EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE TO PAUL BEEKMAN TAYLOR'S:

GURDJIEFF'S AMERICA:
Mediating the Miraculous

Written by Roger Friedland

"Bravo America," were Georgii Gurdjieff's last words before dying in a Paris hospital in 1949. This is the third in Taylor's trilogy of Gurdjieffian histories, an American story written by the son of one of Gurdjieff's lovers. Paul Taylor's Gurdjieff's America tracks Gurdjieff's physical and metaphysical movement towards and through a country whose people, in comparison to others, he thought, were much closer to shit than to God. America, Taylor shows us, always possessed a peculiar gravity for Gurdjieff. Not only was it a physical destination for over a decade before Gurdjieff actually arrived for the first time in Manhattan in 1924, but he identified it as a place inside the self, the locus of essence whose discovery, consolidation and manifestation he taught was one of the objectives of the "work."

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Gurdjieff worked America's favorite terrain - the self, which has been sanctified, among others, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He understood the self to be a fundament of artistic genius, the stuff out of which one became an authentic being, not an agreeable personality. Gurdjieff rejected the sufficiency of the standard approaches--the Kantian grounding of knowing in a subject's rationality, the materialist pleasure principle and its behaviorist determinations, and of course the Christian's fallen flesh, old-time religion. Operating in the same terrain as the Theosophists who inspired some of his explorations, Gurdjieff's teaching was a modernist child, his practice of "self-remembering" working within modernity's problematic ground of knowledge, what the great French theorist Michel Foucault would identify with modernity's rise of "Man," as both the object of knowledge, the thing to be known, as well as the ground of knowing, the subject who knows.