Religion: Harmonious Developer

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Not many people in the U. S. have ever heard of Georges Gurdjieff. Not many who have heard of him could repeat more than garbled rumors. Not many of those who know him know what to make of him. He is the strange head of a strange practical religion. Until two years ago his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was established in Fontainebleau, France. Then, an atrocious automobilist, he had an accident, closed the Institute. His subsequent movements have been obscure; always he has shunned publicity. Last week the few Manhattanites who knew he was in town gathered in Author Muriel Draper's studio to get another look at him.

An Armenian Greek in his 60's, he has a domed, shaven head, piercing dark eyes in an oval face, a walrus mustache, bull neck, a paunch, huge muscles. He is unaccountable, unpredictable. A clever man, he acts sometimes like a lunatic, sometimes like a genius, sometimes like a child. He loves to laugh, apparently enjoys being angry.

Once he fought a strange duel: he and his opponent hid themselves behind targets on an artillery range, lay there all day under the gunfire. At dusk Gurdjieff, unharmed, rescued his antagonist who was wounded, unconscious. He spent his youth wandering in the East, trying everything once. Say his followers, in the Tibetan mountains he found traces of a forgotten way of life, as old as Pythagoras (532 B. C..); he returned to Europe to teach it to a few. He bought the medieval prieuré at Fontainebleau. turned it into his Institute. Institutees lived simply, worked hard, learned complicated Eastern dances to Gurdjieff's music (he has written more than 5,000 pieces).

The main activity of the Institute was under the surface. Every Institutee, all the time, was supposed to practice The Method; to be aware of all bodily movements as though someone else were making them ("observation with non-identification"). The dances were valuable in promoting the objective study of one's own movements. This regimen was part of an attempt to attain complete self-consciousness—chemical, physical, psychological awareness-of-self. Achieving this, a man might properly understand himself as part of his environment, might develop will, avoid being machine-like in a machine age.

Gurdjieff defined a normal person as one ''capable of actualizing his own potentialities." Great example: Leonardo da Vinci. The normal person, he declared, was developed to his biological limit. He believes, for instance, continual selfconscious attention to olfactory sensations would finally render a man's nose as keen as a dog's; that similar results could be obtained with other mental, physical, emotional potentialities. Most famed Institutee: the late Katherine Mansfield, who died of advanced consumption (1924) at the Institute. Other onetime Institutees: Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson (onetime editors of the late Little Review).

Gurdjieff is now writing a book, most of which, in various stages of revision, has been read to his followers. Its name: Tales Told by Beelzebub to his Grandson.