Natural Sales Training

Develop your teams natural selling potential

Natural Training has changed the world of sales training at over 1,000 UK companies by playing to thestrengths, personality and culture of individuals and your organisation.

This results in sales training that feels immediately more useful and practical, flowing through your blood rather than stuck in a workbook. Help your team develop a winning sales structure, grow in confidence and motivation, increase outbound activity, and win more new business at meetings and pitches.Naturalsales training will make you money.

I want to hear more!

Absolutely brilliant, the best training I have had in my experience in this industry (17 years). You are a fantastic team and very dynamic.

Regine Perron, Clarins

We win awards for our sales training, such asGlobal Sales Program of the Year at the prestigious Golden Peacock Awards.

Why? Because we dont do off the shelf training you can buy a book and do that yourself.

Success comes in different shapes and sizes. But you wouldnt think so to look at most training curriculums. People are herded into a classroom and expected to twist themselves into a proven methodology with no respect for their natural style or personality.

Here at Natural Training, we take a different approach. We believe that there are many ways of getting your team from where they are now to where you want them to be. Our talent is finding the right way for them that creates the right results for you.

So, we spend a little extra time up front, working out how you make money. We build a solution around your strengths your best sales people, your best target customers, and what drives your industry. Then we match you to a trainer from our Faculty with the right blend of experience. That means that you get a sales training programme that feels like yours your language, your challenges, your customers featured in the scenarios and examples.

Long after the training programme is finished, the results will remain, because its part of your culture, your DNA. Thats why when we hand over the reigns, and release your people back into the wild, we are certain that you can go from strength to strength without needing us any more.

Our sales training is relevant to todays market, and will develop your teams natural instincts to be clear, memorable and confident. As always we refuse to create a room full of robots. Each member of your sales team will learn how to maximise their natural style to full sales advantage.

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Enjoyable learnt throughout the day and got more confidence as the day went on. Came up with new ideas such as getting through gatekeepers that I hadnt thought of before. I found it easier to get appointments I will put aside time each week now to make new business phone calls.

Gary Hudson, Sales, Westfield

Our mission is to provide companies and sales teams in the UK, Europe and the world with sales training that makes you money.

We provide successful selling strategies that close more new business, improve customer relationships, increase customer retention and deliver real value to your customers.

Our style is practical and hands-on, designed around the needs of todays sales people. Sales teams wont appreciate getting bogged down in theory they want to participate, learn, and most of, do. We bring energy to the training room, we come loaded with practical ideas, years of experience and sound knowledge based on years of research.

With Natural Sales Training you will also have access to a leading sales expert for a decent, common-sense day rate. Our trainers are exceptional they live and breathe sales. The NaturalSales Training Company is available to train your sales team in a bespoke sales training course according to your brief, or via any of the following popular workshops:

We dont do off the shelf sales training, because you have challenges unique to your team, your industry and your customers. Instead we listen to your needs and produce fresh sales training that will change behaviours and meet your performance targets

I want to hear more!

Excellent small workshop, great resources, relaxed atmosphere, nice trainer, very practical and best of all enjoyable. Alison Ozanne, Virgin

At Natural Training we pride ourselves on having a team who are dedicated to bringing the best training experience to your organisation. Our experts have worked across many sectors and each have uniquestrengthswe can directly apply to your needs. For a realintroduction to the team, follow the link below.

Meet the Team

Made me more assured of myself how to maintain control of a negotiation, and systematically analyse a negotiation with the key players involved. Julie Thompson, Group KAM, Panalpina

Manage accounts in a proactive way. Grow sales revenue from your existing customers we can help you up-sell, cross-sell and generate raving, loyal fans among your customer base.

Fine-tune your teamsnatural sales performance. Even the best can get better and high performing teams can sharpen theirfocus.

Successful selling is your birthright. The foundation skills for sales success utilising your natural style.

Effortlessly handle objections and close the deal.

The toughest, most disciplined sales training in Europe.

Move your audiences to action be clear and persuasive

Procurement doesnt always focus on price. It just wants you to think it does.

Selling at Tradeshows learn how to organise your time, generate leads during the trade show, and follow up in the right way afterwards.

Is your team feeling a bit jaded? We integrate high power sales motivation sessions into all of our training, conference sessions and more.

Getting customers to buy at a premium price and winning business in highly competitive markets.

Get a tailored course

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Sales Training - Natural Training

Welcome to Cycle Of Sales!

I hope you enjoy perusing the information contained on this site. Ive attempted to offer a great deal of free direct sales training, management, as well as direct sales recruiting information for you, the direct sales professional.

You can check out much of this information at our Learning Center (click here,) and make sure you take a look at our glossary of salesdefinitions here (you can now download a PDF copy.)

Over the past year, Ive worked to complete my first twelve MP3 audio courses. Each course covers various sales, management, and recruiting topics and can be downloaded immediately upon purchase.

Each course may be studied at your convenience- whether listening to the modules in your car on your way to ahuge sales presentation, or on virtually any personal audio device.Each course is also accompanied with a course PDF download featuring an outline and module exercises.

I wish to thank you for visiting this web site, and I wish you the best success in your direct sales endeavors!

Chris (C.J.) Anderson

Read more here:
Online Sales Training, Free Sales Training, Download ...

The Secaucus Public Library will be hosting a Scrabble tournament for adults on Friday, October 9th from 12 noon until 2pm as part of its ongoing Friday Lunch Break series. The competition, which will take place in the librarys second floor meeting room, will be sponsored by the Secaucus Spectator and coordinated by its editor, Don Evanson. Prizes will be awarded to the two highest-scoring players. The tournament will consist of four 30-minute lightning rounds, and the players with the two highest combined scores at the end of all four rounds will be the winners.The library will haveScrabble boards on hand and players are encouraged to bring their own, if possible, in order to ensure thatthere will beenough to run all matches simultaneously. Official Scrabble dictionaries will be provided to settle any word-related disputes.

