“This work has service at its apex not its foundation.
At its foundation it has understanding what our situation really is.”—J.G. Bennett. Fallen Leaves. Private Collection, 1980.

“Tonight when we reached Hopeless Idiots, G was very solemn and after the Addition, spoke about ‘this small aim’ not to perish like a dog, and how everyone must have this. Everyone must have the wish ‘not be taxi,’ but to have real owner, not a succession of passengers. He gave us all the task of learning to distinguish between feeling and sensing*—when he sees that we do this task, and do it often, then he will be able to give us another subjective task.” — Elizabeth Bennett. Idiots in Paris p. 48

*download >> The Distinction Between Sensing and Feeling. JG Bennett, 1949.

“We had one of Madame Salzmann’s extraordinary practices: first we sat for 20 minutes sensing various parts of the body** and then the whole body: then we did a new canon with more ‘active’ sort of movements than usual: then we worked on the arms and legs, separately, of the First Obligatory, and she gave us an astonishing demonstration of how to balance; then we sat, beating rhythms on our knees, then we marched on the spot, and afterwards round the room, and then she teased us because we could not do it properly, and jumped up, with a little bounce, from the piano, laughing, and ended the class.” — Elizabeth Bennett. Idiots in Paris p. 128

“This morning I spent an hour on my knees in the Spring House. After forty minutes, I found I had the power to reach the Collected State. Afterward the pain in my legs became too insistent. But once again toward the end, I began to sense my existence differently. I am not sure that I am doing it rightly, so I hope I shall have a chance of asking.” — JG Bennett. Ibid. p. 12

Anyone who met Elizabeth Bennett—especially those who accepted her as their teacher–knows well and felt clearly her enthusiasm for “sensing”: she lived it! This enthusiasm was once simply-yet-powerfully expressed to us who were at Sherborne on the fourth basic course: (referring to Mr. B.) she said, with a twinkle in her serious light-filled eyes, “In 1949, he came back from Paris with “sensing,” which Mr. Gurdjieff was then emphasizing as the foundation of his Work!”

The rest is history: a corpus of “morning exercises” was developed and introduced by Bennett and his students to thousands. These “active meditations” are founded and grounded in that action of mind-to-body we (today) simply call “sensing.” The without-a-doubt most important experience Bennett transmitted to us during the last months of his life was that of “occupying our own body” through the work of being actively attentive to the organic sensation of life in it!

Wow! is an understatement. We all know and have experienced—or if not yet, then we need to find a source of help to experience—”without a doubt” the equanimous state of attentive mind in which we are present to life in any part, every, all parts or the whole of the body. It’s really simple, this sensing thing—but to come to it “without a doubt” weeks, months, even years of regular practice with right-accommodating guidance from others who have already come to it without a doubt is necessary. Where to find this help?

The intention of this post is to begin a lively conversation on the received benefits of “sensing” and on how to share with others this important human activity for right human development.

—James Tomarelli, February 25, 2012

Across the lawn to one side of the estate is a copse of dark larch trees, always seeming to be in silhouette. In a photo, I place them between the camera and the House, their hanging branches framing the architecture that has lost its graceless appearance as I have become accustomed to the foreign aesthetics. Mrs. Bennett sees my black and white photo and decides to have post cards printed from it in time to be sold at the fête.
As the event draws near, many students mention having dreams about their preparations for it. It is our seminal joint venture. During the weeks of preparation the Morris group is on house duty more often than the others, yet we remain cheery, attributing our mood to the music that buoys us up each day. We are also on house duty the day of the fête, not feeling as if we’re missing out on anything; Morris dance has endowed us with a miraculous state of equanimity.

On the big day each group plays its role, and we all contribute to the grand complex occasion. The Morris dancers are billed as performing the famous Sherborne Morris Dances in the village proper for the first time in a century, which is true, and makes us feel that we are doing something special for the village as well.

Finally the fête over, dinner finished, the performance of Peer Gynt complete, and all the company gone, Jonas follows me around the house talking at me non-stop as I’m putting away odds and ends, abandoned dishes, brooms, whatever I see out of place or undone. He speaks of Work philosophy, his experiences at Sherborne, his family, but no thought is complete. Nothing is making any sense to me. He rambles from one subject to another, incomprehensible. We’ve not spent that much time together lately and when we went on those exeats, I hadn’t noticed anything like this. He’s agitated in a way I’ve not seen before.
You can tell that he can’t stop talking. He has no control over himself, and I’m exhausted, having never experienced anything this frantic. Finally, I just stand there, bewildered.
“I can’t bear this,” I tell him, “and I don’t know how to put an end to it.”
“My mother said the same thing to my father,” Jonas says. “Maybe we’ll be lucky. At least we won’t have eleven kids like they do—well, maybe not lucky, just different.”
I’m thinking, When had we discussed marriage?
I am so tired my eyes are closing even as I’m standing there with him. He suggests we sleep outside. Fresh air sounds good, and the instant we crawl into the sleeping bag I drift off. But he soon awakens me, wanting to make love.
“I have too much energy,” he says.
We make love and I fall asleep again. Then he awakens me a second time.
“I’m uncomfortable in this small bag,” he tells me. As soon as he’s quiet, I fall back to sleep, but he awakens me again.
“I think I’ll go in.”
“Okay,” I say with my eyes still closed, then struggle to stand up, blissful over the thought of going to my luxurious cot.
He stops walking and says, “I think I’ll go in alone.”
I’m not supposed to walk to the house with him? “What are you up to?” I sputter, now wide-awake.
“Talk is my failure,” he says and then walks off.
After a few minutes of collecting my befuddled self, taking deep breaths under the starry sky, I trudge to the entrance. Jonas is standing inside the doorway waiting for me. I should just walk by, but I stop and look up at him, hoping for clarity. Whatever it is he’s saying, I finally understand that something is seriously wrong with him. He goes off to his room and I go to mine.
A glance out the window shows the sky beginning to lighten. My God! This had been going on all night. What can be done? Can anyone here help him? I’ve watched this happen to others during the year.
I’m so disturbed by his mental condition, I’m afraid to go to sleep only to awaken later still immersed in sorrow. But this is Sherborne. I’ll sleep for a few hours and life will continue and I’ll still be trying to assess whether this place is operating on some wise engine of persistence-in-the-face-of -difficulty or plain old insanity.

