Name	Sri Aurobindo
Caption	Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghosh) in 1916.
Birth-date	August 15, 1872
Birth-place	Calcutta (now Kolkata), India
Birth-name	Aurobindo Akroyd Ghosh
Death-date	December 05, 1950
Religion	Hinduism
Death-place	Pondicherry (now Puducherry), French India
Quote	The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze.And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.

Sri Aurobindo ( Sri Ôrobindo) (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress and spiritual evolution.

Aurobindo synthesized Eastern and Western philosophy, religion, literature, and psychology into a vision of the world as a vessel of divine being-consciousness-bliss.

Aurobindo was the first Indian to create a major literary corpus in English. His works include philosophy; poetry; translations of and commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads, and the Gita; plays; literary, social, political, and historical criticism; devotional works; spiritual journals and three volumes of letters. His principal philosophical writings are The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, while his principal poetic work is .

Biography

Early life

Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta, India to Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose, District Surgeon of Rangapur, Bengal and Swarnalata Devi, the daughter of Brahmo religious and social reformer, Rajnarayan Basu. Dr. Ghose chose the middle name Akroyd to honour his friend Annette Akroyd.

Aurobindo spent his first five years at Rangapur, where his father had been posted since October 1871. Dr. Ghose, who had previously lived in Britain and studied medicine at King's College, Aberdeen, was determined that his children should have an English education and upbringing free of any Indian influences. In 1877, he therefore sent the young Aurobindo and two elder siblings - Manmohan and Benoybhusan - to the Loreto Convent school in Darjeeling.

England

Aurobindo spent two years at Loreto convent. In 1879, Aurobindo and his two elder brothers were taken to Manchester, England for a European education. The brothers were placed in the care of a Rev. and Mrs. Drewett. Rev. Drewett was an Anglican clergyman whom Dr. Ghose knew through his British friends at Rangapur. The Drewetts tutored the Ghose brothers privately. The Drewetts had been asked to keep the tuitions completely secular and to make no mention of India or its culture.

In 1884, Aurobindo joined St Paul's School. Here he learned Greek and Latin, spending the last three years reading literature, especially English poetry. Dr. K.D. Ghose had aspired that his sons should pass the prestigious Indian Civil Service, but in 1889 it appeared that of the three brothers, only young Aurobindo had the chance of fulfilling his father's aspirations, his brothers having already decided their future careers. To become an ICS official, students were required to pass the difficult competitive examination, as well as study at an English university for two years under probation. With his limited financial resources, the only option Aurobindo had was to secure a scholarship at an English university, which he did by passing the scholarship examinations of King's College, Cambridge University. He stood first at the examination. He also passed the written examination of ICS after a few months, where he was ranked 11th out of 250 competitors. He spent the next two years at the King's College.

By the end of two years of probation, Aurobindo became convinced that he did not want to serve the British, he therefore failed to present himself at the horse riding examination for ICS, and was disqualified for the Service. At this time, the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III was travelling England. James Cotton, brother of Sir Henry Cotton, for some time Lt. Governor of Bengal and Secretary of the South Kensington Liberal Club, who knew Sri Aurobindo and his father secured for him a service in Baroda State Service and arranged a meeting between him and the prince. He left England for India, arriving there in February, 1893. In India Aurobindo's father who was waiting to receive his son was misinformed by his agents from Bombay (now Mumbai) that the ship on which Aurobindo had been travelling had sunk off the coast of Portugal. Dr. Ghose who was by this time frail due to ill-health could not bear this shock and died.

Baroda

In Baroda, Aurobindo joined the state service, working first in the Survey and Settlements department, later moving to the Department of Revenue and then to the Secretariat, writing speeches for the Gaekwad. At Baroda, Aurobindo engaged in a deep study of Indian culture, teaching himself Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali, all things that his education in England had withheld from him. Because of the lack of punctuality at work resulting from his preoccupation with these other pursuits, Aurobindo was transferred to the Baroda College as a teacher of French, where he became popular because of his unconventional teaching style. He was later promoted to the post of Vice-Principal. He also started taking active interest in the politics of India's freedom struggle against British rule, working behind the scenes as his position at the Baroda State barred him from overt political activity. He linked up with resistance groups in Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, while travelling to these states. He established contact with Lokmanya Tilak and Sister Nivedita. He also arranged for the military training of Jatindra Nath Banerjee (Niralamba Swami) in the Baroda army and then dispatched him to organise the resistance groups in Bengal. He was invited by K.G. Deshpande who was in charge of the weekly Induprakash and a friend from his days in Cambridge to write about the political situation. Aurobindo started writing a series of impassioned articles under the title New Lamps for the Old pouring vitriol on the Congress for its moderate policy. He wrote:

"Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism"

further adding:

"I say, of the Congress, then, this, - that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders; - in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed."

The Congress which practised more mild and moderate criticism itself, reacted in a way which frightened the editors of the paper who asked Aurobindo to write about cultural themes instead of Politics. Aurobindo lost interest in these writings and the series was discontinued.

In Bengal with Barin's help he established contacts with revolutionaries, inspiring radicals like Bagha Jatin, Jatin Banerjee, Surendranath Tagore. He helped establish a series of youth clubs with the aim of imparting a martial and spiritual training to the youth of Bengal. He helped found the Anushilan Samiti of Calcutta in 1902. When the Partition of Bengal was announced, there was a public outpouring against the British rule in India. Aurobindo attended the Benares session of Congress in December 1905 as an observer, and witnessing the intensity of people's feelings decided to throw himself into the thick of politics. In 1907–1908 Aurobindo travelled extensively to Pune, Bombay and Baroda to firm up support for the nationalist cause, giving speeches and meeting various groups. He was arrested again in May 1908 in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case. He was acquitted in the ensuing trial and released after a year of isolated incarceration. Once out of the prison he started two new publications, Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali. He also delivered the Uttarpara Speech hinting at the transformation of his focus to spiritual matters . The British persecution continued because of his writings in his new journals and in April 1910 Aurobindo signalling his retirement from politics, moved to Pondicherry.

Conversion from politics to spirituality

Aurobindo's conversion from political action to spirituality occurred gradually. Aurobindo had been influenced by Bankim's Anandamath. In this novel, the story follows a monk who fights the soldiers of the British East India Company. When in Baroda, Aurobindo and Barin had considered the plan of a national uprising of nationalist sannyasis against the empire. Later when Aurobindo got involved with Congress and Bande Mataram, Barin had continued to meet spiritualists for recruitment for such a plan. In 1907, Barin introduced Aurobindo to Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, a Maharashtrian yogi. Aurobindo had been engaged in yogic discipline for years, but disturbances to his progress following the recent events surrounding the Congress had put him in the need of consulting a yogi. After attending the Surat session of the Congress in 1907, Aurobindo met Lele in Baroda. This meeting led him to retire for three days in seclusion where, following Lele's instruction, Aurobindo had his first major experience, called nirvana - a state of complete mental silence free of any thought or mental activity. Later, while awaiting trial as a prisoner in Alipore Central Jail in Calcutta Aurobindo had a number of mystical experiences. In his letters, Sri Aurobindo mentions that while in jail as under-trial, spirit of Swami Vivekananda visited him for two weeks and spoke about the higher planes of consciousness leading to supermind . Sri Aurobindo later said that while imprisoned he saw the convicts, jailers, policemen, the prison bars, the trees, the judge, the lawyers as different forms of one godhead, Krishna .

The trial ("Alipore Bomb Case, 1908") lasted for one full year, but eventually Sri Aurobindo was acquitted. On acquittal, Sri Aurobindo was invited to deliver a speech at Uttarpara where he first spoke of some of his experiences in jail. Afterwards Aurobindo started two new weekly papers: the Karmayogin in English and the Dharma in Bengali. However, it appeared that the British government would not tolerate his nationalist program as then Viceroy and Governor-General of India Lord Minto wrote about him: "I can only repeat that he is the most dangerous man we have to reckon with." The British considered the possibilities of a retrial or deportation, but objections from Lord Minto, or the Bengal government at different instances prevented immediate execution of such plans.

When informed that he was sought again by the Indian police, he was guided to the French territory Chandernagore where he halted for a few days. On April 4, 1910 he finally landed in the French colony of Pondicherry. At Pondicherry he dedicated himself completely to his spiritual pursuits.

Pondicherry

In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo completely dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of concentrated yoga, Sri Aurobindo was proposed to express his vision in intellectual terms. This resulted in the launch of Arya, a 64 page monthly review. For the next six and a half years this became the vehicle for most of his most important writings, which appeared in serialised form. These included The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, and The Future Poetry. Many years later, Sri Aurobindo revised some of these works before they were published in book form. It was about his prose writing of this period that Times Literary Supplement, London wrote on 8 July 1944, "Sri Aurobindo is the most significant and perhaps the most interesting.... He is a new type of thinker, one who combines in his vision the alacrity of the West with the illumination of the East.He is a yogi who writes as though he were standing among the stars, with the constellations for his companions."

For some time afterwards, Sri Aurobindo's main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousands. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice—others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, Sri Aurobindo resumed work on a poem he had started earlier—he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. During the World War II, he supported the allies, even donating money to the British Government, describing Hitler as a dark and oppressive force.

