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.