His personality, what he has brought us, has permeated our era and any historian who would endeavor to draw up a panorama of human thought will be unable to account for it. After Beelzebub's Tales , Meetings with Remarkable Men , the second book undertaken by Gurdjieff, while illuminating the person of Gurdjieff himself, so poorly known, shrouded in babbled myths, assists us in better placing the meaning of the spiritual investigations that he proposes. He brings us, in a form all his own, the material necessary for a reconstruction . But Beelzebub did not emerge fully armed from the cosmos. His critical conclusions, his exhortations, the lasting call that he constructed, the apparatus for a harmonious development of man that he established, all of these are the result of an incessant confrontation, a re-creation based on scattered elements, the product of considerable intelligence, common sense, suffering, and sweat.
Meetings has exemplary value.
We are presented with models to follow. But it may not seem that way at first. In the portraits themselves the treatment is administered to the reader in another form. In my opinion, the quintessence of an idea can sometimes be very well transmitted to others by means of certain anecdotes and proverbs formed by life. So, a series of familiar anecdotes starts us off.