On August 15, 1947, on his 75th birthday, when India achieved political independence, a message was asked from Sri Aurobindo. In his message, which was read out on the All India Radio, Sri Aurobindo dwelt briefly on the five dreams he has cherished all his life and which, he noted, were on the way to being fulfilled. Sri Aurobindo died on December 5, 1950 after a short illness.

The Mother

Sri Aurobindo's close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Richard (b. Alfassa), came to be known as The Mother simply because Sri Aurobindo started to call her by this name. On being asked by why he called her the Mother, Sri Aurobindo wrote an essay called The Mother in order to shed light on the person of Mirra.

Mirra was born in Paris on February 21, 1878, to Turkish and Egyptian parents. Involved in the cultural and spiritual life of Paris, she counted among her friends Alexandra David-Neel. She went to Pondicherry on March 29, 1914, finally settling there in 1920. Sri Aurobindo considered her his spiritual equal and collaborator. After November 24, 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, he left it to her to plan, run and build the growing Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the community of disciples that had gathered around them. Some time later when families with children joined the ashram, she established and supervised the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education which, with its pilot experiments in the field of education, impressed observers like Jawaharlal Nehru. When Sri Aurobindo died in 1950, the Mother continued their spiritual work and directed the Ashram and guided their disciples. In the mid-1960s she personally guided the founding of Auroville, an international township endorsed by UNESCO to further human unity near the town of Pondicherry, which was to be a place "where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities." It was inaugurated in 1968 in a ceremony in which representatives of 121 nations and all the states of India placed a handful of their soil in an urn near the center of the city. Auroville continues to develop and currently has approximately 2100 members from 43 countries, though the majority consists of Indians, French, and Germans. The Mother also played an active role in the merger of the French pockets in India and, according to Sri Aurobindo's wish, helped to make Pondicherry a seat of cultural exchange between India and France. The Mother stayed in Pondicherry until her death on November 17, 1973. Her later years, including her myriad of metaphysical and occult experiences, and her attempt at the transformation at the cellular level of her body, are captured in her 13-volume personal log known as Mother's Agenda.

Philosophy and spiritual vision

One of Sri Aurobindo's main philosophical achievements was to introduce the concept of evolution into Vedantic thought. Samkhya philosophy had already proposed such a notion centuries earlier, but Aurobindo rejected the materialistic tendencies of both Darwinism and Samkhya, and proposed an evolution of spirit along with that of matter, and that the evolution of matter was a result of the former.

He describes the limitation of the Mayavada of Advaita Vedanta, and solves the problem of the linkage between the ineffable Brahman or Absolute and the world of multiplicity by positing a hitherto unknown and unexplored level of consciousness, which he called The Supermind. The supermind is the active principle present in the transcendent Satchidananda as well in the roots of evolution: a unitary level of which our individual minds and bodies are minuscule subdivisions.

Sri Aurobindo rejected a major conception of Indian philosophy that says that the World is a Maya (illusion) and that living as a renunciate was the only way out. He says that it is possible, not only to transcend human nature but also to transform it and to live in the world as a free and evolved human being with a new consciousness and a new nature which could spontaneously perceive truth of things, and proceed in all matters on the basis of inner oneness, love and light.

Evolutionary philosophy

Sri Aurobindo argues that humankind is not the last rung in the evolutionary scale, but can evolve spiritually beyond its current limitations to a state of spiritual and supramental existence. This evolutionary existence he called a "Divine life on Earth", characterized by a spiritualized, supramental, truth-consciousness-oriented humanity.

Process of creation and evolution

He speaks of two central movements in the process of creation: an involution of consciousness from an original omnipresent Reality, manifesting a universe of forms, including matter; and an evolution of those material forms in creation upward toward life, mind, and spirit, reconnecting to their spiritual source. It is also a process of evolution.

Involution

The process by which the Energy of creation emerged from a timeless, spaceless, ineffable, immutable Reality, Sri Aurobindo refers to as the Involution. In that process the Reality extended itself to Being/Existence (Sat), Consciousness, that generated a Force - (Chit); and Bliss (Ananda)-- self enjoyment in existing and being conscious. Through the action of a fourth dimension, Supermind (i.e. Truth Consciousness), the Force (Chit) of Sat-Chit-Ananda was divided into Knowledge and Will, eventually formulating as an invisible Energy that would become the source of creation. Through its own willful self-absorption of consciousness, the universe would begin as Inconscient material existence from out of that Energy.

Evolution

The process of existence emerging out of the Inconscient is referred as evolution. Initially, it emerges gradually in the stages of matter, life, and mind. First matter evolves from simple to complex forms, then life emerges in matter and evolves from simple to complex forms, finally mind emerges in life and evolves from rudimentary to higher forms of thought and reason. As each new principle emerges, the previous stages remain but are integrated into the higher principle. Humanity represents the stage of development of mind in complex material forms of life.

The higher development of mind in the mass of humanity is not yet a secure possession. Reason and intellect still do not dominate the life of most human beings; rather, mind tends to be turned to the purposes of the life principle, which is focused on self-preservation, self-assertion, and satisfaction of personal need and desire. But evolution does not cease with the establishment of reason and intellect; beyond mind are higher levels of a spiritual and supramental consciousness which in the nature of things must also emerge. This higher evolution is described as a dual movement; inward, away from the surface consciousness and into the depths, culminating in the realization of the Psychic Being (the personal evolving soul); and then upward to higher levels of spiritual mind Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, and Overmind), culminating in the final stage of supramentalisation. Whereas these higher levels of consciousness have been attained in particular individuals, they must eventually emerge more universally as general stages in the evolution. When they do emerge, there will come the embodiment of a new species on earth that will be once again united in consciousness with Sachchidananda.

Brahman

A central tenet of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is that the Truth of existence is an omnipresent Reality that both transcends the manifested universe and is inherent in it. This Reality, referred to as Brahman, is an Absolute: it is not limited by any mental conception or duality, whether personal or impersonal, existent or nonexistent, formless or manifested in form, timeless or extended in time, spaceless or extended in space.

It is simultaneously all of these but is bound by none of them. It is at once the universe, each individual being and thing in the universe, and the Transcendent beyond the universe. In its highest manifested poise, its nature may be described as Sachchidananda—infinite existence, infinite consciousness, and infinite delight or bliss; a triune principle in which the three are united in a single Reality. In other words, it is a fully conscious and blissful infinite existence. The importance of this concept for humanity lies in its implication that Brahman is the deepest and secret Reality of humans, it is their true Self, and it is possible to recover this Reality of their being by removing the veil of ignorance that hides it from them and imprisons them in a false identification with an apparently divided and limited egoistic movement on the surface of the being. This is the metaphysical basis for Sri Aurobindo's yoga, the discipline given to consciously unite humans' life with their essential Reality.

Triple transformation of the individual

Sri Aurobindo's argues that Man is born an ignorant, divided, conflicted being; a product of the original inconscience (i.e. unconsciousness,) inherent in Matter that he evolved out of. As a result, he does not know the nature of Reality, including its source and purpose; his own nature, including the parts and integration of his being; what purpose he serves, and what his individual and spiritual potential is, amongst others. In addition, man experiences life through division and conflict, including his relationship with others, and his divided view of spirit and life.

To overcome these limitations, Man must embark on a process of self-discovery in which he uncovers his Divine nature. To that end, he undertakes a three-step process, which he calls the Triple Transformation.

(1) Psychic Transformation -- The first of the three stages is a movement within, away from the surface of life, to the depths, culminating in the discovery of his psychic being (the evolving soul). From that experience, he sees the oneness and unity of creation, and the harmony of all opposites experienced in life.

(2) Spiritual Transformation -- As a result of making the psychic change, his mind expands and he experiences knowledge not through the hard churning of thought, but through light, intuition, and revelation of knowledge, culminating in supramental perception. Light enters from the heights and begins to transmute various parts of his being.

(3) Supramental transformation -- After making the psychic and spiritual change, he makes the supramental and most radical change. It is basically a complete transformation of the mind, the heart, the emotions, and the physical body.

Evolving soul (psychic being)

Sri Aurobindo laid utmost stress on finding and living in the psychic being (i.e. an evolving soul) within which is the essence of our individual being. If we forge our way into the deepest parts of our being, we will come upon a personal evolving soul. From this psychic being we can overcome the limits of consciousness of the individual human. From there we perceive our true nature and essence; we become more aware of our surroundings; we become one with others and life; we experience an inner Guide that influences us to move in the right direction and catches our negative propensities as they arise on the surface; we come in touch with our universal nature; we come in touch with the transcendent reality and spiritual Force; we overcome the limits of time, bringing timelessness into time; and evoke the powers of the Infinite into this finite existence, to name several. Also when we plunge within and touch the evolving soul, it becomes easy to move up in consciousness above mind to spiritual mind of illumination, intuition, revelation, and (supramental) truth consciousness. It should also be noted that this psychic entity is itself evolving, as it enters the person's whose experience it believes it can benefit from, extracts the essence of that person's experience, and then moves on to the next birth until it is fulfilled in its journey through space and time. The connection to the evolving soul is thus the key to the evolution from this the human side, as from there we overcome the inherent Ignorance, division, dualities, and suffering of Man, enabling him to fulfill his human aspiration of God, freedom, joy, and immortality. (From the spiritual side, it is the descending Supramental Force that enables the progress of life to its ultimate capacity. The two together, the connection to the psychic being and the surrender to the descending (supramental) Force are the keys to the evolution and transformation of the individual, humanity, and life in the universe.)

