Author: Andrew Phillip Smith

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 10 No 4 (Aug 2016)

Biochemist, author, spiritual teacher, kayaking fisherman, founder of an intentional community, misanthrope – Robert de Ropp was a complex man. Within him, the scientist, the magician, the missionary, the domestic oaf, hermit and warrior jostled for position. Practical and forthright, and distrustful of wide-eyed spirituality, he nevertheless became widely known to seekers in the 1960s. Books like Drugs and the Mind, The Master Game, Warrior’s Way and Self-Completion helped many to bridge the gap between drug experiences and disciplined spirituality. 

Born in England in 1913, he came from an aristocratic background, but the early death of his mother in the post-WWI influenza epidemic and the subsequent lack of interest shown by his father resulted in a bizarre childhood. 

His father was a Lithuanian Baron who in the 1920s lost most of his money in ill-advised financial ventures. At the age of 12, de Ropp, who had until that point been advancing through the elite English school system, found himself dumped for two years at the family seat in Lithuania. The mansion itself had not been maintained and, having been shelled in the war, was close to a ruin. Robert rattled around in a freezing cold, rat-infested great house that could accommodate fifty people. The neglected estate was run by the peasant families who had been there for generations, if not centuries. In place of his Oxbridge-oriented classical education the half-starving de Ropp found himself receiving a practical schooling in fishing and traditional agriculture from the old retainers. 

With little warning he found himself extricated by his father only to be resettled once again, this time in the Australian outback, where he found himself working in a hopelessly misjudged farming venture. When this went bottoms up he made his way to Port Adelaide where he tried unsuccessfully to drown himself. Somehow, the fourteen-year-old managed to get back to England by himself with ten shillings in his pocket. Via a family connection he was taken in by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose pastoral pieces are now a mainstay of popular classic music radio programming. Finally achieving some stability, Robert studied science and became a molecular biologist. 

Robert would only have occasional contact with his father, who lived until 1973. William de Ropp was a fascinating figure in his own right. A Germanic Lithuanian aristocrat, he became a confidante of Hitler and enjoyed close contact with him in the mid-1930s. William de Ropp had close connections with high-ranking British figures who were in favour of appeasing Hitler. He was actually being employed as a double agent who was able to obtain considerable intelligence for the British on Hitler’s ambitions and the state of the Luftwaffe. 

Encountering Ouspensky & Gurdjieff

In the 1930s Robert de Ropp got to know the novelist Aldous Huxley and his friend Gerald Heard who taught meditation. Heard was one of the first westerners to teach eastern meditation styles but de Ropp found his approach over-emotional. Not so P.D. Ouspensky, who seemed free from sentimentality and pretentiousness. After a hesitant start, de Ropp joined Ouspensky’s groups and began the work (based in the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff), which, with development and adaptation, would dominate his inner spiritual life. 

De Ropp was tough and well-prepared for the physical exertions that form part of the Gurdjieff work. G.I. Gurdjieff taught that man (humans) has no single indivisible ‘I’. Desires, thoughts, feelings, urges, pass constantly through us, each of them claiming the title of ‘I’ temporarily. Certain typical clusters of these ‘I’s form somewhat separate personalities. Each personality may have a separate set of concerns that collect together, representing the different aspects of one’s concerns or the separate contexts in which one must relate to other human beings. As an example, many adolescents experience a taste of this when they experience the discomfort of recognising that the way they behave with family may be very much at odds with the way they behave with friends.

De Ropp found this to be a key to self-understanding. Obviously disposed to coming up with new categories, as we shall see in other areas of his writing, he analysed his own constituent personalities. What was unique in de Ropp’s approach was his use of the personalities in autobiography. Throughout Warrior’s Way – incidentally one of the most readable, honest, and varied of spiritual autobiographies – de Ropp characterises his behaviour according to the personality which was dominant. These included archetypes such as the Magician, who was able to feel the mystique of nature, and the Scientist, always applying rationality and looking for evidence. Yet others are more individual. The Missionary was that part of de Ropp who wanted to convert others to what he saw as the truth of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky system. The Missionary was energetic and sincere but authoritarian, dogmatic and domineering. Opposed to the Missionary was the Domestic Oaf, desirous of family, children, a steady job, of house and land. (At times his personalities included the Recluse, the Cynic and others; this was a pragmatic rather than a systematic approach.) 

