Meetings with Remarkable Men

Introduction

Gurdjieff frames the second series of his writings as an attempt to construct a ’new world’ in the reader’s consciousness by presenting ancient wisdom through accessible narrative, while critiquing contemporary civilization’s literature, journalism, and grammar as corrupting forces that prevent genuine human development.

• Gurdjieff structures the second series around answering recurring personal questions—about remarkable men, the soul, free will, suffering, and his system—by embedding philosophical ideas within autobiographical tales organized according to ’logical sequence.’
  • The most frequently asked questions included whether man has a soul, what hypnotism and telepathy are, what marvels he saw in the East, and how he became interested in his system.
  • He resolves to present material as separate independent tales that can function as answers to these questions, sparing him from repeated explanations with idle curiosity-seekers.
• An ancient saying about preserving ’the wolf and the sheep’—symbolizing bodily function and feeling, guided by thinking—encapsulates Gurdjieff’s central philosophy that harmonious inner life requires the active reconciliation of fundamentally opposed forces through conscious effort.
  • Learned analysis determined that ‘wolf’ symbolizes the fundamental and reflex functioning of the organism while ‘sheep’ symbolizes the functioning of feeling; the man himself represents thinking.
  • The popular riddle of ferrying a wolf, goat, and cabbage across a river illustrates that achieving harmony requires not only ingenuity but extra labor—one must ‘cross the river an extra time.’
• Contemporary literature is fundamentally corrupted because it concentrates entirely on stylistic polish rather than quality of thought, producing ‘word prostitution’ that develops no real understanding and leaves readers with nothing of substance—like the old sparrow who finds only noise and noxious fumes where there was once nourishment.
  • An elderly, intelligent Persian divides contemporary literature into three categories—scientific books recycling old hypotheses, novels describing the degeneration of the sacred feeling of love into vice, and travel descriptions by people who have never left home.
  • The tale of two sparrows contrasts horse-drawn vehicles (which left nourishing traces) with automobiles (which produce more noise and smell but nothing of substance for feeding sparrows or posterity).
• Only he will deserve the name of man and can count upon anything prepared for him from Above, who has already acquired corresponding data for being able to preserve intact both the wolf and the sheep confided to his care.
• Journalism is identified as the principal evil of contemporary civilization because it systematically weakens human thinking, destroys conscience, and creates false authority—illustrated by concrete cases where reporters caused poisonings, ruined careers, and drove honest workers to suicide.
  • The Persian speaker describes how a family was fatally poisoned by sausages after newspaper articles and advertisements promoted a fraudulent butcher shop, exposing how reporters serve commercial interests at lethal cost.
  • A literary critic who had been refused sexual advances systematically destroyed a researcher’s book through false reviews, driving the honest worker and his wife to hang themselves together.
• Artificial grammar, constructed by ‘illiterate upstarts’ rather than evolved by life itself, distorts language so severely that precise transmission of experienced thought becomes impossible—exemplified by the absence in modern Russian of a word distinguishing ‘I say’ from ‘I speak.’
  • The Persian discovered that ancient Russian once had the word skazivaïou (corresponding to the Persian diaram, meaning ‘I say’) but grammarians eliminated it because its consonance did not fit civilized grammar requirements.
  • This artificial grammar separates thought from feeling and instinct, so that among Europeans only one of the three data necessary for a sane human mind has developed—thought—while feeling and instinct remain undeveloped.
• Gurdjieff defines a ‘remarkable man’ not as one who performs impressive tricks but as one who stands out by resourcefulness of mind, restraint in natural manifestations, justice, and tolerance toward the weaknesses of others—a definition that structures the entire series.
  • A man who does tricks is remarkable only until the secret is known; genuine remarkableness is a stable quality of character independent of external performance.
  • The first remarkable man in his life was his father, whose influence left its trace on his whole existence.

My Father

Gurdjieff’s father, an ashokh of the Adash tradition who preserved millennia-old oral legends including the Gilgamesh epic, embodies the ideal of a man who maintains inner freedom and poetic soul regardless of material catastrophe, and whose educational methods—instilling indifference to fear and love of work—formed the foundations of Gurdjieff’s own character.