Light refreshments, including hot beverages, soda, water, snacks and sweets will be provided,but participants are welcome to bring a brown bag lunch if they prefer a more substantial meal. Plates, napkins and eating utensils will be available for attendees. Registration is highly recommended. For more information or to register, call the library at 201-330-2083 or register online through the librarys calendar of events page at secaucuslibrary.org.

Visit our list of online resource to access the free Driver Education program. This Driver Education program contains the following state-specific information:

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Secaucus Public Library

Invest in Yourself and Make It Happen

What boggles my mind is we hear all this information from experts on where to invest.

They shout:

"Put it in your 401k account." "No, a diversified portfolio." "Invest in technology." "Open a high yield money market account." "Buy gold."

Don't get me wrong, that advice can be helpful to a certain point.

However, many people seem to overlook the fact that the greatest asset they can invest in is themselves.

You are one of the greatest assets you can possibly invest in and given that, you should start right away to invest aggressively for maximum ROI.

What do I mean by investing in yourself?

Learning how to maximize the enormous potential that lies in your mind and body.

This includes learning how to set goals, how to manage your time, how to remove fear and doubt, how to adjust your thinking, create new habits, squash bad habits, how to take care of your health, how to focus, etc.

By taking the time to do these things, your return on investment will be exponential!

A very simple example of investing in yourself is learning how to read. You may take that for granted, but keep in mind that a large portion of the population cannot read.

By learning how to read, you are able to gain information from books, magazines, and the Internet; resources that you could not have tapped into had you not invested in yourself.

You see, when you invest in yourself, a thousand other doors open.

Imagine if you invest in yourself daily! You will basically be compounding all the interest you earn daily and your return will be priceless. A million other doors will begin to open.

You see, our brains and bodies are so well designed and have unbounded potential. All we need is a manual to unleash it.

Here you will find quality, DEFINITIVE articles dedicated to helping you unleash the potential of your brain and body. These articles cover an array of topics on self improvement, such as goal setting, time management, thinking strategies, health and fitness, social life, financial abundance, inspirational stories to keep you motivated, and many other topics.

By investing in yourself, you can make it happen, make anything happen. Whatever your dreams, goals, or aspirations may be, you WILL make it happen.

All of the free articles on this site were written with the following goals in mind:

1. To provide high quality, DEFINITIVE self improvement information. 2. To make the information easy to understand. 3. To make the information easy to apply. 4. To move you to take action NOW toward the direction of your dreams.

If you are one who wishes to read on paper, you will find that all articles are printer friendly. Simply press print and you will only print out the contents of the article, nothing more.

You can start by reading the most Popular Articles and the frequently updated Blog.

You can also read the official Mission Statement of this site.

There are so many people all over the world people today that are living their dreams. Join them! If you have the ability to access this site and understand the words you are reading on this screen, you are more than capable of achieving your success.

Bookmark this site and get started today!

Dont wait for your ducks to line up in a row to start going for your dreams. The ducks never line up. Only when the mama duck goes out do the baby ducks follow in tow.

Be the mama duck and dare to go down the path that few people dare to go down. The path of your dreams.

If youre wondering who I am, you can read About Me.

You can also sign up for the Free VIP Self Improvement Newsletter in order to get the VERY BEST VALUE out of this site, so start to invest in yourself today and make it happen!

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Brian Kim.net - Invest in Yourself and Make It Happen ...

Stay together friends. Don't scatter and sleep.

Our friendship is made of being awake. -- Rumi

Welcome to Silver Spring Zendo/One Heart Sangha

Sensei Rose Mary Myoan Dougherty

Sensei Bill Ji An Dietrich

Sensei Bob Jin Gen Ertman

The One Heart Sangha is a multifaith community of Zen students who sit together on a regular basis to support one another in staying awake, moment-by-moment, to see and live our true nature, our at-one-ment with all. One Heart Sangha exists to support the ongoing practice and compassionate presentce of its members. Our lineage is that of the White Plum Asanga which was established by Taizan Maezumi Roshi and draws heavily on the teachings of the Soto School of Zen, founded by Dogen Zenji in the 13th century.

Silver Spring Zendo/One Heart Sangha is a non-profit organization.

We are affiliated with the Zen Peacemakers Sangha, founded by Roshi Bernie Glassman. Its members are individuals, groups and organizations dedicated to realizing and actualizing the interconnectedness of life.

Sensei Rose Mary Myoan Dougherty

Sensei Rose Mary Myoan Dougherty is the Spiritual Director and founder of One Heart Sangha/Silver Spring Zendo. She is a member of an international community of vowed religious women whose call today is to hear the cries of the earth and its people and respond compassionately. She has offered workshops, retreats, and spiritual guidance in the contemplative tradition in interfaith settings for over thirty years. She began her Zen studies with Charlotte Joko Beck and is dharma heir of Janet Jinne Richardson Roshi. She completed the End of Life Counseling Program at Metta Institute in California. She volunteers at a hospice for the homeless in Washington, D.C., and offers retreats and workshops for hospice caregivers, especially through the program "Companioning the Dying: Opening Fully to Living," which she co-directs. As a sensei, she teaches Zen meditation at Silver Spring Zendo/One Heart Sangha in Silver Spring, Maryland, and in other settings.

