Real People: At the Pinnacle with Irmis Popoff and the Second Basic Course at Sherborne House with J.G. Bennett: A Memoir

In today's world of political and climate instability, Real People tells the story of a unique school designed not only to prepare students for the future but to help them become "real human beings."

John G. Bennett spent fifty years studying the spiritual teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and others. At seventy, he followed an inner directive to "start a school." Few of Bennett's students have chronicled the esoteric experience of his ten-month Basic Courses at Sherborne House in the bucolic Cotswolds area of England. Roberta J. Chromey has done this through telling the story of her young self, Bobby Jo.

Real People follows Bobby Jo from college in New Jersey to her first teacher in the Gurdjieff Work, then on to J. G. Bennett's school in England in the early 1970s. In the ancient halls and dorms, paneled dining room, Great Hall, basement kitchen, and Horse Parlor of Sherborne House magical events happen. Bennett gives talks and Themes that inspire surprising outcomes, such as an examination of one's relationship to material objects culminating in empathy with a potato and a dance with a mop.

The course is its own journey, from learning to cook and clean for one hundred fellow travelers, to experiencing the discipline and mystery of Gurdjieff's dances, to finding communion with a pony. Meditative exercises and practices of silence and awareness open doors to external and internal realms. Senior staff are fully drawn characters. Visiting teachers play major roles at crucial junctures, fellow students provide background. The course comes alive in a living crucible that melts young Bobby Jo and forms in her a new understanding.