Discovering Gurdjieff

On very small stools sat a few people I had never seen before, plus one or two of Bennett’s pupils.  All at once, just as I had decided that we must somehow infiltrate into this settled scene and find seats for ourselves, I heard the steady flip-flop of slippers approaching the entrance hall outside the room, not exactly a shuffle, but definitely the step of someone no longer young, whose weight and movement produced a disturbance in the air, something like a very slight echo.  I cannot say, now, that anything in me responded to these impressions. Various delaying tactics happened rather quickly:  a young Frenchwoman opened the glass door and very seriously, as if weighing something up, looked around.  There were various nervous movements on my right, and then, suddenly, there he was, slowly advancing across the narrow room and smiling at an elderly woman who had risen impulsively to her feet and, with hand outstretched, stepped forward across the space in front of the stools.  Indulgently, he halted to receive her greeting, looking neither to the left nor the right, a mere twelve or fourteen inches away from me, and it was as if he had brought with him some other quite potent atmosphere.

What I felt then was beyond evaluation; there was no inner comment at all.  Nothing :  neither approval nor disapproval.  I just stood there, quite free, as if suspended in a state of steady perception.  Long afterwards, I remembered hearing an account of Mr Gurdjieff’s teaching which exactly described this moment:  ‘You will experience something completely new, and must hope that in your struggles to understand you do not lose it too quickly.’

            Standing, more or less immobile, strangely outside the scene that was being enacted barely a foot away, I was suddenly deeply re-connected with that unknown ‘me’ who had reacted so strongly to the original news of Gurdjieff’s survival  ‘But he is alive and teaching in Paris’. This note, sounding once more across the intervening months, re-awakened what I had previously experienced. Blossoming again in a kind of deeply personal and secret confidence, an understanding which was much more than hope, and a kind of meekness and readiness for anything filled the places often reserved in everyday life for my restless analyses and constant self-justification  –  my endless comparisons, commitments, re-shufflings and deeply hidden belligerence.

            As words and elementary thoughts began to filter through this ideal state, uppermost in my mind I found the taste of truth which recent visitors had brought back to England.  This man bore no resemblance whatsoever to the kind of mountebank with piercing eyes who had been written off by some of the dilettante commentators from an earlier generation.  Now, face to face, I took in the faded extensive bruising left by the recent motor accident on his honey-coloured skin, as well as the wide, warm smile which somehow masked his eyes.  A maroon-coloured fez, worn at an unexpectedly carefree angle, completely obscured the shape of his head, and his air of deep relaxation and generosity was completed by loose clothes: a kind of grey smoking jacket cum dressing gown, also edged in maroon, over baggy old trousers surmounted by a white Russian blouse with an embroidered neckline.

            Just as he began to move rather slowly but very deliberately away from his central stance, I realized that despite the extraordinarily positive feelings that inhabited me, and my strong sense of ‘belonging’, I had in fact been completely outside his field of vision, both literally and metaphorically.  Now he wheeled around surprisingly lightly on his heavy body, making a small affectionate salute in the direction of an old friend of mine, and saying ‘Who have we here?’ before seating himself in a dark blue velvet tub chair near the entrance, and I suddenly found myself seated in the front row of the audience, much too big for my stool.