• The oral tradition of the ashokhs—illiterate bards who memorized and improvised vast bodies of poetry, legend, and song across Transcaucasia and Asia Minor—preserved ancient knowledge for millennia with greater fidelity than written scholarship, as demonstrated by the Gilgamesh legend reaching Gurdjieff’s father unchanged over four thousand years.
  • When Gurdjieff read in a magazine the deciphered Babylonian tablets containing the Gilgamesh legend, he recognized the twenty-first song—which he had heard repeated throughout a single night’s debate—in almost exactly the form his father had sung.
  • His father argued that the Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh was the origin of the Hebrew Bible’s flood account and Christian world view, with only names and details changed—a claim that sparked an all-night debate with Dean Borsh.
• The kastousilia practice between Gurdjieff’s father and Dean Borsh—a form of impromptu philosophical dialogue using seemingly absurd questions and answers—was an original developmental method that embedded profound thoughts in apparently nonsensical exchanges, only revealing their meaning years later.
  • When the dean asked ‘Where is God just now?’ the father answered ‘God is just now in Sari Kamish,’ making double ladders from the tall pines so that individuals and nations might ascend and descend—which seemed like madness but contained rich hidden thought.
  • Gurdjieff understood the significance of these conversations only much later when he encountered parallel questions in his own searches.
• The father’s four commandments for attaining inner freedom and happy old age—loving parents, remaining chaste until adulthood, being outwardly courteous while remaining inwardly free, and loving work for its own sake—represent a practical philosophy of character built on self-restraint and authentic relationship.
  • Particularly noteworthy is the third commandment’s dual injunction: be courteous to all without distinction of wealth or rank, but inwardly remain free and never put too much trust in anyone.
  • The father’s relationship with his son was not that of father to son but of elder brother to younger, and his extraordinary stories greatly assisted the arising of poetic images and high ideals.
• I can now say for certain that in spite of his desperate struggle with the misfortunes which poured upon him as though from the horn of plenty, he continued then as before, in all the difficult circumstances of his life, to retain the soul of a true poet.
• The father’s intentional educational procedures—placing frogs and worms in the boy’s bed, forcing cold-water bathing at dawn, compelling early rising—were designed to eliminate fastidiousness and fear, and Gurdjieff credits these practices with enabling him to overcome all subsequent obstacles in his travels.
  • The most worrying procedure for surrounding adults was forcing the child to rise early, go to the fountain, splash with cold spring water, and run about naked—punishing without mercy any resistance.
  • Gurdjieff often remembered and thanked his father for this in later years, saying that without it he could never have overcome all the obstacles and difficulties he encountered.
• The father’s ruin—losing enormous inherited wealth when a cattle plague destroyed both his own herds and those of poorer families he had insured by local custom—did not destroy his inner equilibrium; he retained the soul of a poet, became a source of courage for his family, and never lost his freedom from identification with external misfortune.
  • The father came of a Greek family who had fled Byzantine persecution by Turks, eventually settling in Armenia, where his inherited wealth was wiped out by a mass cattle pestilence leaving him responsible for other families’ losses too.
  • His ‘instinctive aversion to deriving personal advantage from the naïveté and bad luck of others’ made him repeatedly fail at commerce but preserved his honor and inner state intact.
• The father’s simple but definite view of the soul—that experiencings in life elaborate a certain substance from which ‘something’ gradually forms, acquiring almost independent life, persisting after death but eventually disintegrating—was illustrated by reference to Gurdjieff’s own hypnotic experiment on the exteriorization of sensitivity.
  • The father referenced an experiment in which Gurdjieff, by rubbing a clay-wax figure with oil scraped from a hypnotized medium’s body, could cause the medium’s flesh to bleed when the figure was pricked—demonstrating a finer, more sensitive materiality persisting independently.
  • The father died during the Turkish attack on Alexandropol, wounded while protecting the family property he refused to abandon, and was buried by old men who happened to remain.

My First Tutor

Dean Borsh of Kars Military Cathedral became Gurdjieff’s first tutor and formed the ‘secondary stratum’ of his individuality through a rigorous, original curriculum spanning theology, medicine, and practical crafts—combined with a conception of the priesthood as requiring simultaneous medical knowledge—and his influence proved lasting enough that Gurdjieff secretly visited his grave decades later.

• Dean Borsh’s conception of the ideal priest demanded simultaneous medical competence, because body and soul are so interconnected that neither physician nor confessor can fully help a patient or parishioner without access to the other domain—a vision that shaped Gurdjieff’s simultaneous preparation for both priesthood and medicine.
  • Four teachers were engaged for Gurdjieff: Ponomarenko for geography and history, Krestovsky for Scripture and Russian, Sokolov the physician for anatomy and physiology, and the dean himself for mathematics.
  • Gurdjieff’s family had originally intended him for the priesthood, but the dean’s unusual synthesis meant that medical training was not an alternative but a complement.
• The dean taught that gratifying sexual desire before adulthood irreparably destroys a person’s potential—like adding alcohol to fermenting grape must (madjar) before it becomes wine, producing only vinegar—while after maturity the same experiences strengthen rather than corrupt.
  • The dean used the metaphor that just as madjar into which even a single drop of alcohol has been poured can only ever become vinegar and never wine, premature gratification of lust produces a monstrosity rather than a real man.
  • He specified that nature establishes maturity between ages twenty and twenty-three for males and fifteen and nineteen for females, varying by geographical conditions of formation.
• The dean’s ten principles of education—from belief in punishment for disobedience and hope for reward only through merit, to fearlessness toward devils and patient endurance of pain—constitute a systematic program for forming a responsible, self-reliant character grounded in earned confidence rather than inherited comfort.
  • The principles include: love of God but indifference to saints; remorse for ill-treatment of animals; fearlessness toward devils, snakes and mice; joy in contentment with what one has; and the striving to earn one’s bread from an early age.
  • The dean stated flatly that until adulthood no person is responsible for any act—voluntary or involuntary—as sole responsibility lies with those who have undertaken their preparation for responsible life.
• The dean’s teaching on the necessity of a corresponding type of the opposite sex for the completion of each person’s incomplete nature—and the ancient custom of betrothing children in infancy to allow habit-matching across a lifetime—reflects a sophisticated understanding of complementarity as a structural requirement of human development, not merely a social preference.
  • Without a corresponding type for mutual completion, a person under natural laws cannot remain without gratification and falls under the influence of non-corresponding types, losing the typical manifestations of individuality involuntarily and imperceptibly.
  • Ancient peoples, understanding this necessity, betrothed boys at age seven with girls of one year, requiring both families to align habits, inclinations, enthusiasms, and tastes throughout the children’s growth.

