Daumal with Gurdjieff and the de Salzmanns

Gurdjieff International Review

Daumal with Gurdjieff and the de Salzmanns

Finding a Path

by Kathleen Rosenblatt

“A Man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering.”

G. I. Gurdjieff

In October of 1930, René Daumal and his friends began to notice a tall, solitary man who had recently begun to frequent their haunt, the Café Figon on the Boulevard St. Germain, where they convened every Thursday following their meeting at the artist Joseph Sima’s studio. This gentleman would always sit in a corner of the terrace, drinking many glasses of calvados and endlessly drawing curious Arab and Chinese characters. Finally, in early November, Joseph Sima recognized Alexandre de Salzmann from an earlier collaboration at the publishers Pégase in 1923. He presented the legendary artist to his young friends. According to Georgette Camille, a contributor to Le Grand Jeu, de Salzmann approached them on another occasion. After conversing a while, he asked those at the table to try something: to hold their arms straight out to the side for as long as they could. Minutes later, Daumal was the only one with arms still outstretched, and de Salzmann said, “You interest me!”¹ As it turned out de Salzmann was a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff, and these encounters were one of those fated “coincidences” dear to the Surrealists. It was a major turning point in the twenty-one-year-old Daumal’s life. Jacques Masui writes in his article “René Daumal et l’expérience Gurdjieff” that “Daumal was not content merely to accept the Gurdjieff teaching; he gave himself over to it.”²

Who was Gurdjieff the man and what was the teaching that so intrigued Daumal? According to those who knew him, he was a powerfully spiritual, enigmatic, unpredictable scientist of the soul. The late P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, described the effect Gurdjieff had on his followers:

His mere presence gave out energy. To receive his glance was to receive a moment of truth that was often very hard to bear. A master like Gurdjieff is not someone who teaches this or that idea. He embodies it himself.… I think I saw in him what every true master has: a certain sacrificial quality as though he clearly had come for others.³

In this chapter, we will give a brief overview of the history and teaching of Gurdjieff directly, and then examine the same concepts through the public and private writings of Daumal. In addition, we will open the door a second time to Daumal’s last fourteen years of life, viewing them through this new lens—his association with the Gurdjieff phenomenon.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1867–1949) was born in Alexandropol in Armenia and spent his boyhood in Kars in northeastern Turkey. Sources indicate that he was a child of exceptional capabilities, greatly influenced by his father, a bard or storyteller, who could recite from memory long stories dating from antiquity. Even as a youth Gurdjieff wished to understand the significance and purpose of man’s life on Earth. In this pursuit, he spent many years traveling in the Middle East, India, and Tibet. It seems that he visited monasteries of the Essenes, the Sufis, the Yasavis, the Kwajagan, and the Sarman Brotherhoods. These were esoteric communities connected with both Islamic and Christian traditions—what the Sufis call the “Inner Circle of Humanity.”

The Kwajagans, for example, emphasize the practice of spiritual discipline without retiring from the world. These are practical people, often craftsmen, who live in society but remain “invisible” to the uninitiated. The Kwajagans value the Khalka or group, the companionship of Master and disciple, and spiritual exercise (Zikr). They believe in the necessity for constant vigilance, in the Mujahede, the holy war, otherwise known as the struggle with one’s own weaknesses. Similarly, the Gurdjieff Work is a way “in life,” a “work on oneself” in the midst of the usual conditions of life. Gurdjieff seemed to have the ability to synthesize and incarnate in himself the essence of the ancient traditions he encountered. His mission as a teacher was to make them known in the West.

