George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff was born (c. 1866) in the Caucasus, a region where many peoples and traditions coexisted productively in what remains to this day a border zone between Asia and the West. He recognized in his youth that conventional Western science, philosophy, and religion could not answer his compelling questions about what he called "the sense and aim of human existence."

Convinced that answers to his questions might be found in Asia, perhaps in remote religious communities sheltered from the modern world, he formed a group of like-minded associates, the Seekers of Truth, and for some twenty years travelled with them in search of hidden knowledge through the Near East, Central Asia, India, and parts of North Africa and the Orthodox Christian world.

Early influences led to Gurdjieff’s lifelong striving to understand the significance of life and the meaning of our human existence in relation to the whole of creation. During his twenty years of search in remote parts of Asia and the Middle East, he acquired an understanding of ancient knowledge that was long forgotten in the West.

Gurdjieff returned to Europe in 1912 bringing a fully-developed set of spiritual ideas to the West. These ideas were radical at that time as up till then little was known of the profound thought and spiritual yearning of many centuries of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism and others. He had distilled these perennial teachings and philosophies into a system of ideas that could be readily accepted and understood by the Western way of thought.

For the remainder of his life, he tirelessly explored ways of passing his teaching on to others as his own understanding continued to evolve. Neither a philosophy nor a religion, the teaching’s underlying principle remains unchanged: “Know Thyself.”

In the 1960s, under the guidance of Stanley Nott, a direct pupil of Gurdjieff, the Gurdjieff Society of Australia was founded.  Nott had worked with Gurdjieff in the 1920s at the Prieuré.