“Let the children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” Mark 10:14–15
My enduring interest in Gurdjieff, including what I remember of him, is the power he manifested, not only in his written works, but in the carriage of his person and the thrust of his teaching. No one who was ever in his presence was left indifferent to his power of being. Perhaps this is truer of children than of adults, because children came to him relatively unburdened with interfering social and intellectual influences. They appeared open without reservation, question or distrust. They took him for what they experienced with him. He said that the children about him knew him “in the skin.”
When Gurdjieff established his “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man,” first in Essentuki, then in Constantinople, Hellerau, Fontainebleau, and New York, he dedicated considerable time and energy in the teaching of children as well as of adults. Although, from time to time, he addressed children in a teaching context, he taught them lessons in life in a number of different ways. One can say that his own childhood served as a model of education. As his autobiographical recollections in Meetings With Remarkable Men[1] suggest, the child Gurdjieff developed a capacity for listening—particularly to his father and his father’s friends—and what he heard he remembered. In short, he developed at a very young age a memory common among the oral storytellers he heard. Consequently, whatever he read was imprinted automatically to his prodigious memory.
A February 1921 leaflet announcing his Institute classes on rue Yéménédji in Pera reflected what he himself had learned in his youth:
On vient d’ouvrir au sein de la section de Constantinople de l’Institut du développement harmonique de l’homme de G. I. Gurdjieff des Classes Spéciales.
The classes, offered at different amounts in tirest (Turkish liras), were: 1. Painting and design by Salzmann and Feldmann, 2. Music by Hartmann, 3. Languages (English, French and German) by Miss Englington and Professor Stettler, 4. Rhythmo-plastic gymnastics, 5. Medical gymnastics directed by Stjernvall, and 6. Lectures and talks under the direction of Ouspensky. It is noteworthy that a children’s section was announced as well (for ages 4–10) which offered classes in music, dance, song, gymnastics, manual works, games and languages which included English, German, French, Russian, Italian, Greek, Polish and Armenian. The attention of parents was drawn to the offer of picking up and delivering their children. Unfortunately, no testimony of children who might have attended classes there is extant.
In his own youthful social and intellectual engagements with children, Gurdjieff developed a curiosity that spurred him into taking risks. Whether or not it is entirely faithful to fact, the account of his “duel” with another boy, which consisted of lying within range of artillery fire, reveals a fearless risking of life and limb as a test of self-discipline in developing a mastery of personal will over accidental circumstance. It would seem that, as a boy, Gurdjieff never hesitated to explore avenues of growth that necessitated leaving his home and schooling to become familiar with other civilizations. He became adept at adopting other cultural modes and their languages. In short, Gurdjieff learned to play roles. Every experience was, in effect, a lesson in acting.
His later instruction of the children about him consisted largely of guidance in these particular skills. In the first series of All and Everything,[2] Beelzebub’s instruction emphasizes to his grandson Hassein an art of role-playing that can be honed by observation.
When Gurdjieff, in exile from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, established his Institute in Essentuki, he was surrounded by children, many of whom were members of his family. He recalled that:
One rainy morning, while sitting at the window looking out at the street and thinking how to obtain this, that and the other, I saw two odd-looking conveyances pull up at my door, from which a number of shadowy forms emerged.
At first it was even difficult for me to make out what they were, but, as my agitated thoughts grew a little calmer, I gradually began to realize that these were people, or more exactly skeletons of people, with only their burning eyes alive, clad in rags and tatters, their bare feet covered with wounds and sores. There were twenty-eight in all, among them eleven children between the ages of one and nine.