Bogachevsky

Bogachevsky (later Father Evlissi), a young seminary candidate who became Gurdjieff’s teacher in Kars and eventually an assistant abbot of the Essene Brotherhood near the Dead Sea, instilled in Gurdjieff the crucial distinction between objective morality (based on conscience formed over millennia) and subjective morality (invented convention that varies by place and class)—a distinction that became a guiding principle of Gurdjieff’s life.

• Encounters with unexplained phenomena—Yezidis unable to escape drawn circles, a paralytic cured at an Armenian holy site, rain following a solemn prayer service in drought, and a dying woman healed by rose-hips prescribed in a dream—drove Gurdjieff to a crisis of irreconcilable contradiction between scientific knowledge and undeniable empirical facts.
  • The Yezidi circle phenomenon was later experimentally verified: a Yezidi forcibly dragged out of a circle immediately falls into catalepsy, recoverable only by return within thirteen or twenty-one hours, or by a priest’s incantation—ordinary hypnotic techniques failed completely.
  • The drought ended in a downpour before pilgrims reached town after a solemn joint service by Greek, Armenian, and Russian clergy carrying a miraculous icon; this ‘coincidence’ was inexplicable by scientific categories.
• Bogachevsky distinguished objective morality—established by life and divine commandment over millennia, maintained by conscience and broadening over time—from subjective morality, which is invented by man, relative to person and place, and historically formed by the stuffing of children with conventions that prevent Nature from developing authentic conscience.
  • He contrasted two Kars incidents: Lieutenant K blinded a shoemaker who repeatedly sought owed wages, and was acquitted; Lieutenant Makarov shot himself rather than fail to repay a debt to a card-sharper—both driven by honor codes that protected the powerful while sanctioning abuse of the poor.
  • Bogachevsky told Gurdjieff: ‘Conscience is everywhere the same—as it is here, so it is in St. Petersburg, America, Kamchatka, and the Solomon Islands’; subjective morality by contrast fragments according to local convention.
• Bogachevsky’s spiritual journey from seminary candidate to assistant abbot of the Essene Brotherhood—through marriage failure, monastic life, pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and friendship with an Essene rosary-vendor near the Lord’s Temple—illustrates how authentic spiritual development follows its own logic independent of institutional religion.
  • The Essene Brotherhood was founded approximately 1200 years before the Birth of Christ, and tradition holds that Jesus Christ received his first initiation within it.
  • Bogachevsky was introduced to the brotherhood gradually through the rosary-vendor, then served as warden, prior of an Egyptian branch, and finally was appointed assistant to the abbot of the chief monastery near the Dead Sea.
• Bogachevsky’s practice of hearing Gurdjieff’s weekly confession—continued by mail after his departure, in which Gurdjieff wrote out his confession and received replies—established a discipline of self-examination and accountability that prefigures the systematic self-observation Gurdjieff would later develop in his Institute.
  • This practice was maintained across geographic separation and institutional change, indicating Bogachevsky viewed the relationship as a genuine spiritual obligation rather than a formal duty.
  • Gurdjieff’s final verdict on Father Evlissi was that he ‘happened to become one of the first persons on earth who has been able to live as our Divine Teacher Jesus Christ wished for us all.’

Mr. X or Captain Pogossian

Pogossian, an Armenian seminary student who became the owner of ocean steamers, demonstrates through his lifelong practice of conscious, unceasing labor—and through his shared expedition with Gurdjieff that led to the discovery of a parchment referencing the legendary Sarmoung Brotherhood—that no conscious work is ever wasted, and that purposeful physical effort is the distinguishing mark of genuine human being.

