In last month's column, I wrote about the prisons of my youth. I likened the experience to being caught in a Chinese puzzle of a prison—escape from one cellblock only led to another, from family to public school to street life, to college.

Like any prisoner, all I dreamed of was escape, but as I made my way past collegiate love affairs, survived a two-year selective service sentence as a worker at a mental hospital, as I staggered into the muck and ego-driven mire of the Off-Broadway scene, I one day got lucky. I don't know how else to describe it. I found a way out of my prison maze by finding someone else who had made his own great escape. I discovered a fellow named George Gurdjieff.

How I came upon him was pure serendipity. The father of a friend had sized me up one day and given me the name of this man whose name sounded like what you say when you sneeze:

"Gurdjieff!"

God bless you.

I read a book about him, something called Boyhood With Gurdjieff, by a fellow named Fritz Peters. It was this man's reminiscences of what it was like to be a boy in the presence of a man like no one he had ever seen before.

The man Peters describes was some kind of character. Peters spent four years in the 1920s at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Man, an estate in France where people had come to learn something new about themselves and the world around them. It was quite a place, this institute. It had to be, because Gurdjieff was quite a man. He was a man unlike any other I'd ever encountered, whether in the flesh or in the pages of a book.

This book turned out to be my escape manual. Remembering that experience of discovery today, I still get chills, exactly the way someone who had been held in solitary confinement would feel at the memory of the door to his cell being suddenly blown off.

Here was a man—an absolutely fearless man. He could think for himself and he could take action, and the actions he would take were original, unforeseen, and marvelously suited to the situation.

When he spoke, he was right there, listening, picking up what the other person was giving out. And when he responded it was deep and rich, like good, black, fertile soil in the spring.

He wasn't pretending and hiding things from himself. What he knew flowed into the moment at hand, so that he seemed to be a great force, a fountain of knowingness. He was at the center of a circle whose circumference reached out to embrace the stars.

He could do anything, create anything, fix anything—whether it was a building or a steam engine or a clock. With the beam of his attention he could bring his powers to bear upon any problem, and lo, it was no problem. He was the ultimately resourceful man.

Nothing seemed to restrict him, not time nor place nor people. He did as he pleased, as a free man. And it pleased him to work, to exert himself, to stretch himself.

And he could laugh. He arranged the most elaborate practical jokes, sometimes just to amuse himself. He saw the humor inherent in situations and could elaborate on it and turn it to practical use.

Only years later did I hear a recording of him talking to a group. His voice was so sweet, so mellow, I saw why people loved to be in his presence. He spoke and there were gales of laughter, and when the laughter subsided he spoke again and there was more laughter. He sounded like he was having the time of his life.

He was the kind of person you could depend on, especially in the clutch. When there was danger he maintained his presence of mind and could do what was necessary.

He had traveled everywhere and done everything and he knew everything that needed to be known. He had explored the world but he had also explored himself, so that he knew what human beings were capable of. He had come to know, yet, hadn't become jaded by his knowledge.

Life came to life when he was there. Anything could happen, and did. He was as unpredictable as the wind, yet he was steadfastly grounded in himself.

He could cook and play music and dance and write. People thought him a charlatan. He didn't care. He knew who he was and acted accordingly. He was a human being capable of doing all and everything.

And as if that wasn't enough, he accomplished all this in the most ordinary circumstances of life. He dressed like an ordinary man of his era (his magnificent  handlebar moustache only looks exotic to our eyes today). He strolled the streets of Paris. He counseled people while eating at Childs Restaurant in New York. And he  protected a band of people traveling with him through the mountains of the Caucasus during the Russian Revolution.

He was, in short, a new type of man. His new type was built firmly on the bedrock of the old. He was, in fact, a sort of mutation. He had all these preeminently human qualities that we all recognize and in our heart of hearts admire. What he did was take another step, and that step had taken him through the ordinary and into newness.

That's it—he was a mutant. He had come into the world to accomplish something. He was an agent of the Absolute and was entirely focused on service to the earth. Because of that position he could afford to have no loyalty but one—loyalty to the truth. He didn't have to accept all the rigmarole of ordinary life—since he belonged to no party and did not have to fear threats to his position he could do what was right and necessary. He could pick and choose as the situation required. He could use what worked. He could create new forms. He could rise to the occasion as the earth wobbled on the edge of destruction. He could set a new standard and live it.

Of course, I didn't realize all this at my first meeting with this remarkable man. It took time. I read more books, but not too many. I attended classes, and I began to practice some of what I learned there. The more I learned about George Gurdjieff, the more I wanted to learn. He opened up every possibility for me, this unexpected man, this servant of the earth, this hero.