A Note from the Publisher

One Who Was Able to Learn
A biographical note by Anthony Blake.

The Struggle to "Make Something" for Oneself
A biographical note by George Bennett.

I knew John Bennett the last months of his life, while a student at his Fourth Way School, The Sherborne Academy, in Sherborne, England. Mr. "B" was a sincere and adventurous man, dedicated to life, and filled with love for Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff's Teaching, which radiated through his own work. Bennett risked and lost much -- the approval of his peers, a future in politics and commerce, and personal financial assets -- to follow G's dictum to "find out for yourself."

While continuing doing so and while giving back what he had come to know, JG Bennett died, with his working shoes on, while digging in his flower garden on Friday, December 13, 1974, at Sherborne. The previous morning he and other staff at the Academy demonstrated Gurdjieff's ritual prayer, The Great Prayer, to us students. Looking back I see it as a fitting farewell for a man who lived life to its fullest while inspiring others to do the same.

John Bennett had a clear mind, an open heart, and knew the secret of "learning while teaching others."

-- James Tomarelli
for Bennett Books

J. G. Bennett was born in 1897 in England. His father was English and his mother was an American, from one of the great Pennsylvania families. In his autobiography, "Witness," the early years are passed over and we first see Bennett as a young officer in the First World War, fascinated by the new four-dimensional geometries of the West and attracted towards the cultures of the Near East and Asia. After being wounded -- an event that gave him practical experience of non-corporeal states -- he found his way to Turkey and military intelligence.

It was here that he met, amongst several remarkable men who were to have a great influence on him, G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff, who had recently emerged from the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, seemed to demonstrate a practical knowledge of hidden dimensions Bennett had not thought possible.

On returning to England, Bennett's outer life turned towards scientific and technological research. His inner life, however, focused on the possibilities that Gurdjieff seemed to offer, and in 1923 he went to the Prierre at Fontainebleau in France, where Gurdjieff was installed. The Prierre was a place of extraordinary experimentation, and Bennett went through many deep experiences. Strangely, Bennett found himself compelled to return to England and to take up his outer duties once more. Once in England he became attached to the work of P. D. Ouspensky, who had been at one time Gurdjieff's chief disciple. Ouspensky demanded total severance from Gurdjieff, and Bennett obeyed: He was not to see Gurdjieff again for another twenty-five years.

Bennett's work with Ouspensky was fraught with difficulty, but here were laid some of the foundations for the framework of ideas that he eventually incorporated into his magnum opus, The Dramatic Universe.

His professional life drew him towards fuel technology and included a skirmish with Greek bitumen deposits that landed him in a stinking, lousy prison cell! Eventually he became Director of Research for the Coal Utilization Council, and set up laboratories in Kingston, Surrey, at Coombe Springs during the Second World War. Many years before, he had refused a political career as being incompatible with the demands of his inner search. In the 1930s he had attracted a number of people who wanted someone to explain the ideas of the "System," which were introduced by Ouspensky.

By the end of the war he found himself with a group of serious people who wanted guidance. He acquired Coombe Springs and founded the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences Ltd., a society devoted to the investigation of the psychokinetic idea "What makes the being of a man undergo change?"

As Coombe Springs developed, Bennett found himself under greater and greater demands, and began looking once more for a source of guidance. He had long since been separated from Ouspensky's groups [Ouspensky died in 1946] when in 1948 he met Madame Ouspensky again, and she advised him to go to Gurdjieff in Paris. Bennett was surprised -- he had thought Gurdjieff dead.

So came a time of reunion of many people as they flocked to the apartment in rue des Colonels Renard, where Gurdjieff gave readings from his books, then unpublished, and his famous dinners. Bennett quickly absorbed the three series of writings -- "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson," "Meetings with Remarkable Men," and "Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' " -- and devoted himself to Gurdjieff's cause, remaining in close contact with him until Gurdjieff's death in October 1949.

Returning his energy and attention to Coombe Springs and to the groups that had formed around him, Bennett embarked on the construction of a sacred building, the djameechoonatra, a nine-sided auditory hall based on the enneagram symbol. In the 1950s Bennett was also putting his energies into writing The Dramatic Universe, the first volume of which explained the possibilities of a five-, then a six-dimensional geometry.

