OF GREEK AND ARMENIAN parentage,
G. I. Gurdjieff was born and grew up in the volatile Caucasus region located between Christian Orthodox Russia and Islamic Turkey, Iraq, and Persia. His family moved from Alexandropol (present day Gyumri) to Kars shortly after its recapture by Russia from the Turks. There he was tutored by the Dean of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral and later by Bogachevsky, a candidate for the priesthood. Coming "to the whole sensation" of himself at an early age and recognizing the mindless mechanicality of human life, the question arose within Gurdjieff—what is the meaning and purpose of life on earth and of human life in particular?
          Dissatisfied with the answers of contemporary religion and science, Gurdjieff intuited that the wisdom societies of ancient civilizations held the real key to his question. And so with a group of like-minded friends who called themselves the Seekers of Truth, he made many journeys into remote and dangerous areas with the aim of rediscovering this ancient knowledge.
          In the ruins of Ani, the ancient Armenian capital, Gurdjieff and his friends discovered correspondence that spoke of an esoteric brotherhood called the Sarmoung. The brotherhood had existed in Babylon in 2,500 B.C., and subsequently migrated northward to the Izrumim Valley. Gurdjieff set out for the valley hoping to contact the Sarmoung, but on the way he unexpectedly came upon a map of 'pre-sand Egypt.' Immediately, he changed course and in 1895 arrived in Egypt.
          It was there in Egypt—"only not from the Egypt we know," Gurdjieff said, "but from one we do not know "—that he discovered "the true principles and ideas" of the ancient teaching that could show Man his place on earth and the reason and meaning of his existence. Gurdjieff realized that elements of this teaching over time had dispersed northward into Babylon, the Hindu Kush, Tibet, Siberia and the Gobi desert. He set out on a second journey to re-collect them. Having the true principles and ideas of the teaching, he was then able to reformulate these elements into a practical and powerful teaching for modern mentality. He called it The Fourth Way.
          Recognizing that humanity had entered a precarious period, Gurdjieff took a vow to introduce and establish the teaching in the West to keep humanity from destroying the world. His plan was to gather students and open an institute by which to propagate the teaching. Arriving in Russia in 1912, he formed groups of students and bought a villa. In 1915 he met P.D. Ouspensky, who would become the chief interpreter of the Russian period of his teaching. In 1917, however, the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the victory of the Bolsheviks—Gurdjieff termed Marxism "satanic"—made establishing the teaching in Russia impossible and he had to leave. In 1920 Gurdjieff and his students arrived in Constantinople. Conditions there were little better and so in 1921 they left for Europe. After attempts to open the institute in Germany and England proved fruitless, his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was finally established in France on September 30, 1922. A year and a half later—January 1924—Gurdjieff and a troupe of dancers made a triumphant visit to America to introduce the teaching. That July, however, he suffered a major car crash. By August, realizing there was not sufficient time to prepare his students, Gurdjieff disbanded the Institute.
          For nearly four months Gurdjieff pondered the situation. Then on December 16, 1924, a stupendous idea arose and he began to dictate: "It was in the year 223 after the creation of the World by objective time-calculation, or, as it would be said here on the 'Earth,' in the year 1921 after the birth of Christ. Through the Universe flew the ship Karnak of the 'trans-space' communication." Gurdjieff would defeat time by hurling the teaching into the future by writing a Legominism of three series of books under the title All and Everything.
          By the early thirties he finished the First and Second Series of his writings (though he continued reworking them until the very end of his life). In 1933 he published The Herald of Coming Good but later withdrew it from publication. In 1935 he completed the Third Series, Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' (though some contend he left it unfinished). That October he formed an all-women's group known as "the Rope" and worked with them until September 1939, the beginning of the Second World War. During the Nazi occupation of France Gurdjieff continued working with small groups of people in Paris. At war's end, despite increasing infirmity due to age and illness, he visited America, and only two months before his death he visited the prehistoric caves of Lascaux. During these years, Gurdjieff called his many students to him so that he might reinstill in them the essential experience of the source of The Fourth Way.