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George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in 1869 in Alexandropol (Russian Armenia) and he is one of the few recognised great western masters to have lived in the last century.
Having spent his youth travelling and studying different (then-unknown) cultures, he devoted himself completely to working on awareness, in the sense of a means to awaken mankind from his everyday automatisms and bring out his hidden potential.
His knowledge ranged from music (he composed a number of pieces) to philosophy, and he used dance as a tool for harmonisation: he also wrote a number of texts that are still important today for anyone wishing to undertake a path towards inner awakening.
Gurdjieff had the opportunity to meet extraordinary men from whom he developed a conviction that something vitally important was missing from the view of man and the world found in European science and literature. He had decided to study medicine and theology, but his dissatisfaction with the limitations of this type of education led him to search elsewhere, on his own account.
With a group of "seekers of the truth" he travelled for many years through Africa, Asia and the Far East, reaching places that even the most attentive explorers might not have imagined existed. Where he actually managed to get to is impossible to say, and even what he personally reveals in his book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" is so shrouded in metaphor that the vague geographical coordinates are indecipherable.
In 1922 he founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Chateau du Prieuré de Fontainebleau near Paris. Here the "work on oneself" that he proposed had a firm base and attracted, amongst others, several European artists and intellectuals. He organised a truly independent community, growing food, keeping animals, carrying out various working activities and holding special classes of exercises for the "transformation of energies" which consisted of the famous "movements" drawn from the sacred dances, and of conferences on the theoretical aspects of the "work".
In 1924 he organised an American branch of the Institute, marking the occasion with a demonstration of his "movements", accompanied by the piano with the sacred music composed together with the Russian musician Thomas De Hartmann. Amongst those who became his followers here were writers such as Margareth Anderson, philosophers like Alfred Orage, who in those years had founded the literary journal "The New Age", and architects such as Frank Lloyd-Wright. We can also name among his famous pupils Louis Pauwels, Dorothy Caruso (married to the well known tenor), the extraordinary writer Katherine Mansfield and many others. Soon after his return to France he was seriously injured (but miraculously survived) in a terrible road accident that forced him to interrupt his practical work at the Prieuré and begin to commit his ideas to paper, resulting in works such as "Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson", the previously mentioned "Meetings with Remarkable Men" and "Life is Real only Then, When I Am".
During the Second World War he continued teaching with great difficulty, receiving groups of pupils in his apartment in Rue des Colonels Rénard; then suddenly, in 1948 he decided to resume his more extended activities. Sadly, a year later he passed away.
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Gurdjieff 
