Venture with Ideas: Meetings With Gurdjieff And Ouspensky by Kenneth Walker supplies the feeling of a pupil’s actual experience of studying with Gurdjieff.
This warm human memoir lightly sketches Gurdjieff’s psychological and cosmological teaching, within the biographical context of the author’s twenty-four years study with Ouspensky in England.
Dr. Walker’s vivid account, particularly of his first visit to Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment in the late 1940s, is distinguished by his keenly trained powers of observation as a physician. Gurdjieff used to say that a man revealed himself most clearly in his reactions to sexuality and to money. I could add yet another signpost to a man’s personality, namely, his reaction to Gurdjieff himself.
Many reactions were possible, but it was impossible to be indifferent to him or to forget that he was there. Whatever he was, he was something on a much bigger scale than one had ever seen before, or is ever likely to see again.”
Walker’s scientific background adds interest to his reception of esoteric ideas.
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