Meetings with Remarkable Men

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Introduction

Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963) is one of the great spiritual adventure stories of the twentieth century. In it the enigmatic Greek-Armenian-Russian esoteric teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1877?–1949) tells of his early years in the ethnic melting-pot of the Caucasus, and his search in Central Asia, Egypt and the holy lands for the ‘ancient wisdom’ and ‘lost knowledge’ that he later taught to his students. We should, however, recognize that as strict autobiography Meetings with Remarkable Men should be read with caution. Until Gurdjieff ‘surfaced’ in Moscow in 1915, little of his life can be corroborated, and for the period covered in Meetings with Remarkable Men – roughly 1890 to 1910 – we have only his word. As his biographer James Moore remarks, there is ‘not one shred of independent evidence to confirm his extraordinary account – nor indeed to invalidate it’.*

In this ambiguity Gurdjieff followed in the footsteps – often literally – of his fellow esoteric teacher and compatriot Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), whose claims to have travelled around the world and, even more extravagantly, to have visited Tibet at a time when Europeans were turned away, remain controversial and unverifiable.† Like Gurdjieff, Blavatsky was in search of ancient wisdom, and, like Gurdjieff, after finding it she returned to the West in order to teach what she had learned; the essence of it can be found in her two compendious volumes Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). Again like Gurdjieff, Blavatsky emerged into public life only in her forties, when she co-founded, in New York City in 1875, the Theosophical Society. Before this her life, as the cliché goes, was ‘shrouded in mystery’, one that, like Gurdjieff, she went out of her way to create. Yet there is enough circumstantial evidence in her accounts of adventures in India, Egypt and the Himalayas to suggest that at least some of her mystical-spiritual journeys did take place, and the same can be said for Gurdjieff.

There seems to be something in the Russian spirit that unites the hunger for spiritual knowledge with a positive need for travel. Grigori Rasputin (1869–1916), the ‘Holy Devil’, an older contemporary of Gurdjieff, and like him driven by a deep spiritual hunger, once walked from his home in Pokrovskoe, Siberia, to the monastery of Mount Athos in Greece, taking in Jerusalem along the way. There is also the tradition of the Russian startsy, elders of the Church and spiritual advisers, who took to the high road and, like journeying Buddhist monks, preached their message throughout the land; readers of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) will recall the figure of Father Zosima. It is no wonder that one of the classics of Russian spirituality is the anonymous Way of a Pilgrim (1884), which recounts a pilgrimage across Russia while practising the Jesus Prayer, a kind of Eastern Orthodox mantra. But it is not only in light of the spiritual tradition of Holy Russia that the journeys recounted in Meetings with Remarkable Men should be seen. The Western occult and esoteric traditions also inspired prodigious travels. The Swiss alchemist and natural healer Paracelsus (1493–1541) covered most of Europe on foot. In the eighteenth century, the character of the occult ‘noble traveller’ was exemplified in figures like the Comte de Saint-Germain (1712?–84) and Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo (1743–95), who crisscrossed the continent incessantly, seeking out initiations and initiating others in turn. Gurdjieff’s contemporary, the notorious dark magician Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), spanned the globe and, among other exploits, made two attempts on the Himalayas.

If Gurdjieff’s recounting of his adolescence and early manhood in Meetings with Remarkable Men requires some pinches of salt, his later career is well documented.* Gurdjieff’s life became accessible to independent corroboration in Moscow in the spring of 1915 when the Russian writer and journalist Peter Demianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947) reluctantly agreed to a meeting with a ‘certain G., a Caucasian Greek, who led a group engaged in various “occult” investigations and experiments’.† Ouspensky was reluctant to meet this ‘certain G.’ because he himself had just returned from his own spiritual journey, a ‘search for the miraculous’ that took him to Egypt, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India, among other places, and from which he came back empty handed. Ouspensky, like Gurdjieff, called himself a ‘seeker of truth’, and he had been in search of ‘schools’ from which he could learn ‘an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used’ that could help him to escape from ‘the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live’.‡ His search, however, proved disappointing, and Ouspensky wasn’t looking for gurus. Ouspensky was a well-known authority on mysticism and ‘higher consciousness’ – his book Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World (1912) had made his reputation – and his accounts of his travels appeared in the popular press. Ouspensky didn’t know it, but the students of Gurdjieff who urged him to meet their master had read his articles and books in advance. Gurdjieff knew of Ouspensky and was determined to ‘ensnare’ him; it was only after the persistent efforts of Gurdjieff’s students that Ouspensky eventually accepted the invitation.

