A Path Out of Exile: With Gurdjieff in Post-war Paris -- François Grunwald
- Roger Lipsey
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
March 2026, words at a public gathering at the Friends Meeting, Washington, D. C. to celebrate publication of the book, translated by two members of the Gurdjieff Society of Washington
François Grunwald's book is instantly recognizable as a classic. It takes time for a book to be recognized as permanent, but not this time. I hope you'll have the joy and reward of reading it.
In teachings, and therefore in the Gurdjieff teaching, continuity from generation to generation is essential. Some of Grunwald's teachers—Jeanne de Salzman, Henri Tracol—were long-lived and were teachers also for my generation, including Dr. Jean Vaysse and René Zuber. The continuity was strong. But continuity in a teaching is not just the written word.
It's not even just the spoken word. It's a great deal more. It is the presence of the highly significant teachers, the ones to whom one could trustingly look. It is the emanation from their presence. You might say skeptically that no one emanates anything, but that’s not true. People do emanate. Men and women of substantial being emanate strongly, and the impact of their presence is—I’ll use a dry word—is ever so pedagogic. You learn from it, and from everything in your interactions with your teachers, their tone of voice, the situations you enter into, the trouble you get into with them, the solutions that appear.
All of that lived history is part of the continuity from generation to generation. And this is a continuity that needs to be sustained. Of course, that's not easy because the next generation doubts itself. How on earth could I or any of us absorb and pass on this great teaching? But the doubt we live with is just the beginning of a serious entrance into the substance of the teaching. It doesn't end with that doubt, it begins with it. And the doubt is abiding. One can never quite do without it. It's a “reminding factor,” to use Gurdjieff's language.
Though Grunwald's extraordinary book and experience are set in the 1940s—and on into the ‘50s and ‘60s when he worked with Henriette Lannes, Jeanne de Salzmann, and others—it’s not finished. It continues. I experienced an example of this continuity less than two weeks ago.
In our Gurdjieff house in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, we celebrated Gurdjieff's birthday, as we always do, on or close to the 13th of January. We had invited an Indian woman—a young virtuoso performer on the sitar—accompanied by a tabla player to share their music with us for an hour.
Our hall, which is generally very plain, had been decorated as if it were an Indian pavilion. Seema, the sitarist, was sitting in this little pavilion of scarves we had made for her. She was beginning to tune her instrument when she received a call on her cell phone. That was surprising. She answered, spoke in Hindi, and later explained that she needed the permission of her master to perform. Hearing that, I teared up. It was utterly moving to see and feel continuity, to see an orderly progression taking place before my eyes.
We learn things ever so slowly, and we scarcely know that we've learned them. We live in a realm of blindness, ignorance, slow-mindedness, and yet we do learn things, and sometimes we realize it. One thing I've learned is that there really are two in us. There is one who is facile, who lives in this world, who knows his way around, who is reasonably comfortable, knows the score until there's no score left. And then there is another one in us: much deeper, the person of feeling, the person who is looking out from within this superficial carapace, looking out on this world and feeling what's at stake.
The appearance of this truth of feeling is something that Grunwald speaks of. This is another continuity. In the company of Gurdjieff at his table, Grunwald for the first time perceived the distinction between ordinary, trivial emotion and genuine feeling.
I'm recommending to you, however you go about it, respect for the possibility that we are two, and that the one who is so very able to make his or her way in life is not the only one who is here. There is someone else.
I had the unexpected notion that I would speak tonight not only to you, my very welcome companions in this space, but speak as if to my mother and father, who are no longer on the planet, to say to them what it is that I've dedicated my life to—quite apart from their wishes for me, which were different. I often think of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s apologia pro vita sua, the apology for his life. I thought to offer tonight, as if to my parents, an apology for my life. Now that would take some time. But nonetheless, let's see what I can do, in short form, to honor them and honor you.
One thing that I would say to them—and I'll say to you—is that we all have inner lives. Every single one of us from the simplest of human beings, to the most troubled, to the most ingenious. We all have inner lives, which means that it's all sparkling inside. There are thoughts, of course; there are feelings somewhere—clearer, stronger, suppressed—but they are there. And then there is this body.
One of the great gifts of the Gurdjieff teaching—which I'm sure can be encountered in other forms and other teachings, but this is the teaching I know—is that the body is the supreme place where it all occurs. Within the body or just outside in a sort of atmosphere. The miracle of consciousness is the miracle of this body.
Some people simply fall out of their childhood into either knowledge or teaching. I still have a friend, my college roommate, born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, right where Walden Pond is. My admired friend fell out of childhood into Thoreau's teaching. He instinctively adopted Thoreau as his master. He is now an older man and a Thoreauvian through and through. All of the elements of good teaching are in Thoreau.
Some people fall out of childhood into fullness of life. Some of us don't. Some of us feel uneasy: our lives are problematic, we sense that there is something to understand, a way to be that we have no knowledge of. Such people are fortunate to encounter an authentic teaching. It needn't be the Gurdjieff teaching, but it needs to be authentic.
Part II will be posted on August 1st.
With thanks to the archivist at the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York for the photograph of Mr. Gurdjieff.