Sensei Bill Ji An Dietrich is one of the founding members ofSilver Spring Zendo/One Heart Sangha. He is a dharma heir of Rose Mary Myoan Dougherty, Sensei, and previously studied under Janet Jinne Richardson, Roshi, and Rosalie Jishin McQuaide, Sensei. Heis the former executive director of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, an ecumenical institute for contemplative spirituality. He has offered numerous contemplative programs and retreats as well as spiritual guidance in interfaith settings for over 20 years. Billhas completed theMetta Institute'sEnd of Life Care Practitioner Program, where he studied with mindfulness teachers Frank Ostaseski and Ange Stevens, and with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Sensei.He currently devotes much of his time to end of life care and is an active hospice volunteer patient visitor and chaplain. He also co-directsCompanioning the Dying: Opening Fully to Living,a program of formation and support for those engaged in end of life care. Bill is a member of Bethesda Friends Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). He previously had a long career in business and has served since 1986 on the board of trustees of the Ariel Investment Trust, a series of socially responsible mutual funds. He lives in Rockville, Maryland with Anne, his wife of over 30 years and a retired engineer, and together they have three adult children and one granddaughter.

Sensei Bob Jin Gen Ertmanis a dharma heir of Rose Mary Myoan Dougherty, Sensei, anda long-time member of the Silver Spring Zendo/One Heart Sangha. He is also a member off the Zen Peacemakers and is grateful for the way it has shaped his practice in all of life. He writes and teaches haiku as a practice of being fully in the present moment.He received the precepts at Boundless Way Zen from James Ford, David Rynick, & Melissa Backer.Bob is a retired federal attorney and lives in Annapolis with his wife, Phyllis. Together they are facilitators of a Mndfulness Practice Group at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis.In his spare time, Bob collects fossils, with his daughter Hallie when he can (They began when she was 4--she's 28 now).

To register for any events, or if you wish to contact the sangha, please email:

registration@silverspringzendo.org

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Silver Spring Zendo/One Heart Sangha - Welcome

Meditation is a natural state of the human mindat rest, open, alert. The practice of meditation has been taught for over 2,500 years as a vehicle for realizing the beauty and magic of the ordinary world without aggression or manipulation.

The teachings of Shambhala Buddhism emphasize the potential for enlightenment inherent in every situation or state of mind. Through discipline, gentleness and a sense of humor, the practitioner is invited to let go of conflicting emotions and wake up on the spot.

Mindfulness/awareness meditation is the foundation of all that we do at the Shambhala Meditation Center.This ancient practice of self-discovery is rooted in the simple but revolutionary premise that every human being has the ability to cultivate the minds inherent stability, clarity and strength in order to be more awake and to develop the compassion and insight necessary to care for oneself and the world genuinely.

Meditation instruction is available to anyone, free of charge. We offer introductory instruction to newcomers and follow-up instruction to other practitioners on Sunday mornings, Wednesday evenings, as part of our Open House program, and at other times by appointment. Not just for new meditators, instruction is also recommended as part of our ongoing practice. You are always welcome to come in and speak to an instructor about your regular practice and you may even ask to form a working relationship with the instructor of your choice.

Depending on a students interest and experience, meditation instruction might include:

Introducing the practice of meditation Introductory meditation instruction presents the basic meditation techniques taught in the Shambhala community.

Clarifying the view of meditation In our tradition, meditation instruction involves more than the communication of a technique; it is, at heart, about the transmission of the revolutionary view that unconditional wisdom and compassion are the very ground of our being, and that by learning to relax more and more fully, we allow this fundamental nature to flower.

Instruction on working with obstacles to meditation Common obstacles to meditation include disheartenment, resistance, procrastination, discursiveness and spacing out. The obstacles are well documented in the Shambhala Buddhist teachingsand so are their antidotes.

Guidance on the path of practice and study Shambhala presents many opportunities for students to deepen their practice and studypublic meditation sessions, weeknight classes, weekend programs, retreats and seminaries, to name a few. A meditation instructor can help you decide what to do next and when to do it.

Guidance on joining meditation and daily life The workaday world is where the rubber meets the road. Getting the tools to meet lifes ups and downs with a strong and pliable mind and an open heart is another potential benefit of working with a meditation instructor.

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Meditation | Providence Shambhala Center

Meditation

Mindfulness meditation is the foundation of all that we do at the Shambhala Buddhist Meditation Group. Originating from Shakyamuni Buddha, this 2,500 year-old practice of self-discovery is rooted in the simple, but revolutionary premise that every human being has the ability to cultivate the mind's inherent stability, clarity and strength in order to be more awake and compassionate in everyday life.

The key to deepening one's practice and discovering the inherent wakefulness and basic goodness that we all posess is by establishing a daily meditation practice. In addition to our weekly meditation sessions, weekend Shambhala Training intensives, and other events, our center also offers a monthly nyinthun where anyone who wishes may join us for a three-hour sitting session (alternating 20 minutes of sitting meditation with 10 minutes of walking meditation) every fourth Sunday from 9:00am-12pm. These sessions offer a chance to practice meditation with others in a quiet conducive setting for longer periods than we are able to at our open house. In contrast to our regular meditation sessions, the nyinthun does not contain any instruction or discussion (meditation instruction for newcomers will be available upon request). Anyone is welcome to come and go at anytime during the nyinthun period. The general schedule of the day will be opening chants then sitting & walking from 9am-Noon. Exceptions to this schedule will happen when other events are taking place, such as a Shambhala Training weekend. The specific times for these events can be found on our monthly calendar and in our weekly email updates. If you are not receiving these emails and would like to, please add your name and email address on the Home page of this website.

Beginner Meditation and Discussion

The Second Tuesday of Every Month, 6:00pm to 7:00pm.