Supramental existence

Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future includes the appearance of what may be called a new species, the supramental being, a divine being which would be as different and superior to present humanity as humanity is to the animal. It would have a consciousness different in kind than the mind of the human, a different status and quality and functioning. Even the physical form of this being would be different, more luminous and flexible and adaptable, entirely conscious and harmonious. Between this supramental being and humanity, there would be transitional beings, who would be human in birth and form, but whose consciousness would approach that of the supramental being. These transitional beings would appear prior to that of the full supramental being, and would constitute an intermediate stage in the Earth's evolution, through which the soul would pass in its growth towards its divine manifestation as the supramental being in the earth nature.

Philosophy of social evolution

Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision extended beyond the perfection and transformation of the individual; it included within its scope the evolution and transformation of human soripudica society. In both the individual and in society, the soul and spirit is at first hidden and occult. This, he argues, influences the direction and course of development from behind, but allowing nature to follow its gradual, zigzagging, and conflict-ridden course. Afterwards, as mind develops and becomes more dominant over obscure impulses, the ego-centered drives of vital nature. This results in a more objective, enlightened perception and approach towards human existence and the potential developments that become possible. At the highest stage of mental development he argues that a greater possibility and principle becomes apparent, which is spiritual and supramental in nature. At this point a true solution to humanity's problems becomes visible in the context of a radical transformation of human life, into a form of divine existence.

Integral Yoga

In The Synthesis of Yoga, and in his voluminous correspondence with his disciples collected under the title Letters on Yoga, Sri Aurobindo laid out the psychological principles and practices of the Integral Yoga or Poorna Yoga. The aim of Integral yoga is to enable the individual who undertakes it the attainment of a conscious identity with the Divine, the true Self, and to transform the mind, life, and body so they would become fit instruments for a divine life on earth.

Analysis of Indian culture

In Renaissance in India (earlier called The Foundations of Indian Culture), Sri Aurobindo examines the nature of Indian civilization and culture. He looked at its central motivating tendencies and how these are expressed in its religion, spirituality, art, literature, and politics. The first section of the book provides a general defense of Indian culture from disparaging criticism due to the misunderstanding of a foreign perspective, and its possible destruction due to the aggressive expansion and infiltration of Western culture. This section is interesting in the light it sheds on the nature of both Eastern and Western civilizations, how they have developed over the centuries, how they have influenced each other throughout the ages, and the nature and significance of these exchanges in the recent period. The principle tenet of the exposition is that India has been and is one of the greatest civilizations of the world, one that stands apart from all others in its central emphasis, or rather its whole foundation, based on spirituality, and that on its survival depends the future of the human race—whether it shall be a spiritual outflowering of the divine in man, or a rational, economically driven, and mechanized association of peoples.

Interpretation of the Vedas

One of the most significant contributions of Sri Aurobindo was his setting forth an esoteric meaning of the Vedas. The Vedas were considered by some to be composed by a barbaric culture worshiping violent Gods. Sri Aurobindo felt that this was due to non-grasping of vedic symbolism, both by Occidental and Oriental scholars.

Sri Aurobindo believed there was a hidden spiritual meaning in the Vedas. He viewed the Rig Veda as a spiritual text written in a symbolic language in which the outer meaning was concerned with ritualistic sacrifices to the gods, and the inner meaning, which was revealed only to initiates, was concerned with an inner spiritual knowledge and practice, the aim of which was to unite in consciousness with the Divine.

In this conception, Indra is the God of Mind lording over the Indriyas, that is, the senses (sight, touch, hearing, taste etc.). Vayu represents air, but in its esoteric sense means Prana, or the life force. So when the Rig Veda says "Call Indra and Vayu to drink Soma Rasa" the inner meaning is to use mind through the senses and life force to receive divine bliss (Soma means wine of Gods, but in several texts also means divine bliss, as in Right-handed Tantra). Agni, the God of the sacrificial fire in the outer sense, is the flame of the spiritual will to overcome the obstacles to unite with the Divine. So the sacrifice of the Vedas could mean sacrificing ones ego to the internal Agni, the spiritual fire.

Sri Aurobindo's theory of the inner spiritual significance of the Vedas originally appeared serially in the journal Arya between 1914 and 1920, but was later published in book form as "The Secret of the Veda." Another book, "Hymns to the Mystic Fire", is Sri Aurobindo's translation of the spiritual sense of many of the verses of the Rig Veda.

Poetry

Sri Aurobindo not only expressed his spiritual thought and vision in intricate metaphysical reasoning and in phenomenological terms, but also in poetry. He started writing poetry as a young student, and continued until late in his life. The theme of his poetry changed with the projects that he undertook. It ranged from revolutionary homages to mystic philosophy. Sri Aurobindo wrote in classical style.

Savitri

is Sri Aurobindo's epic poem in 12 books, 24,000 lines about an individual who overcomes the ignorance, suffering, and death in the world through Her spiritual quest, setting the stage for the emergence of a new, Divine life on earth. It is loosely based on the ancient Indian tale of 'Savitri and Satyavan' from the Mahabharata.

"Savitri" is the longest poem of English iiterature written outside the English-speaking countries of Europe and America.

The Mother said of Savitri:

The Future Poetry

In Sri Aurobindo's theory of poetry, written under the title The Future Poetry, he writes about the significance that art and culture have for the spiritual evolution of mankind. He believed that a new, deep, and intuitive poetry could be a powerful aid to the change of consciousness and the life required to achieve the spiritual destiny of mankind which he envisioned. Unlike philosophy or psychology, poetry could make the reality of the Spirit living to the imagination and reveal its beauty and delight and captivate the deeper soul of humanity to its acceptance. It is perhaps in Sri Aurobindo's own poetry, particularly in his epic poem Savitri, that we find the fullest and most powerful statement of his spiritual thought and vision.

Followers of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother

The following authors/ organizations trace their intellectual heritage back to, or have in some measure been influenced by, The Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

:*Sisir Kumar Maitra (1887-1963) was an academic philosopher who wrote widely on Sri Aurobindo and Western philosophy. He wrote the essay 'Sri Aurobindo and Spengler: Comparison between the Integral and the Pluralistic Philosophy of History' in the 1958 symposium compendium, 'The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo.'

:*Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007) was an Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. in 1964. An author, composer, artist and athlete, he was perhaps best known for holding public events on the theme of inner peace and world harmony (such as concerts, meditations, and races). In 1944, he joined his brothers and sisters at Sri Aurobindo's ashram. He has written many books about Sri Aurobindo.

:*Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889 - 1983) was one of Sri Aurobindo's senior disciples, and wrote extensively on philosophy, mysticism, and spiritual evolution in the light of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother's teachings.

:*Indra Sen (1903-1994) was another disciple of Sri Aurobindo who, although little-known in the West, was the first to articulate integral psychology and integral philosophy, in the 1940s and 1950s. A compilation of his papers came out under the title, Integral Psychology in 1986.

:*Ram Shankar Misra was a scholar of Indian religious and philosophical thought and author of The Integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo (publ. 1957), a philosophical commentary on Sri Aurobindo's work.

:*Sri Anirvan (1896-1978) translated "The Life Divine" in Bengali and "Savitri" into Bengali in "Divya Jeevan Prasanga", published by Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir,1948-51.

:*Satprem (1923 - 2007) was a French author and an important disciple of The Mother who published Mother's Agenda (ed.1982), Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness (2000), On the Way to Supermanhood (2002) and more.

:*Pavitra (1894 - 1969) was one of the very early disciples of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Born as Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire in Paris. Pavitra left some very interesting memoirs of his conversations with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in 1925 and 1926, which were published as Conversations avec Pavitra.

Organisations and institutes

:* Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research, located in Pondicherry, India, provides online advanced degree programmes (e.g., MA, M.Phil., and Ph.D.) in Sri Aurobindo Studies. It works in collaboration with Indira Gandhi National Open University which grants the degrees. It also publishes books related to the thought and vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, holds conferences, and sells CDs of talks by Ananda Reddy, its Director, on Sri Aurobindo's various major works.

:* World Union - A non-profit, non-political organisation founded on 26 November 1958 in Pondicherry, fired by the Third Dream of Sri Aurobindo; also publishes a quarterly journal with the same title. A.B. Patel was the driving force and for many years, M.P. Pandit was the leading light.

:* The Integral Life Foundation P.O.Box 239 Waterford CT. 06385 USA has published several books by Amal Kiran.

Journals

:* Mother India is the Sri Aurobindo Ashram's originally fortnightly, now monthly, cultural review. It was started in 1949, the founding editor being K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran), who continues as editor for over fifty years.

:* Collaboration is a journal dedicated to the spiritual and evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Content includes articles, essays, poetry, and art. Topics range across the theory and practice of Integral Yoga, Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and metaphysics, developments in the international township of Auroville, activities of various centers and announcements and reports about various conferences related to the Integral Yoga.

Influence

Sri Aurobindo's influence has been wide-ranging. In India, S. K. Maitra, Anilbaran Roy and D. P. Chattopadhyaya commented on Sri Aurobindo's work. Writers on esotericism and traditional wisdom, such as Mircea Eliade, Paul Brunton, and Rene Guenon, all saw him as an authentic representative of the Indian spiritual tradition.

Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg were among those who were inspired by Sri Aurobindo, who worked on the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Soon after, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which later emerged the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Karlheinz Stockhausen became heavily inspired by the writings of Satprem about Sri Aurobindo during a week in May 1968, a time of which the composer was undergoing a personal crisis and had found Aurobindos philosophies were relevant to his feelings at the time. After this experience, Stockhausen's music took a completely different turn, focusing on mysticism, that was to continue right up until the end of his career.

Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy – and indirectly, the human potential movement, through Murphy's writings. The American philosopher Ken Wilber has been strongly influenced by Sri Aurobindo's thought, and has integrated some of its key ideas with other spiritual traditions and modern intellectual trends Wilber's interpretation has been criticised by Rod Hemsell and others. New Age writer Andrew Harvey also looks to Sri Aurobindo as a major inspiration. Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson is also heavily influenced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the spiritual community that grew up around him and was organized and directed by the Mother, continues to operate with slightly more than 2000 members and a similar number of nonmembers who live nearby and are associated with the Ashram's activities. The experimental international city of Auroville, founded by the Mother and based on Sri Aurobindo's ideals, is located about 10 km from the Ashram; it has approximately 2000 members from around the world, and an international base of support groups called Auroville International.

Based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and his Divine Mother, the school based in Bangalore called Sri Aurobindo Memorial School was set up. The day over there begins with prayer, meditation and yoga. The children are also served Ladoo on their birthday and poems of Sri Aurobindo are recited in class everyday.

Quotations

Partial bibliography

Bases of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-77-9

Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-78-7

Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, (compiled by M.P. Pandit), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-74-4

Essays on the Gita, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-18-7

The Future Evolution of Man, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-940985-55-1

The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-44-6

Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-22-5

The Ideal of Human Unity, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-43-8

The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-76-0

The Life Divine, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-61-2

The Mind of Light, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-940985-70-5

The Mother, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-79-5

Rebirth and Karma, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-63-9

Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-80-9

Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-19-5

Sri Aurobindo Primary Works Set 12 vol. US Edition, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-93-0

Sri Aurobindo Selected Writings Software CD ROM, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-88-8

The Synthesis of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-65-5

The Upanishads, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-23-3

Vedic Symbolism, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-30-2

The Essential Aurobindo - Writings of Sri Aurobindo ISBN 978-0-9701097-2-9

The Powers Within, Lotus Press. ISBN 978-0-941524-96-4

Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination by Aurobindo, Lotus Press. ISBN 81-7058-014-5

Hour of God by Sri Aurobindo, Lotus Press. ISBN 81-7058-217-2

See also

Arya (journal)

Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo

Integral movement

Integral psychology

Integral yoga

Sri Aurobindo Memorial School

References

Further reading

Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar', Sri Aurobindo: Meri Drishti Mein, Lokbharti Prakashan, New Delhi, 2008.

Heehs, Peter, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo p. 381, Columbia University Press, 2008

Kumari, Shyam, How they came to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother (4 volumes), Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. Stories and experiences of Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's disciples. ____________ Vignettes of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother (3 volumes), Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. Hundreds of brief stories of the Masters' interactions with their disciples in each volume. ____________ Musings on the Mother's Prayers and Meditations (3 volumes), Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. The author's reflections on each of the Mother's published "Prayers and Meditations."

Nahar, Sujata (Ed.) India's rebirth - A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writings, talks and speeches, 3rd edition, 2000, Hermanville, France: Institut de Recherches Évolutives. (http://www.voi.org/books).

Satprem, Sri Aurobindo, or the Adventure of Consciousness 1968, Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. Exposition of the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the techniques of Integral Yoga.

van Vrekhem, Georges: Beyond Man - The Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, HarperCollins Publishers India, New Delhi 1999, ISBN 81-7223-327-2.

_________ Hitler and his God - The Background to the Hitler phenomenon, Rupa & Co, New Delhi 2006.

_________The Mother - The Story of Her Life, HarperCollins Publishers India, New Delhi 2000, ISBN 81-7223-416-3

_________ Overman  –  The intermediary between the human and the supramental being, Rupa & Co, New Delhi 2001, ISBN 81-7167-594-8.

_________ Patterns of the Present  –  From The perspective of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Rupa & Co, New Delhi 2001, ISBN 81-7167-768-1.

Prithwindra Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo, "Biographies", Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 2000

Richard Kitaeff, "Sri Aurobindo", in Nouvelles Clés, n°62, pp. 58–61.

External links

Moscow Sri Aurobindo Center of Integral Yoga

The Integral Yoga community in Russia

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Sri Aurobindo Society

Symbolism in the Poetry of Sri Aurobindo-By Syamala Kallury

New Insights into the Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother site.

The english Version of the writings as PDF.

Sri Aurobindo Information.

Biography of Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo, his work in the occult.

Speech given by Dr. Shivajirao Bhosale on Yogi Arvind (Sri Aurobindo) in Marathi.

Category:1872 births Category:1950 deaths Category:20th-century philosophers Category:Advaitin philosophers Category:Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Category:Anushilan Samiti Category:Bengali people Category:Contemporary Indian philosophers Category:English-language poets from India Category:English spiritual writers Category:Hindu gurus Category:Hindu monks Category:Hindu philosophers Category:Indian essayists Category:Indian non-fiction writers Category:Indian philosophers Category:Indian poets Category:Indian religious leaders Category:Indian revolutionaries Category:Indian spiritual writers Category:Indian vegetarians Category:Integral thought Category:Modern Hindu writers Category:Old Paulines Category:People from Kolkata Category:People from Vadodara Category:Spiritual evolution Category:Yogis Category:Bengali spiritual writers Category:Indian translators

Name	Swami Sivananda
Birth-date	September 08, 1887
Birth-place	Pattamadai, Tamil Nadu, India
Birth-name	Kuppuswami
Death-date	July 14, 1963
Death-place	Rishikesh
Guru	Swami Vishwananda Saraswati
Philosophy	Yoga of Synthesis
Quote	Be Good, Do Good.

Swami Sivananda Saraswati (September 8, 1887—July 14, 1963) was a Hindu spiritual teacher and a well known proponent of Yoga and Vedanta. Sivananda was born Kuppuswami in Pattamadai, in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. He studied medicine and served in Malaya as a physician for several years before taking up monasticism. He lived most of the later part of his life near Muni Ki Reti, Rishikesh.

He is the founder of The Divine Life Society (1936), Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy (1948) and author of over 200 books on yoga, vedanta and a variety of other subjects. He established Sivananda Ashram, the location of the headquarters of The Divine Life Society (DLS), on the bank of the Ganges at Shivanandanagar, at a distance of 3 kilometres from Rishikesh.

Sivananda Yoga, the yoga form propagated by him, are now spread in many parts of the world through Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, but these centres are not affiliated with Swami Sivananda's original ashrams which are run by the Divine Life Society.

Early life

Sivananda was born Kuppuswamy in Pattamadai near Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu, India as the third son to his parents on 8 September 1887. As a child he was very active and promising in academics and gymnastics. He attended medical school in Tanjore, where he excelled. He ran a medical journal called Ambrosia during this period. Upon graduation he practiced medicine and worked as a doctor in Malaya for ten years, with a reputation for waiving his fee for poor patients needing treatment. He sang bhajans and danced in ecstasy with Maharshi's bhaktas. He also went on pilgrimages to various places in northern India including Kedarnath and Badrinath. He visited Kailash-Manasarovar in 1931.

Foundations

, Rishikesh]] During Sivananda's stay in Rishikesh and his travels around India, many came to him for guidance in the spiritual path. He permitted some of them to live near him and instructed them. Sivananda asked his students take copies of his short articles and send them for publication. Over time, large numbers of people started coming to him and his circle started growing.

Sivananda founded the Divine Life Society in 1936 on the banks of the Ganges River. The free distribution of spiritual literature drew a steady flow of disciples to the Swami, such as Swami Satyananda Saraswati, founder of Satyananda Yoga.

In 1945, Swami Sivananda created the Sivananda Ayurvedic Pharmacy, and organized the All-world Religions Federation. He established the All-world Sadhus Federation in 1947 and Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy in 1948. He called his yoga the Yoga of Synthesis.

Disciples

temple, Divine Life Society, Muni Ki Reti, Rishikesh]] Swami Sivananda's two foremost disciples were Swami Chidananda and Swami Krishnananda. Swami Chidananda was appointed President of the Divine Life Society by Swami Sivananda in 1963 and served in this capacity until his death in 2008. Swami Krishnananda was appointed General Secretary of the Divine Life Society by Swami Sivananda in 1958 and served in this capacity until his death in 2001. Swami Krishnananda is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians and philosophers of the 20th century.

Other prominent disciples were Swami Venkatesananda (South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, Australia), Swami Pranavananda (Malaysia) and Swami Sivananda Radha (Canada). Another prominent disciple was Sri Swami Sahajananda (South Africa), who was directed by Sri Swami Sivananda to establish the Divine Life Society of South Africa.

;Disciples who went on to grow new organisations

Swami Chinmayananda founder of the Chinmaya Mission

Saint Chot (1900-1988), lived 5 years with Swami Sivananda from early 1940s, earlier than other prominent disciples. After WWII he worked in Bangkok as a newspaper editor and part time yoga teacher. He retired from journalism at 75 and spent final years teaching at his ashram in Bangkok where he peacefully died in 1988. Chot founded no "expanded" organization.

Swami Jyotirmayananda, President of the Yoga Research Foundation in Miami, U.S.A.

