Witness: The autobiography of John Bennett

by J.G. Bennett

Book Overview

The autobiography of John Godolphin Bennett, describing his extraordinary journey from military beginnings, his meetings with some of the greatest teachers of the 20th Century - including G.I.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0934254052
• ISBN13: 9780934254052
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Claymont Communications
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A good Catholic Boy

I read this book almost a decade ago and remember being rather alarmed by it. I liked Bennet ,he was what we in england would call a good lad, Honest wholesome and despite the charlatans he liked to keep company with totally sincere. So it It is thus devastating to find that at the journeys end Bennet is left (seemingly) empty handed. Whilst Bennett didn't die cynical or bitter, there is an unmistakable sadness in these memoirs. In this book we accompany Bennet as he travels through the jungle of 20th century spirituality in search of meaning of life..Like a spiritual james bond Bennett embarks on one adventure after another,. Blessed with limitless enthusiasm and unshakable faith in God Bennet always thinks that that the truth is just around the corner. After all the various gurus have been exhausted, after all the running back and forth, Bennett even entertains the idea that he himself is the master whom he had been searching for. However even that doesn't work. He ends up where he started and dies a good catholic boy, admitting a kind of defeat? I walked away from the book, feeling defeated too. If this man's efforts are anything to go by(and he was brave enough and sincere enough to try anything and anybody)there is no spiritual truth worth striving for. You can't help feeling its all a sham. I feel very differently about this book now. I believe Bennett is an important roadmap for what not to do and anyone who has an interest in twentieth century spirituality should read this book. Bennet was a spiritual guinea pig for the modern world. In his experiences we find the totality of twentieth century spiritual experiment one that encompasses all the various forms it took, from the traditional to the occult. The old age to the new age, the east and west, science and faith, technology and agriculture,esoterism and exotericm, innocence and experience. At the end was the realisation that perhaps the main traditional religions are already complete and cannot be improved upon, Bennet was actually the lucky one. He went through it all, but he never lost faith, he never became broken and he never lost his optimism, he never lost his soul. I imagine he's in a good place now and in death will have found what he sought so elusively for in life.

Not to be missed

John G. Bennett's autobiography Witness: The Story of a Search was the first book connected with "The Work" that I encountered: an intense, self-searching, often self-accusing account of a remarkable life. Reading it again twenty years later it is not difficult to fathom why I was so drawn in: the tales of a young British army captain stationed in foreign intelligence in Istanbul shortly after the post-WWI armistice reads more compellingly than a spy novel, and the frequent interspersal of mystical experiences and mind-bending displacements of consciousness, whether under Gurdjieff's inscrutable eye at his Fountainbleau institute, in a dervish tekke in the twilight of the Ottoman empire or in the drinking den of Ouspensky's flat in London, painted a picture of a quite successful man of affairs whose wordly life nevertheless paled in the flashes of a supra-normal light. The book rivals Montaigne in its honesty, as Bennett recriminates over a lifetime of obsessively driven, self-willed behavior and cold-blooded intellectualism. But what an intellect: he clearly was a creative intellectual, and one who could see things on a grand scale as well. He was free, to an alarming degree it seems, of the conservatism that confines the rigor of academic minds to the mere service of another man's ideas.

Pilgrim's Progress

Both blessed and cursed with prodigious mental gifts and a commanding stature, John Bennett is unsparingly self-critical of his journey from early adulthood until a few years before his demise in the early 1970s. So his account commences with his work as an intelligence officer in Istanbul, 1919, as part of Britain's occupational forces. The book is a linear progresssion in terms of his various achievements after the Near East years, a researcher in the coal industry, and work in the infant plastics business and so on. But his spiritual progress is the grist of the book. The battle to subdue his self-will, arrogance and impatience are rigorously charted. At times he seems unremittently hard on himself. To an average sloth, like myself, Bennett sets an insuperably high benchmark. Fate has him introduced to the Armenian thermatagurge, Georges Gurdjieff while they are both in Istanbul and their relationship is a turning point in his life. Bennett is no slouch in networking. He meets Arnold Toynbee, Krishnamurti, The Huxleys, Schoemaker, Montessori, just to mention some names still on the popular record. P D Ouspenski, a considerable force himself, is in here too. The lienage continues to this day with theatre people like Lincoln Kirsten, Dianne Cilento, John Cleese and Peter Brooke and musicians, Kate Bush, Rob. Fripp and Peter Gabriel. As Bennett's association with the Ouspenki's, sufis, Idries Shah, and Hassain Sushud, Pak Subud and the Shiva Puri Baba unfold, he recounts particular insights gained from each and how he is able to get out of his head, open his heart and marry conscience with consciousness. It's not a difficult read and is a great entry point to the Bennett, Ouspenski, Gurdjieff literature that abounds. An autobiography of such candour is refreshing. For all the assurances that his efforts were worthwhile, one is left wondering if such awesomely talented energies as he had at his disposal(initiatives in maths, liguistics, chemistry, business organisation, political nous and contact with top shelf gurus) found such confounding obstacles in 'work on one's self', how fares my small, flickering candle of low grade wax? An acquaintance recommended this book to me in 1971 at a small gathering dissecting Michael Gelvin's brilliant commentaries on Heidegger's, 'Being & Time'. I'm on my 5th re-read and have lent it, judiciously on a number of occasions. thanks, Sue Ford!

An amazing life

there are many personal anecdotes of Bennett's encounters with Gurdjieff and Subud here, but I personally found them less interesting than his accounts of his encounters with Sufism and dervishes. Anyone interested in the Mevlevi ceremonies should not miss his account of witnessing the ceremonies in Konya in the 1920s. Throughout the book he is running into dervishes of one sort or another, who reveal much personal spiritual experience to him, of a way of life that is now no more. alas.