Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way

“Stephen A. Grant describes the three historic phases of the manifestation of the Fourth Way and so reveals in their surprising details the accurate nature of the inner esoteric work identified with George Gurdjieff.” —John Robert Colombo, author, anthologist, and communications consultant “In Meetings with Remarkable Men, the great, ever-mysterious spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff describes encountering in Central Asia the Monastery of the World Brotherhood. This monastery housed former followers of every religion, but they were so united in their pursuit of ‘God the Truth’ that it was impossible to discern any difference among them. In this lucid book, Stephen Grant, an accomplished attorney and Gurdjieffian, explains that they were fellow practitioners of an esoteric way—not a way of knowing but of understanding, of being, and living the Truth of God and Reality. Grant examines the extraordinary sweep of Gurdjieff’s work—his Fourth Way, which combined Western science with Eastern spirituality—to bring that ancient wisdom to the West. Charting the evolution of Gurdjieff’s teaching from his youthful search with the ‘Seekers of Truth’ to the earliest exposition of his ideas with P. D. Ouspensky to the writing of his ineffably original Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and his unfinished last book, Grant shows us how an esoteric teaching, like the cosmos itself, grows and evolves. Gurdjieff’s work is shown to live on in the work of his closest pupil, Jeanne de Salzmann, who emphasized Presence, attention with sensation and feeling. In the deepest sense, she realized the esoteric way to Reality that her master brought to the West, according to Grant. Her last words were: ‘I see what is.’” —Tracy Cochran, author of Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself