The Gurdjieff Work
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Paris, 1922
"The ideas are a summons, a summons towards another world, a call from one who knows and who is able to show us the way. But the transformation of the human being requires something more. It can only be achieved if there is a real meeting between the conscious force which descends and the total commitment that answers it. This brings about a fusion.
A new life can then appear in a new set of conditions which only someone with an objective consciousness can create and develop.
But to understand this one must have passed through all the stages of this development oneself.
Without such experience and understanding the work will lose its effectiveness and the conditions will be wrongly interpreted; they will not be brought at the right moment and one will see situations and efforts remaining on the level of ordinary life and uselessly repeating themselves."
~ from Jeanne de Salzmann's introduction to Views from the Real World: Early Talks of G.I. Gurdjieff, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1973