Richard Wachtel Interviewed by Avi Solomon
Avi: Why don't you
start by introducing yourself?
Richard: My name is Richard David Wachtel,
I am 66 years old, I live in Jerusalem, Israel. I was a school teacher of
Physics in New York City, retired and settled in Israel in 1998. I have been
connected with the Work formally since the spring of 1960 when I entered the
Gurdjieff Foundation in New York City. At that time I was a member of a group in
the foundation and the leader of that group was Willem Nyland, who was then and
continued to be till his death my teacher. Nyland's teaching is today also known
as the Institute for Religious Development and apart from USA represented in
Australia and here in Israel, which can be seen on the web site.
Avi: So how
did you get into this 'other' business?
Richard: I was in the American
army at the time, stationed within hitchhiking distance of Greenwich Village in
NYC, which I liked and I used to come up on weekends when I could get away. In
the village I met a number of people one of whom who was in Mr. Nyland's group
and we casually started discussing certain ideas which I found attractive. Very
quickly he told me the source of those ideas and recommended that I do some
reading, which I did because one of the things you can do in the army in
peacetime is read.
On getting out of the army, at work one day I received
a telephone call from Mr. Nyland asking me if I was interested in joining the
group at which I promptly said Yes. He interviewed me and after the interview
said well if I would like I could join the group which was then at the Gurdjieff
Foundation. I joined the group and I've been in it ever since.
Avi: What
impression did Mr. Nyland make upon you?
Richard: Nothing other than he
was a man who was, actually a few years younger than I am now, I was in my 20s
and he in his 50s. I remember that he had a strong Dutch accent because he was
from Holland, but I though he was German but I was wrong.
Other than that I
don't remember any particular impressions. I was just glad to get into a group
because in my reading I had learned that a group is absolutely necessary and
that one can't really accomplish much in the way of work on oneself without a
group. I needed a group and this was my way of getting into a group.
Avi:
Was there anything in your childhood that inclined you towards the search for
such things?
Richard: Definitely. As a child I was an insomniac who
constantly in my sleeplessness contemplated death and nothingness and also
concepts like everythingness as well as infinity and eternity and living forever
and I got into some fairly spooky subjects. I would think out these things night
after night for sometimes fairly long periods of time and it made me a bit
strange and interested in things that other children of my age weren't
interested in and conversely I wasn't interested in things that other children
were interested in like sports. I was a bit of an outsider and I suppose it gave
me a spiritual twist although at that time I didn't know it.
Avi: What is
work and what has it given you?
Richard: What is Work? Well, I'm not
going to describe work here, that's something I don't talk about in a casual way
outside of a meeting, but I can say what, having been in the Work, and having
applied the ideas of Gurdjieff as taught to me by Mr. Nyland, Work has meant to
me in my Life. Is that acceptable?
Avi: OK!
Richard: All right,
number one, Work has created in me a direction. It is a direction in which I can
always experience more and more and more, I can become more and more open. I can
experience a kind of 'inner growth', for lack of a better term.
I can get
answers to questions that my mind could pose but never answer. My mind could ask
questions, big questions like the meaning of life, why am I here? What is my
relationship to Life? What is my relationship to God? Is there a God? What is
God, if there is a God? It's affected my relationship to my own death, to the
death of this physical body. It is affected my understanding of death in general
so that I can deal somewhat differently than most people with the death of loved
ones.
I've been able to simply grow in such a way that I begin to know these
concepts not in a conceptual or intellectual way, but through some sort of inner
experience, information.
Avi: What do you mean by
information?
Richard: In some way one knows something without actually
being told something, without actually having learnt it from any apparent
outside source. To give you an example, death was always a very big issue with
me, was always very frightened of it, but I now perceive, as I see it, not think
about it, as simply the death of another human being on planet earth. It's a
whole different way of seeing this death. It's not something I was told or read,
It's something I know so much to the point where this information that I have
can't be refuted by any outside source, I simply know it.
Avi: What
special emphasis did Mr. Nyland have relative to the Foundation?
Richard:
The Foundation tended to be more theoretical, more discussion oriented, Mr.
Nyland stressed application in the form of actual working on oneself. He found
at that time, at least according to what he told us, that those at the
Foundation were not rigorous enough in their application of the ideas, that they
were more prone simply to discuss it.
Also he didn't like Ouspensky, Mr.
Ouspensky not Madame Ouspensky whom he liked. He didn't like that there was so
much input from Ouspensky into the ideas at the Foundation. He always explained
after he split off from the Foundation that Ouspensky's ideas had no place in
the work that we were doing, talking about and then actually doing. As a matter
of fact if anybody would begin even to quote Ouspensky at a meeting or say
"Ouspensky said this" or "I read in such and such a book by Ouspensky" he would
stop them right away, "we don't talk about that here"!
Avi: What about
'Beelzebub's Tales'?
Richard: That to him was the central writing. He
called it 'our scriptures'. That was our Bible. Even more than anything else
that Gurdjieff wrote. It was All and Everything! Everything that we needed to
know was contained within that book. It was difficult to get it out of the book
but it was there. As a matter of fact he even recommended it as introductory
reading, which surprised me because I always thought that the book All &
Everything was so difficult that it could be quite a turnoff for new people who
were genuinely interested.
Avi: How was All & Everything
read?
Richard: We made the effort on our own according to the
instructions as written by Gurdjieff and he emphasized that we follow those
instructions. He expected us to do it on our own. You know I'm talking bout the
3 readings. Only on the 3rd reading do we begin to try to ponder and to think
about the ideas as such.
Avi: Are there certain types of people who get
attracted to the Gurdjieff Work vs. other religions?
Richard: Work, the
ideas, the whole system is basically a religion without devotion, without
ritual. So people who get attracted to Work are people who do have a spiritual
need but are turned off by all the hype and the ritual and the pomp and
pageantry of conventional religion. Work is kind of a bare bones, no frills
religion.
There's something in work, as there's probably in all spiritual
disciplines, which certain people are sensitive to and are therefore attracted
to it. You can't necessarily pick out who's going to be attracted to it and also
once they're attracted who's going to stay. I've been surprised too many times
to try to predict.
Avi: Thank You!
Richard: OK!