Witness

This is the story of a life of adventure and search, an account of meetings with great teachers, a love story, an inspirational tale of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. John Bennett (1897-1974) had not one career but several; starting his life as a soldier and spymaster in the early years of the Middle East conflicts, Bennett moved into - and failed - in the world of finance as an adventurer and entrepreneur. He reinvented himself as a world-leading technologist and director of research. All through his adult life, his outer life was on a parallel and sometimes divergent course to his inner spiritual search under the guidance of P.D. Ouspensky and G.I. Gurdjieff. After his career in the coal industry came to an abrupt end in his sixth decade, he entered the path of a single-minded seeker. For fifteen years, he travelled widely, seeking knowledge and sharing knowledge. Although he began a written account of his ideas in 1940, it was only in the last four years of his life that he declared his willingness to teach and worked intensively with large groups of students at his International Academy for Continuous Education. Subsequent history has revealed over and over that Bennett was ahead of his time, and that he developed and presented a vision of the next stage of evolution of humanity in the Synergic Epoch.