The Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts

Gurdjieff was born (c. 1866) in the Caucasus, a region where many peoples and traditions coexisted productively in what remains to this day a border zone between Asia and the West.  He recognized in his youth that conventional Western science, philosophy, and religion could not answer his compelling questions about what he called "the sense and aim of human existence." Convinced that answers to his questions might be found in Asia, perhaps in remote religious communities sheltered from the modern world, he formed a group of like-minded associates, the Seekers of Truth, and for some twenty years traveled with them in search of missing knowledge through the Near East, Central Asia, India, and parts of North Africa and the Orthodox Christian world.  Early in 1912, he established himself as an independent teacher in Moscow (and the following year also in St. Petersburg) and began to transmit the ideas and practical methods for "work on oneself" that today bear his name.

When the Bolshevik Revolution imposed heavy restrictions on Russian society, he migrated with a number of pupils to France. There, just outside Paris in 1922, he founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, to which pupils came from the United States as well as many other countries.  While Paris and its region remained his residence until his death in 1949, he visited the United States at the beginning of 1924, established groups for the study of his teaching, and periodically returned to work with them through 1948.  The Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts traces its roots to these first American groups.