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5: In search of the miraculous: the Fellowship

Some nineteen years later I was working on a painting project that required great accuracy. I was painting a straight line. Suddenly, for reasons that are not clear and without looking up, I became aware of my surroundings other than just the paintbrush, and there seemed to be more light, although nothing in my surroundings had changed (I was actually in the garage). I put my attention on the point where the working surfaces met, as taught in the SES, and the line proceeded straight. A thought intruded, the feeling of presence was lost, and the line wavered also. Although this only lasted a few seconds, the thought then came, ‘I must find people who know about this,’ and that if necessary I would return to the SES and start all over again.

That is how I found the School. I had an old bookmark for ‘Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Centres’ in one of my books. I remember phoning all the numbers on it—some were dead, some had been reallocated. One of the last ones I tried was a number in California and it was just an answering machine. I left a message. Nothing happened for a few days. Then I was rung at about one o’clock in the morning and given the number of the London Centre. Then the line went dead, so I never found out who I had been speaking to.

The introductory meeting was in the Hampstead flat of a middle-aged couple on a long-term visit from the USA. Everything was very bright and neat. There was a gathering of maybe eight or ten students, some to give the meeting and some to observe, and eventually there were three of us as prospective students. 

I already had high hopes before entering. I had been reading Ibn Arabi’s Whoso knoweth himself, a short book extracted from the Treatise on Being, the title based on a Hadith of Mohammed (‘Whoso knoweth himself knoweth his Lord’). The book is a slim hardback volume, beautifully bound and with a gold geometric Kufic inscription on the cover. I felt I was on the verge of discovering something important, and the world seemed filled with light. Ibn Arabi argues that since there is only one God, everything is God, and he gets as close as he can to the claim of Vedanta that the real Self is God. Avoiding apparent heresy by a hair’s breadth, he nevertheless claims that anything else is polytheism.

Entering the room I felt as though I were living in a fog and everyone else in the room was more there than I was. To walk across the room to deposit my coat felt like walking through illuminated space and I felt I was being observed. I hardly made eye-contact with anyone.

I imagine that my experience was part of my own subjectivity: I had already left my critical faculty behind. I also tend to be a shy person, not at ease in company, although this is something I have learned to overcome—not by becoming an extravert, which I was not born to be, but by learning that being present and listening to others puts me in a safe place from where I look out. In any event, my state of mind was clearly very different from that of the originator of the notorious blog many years later.

Contrary to what is documented elsewhere, I did not find the people unfriendly or stand-off-ish. They asked us neither to believe nor disbelieve what we would hear, asked us to keep questions until tea was served, presented the material, and then served tea and biscuits. The idea that man is a sleeping machine and the possible levels of consciousness were explained, none of which I found surprising. The idea of self-remembering was introduced. There were two further meetings held a week apart. In these the body types and centres of gravity were explained (about all of which more later), and at the end also the conditions for joining including the payment and the no smoking rule. I do not remember asking any questions.

Of the three of us, two joined, and the other left after a few weeks, saying what he really wanted to know was the symbolism of Sufi carpets, which information was not available in the London Centre. 

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