Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy [Paperback]

From a master biographer and longtime Gurdjieff practitioner, a brilliant new exploration of the quintessential Western esoteric teacher of the twentieth-century.

The Greek-Armenian teacher G.I. Gurdjieff was one of the most original and provocative spiritual teachers in the twentieth-century West. Whereas much work on Gurdjieff has been either fawning or blindly critical, acclaimed scholar and writer Roger Lipsey balances sympathic interest in Gurdjieff and his Fourth Way teachings with a historian's sense of context and a biographer's feel for personality and relationships. Using a wide-range of published and unpublished sources, Lipsey explores Gurdjieff's formative travels in Central Asia, his famed teaching institution in France, the development of the Gurdjieff Movements and music, and, above all, Gurdjieff's fascinating continuous evolution as a teacher.

Published on the 70th anniversary of Gurdjieff's death, Gurdjieff Reconsidered delves deeply into Gurdjieff's writings and those of his most important students, including P. D. Ouspensky and Jeanne de Salzmann. Lipsey's comprehensive approach and unerring sense of the subject make this a must-read for anyone with a serious intention to explore Gurdjieff's life, teachings, and reputation. This work is exceptionally well written, limpid in style, terse in expression, and clear in sense. It is more than an excellent introduction to Gurdjieff for readers who know little of him or his work; it is, in effect, Gurdjieff considered as well as re-considered. —Paul Beekman Taylor, author of G.I. Gurdjieff: A New Life and Gurdjieff in the Public Eye

“More than Gurdjieff reconsidered, this book is Gurdjieff rediscovered. Behind us are the rumors, shadows, circular repetitions of vague and undocumented criticism. We discover a man of infinite humanity. Gurdjieff was inl#.