J.G. Bennett was one of my father’s “gurus” – not in person, but through the ideas passed along through mentors. I’ve also learned much from him via books and people who have worked with him or studied his ideas.
Concern For The Future [excerpts from a longer description of a lecture by …] J.G. Bennett (London, 1972); bold highlights are mine.
THERE IS A CRISIS, and it is a crisis of people. We are not able to live in such a way that we can avoid the troubles that threaten us. …
We can’t make a start unless we are prepared to see ourselves and recognize that every one of us –the most just, the most tolerant, the most pacific is making his or her contribution to the total injustice and intolerance of the world. … Because if we think that we can solve the world problem in terms of other people being different while we remain the same, we shall certainly get nowhere. …
Now we’re at another period of great confusion and crisis … I believe that only ideas- only Ideas that really penetrate into people and for which they’re prepared to work and suffer –can change the future and also change the people themselves. … We need now to develop a new kind of concern, that is a concern for life, a concern for the future, a concern for the human race and be prepared to make sacrifice for the sake of this concern but this does mean a very great and very difficult change that we have to see whether we’re able to face in ourselves, that is, a change in our attitude towards the power and the strength that we have, not only as groups, as human race but also as individual.
… This belief that what we can do we have the right to do is so deeply ingrained in us that it would require a long process … to come to an understanding that we human beings cannot live by the principle that might is right and that what I can do I am entitled to do.
Anyone who can observe impartially his own behavior and the behavior of those around him can see that it is so deeply imbedded in us, that we can make whatever demands we’re able to enforce, that we can’t easily shed this. And the difficulty for us is not only that this conviction that we’re entitled to do what we can do is ingrained in us, but we’re not even aware of it. We do not even see how we’re constantly living by this principle and that we ourselves are creating this very state of crisis, this very disorder that we ourselves are constantly condemning.
The following was in a post in the FB group for the J G Bennett Foundation that started, “Here is JGB’s road map for the New World” — taken from the final paragraphs of Gurdjieff Today, published in 1973.
To save the world three different kinds of action are required: one is visible and two are invisible.
The visible work is to prepare the new social order. We shall need ‘work communities’ or, as Gurdjieff called them, ‘Fourth Way Schools’. These will be devoted to training people to survive and perfect themselves under the severe conditions of the next hundred years. These schools will have the practical task of creating self-supporting communities able to work together and share resources and also to help their environment. This is much harder than it looks. Modern man is a taker and not a giver. Whoever has power uses it to take and hold; whereas the only right use of power is to give and share with others. It is possible to go far enough in the elimination of egoistic grasping after one’s own benefit to be able to live and work in a community. But this requires teaching and training. That is what Fourth Way Schools are for; but only on the exoteric or outer plane.
The deeper, mesoteric work is concerned with energies. Psychic and spiritual energies must be released, concentrated, stored up and put to work in the right way. This requires very special knowledge and readiness to work and sacrifice. There are schools in the world that are doing this today but they are not in the West. We need to take up this work ourselves. If people are willing to undertake such work, they must first be tested to see if they have the required qualities. They must be able to put aside personal ambition and set themselves to serve the future without expectation of reward. Gurdjieff once said that 200 conscious people could stop war. If this number will be available by 1990, the disaster that threatens mankind will be averted. At Sherborne, we have made a start and already a few people are on the way. In 1977, I hope to have a special course for those who have prepared themselves. If all goes well we shall contribute our quota to the group of energy transformers. There are other centres where similar preparations are going on. Finally, there is the true esoteric work that is supernatural. There is at this present time a great spiritualizing action that is preparing the New Epoch. This action comes, as Gurdjieff puts it, ‘from Above’. All we can do is to cooperate with it and be its instruments. The Spirit cannot work without the Flesh. The New World communities are the flesh of the new humanity. Spiritual energies are its blood but its life is entering from Above. I have confidence that this action will succeed and that many of you here today will see the birth of the New World.
Bennett missed, I think, that indigenous communities were not able to pursue mesoteric (processing “psychic and spiritual energies”) methods/ceremonies integral to their cultures, due to their practices being repressed, even made illegal (until the 1970’s in the US). We are now in a time when some of this once kept-private knowledge is being shared. For instance, Arkan Lushwala (see my Community page) sharing his observation that two of the greatest dysfunctions in Western society are (1) seeing oneself as a discrete, separate entity rather than part of a web/matrix that includes all forms of life and the material world, and (2) the relationships of men and women lacking an understanding of and support of differences (biological and otherwise) in those in a relationship.