De Ropp worked every weekend at Lyne Place in England and then, after the end of the war, at Franklin Farms in New Jersey for over a decade. He was not alone in feeling that Ouspensky had lost his way and succumbed to a form of the guru trap, with a drinking problem and surrounded by followers who had become dogmatic and authoritarian. He was also not alone in feeling that in his last months Ouspensky had shrugged off this role and lived like a spiritual warrior at the end.

After Ouspensky died de Ropp finally met Gurdjieff in New York in 1948. With some exceptions, the strict firewalls that Ouspensky erected against what he thought was the increasingly erratic influence of Gurdjieff had broken down. Long term students of Ouspensky encountered Gurdjieff in a series of vivid and pungent encounters. Gurdjieff struck de Ropp as a king in exile, perhaps the last Magus. He was the most impressive man de Ropp met in his entire life – a view to which he held 30 years later. Gurdjieff combined the Tarot archetypes of Magician, Hierophant, Emperor and Hanged Man. Yet, when Robert and his wife walked back with Gurdjieff after a movements class in New York, he wracked his brains trying to remember the question he should have asked Gurdjieff, but it just would not come and they continued in silence. Soon afterwards Gurdjieff would be in such demand that there was no chance for direct contact; De Ropp would have a long illness, and the master died the next year in 1949. In retrospect, de Ropp decided that although Gurdjieff represented unparalleled spiritual possibilities, he just wasn’t up to the challenge. “For the intelligent and the strong he [Gurdjieff] could provide the inspiration of a lifetime. But for the stupid and the weak he could be dangerous, even deadly. You have to be a pretty strong player to be able to play games with such a master.”¹ 

The Domestic Oaf won out, eager for a job, a mate and a family, but life was not to be easy. Now on his second marriage and second family, de Ropp built himself a house from scratch for $3,500, and held down a good scientific post.

Both de Ropp’s wives suffered from mental illness, his first wife to such an extent that she was institutionalised for decades. His scientific professional life would now intersect with his inner mental life to understand the influence of drugs on the mind. 

Drugs & the Mind

De Ropp had a common sense attitude to drug use. He didn’t believe that psychoactive substances, whether modern pharmaceuticals or traditional plants, could lead one to anything like true awakening. Yet neither did he agree with the increasingly vociferous prohibition in response to the 1960s drug scene. Anyone who wished to experiment with drugs should be able to do so, preferably in a safe situation. Even though de Ropp had experimented with drug use and concluded that it was a “blind alley, a cul de sac, a dead end,”² he still recommended that others should not take him for his word but try their own experiments – preferably in safe conditions. Legislation against psychedelics and other mind-altering drugs, he believed, “strikes at one of the most fundamental of all liberties, the liberty of the individual to explore his own inner world by means of his own choosing.”³

His book Drugs and the Mind not only addressed issues such as the nature of addiction and the use of drugs to treat mental illness. Already in 1957 de Ropp had written: “The greatest public health problem at the present time is mental illness.”⁴ The book had entire chapters devoted to peyote and marijuana. Of the many mind-altering substances de Ropp personally experimented with, it was not the more dramatic and powerful hallucinogens like LSD or peyote that impressed him, but cannabis when taken as an extract in a sizeable dose. 

Among the love and peace generation, de Ropp became, if not quite a household name, then certainly the author of one of the significant books of the period. Drugs and the Mind kept company on hippy bookshelves with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and works by Timothy Leary and Alan Watts. The disciplined and scientific Englishman, now in his fifties, found himself fêted by young Americans who were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. De Ropp was one of a small number of older people who could see the potential of the new movement. Leary’s message was turn on, tune in and drop out. But could these explorers of inner space turn up (on time), tune up their bodies, and drop unnecessary attachments?

