Great changes have taken place since the death of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff more than forty years ago, yet much of the mystery that surrounded him in his lifetime remains. This book staisfies the demand to "hear" his actual voice and direct instruction in the form of conversations between Gurdjieff and his pupils.

That any record of these lectures exists at all is due to a few pupils who, with astonishing powers of memory and in most cases entirely without Gurdjieff's knowledge, managed to write down what they had heard afterward, whether during the tense and difficult times of their escape from revolutionary Russia, or at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Paris, or during visits to American pupils in New York and elsewhere.

To lectures from the years 1917-1933 has been added the account of a conversation with Gurdjieff known as "Glimpses of Truth," written by a Moscow pupil in 1914 and mentioned by P.D. Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous. Gurdjieff's aphorisms, formerly inscribed a ove the walls of the Study House at the Institute, conclude the volume.