Gurdjieff, a Beginner's Guide--How Changing the Way We React to Misplacing Our Keys Can Transform Our Lives

When I grew up, my parents would occasionally go to Gurdjieff group meetings. We weren't a religious family, so that was the closest we came. Although I was hanging out with the kids rather than participating, I always wondered what was going on and meant to read about the concept somewhere down the line. I decided to finally check it out, and this seemed like an approachable guide.

To put the entire idea into a few sentences it would be something like this: We have control over our emotions and being. The Wikipedia article says it more abstractly: ‘Gurdjieff claimed that people cannot perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic “waking sleep.”'. It reminded me a lot of the This is Water essay which focuses on a similar idea. This very introductory guide surely only touches on the basics, but many of the principles I could see influencing my parents, and my development growing up as well.

Although the book is a good introduction to The Work, it only touches skin deep.

When I grew up, my parents would occasionally go to Gurdjieff group meetings. We weren't a religious family, so that was the closest we came. Although I was hanging out with the kids rather than participating, I always wondered what was going on and meant to read about the concept somewhere down the line. I decided to finally check it out, and this seemed like an approachable guide.

To put the entire idea into a few sentences it would be something like this: We have control over our emotions and being. The Wikipedia article says it more abstractly: ‘Gurdjieff claimed that people cannot perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic “waking sleep.”'. It reminded me a lot of the This is Water essay which focuses on a similar idea. This very introductory guide surely only touches on the basics, but many of the principles I could see influencing my parents, and my development growing up as well.

Although the book is a good introduction to The Work, it only touches skin deep.

It's easy to rate the teachings laid forward in this book as opposed to the book itself. Since this is the first book I'm reading on the topic. it's hard for me to separate the two. The book has some personal anecdotes which I didn't really find particularly interesting. He draws some references from other books, but none of them are very compelling. It would be more interesting to me if the book had some deeper parallels to other works and ideas. I recognized ideas from Buddhism, Stoicism, Adlerian psychology, Tao, etc, but I think the book failed to connect them.

So I feel the book was written by someone who's somewhat of a layman, and hence the rating 3 stars. To his credit, he claims nothing else at the outset, but that doesn't change my rating.