Unlike Leary or Watts, each of whom de Ropp felt had succumbed to the temptations inherent in being a guru, de Ropp managed to navigate the rapids of the psychedelic tide. Although he could see that young people were in desperate need of self-discipline and grounding, he also felt that the Fourth Way of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky teachings was somewhat authoritarian in its approach, and neither entirely successful in its methods or transmission. This line of thinking led to his next major book, released in 1968, The Master Game: Beyond the Drug Experience, which sold in the hundreds of thousands. 

Spiritual Explorers & Teachers

Throughout his life de Ropp encountered many spiritual explorers and teachers. By the time he moved to California in 1962 he had developed a knack of testing would-be teachers. It was not an infallible touchstone of soundness yet it worked well enough. He simply challenged them in his forthright manner. When he did this to Timothy Leary in 1962, after a long and inspiring talk from Leary on his plans to establish a utopian psychedelic community on the Pacific coast of Mexico, Leary simply turned off his hearing aid. It was a quirky response from Leary but didn’t bode well for the future of a co-operative enterprise. As is so often the case with spiritual teachers, the message was – my way or the highway. De Ropp saw Leary’s hallucinatory tropical utopia as impractical, and he was right – it was closed down by the police after just a few weeks.

Of the flower power generation, de Ropp admired Ken Kesey but felt he hadn’t followed through successfully. Only Steve Gaskin, founder of the Farm community, met with his approval. 

De Ropp may be accounted a teacher himself. How did he fare? He describes his hesitancy and self-questioning, but many teachers feel thus inwardly. Rather than displaying these to the pupil, spiritual teachers often overcompensate for their internal doubts. 

Despite his love for describing life as a game, de Ropp certainly had something of the puritan about him. He detested alcohol and tobacco. City life was not for him and only country living seemed authentic. But most of us live in cities and towns, and they aren’t without their advantages. 

De Ropp could see that the situation of humanity in the West was changing rapidly and he was able to negotiate the rapids produced by the flood of change. He began his own experimental community, the Church of the Earth, in Sonoma County, California. It was never intended to be a large group. A good portion of the group, with de Ropp’s blessing, started going to J.G. Bennett’s more ambitious International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne, England. De Ropp had reservations about those who came back from the accelerated ‘evolution’ of Sherborne House, dubbed by one wag the ‘Bennetron’. “I had expected well-trained, obedient, ready-for-service disciples,” de Ropp wrote, “I received rebellious, starry-eyed, self-opinionated ‘adepts’.”

When they returned they were in no mood for serious teachers, or so de Ropp concluded, and the whole enterprise collapsed. The Church of the Earth was intended to have been built around the three pillars of garden, temple, and university, feeding the body, spirit and mind respectively. In a 1974 book of the same name, de Ropp describes their attempts at working together and setting up a rural community. The garden seems to have fared the best. The temple or dojo never seems to have got far beyond a wonky physical structure, and of the university there was little mention at all apart from a vague notion of seminars. Perhaps the project’s collapse was to de Ropp’s advantage after all. As a result he never was seduced by the guru trap.

Warrior’s Way & Self-Completion

De Ropp seems to have been most stimulated by his attempts to harvest the garden of the sea. He designed and built his own kayaks and became a skilled fisherman. He found the sea a demanding teacher, unforgiving of lapses of attention, requiring the fisherman to successfully adapt to the rhythms of nature. At the end of his penultimate book, Warrior’s Way, de Ropp contemplates existence from his tiny boat in the Pacific Ocean on the northern Californian coast. He has somehow made contact with a Taoist spirit teacher named Fong, who has given him the gift of balance between yin and yang, receptiveness and relaxation balancing the austere demands of the Gurdjieff work; he was a Taoist hermit going with the flow. De Ropp seeks no ultimate answers, feels no need for any metaphysical belief, has no desire or faith in a survival of the personal ego. “My spirit will dance there as the shadow of that rock, among seagulls and pelicans, sea lions and starfish. I would like to give my flesh back to the ocean to feed the fish whose bodies have so often fed me.”⁵

Forty years ago de Ropp’s concern for the state of humanity and the planet was part of the emerging green movement. His view of modern westerners as “a spoiled, careless, pampered, town-bred manswarm” might seem harsh but we are already several stages down the road, oblivious of the warning signs. We do not even notice them as we wander towards oblivion, our sight focused on smartphones as we stagger towards the cliff. (This is metaphor but it seems that every week someone walks into a lamppost or off a cliff because they’re absorbed by their smartphones. There should be a word for the phenomenon.)