Swami Lalitananda, Vice President of the Yoga Research Foundation in Miami, U.S.A.

Swami Omkarananda, founder of the Omkarananda Ashram Himalayas

Swami Satchidananda, founder of the Integral Yoga Institutes, U.S.A.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati, founder of Satyananda Yoga movement

Swami Shantananda, founder of Temple of Fine Arts (Malaysia & Singapore)

Swami Sivananda Radha, founder of Yasodhara Ashram in British Columbia, Canada

Swami Vishnu-devananda, founder of the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, HQ Canada

Authorship

A prolific author, Swami Sivananda wrote 296 books on a variety of subjects: metaphysics, Yoga, religion, western philosophy, psychology, eschatology, fine arts, ethics, education, health, sayings, poems, epistles, autobiography, biography, stories, dramas, messages, lectures, dialogues, essays and anthology. Yet his books emphasized the practical application of yoga philosophy over mere theoretical knowledge. He was known to have said "An ounce of practice is better than tons of theory. Practice Yoga, Religion and Philosophy in daily life and attain Self-realization."

Death

Swami Sivananda died on 14 July 1963 in his Kutir on the bank of the Ganges, in Shivanandanagar.

Works

Yoga of Synthesis. Published by Yoga-Vedanta Forest University, 1956.

''Lord Siva and His Worship'. Published by Yoga-Vedanta forest academy, Divine life society, 1962.

Practice of Yoga. Published by U.P., Divine Life Society, 1970.

Autobiography of Swami Sivananda. Published by Divine Life Society, 1980.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: Sanskrit text, English translation, and commentary. Published by Divine Life Society, 1985.

Karma Yoga. Published by Divine Life Society, 1985. ISBN 094902705.

''Lord Shanmukha and His Worship. Published by Divine Life Society, 1996. ISBN 8170521157.

Downloadable Books by Swami Sivananda Divine Life Society

Further reading

Sivananda and the Divine Life Society: A Paradigm of the "secularism," "puritanism" and "cultural Dissimulation" of a Neo-Hindu Religious Society, by Robert John Fornaro. Published by Syracuse University, 1969.

From man to God-man: the inspiring life-story of Swami Sivananda, by N. Ananthanarayanan. Published by Indian Publ. Trading Corp., 1970.

Swami Sivananda and the Divine Life Society: An Illustration of Revitalization Movement, by Satish Chandra Gyan. Published by s.n, 1979.

Life and Works of Swami Sivananda, by Sivananda, Divine Life Society (W.A.). Fremantle Branch. Published by Divine Life Society, Fremantle Branch, 1985. ISBN 0949027049.

Sivananda: Biography of a Modern Sage, by Swami Venkatesananda. Published by Divine Life Society, 1985. ISBN 0949027014. Online

Sree Sivananda Lahari: A Sanskrit Kavya by Vanikavi Manomohan(three parts viz. Pranatikaa, Jiivanikaa, Vachanikaa) with English Translation

Notes

External links

Divine Life Society

Category:1887 births Category:1963 deaths Category:Advaitin philosophers Category:Hindu gurus Category:Modern Hindu writers Category:Yogis Category:Hindu monks Category:Hindu religious figures Category:People from Dehradun Category:Indian spiritual writers Category:Indian autobiographers Category:Indian Hindus Category:Tamil people

Region	20th century mystic
Era	Esotericism
Color	#B0C4DE
Image name	Gurdjieff2.jpg
Name	George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
Birth date	January 14, 1866?
Birth place	Alexandropol, Russian Empire
Death date	October 29, 1949
Death place	Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
School tradition	Fourth Way or the "Gurdjieff Work"
Main interests	Psychology, philosophy, science, ancient knowledge
Influences	Officially unknown; but according to his book: His childhood and adult teachers, his father, Mullah Nassr Eddin.
Influenced	Jeanne de Salzmann, Lord Pentland, P. D. Ouspensky, Olga de Hartmann, Thomas de Hartmann, Jane Heap, John G. Bennett, Alfred Richard Orage, Maurice Nicoll, Colin Wilson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Robert Fripp, Moshé Feldenkrais, P. L. Travers, Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), Peter Brook, René Daumal, Katherine Mansfield, Keith Jarrett, James Moore,
Notable ideas	Fourth Way, Fourth Way Enneagram, Centers, Ray of Creation, Self-remembering}}

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff , (, , , January 14, 1866? – October 29, 1949) was a mystic and spiritual teacher. He called his discipline "The Work" (connoting "work on oneself") according to Gurdjieff's principles and instructions, or (originally) the "Fourth Way". At one point he described his teaching as "esoteric Christianity".

At different times in his life, Gurdjieff formed and closed various schools around the world to teach the work. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and early travels expressed the truth found in ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives and humanity's place in the universe. The title of his third series of writings, Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', expresses the essence of his teachings. His complete series of books is entitled All and Everything.

Biography

Gurdjieff was born to a Greek father and Armenian mother in Alexandropol (now Gyumri, Armenia), then part of the Russian Empire. The Muslims around Georgia call the Georgian people gurdjis, which may account for the root of the name "Gurdjieff".

The exact date of his birth remains unknown (conjectures range from 1866 to 1877). Some authors (such as Moore) argue persuasively for 1866, others (like Patterson) for 1872; a passport gave a birthdate of November 28, 1877, but He stated that he was born at the stroke of midnight at the beginning of New Year's Day (Julian calendar). Gurdjieff grew up in Kars and traveled to many parts of the world (such as Central Asia, Egypt and Rome) before returning to Russia for a few years in 1912. He later said: "Begin in Russia, end in Russia." Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Gurdjieff's work has received renewed attention.

The only account of Gurdjieff's early life before he appeared in Moscow in 1912 appears in his text Meetings with Remarkable Men. This text, however, cannot be read as straightforward autobiography. In the pre-1912 period Gurdjieff went on his apocryphal voyage outlined in Meetings with Remarkable Men where he comes upon a map of "pre-sand Egypt" which leads him to study with an esoteric group, the alleged Sarmoung Brotherhood.

From 1913 to 1949 the chronology appears to be based on material that can be confirmed by primary documents, independent witnesses, cross-references, and reasonable inference. On New Year's Day in 1912, Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow and attracted his first students. In the same year he married the Polish Julia Ostrowska in St Petersburg. In 1914 Gurdjieff advertised his ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, and supervised his pupils' writing of the sketch "Glimpses of Truth". In 1915 Gurdjieff accepted P. D. Ouspensky as a pupil, while in 1916 he accepted the composer Thomas de Hartmann and his wife Olga as students. At this time he had about thirty pupils.

In the midst of revolutionary upheaval in Russia, he left Petrograd in 1917 to return to his family home in Alexandropol. During the Bolshevik Revolution, Gurdjieff set up temporary study communities in Essentuki in the Caucasus, then in Tuapse, Maikop, Sochi and Poti, all on the Black Sea coast of southern Russia, where he worked intensively with many of his Russian pupils.

In March 1918, Ouspensky separated from Gurdjieff. Four months later Gurdjieff's eldest sister and her family reached him in Essentuki as refugees, informing him that Turks had shot his father in Alexandropol on 15 May during the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923). As Essentuki became more and more threatened by civil war, Gurdjieff put out a fabricated newspaper story announcing his forthcoming "scientific expedition" to Mount Induc. Posing as a scientist, Gurdjieff left Essentuki with fourteen companions (excluding Gurdjieff's family and Ouspensky). They traveled by train to Maikop, where hostilities delayed them for three weeks. In spring 1919 Gurdjieff met the artist Alexandre Salzmann and his wife Jeanne and accepted them as pupils. Assisted by Jeanne Salzmann, Gurdjieff gave the first public demonstration of his Sacred Dances (Movements at the Tbilisi Opera House, 22 June).

In the autumn of 1919, Gurdjieff and his closest pupils moved to Tbilisi, formerly known as Tiflis. There Gurdjieff's wife, Julia Ostrowska, Mr and Mrs Stjoernval, Mr and Mrs de Hartmann and Mr and Mrs de Salzmann gathered a lot of the fundamentals of his teaching. Gurdjieff concentrated on his still unstaged ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians; Thomas de Hartmann (who had made his debut years ago before as the Czar of All Russia) worked on the music for the ballet; and Olga Iovonovna Lazovich Milanoff Hinzenberg (who years later wed the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright) practiced the ballet dances. In 1919, Gurdjieff established his first Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He was thought to be greatly influenced by Nikolai Marr, a Georgian archaeologist and historian.

In late May 1920, when political conditions in Georgia changed and the old order was crumbling, his party traveled by foot to Batumi on the Black Sea coast and then to Istanbul. Gurdjieff rented an apartment on Koumbaradji Street in Péra and later at 13 Abdullatif Yemeneci Sokak near the Galata Tower. The apartment is near the tekke (monastery) of the Mevlevi Order of Sufis (founded by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi), where Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Thomas de Hartmann experienced the sema ceremony of The Whirling Dervishes. In Istanbul Gurdjieff also met Captain John G. Bennett, then head of British Military Intelligence in Constantinople. Later, Bennett would become a follower of Gurdjieff and of Ouspensky.