Please join us on the second Sunday of every month for an introduction to the Shambhala Buddhist Meditation Group. Come and learn about the variety of programs and opportunities for practice offered here, and guidance for beginners is available free of charge. Beginner meditation includes an sitting/walking meditation practice with guidance for beginners and discussion from Pema Chodron, the Sakyong and other teachers.

Meditation Schedule

All are welcome to our weekly and monthly programs as well.

See the monthly calendar for an updated schedule.

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Meditation - Tallahassee Shambhala Meditation Group

However, there was one kind of publicity that he always got in Europe and America, and that was the kind made by the wagging human tongue: gossip. In 1921 he showed up in Constantinople. "His coming to Constantinople," says the British scientist, J. G. Bennett, "was heralded by the usual gossip of the bazaars. Gurdjieff was said to be a great traveler and a linguist who knew all the Oriental languages, reputed by the Moslems to be a convert to Islam, and by the Christians to be a member of some obscure Nestorian sect." In those days Bennett, who is now an expert on coal utilization, was in charge of a British Intelligence section working in Constantinople. He met Gurdjieff and found him neither Moslem nor Christian. Bennett reported that "his linguistic attainments stopped short near the Caspian Sea, so that we could converse only with difficulty in a mixture of Azerbaidjan Tartar and Osmanli Turkish. Nevertheless, he unmistakably possessed knowledge very different from that of the itinerant Sheikhs of Persia and Trans-Caspia, whose arrival in Constantinople had been preceded by similar rumors. It was, above all, astonishing to meet a man, almost unacquainted with any Western European language, possessing a working knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and modern astronomy, and able to make searching comments on the new and fashionable theory of relatively, and also on the psychology of Sigmund Freud."

To Bennett, Gurdjieff didn't look at all like an Eastern sage. He was powerfully builthis neck rippled with musclesand although of only medium height, he was physically dominating. He had a shaven dome, an unlined swarthy face, piercing black eyes, and a tigerish mustache that curled out to big points. In his later years he had a large paunch. But in one respect Gurdjieff's reputation followed the pattern of all the swamis, gurus and masters who have roamed the Western world: his past in the East was veiled in mystery. Only the scantiest facts are known about him before he appeared in Moscow about 1914.

Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol, an Armenian city, in 1866. His father was a kind of local bard. It is said the boy was educated for the priesthood but as a young man he joined a society called Seekers of the Truth, and went with this group on an expedition into Asia. He was in Asia for many years and then came to Moscow where there was talk that he planned to produce a ballet called "The Struggle of the Magicians."

The rest is hearsay. It has been said that the Seekers of the Truth went into the Gobi desert. It has been said that they were checking on Madame Blavatsky'sSecret Doctrine, and at places where she said there were "masters" they found none; whereas at places unspecified by her, they did find "masters." It has been said that Gurdjieff found one teacher under whom he studied for fifteen years and from whom he acquired his most important knowledge. It has been said that several times he became a rich man in the East. This is all hearsay.

A better grade of hearsay centers around Gurdjieff in Tibet. Was he or was he not the chief political officer of the Dalai Lama in 1904 when the British invaded Tibet? According to Achmed Abdullah, the fiction writer, Gurdjieff was the "Dordjieff" to whom the history books make passing reference, supposedly a Russian who influenced the Dalai Lama at the time of the Younghusband Expedition. Abdullah was a member of the British Intelligence assigned to spy on this "Dordjieff," and when Abdullah saw Gurdjieff in New York in 1924, he exclaimed, "That man is Dordjieff!" At any rate, when there were plans in 1922 for Gurdjieff to live in England, it was found that the Foreign Office was opposed, and it was conjectured that their file dated from the time of the trouble between the British government and Tibet. According to rumor, Gurdjieff counseled the Dalai Lama to evacuate Lhasa and let the British sit in an empty city until the heavy snow could close the passes of the Himalayas and cut off the Younghusband expedition. This was done, and the British hurried to make a treaty while their return route was still open.

Much more is known about Gurdjieff after 1914. A recently published book by P. D. Ouspensky which the author calledFragments of a Forgotten Teaching, but which the publisher has renamed In Search of the Miraculous, gives a running account of Ouspensky's relations with Gurdjieff over a ten-year period. Of his first interview with Gurdjieff, Ouspensky says: "Not only did my questions not embarrass him but it seemed to me that he put much more into each answer than I had asked for." By 1916 Ouspensky was holding telepathic conversations with Gurdjieff. He also records one example of Gurdjieff's transfiguring of his whole appearance on a railroad journey, so that a Moscow newspaperman took him to be an impressive "oil king from Baku" and wrote about his unknown fellow passenger. The greater part ofIn Search of the Miraculous consists of the copious notes Ouspensky made on Gurdjieff's lectures in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which give us the only complete and reliable outline of Gurdjieff's system of ideas thus far in print1. It is plain from Ouspensky's exposition that Gurdjieff attempted to convey Eastern knowledge in the thought-forms of the West; he was trying to bridge the gap between Eastern philosophy and Western science.

For us in America the story of Gurdjieff is the story of three men whom I call the "black sheep philosophers." Gurdjieff was the master, and the other twoAlfred Richard Orage who died in the fall of 1934, and Peter Demianovich Ouspensky who died in the fall of 1947were his leading disciples. I call them philosophers; others would call them psychologists; many have called them charlatans. Whatever one names them, they were black sheep: they were looked at askance by the professional philosophers and psychologists because of the different color of their teachings. Nor were they accepted by theosophists, mystics, or various occult professors. They stood apart and their appeal was to what I shall call, for want of a more inclusive word, the intelligentsia.

