The Key to a Teaching

By D. M. Dooling

How can I speak of him without lying?” asked René Daumal when someone
questioned him about God, “and how can I not speak of him without lying?” How
can we, how must we, bear witness to our own experience, even if what shaped it
was on another level and beyond our understanding?

Once in a long time—some say, only at moments of the greatest human danger and
despair—a man appears, it seems, in order to show what has been forgotten; to put
things back together again; to return to the light of reason a world tottering on the
edge of madness. Gurdjieff called them Messengers from Above. Perhaps they
have not all been recognized, even in the light of history; perhaps none of them
were recognized, except by a very few, during their lifetimes. Many people think
there has been only one such envoy from Heaven, but argue as to whether his name
was Jesus, Mohammed or Gautama. For always we drift back into comparison,
selection and opposition, until another Teacher appears to transform our inner
world and open us for a moment to the reality of wholeness. This appearance is a
world event, another chance granted to the human race; yet only a few people, in
the fraction of humanity that is living at that moment, know that such an event has
occurred. And perhaps the full action of the event depends to some extent on the
witness borne to it by these few.

Gurdjieff was such an event for those who came in contact with him. By what
chance did we cross his path? Why were we among those on whom his glance
happened to rest? We must all have asked ourselves that. We do not know why;
but we were there when Gurdjieff happened, and so he happened to us, and our
lives were changed. We were witnesses, worthy or not, of this earthquake.…

[The complete text is available in the printed copy of this issue.]

~•~

Dorothea Matthews Dooling was born in Ohio in 1910. She studied at Oxford, then
married and settled in Montana where she raised and home-schooled her six
children. She met Gurdjieff for the first time in 1929, and became seriously
engaged in the study of his teaching in 1942. In 1953 she moved to New York and
became a member of the Gurdjieff Foundation. During the 1960s and 1970s, she
was responsible for the Gurdjieff groups in Lima, Peru and Boston. She took an
active part in the translation and publication in Spanish of most of the Work
literature. In 1976, she founded Parabola Magazine, and continued to work as its
editorial director until her death in Montana in 1991.
The Key to a Teaching
By D. M. Dooling

Copyright © 2004 The Estate of D.M. Dooling

This webpage © 2004 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing
Featured: Fall 2004 Issue, Vol. VIII (1)
Revision: November 1, 2004