Gurdjieff attempted to bring his students to an awareness of the automatic nature of their behavior, to clarify the ways in which the undeveloped individual constantly reacts according to the notions of “like and dislike,” a slave to the conditions in which he finds himself. Gurdjieff drew upon an allegory originating from Central Asia, also found in both the Vedas and Plato wherein the human being is likened to a carriage with a horse and a driver, these aspects corresponding to the physical, emotional, and mental natures of the individual respectively. However, in the average man there is no passenger or master whose presence can unify and give direction. This is the condition Gurdjieff refers to as being “asleep,” that is, less than fully conscious, and thus incapable of “remembering ourselves.” There is no master because the master is asleep. P. D. Ouspensky, one of Gurdjieff’s foremost pupils, reports:

In ordinary conditions of life we do not remember ourselves, that is, we do not feel ourselves, are not aware of ourselves in the moment of a perception, an emotion, a thought or action.… In an ordinary psychic state I simply look at a street. But if I remember myself I do not simply look at the street. I feel that I am looking, as though saying to myself: “I am looking.”⁴

The teaching of Gurdjieff, known to his followers as the Work, speaks of the possibility of awakening to a higher level of consciousness. The first step in the search for greater awareness involves seeing oneself more objectively and developing an impartial moment-to-moment attentiveness toward impressions of the body and senses. In Buddhist practice this is also known as Dharmakaya, or mindfulness of the body/mind. “Self observation” brings body (the carriage) and mind (the driver) into a new relationship, one that can attract feelings (the horse) as well. It is this awareness, this remembering, that can bring together all three parts (carriage, horse and driver) in a more conscious state of integration, “self-remembering”—being present in this moment. “Remembering oneself” is the key to reestablishing the directive of the passenger (master). Dr. Michel de Salzmann, (the de Salzmanns’ son who also worked with Gurdjieff), describes this experience in Seeing: The Endless Source of Inner Freedom:

In the progressive process of seeing, one should first learn certain difficult things: not to interfere, not to prefer one aspect to another.… As one begins to realize that the fundamental aim is to become aware of the whole of oneself, then the sacred quality of “seeing” becomes as important as what is seen, and a balance begins to appear.… An attitude of seeing begins to prevail.… One is no longer taken by the forces interacting in oneself. We are speaking of a long, patient work—staying present to oneself and feeling the need to come back.… In the Gurdjieff teaching this is sometimes called “self observation,” finding a sensitive place where one can receive impressions, and letting things be as they are.⁵

These higher states of being depend on continued attentiveness to the inner experience of being present. Through such efforts the capacity for conscious attention (mindfulness) grows, as does one’s capacity to inhabit the body consciously and to open to finer perceptions of oneself and the universe. Gurdjieff utilized many approaches to assist his students in developing this capacity for consciousness, including meditative exercises, tasks requiring inner attention, sacred music, dances, and movements from the East, as well as the cornerstone of the teaching, the group work. The music and movements were not simply recycled from ancient traditions, they were reactualized, based as well on Gurdjieff’s own understanding of human energies. One anonymous French student of Gurdjieff, interviewed in 1977, said that “each dance seemed neither like something newly invented nor a literal reproduction of an ancient dance. When you were in front of him, each movement seemed like a creation, not an improvisation but a creation.”⁶

In 1922, in Fontainebleau, France, Gurdjieff established the Institute for Harmonious Development, a community of seekers who lived together under “conditions in which man could be continually reminded of the sense and aim of his existence by an unavoidable friction between his consciousness and the automatic manifestations of his nature.”⁷ Within this community Gurdjieff himself provided the friction by creating difficult conditions for his students, exercises and tasks requiring concentrated effort and self-awareness, unexpected events, and hard physical labor. He tried to galvanize his students to a sense of the urgency, a sense of the inevitability of their own death, of the need to awaken now.

According to Gurdjieff, one of the main purposes for disciplinary exercises was to distinguish in oneself the place of origin of one’s reactions. He felt that man had to study his “machine”—his body and his instincts—in order to begin to understand the mechanisms and the accidental external influences that drive him to move, now in one direction, now in another. We have seen that in Hindu tradition, disciplinary exercises were similarly encouraged. The special postures and breathing techniques that Gurdjieff demonstrated are similar to some yogic asanas (positions) and pranayama (breathing techniques). His exercises for focusing attention recall the Hindu dhyana (mental exercises).