“When we really come near this question of freedom, something in us revolts entirely against it. I remember very well when my work did bring me to a point where I knew and saw that I had the power—I saw that I knew exactly how to do it, so that I could feel exactly what I chose to feel. If I could do that, then I would be responsible for my life and I could no longer blame anything outside myself; because what was outside me could not touch me. Therefore, I had to be the answer. If I was in a bad state, I was able to change it; and if I did not change it, I could not blame any one else. But I wanted to be able to blame people. I wanted to say that it was not possible that it could have been different.”

“So I think that anyone who comes to have a real taste of what it is like to be free then also understands how strongly something else in us does not wish for it. Someone who says he is quite sure he wants to be free is still very superficial. That person has not yet experienced what is really involved. It is not only that to be free requires a price that one has to pay, but when one is free then one has a new trouble, and that is that a free man is a responsible man. Beneath it all, we do not want to be responsible.”

“One partial purpose of this exercise [the theme of 'freedom from like and dislike'] is to bring objective meaning into words, not imagination. Another is that we need to know more about like and dislike if we are to make use of this as material for our work.” _ An excerpt from JG Bennett. The First Liberation, Chapter 1, “Freedom from Like and Dislike,” p. 14.

All real enjoyment is as good, from the point of view of
energy production and conservation, as suffering. _JG Bennett

The last phase of the course is filled with a new energy, a sense of promise—what a relief—though the core of our daily schedule has not changed. We continue our usual activities of housework, gardening, Theme, Movements, and the evening reading. But now more of our other activities have a creative and interactional element to them. The longer days and burgeoning signs of spring appear to be earth’s way of joining in on the assignment to manifest our work.
For the first time in months, out in the garden students are tossing off their down vests and jumpers, as the British call sweaters. Fewer layers of warm clothes make everyone appear to have lost anywhere from ten to thirty pounds. It has been so long since I’ve seen my bare arms in the light of day, that when I lay eyes on them, I feel indecently exposed.

There are trips to the garden where Mick and I search for woad, a plant once used to make the purple dye used by royalty and to see his hot colored oriental poppies waist high tumbling over each other. Gertie, my friend with Parkinson’s, and I celebrate our upcoming birthdays with little chocolate cakes from the post office. We’ve been missing such ordinary pleasures.
I tell Gertie that what feels like another birthday present, is a coming visit from my Jungian analyst, June Singer. I am touched that she suggested coming here, for my own parents visited me only once since I’ve lived away from them, and that was when I was still in Chicago. She is coming for three days, which include June 8, Mr. Bennett’s 75th birthday and my 31st. And I’m still wondering if our shared birthday reflects having anything in common with him.
When June Singer arrives, Mr. B treats her as if she were a parent visiting, as several have during the year. I’m delighted that Mr. B invites her to observe classes and is taking a personal interest to speak with her, even though their time together cuts into ours.

