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These lectures were intended by Ouspensky as introductory material for people interested in the work in England. This material is still unmatched as a brief statement of the work's psychological ideas. Designed to be read aloud at weekly meetings of small groups of people interested in the work, they are almost a basic primer of Gurdjieff's psychological ideas on consciousness and spiritual development. They were constantly revised as new groups came into existence and took their final form only after Ouspensky moved from London to New York, where he continued to teach from 1941 to 1947. The psychology Ouspensky sets forth in these introductory lectures has existed in one form or another for thousands of years and, unlike modern psychology, studies man from the point of view of what he may become. Once a man realizes how little control he has over his reactions to external circumstances and internal stimuli, he may wish to find a way to become free of this mechanical way of living. Ouspensky describes how a man must work simultaneously on his knowledge and his being to find inner unity and why although his development depends on his own efforts, this is very difficult to achieve without guidance from a school.¿

Alfred Richard Orage (1873-1934), whom G. B. Shaw declared the most brilliant editor of the past century, suddenly laid down his pencil in 1922 and sold his famous journal The New Age to work with the mystic G. Gurdjieff in France. Orage hoped that with Gurdjieff's help, he could come to a more fundamental understanding of the human species. For Orage, modern man had come to the end of his tether, and without the development of new faculties, he was convinced that the problems that pile up in front of mankind would not be solvable, and even the very will to live must decline. Gurdjieff claimed to have found a way to develop new and higher faculties, and to have been trained in the necessary methods and knowledge which had its sources in the hidden wisdom of the East. Orage worked intensively for more than a year with Gurdjieff in his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, and it seems that he had found what he was seeking. Gurdjieff, on the other hand, found in Orage someone whom he considered a brother in spirit. A spirit that was defined by Orage some years before as: ". . . displaying itself in disinterested interest in things; in things, that is to say, of no personal advantage, but only of general, public or universal importance." When Gurdjieff expanded his activities into the New World, it was only consequent that Orage became his emissary there. Orage arrived in New York in December 1923 to expound Gurdjieff's ideas, and until 1931, was talking to a growing group of interested people. This book contains the notes of many of these talks. We are grateful to the notetakers and their prudence to leave their papers to the universities of Yale, Berkeley and Leeds, who guaranteed the survival of these papers in their archives. Without all this combined effort, they would otherwise be scattered all over the world, largely unknown and "upon the verge of being irrecoverably lost" as C. Daly King once wrote. Along with Orage's Commentary on "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson," this edition completes the record of Orage's meetings, talks and lectures on Gurdjieff's teaching. Illustrated with 130 line drawings and 37 photographs

A student asked: I have heard the phrase "listening to the book in all three centers" and I am not clear on how it can be done. Orage: It isn't a matter of how it can be done, but of understanding what it means and then wishing to hear the book that way. Remember how you listened to stories you heard when you were a child, so that you participated, your hair stood on end and your eyes shone or you wept? That is reading with all three centers, and Gurdjieff would hope the book reading could be of that order. A. R. Orage's commentaries on Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson are an essential part of the Fourth Way literature. They demonstrate a way of approaching and understanding a work that Orage considered to be literature of the highest kind. As the figures in Beelzebub are mythological and their language, parabolical, the book may not be easily comprehensible by the average reader or Fourth Way beginner. Orage's commentaries help to clarify and simplify the important lessons in the book by serving as keys to understanding Beelzebub which, as Gurdjieff once said, are all in the book, but not near their locks. Available to the reader for the first time in its entirety, this present volume promises a multifaceted illumination of Beezlebub.

"The writing of 'The Courage Machine,' which covers ten years, was retarded by illness. For a long time I lived beside death. But I had a presentiment that something essential -- something foreseen in New York -- would develop for me during these last years. I was not mistaken."This book follows an evolution which, for me, is not a curve but an ascending line. There is a beginning and an end; a new beginning, an advance, and a new search; then again an advance -- but this time on an essential plane, where the great events are inner ones."Georgette Leblanc's first encounter with the celebrated mystic, teacher and philosopher, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, was the turning point of her life. Impressed by his vast knowledge and "unknown doctrine," she attended his Institute at the Château du Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon for two years. From then on, she continued to live according to his principles, absorbing his doctrine more and more deeply. Her effort to incorporate what she had assimilated during her years with Gurdjieff is recorded in the last part of the book.

What are we here for? Who set up the Earth and the Sun? How did we get to be what we are? What is life for or about? This book offers a rational philosophy and a new conception of life and the eternal verities at a time when the character of the universe is every man's guess, and the old moorings are adrift. The author sets out to prove in mechanistic terms the reality of the Soul and the inevitability of God. He does not write in the symbols of faith or the intricate formulas of science. A book for everyone who is puzzled by new cults, creeds, beliefs and unbeliefs. A harbor in the uncharted seas of current thought. "Find, to begin with, who does what a man does, and what for? Is he just his body, or does an invisible entity animate and utilize its parts? If he be no more than his body, then life is an interaction between an organism and an environment, and it begins and ends here and now. If this be so, let us face the truth and make the most of our span. If man be this entity, then this is his vehicle -- discover the character and mode of the affiliation: who confined him in its frame, and what is being done or demonstrated during his occupation of it?" This book proves that the human race is more important in the great scheme of things than it has ever claimed to be or thought it was. " . . . Mentally the trouble is due to the error of your philosophies in taking for granted the whole framework of earth, life and being, and assuming the interaction of its parts as the end and aim of existence. Here is a giant sphere woven of an intricate fabric of gases and metals, revolving on its own axis, following an exact orbit round a central power station from which it derives energy, illumination and heat, bearing an infinite cargo of passengers who are sustained from its substances by their own exertions; all according to principles so mathematical, so efficient that they are classed as immutable laws -- and in the face of a system so obviously a mechanism designed for a purpose, your wiseacres declare the whole business an accident! It's absurd." With the waning of organized religion man must seize upon something to explain existence. This book is essential to anyone who wants to keep his intellectual or spiritual bearings in a world overwrought by the conflicting theories of Einstein, Eddington, Jeans, Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Mr. Cosgrave says: "The mystery in the background of Life is not that men do as they do; it is the frame, circumstance and fact of their existence. . . . In the fervor of new undertakings our generations forget that they are mere pensioners of an ancient bounty, and that neither to the machineries of their bodies, nor to the constitution of the environment, do they contribute more than use. The discoveries hailed so enthusiastically are but disclosures of primordial provisions for the upkeep and operation of our kind; and our inventions but readaptions of old processes to altered positions." It is not a sentimental book. The argument leans neither on revelation nor theology; but it attempts to demolish the dogmatism of current science and to laugh Behaviorism out of court. It is told with clarity and humor. It is designed for the layman. To the believing reader it offers new light on the problems of human existence and a common-sense philosophy; to the skeptic it presents a definite and aggressive challenge. Mr. Cosgrave has been an editor of magazine and Sunday publications for some forty-two years. Under his guidance Everybody's Magazine achieved its greatest influence and fame. After fifteen years as a Sunday editor of the New York World h