BEGINNING WITH HIS FIRST VISIT in 1924, Gurdjieff made a total of nine visits to America. Though noting its obsession with "growing dollars," he believed that "America had the largest percentage of beings in whose presences the said possibility [of the acquisition of Being] is not entirely lost." He said that America was a country that was very strong but also very young. Politically—in a rare pronouncement—Gurdjieff predicted that the eastern world would again rise to a position of world importance and become a threat to the momentarily all-powerful, all-influential new culture of the western world dominated by America.