It feels it is possible to discern the vibration of a true student, even throught the writings about this man.
Mr. Gurdjieff's magic alchemy at work.
What he couldn’t calculate, and had no need to, was the impact on himself and on those around him of his questioning. It probably remade him over the years. Simply by questioning and by attending to the answers that came of themselves or emerged in the course of unblinking inquiry, he became a wise man and a spiritual man. But there was something more: his feeling for people. It must have guided him into medicine in the first place; it certainly grew with the years as he looked after many thousands of patients. Dr. Welch had a capacity for unfeigned, immediate compassion: one experienced it at once when speaking with him of any real difficulty, be it medical or personal. He often railed at human self-preoccupation and described us, as Gurdjieff did, as lamentably unavailable to one another. This was somehow scoured out of him; perhaps his awareness of it was enough gradually to evict it. He had the rare attribute of welcoming people to be their best, didn’t invisibly compete. He was there for others, so fully that he almost shone with love at times. But some factor, perhaps good taste, certainly good sense, allowed him to feel much without becoming sentimental.
Gurdjieff. The great inflector of Dr. Welch’s life, the one who implicitly challenged him to be not just a superb doctor—already no small thing—but to explore human experience with wrenching honesty. Gurdjieff was the teacher whom he met in New York in the 1930s and loved ever after with the awe and delight of a son toward a difficult but astonishing father. It was this man, whom we can safely regard as a Western Zen master, who redefined for Dr. Welch—and many others of his generation—the full meaning of humanness and the possible scope of experience. Gurdjieff’s example and influence, falling on many different souls, bore fruit in many different ways. In Dr. Welch, is it saying too much, or saying falsely, to remember his enormous humanity, outsized really: more than one could hope for. Gurdjieff did not lead him to the heaven of the mystics—Dr. Welch thought earth to be heaven enough for now, if properly perceived and lived—but Gurdjieff did contribute in ways that can never be fully known to the emergence of rich humanity in his spiritual son. Gurdjieff said, if you work for your life you also work for your death. Dr. Welch worked for his life, and the lives of others.
Dr. Welch was born on September 12, 1911, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin—a town he
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