These people turned out to be relatives of mine, among them my own sister with her six children.[3]
As winter turned to spring in 1920, the coherence of the Institute seemed to dissolve. The Turks once more penetrated into Armenia. In January they razed Baytor and slaughtered his sister Anna, her husband and children with the exception of Valentin (“Valia”) who had been able to hide. After being rescued by the Red Army in June, Valia walked and rode surreptitiously on trains from Baytor to Tbilisi, some hundred and fifty miles away. His cousin Luba recalls Valia walking into her garden, crying out, “I am Valya. Where is Mama?” He told his aunt Asta, Luba’s mother, that the Turks had raped his mother, and that he had escaped with a baby, who died on the way.[4]
Valia was the eldest of the dozen or more children that populated the Institute in Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff paid particular attention to the children there, directing their play and games. He had often said that cognitive relations with those who knew him “in the skin” were more meaningful than genetic connections. More than one former pupil said that Gurdjieff was a “father” to him. Frank Lloyd Wright testified in an interview that Gurdjieff admitted to “104 sons of his own and 27 daughters, for all of whose education he has made provision and to which he has given attention.”[5] Gurdjieff told others in New York that he had ten of his own children, but the names of only seven circulated. In New York, Gurdjieff told Irmis Popoff that he had fifty sons in monasteries.[6]
Others he probably never met claimed him as their begetter.[7] Gurdjieff’s own view was that he was “father” to the many he treated with paternal care besides his nephew, nieces and the children of associates who had played on the lawns of the Prieuré. It seems strange that current biographies of Gurdjieff pay little mention to the children who were with him in the Caucasus, Constantinople, Berlin, France and the United States. There was a large population of children of all ages at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon. A film of children’s games made by a pupil in the summer of 1929 shows some twenty children doing the “stop” exercise and performing movements on the front lawn. The eldest of the children was Valentin (“Valia”) Anastasieff. Luba, Genia, and Lida Gurdjieff, Fritz Peters, Natalie de Salzmann, Nikolai de Stjernvall and Michel de Salzmann are all recognizable in the film. Among them in the film was one adult, Georgibilovich Kapanadze, the husband of Gurdjieff’s niece, Sophia.
Small children at the Prieuré played games together on the spacious lawn in front of the main house. The most popular game was “stop,” in which a line of children would form behind someone with eyes turned away. The children would race across the lawn until the person called out “stop” as he or she turned around to see who failed to freeze in position. The practice of stopping his or her motion suddenly prepared one for the more advanced “movements” and sacred dances. Often Gurdjieff would watch the children’s play from the steps of the Prieuré.
Nikolai de Stjernvall told me of an exercise in attention that the children would play at the Prieuré. Gurdjieff, or another person, would send a child out to a certain spot where he or she was to stand for the count of ten, and then come back and report what he or she had observed. Five or six children would go to the same spot for the same amount of time, and then return and report what he or she observed. Then the dispatcher would tell the children the differences reported in observation. One might be asked why he did not see what another did. To observe well requires attention and memory. Gurdjieff admonished children who seemed to lack attention with the expression pomnie sebya, “remember yourself.”
Most of the children who joined him with their parents in New York in 1948 and 1949 were already in their teens or early twenties. Margery Toomer (“Argie”), daughter of Jean Toomer, was not there, but she attended movements classes after Gurdjieff left. On the whole, the children were in awe of Gurdjieff, and he flattered them by calling them “candidates for initiation.” A child invited to lunch for the first time might be seated at the long table set up in the largest bedroom of his suite at the Wellington. Comportment at table was particularly important for Gurdjieff who often compared the loose manners of Westerners to the tight quasi-sacred manner of those in the East. Occasionally, on a first visit to his table, a child placed on Gurdjieff’s right was given an adult portion of vodka for the toasts to idiots. In the order of idiots, a child was an “unformed idiot,” or “aspirant for ordinary idiot.” It was considered an honor for a young person to receive from Gurdjieff’s hand a special morsel of food, such as a sheep’s eye.
Gurdjieff used occasions when children were gathered in his company to give them lessons in “life.” Lillian Firestone recalls Jeanne de Salzmann’s recollection of Gurdjieff’s lessons to her son on money.
One day, when her young son Michel wanted money to buy some special treat, Mr. Gurdjieff happened to hear the request and said, “Michel, you can keep anything I give you as long as you can add it up.” Michel was eager for the challenge. “Put out your hand,” Mr. Gurdjieff said, and he began slowly laying money in the boy’s open palm. First, there were coins, one franc, two francs. Michel added them up and happily sang out the total. Then Gurdjieff increased the pace. He added five, ten, twenty franc notes while the boy struggled to keep the addition going. Michel knew that as long as he kept his attention, he could continue to count. But as the pace of cascading money quickened, fear of losing it distracted him. Faster and faster the notes came overwhelming his resolve, until he finally lost count. The game ended with what he had been able to tally, but he kept for a lifetime the impression of that struggle within him of greed and fear, and the possibility of witnessing the battle within...