• Pogossian’s compulsive habit of constant physical activity—swinging arms, marking time, finger manipulations—was a conscious strategy to train his lazy nature through reason rather than impulse, based on his conviction that no conscious work is ever wasted and will eventually be paid for either by others or their descendants.
  • “Pogossian distinguished his ‘I’ (his mind) from his nature, stating he loved work only with his mind while his nature was just as lazy as anyone else’s—and that persistence was the means of converting mental to natural love of work.” —Pogossian
  • He began with nothing and by 1908 was one of the richest men on earth through conscientious, ox-like labor—vindicating his theory that conscious labor is never wasted.
• The discovery in the ruins of Ani of a parchment referencing the Sarmoung Brotherhood—a legendary esoteric school said to have existed in Babylon from 2500 BCE and known to have persisted until the sixth or seventh century CE—galvanized both Gurdjieff and Pogossian into planning a dangerous expedition to find it in the region between Urmia and Kurdistan.
  • The parchment stated that Father Telvant had ‘at last succeeded in learning the truth about the Sarmoung Brotherhood,’ whose ernos actually existed near Siranoush and had migrated to the valley of Izrumin, three days’ journey from Nivssi (present-day Mosul).
  • The Sarmoung Brotherhood was said to possess great knowledge containing the key to many secret mysteries; cross-referencing the current Aisor (Assyrian-descended) population around Mosul suggested it might still exist in that region.
• The theft of a map of ‘pre-sand Egypt’ from an Armenian priest’s chest—which Gurdjieff justified to himself as necessary for his search—led directly to his encounter with Prince Lubovedsky at the Egyptian pyramids, demonstrating how morally ambiguous actions can nonetheless produce consequential spiritual outcomes.
  • A Russian prince had previously offered the priest 500 Turkish pounds for the map, then paid 200 pounds merely for a plaster-cast copy—the prince’s extreme interest confirmed for Gurdjieff the map’s extraordinary significance.
  • Gurdjieff secretly made an oiled-paper tracing of the map over a single night, replaced the parchment, then had it sewn into the lining of his clothes before departing with Pogossian toward Syria and eventually Egypt.
• Pogossian’s transition from seminary student to ocean-steamer owner was catalyzed by a tavern brawl in Smyrna, which led to passage on an English warship and immersive work in its engine room—illustrating how chance encounters combined with the disposition toward conscious labor can transform an entire life trajectory.
  • The English sailors, grateful to Gurdjieff and Pogossian for defending them in the brawl, arranged passage for both men on their warship, with Pogossian assigned to the engine room and Gurdjieff cleaning metalwork.
  • Pogossian ultimately studied at a Liverpool technical institute of marine engineering through the influence of these English friendships, received a mechanical engineering degree, and pursued a career that made him wealthy without ever sacrificing honesty.

Abram Yelov

Abram Yelov, an Aisor philologist who became Gurdjieff’s close friend through the Tiflis book trade, exemplifies a distinctive combination of extraordinary linguistic and bibliographic gifts with a principled view that languages are learned not as escape from idle thought but as direction of inevitable mental activity toward useful ends—and his tender yet combatively expressed friendship with Pogossian illustrates that authentic love need not conform to conventional expression.

• Yelov’s approach to language study was a deliberate strategy for directing thought away from idling fantasy and toward useful work, based on his reasoning that thought works ceaselessly regardless and requires minimal extra energy to redirect—making language acquisition both productive and essentially effortless.
  • “He stated: ‘Instead of allowing my thoughts to think about caps of invisibility or the riches of Aladdin, rather let them be occupied with something useful; in giving direction to thought no more energy is needed in a whole day than for the digestion of one meal.’” —Yelov
  • Before Gurdjieff knew a word of any European language, Yelov already spoke almost all of them so perfectly that it was hard to tell they were not his own—a feat later deployed to escort a holy relic past British soldiers in Turkestan by impersonating a British officer.
• Yelov’s scrupulous respect for others’ religious conscience stemmed from his conviction that conscience itself is the most valuable thing in a person, that faith sustains conscience, and that religion sustains faith—making any attempt to undermine another’s religion an act of destroying their most essential possession.
  • He observed the intensive missionary activity among Aisors by almost all European religions, noting that Aisors ‘converted’ repeatedly and outwardly for material benefit while this destroyed the very conscience that had been the foundation of their being.
  • “He stated: ‘It would be a great sin if I should begin to judge his religion or to disillusion him about it, and thus destroy his conscience which can only be acquired in childhood.’” —Yelov
• Gurdjieff and Yelov’s plaster-of-Paris workshop in Tiflis—launched after Gurdjieff learned trade secrets by pretending to be a blockhead assistant to an Italian manufacturer—demonstrates the principle that careful observation and strategic self-presentation can extract specialized knowledge unavailable through direct inquiry.
  • The key secrets were minor but critical: the precise number of lemon juice drops to prevent bubbles in plaster, and the correct proportions of glue, gelatine, and glycerine for molds—without these, proper results were impossible despite knowing all general procedures.
  • Gurdjieff added original product lines including comic penholder heads filled with shot and ‘Invalid in Bed’ money-boxes, which reportedly appeared in almost every Tiflis house of the period—eventually selling the thriving workshop to two Jews at a good price.
• The paradoxical friendship between Yelov and Pogossian—expressed through constant mutual insults, ethnic slurs, and apparent contempt, while concealing an extraordinarily tender love expressed through hidden gifts of candy and emotional protectiveness—illustrates that authentic human bonds may be expressed through forms incomprehensible to conventional social expectations.
  • When Yelov received candy he would not eat it himself but hide it to bring Pogossian, presenting it with mockery: ‘How the devil did this garbage happen to be in my pocket? Gobble up this muck; you’re an expert in swallowing everything no good to anyone else.’
  • Pogossian called Yelov ‘khachagokh’ (stealer of crosses, a term for Aisor fraudsters) and Yelov called Pogossian ‘salted Armenian’; yet Gurdjieff was moved to tears when he perceived the tenderness beneath these forms.

