Colin Wilson (author of
The Outsiders, The Occult, Beyond the Occult and other books) wrote a book about Gurdjieff and his associates called
The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff. It is comprehensive while being short.
If Gurdjieff’s ideas could be summarized in a sentence, it would be that man is like a grandfather clock driven by a watch-spring. Or like an enormous water mill driven by a muddy trickle of water. The strange paradox is that in spite of the inadequacy of his driving force, an enormous and complex mechanism already seems to exist. Like a ladder, man consists of many levels. The problem, then, is clear: to increase the driving force. Man may be more than half mechanical; but he can choose whether to live in a blank, hypnotized state, or whether to live as though some immense un-guessed meaning lay on the other side of this curtain of everyday reality, waiting to reveal itself to a sense of purpose. - Colin Wilson, The War Against Sleep, (page 80, second to last paragraph of book)