In 1956, before the great building was finished, Bennett caught wind of an extraordinary teacher from Indonesia, Pak Subuh. Before long Bennett was convinced that here was the "missing element" of the Work as he had learned it and an integral part of the total revelation he had begun to believe in and hope for. Travels in Islamic countries in the early '50s had assured him of the reality of the psychokinetic tradition, but had answered none of his queries about the future of mankind.

Through Bennett, Subud went all over the world and remains an expanding spiritual movement. Bennett, however, became personally disillusioned with the movement, and after four years he withdrew to live simply with his family. He became a Roman Catholic and pursued his own researches and writing.

In 1960, soon after I first met him, there were many round him who were eager for a more balanced approach than that possible by Subud or by the "System" alone. Bennett responded by starting groups and gradually increasing the range of their inner work. He gathered a group of young scientists and teachers around him to help in the development of what became Systematics. As he worked on later volumes of The Dramatic Universe, his interests expanded into education and eventually into the application of computers. A quite new system of reflective language called Structural Communication was developed that eventually entered the realm of business practice.

His search for a comprehensive vision of the Work matured. In the early '60s he paid two visits to the remarkable Nepalese saint, the Shivapuri Baba, who asked him to transmit his teaching to the West, which Bennett did, in lectures and in the book Long Pilgrimage. Then came the contact with Idries Shah that opened up for many of us the prospect of the real existence of "power houses" in the East, seeking for relay stations in the West.

We began to study the teaching materials that illustrated so much of Gurdjieff's methods and helped to bridge East and West. None of these excursions away from the preserved canon and doctrine of the "System" was easy for Bennett. Understandably, this helped in the development of his inner freedom, a development that came to fruition when in 1967 he faced death due to uric acid poisoning.

Something very deep happened to him then, and he was different. Soon afterwards he began discarding the external involvements that took so much of his energy -- especially a ludicrous venture into a business to exploit the technique of Structural Communication -- and in 1970 he began to speak of setting up conditions for an intensive course that could transmit at high speed the useful techniques for transformation in a balanced way. Before, he had not been sure of his ability to create conditions of work.

Many influences were on him, including that of Turkish Sufi, Hasan Susud Konevi, who introduced Bennett to the existence of the Masters of Wisdom, the KhwÃjÃgan. Another influence was Idries Shah, and yet another a representative from the New Age Youth Movement in the United States. Various stories are told by various factions of what transpired.

The upshot was the creation of The International Academy for Continuous Education, based at Sherborne in Gloucestershire, England. Within a few months, Bennett had attracted a hundred students to take part in a ten-month training course. He envisaged five such courses and then spoke of developing a new kind of community in which a new understanding of Nature would be fundamental.

At Sherborne, he gave out an enormous amount of information and guidance on the practice of inner work, and this material has been put into books such as "Deeper Man," "Transformation," "The Sevenfold Work," "Needs of a New Age Community," and "The Way to Be Free." On December 13, 1974, while digging in his favorite garden at Sherborne, J.G. Bennett sustained a heart attack and died amongst family and students.

The prime thing that remains is the ideal of search for the whole vision, for the hidden Sources, the hope and belief in a new revelation and a supreme example of one who was able to learn.

Anthony Blake

THE STRUGGLE TO "MAKE SOMETHING" FOR ONESELF
A biographical note on JG Bennett by George Bennett, his son.

This note first appeared in Bennett's book, "Needs of a New Age Community."

ALL BUT ONE OF THE TALKS in [Needs of a New Age Community] were given at the International Academy for Continuous Education in Sherborne, England, at the "experimental" Fourth Way school that J.G. Bennett established in 1971, less than four years before he died. Although many people had benefited from working and studying with him during the previous thirty years, it wasn't until he was at Sherborne that he set himself up as a teacher. The academy at Sherborne was the culmination of a spiritual search that had begun more than fifty years earlier and that had started to take shape from the time of his first meeting, in 1920, with the Russian teacher and philosopher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

At Sherborne, in courses lasting only ten months, Bennett took on the task of trying to pass on -- to one hundred students at a time -- the fruits of his own lifetime's search. He felt it to be a task that he had been given and that there was a real need, especially among younger people, for the kind of practical knowledge and deep spiritual wisdom that he had earned during his eventful life.