It is impossible to assimilate Orage, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff into any recognized Western school of thought. The New York obituaries of Gurdjieff called him the "founder of a new religion." It was said that he taught his followers how to attain "peace of mind and calm." This was an attempt to assimilate him. But Gurdjieff claimed no originality for his system and did not organize his followers; furthermore, he did nothing to establish a new religion. As for "peace of mind and calm" There is the incident of an American novelist who calls himself a "naturalistic mystic." In the middle of a dinner with Gurdjieff in Montmarte, this novelist jumped up, shouted, "I think you are the Devil!" and rushed from the restaurant. The truth is that Gurdjieff violated all our preconceptions of a "spiritual leader" and sometimes repelled "religious seekers."

In my view, the man was an enigma, and that means that my estimate must necessarily be a suspended estimate. The supposition that he was founding a religion will not hold up. And I do not believe he was a devil out of the pages of Dostoevski. There is an old saying that a teacher is to be judged by his pupils, and by that test Gurdjieff had knowledge that two of the strongest minds in our period wanted to acquire. These minds belonged to the English editor, A.R. Orage, and the Russian mathematical philosopher, P.D. Ouspensky. Both surrendered to Gurdjieff. Let us look at the disciples and then come to their teacher.

ORAGE, a Yorkshireman, bought a small London weekly, The New Age, in 1906. From then until 1922, when he relinquished the paper and went to Fontainebleau where Gurdjieff had his headquarters, Orage made journalistic history. He was remarkable for finding and coaching new writers. Among these was Katherine Mansfield, who acknowledged her great indebtedness to him as a literary mentor. Another was Michael Arlen, who once dedicated a novel to Orage in terms like these: "To A.R. Orageslow to form a friendship but never hesitant about making an enemy." Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, Hilarie Belloc and Arnold Bennett debated with each other in The New Age, and Shaw called Orage a "desperado of genius."

The New Age was more than a literary review. It played a lively role in British political and economic movements. It began by being highly critical of Fabianism, then took a positive turn by advocating National Guilds, or Guild Socialism, as the Guilds movement was popularly called. With A.G. Penty and S.G. Hobson, Orage was one of the prime instigators of the National Guilds movement, but he always had a lingering doubt of the practicability of its platforms and in 1919 he dropped it and joined with Major C.H. Douglas to found the Social Credit movement. With him went many of the more brilliant Guild Socialists, to the mortification of G.D.H. Cole who denounced the "Douglas-New Age heresy."

To literature and economics, Orage added a sustained interest in occultism, and it was this that finally led him to Gurdjieff's Chteau du Prieur at Fontainebleau-Avon. Nietzsche had extended the horizons of Orage's thought during his formative years, and Orage's weekly became a forum for Nietzscheans. He himself wrote two small books on that grossly misunderstood philosopher which remain the clearest expositions yet penned of the superman doctrine. On the spoor of the superman, Orage investigated theosophy, psychical research, and Indian literature, and he wrote one book,Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman, which hinted at the mental exercises he practiced to enlarge and elevate consciousness. T.S. Eliot called Orage the finest critical intelligence of his generation, which is an assurance to the reader that Orage was no gull in his excursions into mysticism. In 1922, at the age of forty-nine, he cut all ties in England, went to Gurdjieff at Fontainebleau-Avon, and was set to digging trenches and washing casseroles.

At that time Gurdjieff'sInstitute for the Harmonious Development of Man was in full swing. With funds provided by Lady Rothermere, Gurdjieff had acquired the historic Chteau du Prieur, once the residence of Madame de Maintenon, the consort of Louis Quatorze, and in latter years the property of Labori, the attorney for the exonerated French officer, Dreyfus. The institute provided a thorough work-out for the three "centers" of human psychology. Its members engaged in hard physical tasks ranging from long hours of kitchen drudgery to the felling of trees in the chateau's forest. Unusual situations, friction between members, and music insured great activity for the emotional "center." For the mental "center" there were exercises that often had to be performed concurrently with physical tasks. An airplane hangar had been set up on the grounds. This was known as the "study house" and was the scene for instruction in complicated dance movements. There were mottoes on the walls of the "study house." One of them in translation read: "You cannot be too skeptical." This was the milieu the brilliant English editor entered to become a kitchen scullion.

In 1924 Gurdjieff came to America with forty pupilsEnglish and Russianand gave public demonstrations of dervish dances, temple dances, and sacred gymnastics. Orage came along but did not perform the movements, although he had practiced them for a Paris demonstration. Nothing like these dances had ever been seen in New York, and they aroused intense interest. They called for great precision in execution and required extraordinary coordination. One could well believe they were, as claimed, written in an exact language, even though one could not read that language but only received an effect of wakefulness quite different from the pleasant sense of harmony most art produces. When Gurdjieff and his pupils sailed for France, Orage was left in New York to organize groups for the study of Gurdjieff's system, and for the next seven years he was engaged in this task.

