Gurdjieff Bennett and the Fourth Way (2)

knowledge available to us in the form of pupils‘ recollections and Gurdjieff's own
intentionally published works. These sources serve to provide perspectives on the
intended direction of Gurdjieff's fourth way school (although these perspectives are
not, as we shall see, always uncontradictory.)
Moreover, Gurdjieff's elaborate
spiritual developmental psychology has the potential to function as a tool for
discriminating the necessary inner qualifications for leadership.
Gurdjieffians and Post-Gurdjieffians
In this section I set up a picture of the main lines of transmission and claims to
spiritual descent associated with Gurdjieff and establish the significance of
J.G.Bennett as a focus of research.
Gurdjieff's pupils.
P.D.Ouspensky (1878-1947), Gurdjieff's most famous pupil, first met Gurdjieff in
1915 and finally separated from him (after six years of growing uncertainty and
intermittent contact) in 1924. – By this time Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were
respectively established in France and in England. – Henceforward until his death he
represented himself as a teacher in his own right teaching what he took to be the pure
version of Gurdjieff's ―System‖ (this is Ouspensky's term for his understanding of the
form of Gurdjieff's teaching from the period 1915-17. However, Ouspensky believed
that there was some essential ingredient missing from the ―System‖, but he denied
that Gurdjieff himself had it. 17 ) However, prior to the schism, several of his early
18