It was a hazardous undertaking. Bennett didn't know whether it would be possible to convey anything of substance in so short a time, and he had neither candidates nor material resources. But in the summer of 1971, these quickly came together.

His teaching method was based on that developed in the early 1920s by Gurdjieff at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau in France. Students undertook practical work in the house and garden; they attended talks in which Bennett developed his own ideas; there were readings from Gurdjieff's writings and classes in his psychology, as well as intensive work on Gurdjieff's "Movements," an extraordinary repertoire of sacred and ritual dances. In addition, Bennett worked with Sufi techniques that he had learned directly from masters in the Middle East.

Bennett always referred to Sherborne and the "ideal human society" he envisioned in the last year of his life as "experiments." This word expresses his understanding of "hazard" as a factor that permeates all existence and gives it its "drama": thus he titled his great four-volume work The Dramatic Universe. Bennett understood hazard to give the danger of failure along with the possibility of progress, but he was not afraid of either one. In the course of his long search to make sense of the world and man's place within it, he tried many methods and consulted many sources of wisdom. Practical by nature, he was prepared to use these methods if he found by his own practice that they bore fruit or to abandon them if they did not.

The oldest of three children, J.G. Bennett was born June 8, 1897, of an American mother and an English father. His mother was from an old pre-Revolutionary New England family, and his father was a correspondent for Reuters, the international news agency. Though Bennett makes little reference in his autobiography, Witness, to his childhood, he acknowledges elsewhere that he owed his mother a great debt for instilling in him the virtues of hard work and tolerance.

Spending his early childhood in Italy, he learned to speak Italian before he spoke English. This lay the foundation for an extraordinary facility with languages, which later in his life enabled him to talk to many spiritual teachers (Gurdjieff among them) in their native tongues and to study Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Christian sacred texts in their original forms.

Formal education for Bennett stopped at school. He never took up the scholarship in mathematics that he won from Oxford University, for circumstances propelled him into life so fast that he never had time to go back. But he was an excellent sportsman and captained the school rugby football team. He went on to play for the army against such redoubtable opponents as the New Zealand national team. He broke his arm once and his collar bone twice in that robust sport, and he maintained that these experiences gave him, at an early age, a valuable freedom and indifference toward his own body.

In the First World War, at the age of twenty-one, Bennett became a captain in the Royal Engineers, with responsibility for signals and telegraphy. Reading his letters of the time, one is struck by a surprising indifference to the dangers he faced. One letter, to his fiancèe, was written even as he took shelter in a bomb crater from a two-way bombardment that had caught him on open ground. The war, however, led to one of the seminal experiences of his life. Being badly injured in the head and lying unconscious on an operating table, he experienced an "out of body" state that convinced him there is something in man that can exist independently of the body.

While convalescing, Bennett was invited to join a course in the Turkish language because the army needed intelligence officers in the Near East. Throwing himself wholeheartedly into the task, as was his nature, he eventually found himself, at an absurdly early age, in Constantinople holding a very sensitive position between the British and the Turks. Fluency in Turkish made him the confidant of many high-ranking political figures there, and it allowed him to develop the knowledge and love of Turkey that would remain with him all his life. More importantly, he began to understand other modes of thought than European.

In 1921, in the aftermath of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, Constantinople was the center of great ferment and change. It was also the funnel through which many displaced persons passed on their way to the West, and it was part of Bennett's job to monitor their movement. Among these "displaced persons" were two most extraordinary men, with whom "circumstance" brought Bennett into contact: G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky.

Bennett met Gurdjieff through a close friend in the Turkish royal family, Prince Sabaheddin, a reformist thinker and a profoundly spiritual man. Bennett's intermittent meetings with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in Constantinople shaped the direction of his later spiritual search. But when they moved on to Europe, Bennett remained in Turkey, fascinated by the labyrinthine political and social developments that finally led to the overthrow of the sultanate and to the establishment of the Turkish republic.