In his account of his years with Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous (1949) – still the best introduction to Gurdjieff’s ideas – Ouspensky writes of their meeting in a dingy Moscow café, frequented by ‘small dealers’ and ‘commission agents’. ‘I saw a man of an oriental type, no longer young, with a black moustache and piercing eyes, who astonished me first of all because he seemed to be disguised and completely out of keeping with the place and its atmosphere. I was still full of impressions of the East. And this man with the face of an Indian rajah or an Arab sheik whom I at once seemed to see in a white burnoose or gilded turban, seated here … in a black overcoat with a velvet collar and black bowler hat, produced the strange, unexpected and almost alarming impression of a man poorly disguised, the sight of whom embarrasses you because you see he is not what he pretends to be and yet you have to speak and behave as though you did not see it.’* They spoke of India and yoga and Ouspensky quickly understood that Gurdjieff had been to places he had only heard of and very much wanted to visit. After their first meeting came others and for the next few days Ouspensky importuned Gurdjieff with dozens of questions. They spoke of drugs – Ouspensky had already experimented with nitrous oxide and hashish – and the war, and many other things, but what struck Ouspensky most was Gurdjieff’s insistence on what at first sight seems an absurd idea: that human beings are ‘asleep’. Human beings, Gurdjieff told Ouspensky, are ‘machines’ and their actions, beliefs and ideals are entirely ‘mechanical’. ‘All the people you see, all the people you know, all the people you may get to know, are machines, actual machines working solely under the power of external influences.’† This revelation shocked Ouspensky and he could not completely accept it.‡ But with a world erupting into war, Gurdjieff’s diagnosis must have seemed acute. Ouspensky was impressed by this ‘certain G.’, he felt certain that Gurdjieff knew what he wanted to know. And when Gurdjieff began to speak of how one can stop being a machine and ‘wake up’, Ouspensky was hooked. Ironically, the ‘school’ he had sought in faraway places seemed to be right there, practically on his doorstep.

Ouspensky remained Gurdjieff’s student for the next four years. Against the backdrop of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Civil War – In Search of the Miraculous is itself a kind of spiritual adventure story – Ouspensky subjected himself to Gurdjieff’s stern command. But by 1921, when he found himself among many other White Russian refugees stranded in Constantinople, he had broken with his teacher and was following his own path. He was in luck. An enthusiastic reader of Tertium Organum, Lady Rothermere, wife of the wealthy newspaper baron, was determined to meet him and financed his escape to London. If that wasn’t miraculous enough, she also arranged for Ouspensky to lecture on Gurdjieff’s philosophy – he had abjured the teacher but not the teaching – to audiences that included T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Algernon Blackwood and A. R. Orage, the flamboyant editor of The New Age, the pre-eminent ‘journal of ideas’ at the time.* In 1922 Gurdjieff opened his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieuré des Basse Loges in Fontainebleau – at one time the home of Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame de Maintenon – a large chateau with immense grounds about forty miles south-east of Paris. Orage gave up his editorship of The New Age and went to Fontainebleau to devote himself to what would come to be known as the ‘Work’. Maurice Nicoll, one of C. G. Jung’s earliest English followers, gave up his lucrative Harley Street practice, and, with young wife and infant child, did the same. Many others followed – including the writer Katherine Mansfield – and both Orage and Nicoll would become respected exponents of Gurdjieff’s ideas. Gurdjieff introduced the sacred ‘oriental dances’, whose origin, he claimed, came from the mysterious Sarmoung Brotherhood he speaks of in Meetings with Remarkable Men, and it was as a ‘teacher of dances’ that in the 1920s Gurdjieff was most known. Soon newspapers spoke about the ‘Forest Philosophers’ who had taken up residence in the woods of Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff’s Institute was prospering and attracting more students, many from the United States, and the future looked good for the Harmonious Development of Man.

