Jack Kerouac Studied the Great Mystic G.I. Gurdjieff

Literature and esoterica are my main bags, baby. So it was that I fairly jumped out of my stool when I was reading Windblown World and came across the author Jack Kerouac — the man who made me want to write — writing about the mystic GI Gurdjieff — the man who first launched me on my spiritual path.

Windblown World, published 2004, collects journal entries that Kerouac wrote between 1947 and 1954. It provides an intriguing look at how Kerouac was thinking during perhaps the most creatively important period of his life (including plenty of entries of the thought process behind his classic, On the Road).

Iassume that anyone taking the time to read this will have at least a passing familiarity with Kerouac. In case not, however: Jack Kerouac was one of the most important American novelists of the 20th Century, primarily remembered today for the aforementioned On the Road.

I would argue that Kerouac was one of the most important novelists in world history, even, based on the simple fact that few books have shifted global culture more than On the Road. That book inspired countless people to look at life in a very different way, taking to the road in search of adventure and the eternal existential now.

Many formative figures of the ’60s counterculture (which Kerouac, ironically…