Back in May, when our three groups had been reconfigured again, Mr. Bennett introduced the grandest project on our plate of ‘manifestation’ for the last third of the course. Our assignment is to orchestrate a fête to be held at Sherborne near the end of June to benefit the building fund of the local Catholic Church. Each group is given a unique role: to specialize in meditation, to perform Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, or to present Morris Dance.
We’re allowed to choose whichever group we wish, although I hear rumors that certain students had not been given their choice. I am exceptionally satisfied to have chosen and to be in the Morris Dance group. My contentment reminds me of being in the ‘average’ group near the beginning of the course where, when doing Movements, our group felt neither too competitive, nor too awkward. As a member of the Morris group, we neither have to be too quiet as in meditation nor too much the focal point of an audience as when acting in a play. The commonality of our group members springs from an easy-going playfulness. And, by the way, Jonas is on the team, too.
The traditional English village dance is said to derive from Moorish dances, each village having its own variations. Mr. B invites from the outside a traditional Morris instructor who teaches dances that are known to have originated in Sherborne village, though it’s been many years since village residents danced them. Part of ‘traditional’ means that only the men of the group dance. The women play a supporting role—sewing costumes, tending to supplies, and baking and serving cake at the performances. Jenny and I bristle when we hear about our function.
Morris Dance is usually danced in groups of six men at a time. The costume consists of white shirts and pants, a black bowler hat, and a red sash pinned on the right hip with a rosette of red, white, and green ribbon. Each dancer carries a white handkerchief in one hand, red in the other, and wears shin pads covered with noisy bells, producing a pleasing percussion from the dancers’ steps. Two men on our team play instruments—one a concertina and the other an accordion, learning the music by following the teacher who, at first, plays fiddle until they learn the tunes.
All Morris teams dance the same steps except for the kicks and jumps that are unique to each village’s style. Handkerchiefs are used for flourishes and, in some dances they use sticks to clank as the men hit them together.
Often, the best dancer of the team plays the fool, weaving in and out among the dancing team members. He’s knowledgeable enough to stay out of their way yet involved enough to challenge their concentration. His costume is a long patchwork vest over the same white shirt and pants everyone wears. Juggler Jon is our perfect dancing fool, though he was sure it was a mistake when he wasn’t given either of his preferred group choices. A determined visit to Mr. Bennett clarified that it was not a mistake. He was chosen to work on himself, and much to our group’s good fortune Jon rises to the challenge.
The dance engenders a boisterous maleness we all enjoy, directing their active energy into playful competition. Who can jump higher? Stay in the air longer? Snap his handkerchiefs with greater embellishment? They cajole and applaud each other, drawing passers-by with an exuberance that makes everyone smile.
A paper maché horse costume worn by a team member carries a basket in its mouth to collect donations from onlookers. As put off as some of us women felt at first, as soon as we heard the music our dour mood dissipated and never returned. The tunes are unknown but with a familiar lilt to them. Everybody grins when the music starts.
When Mr. B asks us what we think of Morris Dance, we all agree it makes us feel close to each other and more optimistic. Whether we are spectators or team members, the music and dance changes our states. I’m surprised that I, too, feel so close to everyone, since I’ve been assigned a separate task to be done during Morris practice time.
Mr. B asked if anyone knows how to throw pottery. I had been required to take pottery classes at the Art Institute, but in my perfectionist thinking, knowing I can’t throw as well as the pottery majors, I don’t claim expertise.
Tomás, always confidant he can do anything, volunteers. However, when Russ shows me Tomás’s drooping ashtrays, I offer that I can at least make pots taller than those.
“Where I’ll get stuck,” I tell him, “is on the glazing,” another one of those technical things that catch me up. Russ says he’ll take care of that, so while the Morris team dances on the cement pad just outside the art studio, which is the old estate orangery, I am inside making myself a few pottery tools from twigs and wire. I throw dozens of small vase-like forms and partial forms to combine with hand building into container shapes. Rolling out the clay on burlap sacks gives it texture. Between the potter’s wheel and the worktable, I form vessels that are spontaneous and playful.
Russ rubs colored oxides into the textures and then glazes them with a clear shiny glaze. Not anything like what I would have done, which adds to my finding them interesting despite their dark tones.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. _Thomas A. Edison

Russ’s girlfriend, Perdie, visits him in the art studio. She glares at me, making no greeting. She’s on the staff, too, teaching psychodrama, a talent she displays daily. Whenever we have class with her she acts so irate, I’m convinced she’s just had a fight with someone. Maybe she, too, feels marginalized by the attitude toward psychology, but I never think to reach out to someone who frightens me with her anger.
In the orangery, she whispers to Russ, keeping private whatever her business. I wonder if seeing him and me working together motivates her unfriendliness. If so, it’s a total waste of her energy. Russ and I rarely even speak to each other; meaning, in my mind, we are getting along better than ever. At least I’m not being battered by his sarcasm.
The art studio orangery is a plant conservatory made of glass, letting in sunlight from all sides, which cheers me. The hours spent here are the most satisfying times. I’m doing something I love and, for a change, it is viewed as useful to the community. The orangery is as special to me as my other favorite place, the cloister. And the magic of pottery always awes me—clay’s amazing plasticity that can imitate, in looks, any other material while it possesses the ability to be transformed into permanence by fire.
Best of all, right outside the door, the Morris men practice and play music. The women gather around them smiling and doing the tasks they’re working on. To take breaks, I go out to the dancers and am welcomed to dance in place of whoever needs to catch his breath. These few weeks of light and cheery mornings filled with music, dance, and art are my golden age at Sherborne.

Along with ninety other students from around the world, I studied with John Bennett at his Sherborne Academy the last months of his life.

Mr. Bennett was a sincere and adventurous man filled with a visible love for Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff’s Teaching. That love radiated through to us as a transmission.

Following Gurdjieff’s advice to “find out for yourself,” Bennett risked and lost much: the approval of his peers, a career in politics and commerce, and personal financial assets.

Bennett researched and validated everything he received from Gurdjieff; and—while sharing with us what he had found—while digging in the Sherborne flower garden, John Bennett died on Friday, December 13, 1974, thirty-seven years ago.

James Tomarelli

Even now, in the last third of the course, there are still issues about food. On our applications to Sherborne, we had been offered a choice of meat or vegetarian fare. Yet Mr. Bennett lectured at intervals about vegetarian eating and how often we in the West do it only for sentimental reasons. Each time he brings up the topic, he emphasizes the negative implications and reminds us about the spiritual transformation of any food. More and more people opt out of their vegetarian diets.
As an experiment, I’d been hoping to improve my health by eating vegetarian, but as each lecture convinces more students to give it up, I’ve become the only vegetarian left. This is no longer a health experiment for me but only obstinacy. I think we’ve been manipulated. And then I sadly wonder if my stubbornness can be applied to something more uplifting.

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight. _Rita Rudner

On a related note, my roommates discover my cheese stash in the dorm, and they eat it when I’m not around. I’ve never discussed my low blood sugar symptoms with anyone, so they have no idea this protein is medicine for the shakes I get every morning as we are completing our work in the garden. From the time I was a child, I’ve had daily bouts where I felt so shaky I would have to lie down. When it gets that bad, my face goes white, and I break into a cold sweat. Sometimes the weakness is so intense it brings me to tears. The simultaneous mental confusion at those moments makes it impossible to determine whether I even need a glass of water if someone nearby observing my state asks.
In college, a friend gave me a book about nutrition. It sounded to us like my symptoms were from low blood sugar. I experimented with my diet and made great progress. Doctors had never treated or tested me for anything during all the years I told them about it. When I cut out bread to go easy on processed carbohydrates, the change was almost miraculous. I continued to practice this solution at Sherborne. However, since being here, I’m having mild bouts of weakness and shaking again and can’t determine why. I almost never eat bread here and only rarely the tea biscuits.
It’s taken me until now—June–only two months before the end of the course, because of frustration over the vanishing cheese, to finally go to Mrs. B and explain my health history. Sympathetic to my dilemma, she arranges for me to have yogurt every morning instead of porridge. How typical of me to wait for a crisis instead of trusting my years of experience and making suitable arrangements.

