“Man’s possibilities are very great. You cannot even conceive a shadow of what man is capable of attaining. But nothing can be attained in sleep. In the consciousness of a sleeping man his illusions, his ‘dreams’ are mixed with reality. He lives in a subjective world and he can never escape from it. And this is the reason why he can never make use of all the powers he possesses and why he lives in only a small part of himself.” - George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866?-1949)

Who is Gurdjieff? Referred to as the Greco-Armenian Mystic and nicknamed the Tiger of Turkistan, this enigmatic character appears one day in Europe from out-of-no-where to reveal a new esoteric teaching which belonged, nevertheless, to the most ancient Tradition.

Without being religious, his teaching unites all religions. Simple, as well as scientific, his explanation of human psychology and the energies of the body do not belong to Esotericism as such; and yet, it answers all its questions. And even though Gurdjieff does not reveal the alchemical sexual key to awaken the Kundalini and voluntarily omits talking about the Divinity, it is thanks to him that modern Gnosis has the most profound and precise Knowledge on the subject of working in oneself, the structure of the Macrocosm, and the technique of how a man and woman (the Microcosm), by using the Law of the Octaves,  can reconquer the Macrocosm by transforming the inferior energies of the ego to crystallize the Internal Bodies.

Insisting on the idea that the human being is really asleep despite the fact of having the firm “impression of doing”, Gurdjieff teaches that, in reality, it is the subjective aspects of our psychology that act mechanically through our three brains (intellectual, emotional, motor). The Remembering-of-oneself combined with superior emotions (Mysticism) comprise the unique method of preserving and regenerating the subtle energies of the body so as to ascend once again, octave by octave, to the higher worlds of Consciousness. This is what Gurdjieff calls The Fourth Way.

Worthy of the Knowledge that Pythagoras found in Ancient Egypt, these same keys are given to Gurdjieff himself in the time-honoured monasteries of the Orient and Middle East, whose locations he always kept secret. Handed down from Master to Disciple since the beginning of time, this Knowledge allowed Gurdjieff to awaken up to 70% of his Consciousness and to create his Internal Bodies.

He establishes numerous schools, first throughout Europe, and then in New York. He has many disciples (notably Ouspensky and Maurice Nicoll). He writes two books, generally misunderstood even today; and following an automobile accident in which he almost loses his life, he decides not to publish the third one which he was to reveal all his Knowledge. Yet despite this, the little that his disciples were able to expose in their writing is grandiose.

It was only a few years later that Samael Aun Weor totally revealed Gnosis, in which Gurdjieff’s “fragment of an unknown teaching” has a primordial and irreplaceable position.