In his final book, Self-Completion, in which he introduces himself as an elderly hermit, he included insights into Gnosticism and the latest developments in science. The Gurdjieff-Ouspensky work still provided the spine of his teaching but his pragmatic approach combined the work with aspects of Taoism, psychology, Sufism, Arthur Koestler’s holons, and his own bluff, no-nonsense assessment of western culture. 

In 1987, at the age of 74, he died while kayaking in his beloved Pacific. Having pitted himself against the ocean for years, one suspects he knew that he could not win every time, and would have been content to have died in that manner, honourably, alone with nature, in the Warrior’s Way.

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Footnotes

1. Warrior’s Way, Dell Publishing, 1979, 192

2. The Master Game: Beyond the Drug Experience, Delacorte Press, 1968, 23

3. Ibid.

4. Drugs and the Mind, Evergreen, 1957, 167

5. Warrior’s Way, 351

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 149 (Mar-Apr 2015)

On 13 December 1974, just over forty years ago, a 77-year-old Englishman died unexpectedly, after digging a flower garden, on the grounds of Sherborne House, an impressive mansion in the Cotswalds of England. Formerly a private school, it was now the headquarters of the International Academy for Continuous Education. For years he had made demands on himself that would have exhausted most people half his age within weeks.

A scientist by profession, he brought aspects of the experimental method to bear on spiritual technique and attempted a philosophical union of science and esotericism. He spoke many languages (eighteen, according to one count, including Italian, French, German, Russian, Turkish, modern and ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Pali, Persian and Indonesian) and had travelled widely, particularly in the Near East. His facility with languages allowed him access to Sufi teachers in a way that was difficult for Westerners of the period.

Several inches above six foot tall, with a distinctively English, slightly equine face, the stray wisps of white hair only marginally wilder than his eyes, dressed in tweed and checks and corduroys, in clashing shirts and woollen ties, John Godolphin Bennett was one of the great spiritual explorers of the twentieth century. Probably best known as a pupil of the spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, he was an extraordinary, if largely forgotten, teacher in his own right. In terms of energy and creativity, he was second to none. By his final years he had developed compassion and wisdom too.

Born in 1897 in Wimbledon to a middle class family, Bennett spent four years of his childhood in Italy, helping to lay the foundations of his linguistic ability. His father was a widely-travelled and rakish Englishman, his mother a puritanical, yet hardworking, American. Little is known publicly about his very early life. Bennett states in his autobiography Witness that his childhood seemed irrelevant in terms of the book as his boyhood was no different to any others.

Out-of-Body Experience

Bennett felt that in many ways his life truly began on 21 March 1918 when he was wounded by machine gun fire in the First World War on the western front. He woke up outside his body looking down on the beds of the army hospital. When he was taken to the operating theatre he heard medical staff commenting they would have to use coarse thread for his stitches as there was no fine thread left. After he had woken a nurse examining his stitches remarked they should have used fine thread, to which Bennett was able to explain there had been none left. The nurse was very surprised as there should have been no way that he would have known this as he had been in a coma for six days. This out-of-body near-death experience became a touchstone for Bennett’s understanding and he would later have similar experiences.

After the war Bennett undertook an intensive course in the Turkish language and was posted to Constantinople, where he held a sensitive position in Anglo-Turkish relations. Rapidly acquiring fluency in a very difficult language, he found himself being consulted as an expert in international diplomacy at a young age. He was able to visit dervish communities before the new Turkish government suppressed them. It was in 1920 and 1921 that he first made contact with G.I Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, each of whom had fled the Russian Revolution with both temporarily living in Constantinople. He had been impressed with some of the dervishes but found in the teachings of the Armenian Gurdjieff’s, also explicated by the Russian Ouspensky, a weight and clarity he had not experienced elsewhere. The Gurdjieff Work cannot be summarised in a couple of sentences but includes practices of self-observation, self-remembering, work with sensation, sacred movements and other exercises, supported by an extensive psychological system and a cosmology.