Grief from the dream lingers all day until I speak with Edith about my response to Sherborne. “The atmosphere here suppresses my playfulness and creativity. I want the information we’re given but everything is so serious. I’m driven to doing artwork—my main way of expressing humor and perception.”
Edith says, “You won’t have to live in this environment much longer.
And despite the methods not being compatible with your nature, you will benefit from Mr. Bennett’s genius. He’s given me something I wasn’t getting from Jung.”

Dreaming permits each and every one of us
to be quietly and safely insane
every night of our lives. _William Dement

Another eminent visitor is Idries Shah, a teacher of Middle Eastern wisdom in the form of traditional teaching stories. We are warned not to crowd him by demanding attention the way the students had done the first year, embarrassing Mr. B with their poor manners and possibly displaying how little they’d learned. Shah is a dark handsome Afghani wearing a stylish black leather jacket befitting a rock star. Many of the students are familiar with his collections of stories. Shah, like Bennett, is gifted in speaking of the ineffable, but in a different way—with more humor and sarcasm while pointing to the frailties of our human condition.
He said, “Although hearing a lecture one time or perhaps even many times can hardly substitute for being at a school and living in the presence of a teacher, such meetings can certainly prepare you for being able to benefit in the future from wisdom to which you might be exposed.”
Was he saying we might have achieved very little in our time with Mr. Bennett? That Mr. B might not be a real teacher or Sherborne a real school? That we weren’t properly chosen as students? My brain feels like it has been crocheted by the time he is done with us, though I am left with a now-familiar sense of his telling us how, as seekers, we tend to become attached to all the wrong things and, besides, always miss the point of what we’re being shown.

Chapter 26
Up The Ladder

It is one of the laws that if we wish to change
we must make it possible for somebody else to change. _JG Bennett

My thinking function is beyond overload. The only thinking I’m doing is visual—no words. Images of eggs keep popping into my mind unbidden. I have accumulated a collection of black and white photos taken around the property. In my mind, each one of them begs for a sunny side-up egg—hanging on a fence, resting on the balustrade, being held in someone’s hand while companions examine it, and, even, lurking behind the flora. A cheery prowling egg! Mrs. Bennett hears about the photos with eggs painted on them and asks to see them. I wonder what she is doing with them, imagining her taking them to a psychiatrist for professional evaluation.
Charts and graphs come to mind with eggs as the markers. Sometimes I copy graphs from scientific journals in the library and paint my 18 x 24 inch version of them on sheets of brown craft paper tacked up on the dormitory wall. In general, people laugh when they see them. The cartoons have an innate humorous nonsensical quality; I am sure they are keeping me sane though I don’t know how.
One dorm mate, Nadine, often talks and jokes with other people, but never has much to do with me, so of course, I don’t try to befriend her either. When anyone comes into our room and looks at my art, her face darkens. Today, after some visitors leave, she scowls.
“What is the meaning of this so-called art?”
“I can’t explain them,” I say. “The images just come to me.”
She spins on her heel and marches out of the room. My answer doesn’t please her.
I often come to our dorm at the end of morning tea and lie down for five or ten minutes to get past the low blood sugar shakes that always hit me that time of day. If Nadine arrives at the same time to change from her gardening clothes, she never speaks with me but on her way out slams the door as hard as she can. I assume she is protesting my lying down in the middle of the day, which is frowned upon, but neither of us brings it up for discussion. It’s another instance of where I’m unwilling to confront anyone’s anger or my own response to it.

I work on a triptych, art in three sections, that reminds me of the active, receptive, and reconciling forces so often mentioned in lectures. Three images come, camouflaging their meaning in humor. They share a similar shape. A blue Saturn with its rings is the active force; a brown bagel with lox and cream cheese peeking out from between the top and bottom halves is the receptive; and a sunny side-up egg, floating cloudlike in a blue sky is the reconciling.
After lunch Jon, the juggler, intercepts me in the hall. As if to fulfill the role of divine messenger, he shows me a book called The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch by Wilhelm Franger, then points to a paragraph for me to read.
“…the egg contains the meaning of the world; and to attain equilibrium with the world, to be attuned to its creative harmony and to make oneself an instrument of divine Nature, appeared to the community of the Free Spirit as the condition sine qua non of spiritual perfection.” Another section he points to reads “…whose egg-like shape show it to be the germ-cell and navel of this paradisiacal world.” The words seem to fit.
In keeping with the egg theme, even though Jonas and I spend less time together he still points out excerpts from books he has on hand. In Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, he shows me, “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: It would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go indefinitely being just an ordinary decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
Only one of my paintings strays from the egg theme. It is a light bulb with its network of tiny filaments exposed. Rather than seeing it as the metaphor of a bright idea, I equate it with the mitochondria within a cell, the engine of minuscule transformations.