When Mr. Gurdjieff sailed to Paris [sic] on an ocean liner in 1933 with some of his students, eight-year old Michel made his way to the shipboard casino. Trying his luck at roulette with twenty-five cents, he suddenly found his change doubling and redoubling as an amused semi-circle of adults cheered him on. By the time his mother found him, he had amassed $280, a substantial sum in those days. Madame de Salzmann did not want to be unfair by simply taking the money away from him, yet she felt that allowing him to keep it would leave him with the naive impression that something could be had without effort, and that it was always necessary to pay for what one receives. She asked for Mr. Gurdjieff’s advice. He thought it over and sent for Michel.
Mr. Gurdjieff truthfully explained the group’s precarious finances to the boy and noted that, as soon as they landed, he had to meet pressing bills. Michel asked how much was needed and Mr. Gurdjieff named a figure. It was exactly the sum Michel had won. After a few moments of reflection, Michel reported that he had that much money himself and would be very proud to lend it to Mr. Gurdjieff. His unexpected windfall enabled him to help the group in an adult way, to be a man. It made him feel big, while any moralizing about the evils of gambling would have made him feel guilty and small. He had been given the opportunity to choose.[8]
Gurdjieff had no moral compunctions against gambling. Indeed he encouraged gambling as an exercise. Katherine Hulme recalls Gurdjieff saying, “One custom I have, always in Monte Carlo. To all the children I give money and they must play all in the Casino, and after—give me half their winnings.”[9]
In effect, Gurdjieff encouraged children to consider that the profitable use of money required careful use of thought. Elizabeth Bennett recorded an incident in Chamonix that illustrates the point. After finishing a dessert of melons and strawberries in the hotel dining room, Gurdjieff invited the others to take their coffee in the foyer.
Before he went, he held up his half-eaten segment of melon and said who should clean this so that it could be painted—tomorrow he wished to paint this skin and give it as a present to a friend—who would prepare it for him? Paul said he would, and Mr. G. said Eve [Paul’s sister] could help him and if they did it properly he could have 1,000 francs. When he left the dining room Eve and Paul were sitting at the table still, with their heads together over the melon skin.
[After a time] Paul came back with his melon skin and showed it to Mr. G. They bent over it together, very solemn, and then G said no, it wasn’t quite good enough, nothing yellow should remain. Paul went solemnly off to fetch a razor blade while Mr. G watching him go, laughed and said, “See now what education he have. Until now he knew nothing, he only knew how to eat and shit, never he work with this,” tapping his forehead, “now this his first labeur.” When Paul came back again after an interval, the skin was perfect. Mr. G. folded it and put it in his pocket and gave the 1,000 francs—“not forget sister.”[10]
Gurdjieff often addressed the topic of a child’s understanding of the value of money, both abstract and “real” value. For example, he assigned children “tasks” that demanded attention. In New York he had a child search for certain delicacies he intended to serve at the table. It was easy enough to find shops where Turkish delights and halvah, which he enjoyed, could be found. It took more initiative to find sheep’s heads, camel and bear meat. He gave one of the “calves” a thousand dollars to buy Christmas presents for the holiday guests at the Wellington Hotel in 1948.[11] At the same time, a boy was given five hundred dollar bills to exchange for silver dollars.[12] In both cases the changing of hundred dollar bills by children in banks proved difficult, and aroused bank clerks’ suspicion. The silver dollars played a role in testing children when, a few days later, Gurdjieff put a pile of dollar bills next to a pile of silver dollars and had children choose either ten paper dollars or eight silver dollars. Most favored the silver dollars.[13]
In other words, Gurdjieff’s lesson was that money has both a real and a symbolic value, or two “real values” depending on the materials involved; in this case, paper of greater value than silver, an apparent contradiction of fact. Gurdjieff would have children read values. In a 1926 letter to Edith Taylor, Jean Toomer wrote:
Little Leda [sic] had somehow gotten possession of a cheap toy watch and had grown quite attached to it. One day, while they were sitting at a café, Gurdjieff saw her kissing and fondling it. He reached over, snatched it from her hands, threw it on the sidewalk and crushed it with his foot. Leda was heart-broken, went to her father [Dmitri] and cried bitterly. All day she was inconsolable. Gurdjieff paid no attention to her. But the next day he bought and gave her a genuine watch.[14]
Such exercises were also lessons in distinguishing between useful expenditure of energy and wanton production of waste. To use properly a mechanism such as a wrist watch or clock is an exercise in attention, as is betting in a Casino. It involves being “awake,” while undirected or thoughtless energy is idleness, or sleep.
