The Tales and Philology

“Philology provides a better path to the truth than philosophy.” ~ George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff At the beginning of The Tales, not on the first page, but actually before the first page on the “copyright page”  we find the following paragraph: Original...

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Betimes in the morning say to thyself: “This day I shalt have to do with an idle curious man, with an unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious man; an unsociable uncharitable man. “All these ill qualities have happened unto them, through ignorance of...

Issue #5

Subscribe Issue #5 — June 2021 “A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows.” Control and Influence (Part 1) A number of years ago I had surgery...

The Revision of The Tales (Part 3)

As we noted in the first posting in this series, this discussion of the revision of The Tales is not intended to be a critical take-down of the Gurdjieff Foundation’s publication of it. Mme de Salzmann ordered the revision, and it was not published until after her...

Tales of Bodhidharma

A bearded Indian monk, the third son of a South Indian Brahmin king, appeared one day at the Chinese port of Canton and made his way from there to  Nanking, near the mouth of the Yangtze River. He was responding to an invitation from China’s Emperor Wu of the...