Imitation Fourth Way Groups Started by Gurdjieff Rejects

[sankara]

Sorry what does "hanbledzoin" means? It is not reported in the dictionnary I can use.
Thank you

 

[Amir]

[From QMI Glossary Page: http://www.qm21.com/glossaryframe.html]
Hambledzoin: energy of a spiritual quality which Gurdjieff drew upon for the purposes of healing. The same as Baraka and the Holy Spirit. (see also Baraka, Holy Spirit, Spirit)

 

[sankara]

Thank you Amir...

 

[nemo]

Quote from: Laura
(...)... and he [Gurdjieff] obviously had some success with his pupils, but not many of them, and not necessarily long lasting.
Once he was dead, it seems that his "4th way work" ended and those he left only continued on in imitation with no real source of inspiration.

Would there be a way to direct me (and others) to some background information through which one could come to an understanding about how you arrived at this assessment?
I`m reading bits here and there about post-Gurdjieff-Fourth Way-groups and am somewhat astonished at their obscurity. Even John Pentland and Jeanne De Salzmann didn`t seem
to have published anything (apart from a lecture here or a foreword there), also not a single biography (or interviews) on/with them has ever seen print.
I`m wondering about this since there seems so little information about the Work and subsequent successes or failures by those groups.

I posted that question in another thread and in order not to hijack that thread I rather reply on this thread, given by Kniall (thanks btw :)) for me to get some backgound information I`d asked for.
I`m well aware of this thread, having read it a couple times (Only the C´s know which "I"`s have done the reading ) . I skimmed it for the third time and things are finally falling into place for me.
It happens guite often that I don`t see the woods for all the trees and then submit the kind of posts which are everybody`s waste of time. Like my above question, the answer of which should have been clear to me since last summer when I roamed some german esoteric forums.

I registered on one site where on one thread the 4th Way was being discussed, one of the members a woman who`s read Laura`s books, another a member of a Berlin 4th Way group. We tried in vain to explain the concept of Conscious Evil to this 4th Way guy. The STS/STO concept alienated him: Good and evil is all in your head, you know; Evil is only the result of mechanicalness, you know, a.s.o...At some point the main moderator interrupted, saying that good and evil are relative concepts. I brought up the Holocaust and gang-rape as gross examples that STS/STO are NOT relative ... or only at best in a very cynical way. That experience should have rally cleared my question up for me.

Then along came Painter, a new forumite with long 4th Way Group experience. He seemed to have established a nice rapport with Laura. I greatly enjoyed his posts and my impression was that those groups really had helped him a lot. Next I`m reading more accounts by various 4th Waylers, among them William Pat Patterson, whose "4th Way"-autobiography I think is preeetty good (haven`t finished it yet). His description of his "Don Juan", Lord John Pentland, leaves a strong impression in my mind. The same goes for accounts about Jeanne De Salzmann. My impression from these various accounts were that LJP and JDS as well as WPP are very indepted to Gurdjieff, trying to keep the teaching pure.
Back to Laura, who wrote that after G`s death the 4th way ended and his pupils basically imitated the teachings with no real inspiration. That was not my impression from the sources (which are very fragmented and hardly allow for any final assessment on my part) I`ve read.
My REAL, underlying guestion probably is: Were all the struggles of G`s later pupils really all in vain??? Watered down, yes maybe, but all for naught?

Beelzebub is obviously some kind of scripture for them. I`m reading it for the first time and have no idea if there is anything in the book, which can be taken literally.
But when I read, in the chapter The Chief Culprit, his descriptions of the hasnamus character I really couldn`t help thinking psychopath - even though the nummer 313 reg. Hasnamusses confuses me. The Hasnamus pops up occasionally in the book and I find the context very reminiscent of Ponerology. Okay, G doesn`t indeed make a big deal out of this question, but still: how can those Beelzebub-exegets ignore this for decades???

Now if I understand correctly, the question of Conscious Evil is a No-go-zone (also thanks to P.D.O ) for these 4thWay-groups, in fact, given your assessments, it appears to be a bonafide chism between 4th Way and QFG, an unbridgable ideological abyss. Gosh!

 

[pstott]

I know of one thriving 4th way school in West Virginia called Claymont. They follow the Gurdjieff teachings, and are well-versed in the movements and deHartmanns' music.

They also borrow from other traditions - they have a semi-resident Buddhist monk and they host visits from a Turkish Mevlevi Dervish sheikh and his followers. I was privileged to be present one weekend when the Mevlevis came and we performed a Zikur. This was an amazing experience that deeply affected all the people from Toronto who attended.

At Claymont they have also managed to create a largely self-sufficient community with their own farms, fish farm, pottery and crafts workshops as well as the school.

 

[John G]

I know of one thriving 4th way school in West Virginia called Claymont. They follow the Gurdjieff teachings, and are well-versed in the movements and deHartmanns' music.