Prince Yuri Lubovedsky

Prince Lubovedsky, a Russian nobleman whose wife’s death drove him from military life into forty years of spiritual searching across Africa, India, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, serves as Gurdjieff’s closest essence-friend and elder companion—their last meeting at the chief monastery of the Sarmoung Brotherhood, where the prince accepted a three-year death sentence with equanimity, represents the culmination of a life devoted to transforming accumulated suffering into genuine being.

• Lubovedsky’s spiritual search began when an unknown old man visited him in Moscow after his wife’s death—an event that transformed him from a guards officer into a lifelong seeker who spent his fortune organizing expeditions and living in monasteries across Asia in pursuit of answers to questions about the meaning of existence.
  • The mysterious visitor who initiated Lubovedsky’s transformation appeared to know him as ‘Gogo’—a childhood nickname known only to his mother and nurse sixty years before—and reproached him for spending forty-five years satisfying curiosity about external things instead of making the desire of his mind become the desire of his heart.
  • When the old man in Kabul told him he had ‘consciously died to the life he had led until now’ and must go where indicated, Lubovedsky felt there was nothing to break from since all interests had already faded, and consented immediately.
• Vitvitskaïa—a Polish woman rescued by Lubovedsky from a white-slave trafficker—transformed from a woman of moral ruin into an ideal of womanhood through sustained contact with persons of ideas, demonstrating Gurdjieff’s conviction that environment and conscious influence can fundamentally redirect a human character.
  • Vitvitskaïa had been seduced by a commercial traveller, exploited by a senator, used as patient-bait by a doctor, and nearly trafficked to Alexandria when Lubovedsky intervened on the ship; Gurdjieff initially felt ‘something like hatred’ for her but agreed to escort her to Russia.
  • After years with Lubovedsky’s sister in Italy, Vitvitskaïa developed a deep interest in the objective science of music, eventually joining Gurdjieff’s expedition group and conducting experiments on the effects of sound on human and plant life before dying of a cold on the Volga.
• The apparatuses in the Women’s Court of the Sarmoung Brotherhood monastery—ancient ebony-and-ivory devices with seven branching segments articulated by ivory ball joints, used to teach sacred dance postures—represent a four-thousand-five-hundred-year-old system for encoding and transmitting objective knowledge through bodily position rather than text.
  • Metal plates with inscriptions (copies of gold originals kept by the sheikh) were used to set ball positions, fixing postures that student priestesses held for hours to sense and memorize; the complete alphabet of postures allowed brethren to ‘read’ truth encoded in the evening temple dances.
  • Gurdjieff found the execution of the genuine priestesses’ dances surpassed anything he had seen anywhere for purity of precision—a precision made possible by the apparatus-based training system over many years before a student was permitted to dance in the temple.
• Soloviev’s trajectory—from provincial merchant’s son through drunkenness, counterfeiting, and railway work to cured sobriety, full membership in the Seekers of Truth, and death by wild camel bite in the Gobi Desert—illustrates both the transformative power of hypnotic suggestion applied with genuine care and the irreducible role of chance in human destiny.
  • Gurdjieff cured Soloviev’s alcoholism through daily hypnotic sessions inducing such aversion to vodka that he ‘could not even bear to look at this poison’; this was done out of genuine friendship, not for payment.
  • On the unprecedented Gobi crossing—using sheep as load-bearers for water bladders, stilts for sand-storm navigation, and improvised litters of twenty-one sheep each—Soloviev was killed by a bite to the neck from a wild camel while hunting, the wound severing half his throat.
• The Gobi Desert crossing—engineering a solution to the seemingly impossible problem of provisioning a long desert traverse by feeding sheep on organic-mineral sand mixed with their own meat, and navigating sandstorms on stilts—exemplifies Gurdjieff’s group’s method of combining specialized expertise (mining, medicine, philology) to solve problems that appear insoluble within conventional frameworks.
  • Mining engineer Karpenko discovered that certain sand layers in the Gobi contained organic matter from ancient sea organisms or wind-blown vegetable tissues, and experimentally proved sheep would eat this mixed with their own ground meat—making the flock self-provisioning.
  • Dr. Sari-Ogli discovered that sand-filled air in storms rises no higher than twenty-five feet, and that the upper contour of the sand-filled atmosphere mirrors the desert surface—making stilt-walking at that height not merely possible but visually assisted by visible dune contours.