In August 1921 and 1922, Gurdjieff traveled around western Europe, lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work in various cities, such as Berlin and London. He attracted the allegiance of Ouspensky's many prominent pupils (notably the editor A. R. Orage). After he lost a civil action to acquire Hellerau possession in Britain, Gurdjieff established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man south of Paris at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Fontainebleau-Avon near the famous Château de Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff acquired notoriety as "the man who killed Katherine Mansfield" after Katherine Mansfield died there of tuberculosis under his care on 9 January 1923. James Moore convincingly shows however that Katherine Mansfield knew that she would soon die, and that Gurdjieff made her last days happy and fulfilling.

Starting in 1924 Gurdjieff made visits to North America, where he eventually took over the pupils taught previously by A.R. Orage. In 1924, while driving alone from Paris to Fontainebleau, Gurdjieff had a near-fatal car-accident. Nursed by his wife and mother, he made a slow and painful recovery — against medical expectation. Still convalescent, he formally "disbanded" his Institute on 26 August (in fact he dispersed only his less-dedicated pupils), and began writing All and Everything.

In 1925 Gurdjieff's wife contracted cancer; she died in June 1926 in spite of radiotherapy and of Gurdjieff's magnetic treatments. Ouspensky attended her funeral. According to Fritz Peters, Gurdjieff was in New York from November 1925 to the spring of 1926, when he succeeded in raising over $1,000,000.

In 1935 Gurdjieff stopped writing All and Everything. He had completed the first two parts of the trilogy but only started on the Third Series. (It was later published under the title Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'). In Paris, Gurdjieff lived at 6 Rue des Colonels-Rénard, where he continued to teach throughout World War II.

Gurdjieff died on October 29, 1949 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. His funeral took place at the St. Alexandre Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral at 12 Rue Daru, Paris. He is buried in the cemetery at Fontainebleau-Avon.

Ideas

Gurdjieff claimed that people cannot perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic "waking sleep".

"Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies." As a result of this condition, each person perceives things from a completely subjective perspective. Gurdjieff stated that maleficent events such as wars and so on could not possibly take place if people were more awake. He asserted that people in their typical state function as unconscious automatons, but that one can "wake up" and become a different sort of human being altogether.

Self-development teachings

:Main article Fourth Way

Gurdjieff argued that because many of the existing religious and spiritual traditions had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality, they could no longer serve humanity. As a result humanity were failing to realize the truths of ancient teachings and were instead becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to control from outside and increasingly capable of otherwise unthinkable acts of mass psychosis, such as the 1914-18 war. At best, the various surviving sects and schools could only provide a one-sided development which did not result in a fully integrated human being. According to Gurdjieff, only one dimension of the three dimensions of the person - namely, the emotions, or the physical body or the mind - tends to develop in such schools and sects, and generally at the expense of the other faculties or centers as Gurdjieff called them. As a result, these paths fail to produce a proper balanced human being. Those wishing to undertake any of the traditional paths to spiritual knowledge (which Gurdjieff reduced to three - namely the path of the fakir, the path of the monk, and the path of the yogi) were required to renounce life in the world. Gurdjieff developed a Fourth Way which would be amenable to the requirements of modern people living modern lives in Europe and the united States. Instead of developing body, mind, or emotions separately, Gurdjieff's discipline worked on all three to promote comprehensive and balanced inner development.

In parallel with other spiritual traditions, Gurdjieff taught that one must expend considerable effort to effect the transformation that leads to awakening. Gurdjieff referred to the effort that one puts into practice as The Work or Work on oneself. According to Gurdjieff, "...Working on oneself is not so difficult as wishing to work, taking the decision." Though Gurdjieff never put major significance on the term "Fourth Way" and never used the term in his writings, his pupil P.D. Ouspensky from 1924 to 1947 made the term and its use central to his own teaching of Gurdjieff's ideas. After Ouspensky's death, his students published a book titled The Fourth Way based on his lectures.

Gurdjieff's teaching addressed the question of humanity's place in the universe and the importance of developing latent potentialities — regarded as our natural endowment as human beings but rarely brought to fruition. He taught that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies, inner growth and development are real possibilities that require conscious work to achieve.

In his teaching Gurdjieff gave a distinct meaning to various ancient texts such as the Bible and many religious prayers. He claimed that those texts possess a very different meaning than what is commonly attributed to them. "Sleep not"; "Awake, for you know not the hour"; and "The Kingdom of Heaven is Within" are examples of biblical statements which point to a psychological teaching whose essence has been forgotten.

Gurdjieff taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy in various ways and to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness. According to his teaching, this inner development is the beginning of a possible further process of change, the aim of which is to transform people into what Gurdjieff believed they ought to be. Distrusting "morality", which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and superficial, Gurdjieff greatly stressed the importance of conscience. This he regarded as the same in all people, buried in their subconsciousness, thus both sheltered from damage by how people live and inaccessible without "work on oneself".

To provide conditions in which inner attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements", later known as the Gurdjieff movements, which they performed together as a group. He left a body of music, inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann. Gurdjieff used various exercises, such as the "Stop" exercise, to prompt self-observation in his students. He frequently used other shocks unexpectedly to help awaken his pupils from constant day-dreaming.

Methods

Gurdjieff transmitted his ideas through a number of different methods and materials, including meetings, music, movements (sacred dance), writings, lectures, and innovative forms of group work. He was not consistent in his use of these materials through his lifetime; for example, six years in Paris were devoted primarily to writing, while composition of music and movement centered around a few distinct periods. In Russia he was described as keeping his teaching confined to a small circle, while in Paris and North America he gave numerous public demonstrations.

Gurdjieff felt that the traditional methods of self-knowledge—those of the fakir, monk, and yogi (acquired, respectively, through pain, devotion, and study) -- were inadequate on their own. These three can be understood as a metaphor for work on the body, emotions and the intellect separately.

"Gurdjieff's teachings were transmitted through special conditions and through special forms leading to consciousness: Group Work, physical labor, crafts, ideas exchanges, arts, music, movement, dance, adventures in nature..., enabled the unrealized individual to transcend the mechanical, acted-upon self and ascend from mere personality to self-actualizing essence."

Music

The Gurdjieff music divides into three distinct periods. The first period is the early music, including music from the ballet Struggle of the Magicians and music for early Movements, dating to the years around 1918.

The second period music, for which Gurdjieff arguably became best known, written in collaboration with Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, is described as the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music. Dating to the mid 1920s, it offers a rich repertory with roots in Caucasian and Central Asian folk and religious music, Russian Orthodox liturgical music, and other sources. This music was often first heard in the salon at the Prieure, where much was composed. Since the publication of four volumes of this piano repertory by Schott, recently completed, there has been a wealth of new recordings, including orchestral versions of music prepared by Gurdjieff and de Hartmann for the Movements demonstrations of 1923-24.

The last musical period is the improvised harmonium music which often followed the dinners Gurdjieff held in his Paris apartment during the Occupation and immediate post-war years, to his death in 1949. A virtually encyclopedic recording of surviving tapes of Gurdjieff's improvising on the harmonium was recently published. In all, Gurdjieff in collaboration with de Hartmann composed some 200 pieces.

Movements

Movements, or sacred dances, constitute an integral part of the Gurdjieff Work. Gurdjieff sometimes referred to himself as a "teacher of dancing," and gained initial public notice for his attempts to put on a ballet in Moscow called Struggle of the Magicians.

Films of Movements demonstrations are occasionally shown for private viewing by the Gurdjieff Foundations, and one is shown in a scene in the Peter Brook movie Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Group work

Gurdjieff taught that group efforts both enhance and surpass individual efforts preparing them to practice a new psychology of evolution. To accomplish this, he needed to constantly innovate and create new alarm clocks to awaken his sleeping students, as Jesus did 1900 years before. Students regularly met with group leaders; both separately and in group meetings, and came together for "work periods" where intensive conscious labor, connected with the forms mentioned above. Work in the kitchen was a special task and sometimes elaborate meals were prepared. This food was the lowest of the three being foods, food, air and impressions. Air and impressions being even more important, special exercises were given for them.

According to Gurdjieff, the work of Schools of the Fourth Way never remains the same for long. In some cases, this has led to a break between student and teacher as is the case of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. The outward appearance of the School and the group work can change according to the circumstances. He believed that the inner individual expression, such as the practice of self-remembering with self-observation and the non-expression of negative emotions, always remains the same and could never change, for that is the guarantee of ultimate self-development.

In addition, one should never violate the one basic rule in group-work which guarantees the harmonious development of the Work: the practice of external considering. Whenever group-work fails, the failure may be traced to a lack of external considering among its members.

A follower of Gurdjieff, former American Fabrics magazine publisher William C. Segal, tells of periods of hard labor around the clock which in the Gurdjieff System are known as "super-efforts". According to Gurdjieff, only super-efforts count in the Work. In 1948 and 1949, Segal was sporadically in contact with Gurdjieff, who had been the teacher of avant-garde lesbian Jane Heap. In 1951, at 26, Peter Brook became a pupil of Heap in London and Segal published the magazine Gentry. As Segal would write in the poem "Silence Clarity", "... It is through the body that sits here/ that I go to my true nature." A voice at the borders of silence would conclude, "... It is through the mind that stands still/ that I experience my true nature."

Writings

hieroglyph of a universal language]]

Gurdjieff wrote and approved for publication three volumes of his written work under the title All and Everything. The first volume, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, is a lengthy allegorical work that recounts the explanations of Beelzebub to his grandson concerning the beings of the planet Earth. Gurdjieff deliberately tried to increase the effort needed to read and understand the book. The second volume, Meetings with Remarkable Men, was written in an accessible manner, and purports to be an autobiography of his early years, but also contains many allegorical statements. His final volume, left intentionally unfinished, shows the Master's hand. Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' contains a fragment of an autobiographical description of later years, as well as transcripts of some lectures.