Then, in July 1924, something happened. Returning to Fontainebleau from Paris, Gurdjieff’s Citroën left the road at high speed and smashed into a tree. Gurdjieff sustained serious injuries. He was found unconscious – he would remain so for five days – lying near the wreck, covered in blood, his head resting on a cushion. How he came to be in this position remains a mystery. Several other mysteries surround the crash, enough to lead some to suggest that Gurdjieff somehow arranged the accident.* It was what he called a ‘shock’, a sudden change, which upset the apple cart and created confusion in those around him. Routine, established patterns, a predictable course of events: these lull us into the ‘sleep’ it was Gurdjieff’s mission to oppose. His Institute was designed to tackle this problem, but it, too, was subject to it. Proceedings there could also become routine. Additionally, Gurdjieff was burdened with onerous financial responsibilities, and was supporting many members of a large extended family. There are strong reasons to believe that he felt the need for a complete change. In any event, two months after his accident, Gurdjieff announced that he was ‘liquidating’ the Institute. It was shutting down. He was turning his hand to another tactic. Gurdjieff, the teacher of dances, was becoming a ‘professional writer’.

From 1925 to 1935 Gurdjieff laboured at putting his ideas onto paper, writing in cafés, restaurants and other public places, embodying his belief that the ‘Work’ must be performed in the midst of life. He conceived of three ‘series’ of writings, each of which had a specific aim and purpose. The First Series encompasses that jaw-breaker of a masterpiece, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950). Its aim was to ‘destroy mercilessly, without any compromise whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world’.* Readers familiar with Beelzebub may accept that it accomplishes its objective. To say it is a difficult book is an understatement. Gurdjieff knots his narrative with endless dependent, subordinate and parenthetical clauses, throws in so many neologisms, and makes so many outrageous claims, that only the most dedicated readers find their way to its pith. In the spaceship Karnak, Beelzebub – one of the names of the devil – and his grandson hurtle through space, and along the way Beelzebub opines on the human condition; that, for some 1,200 pages, is more or less the plot. The result suggests a mash-up between Tristram Shandy and Finnegans Wake, but somewhat less readable. Some suggest Gurdjieff wrote it in this way purposely, to repel the merely curious; others say it is the work of man not quite sane; while others say he was simply an atrocious writer.

This last opinion seems countered by his Second Series, Meetings with Remarkable Men, which, if nothing else, shows that, when he wanted to, Gurdjieff could write clearly. Meetings with Remarkable Men is more than readable, it is gripping, entertaining, often moving, and fulfils Gurdjieff’s aim of ‘concealing serious thoughts in an enticing, easily grasped outer form’, something that Peter Brook’s 1979 solemn film adaptation failed to achieve. It is not surprising that most readers first coming to Gurdjieff disobey his injunction that they begin with Beelzebub, and start with this simpler, more congenial work instead. Gurdjieff’s Third Series, Life is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ (1974), was abandoned and remains fragmentary, and one earlier effort, The Herald of the Coming Good (1933), was considered a disaster, its bombastic style and incredible claims being so outlandish that soon after publication any unsold copies were rounded up and destroyed. After 1935 Gurdjieff abandoned writing and returned to teaching small groups, for a time in New York, but mostly in Paris, where he died in 1949.

The aim of Meetings with Remarkable Men, according to Gurdjieff, is to ‘acquaint the reader with the material required for new creation and to prove the soundness and good quality of it’.* Following the demolition job of Beelzebub, we are ready for a new beginning. But Gurdjieff also tells us that he wrote the book in order to answer all the questions about his life, his beliefs, his travels, that he had been pestered with for years. Gurdjieff solves both problems by introducing the reader to his life and to the many people who have had an instructive influence on him; these are his ‘remarkable men’, although we should note that we also meet at least one remarkable woman – the unforgettable Vitvitskaïa – as well as a remarkable dog, Philos. As more than one commentator has suggested, with the exception of his father, there is little evidence for the actual existence of Gurdjieff’s remarkable men. Dean Borsh, Bogachevsky, Abram Yelov, Professor Skridlov, and the others may be composites of different people, aspects of Gurdjieff himself, or fictional characters, allegorical figures invented to convey a particular idea or meaning. Or they may, with equal verifiability, have been real people. This uncertainty is only one aspect of a multi-levelled work, which is at once adventure story, parable, memoir and metaphysical marvel tale.