In 1923 he spent several weeks at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Château Le Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon near Paris. Bennett is unusual in describing some of his many extraordinary inner and visionary experiences. Although there were expositions of Gurdjieff’s system and impromptu teaching by Gurdjieff, much of the time those at the Prieuré were involved in physical work, on various building projects or cleaning and cooking and other community needs.

Bennett suffered from dysentery but forced himself to work in the summer heat digging ditches for an irrigation system. Day after day Bennett willed himself out of bed when he should have been resting and threw himself into demanding physical labour. One day Gurdjieff put his pupils through a particularly arduous session of his movements or sacred dances after the day’s work. Bennett was one of the few who kept going through increasingly complicated exercises. He promised himself he would stop at the next break but became aware of Gurdjieff paying particular attention to him. He persevered and found himself filled with an energy so limitless that he went on to do another hour of intense digging which would have been far beyond his capacity had he been healthy. Gurdjieff later found Bennett working in the forest and told him that he had tapped into a great reservoir or accumulator of energy that few people were able to reach. Despite an offer by Gurdjieff to take him further into the teachings, Bennett left the Prieuré, feeling he had to attend to his own affairs first (and he was obviously physically exhausted). He would not see Gurdjieff again until 1948, 25 years later.

Bennett enthusiastically explored many spiritual teachings and followed a number of guides throughout his life, but it was the Gurdjieff Work he always returned to, and which most informed his own teachings.

After his political consultancy and intelligence work, Bennett was involved in a series of somewhat dodgy business enterprises, including an unsuccessful attempt to claim the inheritance of dispossessed Turkish nobles. This culminated in a period of imprisonment in a Greek jail until he was acquitted. Bennett found a more respectable career as a scientist in coal research, at the time the most important fuel source in the world. Although he attended a good school, Bennett never went to university and it is remarkable he could advance so much in mathematics, science and linguistics with little formal training.

He became part of Ouspensky’s groups in England, but had a chequered history with the brilliant, though somewhat authoritarian, Russian writer. Bennett hosted his own work groups which were acknowledged, if reluctantly, as being within Ouspensky’s orbit. In retrospect, Bennett seems not to have felt that he developed greatly during this period until he met Gurdjieff again in 1948. Ouspensky eventually banned Bennett from any contact with his groups on the basis of what seems to have been inaccurate gossip.

Bennett was never a stranger to spiritual effort and discipline, to a degree unimaginable to most of us. For instance, on 1 January 1931 he started a 1,000 day regime with the purpose of obtaining inner freedom. For most people, the regime would have lasted as long as a New Year’s resolution. Bennett kept it up but found himself strangely frustrated by the lack of genuine transformation. For a period of two or three years he practised the prayer of the heart, a technique central to Eastern Orthodox hesychasm, continually repeating the Lord’s Prayer internally between 300 to 1,000 times a day.

The return to Gurdjieff in Paris after the Second World War opened up an entirely new vista of spiritual techniques and teaching. Bennett’s diaries at the time have been published, along with his future wife’s, as Idiots in Paris (Samuel Weiser, 1991). They capture some of the contradictory aspects of his character, revealing the extraordinary efforts he made that were matched by similarly extraordinary states of consciousness. Yet they also paint a rather unpleasant picture of a man obsessed by his own salvation. He undoubtedly must have been very irritating at times. Later in his life he became considerably more understanding and compassionate.

Coombe Springs & Subud

In 1946 Bennett purchased a seven-acre estate at Coombe Springs in Surrey, England that developed into a community where people did practical work, movements and held meetings, with Bennett frequently demonstrating his brilliant lecturing ability. The first half of the 1950s saw Bennett travelling widely in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Persia, and Iraq, meeting with various Sufis, many of whom struck him as very developed. In turn, he was often told by them that he had a major spiritual role to fulfil.

In 1956 Bennett was initiated into the latihan, the central technique of the Subud movement. This opened a flow of purifying energy described as a kind of instant mysticism but which was often accompanied in recipients by all sorts of spontaneous reactions, from bliss to horrifying emotional states and violent thrashing about. Bennett experienced what he described as a purgatorial state of conscience, vividly perceiving the affect he had on others, his many affairs with women, his fear of women, his unreliability and untruthfulness, his insensitivity, self-will, and on and on for a whole fortnight.

Bennett had a naturally remarkable intellect that he developed through hard work, and he had trained his body to be strong and resilient. Yet he felt it had taken Subud to finally open his heart. He put aside the disciplines of the Gurdjieff Work, which seemed unnecessary in comparison to the efficacy of the latihan, and turned Coombe Springs over to the promotion of Subud, becoming a somewhat messianic spokesperson for the movement, which attracted much media attention.

His enthusiasm for Subud eventually waned and by the early 1960s Bennett had once again performed an about turn, resumed Gurdjieff-style exercises and experimentation, and started work with a young group of brilliant scientific men on the final two volumes of The Dramatic Universe.

The Dramatic Universe

His magnum opus, The Dramatic Universe, was published in four volumes between 1956 and 1966, but Bennett had been working on the material for it since the 1940s. Bennett intended it as a synthesis of what he termed fact and value: fact being the province of science and value that of religion, philosophy, and esotericism. The Dramatic Universe is a work of serious philosophy by a genuine scientist who is the master of his materials, based on the principles of esoteric spirituality that he practised in his daily life. It is full of insights and extraordinary viewpoints. It is also very difficult reading. A selection of chapter titles from the first volume illustrate the difficulty: “The Existential Tract and the Cosmodesic,” “Pencils of Skew-Parallels,” “The Higher Gradations of Thinghood,” “Quinquepotence–Viruses” not to forget “Septempotence–Organism,” and so on.

The combination of esoteric teaching, formal philosophical language and scientific rigour constituted a recipe for being ignored, and the proof is in the pudding. Few Gurdjieffans, and even many of those involved in the Gurdjieff-Bennett Work, let alone the general public, have read the entire Dramatic Universe (and I have to include myself in this category.) It is, however, a mine of possibilities where gems await determined diggers.

The discipline of systematics is foundational to The Dramatic Universe. This is a method developed by Bennett of using number to describe “systems” and their progression. Gurdjieff’s Law of Three and Law of Seven offer important ways of understanding the Universe on all scales. The Law of Three describes how a triad of forces is necessary for every phenomenon to occur, while the Law of Seven, or law of octaves, using the musical scale, describes how any process changes through time and requires help from outside at certain places, known as intervals, to keep progressing in the original direction.

Bennett saw that it was arbitrary to limit discussion to only these numbers and incorporated Gurdjieff’s laws of three and seven into the general scheme. A system with a single term has a unity in which there can be no development. Two-term systems are usually polar, containing opposition. When there are three terms, a system largely matches Gurdjieff’s triads with their active, passive and neutralising forces. Four term systems form a tetrad that has stability. These number systems use the natural properties of whole numbers. Different number-systems have different properties that seem contradictory but may be integrated into a grand scheme.

As a tool of analysis, systematics allows the user to examine the elements of a situation and understand the relationships between them. As an esoteric technique, it also has the potential of explicating elements of sacred geometry and Pythagorean numerology. The application of systematics has gone beyond esotericism to management and industry.

Spiritual Smorgasbord

Just as his adoption of Subud had alienated a large number of people who practised the Gurdjieff Work, Bennett’s return to the latter alienated those who had become Subud enthusiasts. Never one to allow his spiritual smorgasbord to get too stodgy or lack variety, in the 1960s Bennett visited a Nepalese teacher named Shivapuri Baba and converted to the Roman Catholic faith. Bennett had had visions of Christ at various times in his life. He also held a correspondence with leading physicist David Bohm, who would later work with Krishnamurti.

To cap it all, Bennett was approached by Idries Shah, the Western populariser of Sufism. Shah presented himself as a living representative of the same esoteric source as Gurdjieff. He persuaded Bennett to hand over Coombe Springs entirely to his own work, including the deeds of the property, with no conditions. Bennett and his close followers were eventually forbidden to enter the property and it was sold off for a considerable price. This event is a litmus test for one’s attitude to Bennett. Many see Shah as perpetrating a dishonest scam which the naive Bennett fell for. Yet Bennett seems to have been genuinely liberated by the experience and felt that Shah had given him the opportunity of moving forward.