Claymont was founded by John Bennett and in this thread:

_http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3580

Sterling Doughty gives his impression of Bennett:

"hey, what was john bennett like?" He was a bit stiff frankly, he had this red wood chair at Sherborne and everbody was a bit afraid of him. He was a bit pissed at my me when I was swinging a scythe near this chained eagle they had. But when meditating on Elohim with him, it was more than wonderful.And watching the performance of the movements was sublime. I have a few photos.

It's kind of a backhanded compliment which is extremely mild compared to what Doughty says about another group he was in and it's founder, the Arica School founded by Oscar Ichazo. The thread link above and Doughty's website:

_http://www.angelfire.com/ar/metaton

sound a little like the Laurel Canyon series:

The results of the early exercises (those used in Chile and in the 3 month and 40 day trainings) were what drew the early groups to Arica. Most of the exercises were really fine. The theoretical material and the presumed (erroneously) association with Mr Gurdjieff were also big draws. It is hard to describe the culture that existed in Big Sur in the late sixties, but we sure had one hell of a time and when the Arica idea filtered back from Chile, a lot of people decided this was the next big step. (Although we had all used LSD, we didn't know that it was a significant element in the Chile training. In Arica terminology Ladiyat was the code for LSD 25 and MRC for marijuana. Coke played a significant role in the inner circles but was theoretically proscribed for ordinary members.)

We were all attracted by the basic theme: Ichazo had studied with many teachers in many traditions and had eliminated the cultural trappings and ornaments of the exercises and synthesized them into a new, more effective and comprehensive whole. Sounded great.

You say: "it seems to me ichazo and arica have not always existed on promises alone..." This is completely true. To suggest otherwise would be false.

What's happening today is, in my analysis, a form of "feel-good" hypnosis which keeps a small number of people paying Ichazo's way and feeding his and their delusion. Unfortunately, the points you bring up about cults, " dynamics of brainwashing-- such as isolation, imagination, propaganda, conformity, ritual, and the feeding of the need for family, friends and authority..."are, together with false promises and hypnotism induced throught the yantras, the principal elements of today's Oscar/Arica Cult.

The early work was certainly of great value to me. It still is. I was on occasion awake (still am), and had a number of Samadhis and other fine experiences. But some of it was, in my opinion, contaminated with hypnotic seeds from the very beginning.

Why, I have no idea. If Ichazo had behaved honestly and openly, he could have had the ample money and fame that he still so desperately seeks. But he is, in my experience, a person without any human morals. (As Marie so beautifully says, a highly disintegrated 9.) I think you also have to remember, which many Aricans and others seem to have forgotten, that experiences are experiences, they are not, in and of themselves, awakening...

I didn't use psycheldelics in the tanks. I don't think we were really concerned about far we would go. In fact, we never did really come back. I have had experience with various forms of psychosis. I think the tainted work of Arica was a trigger. But then, we tried most evedrything we could get our hands on in those days. Not just for fun, we wanted to find out something real.

It was never my intention with metaton to get into Oscar's personal life. I was contacted by his daughter and Oscar's former confidante, Jenny Pereda after the first revelations about the "rape" came to light courtesy of a nice Arica lady who was shocked by the whole mess.

Several Arican women knew of this incest, as you read a bit about in in the metaton Rodomontade pages. I was told that most all of the Arica women were forced to have sex with Oscar while their unsuspecting boyfriends/husbands were out in the desert on some exercises. Personally I don't care about his sex life except where coercion, especially "spiritual" coercion. I dealt with the matter
by sending out a series of newsletters, only to Aricans, called TON 6, 7, 8 and possibly 9. metaton is grounded in allegations based almost exclusively on Arica/Oscar written material, with analysis
based on what facts we were able to gather. I sent copies of all of metaton and the TON newsletters to Arica Institute. They have never complained about anything. Many Aricans however "thought" that I made all this [blocked due to guideline #4 violation] up. I don't expect you to believe just because I said it. I think the Rodomontade discussion is as far as it needs to go.

However, I am convinced, based on letters and phone conversations, that the charges would stand up in court. I know where his daughter lives but I don't see any useful purpose in dragging this up again.
I think the metaton material, based on Arica/Oscar quotes is enough
for people to understand the true nature of Humanity's "saviors"

 

[anart]

I know of one thriving 4th way school in West Virginia called Claymont. They follow the Gurdjieff teachings, and are well-versed in the movements and deHartmanns' music.

They also borrow from other traditions - they have a semi-resident Buddhist monk and they host visits from a Turkish Mevlevi Dervish sheikh and his followers. I was privileged to be present one weekend when the Mevlevis came and we performed a Zikur. This was an amazing experience that deeply affected all the people from Toronto who attended.

At Claymont they have also managed to create a largely self-sufficient community with their own farms, fish farm, pottery and crafts workshops as well as the school.

pstott, I think you need to read - in their entirety - the first two posts of this thread.  Laura explains how 'Gurdjieffian schools' now are basically schools of the fakir - which is what you are describing and is not the 4th Way, by Gurdjieff's own definition.

