Who was Gurdjieff?

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (January 13, 1866 – 1877? - October 29, 1949), also commonly referred to as Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and G. I. Gurdjieff, was an influential early 20th century Russian mystic, philosopher, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent. Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified mind-body consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to transcend to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff described a method attempting to do so, calling the discipline "The Work" (connoting "work on oneself") or "the Method". According to his principles and instructions, Gurdjieff's method for awakening one's consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk, and yogi, and thus he referred to it as the "Fourth Way".