Let me call up from memory one of the evenings Orage talked to a group in New York. The place is a large room above a garage on East Fortieth Street. It is Muriel Draper's flat and there is a bizarre note in its furnishings produced by the gilt throne from a production ofHamlet which Mrs. Draper had picked up. In those days Mrs. Draper was the "music at midnight" hostess she had been in Florence and London. By nine o'clock about seventy people had gathered. Let us look around the room. Seated well back is Herbert Croly, the founder and editor of the New Republic, an admirer of Auguste Comte and therefore a rationalist. A few rows in front is Carl Zigrosser, the print expert. Well off to one side is Amos Pinchot, the liberal publicist, and just coming in we see John O'Hara Cosgrave, the Sunday editor of the New York World. Near the front sits Helen Westley of the Theatre Guild, and always on the front row is the historical novelist Mary Johnston. Squatting on the floor up front with an Indian blanket around his shoulders is impassive Tony, the full-blooded Indian husband of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and near him, but seated on a chair is the celebrated memoirist herself; she is reputed to have bought one of the $12,000 "shares" of Gurdjieff's Institute. Now arriving is Dr. Louis Berman, the authority on glands, and just behind him waves the handsome beard of the painter Boardman Robinson. It is the sort of crowd you might find on the opening night ofStrange Interlude, which is currently playing on Broadway. Some of the men you would see at the luncheons of the Dutch Treat Club; some of the women at the meetings of that advanced exclusive group called "Heterodoxy." A worldly crowd, a 1920-ish crowd, for in retrospect the 1920's seems a period vibrating with intellectual curiosity.

Orage comes in a little after nine. Deliberately, he is always a little late, and often he takes a snifter of bootleg gin in Mrs. Draper's kitchen before entering the big room. He is tall, with a strong Yorkshireman's frame, an alert face, an elephantine nose, sensitive mouth, hair still dark. He is a chain-smoker throughout the meeting. He calls for questions. Someone asks about "self-observation," someone wants to know "what this system teaches about death," someone else makes a long speech that terminates in a question about psychoanalysis. After he has five or six questions, Orage begins to talkand he talks well in lucid sentences often glinting with wit. A graduate student in psychology at Columbia objects to one of his remarks. Orage handles the objection and goes on until a progressive schoolteacher interjects a question. It is like a Socratic dialogue, with Orage elucidating a single topic from all sides. Every question eventually gets back to "the method," and by eleven o'clock he has once again illuminated the method of self-observation with non-identification that appears to be the starting procedure prescribed by Gurdjieff for self-study.

Briefly, what Orage has said is that man is a mechanical being. He cannot do anything. He has no will. His organism acts without his concurrent awareness and he identifies himself with various parts of this victim of circumstances, his organism. There is only one thing he can try to do. He can try to observe the physical behavior of his organism while at the same time not identifying his 'I' with it. Later he can attempt to observe his emotions and thoughts. The trouble is that he can only fleetingly observe with non-identification, but he must continue to make the effort. It is claimed that this method differs from introspection. The non-identifying feature differentiates it from an apperception. The man who finally succeeds in developing the power of self-observation is on the path to self-knowledge and the actualizing of a higher state of consciousness. This higher state, which Orage calls "Self-consciousness" or "Individuality," stands to our present waking state as the waking state stands to our state of sleep.

This bare summary will not, of course, explain why so many New Yorkers came to hear Orage between 1924 and 1931. Some came only once or twice out of a weak curiosity, like Heywood Broun who listened through one meeting, then asked, "When do we get to sex?" and shuffled off, never to return. Others were fascinated by the charm and keenness of Orage's literary personality and found such epigrams as "H. G. Wells is an ordinary man with a carbuncle of genius" full compensation for the dissertations on psychology they sat through. But the solid core of his group were probably the people who prefer Plato to Aristotle; that is, people who feel that there is some kind of film over reality and respond to the idea that this film can be penetrated.

In 1931 Orage faced a personal crisis. He had married an American girl and had an infant son. Gurdjieff, a hard task-maker, wanted him to bring his family to the Chteau du Prieur and continue work on the translation into English of the huge book then called Tales of Beelzebub to His Grandson, which Gurdjieff had written partly in Russian and partly in Armenian. Orage neither wanted to leave his family nor to put them in the never-stable environment of Fontainebleau-Avon. He decided to go to London and there founded theNew English Weekly. On Guy Fawkes Day [Nov. 5] in 1934, he who had never addressed more than a few thousand readers addressed hundreds of thousands of B.B.C. listeners with a speech on Social Credit, went home, and died before morning.

THE link between Orage and Gurdjieff was originally P. D. Ouspensky, who came to London in 1921 and started groups for the study of the Gurdjieff system. Orage attended these, as did Katherine Mansfield, and both went to the source at Fontainebleau. As explained by Ouspensky, there were three main ways to a higher development of man: the way of the fakir who struggles with the physical body, the way of the monk who subjects all other emotions to the emotion of faith, and the way of the yogi who develops his mind. But these ways produce lopsided men; they produce the "stupid fakir," the "silly saint," the "weak yogi." There is a fourth way, that of Gurdjieff, in which the student continues in his usual life-circumstances but strives for a harmonious development of his physical, emotional and intellectual lifethe non-monastic "way of the sly man." The accent was on harmonious, all-around development.

Ouspensky was a highly mental type. At his lectures in New York he seemed like a European professor. He was not nervous in manner and he had a peculiar kind of emotional serenity; one felt that it did not matter to him what his listeners thought of him. In his youth he had been fascinated by the problem of the fourth dimension, the nature of time, and the doctrine of recurrence. When only thirty-one, he wrote a book,The Fourth Dimension, which was recognized as a contribution to abstract mathematical theory. He also practiced journalism for a St. Petersburg newspaper. At thirty-four, he completed the book on which his popular fame rests,Tertium Organum. This book had a great influence on the American poet, Hart Crane, an influence Brom Weber has carefully traced in his biography of Crane. ButTertium Organum is a pre-Gurdjieffian work, and much of it has to be reset in a later pattern of Ouspensky's thought, as he implied in a cryptic note inserted after the early editions. Ouspensky also wrote a short book on the tarot cards, which are surmised to contain occult meaning.