 

[Amir]

The problem with books like the Struggle of the Magicians is that it strains itself on the horizontal. It lists events through time like a calendar and attempts to explain away the situation from the vantage of a one-dimensional perspective. Who knows what is going on in the inner world of a man like Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, or man #5 onwards? There is a vertical dimension to their psychology which cannot simply be investigated by horizontally examining the events of their lives. Did Gurdjieff and Ouspensky really 'break' from each other? Who knows. Was Ouspensky an alcoholic who considered himself a failure? Not by Rodney Collin's account. All of this is moot because what matters is the vertical and, speaking from personal experience, I do not have access to the vertical dimension of these men. I will not be naïve or delusional and try to pretend that I can. The system, as far as my approach and perspective, does not cohere with the C-Transcripts. The latter is of highly suspicious quality relative to the Fourth Way.

The Fourth Way is of elegant design, superior to anything else I know of in the realms of available knowledge. The C-Transripts, in comparison, do not reflect the same quality. They do not cohere in quality.

 

[Laura]

I've been suspcious of Patterson ever since reading "Taking with the Left Hand". He seems to take considerable liberty to make his own interpretations of what others were thinking, particularly Gurdjieff. This is when alarms ring in me, when people believe they are an authority and take it upon themselves to interpret the psychology or inner world of these figures through the knowledge (or rather, information) of them provided in records and accounts of books. It is my understanding that Gurdjieff too has horror stories attributed to him by the accounts of some others, perhaps these stories are less shared for certain Gurdjieffians to maintain their mythology.

What you say has some truth to it. It is particularly problematical for one person to interpret the thoughts of another based on reports of their actions if that person reporting has never found themselves in a similar situation. However, it sometimes becomes a lot easier to figure out what a person may have been thinking based on reports of their actions, if one has a good account of the overall situation, has experienced similar situations themselves, reacted in similar ways, and therefore have an "inside awareness" of what was going on in their own experience that compares to the experience of the other.

I don't think that Patterson can really interpret Gurdjieff's inner world accurately because he hasn't lived Gurdjieff's life and really has no frame of reference with which to interpret Gurdjieff's actions in specific situations.

Nevertheless, having said that, he is a careful researcher and at least makes an effort to present the data.

I asked someone who is somewhat a part of the Ouspensky-line what his opinion of Ouspensky was and he replied that he had never met him. That rings well with me.

Too bad. That is an example of "ignorance endangers." One should become as informed as possible in every way possible, and including networking, in order to form as accurate a mental map as possible. Keeping it open for new data, of course.

But Patterson's book seems to be very useful and factual in presentation; it'll just take some work to verify it all. If we take them (the chronology and description of events) all as is, they seem somewhat..."formatory".
[/quote]

The problem with books like the Struggle of the Magicians is that it strains itself on the horizontal. It lists events through time like a calendar and attempts to explain away the situation from the vantage of a one-dimensional perspective. Who knows what is going on in the inner world of a man like Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, or man #5 onwards?

Many things can be assessed by collecting data, particularly if the individual assessing the matter has had similar experiences. And, if this is done in a network, if one member does not have a particular experience, another may and a more complete picture can be built up.

Of course such a process can never be entirely perfect, but a close approximation can be achieved. And we definitely need approximations otherwise we fall into the PostModernist trap of never being able to think or do anything because we can never interpret anything... Have a look at Ernest Gellner's book "Postmodernism, Reason and Religion" to get an idea of this problem.

There is a vertical dimension to their psychology which cannot simply be investigated by horizontally examining the events of their lives.

See my comments above. Just because we know that we may never be able to perfectly put ourself in another's shoes, that is no reason that we should not make the attempt.

Did Gurdjieff and Ouspensky really 'break' from each other? Who knows. Was Ouspensky an alcoholic who considered himself a failure? Not by Rodney Collin's account. All of this is moot because what matters is the vertical and, speaking from personal experience, I do not have access to the vertical dimension of these men. I will not be naïve or delusional and try to pretend that I can. The system, as far as my approach and perspective, does not cohere with the C-Transcripts. The latter is of highly suspicious quality relative to the Fourth Way.

Many of these things become more transparent when a person has had experiences similar to Gurdjieff's and can "get inside his skin" and also, especially, when one has spent years working with other people and has experienced the many things recounted by Ouspensky and Gurdjieff in their various accounts.

The Fourth Way is of elegant design, superior to anything else I know of in the realms of available knowledge. The C-Transripts, in comparison, do not reflect the same quality. They do not cohere in quality.

Then you are welcome to remain with what you perceive to be the "Fourth Way" and excuse yourself from this forum!

My health, I believe, is compromised by improper breathing. By Essence type (mercurial) I am susceptible to fast and erratic thoughts, emotions, movements, and instinctive impulses. From compulsive talking, poor posture, and off-kilter attitudes poor breathing results. Breathing is connected to the rest of my physiology and therefore poor breathing results in poor functioning of the rest of the system -- poor health.

I am posting here to inquire on the experience of those who frequent these boards. Some of you are no doubt well practiced in yoga and breathing techniques connected with methods of meditation. There is also something else I have come across today which promotes shallow breathing, Buteyko -- this method opposes deep breathing.