His immersion in Turkish affairs and his relationship with Winifred Beaumont, an English woman living in Turkey, completed the growing estrangement from his first wife, Evelyn, who had remained in England. Bennett had married young -- too young, perhaps -- immediately after the war, and despite the birth of a daughter, Ann, their marriage didn't last. After the divorce, Bennett married Mrs. Beaumont, a woman twenty years his senior, and they remained together until she died forty years later.

When Bennett returned to England, he was consulted by the government as an expert on the Middle East, and he acted as an interpreter at the London Conference in 1924, which was supposed to settle matters between Turkey and Greece. He could have then taken up a career in public life and was invited to stand for parliament, but it was already clear to Bennett that his spiritual search would take priority.

In the summer of 1923 he renewed his connection with Gurdjieff and spent three months at Gurdjieff's Institute in France. In spite of the shortness of his stay, Bennett was shown things that convinced him that man is capable of spiritual transformation and that Gurdjieff had profound knowledge and understanding of the techniques by which this could be achieved. Gurdjieff told Bennett that he could help him make significant progress if he would spend two years at the institute. With hindsight, it seems strange that Bennett nevertheless felt obliged to leave, but he was very short of money and felt he needed to put his affairs in order. In any case, he expected to return to Gurdjieff soon; however, they did not meet again until 1948.

Back in England, Bennett joined P.D. Ouspensky's groups studying the "system," which Ouspensky had learned from Gurdjieff. Bennett remained with Ouspensky for fifteen years, during which time his professional life took several bizarre turns. He was involved in various brown-coal mining ventures in Greece and Turkey, which, though ultimate failures, did nevertheless give him an expertise in mining and the chemistry of coal. He spent four years based in Greece and was involved in protracted machinations involving land claims of members of the deposed Turkish royal family. During this period, Bennett led something of a buccaneering existence, but by the mid-1930s, he was back in England and involved in the coal industry once again. In 1938, he was asked to head Britain's first industrial research organization, the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA).

BCURA grew in importance with the start of World War II, and research concentrated on finding a coal-based alternative to oil. BCURA developed coal-gas-powered cars, a coal-based plastic, and, more significant if mundane, efficient fireplaces that gave more heat for less fuel. All this time, Bennett continued to work with Ouspensky and the ideas and methods of the "system."

By 1941, when Ouspensky left England to live in the United States, Bennett was running his own study groups and giving his own lectures. Throughout the Second World War, and in spite of it, the groups continued and expanded in London while Bennett began writing and developing his own ideas as well as Gurdjieff's. But it was not until 1947, when he was fifty, that Bennett published his first book, The Crisis in Human Affairs.

People who came to hear his public lectures and those who joined his private groups found a tall, imposing figure, blue eyed and younger looking than his age. Essentially a shy man, not given to small talk, he possessed an intellect that some people found intimidating. When he began lecturing he was nervous, but very soon he abandoned the use of notes and thereafter always spoke spontaneously. As he grew older, his lectures became one of the principle ways in which he developed his ideas. He was literally "thinking on his feet." Several of his books had their beginnings as lecture transcripts, and the talks Bennett gave at Sherborne House in the few years before he died produced some extraordinary insights. (The J.G. Bennett Tape Collection)

In 1946, Bennett bought Coombe Springs, a seven-acre estate a few miles southwest of London with several buildings and an Edwardian villa on it. He and his wife acquired the property with the intention of starting a small research community. They moved in with ten of his closest pupils, and for twenty years Coombe Springs became a center for group work, attracting hundreds of people.

All the while, publicly Bennett continued to expound Gurdjieff's ideas, but privately his inner life was in turmoil. Ouspensky had repudiated him in 1945, which proved very painful, and he had lost touch with Gurdjieff -- whom he had long regarded as his teacher -- believing him to be dead. So the discovery in 1948 that Gurdjieff was alive and living in Paris was highly significant. In the remaining eighteen months before Gurdjieff died (on October 29, 1949) Bennett took every opportunity to go to Paris -- usually during the weekend -- despite his heavy professional schedule (at Powell Duffryn, the coal company for whom he now worked) and his responsibility for group work at Coombe Springs.

