London Group Talks

Description

In the fall of 1972, JG Bennett began a series of monthly group meetings in London with his more experienced students and collaborators, some of whom had worked with him for decades. The theme of these meetings followed on directly from his message in 1970, but they were, in his description, ‘technical’ meetings, in which he set out to share a wide range of inner work practices that could help people work at transforming the energy of their negative responses into a positive benefit, not only for themselves but for the wider society. Thanks to Bennett’s practice of having such meetings recorded, it is still possible to hear what he said, and use this for one’s own work now.

He began the first meeting by saying, ‘The problem in front of us all is how to live in a world which is being increasingly dominated by negative forces; how to become a possible channel for the transmission of positive forces.’ This problem is still in front of us now, and presumably always will be because, as Bennett pointed out in one of the later meetings, the negative principle is in all of us, and is even a necessary condition for inner work, provided we make use of it. This, after all, is why Gurdjieff described the denying principle as ‘holy’.

This makes it all the more necessary that as many people as possible engage in the work of transforming negativity, and strive to become ‘channels for the transmission positive forces’. Bennett put in front the group the possibility of setting oneself to work ‘uncompromisingly’ at the task of replacing all forms of negativity in oneself with a positive inner action. He went so far as to ask that if we are not prepared with work in this way, what is the value of all the rest? ‘What use can we be in the world,’ he asked, ‘if we add to the negativity instead of diminishing it?’