People who like this sort of thing will find this
the sort of thing they like. _Abraham Lincoln

As if to confirm the egg and germ cell images, Morning Exercise asks us to be in a collected state and to bring that state into another person. I have a sense that I can accomplish this—that being centered allows me to enter someone else’s being. In another variation on the exercise, we are asked to see the whole room of people and experience “I am they; they are I; we are the same.”
Mr. B explains, “The collected state exercise is an action on our own being, enabling us to be as we should be.”
Although I still wonder if I’m doing these exercises correctly, I’ve reached a point where I simply try to do them to the best of my ability and then look back on my experience and evaluate it.
Several Themes also relate to the morning meditation, revolving around sensitivity to other people. We discuss inner considering and how we explain things to ourselves often using second hand information or imagination. Although it is clarifying to understand the negative quality of thinking that is based on misinformation or non-information, again, the word ‘imagination’ is used in a pejorative way. Rarely is imagination described in its function as a channel to direct knowledge through visions or other forms of ‘knowing.’
Despite being uninspired by Work language and the scorn toward emotions, my understanding of all the ways in which we are linked to one another increases. Every aspect of our daily lives reflects the connection, and Theme observations made by the students confirm a shared experience. Whether this is the result of more opportunities to “manifest” or awareness growing from the amount of time we’ve been here, I cannot help but see the connections and contributions among us.
We know where our food comes from, how the soil is treated, how food is harvested, who delivers it to the kitchen, how it gets washed, how leftovers will be returned to the garden or fed to the chickens, the ways in which each of us functions. My being unable to find a broom that I had not put away three days before, how often someone’s gift fills a need that had been left undone, experiencing the shared state of one-hundred people, admiring how the complex house kept operating during vacation with no sign-up sheet, all are microcosms of the greater world.
At Sherborne we participate in so much more of essential day-to-day processes than in our lives outside of Sherborne. In addition, we see how someone’s bad mood ruins a meal or someone’s good mood spills over to the rest of us. Hurt feelings destroy a project. Joy creates cooperation. Greed leaves others without bread to eat. A cook’s lack of awareness in doling out dinner takes the meal away from the hard working pot scrubber. We experience all sides; and can react badly or cope gracefully with each of them. Accumulated trash attracts rodents or, when cleaned up, contributes to the beauty and order of our environment. The limits of the school setting make these incidents so much more obvious than out in the world where the magnitude of activity allows much to go unnoticed.
Because daily activity revolves around our own care and feeding, I appreciate what it takes to accomplish these things. Every activity reveals our attitudes, how we treat each other, the planet, the universe, and ourselves. Mr. B asks us at different times to imagine what could be accomplished if people did not have the need for personal recognition or the need to indulge in discouragement. What if we would act just because we know a certain action is the right thing to do? The quality of our lives depends on our struggle with ourselves.

Russ, the art teacher, and I discuss the possibility of my offering a ceramics class as my part in the teaching exercise. The way he puts it is something like, “Let’s find an outlet for your passive flexibility and active inflexibility.”
I‘m not that interested in teaching ceramics because I’ve done that in my life before Sherborne. However, I appreciate Russ at the moment for his generous recognition that working with clay is something I can share and for listening to my other idea. It is the first time all year that Russ and I have what I would call a conversation.
Instead of pottery, I decide to teach a variation on the fabric decorating technique called tie-dye; only we are going to tie-bleach. All we need is fabric that fades, string, and bleach. On exeat, I carry a small bottle of bleach with me to a fabric shop and draft the saleslady into cutting samples of dark colored cottons that we dip into the bleach. When I find a rich blue that bleaches out to a range of shades from white to the darkest tones, I buy enough fabric so that everyone in our group will have several eighteen-inch squares to experiment with. The long-range plan is to sew the squares into covers for our Morning Exercise cushions.
In class, I demonstrate an assortment of techniques to tie and sew the fabric so the bleach can’t get to parts of it. It addition, after it is bound, we soak the fabric in water before putting it into the bleach. The wet string and thread make a better barrier than when dry. The results are beautiful. We get a wide array of patterns ranging from the easy-to-recognize flower child’s bull’s eye to complex rhythmic designs formed by neat pleating and tying.
The finished pieces still need to be sewn together to create cushion covers, and only one person, my dorm mate, Renee, volunteers to help. I’m disappointed by the low response. How can I accomplish the goal without more people? Nevertheless, the new buoyancy in the atmosphere, perhaps coming from nearness of completing the course, makes it possible for me to just press on. Letting go of my preconceptions about what is needed, I think instead about how to do what we can.
It is an exeat day, and rather than leave the property, stalwart Renee and I start sewing cushion covers using the same sewing machines that were used to sew Movements costumes. In less than an hour, a few students join us, at first only curious to see what we are doing, then being drawn into helping. The sides must be matched and pinned inside out. Volunteers find more sewing machines and bring them into the ballroom where we’re working. Different people come and go throughout the day, again demonstrating to me how much gets done by working in increments and being open to accepting support in whatever form it presents itself. Many cushion covers are finished and over a few days more keep appearing. I complete only a few myself, yet I initiated the project and, in a way, channel the energy that brings them into existence. The covers appear like magic.
The way help arrives reminds me of situations from my pre-Sherborne art projects, though I don’t think I could have put the experience into words until now. Often, the artistic objects that I wished to make required some technical skill that I didn’t possess—using an electric saw, casting forms in plastic, bolting together lap joints for a two-by-four bed frame. When I tried to get help before getting started, I’d never find it, but if I just jumped in and began working, help would arrive, sometimes before I even asked for it.
I’ve heard people say that maybe the universe wants us to make a show of faith before meeting us half way. Do I need the project to go according to my direction, or will I accept help in the form the universe provides?