Ekim Bey

Dr. Ekim Bey, a Turkish military physician who became Gurdjieff’s childhood acquaintance after nursing him through a skin illness at his father’s Bosphorus estate, demonstrates both the transformative power of genuine encounter with wise teachers—most consequentially a Persian dervish who overturned Gurdjieff’s cherished yogic practices—and the dangers of allowing practical knowledge of human psychological mechanisms to become a source of false reputation.

• A Persian dervish’s critique of Gurdjieff’s two core yogic practices—careful mastication and artificial breathing—demolished his confidence in these methods by demonstrating that both disrupted the organism’s self-regulating balance: excessive chewing atrophied stomach muscles, while forced breathing altered the precise quantitative ratios of substances the lungs naturally extract from air.
  • The dervish used the bread-baking analogy: just as dough requires exact proportions of flour and water, substances formed in the organism from breathing require strict qualitative and quantitative proportions—any forced modification facilitates penetration of harmful substances and upsets the balance of useful ones.
  • He stated that ‘it very rarely happens that anyone who practises artificial breathing does not harm himself irreparably,’ and that practitioners almost invariably develop heart enlargement, windpipe constriction, or damage to stomach, liver, kidneys or nerves.
• Ekim Bey’s ‘fortune-telling’ method—using an alphabet grid to detect involuntary muscle micro-movements in a subject’s hand as it passed over the relevant letters, then deducing names, ages, and life facts—exploited the universal human property that thought directed toward any concrete object causes corresponding involuntary muscle tension in that direction.
  • Even subjects who knew the trick and tried consciously to think of something else would still involuntarily tense their muscles toward the true answer, since this response obeys subconsciousness more than consciousness.
  • The technique generated a reputation for magical powers so burdensome—with letters from pashas, generals, merchants, priests, and women of all ages requesting prophecy, love remedies, and distant healing—that Ekim Bey eventually abandoned his medical practice and fled the places where he was known.
• The improvised Ashkhabad hypnotic fakir performance—in which Ekim Bey posed as an Indian fakir and Gurdjieff as his assistant, filling a hired hall with locals who paid to witness ‘supernatural’ phenomena—turned financial desperation into a demonstration of how specialist psychological knowledge, presented under a theatrical frame, can command substantial payment and social authority.
  • The two unemployed Russian men prepared as subjects were brought to a hypnotic state deep enough to tolerate large pins in the chest, suspended weight on the stomach between two chairs, and having hairs pulled from their heads—none of which they remembered upon waking.
  • Three consecutive evenings of performances in Tashkent produced not only a full cash-box but hundreds of dinner invitations and marked female attention, from which Gurdjieff and Ekim Bey departed without delay.

Piotr Karpenko

Piotr Karpenko, a childhood rival transformed into Gurdjieff’s brother-like friend through a shared near-death experience at the Kars artillery range, later became a prominent mining engineer and full member of the Seekers of Truth—dying prematurely from a gunshot wound sustained during a raft journey down a Himalayan river, a death Gurdjieff mourns as the loss of ‘a rare and sincere friend.’

• The artillery-range ‘duel’—in which Gurdjieff and Karpenko agreed to lie between cannon and targets to let fate decide their survival after a love rivalry—produced in Gurdjieff the ‘whole sensation of myself’ for the first time: an acute awareness of imminent annihilation that paradoxically clarified consciousness and compressed a year’s thought into an hour, forming lasting data against being perturbed by egoistic life-questions.
  • The scheme was proposed by a comrade named Tourchaninov who suggested that artillery practice could serve as a dueling medium, since both parties would risk death without needing weapons; the seconds spent the day fishing while the principals lay in shell-holes.
  • Gurdjieff’s terror was so intense that his entire body trembled independently tissue by tissue, he heard his own heartbeat above cannon fire, and his teeth chattered—yet this extremity became a permanent formation in his individuality preventing future identification with egoistic fears.
• The accident in which Karpenko was wounded by a shell fragment—initially mistaken for death, inspiring terror and remorse in all the boys who had treated the duel as an adventure—transformed Gurdjieff’s hatred for a rival into brotherly love through the experience of fear for another’s life, demonstrating how shared mortal danger dissolves competitive enmity.
  • Seeing Karpenko lying motionless with blood on his leg, Gurdjieff was overcome: ‘all the hatred of the day before turned into pity,’ and his fear for Karpenko’s life matched the fear he had experienced hours before for his own.
  • Gurdjieff spent every night at Karpenko’s bedside until recovery, and their shared object of rivalry—the Riaouzov girl—was simultaneously forgotten by both as the friendship deepened.
• The Himalayan expedition—in which an avalanche killed two members including a guide, leaving the remaining party lost in a maze of intersecting gorges without reliable maps, forcing improvised navigation to a Himalayan river and construction of a goatskin-inflated raft—illustrates the inadequacy of official cartography for genuine exploration and the necessity of improvised engineering over formal plans.
  • Gurdjieff argues that maps of uninhabited regions are worse than useless, describing how a Turkestan military survey officer confused ‘behind’ and ‘in front of’ when transcribing a Kara-Kirghiz nomad’s description—and simply slammed his sketch-book shut rather than redo two hours of drawing.
  • The raft was constructed by slaughtering goats, using their inflated skins as flotation and their bones as fuel for fires—an engineer named Samsanov devising the critical buffer system of bourdiouks attached to the front and sides to absorb boulder collisions.
• An aged Afghan ez-ezounavouran (self-mortifying holy man) who had been a former chief of artillery of the Emir of Afghanistan demonstrated practical healing—dissolving Vitvitskaïa’s goiter through twenty minutes of massage and incantation, and prescribing for Skridlov a two-month decoction of a certain root with fig bark that resolved his twelve-year kidney trouble—while also keeping a tame bear that brought him gifts.
  • The term ‘fakir’ as Europeans use it is unknown in Asia; the Asian word fakhr (from Turkoman for ‘beggar’) actually means swindler or cheat—specifically one who exploits others’ religiousness—while the genuine term for a spiritual self-mortifier is ez-ezounavouran, meaning ‘he who beats himself.’
  • The old man, ninety-eight years old, had passed through Christianity, Islam, and various dervish brotherhoods before seeking solitude to await death; his healing of Vitvitskaïa was permanent—she never had a recurrence.