In the summer of 1949, he spent a month working very intensively with Gurdjieff in Paris, and this experience laid the foundation for a significant transformation in his life and spiritual work. It was a turning point, and in the remaining twenty-five years of his life Bennett became more approachable and more compassionate. Considering how little actual time he spent with Gurdjieff, it is extraordinary how much he made of the opportunities.

Gurdjieff's death was a serious blow for Bennett, as it was for all of Gurdjieff's followers. For a while they were able to work together, but gradually factions appeared -- partly derived from Gurdjieff's own tendency to sow confusion by giving conflicting authority to his closest associates. In Bennett's case, the conflict was exacerbated by his own willingness to take Gurdjieff's ideas and develop them further and, as he put it in the introduction to his book on Gurdjieff,* to struggle to "make something of them for himself."

In 1950 Bennett gave up his professional life, subsequently resisting several attractive offers to return to a career in industrial administration and research, and concentrated instead on the group work at Coombe Springs. He lectured frequently about Gurdjieff's system, trying to fulfill a promise he had made to Gurdjieff to do all in his power to spread the ideas and make them understood. In 1953, he undertook a long journey to the Middle East, which brought him into personal contact with the religion of Islam and various Sufi orders.** When he returned to England, he initiated a project to build a large meeting hall at Coombe Springs. The unusual nine-sided architectural design was based on the enneagram, an ancient symbol presented by Gurdjieff as embodying the fundamental laws of nature. The building took two years to complete, and at the opening in 1957, Bennett commented that the real value of such a project was in building a community rather than the building itself. And there certainly was a great deal of energy at Coombe Springs at the time.

Then, later in 1957, Bennett shook the whole place up with his involvement in Subud, a spiritual movement that had newly appeared from Indonesia. For a number of reasons, Bennett felt that Gurdjieff had expected the arrival of a teaching from that country, and, having tried the Subud spiritual exercise himself, he threw himself with characteristic energy into helping Pak Subuh, the movement's founder, disperse his teaching. He traveled extensively to spread the Subud message, both with Pak Subuh and on his own. He learned Indonesian and was so able to translate Pak Subuh's lectures into various languages. Bennett's own introductory book, Concerning Subud, sold thousands of copies worldwide.

Some of Bennett's pupils were dismayed, and his enthusiasm for Subud deepened the divisions with some of the other Gurdjieff groups in London and Paris. Subud -- with its emphasis on submission to the will of God and its reliance on a single practice, the latihan -- seemed to some to be the antithesis of Gurdjieff's methods for spiritual awakening, and many people left the Coombe Springs groups. Others, however, came in large numbers, and for several years Coombe Springs was the headquarters of the Subud movement in Europe. It attracted serious seekers and sensation seekers as well as unsolicited newspaper headlines. But by 1962, after devoting himself selflessly to its growth and expansion, Bennett left the Subud organization, feeling that a return to the Gurdjieff method was necessary.

So, with a small group, Bennett began to work once again with Gurdjieff's system. He resumed work on the final volumes of his magnum opus, The Dramatic Universe (the first volume had been published in 1956; the second appeared in 1961), and in early 1963, he presented a plan to the council of the Institute for Comparative Study of History, Philosophy, and the Sciences -- which actually owned Coombe Springs and which Bennett had founded in 1946 -- proposing a renewal of the community, which while still open to Subud members would be primarily one where people would be dedicated to spiritual transformation along the lines of the Gurdjieff system. Although he maintained to the end of his life that he had derived great benefit from Subud, it was now the turn of Subud members to be dismayed, and many turned against him.

Meanwhile, Bennett had made an important contact with a Hindu saint living in Nepal: the Shivapuri Baba, who was 135 years old when Bennett visited him in 1961. He went again in 1963, and once more he undertook to make known the ideas of another.* The simplicity and the rigor of the Shivapuri Baba's teaching appealed to Bennett, who was later to refer to the old saint as his teacher.

