John Bainbridge - TOROTE, UK
In September last year John
Bainbridge contacted me and said he needed a host for his new site. I was
delighted to hear from a man who had been starting to study Gurdjieff's ideas at
about the same time as I had. We had an intensive period of web development from
September until Christmas 2002 with John asking how to do things and me learning
all about it and trying to answer his enquiries.
You can access TOROTE's
homepage from here.
GIG: I have made a principal decision to start all interviews
with a standard question about lineage. When you were, as it is said, 'in the
Work', who was your teacher?
John: Ah, "lineage"... I first
contacted the Work, or vice versa, in 1972, and attended groups 'led' by someone
who had himself attended groups with Dr. Maurice Nicoll.
GIG:
Could you describe what brought you to the Work, what you got out of it and what
made you go away?
John: That's really three separate questions;
lets take it one at a time. What initially brought me to the Work was a
dis-satisfaction with conventional answers to some questions that I considered
pretty basic to my psychological make-up and understanding; as a late teenager,
I'd had some experiences that I could only describe at the time as being
'psychic'. Enquiries of adults met with a variety of responses, from amused
tolerance at the follies and intensity of youth, to obvious antipathy. My
recourse was to search in literature, looking at mysticism, Eastern
philosophies, psychic phenomena, that sort of thing. Eventually, after some
seven or eight years, I reached Ouspensky's
writings - "In Search...", "Tertium Organum", "New Model", "Strange Life",
"PoMPE"*,"Talks with a Devil" and the "Fourth Way" - long before that phrase
became a political slogan - and really had the feeling that I was closing in on
something. By that time I was 25, and, coincidentally it seemed, a friend of my
flatmate had just had a meeting with a Work group-leader, and although not
taking it further himself, he passed on the name and address. The rest, as we
might say, is "personal history".
As to what I got out of it... well,
that requires a continual re-assessment. I think there's a lot of truth in the
saying that "anyone who's met the 'Work' for as little as three months, is never
the same again". In the short term, just after meeting the Work, there was an
immediate sense of "Wow! Other people are interested in these same areas of
experience and self-transformation". Relief. Hope. A sense of direction. And a
philosophical - and practical - handle on understanding the inconsistencies in
the worlds around me. Plus an irritation at "Beelzebub" at the first reading! In
the longer term, a real belief that the area of self-transformation is the only
game in town - and the "handle" definitely needs a light but two-handed grip in
modern times! Beelzebub et al. opened up to reveal some extra-ordinary depths.
And heights.
And what made me go away? hmm... The phrase "go away"
doesn't really describe the process - I receded from it, or it from me. It was
never a decision "I'm going to quit", more a divergence of the ways after some
20 years or so. There were several contributory 'reasons' that immediately
spring to mind - "Round up the usual suspects"; first, I have what might be
termed an impatience with the over-stolid quality of self-serving organisations,
and a somewhat 'out of the box' reaction to it! Inevitably, this meant that I
was trusted less than 150%, and "nothing real is ever given to those we don't
trust." Fair enough - but a lot of good folk were lost to the Work for similar
reasons... a second reason was that although I was OK with the first two lines
of the Work, I failed pretty miserably at the third... a third reason - if you
ask three times and are denied.... a fourth, an 'itch' that scratching
at/practising the Work didn't alleviate… fifth, the different speeds of internal
processes between the generations...
The reasons don't really matter,
whether they were as I perceived or - statistically more likely -
not.
GIG: When did you have your first transpersonal experiences
and what were they?
John: As I said before, as a teenager I had
some experiences that couldn't be explained by science, philosophy, logic or any
other method I knew of. These experiences were to do with 'Time' - it's
structure and its visibility. I went through a time of prescient dreams that
turned the way I looked at things base-over-apex, and simultaneously made the
normal concerns of the world far less important, a sort of repeating stage show.
What I had pre-viewed in dreams happened later in real life, and couldn't or
wouldn't be changed. J W Dunne**, Ouspensky, and later Rodney Collin, gave me some sort of
understanding as to what was, or is, going on. In late teens, there was also one
moment, or flash, of what I can only term "absolute understanding" - anyone who
has experienced such a moment will know that all we come away with is the fading
trails and tatters of the insight - it's all that the everyday ordinary mind can
retain. I'm not talking about "the dewdrop slipping into the shining sea", or
"into cosmic consciousness" - something much more personal, individualised, and
specific. Bit like being struck by lightning, I imagine - left shocked, stunned
and wondering what on earth happened! Perhaps even wanting to play with fire
afterwards.
