# Mr. Gurdjieff’s Original Approach to Life
## Mr. Gurdjieff’s Original Approach to Life
Alexandre de Salzmann
*Dedicated to Jeanne de Salzmann*
It is difficult to speak of Mr. Gurdjieff when you haven’t known him directly, and difficult perhaps even for those who have. I’m not here as a historian or academic, but simply as a seeker committed to this way, although all paths are preparation for a Single Universal Way.
This Work suffers from a reputation of secrecy or exclusivity. Far from being elitist, this is perhaps due to the concern of those who came before us to preserve the intimate nature required by this search, to prevent a reductive and misguided understanding of it. Today, it seems to me that the greatest danger on this path is not a dilute transmission of ideas, but the risk of settling into a certain comfort, of fixing a dogma and being satisfied with knowing better states. Gurdjieff, on the other hand, would allow none of this; he calls for something else. His own life bears witness to this. Given the grandeur of his metaphysical vision, it wouldn’t be right to presume to interpret what he wished to do. I’ll pull just a few threads.
### What He Asked of Himself: Without Pity for Himself
He asked of himself without compromise, and to a greater extent, the demands he made on his students. He created obstacles for himself, often introducing sand in the cogs of his own projects to stay alert, to find solutions, to adapt, not to function mechanically.
Until late in life, he exercised internally through numerical counting of great complexity to occupy the part of the mind that tends to wander. In his role as “Monsieur Bonbon,” at the precise moment when he gave a candy to a child, he committed himself internally to remember himself strongly.
To favor his inner work rather than its glorious manifestation, he chose his own version of the “Path of Blame” to be discredited, sometimes to the point of losing face.
The choice of Beelzebub as the hero of his allegorical tale can only lead right-thinking humanity to consider him dubious at first glance.
What he called “super-effort,” often so misunderstood, this surpassing of one's own limits—he exemplified it, even if he said that he had found a way to connect to the great accumulator to accomplish everything he undertook.
In this quest for difficulty, we can also mention working after drinking alcohol, working when tired, or working when peaceful outer conditions were completely absent: for example, he wrote his books in large cafés, in the midst of tumult, not least to feel an impulse of pity for the human condition. It was not a question of passively suffering but of intentionally enduring. It took courage, and no one can deny that he was endowed with it.
### How He Behaved: An Axis in the Middle of Chaos
He represents, he *is* what he proposes. We are in the presence of a real incarnation, not an ethereal evocation.
If he stayed in Paris during the German occupation, it was to help both his pupils and Russian refugees or the poor in his neighborhood. Perhaps he acted, on a subtle level, on an even larger scale. However, he was not limited to the linear idea of “choosing between good and evil” and did not hesitate to resort to the black market to be able to feed those who came to him. He fundamentally loved human beings, which explains his warmth, his humanity.
Taking care of the shopping, cooking, sharing meals, and washing dishes was a complete act: it was about doing things to the end, even at an advanced age.
He refused to be put on a pedestal. Mr. Bennett relates his anger when someone proposed a toast in his honor. Despite the vehemence of his anger, he masterfully personified his invitation to his pupils to play a role externally while remaining free internally.
Legends abound about his behavior, often created from second-hand accounts. They are certainly a reflection of his way of being, but we come to interpretations a little too quickly. Do we really know what he did and why he did it? We can say that everything was intended to awaken, but what really was beyond that? So much energy is devoted to making someone feel and understand something specific.
Lise Etiévan, who helped in his household at the end of his life, describes him as an extraordinarily silent man and says that in his presence, one became silent.
He embodied elements of knowledge that we do not have, but the evidence was undeniable: in his presence, the energy changed. This energy testified to a quality of being. The Work begins at the level of this energy; Jeanne de Salzmann understood this. In the way she developed the Work, she showed that for him, knowledge without feeling makes no sense.
### Doing Differently: The Price of Freedom
As a child, he received a word from his dying grandmother: “Never do anything like others! ... or just go to school...” He clearly states that this injunction is a founding element of his life. Later, in the chapter about Art and the transmission of knowledge in *Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson*, he evokes a “doing differently” inherited from ancestral wisdom.
He was not a simple compiler of various traditional teachings: he lived what he shared and constantly asked others to verify it for themselves.
When he deliberately left doubt about the day, the very year of his birth, is it so as not to be reduced to this information? In doing so, he encourages minds not to count on a date to understand a being and to shake the belief that having knowledge of a chronology is to know.
He engages in “stepping on the corns” of those he meets, that is to say, confronting them with their contradictions and their weakness. It was, in reality, an act of kindness on his part, but it is not surprising that some couldn’t cope with it: we flee because we are afraid of losing what we believe we have. As for those who saw the possibility of change, he helped them incredibly, while proclaiming at the Institute in the 1920s: “Here we can only direct and create conditions, but not help.”
By refusing to be considered a master, he wanted to avoid a form of devotion that would only be a projection of the ego rather than a step aside from it. One can be dedicated, as he himself was, but without idolatry. In 1924, realizing that his Institute had not produced results that met his expectations, he decided to change his approach: he would devote himself to writing.
### Vulnerability: Conscious Man is not a Superman
The sincerity with which Mr. Gurdjieff acknowledged his failures was, for understandable reasons, later toned down. In the second series of his works, *Meetings with Remarkable Men*, is a chapter entitled “The Material Question.” He had originally intended to call it “The Arising, Existence, and Death by Long Agony of the Institute for the Harmonic Development of Man.”
