Gurdjieff: Wartime Meetings (1938)

Transcripts of group meetings held at Gurdjieff's Paris apartment at 6 rue des Colonels-Renard in 1938, with Jeanne de Salzmann assisting. The meetings consist of direct exchanges between Gurdjieff and individual students — terse, penetrating, and highly personal — addressing the specific inner difficulties each person has brought: inability to self-remember, egoism, suffering without aim, hardness in the chest during exercises, and the difference between false and real self-love. Gurdjieff speaks with great directness throughout, diagnosing each questioner with unusual precision and prescribing specific tasks — working not for oneself alone but for others as an antidote to egoism, using voluntary suffering as the fire that crystallizes inner material, paying one's debt to Nature through conscious work. The exchanges reveal Gurdjieff as a working teacher at close quarters, responsive to the exact state of each person in front of him and uninterested in philosophy for its own sake. One of the most intimate documents of his teaching in practice.