![[The Fourth Way Bibliography and Bookshop]](fwb97.gif)
Excerpt from Part I
Copyright 1996 William Patrick Patterson
"Hello, this is Lord Pentland."
The voice is low, unforced, impersonal. I feel like I've called a morgue. My breathing clutches. I can't get the words out. I struggle. Somehow I manage to tell him:
"My name is Patrick Patterson. Peter Rowley gave me your number."
"Yes," the voice answers in that same disembodied monotone. "Why do you want to see me?" The question hits like a spear. Why had I called? My mouth becomes pasty. I begin to perspire. I can hardly breathe. Finally I blurt out-
"I've been interested in Gurdjieff for a long time. Years ago I read his book Meetings With Remarkable Men. It really struck me but I could never find anyone who knew anything about him. Then, the other day, I met this fellow, Peter Rowley, and - "
"Yes. I understand all that. But - why do you want to see me?
Why? Isn't that obvious? Suddenly, I realize the absurdity: I had called the man and didn't know why. I feel foolish, angry.
"Well, in any case," he says after a long pause, "do you wish to see me today?" He sighs like he is very tired and adds, "Or...should we let it go till next week?"
The way he says "next week" I know what he expects me to say.
"Today!" I blurt out. I'd waited seven years.
"All right, then," he declares quickly in an altogether different tone, and proceeds to give me detailed directions to his office in Rockefeller Center. As if talking to a child who is sure to forget, he repeats the directions very slowly.
"See you at six o'clock this evening," he says.
"Yes," I agree, but hesitantly. "See you...then."
I expect a goodbye. But no, he says nothing. But he doesn't hang up either.
It is weird. Like a time shift or something. I am dimly aware that the whole conversation has been like that.
And now here I am, with him there, and neither of us speaking with this empty, irritating gap between us.
Finally, just as I am about to open my mouth to speak - "Goodbye," he says quickly and hangs up in my face...
I stood holding a dead phone. I felt like some kind of idiot. Who was this guy? What was I getting myself into? But I felt sort of quiet inside. I could hear myself thinking about what had happened.
Later, I remembered in Ouspensky's book, In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff had said that in order to come to the teaching a person first had to be disappointed in themselves and the world. Disappointed? That was a laugh. I had died. I had always thought "death" meant physical death. I never suspected it came in so many flavors. I had been effectively erased, fog bound whereabouts forgotten, in the great wasteland of the psychological void. Now perhaps the fog was lifting.
I hurried to Rockefeller Center. I stood in front of the RCA Building. It seemed like a massive burial tomb. Inside it was cool, dark and silent, bereft of people, save for a few grizzled guards whiling away the time. I took the elevator to his floor and slowly made my way down the dimly lighted corridor, the only sound was that of my soles squeaking on the marble floor. Finally, I came to a door reading:
I knocked several times. I expected to meet a portly and dour English gentleman wearing a vest and a gold watch chain. He'd have jowls, wear glasses. Perhaps have a crop of white hair. No answer. I waited. The office was dark. Empty. I cursed. Had he forgotten? Was he playing a trick? I was about to leave when, on impulse, I tried the brass door knob. It clicked. The door opened. The light was faint, ghostly, the office painted in shadows and blackness. I felt like a burglar. An ordinary business office. On the walls were large geological and topographical maps. I glanced at some papers on a desk. This "Lord Pentland" was the company's president.
I was about to leave when I heard the sound of a door opening. I took a few furtive steps forward and peered down a long corridor. In the pale light I saw a tall silent figure, very erect, slender, moving through the shadows toward me. He seemed like some prehistoric bird. He was upon me almost before I knew it. The face was totally impassive. The eyes aware. Yet without expression. The neck was very long, reed - like. It seemed too slender for the head. The eyebrows were dark and bushy. The shoulders were broad. He was balding.
"Hello," I said feigning cheeriness.
No greeting, no response. It was as if I hadn't said anything.
