I graduated from Architecture school in New York in the
Spring of 1985. One of my professors had submitted a few of his student’s final
projects to the 3rd International Architecture Exhibition of the
Venice Biennale. My drawings were selected to be included in the show and the
catalog. In a fit of exuberance, I asked my boyfriend if he would like to
accompany me to Venice to see the exhibition.
That summer, I went to Berlin, Prague and Budapest
with my best girl friend. Afterwards, I took a train from Budapest to Venice
where I met my boyfriend. We planned to travel in Italy for 2 weeks. One night, over a candlelit dinner in Verona,
he asked me to marry him and I said yes. I remember sitting in the bathroom of
our pensione the next morning thinking:
“He wants to marry ME!!” I was thrilled. We climbed the hills behind the
city of Verona the next day and looked out over that ancient and beautiful city
which had once been a part of the Republic of Venice. I was happy and in love.
Life was good.
We were married the following Spring in a small rural inn surrounded
by family and friends. I wore an antique white gown and my husband’s mother who
is a minister married us. A friend recited the Sheva Brachot (seven blessings)
of the Jewish wedding ceremony and my new husband broke a glass under his right
foot. We had a toast from a bottle of Mumm’s that my mother (who had passed
away) had saved for me.
I had my first architectural job in a small firm located in
midtown Manhattan. My husband had a job at a firm that specialized in low-income
housing. We were living in my mother’s old apartment in the Village. We had
lots of friends. We traveled abroad frequently. We went to a friends wedding in
Karachi and then spent a week in Kathmandu, we visited friends in Cyprus. Life
was good.
For years, my dream had been to go to Europe, buy a VW van
and travel overland to India. After our first year of marriage, we decided to
sublet our apartment in Manhattan and spend a year traveling the world, looking
at architecture and thinking about writing a book. We didn’t have any children
and the timing was perfect. My husband took a leave of absence from his job and
I quit my job (architecture jobs were plentiful in New York in the mid 1980’s).
We planned to leave in September and had picked the date
because my husband’s parents were planning on traveling to Hong Kong then. What
better way to start our trip than in Hong Kong (where my husband had lived for several
years growing up) with his parents who still had many friends there and spoke
fluent Mandarin? It had long been my dream to travel to Asia and now that dream
was coming true.
We bought two around-the–world airline tickets and planned
our itinerary: Hong Kong (with a side trip to mainland China), Singapore,
Jakarta, Bangkok, Rangoon, Kathmandu, New Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Cyprus, Paris
and lastly Dakar, Senegal as my brother-in-law was in the Peace Corps there.
In July before we were to leave, an old girlfriend of my
husbands (who I had also known in architecture school) called him and invited
him to meet her and some friends at a bar to discuss a class that she had been
attending that she thought he might be interested in. He asked her if I was
invited as well. She told him that she would have to call him back. She called
back later and said that I was invited as well.
At the appointed time, we met our friend in an Irish bar on
Third Avenue in the mid 30’s. We sat with her in a booth in the front of the
bar sipping our beers while she told us of a wonderful experience she had with
a group of people she had recently become involved with. She said that it was
very rare that the group was open to new people and this was one of those unique
moments. She told us that it would be a shame to miss this opportunity. It
seemed very mysterious.
She was vague. I had a vague sense of unease but there was
also an element of excitement. I asked if the group was associated with the
philosophy of one person and she said that it was associated with Gurdjieff.
The name was familiar but I think (having recently been a graduate student in
psychology) I had him confused with Georg Groddeck (the “wild” analyst) or
Erving Goffman – I had books by both of them on my selves at home. She said it
was a study group and that they read and discussed great works of literature. I
asked was kind of things they read and she told me: Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dante,
Plato, the Bible – nothing that was out of the ordinary.
After we talked for a while, our friend asked if we would
like to meet another friend of hers from the group who was in the back of the
bar. We moved to the rear and there was a group of five or six people
assembled. Two of these were women from the group. I will call them A and J. J
was a fiery redhead and she was speaking very passionately to a man who seemed
to be a friend of someone else. She had asked him a question and after he had
answered she said very bluntly that what he had said was bullshit. I was
impressed with her forthrightness, her no-nonsense attitude, her willingness to
speak up for what she thought was the truth and to put herself on the line. She
had a quality that I was attracted to and I wanted to be like her – sure of herself,
well grounded and in control.
J told us that it was unusual for a married couple to join
the group so she wanted to be sure that we each made our own individual
decision. She told my husband and me that we were not to talk to each other
about the group. If we were interested in giving the group a try, we were to come
a bar in Tribecca named Magoo’s on Sixth Avenue near Walker Street between 6
and 7 pm.
I didn’t speak a word to my husband about it. I was agitated about my decision but did I really wrestle
with the choice of going or not going? I don’t think so. For one, my curiosity
had definitely been piqued. Secondly, my husband’s parents belonged to a
quasi-religious order where people lived communally and dedicated themselves to
community development all over the world. Since my husband had grown up in this
group, I had the sense that he was drawn to groups of this type and that he was
definitely attracted to this one. I felt, even then, that if we did not do this
together, that our marriage would suffer. I did immediately feel a wall that went up when my husband and I were told not to talk about the group together. It was a wall that the group would strengthen over time.
I had always been interested in the occult. I grew up in the
Greenwich Village of the 1960’s. Starting in high school, I used to spend hours
in Weiser’s Bookstore when it was on lower Broadway in front of the 8th
Street BMT subway entrance just below Astor Place. They had reading chairs and
ashtrays throughout the store (long before Barnes and Noble) so it was a
comfortable place for me to spend hours on end reading.