The prologue to the Third Series, *Life is Real Only Then When “I Am*,” has on some typescripts a subtitle: “The Quintessence of the Inner Activity of My Whole Life and at the Same Time My Confession,” or more briefly later: “My Confession.” It is in this book that he relates the moment when he committed himself to renouncing his “acquired powers,” the source, according to him, of all his vices. By placing them outside of himself, they would constitute a reminding factor when he would be tempted to use them.
On several occasions over the years, he said, “You have not understood!” in particular about the difference between feeling and sensation; between what is “intentional,” planned in advance in an appropriate state, and what is “voluntary,” based only on the habitual will that permits the result to quickly evaporate.
Jeanne de Salzmann said that she could hear his sobs behind the door of his room, so difficult was this transmission.
He also showed the purity of what remorse of conscience can be. He once wrote that he cried when he realized that he had not put cigarettes in the packet he had prepared for a young man from a poor family who was leaving for compulsory work in Germany during the Second World War.
In one of his writings, he evokes his consideration for those to whom he may have caused harm because of his commitment to a rather radical way.
### His Way of Teaching: Permanent Confrontation
By going through revolutions, wars, and poverty, one has the impression that he is trying to bring the people around him back to themselves so that they are not completely taken by events. This is what he calls developing individuality, but without the usual egotism. Practice of the exercises he gives goes in this direction: to nourish an inner world, an inner life, so as not to be entirely dependent on external conditions.
He seized on all circumstances encountered to put his pupils in front of their reactions, their contradictions, their inner lies, or simply in front of their pride. Beyond the limits of self-observation, he had the unique capacity of a master: to reveal to them their “chief feature” on what they had specifically to work. He urges each one to become aware of the arrogance of an overdeveloped mind; rightfully a guardian, it tends to usurp power.
He invited people around him to confront their own duality, to live it fully instead of dreaming of non-duality after having felt a greater unity by his side. It is his presence, the relationship he has with each person, that encourages work beyond the observation of what is wrong. His pupils are in the presence of a grandeur.
Louise March said, “He did not teach, he *was*.”
In his books, he can be deliberately obscure so that readers won’t have the illusion of having understood cheaply. He buries truths in passages of dull or almost intolerable descriptions; one passes over them quickly. For instance, when he describes the horrible custom of removing the limbs of animals one by one while keeping the animals alive, he mentions in passing that this has the unfortunate consequence of depriving them of their sensation and giving, half-hidden, an indication about a fundamental aspect of the relationship with the body. One has to dig and search, not just receive in a totally passive way.
What is important is what passes through him, the adventure to which he calls, not a system to follow blindly. He does not impose anything; he strongly and respectfully encourages those in whom he senses a possible response. He then becomes the servant of their transformation, capable of putting himself in their place so that they see their prison and showing them a path to free themselves from their illusions while leaving intact their free will.
### What Was His Goal?
We think we know: To find and bring knowledge, to return to the sources of what has been lost, but once one has said that.
He is not the first to be considered an awakener, a shaker of beliefs. Nor is he the first to show men that they are sleeping. In antiquity, Heraclitus wrote, The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own".
But awakening to reality has its dangers: What can we do if it is unbearable, if we actually enter domains where nothing is certain?
Everything we have reviewed here on Gurdjieff‘s way of life—I must admit that I do not do it, or on a minute scale. So am I really on his way?
This is not a teaching like any other, a philosophy or a religion; it is none of those. Mr. Gurdjieff wants to give a taste of “something else.” He told his Russian students, as early as 1912: “This cannot come through an institution.” It is beyond the understanding of ideas; rather, it is a question of “ideas to be lived—a drama to be lived,” said Jeanne de Salzmann.
In the “Material Question”, he writes that if what he offers has no impact, he will burn everything and leave only his *Beelzebub* and two chapters of *Meetings with Remarkable Men*. *Beelzebub’s Tales*, supposedly designed to sweep away deep-rooted beliefs, and we rush to draw conclusions and make concepts. We quickly pass over the final chord: that it will take a great deal of time or a new organ implanted in us to free us from a dark destiny.
No, we have not understood, but he left living material, Movements to dance with the laws, music for an experience related to the indefinable, and group work to learn to listen and to help each other. To live, despite the atrophy of the authentic impulses of Faith, Love, and Hope, and even with the fragility of our conscience, to live as part of the Whole, of great Nature.
Thank you.
### Author Biography
Alexandre Georges de Salzmann is a French physician, born in 1958, living near Paris. He is president of the Institut G. I. Gurdjieff in Paris as well as of the International Association of Gurdjieff Foundations. Son of Michel and Josée de Salzmann and grandson of Jeanne de Salzmann, he benefited from a particular exposure to the teaching of Gurdjieff. Dr. de Salzmann travels frequently to work with Gurdjieff groups large and small, from long-established groups in the Americas to groups of more modest size such as those in Vienna and Malta. In collaboration with a Slavic linguist, Dr. de Salzmann published in 2021 a revised French edition of Gurdjieff’s major work, *Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson*, corrected in light of the original Russian.
#### Suggested Citation
de Salzmann, Alexandre. "Mr. Gurdjieff’s Original Approach to Life" in The Teachings & Legacy of G.I.Gurdjieff: Conference Anthology, edited by Carole Cusack and Gosia Sklodowska. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2025. © License: CC BY-NC.