In his Wellington Hotel suite in New York City during his 1948–1949 stay, in talks he told children that it was a waste of mental energy to remember something that one could not, subsequently, forget. Then he added, “Forget nothing.” Those paying attention were confused by an apparent contradiction, but further thought had them realize that Gurdjieff was giving them a lesson in the husbandry of memory.
In the same talk he spoke of parental and educational influences on children, pointing out to his youthful audience that what they were wearing and what they were saying to their elders reflected learning by rote, a social convention he deplored. Nothing better illustrates what he meant than the story he tells in Beelzebub’s Tales[15] of two Petersburg school girls, Elizabeth and Mary, who were indoctrinated by their headmistress in repressive and narrow ideas about sex that denied the girls’ knowledge gained by observation of nature. The two, finally, killed themselves out of shame over their natural feelings for the sights and sounds of spring in the animal world.
Two or three times Gurdjieff gathered the children in front of him after lunch, while adults were cleaning and re-ordering the dining area, and talked. The children sat quietly on the floor. Few of us dared to ask questions, though we responded dutifully, if shallowly, to the questions he asked us. I remember one talk about sleep. He said that children slept too long; that six hours should be enough once we learned to sleep efficiently. He said that one could sleep even during the day and mentioned that there were ways of measuring efficiency of sleep. One means was to hold a pencil between the fingers, doze off, and when the pencil dropped, that was enough of a nap. If you sleep too long, he explained, you dream, and when you dream you do not gather energy efficiently, “might even lose energy.” Also necessary in putting oneself soundly to sleep is transferring force from one center to another. One can do this by emptying the mind of thought and the body of feeling and movement. Start by remembering and then forgetting the head in order to diffuse mental energy throughout the rest of the body; and then do the same downward through the rest of the body until concentration exits through the toes.
He spoke also of the importance of being conscious of breath, particularly while talking, because force of speech has to do with an ability to breathe correctly. Breath, he said, is related to bodily rhythms like pulses. He said that self-conscious breathing concentrates thought and, more importantly, the absence of thought. It is important to know how to think of nothing, so that the body’s centers can function independently. He told us about the bandit on the steppes who could sit without thought on a rock so still that the caravan he was waiting to rob could not tell him from a rock even as it passed within meters of him. (Roerich mentions Shamans’ powers that enable people to see them as stones.[16]) As for the breath in speech, “Listen to yourself when speak. What you hear and what others hear are not same. A spoken word has two powers, interior and exterior. A person can move things with power of voice, and power of voice depends upon breath.” Nonetheless, he warned us against trying to control breathing. “Observe breath, but not alter it artificially.”
Along these lines, in his Chicago lecture on 26 March 1924, Gurdjieff explained that breath is a natural mechanical action whose rhythm must not be disturbed, and warned that artificially controlled breathing usually results in disharmony. He concluded, “If anyone here is experimenting with breathing, it is better to stop while there is still time.[17] Ouspensky also warned against artificial breathing on 3 March 1922 to his London pupils.[18] Taoist Chuang Tzu says that a true sage breathes from the heels, others from the throat.[19]
“The All is essence, and Everything is personality,” Gurdjieff explained to us. The All is, on another level of thought, the Absolute, and Everything is what lies along the track of its Ray of Creation toward Nothing. Gurdjieff chided some of us for our dress. All the boys wore jackets and ties, if I remember correctly, and the girls as a rule wore dresses or skirts and blouses. He asked if we dressed like that because our parents were concerned with our appearance. To a positive reply from a child, he said that Americans are obsessed with appearance, both verbal and material. “Do not follow rules your parents give. Make your own rules. Do not identify with role your mother or father wishes you to play for their sake. When you thank someone, thank for what you understand, not for what your parents think they understand and want you to understand” (In Beelzebub’s Tales Ashiata Shiemash castigates the deceit built by parents into education of their children.[20]) “Learn difference between what need and what want.” Gurdjieff told us that one can learn to want what one needs instead of needing what one wants.