Gurdjieff came to the realization of man’s state of sleep by observing his own psyche. He, like Daumal, had a tremendous interest in psychic and occult powers and developed them to a heightened degree. Nevertheless, he found that these powers did not help to maintain simple self-awareness. He then reasoned that he needed a “reminding factor,” a deliberately chosen difficulty or renunciation to keep himself awake. This “reminding factor” or resistance could be some permanent source of “voluntary suffering,” or any difficulty that was deliberately met. Consequently, Gurdjieff renounced his psychic powers, thus denying himself something he valued greatly.

Among Gurdjieff’s main sources was his early training in the Armenian Christian Church. According to its doctrinal teaching, renunciation or abashkharel is similar to the Greek concept of metanoia (religious conversion), literally, “to renounce the world, to carry punishment, or to deprive oneself of food.” It is similar to kavoutioun, another Armenian term meaning “suffering as expiation in order to straighten wrongs, to purify with blessing, or to heal by changing the flow of blood.”⁸ Thus we see that the elements of renunciation and nonattachment pertinent to the Armenian church doctrine, and to Sufi and Indian traditions, became themes in the Gurdjieff teaching.

As in Hindu philosophy and in Daumal’s personal beliefs, here renunciation and nonattachment can be understood on several levels. The word deliberate is a key to understanding what Gurdjieff called “conscious labors and intentional suffering.” Just as the friction of rubbing two rocks together can spark a fire, so the friction of deliberate renunciation can create the energy to see ourselves and change our “mechanical” thinking. On the other hand, Gurdjieff considers passive suffering and negativity to be one of the greatest blights on the psyche of humankind. Our basic outlook, he said, is so habitually negative and our emotional life so generally empty that the emotions most frequently available to us are negative. Our lives are grand melodramas as he explained:

I have already said before that sacrifice is necessary. Without sacrifice nothing can be attained. But if there is anything in the world that people do not understand it is the idea of sacrifice. They think they have to sacrifice something that they have. For example, I once said that they must sacrifice “faith,” “tranquility,” or “health.” All these words must be taken in quotation marks. In actual fact, they have to sacrifice only what they imagine they have, and which in reality they do not have. They must sacrifice their fantasies. This is difficult for them, very difficult. It is much easier to sacrifice real things.⁹

This quotation touches upon Gurdjieff’s belief that human beings are deluded. We think we are at peace, that we love, that we are Christians (or whatever), and that we are awake. Gurdjieff then discusses the prevalence of accidental, unconscious, or mechanical suffering, the kind that makes us feel dramatic, self-righteous—the hero or heroine of our personal novel. He points out the shocking fact that we refuse to admit our attachment to being a victim and he reiterates the crucial distinction between deliberate and mechanical suffering.

Another thing that people must give up is their suffering. It is very difficult also to sacrifice one’s suffering. A man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so attached to anything as he is to his suffering. And it is necessary to be free from suffering. No one who is not free from suffering, who has not sacrificed his suffering, can work. Nothing can be attained without suffering but at the same time, one must begin by sacrificing suffering. Now, decipher what this means.¹⁰

In 1934, Daumal included this theory about suffering into his essay “The Non-Dualism of Spinoza.” He classifies under the heading of “sorrow” all suffering and pleasure that are passively undergone, and, under the heading of “joy,” all suffering and pleasure deliberately experienced: “the joy of a being creating himself and knowing himself as real.”¹¹ In a 1937 letter to his wife, Daumal relates Jeanne de Salzmann’s discussion of negative emotions—how practically all of our daily feelings and emotions are negative in quality and passively felt. In fact, they are imaginary emotions that we take for real ones. Daumal writes:

I remember well the moment in childhood when I began to let myself be invaded by these illusory sufferings; and little by little it became nearly impossible to free myself because it would have left a terrible void. You cannot chase them or overcome them; it would be like trying to remove a hole in the carpet by cutting around it. You make a bigger hole. These sufferings are not real—they are absences, lacks that come from our identification with things and people. Their imaginary nature is actually quite obvious.¹²

Daumal goes on to describe how elders inculcate in children even more reasons to feel bad: the acquired shame of not living up to certain imposed codes.

