George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

Quotes
“If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest.”-George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff in "In Search of the Miraculous": "[The substances that a man who follows the Fourth way needs for his aims] can be introduced into the organism from without if it is known how to do it. And so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises like the yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month in self-torture like the fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all the substances he wants, and, in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required results."

Quotes about Gurdjieff
"In March 1980, the month in which these lines were transmitted, I was presented (under the usual dusty backroom circumstances) a volume purporting to be the long-awaited Fourth Secret Teaching of Gurdjieff. For the past twenty years, we Gurdjieff fans had been titillated by rumors of this Fourth Book, which supposedly listed secret techniques and practical methods for attaining the whimsical, post-terrestrial levels obviously inhabited by the jolly Sufi Master. We had always assumed, naturally, that the secret methods involved drugs. So it was a matter of amused satisfaction to read In this newly issued text that not only were brain-activating drugs the keys to Gurdjieffs wonderful, whirling wisdom, but also that the reason for keeping the alkaloids secret was to avoid exactly the penal incarceration which I was enjoying when the following essay was penned."--Tim Leary (Changing my mind among others p192/3)

“The four "seats of intelligence" loosely described as the intellectual, emotional, moving and instinctive centers are neither harmoniously nor fully developed in the man who exists only in the third state of consciousness. A person may have a brilliant intellectual center and yet be an emotional moron. Or he may be well developed emotionally and yet have a moving center so inept that he can barely tie his own shoelaces. What Sheldon implies in the above quotation and what G. Gurdjieff taught throughout his colorful career is that man does not and cannot attain his full spiritual stature by developing only one kind of intelligence. He must, if he is to grow harmoniously, develop all four.”---Robert S. De Ropp (The Master Game p. 143,4)