Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teachings

Rating:
Summary: An interpretation of modern science forcast by Gurdjieff.
Review: For Gurdjieff followers, both school and independent; this work verifies much of Gurdjieff's cosmology and psychology. The different contributors offer a sifting ground to seperate the fine from the coarse. The "factionalization" of the Gurdjieff movement cannot deter this infusion of new/old knowledge. Its 'Alice's' restaurant.

Rating:
Summary: A Large Collection of Articles & Writers
Review: The number of writers included in this book is 43 and the number of articles even more than that. Many of these writers have not written about Gurdjieff elsewhere.

The best in this book is that it presents many views of the people who had worked with Gurdjieff himself or those who were around him and carried his work on. Many of the articles are based on direct experience of the Work and only a few are speculative and theoretical. The tone of the book is positive; if you are looking for a critical approach to Gurdjieff and his ideas you will have to look elsewhere.

People are different and so are their reflections. Some of the articles are brilliantly written both in content and expression; some are badly translated from French, vague and with very little content.

About 70% of the book is on the Gurdjieff psychology and philosophy, 15% on the Movements and the music and 15% on cosmology.

Rating:
Summary: great, if you're interested in Gurdjieff
Review: This fat collection of essays comes at Gurdjieff from seemingly every angle but one--criticism. While Gurdjieff was indeed a serious, sometimes brilliant observer of many facets of human experience in his day, his best insights are hardly unique, and even those have mostly been surpassed in the half-century since his death. The real flaw in this book, however, is that no one here seems to mind that a very large part of Gurdjieff's life was spent conforming perfectly to the same old sad pattern of a "guru" working a typical religious con, exploiting a gang of pitiful, starry-eyed cult members who believed, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he could do no wrong. In an age that has seen the ravages of Bhagwhan Rajneesh, Free John, David Koresh and thier like, many of whom almost seem to have deliberately lifted from Gurdjieff's huge grab-bag of techniques for taking advantage of the gullible, it would perhaps be constructive to have included an essay on the dangers of blind faith to these manipulative "masters", no matter how brilliant they might seem on the surface.