In 1969 Bennett had another near-death experience due to uric acid poisoning, during which for around 20 hours he was close to death or permanent brain damage. He experienced a continual joyful awareness which convinced him that he could survive both the loss of his body and mind yet retain a self. He mentions other out-of-body states, including one when he was reading for Gurdjieff in Paris, for which Gurdjieff scolded him and told him if he hadn’t been there Bennett might not have got back into his body.

Academy for Continuous Education

In 1971 he began the final phase of his life, setting up the Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne House in the Cotswolds. Five experimental courses each of ten months duration were hosted at Sherborne House. These were mostly attended by people in their twenties, a large proportion of them American. (Bennett had attended the Isle of Wight Festival and was impressed by the energy of the counterculture.) The courses attempted to give a taste of the spiritual life and work on oneself to help orient people for the rest of their lives. True to form, other teachers visited the academy including Hasan Shushud, a Sufi, and Bhante, a Cambodian monk, who taught a form of meditation based on colour using coloured crepe paper and a lightbulb. Around 500 people experienced the courses over a period of five years, Bennett dying near the beginning of the fourth course. The teaching was founded on Bennett’s development of the Gurdjieff Work, including movements and work on sensation, as well as all sorts of techniques from the Sufi zikr repetition and latifa work (somewhat similar to chakras), to meditation and that old standby of digging the garden.

Critics see Bennett as a butterfly, abandoning the Gurdjieff Work for Subud, Subud for Catholicism and Shivapuri Baba, then submitting Idries Shah, and so on, with dashes of contact with traditional Sufis drizzled regularly over the stew. At times it seemed a crazy pebbledash of mixed teachings. Those broadly sympathetic to Bennett – and I am one – may see these rather as correctives to the limitations of each tradition or influence. The instant mysticism of the latihan compensated for the exceedingly hard-won fruits of the Gurdjieff Work. The Sufis offered a connection to an ancient but living tradition that was most likely one of Gurdjieff’s sources. When Bennett became a Catholic it was likely he filled a gap in his overall spiritual and emotional make up, one that his native Anglicanism did not fill.

Although The Dramatic Universe is a notably indigestible read, the dozens of other works published in Bennett’s name are quite approachable, even easy reading. Many of these are based on transcriptions of talks to his pupils. Audio recordings show his delivery to have been slow and measured, delivered in a melodious piping tenor in a particularly refined English accent. Deeper Man (Bennett Books, 1995) is perhaps a good place to begin, informally yet systematically laying out much of Bennett’s own teaching, drawing on Gurdjieff, Sufism and other sources, yet very much Bennett’s own.

Bennett’s legacy perseveres in a variety of groups and individuals. Claymont Court in West Virginia, USA, purchased shortly before Bennett died, remains open as a centre for spiritual activity. George and Ben Bennett, J.G.’s sons, continue the Gurdjieff-Bennett work, now under the umbrella of the J.G. Bennett Foundation (www.jgbennett.org), holding occasional extended practical courses. They and other pupils of Bennett and those interested in his work meet for various international gatherings, which manage to bring together the various strands of Bennett’s heritage.

Anthony Blake has held the flame of Bennett’s experimental approach and his principle of integration without rejection and gone on to develop several techniques in partnership with a variety of other seekers. Robert Fripp, guitarist and leader of the progressive rock band King Crimson, attended the final Sherborne course, the first after Bennett died, and went on to develop Guitar Craft, which uses guitar playing as a vehicle for development. Yet outside these small circles Bennett’s legacy waits to be rediscovered.

Meals in Bennett’s groups at Coombe Springs and Sherborne were typically consumed in silence, but they began with a grace composed by Bennett that could serve comfortably as an epitaph:

All Life is One, and everything that lives is holy.

Plants, animals, and men, all must eat to live and nourish one another.

We bless the lives which have died to give us our food.

Let us eat consciously,

Resolving by our work to pay the debt of our existence.

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