William Patrick Patterson - Biography

Biography

William Patrick Patterson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was an exchange student at the University of Vienna, Austria, and graduated from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, with a B.A. degree in English and minors in Philosophy and Psychology. He worked in New York for IBM, J. Walter Thompson, BBD&O and Harcourt Brace. He founded and edited In New York magazine and ran it for five years before selling it in 1969. Thereafter, he was the editor-in-chief of Food Management magazine and high-tech editor of Industry Week magazine. He resides in California.

Patterson was a longtime student of his seminal teacher Lord John Pentland, who was appointed by Gurdjieff to be the leader of the Work in America and was the president of the New York and San Francisco Gurdjieff Foundations. The rare-born Danish mystic Sunyata, who was given this name in 1936 by Ramana Maharshi, lived with Patterson starting in 1982 and introduced him to Advaita Vedanta. Sunyata died in 1984 at the age of 94, but in the previous year he introduced Patterson to Dr. Jean Klein, a Western Advaita master with whom Patterson studied until Klein’s death in 1998. Dr. Klein provided the foundation for a direct experiencing of the body, allowing Patterson to incorporate Work principles with Advaita Vedanta, which he has named Conscious-Body-Breath-Impressions. Dr. Klein also provided the necessary catalysis and encouragement for the writing of Patterson’s first book on The Gurdjieff Work, Eating The “I”: A Direct Account of The Fourth Way.

Read more about this topic:  William Patrick Patterson

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.
    James Boswell (1740–95)

    There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

    As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)