Elizabeth Bennett

Bennett is today ''the major  exponent of Gurdjieff Work ideas", having the larges bibliographical account of  books and papers related to the Fourth Way and other esoteric ideas.

"We have an extraordinary role to play. The Work needs to manifest the hidden;  the spiritual world  requires  a vehicle  and instrument through which it can work in this world. In so far as we can get out of the way, we can be used. We must cease to be there as something separate.

We can begin to understand this line of work  through the fulfilling of a role, when the role is all important and our self is of no importance. This does not mean that there are not differences  between how this manifests in one person and how it is for another.   Everyone  finds their own creative con­tribution.   It is 'theirs  in so   far as  the    manifestation  uses   the instruments, including the very self, of the   particular person.   When it's like that, the creativity   is pure,   not   ego­istic, not towards self-inflation.

It is  through the Third Force that everything is created.    Everything comes to be through this, yet it is nothing"

J.G. Bennett was born June 8, 1897, of an American mother and an English father. He makes little reference in his autobiography, Witness, to his childhood.

Bennett spent his early childhood in Italy, where he learned to speak Italian before he spoke English. This lay the foundation for an extraordinary facility with languages, which later in his life enabled him to talk to many spiritual teachers (Mr. Gurdjieff among them) in their native tongues and to study Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Christian sacred texts in the original forms.

His teaching methods where enriched by his life experience with many  Teacher as well as his exposure to many  Traditions, but  the central  axis of  his teachings  was based on that developed  by Gurdjieff -at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, in France-.
Bennett devoted himself  to pass on what he had  learned from Gurdjieff.

In 1958 he married Elizabeth Mayall and  they had four children.
Bennett established in 1971, -less than four years before he died- the International Academy for  Continuous Education in Sherborne, England, an "Experimental Fourth Way School at Sherborne."  In courses lasting  only ten months, Bennett took on the task of trying to pass on  -to one hundred students at a time-  the fruits of his  own lifetime's search. Students undertook practical work in the house and gardens;   they attended talks  in  which  Bennett developed his own ideas.   There were readings from  Gurdjieff's  writings and classes, as well as intensive work on  Gurdjieff's    Movements.  In addition, Bennett worked with Sufi techniques that he had      learned directly from masters in the Middle East.

"He felt it to be a task that he had been given and that there was a real need, specially among younger people, for the kind of practical knowledge and deep spiritual wisdom that he had earned during his eventful life."