From Gurdjieff to Gremlins: teaching methods of a present-day fourth way school

Ross, Elizabeth (2011) From Gurdjieff to Gremlins: teaching methods of a present-day fourth way school. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

In the early years of the twentieth century a man named Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866?-1949) began teaching in Russia a system of personal growth that would become known as the Fourth Way. Despite Gurdjieff’s personal eccentricities, e developed a loyal following and on his death left the continuation of his system in the hands of one of his students, Jeanne de Salzmann. De Salzmann created the Gurdjieff Foundations, dedicated to preserving Gurdjieff’s teachings as they stood at the time of his death. In a paper presented to the CESNUR-INFORM Conference in 2001, Sophia Wellbeloved identified Gurdjieff groups as falling, roughly, into two categories: those who followed Gurdjieff’s teachings to the letter, without additions or alterations, to the best of their abilities, such as the Gurdjieff Foundations, and those who preferred to teach the work in the spirit of Gurdjieff, adapting the work over time. Tribe is a Fourth Way school located in Navasota, Texas which falls into the second category, incorporating contemporary books that would fall under the category of self-help, and rituals drawn from Wicca and Lakota practices into their teaching materials. In this paper I seek to examine the teaching methods and materials of Tribe in relation to Gurdjieff’s original teachings of the Fourth Way.

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