The contents of this site are for personal use only.

Welcome to nyland-access.org, a collection of audios, transcriptions , and supplemental material concerning talks on the ideas of Gurdjieff given by W.A. Nyland, a longtime pupil, and then teacher, of Gurdjieff’s methods and writings.  Mr. Nyland met Gurdjieff in 1924 in New York City, became an active member of the Orage group, and remained in contact with Gurdjieff until Gurdjieff died in 1949.  In the late 1950s Mr. Nyland began to record his meetings and create a library, a practice he continued until his death in 1975.  This resulted in over 2600 lectures and questions-and-answer recordings about Gurdjieff’s ideas and their practical application, called ‘Work’ on oneself.

In the 1960s, as his Group in New York grew larger and people around the country began to respond to his teaching and discuss it together, Mr. Nyland set up lending libraries in various locations so Group members could check out audio cassettes or transcriptions for further study.  This access was meant for [1] New people so they would have a means to acquaint themselves with Mr. Nyland’s teaching by listening to introductory tapes, and [2] People already familiar with the material so they could reconsider it with new insight gained through application, much like revisiting Gurdjieff’s All and Everything with understanding of a different order because of new experience.

Today people interested in Mr. Nyland’s teaching are spread all over the country and some in other countries, many far away from a library and not able to easily find what they are looking for.  With that in mind, nyland-access.org contains audio recordings, transcriptions and other material carefully selected to thoroughly represent what Mr. Nyland discussed.  While the number of meetings is limited at this time, in the future this site will contain several hundred.  Mr. Nyland covered many topics in each meeting, often a mix of why one should be interested in Gurdjieff and Work on oneself, how a Group should function and why people need to work together, various results as evidenced by growth of the physical, emotional and intellectual centers, and comments on All and Everything and other writings.  The result, therefore, is that the amount of information on this site is enormous and can be overwhelming.  To this end, all of these meetings are being subject indexed and summarized so people can find topics of interest and select what they want.  A set titled Mr. Nyland’s Talks on Gurdjieff:  Subject Index & Summaries (4 vols) is in progress and will be published soon.

At present, one hundred of these meetings (M1500 thru M1599) have been uploaded and are currently available, an important series from which excerpts have been compiled from the transcriptions and recently published under the title The 1500 Series, Gurdjieff’s Ideas in Daily Life (Land Press, Occidental, 2023).  It should be noted that some of the meetings were poorly recorded and all have extraneous noise; accordingly, the audios in nyland-access.org have been cleaned up, but only to the extent that the quality of Mr. Nyland’s voice not be compromised and lessen the meaning conveyed by how he inflects words in sentences and feels about what he is saying.  Also, transcribing has been a Group-wide effort over many years with many people participating in the difficult task of taking a verbal communication and correctly translating it into a written form.  To avoid ambiguity and misrepresentation, each transcription has been proofed and re-proofed many times to assure accuracy of the words and sentence structure, as well as consistency of style.  As an example, Mr. Nyland uses the word I three different ways—ordinary (I am me), Aware (‘I’ an Objective faculty), and I Am (the “I” of Consciousness and One with higher)—and although it is left to the listener to distinguish between them in the audio, when reading they must be noted differently to avoid confusion.

As supplemental information, other material has been included in nyland-access.org:  [1] The standard (vertical) Three-Body Diagram, to which Mr. Nyland often refers.  For those seeking more understanding, the horizontal version described in meetings M1008 and M2308 is also included; [2] Annotated drawings that depict Freedom from Earth (M1537), The Four Directions of Life (M1522), Becoming an Individuality (M1562, M1708, M1721, M1835), as well as Magnetic Center, ‘I’, God (M1595); [3] The unrevised 1950 edition of Gurdjieff's All and Everything, to which Mr. Nyland also often refers, as well as Mr. Nyland’s Firefly.  These are searchable documents.

HONOR SYSTEM
For checkout from his libraries Mr. Nyland used an honor system, people entrusted to care for the material as well as use it only for their own study.  With this in mind, it is therefore assumed that you agree to the same.  If so, please register for an account.