GIG: I have only once had a vivid pre-cognitive dream,
which involved a person in the Work. The dream was about my beard and I wonder
what is it that made me dream of such a trivial thing that had no bearing on the
world situation or for anything else either. Did your dreams have more
meaningful content?
John: No - the precog. dreams didn't, but the
symbolic dreams did, but that's another story. For me, the precog. dreams seem
to show almost a random moment, as a by-product of some other process. I say
'almost' because they were always associated in linear time with quite an
intense emotional experience two or three weeks previous to the dream - the
interval between dream and 'reality' wasn't so predictable. The 'meaningful
content' for me is that they happen at all, as they fly in the face of the
conventional way of understanding things.
GIG: Tell me about the
idea of your web site! It looks like you are doing a similar thing than I am
trying to do with the editing of GIG. I mean in the sense that you are doing
something special about what has interested you for a long time. What are you
hoping to accomplish?
John: Yes, I'm very interested in
'consciousness studies' and the 'energies' involved in internal experiences;
when I went looking for on-line descriptions of experiences, I was frustrated by
the fact that there was very little available. To my knowledge, there's at least
eleven thousand contributed accounts of transpersonal experiences held in
various databases, but for one reason or another, they're not available - there
isn't open access. To me, this seems upside-down and
self-contradictory; there's sufficient interest in the area to provoke research,
but keeping it 'in house' is self-limiting - literally - and discourages further
growth of interest in the subject.
What I'm hoping, personally, to "get
out of it" is an increased understanding of what's going on! What I hope more
generally to accomplish, is to help bring the whole subject more into the open,
and to contribute to whatever paradigm replaces the 'scientism' that must surely
be coming to the end of its useful term; hopefully a new way of looking at
ourselves and the world where everything is 'in process' - an outlook on life as
a verb, not as a noun!
Wouldn't it be marvellous if the self was a
"growth area"?
Einstein was right when he said, "Our technology has
exceeded our humanity" - to my mind, it's time for the pendulum to swing the
other way, for us to see ourselves not in isolation, ego-centrally, but as part
of something much bigger, more interrelated, parts of a whole. Life and spirit
as part of a spectrum…
I can’t say to what degree these intentions
coincides with the aims of GIG. What do you think?
GIG: My aim is
connected with the high ideal of the third line of work, but it is interesting
how the first and second line keep popping up all the time. I've got plenty of
contacts - it is amazing that this month alone the site has been visited by
people from 59 different countries. I hope the internet will work for
you.
Is there a special group of transpersonal experiences that you are
particularly interested in?
John: The perception of "time" is an
interesting question, but it's only a part of a whole. The word "special" in
your question, for me, implies self-transformation and self-growth. So, an
experience that shows something moving - or being moved - from sensitivity and
awareness, into consciousness...? Maybe anything experienced personally that is
'beyond' the intellect... it's not easy to classify such experiences into
groups, and it may well be fruitless to do so as it reinforces the intellectual,
formatory approach.
GIG: Surely people who visit GIG have
something to offer you in the 'beyond the intellect' area.
John:
Of course! People looking for the kind of web-content that GIG offers are, by
definition, looking for something out of the ordinairy, be it from the point of
view of curiosity or something much, much deeper. Let's not knock the intellect
- it's got us this far! But... why stop there? - within us there's the
physical/instinctive, the emotional, the intellectual, and so much more. It's
the 'so much more' that really needs stronger valuation and exploration - it's
contained in our everyday experience, but sort of at "right-angles" to it. It's
examples from this area that I hope will be contributed to TOROTE.
To my
way of thinking, it seems to be part of the human condition - 'pathology' might
be a better word - to put itself at the centre of the universe, and, so far, we
haven't really learned to use the gifts we've been given, nor even to appreciate
them. Why do we have them? What's their function? How do they fit in with
everything else? What are they telling us? ... and what prevents us from hearing
it?
What on earth are we here for, and what is necessary - obligatory in
an essential sense - for us to be able to complete ourselves?
Yes, it's
most definitely "the only game in
town."
* Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution
**An Experiment With Time" -
latest reprint: Hampton Roads Pub Co; March 2001