Abdominal breathing is certainly crucial. What about deep versus shallow breathing? Artificial breathing will be visible when you are functioning from the mask of false personality. Right breathing should draw and connect us closer to Essence where we have the possibility to remember ourselves.

What do you think?

Links to Buteyko Breathing:
http://www.highbloodpressureinfo.org/buteyko-breathing.html
http://www.pe2000.com/buteyko.htm

Amir

Why would you inquire of anything on this forum when you have posted the following:

The Fourth Way is of elegant design, superior to anything else I know of in the realms of available knowledge. The C-Transripts, in comparison, do not reflect the same quality. They do not cohere in quality.

Obviously, you need to be inquiring of those who are more qualified (in your opinion) to answer your questions.

 

[Amir]

Then you are welcome to remain with what you perceive to be the "Fourth Way" and excuse yourself from this forum!

There are many aspects to the members who participate here and those who follow around your inner and outer circles. I wish to participate with the aspect of them which studies and practices the Fourth Way. I owe you and the community respect and gratitude for opening me to new doors and concepts. It was through you and this community that I became acquainted with the Fourth Way system. I don't believe in the C-Transcripts; I think, feel, and suspect they are an outlet for indulging in every B-Influence imaginable. But that is my perspective. I do not defame or denigrate your character because you believe in things I do not. I respect you and the community and would like to participate in the Work branch of the forum if that is available to me.

Why would you inquire of anything on this forum when you have posted the following:

Obviously, you need to be inquiring of those who are more qualified (in your opinion) to answer your questions.

The situation isn't black and white, Laura. Why position it as such? The being and knowledge of men and women here are likely of all levels. They reach out their hands in so many directions that I'm rather certain I can benefit from their perspectives and experience in all sorts of practical matters.

 

[NormaRegula]

It was through you and this community that I became acquainted with the Fourth Way system. I don't believe in the C-Transcripts; I think, feel, and suspect they are an outlet for indulging in every B-Influence imaginable.

Then why are you here? It looks like your cup is full of your interpretations of the Fourth Way and you want to "teach" Laura and this forum how wrong we are for considering and testing (with data, not feelings) the C's information...even though you posit that you are somewhat grateful that this community introduced you to the Fourth Way system. Guess there's nothing left for you here...other than to preach your interpretations, feelings, and suspicions.

But that is my perspective

Yup. Perhaps you could provide facts and data that prove the C's are an outlet for indulging in every B-Influence imaginable?

I do not defame or denigrate your character because you believe in things I do not.

Believe? Amir, you obviously aren't paying attention. Nor do you show any real understanding of what this forum is about. As for defaming or denigrating anyone's character...your words smack of passive aggressive behavior as in: "Believe what you want...but my feelings, ideas, etc. of what constitutes truth are more correct...from my perspective." One's perspective can be very subjective.

I respect you and the community and would like to participate in the Work branch of the forum if that is available to me.

So you can preach to the misguided and bring them back to your perspective of what constitutes the Fourth Way fold? You have come here with an agenda. This last statement does not respect this forum...or it's founders. How can you show respect by dismissing one of its major focuses- that of considering (not believing!) the C's transcripts via data and facts - by picking and choosing what you want to discuss and/or believe in? Perhaps, you would be more comfortable in another forum devoted only to the Fourth Way...from your perspective.

 

[Amir]

Well put, NormaRegula. The forum's all yours.

 

[PepperFritz]

There are many aspects to the members who participate here and those who follow around your inner and outer circles. I wish to participate with the aspect of them which studies and practices the Fourth Way.

But you have NOT "participated" with members here. Before your posts today, in the more than three years since you joined this forum you have posted a grand total of 4 times. What you really mean to say is that you wish to continue reading the forum and picking and choosing amongst posts and information that happen to agree with your own personal world view. However, you are not willing to "test" that world view by actual interaction members on this board and participation in the method of objective enquiry we endeavour to practice.

I owe you and the community respect and gratitude for opening me to new doors and concepts. It was through you and this community that I became acquainted with the Fourth Way system.

And, clearly, "acquainted with" is the extent of your knowledge of the "Fourth Way system". As Gurdjieff taught, the Work cannot be done in isolation outside of a group network. Anyone who thinks they can and are is merely dreaming that they are doing the Work. Again, you are not willing to "test" whether your understanding and practice of the Fourth Way goes beyond self-delusion, because you are not willing to interact with others on this forum also pursuing the Work. And it appears that you use your "non-belief" in the Cass transcripts as your excuse.

I don't believe in the C-Transcripts; I think, feel, and suspect they are an outlet for indulging in every B-Influence imaginable.

So? No one has asked you to "believe in the C-Transcripts". So why do you feel the need to tell us what you "believe" in this area? Clearly, your self-importance has a need to tell others that they are "wrong".

I respect you and the community and would like to participate in the Work branch of the forum if that is available to me.

