Who was this mysterious Mr. Gurdjieff, the dancing teacher, monsieur Bonbon, the Tiger of Turkestan?
Many people have asked this question and those who were close to him seemed equally puzzled. Hundreds of books have been written about him and still you wonder who this man was. What we do see is that it was clearly his task to seek for answers and to gather and unify what he found. It was urgent. A hundred years later, the effects of the two World Wars would be stark: the beliefs, customs and rituals of millennia would be swept away forever by the ‘muddy flood’ of modernism of the West. It was as if he had read the signs of the times with rare and painful foreknowledge. One of his remarkable characteristics, which indicated the strength of his unique personality, was that he took three oaths at certain intervals in his life: The first, at the age of 30, was to give up his extraordinary power of hypnotism. The second, in 1911, was to bind himself for 21 years to lead a highly principled life. The maxim was: to play a role outwardly, never to identify inwardly. The third he took in 1928