Gurdjieff was born to a Greek father and an Armenian mother, but exactly when remains unclear. The years 1866, 1872, 1874 and 1877 are all possible years of his birth. The year 1877 has a certain prominence because it was the date on Gurdjieff’s passport. Yet Gurdjieff destroyed his birth certificate in 1930 on the eve of a trip to America – an example of his deliberate ‘mystery mongering’ – and all the evidence suggests that he could easily fake a date on a passport, so there is no guarantee it is correct. His birthday is 28 December, but, making allowances for the Old Russian calendar, his followers celebrate it on 13 January. The ambiguity over when Gurdjieff was born also impacts his nationality. He could be Russian or Turkish, depending on the year. If before 1877, he was Turkish; the place of his birth was then under Turkish rule and was called Gümrü. If after 1877, the Russians ruled it, and it was called Alexandropol.

In 1878 his family moved to nearby Kars, which was captured by the Russians in 1877, and it was here that Gurdjieff grew up. It was a turbulent, unsettled and shifting world, and Gurdjieff knew few boundaries and little sense of Western order. As he suggests in Meetings with Remarkable Men this uncertainty taught him to be alert and aware of his surroundings, and to take opportunities that others missed, a lesson he would be at pains to pass on to his students.

The book’s first remarkable man, Gurdjieff’s own father, was a carpenter. After losing a lucrative business he was driven to become a labourer, but his real love was poetry. He was a bard, and Gurdjieff was impressed when he read about a recent archaeological find, ancient tablets containing fragments of the epic Gilgamesh. This was one of the traditional tales his father often recited. He had learned it from another bard who had himself learned it from another, and the recognition of an ancient oral tradition, still alive after centuries, fuelled Gurdjieff’s own later search for ancient ‘schools’.

It is at this point that Gurdjieff’s ‘search’ began. Early on he had shown a fascination for the occult. As an adolescent he witnessed fortune telling, faith healing, table-rapping – all very popular at the time in Europe and North America – even vampirism, and, as he tells us, the death of his sister provoked questions about the afterlife. His biographer James Webb wonders if Gurdjieff actually witnessed some of these strange occurrences but concludes that, of them all, Gurdjieff’s encounter with a Yezidi does ring true. The Yezidis are a religious sect – mistakenly considered devil-worshippers – and are subject to a strange compulsion which makes them unable to step outside of a circle. Gurdjieff recounts coming upon a Yezidi boy trapped within a ring other children had drawn; it wasn’t until he rubbed it out that the boy could escape. Gurdjieff asked everyone about this, but received no explanation, and years later he experimented with a Yezidi woman. It took all his and another man’s strength to pull her from her circle, and when they did she collapsed.

Gurdjieff encountered other mysterious phenomena. He doggedly investigated each one, but neither priests, nor intellectuals, nor ‘men of the world’ had a clue about them. He read voraciously in science, religion and philosophy and concluded that human beings are, for the most part, lazy and incurious – a not uncommon realization – and happily accept whatever plausible story they’re told as the ‘truth’. Gurdjieff would not settle for this, and at an early age determined to uncover the real ‘truth’, whatever the cost.

Gurdjieff studied for the priesthood but he also studied medicine – an early union of spirituality and scientific method that would later impress Ouspensky, and which exemplifies Gurdjieff’s interest in healing both body and soul, the whole ‘harmonious man’. He also developed an uncanny facility for mechanical work, learning how to take apart complex things and put them back together, often making improvements in the process. As Ouspensky recounts in In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff’s later career centred on ‘fixing machines’ as well. His family was poor, so Gurdjieff earned money as a travelling repairman, and much of Meetings with Remarkable Men deals with Gurdjieff’s enviable knack and inventiveness at making money; ‘The Material Question’, added on as an appendix, is a fascinating and instructive account of Gurdjieff’s efforts to finance his operations. He had little regard for legalities. Working for the railway and knowing in advance a proposed route between Tiflis and Kars, Gurdjieff approached town elders along the way and told them that, for a price, he could ‘arrange’ that the train should pass through their town; it would have anyway, but they did not know that, and many were happy to pay. He dyed sparrows different colours, selling them to gullible customers as a rare breed of ‘American canary’, heading out of town at the first chance of rain. Such roguish tales lent an Arabian Nights flair to Gurdjieff’s spiritual travelogue – he also incorporates the Arabian Nights strategy of tales within tales – and Gurdjieff later put his entrepreneurial skills to work as, among other things, a carpet seller, restaurateur and practising hypnotist, curing drug addicts and alcoholics. Gurdjieff could have easily become a prosperous businessman – in fact, he often was.