Weird. The two of us, strangers, standing in a dark hallway, half our faces in shadow, and him just standing there. He regarded me impersonally and without the slightest embarrassment. I felt as if he was drinking me in, weighing me in some way. What an odd duck! I could see him as perhaps the abbot of some distant, time-forgotten monastery - but hardly a disciple of a man like Gurdjieff. No, he must be just a caretaker. The teaching must have died with Gurdjieff.
Finally, the eyes and face still without expression, his lips formed a smile. In a low voice, just above a whisper, he said:
"Would you follow me?" A long arm motioned me down the corridor. We walked down the dusky hallway; the only sounds in my ears were the soft pad of his slippers and the squeak of my shoes. His office was large and ordinary, a little sparse. Without ornamentation. No exotic souvenirs of travels with the Seekers of Truth. No secret symbols of knowledge. Only a few framed family photos. The view was impressive. St. Patrick's Cathedral, Saks, the traffic and crowds along Fifth Avenue, the Manhattan skyline, the bridge to New Jersey. I turned from the bank of windows. He had brought a chair to the side of his desk.
"Sit wherever you like," he said, half-motioning me to a chair by his desk.
Deliberately, I took a chair in front of the windows. He noted that, then took a seat opposite me on a small couch against the wall. His look was as impassive as it had been in the hallway. I took him in now as well. I noticed his ears. They were large, without lobes, nearly coming to a point at the top. Rather elfin - like. This "Lord" wasn't much of a dresser, even for a businessman. He wore charcoal trousers, baggy and beltless, an old dull pea green cardigan, white business shirt, a nondescript wool tie. The dress of a professor of archeology, a scientist maybe. Hardly the stuff of a sly, swashbuckling man like Gurdjieff.
We continued looking at one another. We hadn't sat long when the last rays of the day's sun streamed into my eyes forcing me to move my chair. I was glad for the excuse to move. I thought that might break this awful silence but he continued watching me. I felt like a bug under a microscope. There was something unnerving about him. I sensed he wasn't there in some way. At least not the way I was; the way normal people are. Was he playing some game? I vowed not to speak before he did. Just then he spoke:
"Why have you come?" His voice was soft, unhurried, almost indifferent.
The same question as on the telephone. Again, I felt the same doubt, same bewilderment. Why was I there? What did I want? What had brought me here? I had no answers. I began talking, rambling on, telling him of my early life, how my parents had spoiled me, treating me like a rich kid, buying me anything I ever wanted.
"Well, at least," I said, "it made me realize that material things couldn't make you happy and then, too, death took it all away, so what was the meaning of it all?"
He went on listening
I recounted how I'd studied psychology and philosophy and found no answer with either. Just mind games. Religion seemed too ordinary, played out, and you had to accept its answers on faith.
He made no comment.
"I don't know what life is about," I told him, "but something in me just can't accept that it is all meaningless - there has to be some reason for human life."
I thought he might respond, but he didn't. I waited. He motioned that I should continue.
I told him, too, how after college I'd gone to San Francisco to work in advertising, but was drafted into the Army. Afterward, I'd come to New York. Worked as a copywriter for Montgomery Wards. Later for J. Walter Thompson and BBD&O. Finally ended up at IBM. I told him about how I had started In New York, its success, then about the fast buck boys.
Like a broken water main, the whole story burst out of me. I must have talked for a good hour. But he listened, however long and convoluted. I'd never known anyone with that "power of listening". He gave no sign of how he felt. Perhaps he only appeared to follow. I couldn't tell. When I got to my theories of what life might be about, its purpose and meaning and all, well, I did notice he seemed to tire visibly. He was in his sixties. Probably had a long day.
I ended by telling him of my spiritual experiences, the light and the telepathy, the inner knowing. I was just getting to the good part when - unbelievably:
He yawned!
