Occupy Your Body—Sense Always

“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

May The Force Be With You

Attention is a force—and an energy and a mystery. As a force, attention, when directed inward, awakens in us a “sensation”—a sensitive energy.
This simple act of “sensing” is unique to the legacy of human development work transmitted by GI Gurdjieff.
In a careful study of PD Ouspensky’s Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, chapter nine, we find that being present to the “organic sensation of life” in our body allows for an accumulation of an energy without which self-observation and self-remembering are but a dream.

Who am I?

practical |ˈpraktikəl|
adjective. Of or concerned with the actual doing or use of something rather than with theory and ideas.

Gurdjieff’s teaching is a practical philosophy for becoming whole while struggling to awaken to who we are. It is a living hologram whose three dimensions of body, mind, and heart which, when enlightened by active attention, become unique doorways into remembering “where we are” (sensing), “what we are” (knowing), and “how we are” (feeling).

Why do we need such a teaching? Is it not enough, as Sri Ramana Maharshi taught, to simply ask deeply and persistently “who am I?”

Welcome to Bennett Books Blog!

This blog is dedicated to nurturing, nourishing, and further developing a living legacy of work-on-oneself introduced into Western culture by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff at the opening of the twentieth century. It is a legacy of harmonious development, continuous education, ongoing practice, and lived experience in the many-faceted mystery of being human. Throughout the first half of the last century Gurdjieff intently lived this mystery with all who were drawn to him, able to bear his presence, receive his guidance, and willing to commit themselves to work in his laboratories.

John Godolphin Bennett and Elizabeth Mayall (Bennett) were two of many who answered the call. And this blog, in their name and dedicated to their memory, invites all who knew them to bring to it what they experienced through and with them.

But this blog is not limited to JG and Elizabeth Bennett’s students: it welcomes contributions from all who live, and continue to live, that lived experience of sincere work-on-oneself.

Jean Vaysse’s Toward Awakening — A Return

The return-to-print of a classic text is a joyous event for those whose lives were forever changed from having read it.

Twenty-eight years ago, Toward Awakening, was “one of the first accounts to hint at the practical approach to work through giving attention to the sensation of the body, a study of which was central in Gurdjieff’s method.” [Quote is from the dust jacket text; emphasis is mine.]

In 1974, six years prior to reading Vaysse’s book, I was a student at J.G. Bennett’s Sherborne Academy in England, where Bennett, then in his late seventies, attempted to transmit to a hundred-and-one students, mostly in their mid twenties, all that he “made his own” from all that he received from Gurdjieff. For me, twenty-nine at the time, the most powerful action of attention that Mr. Bennett opened us to was the practice of sensing, which he had learned from Gurdjieff in 1948.