Taking with the Left Hand

by William Patrick Patterson

A book review originally posted on Amazon in 2004

The Arch-Absurd: There is no Fun in Fundamentalism

William Patrick Patterson's first book, EATING THE 'I', made one hell of an impression on me back in '92. The true account of an ordinary guy grappling tooth-and-bloody-nail to apply the ideas of a powerful esoteric teaching to his life, it was almost painfully candid, invaluably enlightening, and beautifully written. I immediately subscribed to his fledgling journal 'Telos' (now 'The Gurdjieff Journal') and eagerly snapped up each new book he wrote. While each successive book has explored a worthy and interesting subject from Patterson's 'Work'-informed perspective, I've detected with some dismay a growing attitude of orthodoxy creeping into his writings. It's as if he's on a personal crusade to take to task those he feels have missed the mark (sinned?) in some way.

TAKING WITH THE LEFT HAND, Patterson's third book, provides a good case in point. It's a curiously conservative offering from a man who, in EATING THE 'I', casually referred to himself as a "maverick."

The book consists of three essays, each first serialized in Telos.

In the first essay, 'How the Enneagram Came to Market,' the author traces the backgrounds of the various people instrumental in developing and popularizing the "Enneagram of Personality Types": Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, Helen Palmer, et al—none of whom, Patterson wants us to know, has ever had any connection to the authentic lineage of Gurdjieff's oral tradition. And if one hasn't been taught by either Gurdjieff himself, or by anyone Gurdjieff appointed to teach, in Patterson's view they are incapable of advancing in The Work, and still less of contributing anything to it.

'Enneagram' is well written, and the biographical material is well-researched and revealing. The main problem is that the author has failed to actually grapple with the typology which informs his subject. Granted, the essay's title doesn't promise a critical evaluation of the Ennea-types. But consider the implications if Patterson were to study the topic and find it valid: He would then have to reconsider his central contention that personality-mapping represents an unauthorized and therefore invalid misappropriation of the Enneagram. Instead, he sidesteps the typology itself in favor of an ad hominem campaign of discrediting its proponents.

Consider, however, that long before the Enneagram craze, a couple of books appeared which attempted to show Enneagrammatic dynamics at work in various processes — cooking a meal, for instance. Not only were these approaches not critically damned, they seemed accepted by the Gurdjieffian mainstream. I've studied both approaches, and have found character analysis via the Enneagram to be at least as effective as — and often more practical than — other uses. Could the controversy here really be that Ennea-typing has become too commercial, and its subject is (false-) personality, which typing is believed to reinforce? Or is it merely an example of a growing trend of orthodoxy in the official Gurdjieff Work today, which tends to resist or dismiss any sort of innovation? Need we remind this orthodoxy that Gurdjieff himself was a great innovator, his teachings of unknown provenance?

In the book's second and perhaps strongest essay, 'The People of the Bookmark,' Patterson takes on the Fellowship of Friends (F.O.F.), a Fourth Way school, and its controversial founder and leader, Robert Earl Burton. While clearly I disagree with Patterson's belief that Burton's lack of experience in an "authentic" Fourth Way group automatically vitiates any possible deeper knowledge he might have, Burton has always seemed as close to the textbook profile of "charismatic cult leader" as it's possible to get, which makes it hard to give him the benefit of the doubt; and then there's F.O.F. itself, with its excruciatingly "refined" sensibilities, studied preciousness and bogus elitism. Critically dismantling such an entity would not be much of a challenge.

However, Patterson goes much deeper in his criticism of Burton than merely objecting to his cultic manifestations. He goes right to the meat of some of the teacher's central tenets and practices, spending some time critiquing his deceptively profound book SELF REMEMBERING. For example, he carefully exposes the fallacy of the "divided attention = self-remembering" equation by tracing the phenomenological relationship between "attention" and the "self" in which it moves; and also by pointing out how this practice of "dividing attention" can tend to reify the act of observing, thereby unduly reinforcing the observer. This is a good example of why Patterson is at his best when he drops the dogmatism and speaks simply from his own experience and wisdom.

In 'The Mouravieff Phenomenon,' the book's final essay, the author makes the case that Boris Mouravieff — Russian aristocrat, esotericist, and associate of both Ouspensky and Gurdjieff — was guilty of plagiarizing Ouspensky's IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS in his own magnum opus, the three-volume GNOSIS; that he fashioned an esoteric hybrid by fusing the ideas of the Fourth Way with those of the Eastern Orthodox Church; and that his understanding of the Fourth Way is derived not from Gurdjieff but from Ouspensky, who was merely Gurdjieff's estranged disciple.

Here again we see Patterson not so much as judge and jury, but perhaps as prosecuting attorney: methodically building up his case, making an impassioned — but eminently reasonable — closing statement to the jury, but leaving out the essential fact that he doesn't really know any more about Mouravieff than the jury does. Indeed, this is the least thoroughly researched essay of the bunch, and even after reading it, one has very little sense of who Boris Mouravieff was and on what he might have based his claim to being "authorized" by some esoteric brotherhood to expound what seems like a hybrid of Fourth Way and Eastern Orthodox teachings.

At times Patterson comes on like a politician on a smear campaign, as he impugns the assorted figures in the shadowy hinterland of the Fourth Way fringes. It seems that the erstwhile maverick is a neo-traditionalist who believes the Gurdjieff lineage has become dangerously contaminated by the wiseacrings of psuedo-Gurdjieffian posers and opportunists, while he himself bears the responsibility of crusading to keep the path pure.

Actual rating: 2½ stars.