Compassion for the Human Condition

Dr. William J. Welch and Mrs. Louise M. Welch met in 1934. Mrs. Welch had been part of A. R. Orage’s Gurdjieff group in New York City since the late 1920s and Dr. Welch, in the midst of a career change from advertising to medicine, joined the Work soon after they met. They married in 1941.

During Gurdjieff's last trip to New York, in the winter of 1948-49, the Welches participated extensively in Gurdjieff's daily activities. Summoned to Paris by Gurdjieff, Dr. Welch was the attending physician during Gurdjieff’s last illness in October 1949.

After Gurdjieff died, the Welches were among a small group of his followers in New York who carried on the teaching and established the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. Dr. Welch was the president of the Foundation from 1984 until his death in 1997. The Welches worked with groups in New York, Toronto, and Halifax, including the “Friday group,” which met at their brownstone in New York. It is from meetings of the Friday group that transcripts were selected for this book.

The teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff places great emphasis on work in groups. In that setting, there can be both an oral transmission of the teaching as well as an opportunity to share experiences and observations in conditions characterized by efforts of conscious attention and sincerity. The result can be a more clear understanding of one’s own inner reality. One begins to feel the truth of how one actually is during day-to-day existence, but at the same time, can experience a taste of one’s greater possibilities.

When starting out in the Work, as the Gurdjieff teaching is now generally called, the guidance of a group leader is needed. The ideas and practices of the teaching are far subtler than they may at first seem. After many years this is not so necessary, and one can meet with one’s peers.

The group chronicled in this book had worked together at length, some for twenty years or more. Nevertheless, as one can see from questions and responses in the meetings, everyone benefited from being exposed, again and again, to the Welches’ clear understanding of both the difficulty and the grandeur of what had been brought to the world by Mr. Gurdjieff.