Born in Gyumri, Armenia, 1867 - Died in Paris, France 29th October 1949.

See also

In Search of the Miraculous
(by Piotr Ouspensky - English version)

(Armenian version):

Images | Music

"The Actor"
Answer given by Gurdjieff in New York on 16th March 1924.
(Extract from the book)

The Teaching of George Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to wake up and serve our purpose as human beings. The fact that man is asleep is often referred to in the Bible and Gurdjieff once called his teaching (which he discovered during his travels to various monasteries) “esoteric Christianity.”

Gurdjieff's Age - George Gurdjieff according to his own account was born in 1867. He told a group meeting on Thursday 28/10/1943 that he was then 76 years old. He died six years later in 1949 when he was 82 years old - and looked this age from photographs and videos taken at that time. His age also reflects what he said in his autobiography "Meetings with Remarkable Men" - that he was about 7 years old at the time of the great cattle plague which affected his father’s livestock. This event occurred in the summer of 1873. In the same chapter he recalls his childhood in the "1870's".

Gurdjieff's Father - Gurdjieff’s Greek father was Ivan Ivanovitch Gurdjief and G recalled that his father was 82 when he last saw him in 1916. So G's father was born in 1834 (as confirmed on his gravestone in the Gyumri cemetery) and would have been 33 years old when G was born in 1867.

Gurdjieff's Mother -  Gurdjieff's Armenian mother was Yeva. Wikipedia has recently quoted " recent research" of Mr  Paul Beekman Taylor in his book G I Gurdjieff: A Life (2020) who opines that she may have been Greek. The author's speculation is based on a marriage certificate held at the National Archives of Armenia in Yerevan, which is shown here.  The certificate however pertains to a Mr Ivan Ivanovitch Kurch-ogli (not Gurdjiev) and his wife Evdokia Elevatorov, who bear no relation to Gurdjieff's parents.

The Gurdjieff Movements

Gurdjieff provided guidance and created conditions for people to "remember themselves" in their daily lives and passed on a series of movements that people could perform as a group under the guidance of a movements teacher. His principal pupils in the 1920's had to learn and practice these movements, which he saw being performed in certain monasteries that he visited during his explorations. The movements are designed to help people think, feel and sense themselves in a new way; and so the participants have no time to dream: they must not only perform the movements as a group (which anyone could do with practice) but must strive to be aware of themselves doing them - which is not so easy. The title of Gurdjieff's third book is called "Life is Real, Only then, When "I am". These movements can help a person experience the truth of that statement.

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