If that is the case, why have you not done so during the more than 3 years since you joined this forum? What has changed that you suddenly want to "participate" in this group, at the same time you have the need to tell the group that they are "wrong" for including the C-Transcripts in investigation of objective reality?

The situation isn't black and white, Laura. Why position it as such? The being and knowledge of men and women here are likely of all levels. They reach out their hands in so many directions that I'm rather certain I can benefit from their perspectives and experience in all sorts of practical matters.

Actually, it IS "black-and-white". This is not a forum where you can "pick-and-choose" only those aspectst that "fit" your current belief system. That does not translate to you must "believe" (on faith) all that you read here. But it does mean that your mind must be open to the possibility of new data. You must also be aware that you do not know what you think you know, that you may not be able to see what you think you see. You have to be willing to consider that your beliefs are just that -- beliefs -- and do not necessarily reflect objective reality. You must be prepared to let go of your Sacred Cows, even if one of those sacred cows is your current understanding of the Fourth Way teaching. Most of all, you have to be willing to recognize -- and work against -- your own Self-Importance, which can only impede the Work.

 

[anart]

I don't believe in the C-Transcripts; I think, feel, and suspect they are an outlet for indulging in every B-Influence imaginable.

Did you mean 'A' influence? For someone so taken with the 'Fourth Way', it seems you'd at least have the terminology correct. If you were attempting to insult or degrade the C's input, 'A' influences would have been more correct.

B influences are vectors that are thrown into the field of A influences but these have a conscious source and a consistent direction. B influences do not cancel each other out and systematically recognizing and following these may lead man to the beginning of esoteric work.

A influences are mechanical and random in nature, they seek to keep man occupied with the external world.

And then there are C influences... which, fascinatingly enough, describe the C's:

C influences are only found within the Work and can only be received in personal interaction with a conscious being. Receiving C influences requires a certain level of personal sensitization and receptivity. Failing this, C influences work like B influences.
C influences come from the SOURCE, that is, from an esoteric Center that is located outside of life. When they directly act on someone with a newly developing magnetic center THROUGH a teacher who is directly connected to the source then these influences are called C influences. From this connection the person's magnetic center will grow and will lead them to escape the dominion of the Law of chance and enter into the domain of consciousness.

This particular C influence is data - pure and simple. It is not for 'belief' in any way, shape, or form - as someone who states that he knows about the Fourth Way, that should have been an elementary conclusion.

 

[Laura]

Was Ouspensky an alcoholic who considered himself a failure? Not by Rodney Collin's account.

Now, there's a name that rings a bell.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/264/the_damned_the_strange_death_of_james_webb.html

The Damned: the strange death of James Webb

On the afternoon of 8 May 1980, after two years of a deep, paralysing depression and at least one psychotic episode, a brilliant young Scots historian of ‘the occult’ put the barrel of his shotgun to his head and blew his brains out. He was 34. Gary Lachman investigates the strange death of James Webb.

By Gary Lachman

September 2001

In the 1970s, James Webb made a name for himself with his fascinating, if sceptical, histories of occultism, The Occult Underground (1974, first published in Britain as The Flight from Reason, 1971) and The Occult Establishment (1976). His most recent book, The Harmonious Circle (1980), a critical study of the enigmatic Russian ‘teacher’ Georges Gurdjieff, his disciple PD Ouspensky and their followers, had just been published and Webb’s career was looking good. He was a regular contributor to Encounter as well as to the encyclopædia Man, Myth and Magic, and his performance at Trinity College, Cambridge, was so stellar that a biennial James Webb Memorial Prize is awarded there in his honour.

Webb’s books combine a painstaking research into ‘the occult’ and an ironic dismissal of it, the kind of ‘know-it-all’ rationalism we’d associate with a Cambridge graduate. But at the time of his suicide, Webb had changed his mind about the kinds of experiences he had chalked up to delusion, fantasy and a post-Enlightenment craving for ‘the irrational’. In his last days, Webb was convinced that the nervous breakdown that cast him into suicidal madness had also revealed dimensions of reality that could only be called ‘supernatural’. He found himself “catapulted into a larger universe” filled with altered states of consciousness and profound visions of “cyclical time.”

But the experience was not all ‘revelation’. Webb also showed the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia. His publisher, he claimed, was “persecuting” him. Worse still, he was convinced that a certain group of French Freemasons “had it in for him.” Such remarks suggest Webb’s change of heart about the ‘supernatural’ was nothing more than the pathetic result of his tragic breakdown. Yet the circumstances surrounding his death were unusual and raise the suspicion that the dividing line between madness and ‘occult revelation’ may not be as clear-cut as we suppose.

How and when Webb’s madness began are unclear; even as a schoolboy at Harrow he was considered brilliant but perhaps a little unstable. After his death, his widow – even more sceptical of the supernatural than he – refused to discuss the matter, preferring, perhaps understandably, to forget the tragic business. By all accounts, Mary Webb was a ‘no-nonsense’, practical woman who loved her husband but had little insight into his brilliance, and even less into his obsessions. It’s a fair guess she felt his interest in the occult was responsible for his death. That Webb married a woman with little of his intellectual spirit and whose insensitivity to his experiences may have contributed to his final breakdown is one of the curiously strange things about the affair. It does account, however, for his relationship with another woman, Joyce Collin-Smith. Many an unsympathetic wife has driven her husband into other arms but, in Webb’s case, the attraction of the other woman wasn’t sexual, but psychic.