Right in my face. No attempt to cover his mouth. No, "excuse me." Not the least embarrassment. He acted as if nothing had happened. Perhaps the "Lord" was a bit senile? Was this another Murphy deal? A wild goose chase? Gurdjieff had died in 1949. This old gaffer - was he just a museum piece?
I hurried then to the end of the story. I was about to excuse myself and leave when - the bastard yawned again!
It was the most incredible yawn I had ever seen. The mouth opened wide, showing a huge cave of teeth and tongue. The neck muscles and tendons stretched full out. Then a loud sucking in of air and the mouth clapped shut, the nostrils exhaling a stream of spent air. The whole mechanical movement of the musculature happened in slow motion, like it was all under his control. He kept his eyes on mine the entire time. They showed nothing. Not the least guilt or apology. Was all this deliberate? If so, why?
I wanted to get the hell out of there, fast. But I didn't. I thought of moving, but couldn't. The thought wasn't strong enough. So we just sat, wrapped in all that heavy silence, all that empty space. It was withering. "Tell me..." he inquired, feigning a curiosity, "can you experience all that now?" There was a slight undertone of challenge in his voice. I saw immediately what he meant: I'd talked about my "spiritual experiences" as if they were a continuing part of my life. I felt like a fish with a hook in its mouth. "No," I finally admitted, a bit reluctantly. He nodded, acknowledging the truth of my admission. "But I could then," I added tersely. "Can you do this now?" He wasn't going to let me off the hook. I looked out the window. The Manhattan skyline stood in sharp black silhouette against the graying twilight. The lights in the buildings, all yellow - they seemed like thousands of impenetrable cat eyes. What was his point? What was he trying to prove? That I was an idiot?
"No," I finally said somewhat sheepishly, "I can't do it now."
"That's true," he shot back quickly.
It was as if we had come to something now, something important. His voice was so direct, sharp, not whispery at all. And the way he pronounced the word "true" - the elongated tail he put on the 'rue' - flashed right through me. Was he suggesting everything I'd said up to that moment wasn't true? Or only half-true? That only my admission - that I couldn't do it now - was worth anything?
The chair felt uncomfortable, unforgiving. I shifted in it uneasily, crossing my legs, clasping my hands around my knee, leaning forward. He shifted as well. More hard silence. I had the most unusual feeling then. It was like a "double feeling." It was as if I was lying and telling the truth- both at the same time.
But everything I'd told him was true! It had happened. I wasn't making it up. So why this feeling of lying? Mentally, I kept seeing reruns of my actions, my words rebounding on me. It was as if I was in some kind of instant replay.
Then his original question - Why have you come? - again shot up in me.
Suddenly I understood. I hadn't answered his question. I hadn't admitted I didn't know why.
That unlocked something. For immediately I remembered what had brought me - what I wanted. Why had I forgotten?
"I want to become conscious," I told him, another tone in my voice.
Something happened in the room then. There was a shift of some type. Same room, same two people, yet it was all different. I felt the space growing, getting larger and larger, like an invisible balloon expanding. The sense of time changed. It was as if time "thinned out." The moment was electric. The whole atmosphere was more subtle, alive.
"Can you help me?" I asked softly.
He sat there, very still, not immediately answering. His hands were folded on his lap, palms up. For a long time he peered into them. It was as though he was reading tea leaves or studying a yantra. He seemed to weigh my question carefully, evaluating my strengths and weaknesses, pitting them against all the obstacles I would encounter. At last he looked up.
"Yes... I think we can."
I felt elated. But inside me the undertone in his voice echoed. I realized that he had said "yes" only by a hair's breath. That I was more a long shot than a calculated gamble.
Lord Pentland's face seemed ancient, timeless.
"Yes, you can be helped," he continued, a small measure of certainty in his voice. Then he added "...if you are sincere."
Last updated 1999.01.15, 5 06.00 GMT.
noshade>© Copyright 1989-2001 Fourth Way and New World. All Rights Reserved.
New World® and Fourth Way® are registered marks.