G. I. Gurdjieff

The starting claim is unflattering. A person has no permanent I, only a crowd of small ones that take turns and each speak in the name of the whole, and ordinary waking life is a form of sleep in which nobody is present to notice. The method attacks that directly. Self observation means watching oneself without correcting or excusing what is seen. Self remembering means holding attention on the observer and the observed at the same time, which pupils reported being able to sustain for seconds at a stretch. Identification, losing oneself in a task or a grievance, is the ordinary condition and the thing being worked against.

Gurdjieff described a person as three centres, moving, emotional and intellectual, which develop unevenly and are usually out of contact with each other. That is why the older paths of the fakir, the monk and the yogi each train one and leave the rest. The Fourth Way trains all three at once and refuses withdrawal: the work is done in ordinary conditions, and at the Prieure near Fontainebleau that meant heavy manual labour, unfamiliar tasks and deliberately awkward arrangements designed to make habit visible. The Movements, dances set to music which often require the limbs to keep different counts at once, exist to make habitual coordination impossible and attention necessary. The enneagram, a nine pointed figure inside a circle, was taught as a diagram of how any process unfolds.

Gurdjieff said the teaching was not his invention but material gathered on years of travel in Central Asia, Persia, Egypt and Tibet, and Meetings with Remarkable Men tells of a search for a hidden brotherhood, the Sarmoung, and of a monastery where the Movements were preserved. No independent trace of that brotherhood, that monastery or those journeys has ever been produced, and the book reads as instruction rather than as report. Scholars of the material generally treat the account as a teaching device and look instead at the currents he demonstrably moved in, which include Sufi practice, Orthodox Christian asceticism and the theosophical vocabulary current in the Russia of his youth. The atlas records the claim and the absence of evidence for it together, because both are part of what the teaching is.

It spread mainly through pupils who wrote. In Search of the Miraculous, by P. D. Ouspensky, set the system out more clearly than Gurdjieff ever did, and its author had broken with him by then. A. R. Orage carried the work to New York. Jeanne de Salzmann held the Movements together after his death in 1949. The strangest part of the afterlife is the enneagram. He used it as a diagram of process and attached no personality types to it whatever. The nine character types now taught under that name were developed later in the twentieth century by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo, and the figure has travelled much further in that form than in his.