He told us also that we had to learn to tell stories. “Story make truth,” he said. “Need not believe everything I tell you, but is truth.” “Never lie, play roles,” he added. “Be something else than what you have habit of being. Know what you not and can know what you are. Even God play roles. Playing roles teaches sincerity, changes attitudes.” Gurdjieff’s apparent contradictions confused me at the time. To not lie but to couch truth in lies took some time for me to reconcile.
Orage and Daly King encouraged role playing as “psychodrama.” William Welch recalls the role-playing King assigned adult pupils. “The purpose was not, of course, to be clever, but to confront oneself in conditions that would not allow evasion.”[21] Orage said that one should “improvise” a role, and “playing roles is an experiment whose aim is to consciously make a life-role.”[22] Ouspensky repeats what Gurdjieff told him of role-playing.[23] Toomer had told me often that playing roles is a way of promoting oneself to a higher being, and that Harry Truman, for example, became presidential by playing well the role of president. Another word Gurdjieff used to children which duplicated “role-playing” was “participation,” joining a role-playing group, and participation is usually “experimentation,” trying something new.
One boy, Wim Nyland’s son, dared ask how to endure pain. He had had a terrible toothache once and tried to arrest the pain by trying to ignore it. Gurdjieff replied that one must do the opposite; that is, concentrate on pain. Pain is a language that the body is speaking to the mind. Listen to it, learn to speak it and speak to it. Pain demands attention and concentration. It incites the body’s recognition of something that is askew and demands collaboration with the mind to get it right. When concentrating on pain all things outside disappear. “Make friends with pain and make friends with inside self.”
Denis Saurat summed up Gurdjieff’s manner with children, “One does not tell children the whole truth, one gives them carefully prepared parts of the truth that one hopes will further the development of their souls, and sometimes one even invents stories, such as Father Christmas, to encourage the children to express themselves.”[24]
Gurdjieff told us that once one seizes an idea, one can forget the words that transmitted it. After a while I realized that when he told me to never remember anything I could not forget, but not to forget anything, the first admonition referred to the detritus of personality that must be “forgotten” in order for essence to manifest itself, and the second meant that one cannot consciously “forget” what is not consciously remembered. Gurdjieff remarked that understanding requires remembrance of what has been, consciousness of what is, and foresight of what is to be. Memory requires order.
Gurdjieff avoided teaching children by sententious precepts. He preferred practical concrete examples to abstract theory. He fit examples to contexts. The child should understand the pertinence of a lesson, such as the one he gave Michel about money, to the immediate experience. Knowledge is material.[25] It is real.
After talks in the afternoon in New York in 1948–1949, Gurdjieff would throw handfuls of hard candies known as “jaw-breakers” to the crowd, but particularly to the children sitting cross-legged at the front of the assembly. He said that bon-bons were rewards for attention. Annie Lou Staveley recalls that a Prieuré pupil explained to her, “Of course he gives candy only to waiters and people like that because he is sorry for them. If people can’t be helped any other way he gives them candy.”[26] This explanation misses the point. A better one is given by Rina Hands who remembers Gurdjieff in Paris giving children sweets as reward for work.[27]
Kenneth Walker, who observed Gurdjieff in 1949, noticed the attention he gave children in Paris that spring:
One of the most striking features of these last reunions was the number of young people who crowded round his table, especially after his return from America. Those of his followers who were parents seemed to have realized that the moment had come for taking their children to Paris. They might understand very little but they wanted them to be able to recall in later years having, a long time ago, met a very remarkable man in France, a certain Mr. Gurdjieff. To ensure their being able to do this, children, ranging in age from three to fourteen, were now being brought to Paris and invited to his flat. There they sat at his table warmly welcomed and specially entertained by him... For him, very young people were of far greater importance than the rest of us, for they were representatives of a future generation of men and women, a generation which had not yet been ruined and which, by right teaching and upbringing, might possibly be saved. . . Gurdjieff as grandfather, dispenser of gifts and enjoyer of fun.[28]
On the day before I left Paris in the late summer of 1949, as I walked down from my hotel toward the Avenue des Ternes, where I intended to buy some things to take back to the United States, I noticed Gurdjieff all alone at a café table on the sidewalk. He glanced up at me, in a typical gesture of his eyes without seeming to move his head. I felt that he wanted me to come to him. It was an occasion for me to say goodbye to him personally, and when I crossed the street he signaled with a nod of the head that I should sit on the other chair. I had thought only of shaking his hand and saying that I was about to leave, but he again signaled with a movement of his head that he did not want me to say anything.