At first as children, we feel abnormal and ashamed if we see that these inculcated sufferings are only imaginary and do not really touch us. Then eventually, we succumb. Finally one day we realize that we must re-learn how to see the emptiness of these negative emotions with which we are so identified. Sometimes it seems easy until we realize that we have only drowned one imaginary suffering in another more subtle one. Negative emotions can take on very subtle even sublime forms, such as we see exhibited in artists.¹³

It is difficult to assess the effect on Daumal of Gurdjieff’s concept of awakening. This is complicated by the fact that Daumal’s most elaborate discussion of awakening took place at least two years before his 1931 encounter with de Salzmann. In “Nerval the Nyctalope,” written in 1929, he wrote, “Man goes to sleep when he stops distinguishing himself from his sensations.”¹⁴ Independently, he intuited how much of our so-called waking consciousness is a kind of hypnotized sleep—that we rarely do distinguish ourselves from our vision, taste, feelings, likes, and dislikes.

In 1970, Daumal’s brother Jack published a fifty-five-page manuscript that Daumal wrote in the years 1926–1928. Jack notes its “intransigent juvenile Marxism” but also, its “perception of truths in the forest of authentic traditions of the East.”¹⁵ In it, Daumal exhibits his own innate understanding of the concept of awakening, years before he encountered Gurdjieff or de Salzmann. “Stay awake!” he exclaimed and then describes the subtleties involved in the process. He lists various daily activities of a human being, and notes that the body carries out most of them automatically:

In order to awaken you have to think: “all this agitation is external to me.” You need an act of reflection. But if this act sets off in you new automatisms, in one’s memory and one’s reasoning process, your voice could continue to maintain that you were still reflecting: but instead you would have again fallen asleep. Thus you can spend entire days without awakening for a single instant. Waking is not a state but an act.¹⁶

Similarly, in “Provocations to Asceticism” (“Les Provocations à l’ascèse”), he asks, “Why this perpetual race after awakening, why try to be more conscious—why desire to leave the condition of ordinary man?” He answers his own questions: “The vision of the intolerable is enough to create the necessity for human consciousness to transform itself. And [it is a] provocation to asceticism: a summons to man saying, ‘pull yourself up by an ever new awakening, or sleep in a spiritual death.’”¹⁷

Thus we can see that in Daumal’s earliest metaphysical searching, his vision of the absurd and his belief in asceticism led him to the same realization confirmed in Hinduism and later in Gurdjieff: that we must evolve and awaken. Using arithmetical equations, Daumal compares the consciousness of the average man getting on a bus (which he designates by the number 3), with the idealistic artist believing in art for art’s sake (#8), and the charitable old lady giving to the poor (#17): “If we agree to designate ‘lack of being’ by zero, (#0) then all these somnambulants differ among themselves as the equations (0 x 3), (0 x 8), (0 x 17), etc., differ among themselves. There is an infinite number of ways of not being.”¹⁸

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Gurdjieff’s emphasis on nonattachment, inner freedom, and discipline was readily accepted by Daumal since effort and hard work came naturally to him. For years he had focused on the need to tame and quiet the body and deny the ego. As useful and necessary as this tack might be, Gurdjieff also emphasized the importance of relinquishing tension and generating deep relaxation in the body, in order to achieve an integration of the many parts of one’s being.

There is brief mention of working with breath and sensation in Ouspensky’s writings. He recalls Gurdjieff’s group work in Essentuki just following the Russian Revolution. Gurdjieff gave an exercise that created a “circular sensation” when the attention was focused on different parts of the body. Ouspensky himself concluded that:

physical states, which are connected with new psychological experiences, begin with feeling the pulse throughout the whole body, as one stroke, which is what we do not feel in ordinary conditions. There remains with me a deep conviction that control over the body begins with acquiring control over the pulse.¹⁹

He then describes various muscle relaxation exercises organized by Gurdjieff that always began with relaxing the muscles of the face. There were noticeable effects on heart beat, neuralgias, and sleep patterns among the group.

