Gurdjieff & Fourth Way

G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?-1949) was considered by some to be the greatest mystical teacher of all time, and by others to be a fraud. His liberation philosophy, commonly called "the Work," paved the way for now-conventional techniques of group and encounter therapy. He was born in Alexandropol, in the Russo-Turkish frontier, to Greek and Armenian parents. Although familiar with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, Gurdjieff preferred to devise his own occult teaching. He postulated that people are no more than machines run by forces outside their control. Human beings in such a state are essentially asleep. In order to wake up, they must work hard to penetrate their normal state of unconsciousness to reach the true consciousness inside.
Gurdjieff's ultimate symbol for his worldview was the enneagram: a circle whose circumference is divided by nine points, yielding an uneven six-sided figure and a triangle. The enneagram shows the whole universe, and how people cross the intervals of development via shocks administered by a teacher. Gurdjieff claimed the enneagram was his alone, but it probably dates to a very similar figure drawn by Athanasius Kircher in 1665. Gurdjieff called his system the Fourth Way, or the Way of the Sly or Cunning Man. There were traditionally three paths to immortality: those of the fakir, the monk and the yogi. In the Fourth Way, however, people do not need to suffer physical, emotional, or intellectual tortures, but merely start from their own life experiences. They work on themselves as they are, trying to harmonise all paths and using every cunning trick they know to keep themselves "awake."