Among the intellectuals who studied and practiced in the 1920s under Alfred Richard Orage, a variety of subsequent careers can be observed. To see Mr. Brown in perspective it may be helpful to glance at two or three of his fellows.
It is natural for a novice to take as their model someone with demonstrated expertise in an activity the novice wishes to master. It was just so with those who gathered around Mr. Orage in New York: some took him as their model, others took Gurdjieff, Orage's mentor. The most prominent career among the post-Oragean intellectuals may have been that of the chemist Willem Nyland, who during his later years especially saw himself as the defender of and advocate for behaviors and practices he associated with Gurdjieff. Mr. Nyland became close to Gurdjieff during a period in the 1930s when that master's fortunes appeared to be waning. Earlier, in prerevolutionary Russia, and later, in Europe, Gurdjieff had sought students especially from among the intelligentsia. His novel, quasi-scientific theories were designed to appeal to intellectuals; his behavior modification techniques were designed to challenge them.
Mr. Nyland was Gurdjieff�s kind of intellectual: sharp, sincere, and diligent in his practice of behavioral modification exercises. Over time these exercises helped to nurture in Mr. Nyland the charismatic personality that Robert De Ropp encountered around 1950 and found, after his years with Ouspensky groups, refreshing. After Gurdjieff's death Mr. Nyland began leading numerous study groups around the U.S., first as a member of the Gurdjieff Foundation and later on his own. (To his credit, many Nyland groups are still functional in the second decade of the twenty-first century.)
Assuming a position of authority inevitably magnifies the effects of one�s strengths and weaknesses. In his interactions with student groups, Mr. Nyland showed that his years of practice had fostered an unwavering sense of personal righteousness. Under his leadership groups developed a strong streak of �behavioral boot-camp.� In Mr. Nyland�s behaviorism the proper role of a teacher�or more senior group member�is to administer a shock, or series of shocks, to those who ask for help. The shocks are intended to provide the aspirant with a new perspective on their super-ego, or personality, thought to be little more than a fabric of lies and tendencies counterproductive to spiritual self-mastery. The effects Mr. Nyland achieved bear marked similarities to those of electric shock therapies favored by clinical psychiatrists of the same era, who used shock therapy when they adjudged some aspect of their patients' behaviors to be counterproductive. Both types of behavioral modification techniques had some successes and some failures, and in both cases the failures could be permanent and cruel.
Another follower of Orage who modeled himself after Gurdjieff was the poet and novelist Jean Toomer. Mr. Toomer appears to have been more nurturing than Mr. Nyland in his attempts to create experimental environments in which Gurdjieff exercises could be fruitfully practiced. In his writings he left extensive and eloquent evidence of his struggle, after Orage's departure, in forming what Buddhists call a 'doubt-mass'. Like Mr. Brown he found the Society of Friends to be of help.
Of the intellectuals who modeled themselves after Orage rather than Gurdjieff, C. Daly King and Gorham Munson were undoubtedly the most prominent. With Orage's encouragement Mr. King led Gurdjieff study groups for many years. He also made an early and significant scientific contribution to the study of consciousness, one that paralleled those of Ouspensky students Robert De Ropp and John Bennett in England—that is, Mr. King contributed not only to the aggregation of new and tested data but more importantly to a fundamental shift in the paradigm of spiritual psychology that occurred in English-speaking lands during the last decades of the twentieth century.
Of Orage's senior students, Gorham Munson appears the most like Orage himself in his mix of broad humanism, long-term fidelity to intellectual life, yet at the same time long-term fidelity to a transformational agenda, even when this meant foregoing all other short-term satisfactions.
References to Allan Brown are scant in memoirs by Orage's students. Unlike some he did not think his destiny lay in group teaching, and he had little interest in creating and sustaining a personality-based sect. In this he was, curiously enough, closer to Orage than to any other of the students mentioned here. Mr. Brown's place in Orage's group, however, can be inferred from the fact that after Gurdjieff insisted that Orage stop teaching the persons who immediately contacted Orage were Mr. King and Mr. Brown—obviously senior students.
Allan Brown showed in his subsequent career just how encouraging and non-judgmental a practice rooted in Gurdjieffian behaviorism can become. There is no evidence of the cocked eyebrow in Mr. Brown's interactions with aspirants. This is not to say that Mr. Brown was a better mentor than, say, Mr. Nyland. But he certainly was a different sort of mentor. He required noone else's behavior to explain his own. And, without diluting the formulations of Orage and Gurdjieff, he demonstrated a distinctly different value system and inner life experience.
Beginning in the 19-teens, Mr. Brown showed symptoms of Marie's spastic ataxia, a progressive and uncureable neurological disease. During the years after Mr. Orage's death, and especially later, after Gurdjieff's death, Mr. Brown was challenged by this severe paraplegic affliction, similar to muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy. His acceptance of this disability combined with his Quaker convictions and long-internalized Gurdjieff practices worked to effect in him a profound humility, the sort that impresses without calling attention to itself. The simplicity and naturalness with which he addresses his correspondents beautifully demonstrate this unforced humility as well as depth of insight. Even in brief excerpts one senses a lifetime of experience distilled through grace and guided by a wisdom rooted outside of personality.
All correspondence is drawn from typescripts left by Mr. Brown as selected and edited by Thea Wheelwright.
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