A flowing journey I have read this book twice. Once while in college, and then ten years later. If you are searching for the meaning of your journey - this book will help serve as a guide. However, be ready to question your beliefs and habitual lifestyle. Also, be prepared to read a page, or perhaps a profound paragraph or two - and then feel compelled to set the book down as you experience a visceral shift in the way you think and live your existence. Even though this book emphasizes at various times the need for you to find a "teacher" as a guide to help with your evolution - it is my opinion that this serves as a metaphor for discovering the teacher within. This book is a slow read - and some parts may seem perplexing or confusing, especially the sacred laws of geometry and mathematics (i.e.: The law of seven) - but I recommend you continue with your reading effort; if you do so - you will be rewarded. Since I am an environmental author and avid reader - I found this book helpful in connecting the dots relative to the lives and writings of some of the world's most profound teachers and scientists.
An Awakening Experience People interact with each other purely in a mechanical way. Most of them prefer this way of "life", going about their business totally asleep. But there are a few who want to wake up, who want to BE. It's not easy. It never is. But if you are one who wants to truly BE, then this book will help you on your first steps to the path; but only if you are willing to "see".
This book tells "how it is", not a bunch of spellbinding fairy tales with rituals and magic spells. This is a book for the true student of Way.In Search of the Miraculous; Fragments of an Unknown Teaching In Search of the Miraculous, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, arguably stands foremost among the various attempts that have been made by Gurdjieff's pupils to introduce his evolutionary ideas through writing. It may be surprising to some that Ouspensky received from Gurdjieff the material organized in this book over a period of only three years, from 1915 to 1918. After his relatively brief but apparently intensive initiation into various aspects of the teaching, Ouspensky separated himself from his teacher for personal reasons while other pupils remained with Gurdjieff to receive advanced instruction for many years until Gurdjieff's death in 1949.
People continue to seek out the Gurdjieff work today under the influence of Ouspensky's extraordinary book. It should be required reading for anyone interested in Gurdjieff. For many people this is the first source of acquaintance with Gurdjieff's ideas. The serious student, by entering into practical work, which extends the process of learning beyond the intellectual study of ideas, may come to discover what the book's subtitle expresses. Evidently charged with the power to influence in the mind an unprecedented vision of reality, the ideas Ouspensky detailed are nevertheless "Fragments" of a teaching which is fundamentally oral in its nature and is intended to inform not only the mind but also the body, the feeling and eventually the whole of oneself. Whereas the truths Gurdjieff wished people to receive cannot be given through books and ideas alone, these true ideas, when heard, may be the first note of an octave of real understanding. The careful study of this book can be increasingly rewarding to the student who has entered into conditions of work under the guidance of people specially prepared within the lineage of those to whom Gurdjieff left the task of transmitting his teaching.
