Without Benefit of Clergy: Some Personal Footnotes to the Gurdjieff Teaching

As a young man, Frank Sinclair looked for, and found, the teaching of G.I.Gurdjieff in Cape Town, South Africa, some eight years after Gurdjieff's death. Moved by his first encounter with Gurdjieff's chief pupil, Madame Jeanne de Salzmann, at Franklin Farms, the old Ouspensky estate at Mendham, New Jersey, he extended his original two-month visit to the United States into a stay that has lasted more than 45 years. In this brief memoir, he describes some unusual events surrounding the last days of Madame Ouspensky, his own extraordinary experiences at Mendham, and his subsequent work under the direct influence of Madame de Salzmann. He gives an intimate account of his lifelong search for meaning, his relations with some unusual people-'seekers all"-and concludes with some 'random inferences" about the place of the Work in the world today.