With his friend Sarkis Pogossian, a theology student from whom Gurdjieff learned the virtue of ‘work’ – Pogossian trains himself to be always active and never waste time – Gurdjieff discussed the fundamental questions of human existence. They visited sacred sites and became convinced that a ‘hidden knowledge’ existed, a ‘ “certain something” which people formerly knew’, but which was now ‘quite forgotten’. Traces of this lost knowledge could be found in the relics of the past – an idea popularized by Madame Blavatsky – and together they purchased a library of ancient Armenian texts and relocated to the ancient city of Ani. There they discovered a monk’s cell in an underground passage, filled with old parchments in ancient Armenian. They learned of an ancient secret society, the Sarmoung Brotherhood, which flourished in 2500 BC. Gurdjieff believed remnants of the Brotherhood still existed, and they convinced an Armenian patriotic society to finance an expedition in search of them. Gurdjieff was, at least for a time, involved in some of the political movements of the day and was also most likely employed for a time by the Tsarist secret service. Much of his search was probably undertaken alongside somewhat more political objectives.

At some point Gurdjieff and Pogossian meet an Armenian priest who shows them a strange map of ‘pre-sand Egypt’. The idea that Egypt was at some time free of its desert has a long occult pedigree, but more recent writers on ancient civilizations suggest more solid, if controversial, evidence for this. In 1990 Robert Schoch, a geologist at Boston University, determined that weathering marks on the Sphinx were formed by water erosion, not by wind, and that this argued that the Sphinx was constructed at a time when Egypt was subject to considerable rain.* But Meetings with Remarkable Men is a work of ‘psychogeography’, in which the outer world is a symbol of our inner one. Gurdjieff associated Egypt with Atlantis – as many occultists do – but the ancient lost continent was for him a symbol of our sunken conscience, the awakening of which was one aim of his work. ‘Pre-sand Egypt’ then is a pointer to our lost ‘essence’, covered over by the layers of conditioning (‘personality’) it was Gurdjieff’s objective to dismantle.

Gurdjieff surreptitiously copied the map – he later told Ouspensky that a seeker must sometimes ‘steal’ knowledge – and, while working as a tour guide in Egypt, through it met the most memorable of his remarkable men, the tragic Prince Yuri Lubovedsky. Prince Lubovedsky was also a seeker and he too had encountered the Armenian priest and paid dearly to copy the map – a hint perhaps that Gurdjieff was the more nimble of the two. Seeing it in Gurdjieff’s hands, the prince befriended him, and a powerful bond, lasting decades, was forged between them. As leader of a group known as the ‘Seekers of Truth’, the prince invited Gurdjieff to join them. Who were these Seekers? Were they a real society, dedicated to discover ancient wisdom and lost knowledge? Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that he did not arrive at his knowledge alone, that he had companions, ‘specialists’.* In her accounts of her travels, Madame Blavatsky spoke of her ‘Masters’, Indian sages from whom she learned esoteric secrets in a hidden monastery in Tibet, but she also used the term more loosely to refer to the many men and women she met along the way, like herself, questers after truth, and from whom she absorbed much knowledge. The man who inspired her on her quest, the Russian Prince Alexander Golitsyn, was a real person, a Freemason who travelled throughout Europe, India and the East, seeking out sacred places and men and women professing esoteric knowledge.† Ouspensky himself spoke of the men and women he met on his own travels, people ‘who were interested in the same ideas that interested me, who spoke the same language as I spoke, people between whom and myself there was instantly set up an entirely distinctive understanding’, and Ouspensky felt that this was the beginning of a ‘secret society, having no name, no form, no conventional laws, but closely connected by community of ideas and language’.‡ Yet Gurdjieff’s Seekers were not limited to his own particular companions, or even to the kind of loose community Ouspensky speaks of. They encompass all seekers from all times, everyone with a sincere hunger to grasp the mysteries of existence. In this sense Gurdjieff’s Seekers are like the members of Hermann Hesse’s ‘League’ in his allegorical quest novel The Journey to the East (1932), who include real contemporary people, ancient figures like Plato and Pythagoras, and fictional characters like Don Quixote.*