“You leave now,” he said, “but we meet again in New York in short time. You have learned much here this summer, I can see. You have heard much, all is story. Man pay for story. Story is like soap, it cleans off smell of work. You know how to play role of story-teller and role of story. After, you clean of body and mind. In story you make yourself known to others. In New York, you tell story, and I give you hundred dollars.”
I hadn’t said a word. I wanted to, but he waved me away with a gesture of his arm. I looked at him and smiled, and he smiled. I thought he was going to laugh. He had given me a final lesson.
~ • ~
Born in London, Paul Beekman Taylor lived as a young child at the Prieure with Gurdjieff and studied with him in 1948 and 1949 before completing his education in the United States and becoming Professor of Medieval Languages and Literature at the University of Geneva. He is the author of several books on Gurdjieff, including G.I. Gurdjieff: A New Life (Eureka 2008), Gurdjieff’s Invention of America (Eureka 2007), Gurdjieff’s America: Mediating the Miraculous (Lighthouse Editions 2004), Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (Weiser 2001) and Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer (Weiser 1998).
| Copyright © 2012 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing Featured: Spring 2012 Issue, Vol. XI (1) Revision: April 1, 2012 |
[1] Gurdjieff, G. I., Meetings With Remarkable Men, New York: Dutton, 1963.
[2] Gurdjieff, G. I., Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1950.
[3] Meetings With Remarkable Men, p. 278.
[4] Everitt, Luba Gurdjieff with Marina C. Bear, Luba Gurdjieff: A Memoir with Recipes, Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1993, p. 18.
[5] Gurdjieff International Review, Volume VIII (1), 2004, p. 68.
[6] Popoff, Irmis B., Gurdjieff: His Work on Myself with Others for the Work, New York: Samuel Weiser, 1973, p. 152.
[7] Taylor, Paul Beekman, Gurdjieff’s Invention of America, Utrecht: Eureka Editions, 2007, pp. 272–273.
[8] Firestone, Lillian, The Forgotten Language of Children: A Journey in Living Authentically, New York: Indications Press, 2008, p. 97–98.
[9] Gurdjieff International Review, Volume IX (1), 2005, p. 17.
[10] Ibid., p. 21.
[11] Gurdjieff’s Invention of America, p. 275.
[12] Taylor, Paul Beekman, Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer, York Beach, ME: Simon Weiser, 1998, p. 170.
[13] McCorkle, Beth, The Gurdjieff Years 1929–1949: Recollections of Louise March, Walworth, NY: The Work Study Association, 1990, p. 82.
[14] Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer, p. 99.
[15] Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, pp. 1036–1040.
[16] Roerich, Nicholas, Heart of Asia: Memoirs from the Himalayas, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1990, p. 43.
[17] Gurdjieff, G. I., Views from the Real World, New York: Dutton, 1973, pp. 164–166.
[18] P. D. Ouspensky Memorial Collection, Yale University: Box 17, Folder 810.
[19] Taoist Chuang Tzu, in The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Taoism, Part 1 (New York: Dover, 1962) p. 238. Originally published by Oxford University Press in 1891.
[20] Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, p. 378.
[21] William Welch, M.D., What Happened in Between: A Doctor’s Story, New York: George Braziller, 1972, p. 50.
[22] Taylor, Paul Beekman, Gurdjieff’s America: Mediating the Miraculous, Cambridge, England: Lighthouse Editions Limited, 2004, p. 307.
[23] Ouspensky, P. D, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949, pp. 239–240.
[24] Pauwels, Louis, Gurdjieff, Isle of Man: Times Press, 1964, p. 113. First published in France under the title Monsieur Gurdjieff, Paris: Seuil, 1954.
[25] See also Meetings With Remarkable Men, p. 57.
[26] Staveley, A. L, Memories of Gurdjieff, Aurora, OR: Two Rivers Press, 1978, p. 33.
[27] Hands, Rina, Diary of Madame Egout Pour Sweet: With Mr. Gurdjieff in Paris 1948–1949, Aurora, OR: Two Rivers Press, 1991, p. 65.
[28] Pauwels, Louis, Gurdjieff, pp. 106–107.