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Stephan Bodian, Editor, Yoga Journal
Patterson has two fine Irish gifts: a vivid memory and a storyteller's ear. Paced like a novel and filled with colorful characters, this spiritual autobiography is certain to appeal to those who want a rare and engaging inside glimpse of the Gurdjieff Work.
Richard Smoley, Editor, Gnosis Magazine
Eating The 'I' gives as full a picture of the Work as it may be possible to get without joining it. It comes from a great depth and carries much conviction.
Author's friend
Eating The 'I' represents a genre which happens to be a personal favorite of mine: an autobiographical narrative of an individual's involvement in an interesting religious group or spiritual path. In this case it is both. The author was a member of a New York Gurdjieff group under the direction of the legendary Lord John Pentland, the British aristocrat appointed by Gurdjieff himself to head the Work in America. Pentland fulfilled this task consummately until his death in 1984, and this book culminates with an account of Lord Pentland's funeral.
Besides being very well written as literature, spiritual autobiography of the highest quality ought to meet three further criteria. First, it must be completely honest, presenting the narrator's and the group's flaws and failings as candidly as it does the virtues and successes. Second, it must communicate the worldview and practices of the path adequately, and do so largely through narration rather than didacticism. Third, it should make clear what kind of impact this practice has on the living of everyday life by a real person of our time.
So far as writing and these three points are concerned, this book is about as good as it gets. Patterson is an excellent writer, with a gifted novelist's ability to capture a character through a few lines of dialogue or seemingly casual notes on expression or dress. Who, after reading the accounts here, will forget Pentland's heavy, deadpan tones and the cutting insight which could be behind them?
As for honesty about himself, Patterson's work is in a class with Christopher Isherwood's devastatingly frank, and brilliant, story of his spiritual quest, My Guru and His Disciple. The Gurdjieff years here recounted were also, for Patterson, years of various vocational and marital crises, and of life among assorted exotic Greenwich Village types and well-living but hollow Madison Avenue yuppies. Amid incessant ups and downs he only gradually gained counterbalancing insight into himself with the help of the Work. As he does, we gain some insight too into what it's all about. We perceive how painstakingly difficult the demanded level of self-examination can be, and how in the end it can perhaps uniquely enable you truly to wake up and see yourself as you are seen by others, and by the universe.
If there is a fault, it is in the length. My feeling is that this could have been profitably cut by about a third to leave a leaner story focused more directly on experience with the Gurdjieff Work. There are many reminiscences which, though unfailingly of some human interest, seem only tangential to that story.
Writers in the Gurdjieff tradition tend to do autobiography. There are the classic accounts of life with Mr. Gurdjieff by Ouspensky, de Hartmann, Peters, and others. Eating The 'I'---to the best of my knowledge the first entirely post-Gurdjieffian autobiography centering on life in the Work---will find an honored place in that series.
Last updated 1999.01.15, 5 06.00 GMT.
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