The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence,
the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice,
the fifth teaching others. _Solomon Gabriol

Spring Break to August 15, 1973

Chapter 25
Questions

One must learn to use life as one’s teacher. We have to learn from life
for our own being, for our own transformation. _JG Bennett

In the downstairs library Mr. Bennett gave us a series of lectures to prepare us for the last phase of the course. As usual, most of us sat on cushions on the floor while the older people sat on the few chairs in the room. In the first presentation he reminded us of the parable of making bread.

He said, “When looking at the last stage of the process, the esoteric, it is not the baking of the bread that is the last step. That comes when we are assimilating it as food. It is only then when it is serving its purpose, feeding the community. Likewise, in terms of human transformation, the esoteric phase is the birth of the spiritual man. Although it is likely that most of you have not achieved such a state of being, we should understand that the transformed person is one who becomes the source of Work for himself and through which the Work flows into the world for the sake of others.
“During this last stage of our studies at Sherborne, you will be more involved with activities that will give you the opportunity to manifest something to benefit the greater community.”

To help us understand the underlying laws of the universe regarding the process of transformation, Mr. B used the symbol of the enneagram. It is an ancient symbol depicting the process of self-renewal, which can be applied to organizations and the completion of tasks as well as to the spiritual development of a person.
He explained that, “By comprehending the pattern demonstrated by the symbol, we follow the steps depicted at each point to learn how events unfold, whether they work, or why they go wrong.”
One lecture devoted to the enneagram used as an example a daily activity such as the preparation of a meal; or in another presentation it was about the subtle process of the transformation of man’s spirit, a task required for evolving the life of the universe. Although I found these cerebral exercises taxing, I went up to my room after the lectures and noted what little I could.

One of several ‘manifesting’ activities during the last third of the year is for each of us to complete a six-week Decision exercise.
Someone asks, “How do we figure out whether a project will take six-weeks?”
Mr. B assures us, “The only way to get a feel for how to calculate the length of time needed for a long-term project is to do it. With experience, you’ll get better at estimating.”

The dilemma of estimating time needed reminded me of learning to draw at the School of the Art Institute. As beginners we’d draw the figure beginning with the head and by the time we got down to the feet, we’d run out of paper. With practice, we learned to keep the whole figure in sight, breaking it up into smaller sections, working the details only within the larger context by returning repeatedly to the whole in order to maintain the proportions. The advanced students spent most of the time studying the subject, only rarely looking down to work their drawings.

A long-term Decision has already caught my attention. The fireplace in my dorm had once been lined with ceramic tiles, but all that is left is the metal backing and a few shards. What if I were to reline the fireplace? I know where to get tile. In the servery, our dinner dishes are often dropped and broken, the shards put into a bucket. I can see the design in my mind’s eye. The half-inch wide blue stripe on the plate rim, broken into little arcs, would become two or three stripes along the outermost area of the fireplace walls. The blue flowers from the center of the plate would also be rearranged in sections contrasting with all white areas. Every day I go down to the servery, collect shards from the bucket, and carry them up to my dorm.
I get hung up on thinking about the types of materials needed to glue the ceramic pieces in place and to fill in the spaces between them. There’s no local hardware store to give me information. Feeling stymied by the technical side of a project has long been a recurring problem in my artistic activity.
My flat pattern teacher at the Art Institute often noticed when I got stuck on things like that. Like moving the needle arm on a phonograph record, she’d give me a little nudge to get me going again. On my own, I depended on friends for technical help. However, at Sherborne, I put aside this problem and before I know it our allotted six weeks are gone. And now we are being given appointments for a second private meeting with Mr. Bennett.
At the appointment, we are to discuss with him how the exercise has gone. He also wants us to bring written answers to these three questions:
1. How did I work on my six-week Decision task?
2. What is my problem or how am I stuck? This needn’t relate only to the task but to our process or lives at Sherborne in general; and
3. What would we like to see different around Sherborne?
“Your answers,” he pointed out, “might also reveal something about your chief feature.”

I dread the meeting, not knowing what the consequences are for not finishing. Another layer of clothing is not helping me stop shivering as I walk the long hall to Mr. B’s office. After I’m seated I confess with shame that my Decision exercise is still unfinished. He surprises me by registering no disappointment. Instead, he suggests I take an additional six weeks to complete the fireplace.
“Ask George to tell you what kind of glue and grout to purchase. These kinds of things are his expertise.”
It never occurred to me to consult George who was in charge of all our practical repair and maintenance work.
At the moment I am eager to get on with telling Mr. B my opinion of Sherborne as he had asked us to.
“I resent you,” I tell him. “I think the school is impersonal, always negative with constant warnings about our pathetic nature. I don’t feel like I have anyone on the staff to talk with, no individualized counseling; and the atmosphere is so gloomy and disapproving that I’ve become apathetic about being here.”
He looks me straight in the eye which makes me feel sure he is listening; and says nothing to interrupt my tirade. When I’m done, we just sit in silence. I’m too nervous to remember the other thoughts I’d had—that I find his manner Victorian and authoritarian and in conflict with much of what he says to us about how we should treat each other.
Mr. B takes a deep relaxed breath and says, “You are unable to reach out. You make demands of the world and when they aren’t met, you withdraw. . . I do care about you.”
I just ignore his saying he cares about me and I can’t accept the rest of what he is saying. I’m thinking, Reach out? Why, I have a cadre of friends here with whom I’m able to talk about most anything. And we laugh together about the predicaments we find ourselves in. What could he mean? But I don’t ask.
He continues, “Do you remember some of the activities you said you wanted to participate in on your original application to Sherborne?”
Hadn’t eons passed since then?
“Yes, I remember.”
He has my application in his hands and is running a finger down various items as he speaks.
“Did you join the choral group?”
“I went to the first meeting but I didn’t like the kind of music they were singing so I didn’t go back.” It doesn’t occur to me until this moment that as a participant I could have suggested other music. I always assume that when someone else is in charge, I don’t have any input.
“What about propagating plants?” Mr. B was referring to a project outside of our daily gardening or my caring for the houseplants. He was talking about getting seedlings started for next season’s vegetable garden.
“Flo was so bossy. I couldn’t stand the way she hovered over my shoulder, micro-managing my every move.”
“Hmmm. Did you work on the rock garden we got started in January?”
“I have terrible circulation.” I’m thinking about how my big toe keeps going white even when I’m in the house. Raynaud’s syndrome. I panic over its numbness and pace the halls trying to get the blood moving again. To Mr. B, however, I only say, “My hands were freezing in the cold.”
He doesn’t get caught up in my answers, instead, seeming to conclude our talk by saying in a gentle tone, “Just go out to people and be friendly. Radiate warmth to them.”
What is he talking about?
Instead of asking, I just dig in my heels. I’m thinking about how all the magic I’d been experiencing before Sherborne seems to have departed from my life. Despite my inability to digest what he’s saying, a tiny voice far away is whispering, “He’s not talking about the times you do reach out, only about the situations when you don’t.”

