Views from the Real World

Great changes have taken place in the Quarter-century since the death of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, yet much of the mystery that surrounded him in his lifetime remains. This book satisfies the demand to "hear" his actual voice and direct instructions. - in the form of conversations between Gurdjieff and his pupils. That any record of these lectures exists at all is due to a few pupils who - with astonishing powers of memory and in most cases entirely without Gurdjieff's knowledge - managed to write down what they had heard afterwards, whether during the tense and difficult times of their escape from revolutionary Russia, or at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Paris, or during visits to American pupils in New York and elsewhere. To lectures of the years 1917-1933 has been added the account of a conversation with Gurdjieff known as "glimpses of Truth," written by a Moscow pupil in 1914 and mentioned by P. D. Ouspensky in In Search Of The Miraculous. Gurdjieff's aphorisms, formerly inscribed above the walls of the Study House at the Institute, conclude the volume.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Spiritual, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.