Meetings with Remarkable Men by G.I. Gurdjieff

The Book

Meetings with Remarkable Men was published in 1963, fourteen years after Gurdjieff's death. It is the second series of "All and Everything" (the first being Beelzebub's Tales, the third being Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am"). Where Beelzebub's Tales destroys the reader's habitual views through cosmic-scale critique, Meetings prepares for new creation by presenting models of genuine seeking.

The book is structured as a series of biographical portraits. Each chapter is named for a person who played a significant role in Gurdjieff's early development: his father, his first teacher (Dean Borsh), and a succession of companions with whom he searched for genuine esoteric knowledge across the vast and largely unknown territories of Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and North Africa.

The narrative covers roughly the period from Gurdjieff's childhood in the 1870s-1880s to the early 1900s, before he emerged as a teacher in Moscow in 1912. This is the most obscure period of his life, and the book is virtually the only source of information about it, which is precisely why it is both fascinating and frustrating: Gurdjieff controls the narrative completely, and there is almost no way to verify his claims.

The Remarkable Men

The "remarkable men" of the title include:

Gurdjieff's father: A bardic storyteller and practical farmer who taught young Georges the value of oral tradition, physical labour, and independent thinking. The father's stories (particularly the Epic of Gilgamesh, which Gurdjieff later recognized in archaeological discoveries) gave the boy his first sense that ancient traditions contained genuine knowledge.

Dean Borsh: Gurdjieff's first formal teacher, a Russian Orthodox priest who combined devout Christianity with a genuine interest in science and natural phenomena. Borsh taught Gurdjieff that religious devotion and scientific inquiry are not enemies but complementary approaches to truth.

Bogachevsky (Father Evlissi): A monk who became a Sufi dervish, embodying the possibility of crossing religious boundaries in pursuit of genuine knowledge. His transformation from Christian monk to Muslim mystic without losing his essential integrity made a deep impression on the young Gurdjieff.

Pogossian: A practical, resourceful companion whose mechanical ingenuity and physical toughness complemented Gurdjieff's more philosophical temperament. Together they undertook dangerous expeditions to remote sites.

Prince Yuri Lubovedsky: A Russian aristocrat and intellectual who brought scholarly methods to the search for hidden knowledge. Lubovedsky represents the intersection of Western education and Eastern wisdom.

Professor Skridlov: An archaeologist whose discoveries provided material evidence for the existence of ancient knowledge systems that had been dismissed as myth.

The Seekers of Truth

Gurdjieff describes forming a group called the "Seekers of Truth" with several of these companions. The group pooled their resources (money, language skills, contacts, physical endurance) and undertook systematic expeditions to locations where genuine esoteric knowledge might survive: Sufi dervish orders, remote monasteries, archaeological sites, hermitages, and communities that maintained traditions the modern world had forgotten.

The Seekers of Truth is a compelling narrative device and possibly a genuine historical group. Gurdjieff describes their methods with precision: they developed cover identities (travelling merchants, pilgrims, scholars) to gain access to closed communities. They learned local languages. They traded goods to finance their travels. They risked their lives crossing deserts, mountains, and war zones. The search was not academic. It was existential: they were looking for knowledge that could transform the human condition, and they were willing to die for it.

Whether the Seekers of Truth existed as a formal group or is Gurdjieff's retrospective construction of his actual (possibly solitary) travels is unknown. The narrative purpose is clear: to present the search for genuine knowledge as requiring not merely individual effort but collective dedication, practical resourcefulness, and the willingness to subordinate personal comfort to a shared aim.

The Sarmoung Brotherhood

The book's most famous and most debated episode is Gurdjieff's account of visiting the Sarmoung (or Sarman) Brotherhood, a legendary esoteric school reportedly located somewhere in Central Asia (Afghanistan or the Hindu Kush region).

Gurdjieff describes being led blindfolded through mountain passes on horseback to a hidden monastery, where he encountered:

• Sacred dances (Movements) that encoded cosmological and psychological knowledge in physical form
• Ancient texts preserving teachings about the laws governing human consciousness
• A community of practitioners who had maintained continuous practice for centuries
• Techniques for developing faculties of perception beyond the ordinary five senses

The Sarmoung Brotherhood has been the subject of extensive speculation. J.G. Bennett (Gurdjieff: Making a New World, 1973) attempted to identify the Sarmoung with the Naqshbandi Sufi order or with communities in the Amu Darya region. Others have connected it to the Ismaili tradition, to Tibetan Buddhism, or to the Yezidi communities of Kurdistan. Some scholars consider it entirely fictional: a mythological device for legitimizing Gurdjieff's teaching by connecting it to an ancient source.

The historical question may be unanswerable. What is clear is that Gurdjieff's system (the Laws of Three and Seven, the Movements, the enneagram, the concept of self-remembering) had to come from somewhere, and the Sarmoung episode provides one possible (if unverifiable) account of its origin.

Gurdjieff's Father: The First Teacher

The opening chapter on Gurdjieff's father is one of the book's most moving. Gurdjieff describes a man who combined the roles of farmer, livestock trader, and ashokh (bardic storyteller) in the multi-ethnic world of the late Ottoman-Russian borderlands. His father told stories from the oral tradition: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Persian legends, Armenian myths, Greek epics. He told them not as entertainment but as repositories of knowledge that the written tradition had lost or distorted.

