One of ten children in a family that ran a store, he arrives in New York at seventeen to study theatre — and for most of a decade that's what he is: a dancer, then an actor, working.

A teacher he called Abdullah, of whom almost nothing independent is known. Whatever passed between them turned a working dancer into someone who read scripture as a manual rather than a history.

He stops dancing and begins to lecture, and doesn't stop. The claim holds from the first talk to the last: what you imagine, held until it feels natural, is what arrives.

At fifty-four he begins to say the promise isn't about getting things at all — that the method pointed at something happening inside the person. Much of his audience doesn't follow him there.

He never built an organisation, took students or named a successor. The talks and a shelf of small books are the whole of what he left.