A Path Out of Exile: With Gurdjieff in Post-war Paris

"We called the main task, to be repeated tirelessly, the goal of all the exercises: 'to remember oneself!' Self-remembering is this attempt to deliberately remind ourselves of the exile in which we live and to transform it, with the time devoted to this practice, into consciousness. This idea evoked an immense resonance in me. I had been in exile since I was seventeen, banished. That was the word that explained my very painful state. Of course, I had experienced rejection from my country and emigration as an exile, but this was about my personal homeland, my inner world. I had lost it a long time ago: I lived on the margins of myself. Consciousness was 'in exile,' captured, stuck in secondary and insignificant circumstances, exiled to the domain of functions and appearances."

François Grunwald, a renowned psychiatrist and tireless seeker of truth born in Vienna in 1917, was a fighter for Free France during World War II, a student of G.I. Gurdjieff after the war and became a leader of Gurdjieff groups in Germany. His autobiography was published for the first time in France in 2017, decades after Grunwald's passing, under the title: A Path Out of Exile, From Freud to Gurdjieff. The present book is the translation of the third part, which centers on Grunwald's encounter and work with G.I. Gurdjieff and his circle of pupils in Paris after World War II and until Gurdjieff's death in 1949. It is likely to be the last direct eyewitness account of this extraordinary time of spiritual search.

Anne Sullivan and Thierry Guillemin are students of the Gurdjieff teaching and collaborate translating spiritual texts.