Professor Skridlov

Professor Skridlov, the archaeologist who first hired Gurdjieff as a guide at the Egyptian pyramids and became a decades-long essence-friend, underwent a decisive inner transformation through their shared encounter with Father Giovanni in a Kafiristan monastery—learning that understanding (formed from intentional information and personal experience) is fundamentally different from knowledge, and that only understanding can lead to genuine being.

• The contrast between Brothers Ahl and Sez in the Kafiristan monastery demonstrates a fundamental law: sermons proceeding only from the mind act on listeners’ minds and produce impressions that quickly evaporate, while sermons proceeding from being act on being and remain instilled forever—proving that what is communicated is shaped by the quality of the communicator’s inner state, not the content alone.
  • Brother Sez’s speech ‘purls like a stream’ and produces intense immediate impression that gradually vanishes completely; Brother Ahl speaks badly and indistinctly with almost no initial effect, but his words take on definite form each day and remain forever.
  • Father Giovanni stated this as a law: ’the quality of what is perceived by anyone when another person tells him something depends on the quality of the data formed in the person speaking’—making inner development a prerequisite for effective communication.
• Father Giovanni’s distinction between faith (arising from understanding formed by intentional information and personal experience) and knowledge (automatic remembrance of words in sequence) explains why missionary work that attempts to ‘graft faith on by words’ is futile—one cannot give another one’s own inner understanding any more than one can fill someone with bread by looking at them.
  • “He told Skridlov: ‘It is a hundred times easier, as said in the Gospels, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for anyone to give to another the understanding formed in him about anything whatsoever.’” —Father Giovanni
  • Father Giovanni had himself been a Catholic missionary who wanted to make everyone as happy as his faith in Christ made him, until accumulated experience taught him the impossibility of transmitting understanding through words alone.
• The Amu Darya river journey from Chardzhou revealed an episode of unreconstructed Asiatic moral integrity: a group of Sarts who discovered large sacks of money left on the boat by a fellow passenger traveled forty-eight hours out of their way to return it—an act that would be inconceivable, Gurdjieff implies, among contemporary Europeans.
  • The Sart explained: ‘The same thing happened to me once and I understand very well how disagreeable it is to arrive in a strange place without the necessary tiangi—it makes no difference if I arrive in my village a week later; I shall regard it as if our steamer had run aground an extra time.’
  • Gurdjieff and Skridlov resolved not to refuse the money but to identify the rightful owner and report it to the nearest Russian frontier post with all identifying details—while the Sarts received a pesh kesh in gratitude for their trouble.
• Professor Skridlov’s tearful encounter with Gurdjieff on Mount Bechow near Piatigorsk—where he wept involuntarily at the grandeur of the Caucasus panorama and explained that since meeting Father Giovanni he could no longer control automatic emotional responses to manifestations of ‘Our Maker Creator’—marks the culmination of his inner transformation from an egoist absorbed in personal interests to a man for whom something transcendent had become the only real value.
  • “Skridlov told Gurdjieff: ‘Before that meeting, my whole being was possessed by egoism. All my manifestations and experiencings flowed from my vanity. The meeting with Father Giovanni killed all this, and from then on there gradually arose in me that something which has brought the whole of me to the unshakeable conviction that, apart from the vanities of life, there exists a something else which must be the aim and ideal of every more or less thinking man.’” —Skridlov
  • This occurred at their final meeting, in the second year of the World War, on a mountain summit they climbed ‘in remembrance of the good old days’—a meeting Gurdjieff states he will never forget.
• The Gurdjieff-Skridlov disguise as Persian dervish and Seïd (Mohammed’s descendant) for entry into Kafiristan—requiring a year of preparation in the ruins of Old Merv learning sacred Persian chants and growing appropriate hair—demonstrates that access to inaccessible esoteric sources sometimes requires not intellectual credentials but the adoption of the social identity of those whom local culture already respects.
  • A Turkoman nomad’s observation guided their strategy: although Kafiristan tribes had near-organic distaste for outsiders, they universally respected those who devoted themselves to the service of God—making a dervish and a Seïd socially immune where any other foreign identity would be dangerous.
  • Previous visitors attempting to copy inscriptions had reportedly been flayed alive by Aisors, confirming that direct scholarly access was impossible—rendering the disguise not a deception but a necessary translation into a culturally legible identity.

