Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) was born in Gyumri (formerly known as Alexandropol) in Armenia. His father was Greek and his mother Armenian. He was trained for both medicine and the priesthood by teachers in the Eastern Orthodox Church. As a young man he was consumed by questions relating to life, death and the meaning of existence. Dissatisfied with the answers given by his teachers, he set out on a search throughout central Asia and the Middle East. After these lengthy travels, described in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men, he reappeared in Moscow in 1913 with a fully developed spiritual teaching. Gurdjieff attracted many students who were drawn to his ideas and explanations of the human dilemma and who wished to work together along the lines he taught.

The Russian revolution forced him and his students to embark on a difficult journey that ended in Fontainebleau, France. There, in 1922, he opened the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which attracted new students from Europe and America. The principal work of the Institute was focused on waking his students from a life of daydreams and subjective biases. According to Gurdjieff, Man spends his life in psychological sleep and is not conscious of himself. Waking up or consciousness requires the harmonious development of three fundamental energies, the energies of mind, body and feeling.

Since his death in 1949, Gurdjieff’s work in the Institute and his teachings have been the subjects of many books by his students. The teachings he offered at the Institute included sacred dances and music, and emphasized an approach to physical work and crafts as a way of spiritual development through practice in the midst of daily life.

Gurdjieff’s source of knowledge remains a mystery to this day, but his teachings ring with a truth that can be experienced through an honest study of oneself.

His teaching and ideas are documented in In Search of the Miraculous written by one of his early pupils P D Ouspensky, while a recent book by Gurdjieff's foremost pupil Jeanne De Salzmann published in 2010 describes the practical aspects of his teaching under the title The Reality of Being.

Gurdjieff himself wrote a series of three books under the general title of "All and Everything" comprising Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson; Meetings With Remarkable Men; and Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'.