Webb first encountered Joyce Collin-Smith in 1972. At the National Liberal Club in London, she gave a lecture to the Astrological Association on the life and work of her brother-in-law, Rodney Collin. Webb was interested in Rodney Collin because, as one of the main followers of PD Ouspensky, Collin would feature prominently in Webb’s book on Gurdjieff. Webb had come to the lecture, intending to ask Joyce for an interview about her brother-in-law.

By the time she met Webb, Joyce Collin-Smith had run the gamut of spiritual teachings. In the 1950s she practiced the Gurdjieff ‘work’ with Rodney Collin at his commune in the suburbs of Mexico City. Before this she had been involved with Dr Frank Buchman, founder of Moral Rearmament. She was also a follower of Pak Subuh, the Indonesian mystic and founder of the Subud movement which included JG Bennett among fellow ‘work’ members. And, in the early days of the 1960s, she had been chauffeur and Girl Friday to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, before the Beatles discovered meditation and made the giggling guru a spiritual superstar. A former Fleet Street journalist, novelist and ex-WAAF officer, Joyce was old enough to be Webb’s mother; at the very least, an unusual candidate for spiritual adviser to a brainy 26-year-old who found most of her pursuits pure hogwash.

And yet, at that very first meeting, Joyce knew Webb would play a large role in her life. She also knew he was fated for some strange destiny. As she recalls in her autobiography, Call No Man Master (1988), the minute she saw the tall, red-haired young man enter the auditorium, her “heart leapt.” It was not love at first sight; on the contrary, in Webb Joyce recognised a sinister, terrifying figure from a repeated nightmare of her childhood. In her dream, a tall, red-haired young schoolmaster asked Joyce to fetch something from a forbidding tower. Frightened of entering the tower alone, she nevertheless obeyed. Halfway up, in a desolate, empty room, the schoolmaster, raving mad, charged in and threw himself at Joyce. She woke each night, sweating and terrified. Now more than 40 years later, the ‘mad schoolmaster’ had come to her lecture.

Joyce watched as he took a seat in the last row. She then gave her lecture, speaking, she recalls, almost solely to him. At the end of her talk, as she spoke with some of the audience, Joyce half expected the ‘schoolmaster’ to erupt into maniacal laughter. But when the shy, diffident young man approached and explained that he was writing a book on Gurdjieff and wanted to speak with her about her brother-in-law, Joyce was surprised at his gentle, almost apologetic manner. They developed an immediate rapport. In Joyce’s house, in Sussex, they talked for hours about philosophy, religion, history and about Joyce’s experiences with ‘the occult’. Precognitive dreams, visions, strange states of consciousness while practising ‘transcendental meditation’ and ‘self-remembering’… even communication with the dead. Webb was impressed. A brilliant scholar, his encounters with ‘the occult’ had been strictly ‘arm-chair’; but it’s clear from Joyce’s account that he was also attracted to something else.

Webb’s family was well off. Had he lived, Webb would have inherited a large estate at Blair Drummond, in Perthshire. But relations with his parents soured because of Mary. Class may have had something to do with it, but Webb’s mother and step-father were certain she wasn’t right for him; when the couple did marry, it was against their wishes. Estranged from his parents, finding little in common with Mary, Webb took refuge in his studies. His brilliance threw him far ahead of his contemporaries. Few could keep up with his discoveries; fewer still talk intelligently about them. And now he had met someone who seemed to know all about ‘the occult’ from the inside, someone who also took an immediate liking to him and gave him approval and encouragement. Joyce quickly became a kind of surrogate mother for Webb. He welcomed the ease and naturalness in her household, so different from the tension around his ‘real’ parents. Later Joyce would claim that they had known each other in previous incarnations; this time they had met as a sort of mother and son.

Inevitably, Joyce compared their astrological charts; both were Capricorns with Leo Rising. The points of contact among their stars suggested to Joyce that James could indeed have been her son – had she had one – and the association with the ‘mad schoolmaster’ faded from her consciousness. Their rapport deepened; her affection for the young scholar grew. More and more, Joyce was reminded of her relationship with Rodney Collin – who, as we shall see, also died in mysterious circumstances. As their philosophical conversations continued they began to experience a kind of telepathy; each knew the gist of the other’s thought before a word was spoken. Their rapid exchange developed into a kind of verbal shorthand. Repeatedly, Joyce felt a curious sensation of déjà vu. At one point, during tea on a summer afternoon, Webb asked Joyce for “another piece of cherry cake.” Immediately Joyce was reminded of another childhood dream, this one involving a Tibetan backdrop, a fantasised ‘brother’ and cherries. Increasingly she felt that they were indeed “two beings who had incarnated within reach of each other many times in different roles.”

