Opening: Collected Writings of William Segal, 1985-1997
After years of quietude, several of the foremost students of famed mystic G.I. Gurdjieff or of his ideas have recently published books dealing in some measure with Gurdjieff's teaching, popularly known as "the Work." Last year saw John Pentland's Exchanges Within, and this year has come Peter Brook's autobiography, Threads of Time. Here is another, and quite extraordinary, presentation of one Gurdjieff student's understanding of spiritual search. Segal, judging by this book, is unusual not only for the subtlety and depth of his knowledge, and for his ability to manifest it through a variety of media--the book contains essays, aphorisms, prose poems, paintings and records of conversation (three interviews)--but also for his ability to relate comprehensions both Western (the initial essay, "Opening," begins with a quotation by Meister Eckhart) and Eastern (Zen influences abound) into his meditations, which seem guided primarily by Gurdjieff's monumental synthesis of Eastern and Western spiritualities. Each page in this volume offers a hint, an encouragement, a remembrance of a more profound level of awareness, perhaps attainable even while engaged in an act so heady as reading: "Quietly watching, anticipating nothing, I am open to what is here, now," Segal writes. "I look at myself reading these words.... Will the fragility of my attention survive the experience of turning this page?" Likely not; but the possibility, Segal artfully shows, may be actualized; and those who wish for that will find remarkable support in his beautifully composed words and pictures, which give a strong sense of truth, of having arisen from what Segal refers to as "the silence which is present in the stillness" within.Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.