SOURCE: "Gurdjieff and Ouspensky," in A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching, Jonathan Cape, 1957, pp. 11-18.

In the following essay, Walker recounts the development of Gurdjieff's major theories.

Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

It is fascinating, and at the same time rather alarming, to look back along the line of the past and to note how thin was the thread which the Fates spun and how easily it could have been broken—and if it had been broken, then one's life would, of course, have been quite different. How little I guessed that when a young Russian journalist on the night staff of a St. Petersburg newspaper made a journey to Moscow in the spring of 1915 he was initiating a sequence of events which was eventually to be of the utmost importance to me also. 'What,' I should have protested, had a clairvoyant gipsy drawn my attention to this—'what on...