Jean Vaysse, a pioneering surgeon born in Le Mans, France in 1917, first encountered Gurdjieff’s ideas in Paris in 1947. He participated in groups there and later helped lead them through the 1960s. Feeling a need to express Gurdjieff’s written teaching in a way that would appeal to a wider audience, he wrote Toward Awakening. When it was published in France in 1975, it was one of the first accounts to hint at the practical approach to work through giving attention to the sensation of the body.
 
Although this carefully written book deals only with Gurdjieff's psychological ideas, leaving those of a cosmological nature for another time, its tone of quiet lucidity can be an effective introduction. Each chapter may also be read as an independent whole. This beautiful hard copy edition published in 2008 is reprinted with minor updates from the original English translation published by Far West Undertakings in 1978, and includes a foreword by John Pentland.