But by the mid-'60s, although the work at Coombe Springs had gathered new momentum, Bennett was ready to make yet another change. He and his groups had become involved with Idries Shah (who is now very well known as an exponent of Sufism but who was then just establishing himself in England), and once again Bennett offered his help. Along with the Institute for Comparative Study, he proposed giving the whole property of Coombe Springs over to Shah. It seemed a ridiculous notion, for the land was becoming very valuable, but, nevertheless, in the spring of 1966 the gift was made. But after Bennett and some of the Coombe Springs residents had moved into a house in the neighboring town of Kingston-upon-Thames, Shah, subsequently and in short order, sold Coombe Springs for a housing development!

Many thought Bennett had made another big mistake. But, in truth, Shah had performed a real service -- quite the opposite of the way it appeared -- by helping Bennett to become completely free of a place to which he had devoted twenty years of his life. Without that sacrifice, it is doubtful whether Bennett would have been able to embark on the last and perhaps most significant project of his life: the inauguration of an experimental Fourth Way school for the passing on of techniques for spiritual transformation.

However, this school didn't happen immediately. For the next four years, Bennett lived quietly with his family: he had married Elizabeth Howard in 1958 following the death of his second wife and now had two sons and two young daughters. With a small group of scientists, he was developing "Systematics," a practical analytical method based on his own researches -- and ultimately on what he had learned from Gurdjieff -- into the laws governing processes in the natural world. This research led to an ill-fated attempt to market a structured learning method, but it is clear, with hindsight, that Bennett was waiting to see what his next task should be. All the while, he continued group work with his pupils and made new contacts with teachers in the Near East.

Then, in 1969, after becoming very dangerously ill and nearly dying (this experience is described in the last edition of his autobiography), he took another important step in his spiritual life, one that appeared to change him fundamentally. Shortly after this bout with death, he became very interested in the condition of young people, especially those who surfaced following the social and cultural turmoil of the '60s with serious questions about the significance of life but with few satisfactory answers. As part of his research into the way they were feeling, Bennett even attended the huge rock music festival on the Isle of Wight (off the southern coast of England) in 1970. The outcome of all this was the setting up of an "academy" to teach some of what he had learned during a lifetime of trying to discover the "sense and aim of life, and of human life in particular."

Initially, he thought in terms of two dozen students working in Kingston, but he soon realized that work on the land -- an essential part of any program to teach people about the proper relationship between mankind and the rest of creation -- would require a larger number. And then there was the unforeseen huge response to his proposal -- particularly in the United States. So very quickly he attracted one hundred pupils, and in the fall of 1971, with the support of the Institute for Comparative Study, he inaugurated "Sherborne," the International Academy for Continuous Education, in the village of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, England.

The ten-month courses, of which he proposed five "as an experiment," proved fruitful, and many people have continued, as he had hoped, to work with the ideas and methods he presented. His aim was to run the courses and then -- in characteristic fashion -- to do something else. However, he died shortly after the start of the fourth course, on December 13, 1974. That course and the fifth were completed by his wife, Elizabeth, working with a few of his most experienced pupils.

What he would have done had he lived another decade is a matter of conjecture. In the months before he died, Bennett worked hard to establish an experimental "ideal human society" embodying the methods and ideas that he had developed and derived from Gurdjieff. He made big efforts to overcome the rifts that had grown between different groups of Gurdjieff's followers, and what is most intriguing, he was beginning to talk about the development of new forms of worship* appropriate for the modern world.

J.G. Bennett left a legacy of selfless giving and unrelenting inquiry into the mystery and meaning of existence. He published numerous works (many unfortunately now out of print), inspired hundreds to seek reality at the expense of self-centeredness, and stimulated the formation of groups of students who have continued to work with the ideas and methods he passed on at Sherborne and Coombe Springs. These people are continuing to this day to learn from his example: that if one wants to follow a system of ideas of spiritual transformation, one has to work with them and try to make something of them for oneself.

-- George Bennett