As Gurdjieff explained to Ouspensky ... "for exact understanding exact language is necessary." In his first series of writings, Gurdjieff explains how difficult it is to choose an ordinary language to convey his thoughts exactly. He continues..."the Russian language is like the English...both these languages are like the dish which is called in Moscow 'Solianka', and into which everything goes except you and me..." In spite of the difficulties, he goes on to develop a special vocabulary of a new language, all of it his own. He uses these new words particularly in the first series of his writings. However, in The Herald of Coming Good, he uses one particular word for the first time: "Tzvarnoharno", allegedly coined by King Solomon.

Reception and influence

Opinions on Gurdjieff's writings and activities are divided. Sympathizers regard him as a charismatic master who brought new knowledge into Western culture, a psychology and cosmology that enable insights beyond those provided by established science. Gurdjieff is said to have had a strong influence on many modern mystics, artists, writers, and thinkers, including Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), Frank Lloyd Wright, Keith Jarrett, George Russell (composer), Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Fripp, Jacob Needleman, John Shirley, Carlos Castaneda, Dennis Lewis, Peter Brook, Kate Bush, P. L. Travers, Robert S de Ropp, Walter Inglis Anderson, Jean Toomer, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Louis Pauwels, James Moore and Abdullah Isa Neil Dougan. Gurdjieff's notable personal students include Jeanne de Salzmann, Willem Nyland, Lord Pentland (Henry John Sinclair), P. D. Ouspensky, Olga de Hartmann, Thomas de Hartmann, Jane Heap, John G. Bennett, Alfred Richard Orage, Maurice Nicoll, Lanza del Vasto, George and Helen Adie and Katherine Mansfield. The Italian composer and singer Franco Battiato was sometime inspired by Gurdjieff's work, for example in his song "Centro di gravità permanente" - one of most popular modern Italian pop songs. Aleister Crowley visited his Institute at least once and privately praised Gurdjieff's work, though with some reservations. During WWI, Algernon Blackwood took up spying while reporting to John Buchan, author of The Thirty Nine Steps. After the war, during the Roaring Twenties, Blackwood studied with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

Gurdjieff gave new life and practical form to ancient teachings of both East and West. For example, the Socratic and Platonic emphasis on "the examined life" recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the practice of self-observation. His teachings about self-discipline and restraint reflect Stoic teachings. The Hindu and Buddhist notion of attachment recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the concept of identification. Similarly, his cosmology can be "read" against ancient and esoteric sources, respectively Neoplatonic and in such sources as Robert Fludd's treatment of macrocosmic musical structures.

An aspect of Gurdjieff's teachings which has come into prominence in recent decades is the enneagram geometric figure. For many students of the Gurdjieff tradition, the enneagram remains a "koan", challenging and never fully explicated. Lord Pentland only allowed very limited use of the figure. There have been many attempts to trace the origins of the enneagram; some similarities to other figures have been found, but it seems that Gurdjieff was the first person to make the enneagram figure publicly known and that only he knew its true source. Others have used the enneagram figure in connection with personality analysis, principally in the Enneagram of Personality as developed by Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, Helen Palmer and others. Most aspects of this application are not directly connected to Gurdjieff's teaching or to his explanations of the enneagram.

The science-fiction and horror novelist John Shirley has written an introductory work on Gurdjieff for Penguin/Tarcher, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas.

Groups

Gurdjieff inspired the formation of many groups after his death, all of which still function today and follow his ideas. The Gurdjieff Foundation, the largest organization directly influenced by the ideas of Gurdjieff, was organized by Jeanne de Salzmann during the early 1950s, and led by her in cooperation with other pupils of his. The main four branches of the Foundation are The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, The Gurdjieff Society based in London, the Institut Gurdjieff (Paris), and the network of foundations in South America founded by the late Natalie de Etievan, daughter of Jeanne de Salzmann. Connected to these four foundations are numerous smaller groups around the world, collected under the umbrella of the International Association of Gurdjieff Foundations. The president of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York was Lord Pentland, who retained this position until his death. It was then led by Paul Reynard, a painter and Master of Gurdjieff Movements. Frank R. Sinclair, author of Without Benefit of Clergy, presides. A group in India is led by Ravi Ravindra, who was a student under Mme De Salzmann and Dr. Welch.

Various pupils of Gurdjieff and his direct students have formed other groups. Willem Nyland, one of Gurdjieff's closest students and an original founder and trustee of The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, left to form his own groups in the early 1960s. Jane Heap was sent to London by Gurdjieff, where she led groups until her death in 1964. Louise Goepfert March, who became a pupil of Gurdjieff's in 1929, started her own groups in 1957 and founded the Rochester Folk Art Guild in the Finger Lakes region of New York State; her efforts were closely linked to the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. Independent groups were formed and led by John G. Bennett and Mrs. Staveley. In 2005 Alan Francis, after co-founding the Gurdjieff Foundation in Oregon in 1999, formed the as yet unaffilated Russian Center for Gurdjieff Studies in Moscow.

Gurdjieff student Lord Pentland connects the Gurdjieff group-work with the later rise of encounter groups. Groups also often meet to prepare for demonstrations or performances to which the public is invited.

Criticism

Louis Pauwels among others criticizes Gurdjieff for his insistence on considering people as "asleep" in a state closely resembling "hypnotic sleep". Gurdjieff said, even specifically at times, that a pious, good, and moral man was no more "spiritually developed" than any other person; they are all equally "asleep".

Henry Miller approved of Gurdjieff;s not considering himself holy but, after writing a brief introduction to Fritz Peters' book Boyhood with Gurdjieff, Miller wrote that man is not meant to lead a "harmonious life", as Gurdjieff claimed in naming his institute.

Critics note that Gurdjieff gives no value to most of the elements that comprise the life of an average man. According to Gurdjieff, everything an "average man" possesses, accomplishes, does, and feels is completely accidental and without any initiative. A common everyday ordinary man is born a machine and dies a machine without any chance of being anything else. This belief seems to run counter to the Judeo-Christian tradition that man is a living soul. Gurdjieff believed that the possession of a soul (a state of psychological unity which he equated with being "awake") was a "luxury" that a disciple could attain only by the most painstaking work of over a long period of time. The majority - in whom the true meaning of the gospel failed to take root - went the "broad way" that "led to destruction". Gurdjieff attributed the human tendency to spiritual corruption and ignorance to astronomical (astrological) influences (particularly the influence of the moon). Christian theology accounts for the proclivity of the majority to fail to achieve salvation as due to the power of original sin. (No, not accurate - original sin is related to a different concept.)

In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (see bibliography), Gurdjieff expresses his reverence for the founders of the mainstream religions of East and West and his contempt (by and large) for what successive generations of believers have made of those religious teachings. His discussions of "orthodoxhydooraki" and "heterodoxhydooraki" — orthodox fools and heterodox fools, from the Russian word durak (fool) — position him as a critic of religious distortion and, in turn, as a target for criticism from some within those traditions. Gurdjieff has been interpreted by some, Ouspensky among others, to have had a total disregard for the value of mainstream religion, philanthropic work and the value of doing right or wrong in general.

Gurdjieff's former students who have criticized him argue, despite his seeming total lack of pretension to any kind of "guru holiness", that the many anecdotes of his sometimes unconventional behavior display the unsavory and impure character of a man who was a cynical manipulator of his followers. Gurdjieff's own pupils wrestled to understand him. For example, in a written exchange between Luc Dietrich and Henri Tracol dating to 1943: "L.D.: How do you know that Gurdjieff wishes you well? H.T.: I feel sometimes how little I interest him--and how strongly he takes an interest in me. By that I measure the strength of an intentional feeling."

Louis Pauwels wrote Monsieur Gurdjieff (first edition published in Paris, France in 1954 by Editions du Seuil). In an interview, Pauwels said of the Gurdjieff work: "... After two years of exercises which both enlightened and burned me, I found myself in a hospital bed with a thrombosed central vein in my left eye and weighing ninety-nine pounds...Horrible anguish and abysses opened up for me. But it was my fault."

Pauwels claims Karl Haushofer, the father of geopolitics whose protegee was Deputy Reich Führer Rudolf Hess, as one of the real "seekers after truth" described by Gurdjieff. According to Rom Landau, a journalist in the 1930s, as reported to him by Achmed Abdullah: at the beginning of the 20th century, Gurdjieff was a Russian secret agent in Tibet who went by the name of "Hambro Akuan Dorzhieff" (i.e. Agvan Dorjiev), chief tutor to the Dalai Lama. However, reports have it that Dorzhieff went to live in the Buddhist temple erected in St. Petersburg and after the revolution, he was imprisoned by Stalin. James Webb conjectures that Gurdjieff may have been Dorzhieff's assistant Ushe Narzunoff (i.e. Ovshe Norzunov) but this is untenable.

Colin Wilson writes about "...Gurdjieff's reputation for seducing his female students. (In Providence, Rhode Island, in 1960, a man was pointed out to me as one of Gurdjieff's , the Gurdjieff system is incomplete, drawing from Dervish sources inimical to Kundalini. Some Sufi orders, such as the Naqshbandi, draw from and are amenable to Kundalini.

