Anthropological research suggests that human beings in virtually every culture in history have ingested chemical substances to alter their consciousness.

• Certain spiritual traditions celebrate inebriation as a metaphor for conscious transformation.
• Sufi mystics speak of being ‘drunk with the wine of love.’
• The Zen tradition has a history of poets and teaching masters who were spirited drinkers of saké.
• Other spiritual traditions have employed certain ‘power drugs’ and psychedelics in sacred rituals and ceremonies as an integral part of their teaching.

The system of knowledge that Gurdjieff taught has a psychological side and a cosmological side, which form twin halves of a comprehensive whole.

Study of the psychological ideas is helpful in understanding the cosmological concepts, and vice versa.

To a certain extent, a thorough grounding in Gurdjieff’s basic psychological ideas is a prerequisite to approaching his complex cosmology.

G.I. Gurdjieff has been described as one of the most fascinating and remarkable men of the 20th century.

He possessed immense personal magnetism and profound esoteric knowledge of human transformation, and he brought a spiritual teaching of vast scope and power to the Western world.

• Yet, throughout his life Gurdjieff was an enigma even to his closest students and was widely misunderstood by observers, critics and the public.

Evolution is defined by science as an orderly and progressive development of organic life governed by certain laws.

From the perspective of science the biological evolution of plants, animals and humans is a series of irreversible transformations of the genetic composition of populations, based primarily upon altered interactions with and adaptations to their environment.

A rich and multifaceted literature has been created over the years from the pens of Gurdjieff, his direct students (first generation), pupils of his students (second generation), scholars and researchers, journalists and critics, and biographers.

At best these writings (Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, In Search of the Miraculous) are works of ‘objective art’ which convey, on multiple levels, great spiritual truths and ideas with an undeniable impact on the reader.

At worst they are shallow, ill-informed and misleading, as they attempt to define Gurdjieff and his teachings through the lens of subjectivity, preconception and dogmatic bias.

Taken as a whole, the Gurdjieff literature forms a composite multidimensional mosaic or portrait of this exceptional teacher, his teachings and his students