Gurdjieff: A Beginners Guide

The idea behind Gurdjieff's Work is that our first birth is our physical body, which is all we need to get through life. But we are capable of developing into something higher, just as an acorn can stay an acorn and die or develop into an Oak Tree, we can develop into something higher. And whereas other methods often require the student to go to a monastery, sanctuary, or to retreats to separate from ordinary life, the Work uses our ordinary experiences in life as the material we work on for our development. These ordinary experiences are not some interruption to our lives, but exactly the material we need to work with.