Bibliography

Gurdjieff's views have arguably become best known through the published works of his pupils. His one-time student P. D. Ouspensky wrote In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, which some, Rodney Collins among others, regard as a crucial introduction to the teaching. Others refer to Gurdjieff's own books (detailed below) as the primary texts.

Published accounts of time spent with Gurdjieff have appeared written by A. R. Orage, Charles Stanley Nott, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Fritz Peters, René Daumal, John G. Bennett, Maurice Nicoll, Margaret Anderson and Louis Pauwels, among others. Many others found themselves drawn to his "ideas table": Frank Lloyd Wright, Kathryn Hulme, P. L. Travers, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Toomer and Ethel Merston.

Three books by Gurdjieff were published in the English language in the United States after his death: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson published in 1950 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., Meetings with Remarkable Men, published in 1963 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., and 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". A book of his early talks was also collected by his student and personal secretary, Olga de Hartmann, and published in 1973 as Views from the Real World: Early Talks in Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Chicago, as recollected by his pupils.

The feature film Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), based on Gurdjieff's book by the same name, depicts rare performances of the sacred dances taught to serious students of his work, known simply as the movements. Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook wrote the film, Brook directed, and Dragan Maksimovic and Terence Stamp star, as does South African playwright and actor, Athol Fugard.

Books

The Herald of Coming Good by G. I. Gurdjieff (1933, 1971, 1988)

All and Everything trilogy:

* Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson by G. I. Gurdjieff (1950)

* Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff (1963)

* Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' by G. I. Gurdjieff (1974)

Views from the Real World gathered talks of G. I. Gurdjieff by his pupil Olga de Hartmann(1973)

Books about Gurdjieff and The Fourth Way

"The Teachers Of Gurdjieff", by Rafael Lefort, 1966, Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-87728-213-7

The Unknowable Gurdjieff, Margaret Anderson, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962, ISBN 0-7100-7656-8

Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma by J. G. Bennett, 1969

Gurdjieff: Making a New World by J. G. Bennett 1973, ISBN 0-06-090474-7

Idiots in Paris by J. G. Bennett and E. Bennett, 1980

Becoming Conscious with G.I. Gurdjieff, Solanges Claustres, Eureka Editions, 2005

Mount Analogue by René Daumal 1st edition in French, 1952; English, 1974

The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, 2006, (includes especially extensive documentation on "the strong influence the occultist Georgi Gurdjieff had on Wright and especially his wife Oglivanna.")

Gurdjieff Unveiled by Seymour Ginsburg, 2005

Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff by Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, 1964, Revised 1983 and 1992

IT'S UP TO OURSELVES, A Mother, A Daughter and Gurdjieff, a Shared Memoir and Family Photoalbum by Jessmin and Dushka Howarth, Gurdjieff Heritage Society, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9791926-0-9

Undiscovered Country by Kathryn Hulme, 1966

The Oragean Version by C. Daly King, 1951

The Gurdjieff Years 1929-1949: Recollections of Louise March by Annabeth McCorkle

Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky by Maurice Nicoll, 1952, 1955, 1972, 1980, (6 volumes)

Teachings of Gurdjieff - The Journey of a Pupil by C. S. Nott, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1961

On Love by A. R. Orage, 1974

Psychological Exercises by A. R. Orage 1976

In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, 1949 (numerous editions)

The Fourth Way by P. D. Ouspensky, 1957

The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution by P. D. Ouspensky, 1978

Eating The "I": An Account of The Fourth Way: The Way of Transformation in Ordinary Life, William Patrick Patterson, 1992

Ladies of the Rope: Gurdjieff's Special Left Bank Women's Group, William Patrick Patterson 1999

Struggle of the Magicians: Exploring the Teacher-Student Relationship, William Patrick Patterson 1996

Taking with the Left Hand: Enneagram Craze, The Fellowship of Friends, and the Mouravieff Phenomenon, William Patrick Patterson, 1998

Voices in the Dark: Esoteric, Occult & Secular Voices in Nazi-Occupied Paris 1940-44, William Patrick Patterson, 2001

The Life & Teachings of Carlos Castaneda, William Patrick Patterson, 2008

Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time, William Patrick Patterson, 2009

Boyhood with Gurdjieff by Fritz Peters, 1964

Gurdjieff Remembered by Fritz Peters, 1965

The Gurdjieff Work by Kathleen Speeth ISBN 0-87477-492-6

Gurdjieff: An Introduction To His Life and Ideas by John Shirley, 2004, ISBN 1-58542-287-8

Gurdjieff: A Master in Life, Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch, Dolmen Meadow Editions, Toronto, 2006

Toward Awakening by Jean Vaysse, 1980

Gurdjieff: An Approach to his Ideas, Michel Waldberg, 1981, ISBN 0-7100-0811-2

A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching, Kenneth Walker, 1957

Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts, Sophia Wellbeloved, Routledge, London and N.Y., 2003, ISBN 0-415-24898-1

Gurdjieff, Astrology and Beelzebub's Tales, Sophia Wellbeloved, Solar Bound Press, N.Y., 2002

The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff, Colin Wilson, 1980

Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff?, René Zuber 1980

Monsieur Gurdjieff, Louis Pauwels, France, 1954.

"Ouspensky, Gurdjieff et les Fragments d'un Enseignement inconnu", by Boris Mouravieff, in Revue Mensuelle Internationale "Synthèses", N°138, Bruxelles, novembre 1957.

"Ecrits sur Ouspensky, Gurdjieff et sur la Tradition ésotérique chrétienne", Inédit, Dervy Poche, Paris, September 2008.

Gurdjieff Seeker of the Truth, Kathleen Speeth, Ira Friedlander, 1980, ISBN 0-06-090693-6

Comprehensive biographies

Gurdjieff: Making a New World posthumous work by John G. Bennett, 1973, Harper, ISBN 0-06-060778-5

The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers by James Webb, 1980, Putnam Publishing. ISBN 0-399-11465-3

Gurdjieff: The anatomy of a Myth by James Moore, 1991, ISBN 1-86204-606-9

Gurdjieff's America: Mediating the Miraculous by Paul Beekman Taylor, 2004, Lighthouse Editions, ISBN 1-904998-00-3. Reissued as Gurdjieff's Invention of America 2007, Eureka Editions.

G. I. Gurdjieff: A New Life by Paul Beekman Taylor, 2008, Eureka Editions, ISBN 978-90-72395-57-3

Videos/DVDs about G. I. Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way

Gurdjieff's Legacy: Establishing The Teaching in the West, 1924-1949 Part III

Meetings with Remarkable Men, Peter Brook, 1979

Some moments with Mr. Gurdjieff and others, France 1949

Music

G.I. Gurdjieff Sacred Hymns, by Keith Jarrett, ECM, 1980

Seekers of the Truth: The Complete Piano Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, Volume One, by Cecil Lytle, Celestial Harmonies, 1992

Reading of a Sacred Book: The Complete Piano Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, Volume Two, by Cecil Lytle, Celestial Harmonies, 1992

Words for a Hymn to the Sun: The Complete Piano Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, Volume Three, by Cecil Lytle, Celestial Harmonies, 1992

Gurdjieff/deHartmann, piano music pianist Elsa Denzey, GFT (record label), 1998

Gurdjieff's Music for the Movements, by Wim van Dullemen, Channel Classics, 1999

Thomas de Hartmann: Music for Gurdjieff's '39 Series' , by Wim van Dullemen, Channel Classics, 2001

Chants, Hymns and Dances, by Anja Lechner and Vassilis Tsabropoulos, ECM, 2004

Melos, by Anja Lechner, Vassilis Tsabropoulos and U.T. Gandhi, ECM, 2008

The Way of the Sly Man, by Dave Morgan, Being Time, 2010

See also

All and Everything

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

Centers (Fourth Way)

Fourth Way

Fourth Way Enneagram

Gurdjieff movements

In Search of the Miraculous

Meetings with Remarkable Men

Ray of Creation

Sarmoung Brotherhood

References

External links

International Association of Gurdjieff Foundations

Gurdjieff entry in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism

Gurdjieff Movements studies

G. I. Gurdjieff and His School by Jacob Needleman, Professor of Philosophy, San Francisco State University

Gurdjieff Reading Guide compiled by J. Walter Driscoll. Fifty-two articles which provide an independent survey of the literature by or about George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and offer a wide range of informed opinion (admiring, critical, and contradictory) about him, his activities, writings, philosophy, and influence.

Gurdjieff International Review Informed essays and commentary on the history, writings, and teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

Writings on Gurdjieff's teachings in the Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret Anderson Papers at Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Gurdjieff Work Definition by Wilhem Nyland Gurdjieff Work Definition by Wilhem Nyland

The first published account in English about Gurdjieff, from In Denikin’s Russia and the Caucasus, 1919–1920, by C. E. Bechhofer [Roberts] (W. Collins Sons, 1921).

Critics

The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort ISBN 0-87728-213-7

The Way of the Sufi by Idries Shah ISBN 0-14-019252-2

Article in The Skeptic's dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll

Gurdjieff: articles and links

Category:1866 births Category:1949 deaths Category:People from Gyumri Category:Fourth Way Category:Armenian philosophers Category:Russian philosophers Category:Russian spiritual writers Category:Western mystics Category:Greek Armenians Category:Greek people Category:Spiritual teachers Category:Armenian writers