The young Russian thinker attempted to be practical about his speculative thinking. He made trips to Egypt, India and Ceylon in search of keys to knowledge. He experimented with drugs, fasting and breathing exercises to induced higher states of consciousness. When he met Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1914, he was ripe for a teacher.

As the years went on, Ouspensky began to make a distinction between Gurdjieff the man and the ideas conveyed by Gurdjieff. Remaining true to the ideas, he finally decided about 1924 to teach independently of the man Gurdjieff. The last chapter of In Search of the Miraculous, deals with this "break," but it is too reticent to make the "break" understood.

Ouspensky held groups in London throughout the 1920's and 1930's, and had a place outside London for his more devoted pupils, some of whom were quite wealthy. When the bombs began to rain on England, he and a number of his English pupils migrated to America and purchased Franklin Farms, a large estate at Mendham, New Jersey. In New York he lectured to shifting groups of sixty or so, while at Mendham his wife supervised the pupils who carried out farm and household tasks as part of their psychological training. Instruction in the Gurdjieff dance movements was also given at Mendham.

Ouspensky's later books have includedA New Model of the Universe, begun in pre-Gurdjieff days but revised and completed under his influence, and a novel,Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, which has a flavor that reminds one of Gogol. Although Ouspensky has written extensively on relativity, the professional physicists appear to have given him a cold shoulder; at least, he is never mentioned in scientific literature. However,A New Model of the Universe produced a great impression on the novelist J.B. Priestly, who wrote one of his most enthusiastic essays2 about it.

GURDJIEFF was by far the most dramatic of the trio; in fact, Gurdjieff as a pedagogue was mainly an improvising dramatist, a difficult aspect of his character to explain briefly. Most people believe that they can make decisions. They believe that when they say "Yes" or "No" in regard to a course of action, they mean "Yes" or "No." They think they are sincere and can carry out their promises and know their own minds. Gurdjieff did not lecture them on the illusion of free will. Instead, in conversation with a person, he would produce a situation, usually trivial and sometimes absurd, in which that person would hesitate, perhaps say "Yes," then change to "No," become paralyzed between choices like Zeno's famous donkey starving between two equidistant bales of hay, and end full of doubt about any "decision" reached. If the person afterwards looked at the little scene he had been put through, he saw that his usual "Yes" or "No" had no weight; that, in fact, he had drifted as the psychological breezes blew.

Often, in his early acquaintance with a person, Gurdjieff would hit upon one or both of two "nerves" which produced agitation. These were the "pocketbook nerve" and the "sex nerve." He would, as our slang goes, "put the bee on somebody for some dough," or he might, as he did with one priest from Greece, egg him on to tell a series of ribald jokes. The event often proved that he didn't need the money he had been begging for. As for the poor priest, when he had outdone himself with an anecdote, Gurdjieff deflated him with the disgusted remark, "Now you are dirty!" and turned away. "I wished to show him he was not true priest," Gurdjieff said afterwards. To go for the "pocketbook nerve" or the "sex nerve" was to take a short cut to a person's psychology; instead of working through the surfaces, Gurdjieff immediately got beneath them. "Nothing shows up people so much," he once said, "as their attitude toward money."

There are legends about how Gurdjieff came by the large sums of money he freely spent. It has been rumored that he earned money by hypnotic treatment of rich drug addicts. There used to be a tale that he owned a restaurant, or even a small chain of restaurants, in Paris. His fortunes varied extremely, and there were times when he had little money. He lost his chateau at Fontainebleau-Avon in the early 1930's. His expenses were large and included the support of a score or two of adherents. He tipped on a fabulous scale. Money never stuck to his fingers but he himself did not lead a luxurious life. He joked with his pupils about his financial needs and openly called his money-raising maneuvers "shearing sheep."

When the Bolshevik revolution struck Russia, Gurdjieff moved south. He halted at various places, notably at Tiflis, to launch groups, but eventually he and his followers crossed the Caucasian mountains on foot and made their way to Constantinople. Via Germany, he reached France where, as related, Lady Rothermere enabled him to found the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Chteau du Prieur. This Institute, Orage once told me, was to have made Bacon's project for an Academy for the Advancement of Learning look like a rustic school. But in 1924, Gurdjieff met with an automobile accident which nearly killed him, and thereafter he turned to the less strenuous activity of writing. The Institute plans were canceled, and he began the tales of Beelzebub as told to his grandson on a ship in interstellar space. This book is a huge parable with chapters on the engulfed civilization of Atlantis, the "law of three" and the "law of seven," objective art, and many riddles of man's history. It purports to be an impartial criticism of the life of man on the planet Earth. In this period Gurdjieff also composed many pieces of music, making original use of ancient scales and rhythms.

In the last year or two of his long life, Gurdjieff finished with his writings and intensified his direct contacts with his followers. Movement classes were started in Paris, and several hundred Frenchmen now come more or less regularly to these and other meetings. In England the exposition of Gurdjieff's ideas is carried on by the mathematical physicist, J. G. Bennett3. Bennett is the author ofThe Crisis in Human Affairs, an introduction to the Gurdjieff system. It is said that Bennett attracts about three hundred to his lectures and that the class in movements numbers nearly two hundred.

Gurdjieff spent the winter of 194849 in New York, as usual unnoticed by the press. The remnant of the old Orage groups came to him, as did the Ouspenskyites from Mendham and many new people. With Oriental hospitality, he provided supper night after night for seventy and upwards in his big suite at the Hotel Wellington, the supper being punctuated by toasts in armagnac to various kinds of idiots: "health ordinary idiots," "health candidates for idiots," "health squirming idiots," "health compassionate idiots." When Gurdjieff drank water, he always proposed, "health wise man." Prepositions were left out of the toasts; Gurdjieff spoke a simplified English that often required an effort to follow. After the supper, Gurdjieff's writings were read until the small hours of the morning. While he was here, he signed a contract with a New York publisher to bring out in 1950 the English version of the 1000-page tales of Beelzebub, under the title All and Everything. It is also expected that after the book appears, his American pupils will give a public demonstration of the dance movements.