Madame de Salzmann reported that, particularly in the last decade of his life, Gurdjieff focused more and more on the importance of connecting with the body through sensation. In his groups, he discussed various techniques to awaken to one’s inner vibration through breathing exercises. It is also confirmed by Jack Daumal and Maurice Desselle that Gurdjieff often spoke about training the mind to sense the body by “following” the breath down through the trunk and limbs while exhaling the carbon dioxide. Since we realize today that the atoms of the body are primarily made up of space, then the bioelectric energy contained in the air that we breath is the major component that fills the vast atomic spaces in our bodies. If we breathe with attention, we pull in the finer energies from the earth’s atmosphere into this vibrating physical mixture of air, water and carbon molecules. Gradually this provides an immediate physical experience of the integration of mind, body, and emotions.

In a lecture given in New York as early as 1930 Gurdjieff explained the importance of sensing the reverberation of energy in one’s solar plexus, especially while pronouncing the words I am. Later that year, Gurdjieff demonstrated a breathing exercise to the same group of pupils. His “Third Series” of writings, not published until 1975, gives his first-person account as he sat in front of them. He describes how at that moment he was directing his attention to the part of the breathed air that settles in his lungs and gradually penetrates inward spreading through his whole organism. He states:

Now I direct the second half of my attention to my head brain for the purpose of serving and possibly constating any process proceeding in it. And already I am beginning to feel in it, from the totality of automatically flowing associations, the arising of something very fine, almost imperceptible to me.… I now consciously direct this second half of my attention and, uninterruptedly “remembering the whole of myself,” I aid this something arising in my head brain to flow directly into my solar plexus. I feel how it flows. I no longer notice any automatic associations.²⁰

This is one of the rare descriptions in the public record of Gurdjieff’s actual techniques. Most of his teaching was transmitted orally.

Daumal explains the Gurdjieff movements as a means of integrating the mind and body. In the essay “Le Mouvement dans l’éducation intégrale de l’homme,” he describes the subtleties involved in trying to “wake up.” First he proposes that all real searches require exterior help to indicate the correct route. He then compares modern pedagogic theories with this “other method” by which the pupil is taught “to center himself with all his organs and faculties, from his head to his toes, passing through the heart.”²¹ We are shown how the trained teacher can supervise the pupil’s attempts to carry out simple physical and mental exercises that lead to an acute awareness of one’s condition:

The teacher suggests that you try a simple movement or gesture, but your body no longer obeys as soon as you stop depending on your old habitual ways of moving. He asks you to express a simple emotion, but you remain speechless or choose inappropriate words as soon as you are stripped of your learned attitudes and your conventional masks. He asks you to do a simple exercise of memory, calculation, or reflection, but your associative mechanisms for discursive thinking, your formulas and your clichés all fall like cold cinders into your brain and onto your tongue. Life is very stingy with experiences like these, but here they are offered to you every instant. Every minute you see more clearly all that is mechanism, dead sleep, laziness, posturing, vanity, and chatter in the various functions of your being. But you will not be crushed with despair because you will see an open door … to the kingdom of which you are the king.²²

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If Gurdjieff confirmed for Daumal the importance of nonattachment and working with bodily sensation, he also reiterated the Hindu belief in the high purpose of art. Art should help the upward flow of consciousness in man, struggling against the current of mechanical life. Gurdjieff had very definite views on art and literature, finding value only in what he called “conscious” or “objective” art. For Gurdjieff, real art had a functional purpose: “In real art there is nothing accidental … the artist knows and understands what he wants to convey, and his work cannot produce one impression on one man and one impression on another, presuming of course, people are the same level.”²³ Therefore the consciousness of the creation depends on the relative degree of spiritual development of the artist. Most art, however, is merely “subjective” art, a soulless mechanical reproduction or the elusive depiction of an isolated individual temperament. Gurdjieff explained further:

You say an artist creates, I say this only in relation to objective art. In relation to subjective art I say that with him “it is created.…” This means that he is in the power of ideas, thoughts and moods which he himself does not understand and over which he has no control. They rule him and they express themselves in one form or another.²⁴

In Gurdjieff’s works All and Everything and Meetings with Remarkable Men, and in excerpts from his lectures, he frequently alludes to this degenerated quality of art produced during the last few centuries, particularly in the West.