It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another;
it is one damn thing over and over. _Edna St. Vincent Millay

After the meeting, I felt pained about the number of activities for which I found reasons not to participate. Hadn’t the anticipation of them contributed to making Sherborne so attractive? By not initiating dialogs to address what I experienced as problems, I was not honoring the other person or myself. I lived in a world expecting my concerns to be ignored or devalued…and that if they were which was most of the time since I never spoke up, I had no recourse.
From the moment I asked George for help, the rest of the six-week Decision project was as easy as collecting the shards had been. He told me exactly what products I needed.
Another piece of information arising from this experience was the completion of an undertaking I believed would require large blocks of time. Instead, five to fifteen minutes a day were more than sufficient. I thought I had never experienced anything like that before, but of course, I had. We all have. Didn’t we learn to talk, walk, write, and roller skate by practicing in small increments over a long period of time? The long-term Decision also provided technical practice regarding Decision-making. I’d found a task that was related to my being plus I learned how to break it up into sensible parts, keep focused on the goal, maintained other activities that needed to be done, and appreciated how by continuing to do them they created energy that supported this aim. I looked forward to being able to apply this experience in the future.

George tells me that he’s had a dream about me: “We are all in a group meeting when Mr. B says, ’Some people never ask questions. In order to encourage everyone to do so I’m going to pull names out of a hat.’
“You were shaking with fear,” George says, “sure he was about to pull out your name. Just before dipping his hand into the hat, you thought of a question, raised your hand, and were called upon.
“Mr. B said, ‘That’s the best question anyone has ever asked.’ Then, looking around the room he says, ‘Why haven’t any of you thought of that?’”

If I wouldn’t listen to my own dreams, maybe I would listen to someone else’s. It was as if George were trying to tell me that my unspoken questions were worth airing but before that could happen I would have to respect their validity.

Chapter 24
Recovery

We have to be able to tolerate other people, tolerate them totally,
not just externally but truly accepting other people as they are and
not attempting to impose ourselves on them. _JG Bennett

Almost a month after I’d been sick, Mr. B spoke of the Theme ‘breathing.’ He said it was important not to interfere with breath, that time is breath, that you are out of the time experience when you stop breathing. He said, “The Zikr breathing works on us despite our mental activities and chatter. We cannot be aware of how it works on us.”
How were we to do the Zikr breathing pattern of a single inhalation and three exhalations yet not interfere with breathing? It was another thing I didn’t understand or ask about.
Morning Exercise called for expanding the present moment. We alternated between the recent past and the near future, more distant past and more distant future until the ever-enlarging time increments included our own birth and the time of our death. The ability to feel an expanded sense of time was reassuring and stayed with me.

After recovering much of my physical energy from the mumps, I involved myself in the daily schedule again—house duties, classes, meditations, and Movements. However, when I missed out on learning a new complex Movement, I wasn’t able to pick it up in class and I never made an effort to learn it outside of class. In fact, I felt a bit detached from all the activities. Something about the distance felt like a good thing—like having gotten off a runaway train.

Within a period of days several teachers bring up the subject of my passivity. I can see some of it and must ask myself again if I have any reasons of my own for doing anything. If I can’t find a purpose for an activity, am I able to do it as an act of devotion or for the sake of experimentation? Only today, weeks since being ill do I realize that I have not once remembered to put my attention on the “Belief” latifa as Mr. B suggested during the personal appointment.
Anna, our most recent Movements teacher, also assesses that I am too passive in class. In this case, I cannot recognize it. Movements usually energizes me, but her class feels like walking into a black hole that sucks my light. I attribute the unexpected drain to her lack of energy. Who knows who is right?