Several months later her husband’s ill health forced Joyce to sell their Sussex house and they moved to a cottage in the New Forest. Money was scarce; Joyce had to take what work she could find, mostly lecturing and doing horoscopes. Not long after, she got a call from ‘Jamie’; he wanted to double check some material for the Gurdjieff book. He and Mary had married recently and had just returned from a honeymoon in the Orient. Joyce was glad to hear from him, but thought he sounded ‘strange’, “rather low and glum,” unlike his usual cheerful self. Webb wanted to visit, but Joyce put him off – her husband’s health would make things difficult. But she promised to ring him soon about lunching with him in London.

Something in Webb’s call made Joyce check his chart again. She saw the familiar qualities, “fiery, vigorous and tenacious,” so much like her own. But there was something else; Webb’s stars indicated a depressive tendency, an inclination to withdraw deeper into himself as he grew older. She didn’t know it at the time, but Webb had done just that. He had amassed an incredible library and spent more and more time alone, immersed in his research. Friends and literary acquaintances saw less and less of him. His marriage, too, seemed shaky. Webb worked well into the night, often falling asleep at his desk amidst volumes of Jacob Boehme, Raymund Lully and other occult writers. What had been an admirable dedication to work now seemed a full-fledged obsession. Joyce warned Jamie of the dangers but, like any good Faust, he ignored them.

The next time they spoke, Joyce felt certain something had happened. It was then that Webb told her of being ‘persecuted’ by his publishers and raved about the French Freemasons. Ill with flu, Joyce urged him to relax. But Webb’s mental deterioration had begun. He didn’t ring again and, to her later regret, Joyce’s own affairs prevented her from telephoning him. The next time she heard from him, Webb had already plunged into madness. “My life has just emerged from a nightmare,” Webb wrote some time later. “I had a full-scale nervous breakdown, with hallucinations, visions and a fine repertoire of subjectively supernatural experiences. Hoist with my own petard, some would say.” The cool rationalism that called occultism a “flight from reason” seemed helpless before the kinds of experiences he had gone through. “Despite the undoubtedly hallucinatory nature of many of my experiences,” he wrote, “a residue remains which I simply have to take seriously.” He tried to fit what was happening to him into some system, calling on Gnostic notions of ‘æons’ and Hindu accounts of ‘kalpas’. But the visions were too vivid and extraordinary to be neatly filed into some metaphysic. The gist of them had to do with time; the world had become a kind of Heraclitean flux. He had “seen molecules.”

Webb’s letter was postmarked Durisdeer in Dumfrieshire. He and Mary had left London and had moved into an old, renovated kirk. Joyce wrote back immediately. Webb replied at great length; he thought she had rebuffed him in his hour of need. His account of his breakdown was harrowing; he had been in and out of various hospitals, had been in the hands of several psychiatrists, was doped on Largactil and had only just escaped electro-shock therapy. He had given up writing and was just barely keeping his sanity. Joyce berated herself for not responding sooner. She soon made up for this. During the next five months she and Webb exchanged a lengthy and extraordinary correspondence. Two or three times a week several pages of Webb’s increasingly wild account reached her door.

He wrote of “a shattering vision of the wheel of life.” He saw his previous incarnations. He became convinced that there is a “principle of consciousness which is not merely the result of a congerie of experience” – what Ouspensky had called the Linga Sharira, the ‘long body’ that extends through countless lives. But the worst was that there seemed to be no stability. Things would not ‘stand still’. No sooner did he look at something than he saw its entire history, its present, past and future. An oak was an acorn, then a rotting mass of mulch. Although he believed there was a “way out”, Webb shrank from the knowledge that we are all “imprisoned in the coils of cyclical time.”

Finally, Joyce could offer something more than sympathy. She was familiar with these visions. During her time with the Maharishi, she had experienced the same phenomena, the result of too much ‘transcendental meditation’. It had brought her to the brink of suicide. She suggested exercises to keep his mind focused in time. These helped for a while but, increasingly, Webb’s thoughts turned to death. He wrote to Joyce that “Rodney Collin was quite right about the importance of dying properly.” He also said he had “revised my opinion about the manner of Ouspensky’s death.” Strange deaths were indeed quite common among professors of Gurdjieff’s ‘work’. When Gurdjieff died in 1949, the doctor performing the autopsy declared his internal organs were in such bad condition that he should have been dead years ago; Gurdjieff had apparently ‘willed’ himself to stay alive. Ouspensky’s death was even stranger. He was obsessed with time; his particular fascination was ‘eternal recurrence’ the notion that, with slight variations, our lives repeat, over and over. The only possibility of ‘escape’ is in becoming more conscious. In his last days, a sick and dying Ouspensky visited various favourite sites, fixing them in his mind, in order to ‘remember’ them in his next recurrence. Weird psychic phenomena occurred; in his efforts to “die consciously,” witnesses report that Ouspensky had become telepathic.

