![\"Screen](\"http:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Screen-Shot-2015-07-10-at-7.50.14-PM.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nA journalist for the New Statesman<\/i>\u00a0(March 1923) echoes the opinion of most of the Birds who wandered into the Prieur\u00e9\u00a0at one point or another, lured by talk of the exercises and experiments in heightened attention being carried out there: \u201cThe life is very simple and uncomfortable, the food is adequate but too starchy for an ordinary stomach, the work is extremely hard. The physical work, indeed, results often in a degree of exhaustion which perhaps exceeds anything that was produced even by a prolonged spell in the winter trenches of Flanders in 1917.<\/span>\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Many of these summering Birds being unreconstructed aesthetes with a taste rather for the finer pleasures of life, this was enough to dampen their interest in short time, along with the fact that the Gurdjieff community required a long, difficult apprenticeship, and patient attendance of lectures along with lessons in music and dance, before anything truly interesting could be imparted.<\/p>\n However, a certain H.R. whose correspondence we possess appears to echo another sentiment: that \u201cMr. Gurdjieff appears to possess full and exact knowledge of the nature, causation and practical reproduction of those rare phenomena of hyper-consciousness in which [William] James was so greatly interested.<\/span>\u201d What is extraordinary is that this well-placed Bird seems, at least temporarily, to have had as much influence on the charismatic and eccentric Gurdjieff as the other way around. In fact, the latter for a time adopted some of the characteristic terminology of the Order, though of course repurposed and repackaged; he is recorded around this period\u00a0as calling the Fontainebleau community \u201cmy family \u2013 my birds\u201d (Fritz Peters, Gurdjieff Remembered,\u00a0<\/em>1965)<\/span>. A 1923 mimeographed German translation of one of Gurdjieff’s European\u00a0lectures \u2013 the only extant edition, it is called Der Weg des dritten Vogel<\/i> \u2013 concerns the \u201cpositioning\u201d of the human faculty of attention between inner and outer, past and future, in an unattached and undirected manner. He refers to the famous metaphor from the Upanishads<\/i>: \u201cTwo birds that are always together, cling to the same tree. Of these, one eats fruit of various tastes, and the other looks on without eating.\u201d<\/p>\n