The Material Question

In response to a question about the Institute’s finances at a 1924 New York dinner, Gurdjieff narrates four decades of resourceful self-financing—from phonograph ventures in Krasnovodsk to the universal workshop in Ashkhabad, carpet trading in Tiflis, and the Paris restaurant and medical practice—demonstrating that the same correct education enabling spiritual seeking also produces extraordinary commercial capacity, and that his lifelong principle of independent self-financing without outside help was only broken once, by necessity, in France.

• Gurdjieff’s commercial competence derived directly from his father’s educational methods—instilling the urge to frequently change occupation so that no craft or business became rote—and from his first tutor Dean Borsh’s practice of making him master a skill and immediately abandon it to overcome the difficulty of something new, so that the challenge of unfamiliarity rather than mastery became his perpetual stimulus.
  • His father used tales of the lame carpenter Mustapha who knew how to do everything and made a flying armchair to foster in the child the irresistible urge to always be making something new, so that even ordinary childhood games were enriched by imagining he did everything in a special way.
  • The aim was not to learn all crafts but to develop the ability to surmount the difficulties of any kind of new work—with the result that work had sense and interest for him not in itself but only in so far as he did not already know how to do it.
• The Ashkhabad ‘Universal Travelling Workshop’—launched to win a wager with Vitvitskaïa, operating for three and a half months and earning fifty thousand roubles—exploited a specific social context: newly-rich provincial inhabitants who imitated European civilization without technical knowledge, accumulating broken objects they could not repair and were too status-conscious to discard.
  • Gurdjieff deliberately charged wealthy clients who had obtained their wealth through exploiting others—including a fat Armenian caracul merchant whose sewing-machine needed only a lever shifted, for which he charged twelve roubles fifty kopeks instead of the instant free fix.
  • The corset business alone involved buying up old-fashioned corsets at twenty kopeks each from all shops along the Central Asiatic Railway and selling the refashioned ‘Paris style’ versions back to the same shops at three and a half roubles—over six thousand units across eight cities.
• Gurdjieff’s principle of absolute financial independence—refusing outside help even in desperate moments over fifteen years, resolving all crises through his own capacities—was broken only once in France by a London loan, yet this exception itself reflected his larger commitment: the loan was the minimum necessary to preserve the Institute from collapse, taken as a calculated risk rather than a dependence.
  • By the time he reached the Château du Prieuré in October 1922 with fifty pupils, his hundred thousand francs were entirely gone; he had to beg a pupil’s wife for her last diamond ring to feed everyone that evening.
  • Revenue sources in France included psychological treatment of alcoholics and drug addicts (one American couple spontaneously doubled the agreed fee after their son’s cure), two Montmartre restaurant ventures sold once established, and oil share speculation.
• The Russian civil war period—with towns changing government daily between Bolsheviks, White Army, and newly-formed factions, requiring Gurdjieff to maintain hundred-person households in Essentuki and Piatigorsk while organizing a scientific expedition disguised as a dolmen survey to extract his people from a war zone—represents the period of most intense nervous strain in his life, resolved by moving through chaos as a genuinely neutral party.
  • Documents issued to him by both opposing sides—one permitting him to carry a revolver, countersigned on the reverse by the other side—illustrated the extraordinary double authority he maintained by his impartial stance.
  • His sister arrived at his door with twenty-seven skeletal relatives including six small children, having walked twenty days over mountains barefoot and in rags after fleeing the Turkish attack on Alexandropol with only an hour’s warning.
• Gurdjieff’s mother’s preservation of a diamond brooch—given to her for safekeeping decades earlier with instructions to take ‘particular care’ of it, maintained as a talisman against all pillaging, revolutionary upheaval, and desperate circumstances—provided the credit for the first American tour at the precise moment when all other resources were exhausted, an event Gurdjieff attributes to the law-conformable result of unflinching perseverance.
  • The brooch, purchased from a grand duchess in Essentuki who needed money, had been distributed for safekeeping among companions as protection against pillaging during the scientific expedition; Gurdjieff had assumed it long since lost or stolen.
  • The American tour, undertaken with forty-six people, no cash reserves, no language skills, and incomplete demonstration programs, ‘far outstripped expectations’—and would have secured all branches of the Institute permanently had Gurdjieff not suffered a serious accident on his return to France.