For us art is not an aim but a means. Ancient art has a certain inner content. In the past, art served the same purpose as is served today by books—the purpose of preserving and transmitting certain knowledge.…

I found nothing in the West to compare with Eastern art. Western art has much that is external, sometimes a great deal of philosophy; but Eastern art is precise, mathematical, without manipulations.²⁵

Many critics and writers feel that Gurdjieff’s own work, All and Everything, as well as the body of music and dances he produced, were examples of conscious art. In the words of one of his close admirers, Frank Lloyd Wright, “we have for the first time a philosopher distinguished from all others … Gurdjieff was not only an original philosopher; he was a great artist.” Referring to the music that Gurdjieff composed with Thomas de Hartmann, the architect wrote: “I often hear his music. It is from another world.”²⁶ The exotic comedic flair of Gurdjieff’s writing found favor in an unlikely corner: André Breton admired his oblique sense of humor and included Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson in his Anthologie d’humour noir (Anthology of Black Humor).

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If Daumal was such a student of the ancient Hindu tradition, why did he not choose a living Hindu master? Certainly Guénon, his early mentor, felt that the ancient tradition was the only safe path. Guénon abhorred modern forms of religion and apparently, in the beginning particularly disapproved of what he had heard about Gurdjieff. James Moore writes in Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth:

To envisage two characters or indeed two authors more preposterously contrasted than Gurdjieff and Guénon exasperates the mind. Guénon’s exquisite prose style was smooth as a mill pond, but, gliding just beneath the surface like a cruel pike, his spiritual paranoia snapped at the anti-traditional counter-initiatic forces, which a trick of parallax caused him to detect in virtually every modern renewal. Gurdjieff (so near, so practical, so full of being) attracted Guénon’s special anathema: “This man of Greek extraction is not purely and simply a charlatan, but this makes him the more dangerous…. The truth is that … Gurdjieff exercises on those who go to him a kind of grip of psychic order which is quite astonishing and from which few have the strength to escape.”²⁷

It is possible that Guénon was deceived by both Gurdjieff’s chameleon-like quality as he adapted to the level and needs of the person he was addressing, and the veneer of charlatanism and chicanery Gurdjieff frequently employed as a smoke screen to ward off pseudo seekers. In actuality, Gurdjieff may have been exactly what Guénon revered, his only crime being to appear in this century, instead of millenniums past.

In the fourth issue of Cahier Daumal and in a recent personal letter, Jack Daumal described Jeanne de Salzmann’s decision to meet with René Guénon in order to explain certain essential aspects of Gurdjieff’s teaching, of which he was unaware. According to Jack Daumal, the result of their meeting was an acknowledgement on Guénon’s part of the validity of the ideas and teaching of Gurdjieff. Yet, there exists a third party who prefers to remain anonymous, who was present at this meeting at the pyramids in Egypt, and who at first feigned to be Guénon so as to screen this foreign visitor. In a transatlantic telephone conversation in June 1997, he claimed that Guénon had still continued to hold serious reservations about Gurdjieff. This close associate of Guénon felt that “Gurdjieff did not make adequate accommodations for the performance of religious rituals and sacraments for purification and setting the soul in order.” It seems clear to me that Guénon could not accept the concept of what Gurdjieff called “the Fourth Way,” a spiritual path in life, which did not in itself focus solely on liturgical and ritual forms but which could serve as crucial adjuncts to them. Notwithstanding, Guénon’s work has been studied, translated, and held in great esteem by subsequent followers of Gurdjieff.

