Views from the Real World, early talks of Gurdjieff as recollected by his Pupils

Views from the Real World, early talks of Gurdjieff as recollected by his Pupils

Virtually unknown in his lifetime, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff is becoming recognized today as a great pathfinder - a true revolutionary who saw clearly the direction which modern "civilization" is taking, and who set to work in the background to prepare people to discover for themselves, and eventually to diffuse among mankind, the certitude that Being is the only indestructible reality. Great changes have taken place in the quarter-century since Gurdjieff's death, yet much of the mystery that surrounded him in his lifetime remains. His epic work, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, written in the period after 1924, when Gurdjieff lived in France, and intended to express his teaching "in a form accessible to all," has increased the demand to hear, so to speak, his actual voice and direct instructions - that is, for some account of the conversations that took place between him and his pupils, wherever it was, whether during the tense and difficult times of their escape from revolutionary Russia, or at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Paris, or during visits to American pupils in New York and elsewhere. That any record of these lectures exists at all is due to a few pupils who - with astonishing powers of memory and in most cases entirely without Gurdjieff's knowledge - managed to write down what they had heard afterwards.

These are the talks presented in this book. Incomplete as they are, they are an authentic rendering of Gurdjieff's approach to work on oneself and to a progressive understanding of the inner conditions indispensable to self-development. In fact, even in these notes from memory, it is striking that there is always the same human tone of voice, the same man evoking a secret response in each of his listeners.

To lectures of the years 1917-1933 has been added the account of a conversation with Gurdjieff known as "Glimpses of Truth," written by a Moscow pupil in 1914 and tantalizingly mentioned by P.D. Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous. Gurdjieff's aphorisms, formerly inscribed above the walls of the Study House at the Institute, conclude the volume.

Details

• Hardcover with dust jacket (Fine state)
• ISBN: 0710078110
• Condition: Very Good 
  
• Front cover: the cover design is from a painting made at the Prieuré using the Alphabet in which the Aphorisms were written
• Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul