Volume 21, Number 12 · July 18, 1974
Soul Food
By D.W. Harding
Is There "Life" on Earth? An Introduction to Gurdjieff
by J.G. Bennett
Stonehill, 144 pp., $2.25 (paper)
Gurdjieff: Making a New World
by J.G. Bennett
Harper & Row, 320 pp., $8.95
Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff
As Recollected by His Pupils
Dutton, 284 pp., $10.95
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution
by P.D. Ouspensky
Vintage, 128 pp., $1.65 (paper)
Talks with a Devil
by P.D. Ouspensky
Knopf, 176 pp., $5.95
The revived interest, to which these recent books testify, in an occult doctrine of the 1920s challenges an attempt at serious understanding. Although aspects of the teaching made an appeal to the Heard-Huxley-Isherwood group in the 1930s the true doctrine has been kept alive for the past fifty years by a very small number of people, one of them Mr. J.G. Bennett, a man now in his seventies, who directs an 'International Academy for Continuous Education' in England. His introductory lectures on Gurdjieff, dating from 1949, form the substance of Is There 'Life' on Earth?, and he gives a fuller account of the man and his teaching, set in the context of present-day problems, in Making a New World. He also edits and introduces Talks with a Devil, two allegorical stories that Ouspensky wrote in 1914 after his own pilgrimage in the East but before he had met Gurdjieff.
Review, 3177 words
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