Gurdjieff had passage booked for America last October but fell gravely ill. An American doctor flew to Paris, had him removed to the American Hospital, and made him comfortable. "Bravo, America!" he said to the doctor. "Now we can have a cup of coffee." Those were his last words.

How shall I sum up this strange man? A twentieth century Cagliostro? But the evidence about Cagliostro is conflicting, and the stories you will hear about Gurdjieff are highly conflicting. I can personally vouch for his astonishing capacity for work. Two to four hours' sleep seemed sufficient for him; yet he always appeared to have abundant energy for a day spent in writing, playing an accordion-harmonium, motoring, caf conversation, cooking. Those who had to keep up with him were sometimes ready to drop from fatigue, but he seemed inexhaustible after twenty hours and fresh the next morning from a short sleep. He was eighty-three this last winter at the Hotel Wellington. He would retire at three or four in the morning. Around seven the elevator boys would take him down and he would go over to his "office," a Child's restaurant on upper Fifth Avenue. Here, as at a European cafe, he would receive callers all morning.

I have sometimes asked myself what our civilization of specialists would make of certain men of the Renaissancemen like Roger Bacon, a forerunner, and Francis Bacon and Paracelsus who came at the heightif they reappeared among us. I think we would find them baffling, and it would be their many-sidedness that would puzzle us. The biographers and historians have never quite known how to take their scandalous unorthodoxy. To me Gurdjieff was an enigma whom I associate with the stranger figures of the Renaissance rather than with religious leaders. He never claimed originality for his ideas but asserted they came from ancient science transmitted in esoteric schools. His humor was Rabelaisian, his roles were dramatic, his impact on people was upsetting. Sentimentalists came, expecting to find in him a resemblance to the pale Christ-figure literature has concocted, and went away swearing that Gurdjieff was a dealer in black magic. Scoffers came, and some remained to wonder if Gurdjieff knew more about relativity than Einstein.

"A Pythagorean Greek," Orage called him, thus connecting the prominence given to numbers in the Gurdjieffian system with Gurdjieff's descent from Ionian Greeks who had migrated to Turkey. Perhaps this appellation, "Pythagorean Greek," is as short a way as any to indicate the strangeness of Gurdjieff to our civilization, which has never been compared to Greece in its great period from the sixth to the fourth centuries before Christ.

How shall we account for the interest persons of metropolitan culture in the Western world have shown in the Eastern ideas of Gurdjieff and his transmitters, Orage and Ouspensky? One explanation is easy, and it holds for people who seek respite for their personal unhappiness in psychoanalysis, pseudo-religious cults, and the worship of the group (nostrism as manifested in Communism and Fascism). This is the therapeutic interest, and many who have come to the Gurdjieffian meetings have had it. Let us disregard this common interest and ask why Eastern ideas have attracted in these years the interest of sophisticated thinkers like Aldous Huxley who has been remarkable for his typicality. The answer here is that Western culture is in crisis. Ours is a period of two world wars and one world depression. In this period it has been impossible for a thoughtful person not to have been deeply disappointed in his hopes for man. He has seen one effort after another produce an unintended result. World War I made the world unsafe for democracy. The prosperity of the 1920's led to economic drought. World War II turned into cold war. The socialist dream flickered into a totalitarian nightmare. Science becomes an agency of destruction. The doctrine of progress gives place to the feeling the Western man is at a standstill. In a crisis one hopes or one despairs. Gurdjieff, Orage and Ouspensky confirmed the despair but simultaneously raised the hope of Westerners whose mood was disappointment over the resources of their culture. It is said that Aldous Huxley, that modern of moderns, went to a few Ouspensky meetings in London. Eventually Huxley settled for Gerald Heard who draws heavily on Eastern philosophy. In Huxley we may find a symptom of a desperate tendency to turn in our crisis to ideas and teachings that stand outside the stream of Western culture. Orage, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff painted a crisis-picturein one part as black as any school of Western pessimism, in another part so bright as early Christianity. In this balance-by-contrast of the dark and the light is a principal reason for their appeal to moderns.

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Black Sheep Philosophers - Gurdjieff

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent's office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower's Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, Don Juan in Hell, the third act of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903).

In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in Back to Methuselah (1921), although in the same period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present.

Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In Major Barbara (1905), one of Shaw's most successful discussion plays, the audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour.

Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

George Bernard Shaw died on November 2, 1950.

To cite this page MLA style: "George Bernard Shaw - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 4 Oct 2015. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1925/shaw-bio.html>

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George Bernard Shaw - Biographical

Read books online at our other site: The Literature Page - Read the works of George Bernard Shaw online at The Literature Page A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. George Bernard Shaw A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. George Bernard Shaw A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. George Bernard Shaw A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. George Bernard Shaw A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth. George Bernard Shaw Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them. George Bernard Shaw An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country. George Bernard Shaw Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. George Bernard Shaw Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. George Bernard Shaw England and America are two countries separated by a common language. George Bernard Shaw Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough. George Bernard Shaw Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. George Bernard Shaw Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing. George Bernard Shaw Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. George Bernard Shaw Hell is full of musical amateurs. George Bernard Shaw I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize. George Bernard Shaw I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. George Bernard Shaw If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. George Bernard Shaw If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. George Bernard Shaw If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a footrule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved. George Bernard Shaw

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