from the Notice To The Reader:
     The passages in this book originated, for the most part, in convivial and provocative exchanges between Michel Conge and his students. Although not intended for publication, they constitute a record of his thought.
     Reading these passages assumes a familiarity with the ideas brought by Mr. Gurdjieff as revealed in both In Search of the Miraculous and, in a more veiled form, in the myth of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson.
     However, memorized knowledge of these ideas alone is not enough to enter into an understanding of this book. As Michel Conge said, “I will speak especially to those who have been searching for several years, or at the very least for several months, and who, having become acquainted with this teaching’s essential ideas, have felt their truth.”
     In this search, an understanding of the whole body of the ideas brought by Mr. Gurdjieff is inseparable from the practice of an inner discipline, a discipline in which the intelligence of the heart can only be awakened when the body is transparent to the energy of an intelligence from another world.
                                 ~
     Michel Conge’s vocation, ‘to seek the real behind appearances,’ first led him to biology and medicine. It was in 1944, while working at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, that he met the writer René Daumal, who introduced him to Jeanne de Salzmann. She soon included him in meetings with G.I. Gurdjieff, with whom he continued to work until Gurdjieff’s death in 1949. Encouraged by Gurdjieff and de Salzmann, Conge, with his wife, Gilles, began to gather together a nucleus of men and women whose search he accompanied and led until 1984, the year of his death.
     Like markings left on the path of a man returning to his origin, Michel Conge’s words and writings bear witness to the fulfilment of his lifelong vocation.