In contrast to Guénon’s opinion, many scholars feel that Gurdjieff succeeded in breathing life into ancient traditions. A recent author, Ravi Ravindra, discusses Gurdjieff in the context of the Bhagavad Gita. His viewpoint sheds light on Gurdjieff’s potential to clarify traditional beliefs. As a professor of physics and comparative religion, Ravindra feels that both Easterners and Westerners have been cut off from the pure source of true religions, menaced by the twin scourges of sentimentality and scholasticism. The holy texts and rituals are rich with meaning and knowledge, but we have become inured to them. Ravindra writes:

The old traditions take on meaning when they come into contact with the Gurdjieff work. He provides a fresh intuition as an access to the ancient formulations and thus a practical method to reconnect us to both the depth of our being and the depth of the tradition…. In our day, Gurdjieff brings to the traditions this revitalizing challenge, not to destroy them but to search for and reveal again their essential core, released from the rigidities of dogma, from exclusivism and mechanical repetition.²⁸

According to Ravindra, Gurdjieff had the greatest respect for traditional religions and felt that the core of truth they revealed long ago could be recovered through the fragments of hidden meaning preserved in sacred texts and in religious rites.

Bibliographic Notes

¹ Georgette Camile, “René Daumal et le Grand Jeu.” In Pascal Sigoda ed. René Daumal, L'Age d'Homme. Paris: Editions Dossiers H, 1993, pp. 234–35.
² Jacques Masui, “René Daumal et l’expérience Gurdjieff,” Hermés: Recherches sur l'expérience spirituelle No. 5, Spring 1977. Special Edition, p. 34.
³ P. L. Travers, interviewed (along with other prominent Gurdjieff group leaders,) in Margaret Croyden’s article “Getting in Touch with Gurdjieff,” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 1979, p. 30.
⁴ P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 1949, p. 188.
⁵ Michel de Salzmann, “Seeing: The Endless Source of Freedom,” Material for Thought No. 14, 1995 (San Francisco) pp. 17, 18, and 23.
⁶ Pierre Schaeffer, “Maitre de Danse” in “Dossier: Gurdjieff,” a collection of 12 articles on Gurdjieff featured in the December 1977 issue of Magazine Littéraire (Paris), p. 24.
⁷ Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men, 1963, p. 70.
⁸ Catholicos Vazken I, An Introduction to the Armenian Liturgy, London: Privately published, 1992, pp. 61–62.
⁹ Gurdjieff, quoted in P. D. Ouspensky’s, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 274.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ R. Daumal, “Le Nondualisme de Spinoza,” Essais et Notes, L’Evidence Absurde, Tome I (1926–1934) Paris: Gallimard, 1972, p. 91.
¹² R. Daumal, in Jack Daumal, Cahiers Daumal, No. 1, Cairo: L'Organization Egyptienne Général du Livre, Corniche du Nil, 1987, p. 24.
¹³ Ibid., p. 25.
¹⁴ R. Daumal, “Nerval the Nyctalope” in The Powers of the Word Selected Essays and Notes, 1927–1943, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991, p. 47.
¹⁵ Jack Daumal, You Were Always Wrong, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 5.
¹⁶ Ibid., p. 12.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 19.
¹⁸ Ibid., p. 22.
¹⁹ Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 351.
²⁰ Gurdjieff, Life is Real, Only then When I Am, New York: Dutton, 1978, pp. 140–142.
²¹ R. Daumal, “The Role of Movement in the Complete Education of Man” in The Powers of the Word: Selected Essays and Notes, 1927–1943. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991, pp. 71–75.
²² Ibid., p. 73.
²³ Gurdjieff, quoted in Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 26.
²⁴ Ibid., pp. 296–297.
²⁵ Ibid.
²⁶ Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in James Moore, Gurdjieff and Mansfield. London: Routledge, 1980, p. 208.
²⁷ James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element, 1991, pp. 228–229.
²⁸ Ravi Ravindra, “Gurdjieff Work and the Teaching of Krishna” in Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and his Teaching. Edited by Jacob Needleman et al, New York: Continuum, 1996, p. 216.

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[Reprinted from René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide, the first section of Chapter 9, pp. 127–139, by Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt by permission of the State University of New York Press and the author.]