I am appointed house supervisor for our next work weekend. While feeling up for it, I’m also cautious about wanting to protect my newly returned energy. Again, we are expecting about two hundred guests. The air is electric with the excitement of preparing for so many visitors. Servers setting up for lunch come to me for direction in rearranging tables in the dining room. We spend a good amount of time experimenting with several options before determining which groupings to use. After that is settled, I think it is a good time to take five minutes to just sit and breathe, get myself centered for the rest of our long busy day. I let one of the servers know that I am going to sit in my room.
“I’ll be back within ten minutes,” I tell her.
A few minutes after sitting down on the edge of my bed, Mrs. B, bursts into the room.
“Where have you been? Everybody’s been looking for you.” She’s never even talked to me before. And how did she find me so fast if no one knew where I was?
“You can’t simply leave your post whenever you feel like it and abandon everything when so much needs to be done!”
“I just got here. I told Cindy where I was going. I needed to catch my breath.”
“That’s not acceptable! Go back right now and do what you’re supposed to be doing.”
Like a shamed dog, I cower back to the bustle. Hours later in the day, I notice Mr. Bennett across the dining hall and cringe when he catches sight of me and makes a beeline in my direction.
“That was very irresponsible of you!” he says, as if we were in the middle of a conversation about my faux pas. It is obvious Mrs. B reported me. While their complaints are exaggerated, I also have the feeling that the rash of recent criticism has more to do with my growing ability to bear it than with the enormity of my blunders.

If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be
a horrible warning. _Catherine Aird

Meanwhile, Jonas’s unpredictability continues. He invites me to be with him, but then becomes silent and morose. When I speak of the excitement in the air, he corrects me.
“It isn’t excitement. It’s agitation.”
I’m still trying to understand what caused the sudden change? Is it my fault? He passes me in the hall and ignores me. In the evening he seeks me out to be affectionate. The next morning when I sit next to him at breakfast, he talks with everyone at the table and then leaves without having said a word to me. I avoid him the rest of the day to protect myself from the hurt. Then he comes looking for me in the evening and as soon as he finds me, I am hooked on my old expectations, wanting to believe that things have returned to normal.
That night I dream:

Had Jonas started out treating me like this, we never would have become friends. However, now that I am involved with him I cannot accept the reality of how our relationship is. Although something in me is just beginning to let go, I’m still mostly thinking there must be a way to bring back the good humor.

The time for action is past!
Now is the time for senseless bickering! _Ashleigh Brilliant

The combination of detachment from school and the emotional roller coaster with Jonas has me so unbalanced that instead of going to practical work this morning, I sneak away from the house and catch a bus to Cheltenham where Anya and Keld live. Throughout the day I am unable to reach them by phone. I spend the time wandering around the city not enjoying the kind of exploration that under other circumstances would have been pleasurable. Though I had intended to run away, when the afternoon sun fades I begin to feel anxious. Before the last Sherborne bound bus stops running for the night, I return to school and write myself a poem.

As we neared Spring break, another Theme Mr. B introduced was ‘Listening.’ It exaggerated all my discomforts with feeling unable to do what we were there to do. Listening to myself was painful. I heard myself complaining, challenging, denying, agreeing. I noticed how, when a group of us met strangers on exeat, they would talk to the other students but not to me. I often interrupted people by expressing enthusiasm, thinking to bring them closer and instead they stopped speaking. I wasn’t listening.
When Mr. B had finished reading Beelzebub to us, he began reading the sacred Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita during the evening reading. At the Theme meeting, Jim asked Mr. B, “What good is it to listen to you read the Bhagavad-Gita to us if I can’t understand what I’m hearing?”
“At least it predisposes us to new ideas,” Mr. B answered.
I thought back to the first time I read a full-length adult level book, Pilgrim’s Progress, when I was in high school. I didn’t like it. I thought it corny, yet persevered because something about the subject matter of seeking resonated within me. Maybe it wasn’t a new idea so much as it reawakened my childhood aspiration for spiritual understanding when there hadn’t been such ideas around me.

As a young adult the only connection to spiritual life that touched me through experience was working with dreams. I began to study them on my own as a teenager. In psychology class in college I wrote a term paper using my own dreams to explore content, context, feeling, meaning and interpretation. I was introduced to CG Jung whose propensity for dealing with historical works of art as well as imagery arising from the unconscious in general spoke to me in a way I had not discovered elsewhere.

A good portion of the journal I’m keeping is taken up in writing dreams though I am still too preoccupied with the program at Sherborne to attend to them. Dreams are frowned upon in the Work as we are being shown it. They are referred to as shit of the mind, needing regular excretion.
I have been writing down my dreams for almost fifteen years, working with them on my own, with therapists, and most recently with Jung’s student, June Singer, author of Boundaries of the Soul. In my experience, dreams are of all sorts—garbage disposal, assessing experiences, practical guidance for daily life, healing and spirituality. Nevertheless, I neglect them now at a time when they could be most helpful. I have lost my moorings.

My simultaneously disturbed and detached state continues right up to Spring break. Despite the ongoing melodrama, Jonas and I plan to take a vacation together. Robert and Penny, who had gone with Axel and us to the Friends’ Meeting, loan us their car and the family tent. As if the auto were just a large rucksack, Jonas crams it full of groceries, a Coleman stove, the ancient weighty tent, water, and books. Anticipating the open countryside, we travel north.
What began as a sunny afternoon grows dark with an ominous sky. When the weather turns brisk and the wind begins jostling the car so badly that we struggle to keep it on the road, we decide to cut the travel short and set up camp.
Not another soul is at the campgrounds. By this time, the wind is blowing in 40 mph gusts, yanking the heavy old canvas out of our hands. It begins to rain and the temperature drops. We’re freezing while tussling the tent into submission, amazing ourselves that we’re able to figure out what’s supposed to go where. With the tent set up, our clothing soaked, and the temperature falling, triumph is all the sweeter when we finally crawl inside, light the stove and cook ourselves a hot meal. Just like our relationship, the challenges seem unavoidable and moments of quiet and warmth a worthwhile reward. Still, I don’t think it needs to be quite like this.