When Gurdjieff later encountered the Epic of Gilgamesh in archaeological discoveries (the tablets excavated at Nineveh in the 1870s), he recognized the story his father had told him decades earlier, transmitted orally through thousands of years of unbroken tradition. This experience convinced him that oral traditions could preserve genuine knowledge across millennia, and that the dismissal of oral tradition by modern scholarship was a catastrophic error.

The father also taught by example: he worked with his hands (farming, carpentry), he maintained his dignity through poverty and displacement (the family was uprooted by wars), and he never compromised his integrity for material advantage. Gurdjieff presents these qualities (manual competence, practical dignity, moral consistency) as the foundation of genuine development: the base without which all higher knowledge is unstable.

Key Episodes

Beyond the Sarmoung visit, the book contains several memorable episodes:

The carpet expedition: Gurdjieff and Pogossian finance their travels by trading carpets, developing skills in evaluation, negotiation, and repair that serve as both practical training and metaphors for inner work. The carpet trade teaches patience, precision, and the ability to recognize genuine quality beneath surface appearance.

The canary trade: Gurdjieff describes painting ordinary sparrows to look like rare canaries and selling them in markets. When readers protest that this is fraud, Gurdjieff's point emerges: you bought the painted sparrow because you could not tell the difference between a genuine canary and a painted sparrow. The inability to distinguish the genuine from the fake is exactly the condition of human sleep.

The universal automaton: Gurdjieff describes building a mechanical device that demonstrates how human behaviour is automatic and predictable. The device responds to stimuli in predetermined ways, just as most human beings respond to life events through conditioned reflexes rather than conscious choice.

Autobiography or Teaching Text?

The subtitle "Material for a new creation" suggests that Meetings with Remarkable Men is not straightforward autobiography but a teaching text disguised as memoir. Several features support this reading:

• The chronology is inconsistent, with events seemingly rearranged for thematic rather than temporal coherence
• Some episodes (the canary painting, the universal automaton) function primarily as teaching parables rather than as factual accounts
• The "remarkable men" may be composite characters constructed to embody specific qualities rather than portraits of actual individuals
• The narrative structure mirrors the Sufi teaching story: each chapter presents a situation, a challenge, and an insight, with the insight carrying the chapter's real content

This does not mean the book is fictional. It means it is shaped: Gurdjieff selected, arranged, and presented his memories in a form designed to produce specific effects in the reader. The facts may be accurate, but they are in service to a teaching purpose, not to historical documentation.

The Peter Brook Film (1979)

The distinguished theatre director Peter Brook (who was also a Fourth Way student) directed a film adaptation in 1979, featuring the Afghan actor Dragan Maksimovic as Gurdjieff. The film captures the adventure and atmosphere of the book: the vast Central Asian landscapes, the diverse cultural encounters, and the spirit of relentless seeking.

The film's most memorable scenes are the performances of Gurdjieff's sacred dances (Movements), which Brook choreographed with authentic Fourth Way practitioners. These dances, which encode cosmological and psychological knowledge in physical movement, are the most visible legacy of Gurdjieff's teaching and one of the few elements that can be directly experienced rather than merely read about.

What Makes a Man Remarkable

Gurdjieff's use of "remarkable" deserves attention. In ordinary usage, "remarkable" means famous, exceptional, or noteworthy in the world's estimation. Gurdjieff means something different: a remarkable man is one who has developed genuine inner qualities.

These qualities include:

• Independent thinking: The ability to form judgments based on direct observation rather than received opinion
• Conscious aim: The possession of a purpose that organizes the entire life, not merely a career or a hobby
• Practical competence: The ability to do things with one's hands, to survive in difficult conditions, to solve practical problems
• Moral consistency: The maintenance of integrity under pressure, without self-righteous display
• Genuine curiosity: The hunger for truth that will not be satisfied by conventional answers

Several of the book's "remarkable men" are unknown to history. They are not famous, not powerful, not influential in the world's terms. They are remarkable because of what they are, not because of what they have achieved. This is Gurdjieff's most subversive teaching: genuine development has nothing to do with worldly success and everything to do with the quality of one's inner life.

Who Should Read It

Anyone interested in Gurdjieff who wants the most accessible of his own writings. Meetings is narrative, engaging, and often entertaining in ways that Beelzebub's Tales deliberately is not.

Readers of In Search of the Miraculous who want to hear Gurdjieff's own voice after hearing Ouspensky's account. The two books complement each other: Ouspensky presents the system, Gurdjieff presents the man.

Adventure lovers. The book reads, at one level, as a travel narrative through some of the most exotic and dangerous landscapes on Earth, by a man with the practical skills, the audacity, and the driving curiosity of a 19th-century explorer.

Seekers who want models. Each "remarkable man" in the book embodies a quality worth developing. Reading the book is like spending time with people who have achieved something you want to achieve. The effect is inspirational in the best sense: it makes genuine development seem possible, not just theoretical.

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