so that she ceased to be stigmatised as a dragonlady.

George Bernard Shaw called this gentle and complex attitude towards his more troublesome students, Gurdjieff's "natural Christianity." In essence, his response to these difficult people was a deliberate exercise of freedom and the will to exert new energy into the lifeless routine of normalcy.

Famous among the many Gurdjieff sideshows is the troupe of gymnastic dancers he organized and exposed in public exhibitions. Guaranteed to shock and aatound audiences breathlessly charged by the spectacle of the injury-defying dancers, arms and legs akimbo, these spectacular acts of physical agility portrayed in very real terms the true essence of his teachings. The body ordinarily out of sync by force of habit can be snatched back to the original grace of its own hidden energies by hard work, and transcendence over the routine.

Gurdjieff dabbled in telepathic phenomena, but did not actually claim to be reading minds, but rather, he was sensitive to the most obscured flutterings of a person's nervous system, accessed by holding the hand of the subject, which helped him reveal the whereabouts or nature of the designated object remotely hidden for the purpose of the exercise.

Fellow mystic and close friend, P.D. Ouspensky, wrote of several occasions when he and Gurdjieff engaged in full conversations telepathically from different parts of the house.

Another amazing tale has Gurdjieff sitting at the table next to an American novelist, a woman. He commences to inhale and exhale after the fashion peculiar to sexual intimacy, until the woman turned pale and felt a jolt. She related that she had indiscriminately caught the gaze of Gurdjieff's eye, and suddenly, "felt as if I had been struck right through my sexual centre. It was beastly!"

The word on Gurdjieff is that he stands out from most of the magicians we have considered because he had learned to control his own state of affairs and drive his senses to new limits through strong discipline and study. His occult powers were real, although nothing he placed any great personal significance upon. He believed that these powers existed in all of us. His remarkable achiervements can be summed up in his understanding that most of our limitations are arbitrary constraints inspired by force of habit. If we could only learn to charge on through the limits of our own time-honored degrees of fatigue or craelessness, we may all be capable of astonishing feats.

A man of many tastes himself, he spent a life dining on good food, and his special drink of Armagnac. He was neither sexually deprived nor focused on sex as was Crowley. He died at the age of seventy-one, a man much esteemed by believer and skeptic alike.