The Seekers of Truth embark on a series of expeditions and one of Gurdjieff’s aims in relating them is to show us how to overcome difficulties in life, a central objective of the ‘Work’. It is here, perhaps, that the allegorical and symbolic aspect of the book is most strong. One challenge they face is how to cross a forbidding patch of the Gobi Desert. To overcome sandstorms, one Seeker suggests using stilts, to rise above the height of the storm. Another Seeker determines that the sand is actually of organic origin and can be used to supplement the food given to the sheep necessary for the journey – the sheep supply the expedition’s own food. A third Seeker realizes that the stilts can be tied across the sheep and used to carry both the Seekers and their equipment; they can travel comfortably, and use the time for study. Suddenly, what seemed like an impossible situation becomes straightforward – at least symbolically – and Gurdjieff concludes that the ‘difficulties of crossing the Gobi had been intentionally exaggerated’.

If in this account Gurdjieff is not pulling our leg, which he is often inclined to do, the symbolism becomes clear. The sandstorms are the confusion of ‘life’ and the stilts the Seekers’ ability to rise above it. The sheep are the docile, plodding individuals who, though well-intentioned, lack the more discerning perception of the true Seeker, but who are useful to them nonetheless – Gurdjieff often spoke of his students as ‘guinea pigs’ for his ‘experiments’. The sheep carry the Seekers and provide sustenance for them; this is one reason why Gurdjieff allowed people of all types to join his groups: he would find uses for everyone. On his own expeditions with his students – during a time when, with Ouspensky and a small group, he was trapped in the Caucasus by the civil war – Gurdjieff deliberately increased the difficulties, believing that, by surmounting these, they would not baulk at whatever life threw at them.

Finally Gurdjieff finds his way to the Sarmoung Brotherhood, taken blindfolded to its secret monastery, hidden in the fastness of Turkestan. The parallels with Madame Blavatsky’s ‘Hidden Masters’ in their mysterious monastery in Tibet are clear, but some have suggested that Gurdjieff’s Sarmoung Brotherhood actually did exist. J. G. Bennett (1897–1974), a British Intelligence agent who met Gurdjieff in Constantinople and became his student, argued that it is linked to a Sufi brotherhood known as the Naq’shbandis.* Gurdjieff spoke of an ‘inner circle of humanity’, who secretly guided mankind in its affairs, and, after breaking with Gurdjieff, Ouspensky tried his best to contact it. But this ‘inner circle’ may be a metaphor for the individuals who do overcome their ‘mechanicalness’ and ‘wake up’. Such an ‘inner circle’ indeed has a profound responsibility.

In the monastery Gurdjieff learned much. He learned the ‘sacred dances’ he later taught, and he also learned about the ‘law of seven’ and the ‘law of three’, about vibrations, octaves and other cosmological and psychological ‘laws’ that he later taught to Ouspensky. Much of this came to him from his observation of a strange apparatus consisting of a column, a tripod and seven arms, each divided into seven segments. The arrangement of the arms and their segments made up a kind of alphabet or hieroglyphics, which, if understood, communicated these cosmic laws. Gurdjieff tells us he saw much else in this mysterious sanctuary, and remarks tantalizingly that he shall perhaps one day speak of it in a ‘special book’.

That book, alas, was never written, but the one we have here serves well enough. We may not accept Gurdjieff’s teachings unreservedly, and may find his withering indictment of modern Western man too severe; we can do both, I think, and still learn much from him. Meetings with Remarkable Men depicts a life lived intensely, with direction and purpose, in a world full of meaning and the promise of that ‘ “something else” which must be the aim and ideal of every more or less thinking man’. What it also does is introduce us to at least one truly remarkable man.

G. I. Gurdjieff

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN

With an Introduction by Gary Lachman

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN

THE BEGINNING

Introduction

Translators’ Note*