And when, on 2 October 1947, Ouspensky passed away, Rodney Collin, his closest disciple, locked himself in the room next to his master’s and did not emerge until a week later. He told his wife – and Joyce – that he had been in ‘communication’ with Ouspensky the entire time. Nearly 10 years later, on 3 May 1956, Collin himself would die after falling from a tower in Cusco, Peru. He was found in a position curiously resembling the crucified Christ; earlier he had prayed that a crippled peasant boy be cured and told his wife that he had offered God his own body in exchange. There is some suspicion that he too had attempted to ‘die consciously’. Webb had written sceptically about the events around Ouspensky’s and Collin’s deaths. Now he had reason to change his mind.

Joyce considered the possibility that Jamie was going through some kind of self-inflicted initiatory process. She knew their conversations had opened him to the ‘reality’ of ‘the occult’. His armour of sceptical rationality had cracked; in his letters he spoke of curious precognitive dreams and of a kind of ‘gnostic’ personal myth. He had long fantasised that he was a member of a crew whose space ship had crashed on an alien planet. Enslaved by the natives, they soon forget their past. But occasionally a dim memory stirs, the crew members recognise each other, and they recall their mission. “The tragedy,” he told Joyce, “is infinitely far distant, the adventure infinitely long. And we are ageless, ageless.

Had Webb been allowed to explore these intuitions, it’s possible he may have survived. But after several months of having him around the house, Mary forced him to take a job. They didn’t need the money; understandably, Mary felt some kind of work might give Webb some ballast. But she really had no insight into his plight and little patience for his talk about his ‘soul’, later telling Joyce she considered all that sort of thing “rubbish.” A copywriting job for an Edinburgh advertising agency was not quite what Webb needed. The uncongenial atmosphere had the opposite effect, throwing him deeper into alienation. His letters to Joyce became wilder. He was researching a book about esoteric movements in Scotland, but couldn’t “get the pattern of it anymore.” More and more, he believed, someone was after him because he knew too much.

Finally, Joyce decided she had to see him. By this time their telepathic link had increased. She had visions of him at his desk in the kirk and could feel a pain in the back of his neck, a vulnerable spot he shared both with herself and Rodney Collin. She could hear him crying at night, and in her mind reached out to comfort him. Although she had never been there, she had images of the grounds around the house; later, after Webb’s death, she saw these had been accurate. In a few weeks, she and her husband would go to Scotland for their holiday. She decided, then, to see Jamie.

It was too late. On the afternoon before their trip, Joyce heard Webb’s voice calling her name. “I’m coming,” she replied mentally. Then something like an enormous explosion went off in her head. At once she told her husband: “Something is wrong with Jamie.” He said it was her imagination. Incredibly, Joyce didn’t telephone. When they arrived at their holiday cottage there was a message to ring Mary. At three o’clock the previous day, Webb had shot himself. Joyce later discovered the immediate cause was a domestic quarrel. Visiting Webb’s parents, Joyce discovered the full extent of his madness. One night, he crouched before the fire at their estate, repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over, and muttering repeatedly “What is it all about?” On another occasion, he ran out into the winter night in a state of hysteria. He waded waist-deep across a river to reach Dunblane Cathedral 12 miles away, where he banged furiously on the door. Oblivious to those around him, for a few weeks the ‘mad schoolmaster’ was certifiably insane.

Inevitably, Joyce blamed herself for not seeing him sooner. Jamie had plunged into a dark night of the soul and she wasn’t there for him. Her sense of guilt then may account for what followed. She began to feel Webb’s presence. First he asked her to visit his mother. Then he wanted her to carry on his work. Two visits to a medium convinced her that some part of Jamie had survived. Material emerged unknown to her that later proved unsettlingly accurate. The voice told her that he “would come to her,” asking that she get his books from Mary, who “doesn’t understand them.” “Make a replica of me,” it said. At first Joyce was thankful for these messages. But then she felt there was something “not right” about them. This was not the ‘whole’ Jamie, merely bits and pieces of him. As in the film The Sixth Sense, Jamie, or some part of him, didn’t know he was dead and wouldn’t ‘move on’. Joyce began to feel she was being “taken over.” Eventually, a clergyman friend of spiritualist persuasion offered to say a requiem to help Webb relinquish his attachment to the world. Satisfied that the rite would not interfere with them ‘finding’ each other in the next incarnation, Joyce agreed. As they read the prayers in the candle-lit chapel, she felt something lift up from her consciousness and take flight. Jamie had ‘moved on’.

There was one other curious phenomenon. During her first wave of grief, Joyce found herself crying aloud: “Why didn’t you help him?”. In the depths of her anguish she heard a voice that said “I did.” At the same time she saw a face, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a deep, penetrating gaze. She thought it might have been the esoteric teacher Rudolf Steiner. At the time of his suicide, Webb had been commissioned to write a book about Steiner – a task which later went to Colin Wilson. Wilson remarked that if Webb’s earlier books were anything to go by, his book on Steiner would surely have been sceptical. Considering Webb’s strange and tragic death, had he survived, I wonder if Wilson would have been right.