I also perused the classified ads in the Village Voice –
there was a particular page (either at the beginning or the end of the paper)
were among other things there would be advertisements for esoteric groups. My
mother was friendly with a man named Rudi who was a spiritual teacher and
oriental art dealer and I used to hang around his shop on Seventh Avenue and
then later on Broadway near 10th Street. I was sure that there was a
guru or a teacher somewhere in my future.
The recruiting practice is not at all the same today as it
was back then. In the mid 1980’s, it was kind of like an open house. If you
liked the class you stayed and if not you went on your way. Probably hundreds
of people came through the doors in those days but only a few stayed. Now there
is a very rigid system for recruiting new students – there are 5 rigidly
proscribed meetings and everyone has to have certain qualifications such as
they have to make over $60,000 a year, not be employed in or have any relatives
or close friends in law enforcement or journalism, they have a “magnetic center” and a
longing for something that life is not giving them. The recruiter also needs to
prepare a detailed summary of their life history (among other things).
The next day, after work, I made my way to Magoo’s. A, one
of the women who I had met the previous night was sitting at a table waiting
for me. She said that my husband had already been there and had gone on to the
space where the group meets with J and that she would take me there. At this
point, my memory is not serving me very well. I think that they had asked us to
bring money (cash) to the bar for our first month’s experiment. I know that now
they do not ask for money up front and the first month is free. You are not
asked to start paying regular tuition until the end of the experiment. I also
seem to recall that as we sat in that bar, A outlined for me one of the main exercises
that we were expected to do on a daily basis. I was to get a small notebook for
my self-observations that were to be done on the dot of 10, 2 and 6 every day.
There was a special formula for how it was to be written out which changed
periodically.
We were also to get a copy of Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution (later referred to as
the “little book”) and cover it with paper so that no one could see what we were reading.
She also told me that I would be assigned a “sustainer” who would call me after
the class to answer any questions I had and to see how I was doing. She said
that whatever I said to my sustainer was entirely confidential and I should not
be afraid to speak freely.
We left the bar and A escorted me to a building on the south
east corner of Broadway and Franklin Street. Later they moved across the street
on Broadway between Franklin and Leonard Streets above P&S Fabrics. We went
up a rickety little elevator to the 4th or 5th floor. The
elevator opened up onto the whole floor. There were large windows all along the
Broadway side of the building. The rest of the main space was outfitted with
chairs in a semicircle on three tiered risers with an aisle down the middle.
There were perhaps 100 chairs in the room.
When I arrived, no one was sitting down but everyone was in
the middle of the floor doing strange movements and there was a man in the
middle of the room calling out what was to be done. I was told to take off my
shoes and try to follow the movements as best I could. When they were over, we
sat down on the chairs and waited. There was an area in the back where there
were two bathrooms and a place where people could help themselves to coffee (one of the five major food groups). The women who tended the coffee and
seemed to be organizing everything that went on, were all dressed in black. For
a long time I called them “the women in black.” I didn’t see any of the people
who had been in the bar the night before.
In the center of the semi-circle of chairs were two chairs with a small table in between them. On the small table between the chairs was:
What appeared to be two matching glasses of water
A small plate of fresh fruit and chocolate
Two cloth napkins
A small container of toothpicks
A small vase of fresh flowers
An ashtray and matches (EVERYONE smoked in those days)
After a few minutes, a man and a woman entered the room from the back and sat down at the chairs in the front of the room. The “women in black” immediately followed them in and they all had a hushed conversation. The women left and then returned with a mug for each of them and set them on the table.
Later I would know this drill so well I could prepare it in my sleep. I would learn that the cups did not always contain coffee (frequently it was Vodka) and the snacks were selected on S's authority and never ever varied. I would learn that the "women in black" were all single, and that after becoming a "woman in black" one could never quit (unless you got pregnant.)
These two people were the "teachers". The male teacher I will call Mr. Twitch (Mr. T) and the female teacher I will call Ms. Head Hunter (Ms. HH). People began to speak at
random, asking questions of the people in the front who I later learned were
the “teachers”. All sorts of things were talked about and the teachers seemed
to be the final arbiters of all questions. Mostly, I had no clue about what they were talking about except when people asked for personal advice. It seemed so odd to me that people would speak about their inner most secrets in front of 100 people they didn't know. I was not then and am not now a big fan of confessions. Especially public confessions. It reminded me too much of the the Cultural Revolution in China. After awhile, Mr. T said that there were
a number of new people and he wanted to give everyone a chance to speak. He
went around the room counterclockwise asking everyone what they had thought of
the class and why they had come. I was at the far left so I was one of the last
to speak.
I don’t like to speak in public. There were quite a few new
people that night (many of them I never saw again) and it was a while before
they got to me. I had a long time to try to calm a mounting anxiety about
speaking and to think about what I would say. Of course, most of the people
eventually said what I had thought of saying so I was constantly changing my
idea about what I would say. This was a situation that was to plague me
throughout the time that I was in “school”. I always wanted to say something
brilliant and original but the anxiety was too great and by the time they got
to me I mumbled something about being interested in what was being said that
night and not wanting to pass up something that might be unique. What I was
constantly thinking, of course, was about if these people really were above
board and if this was the genuine article.
Later, of course, I learned about many things. I became one of those "women in black" and prepared meals for the teachers and served them during class. It was considered a "third line of work" and the only way to get off it once you were on was to get pregnant. Starting with Mr. T, I would never have guessed so many things about him that I later came to learn were true. In short, that every thing he presented about himself as a spiritual being was downright absurd.
