To cut a long story short, that was the beginning, for me, of finding those other worlds. Bennett was a teacher of the Gurdjieff and Ouspensky system of “work on oneself”. And there I met Hugh Pope, another architectural student, and in May 1955 we were married. By this time I was living at Coombe Springs, in Kingston-on-Thames, where Bennett had a large old house and some five acres of grounds, which was an Institute with other students living in dormitories, or visiting to work there – both physically and psychologically – at weekends.
The Gurdjieff work helped. It didn’t get me into “other worlds” but it taught me that I needed to work internally, on myself, to become more conscious. Which was the way (I was now learning) to become fully, properly, human and to find those other worlds, other Realities.
And that – the Gurdjieff system of work – led me on, in turn, on 2nd June 1957(another memorable date) to the beginnings of the spiritual movement of Subud in the West. And the rest, as they say, is history.
For myself, as soon as I’d been initiated, or “opened” as it is called in Subud, into the latihan kejiwaan (spiritual training) by the Spirit, I no longer felt the misery of feeling lonely in the crowds, inferior and achingly empty inside. That “God hole” inside me had been well and truly opened up, and now began to be filled by the presence and the workings of a subtle energy that as the years went by I gradually realized must be divine.
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The Gurdjieff Work
Jungian Psychology
My Family
Subud
The Metaphysic – an Ancient Indonesian Cosmology
email: abdandsal@ozemail.com.au