FEITIS: How did you happen to meet John Bennett?

ROLF: Well, in the late 1950’s, a client of mine from California -Robinson was his name – said, “Do you know anything about Subuh” And I said, “No, but I know where I could find out about it if you really want to know.” And he said,Well, I’m willing to promote its coming out here it I think it’s any Rood.” So I wrote to a man in Marroco to find out about Pak Subuh. The man’s answer was characteristic. He said that if Americans could spend millions of dollars on defense, they could jolly well spend a few dollars on getting Pak Subuh to California if they want lo know about him. So I passed this on to Mr. Robinson and .Sir, Robinson said. On well, life’s a gamble any wav,” and he contacted the Subuh forces. The John the Baptist (so to speak) of the Subuh forces was John Bennett, and he came to see me in California.

FEITIS: Who was the man in Morocco?

ROLF: Michael Scott. I’ve thought of him so many times recently. I can see the pit tore of him, an Englishman with a derby hat and a rolled umbrella for a cane, and dark suit. Like many cultured Englishmen, he was very well-aware of h store and historical movements. He would eke such a thing as plan a vacation for himself following the old pilgrim route across Southern England. He would walk this route trying to reconstruct in his mind how it was in the time of Chaucer?s pilgrims. He was a rare and an unusual man, but not as rare in England as he would have been in the States.

FEITIS: How did you meet him? Just through the English group?

ROLF: I suppose he just carne to me, the way so many did. Anyway, he had a Winter home down in Morocco lie was interested in getting Pak Subuh there because there was a lot of revolutionary activity going on at that time and he thought that the mere influence of Pak Subuh would tend to strengthen the conservatives. I don’t know it did or not.

FEITIS: What was Pak Subuh like?

ROLF: What was he like? That’s a hard question. In the first place, he was an Asian, an Indonesian. He was a man who had been a clerk in the Indonesian regime. I don’t know that I remember at what point he thought lie had gotten revelations concerning a method for saving the world, but at any rate, he was quite sure he had one (like so many Oriental teachers). His method consisted in a technique for increasing the dominance of the unconscious.

FEITIS: Those are the people who have the latihans?

ROLF: That’s right. Ibu, Pak Subuh’s wife (lbu means mother) was in very poor. Shape and John Bennett and various other people kept saying that if they could get now on the job I probably could do something. I tried, when I saw Pak Suhuh, to get from him a commitment as to whether he understood the relative significance of Rolfing to the kind of think that he was trying to evoke. But I never could get any statement from him. I think he never understood Rolfing.

FEITIS: He spoke English?

ROLF: Yes, but when he spoke on the platform, he spoke Indonesian. John Bennett translated for him, and Bennett was a whiz with languages. The minute each sentence was out of Pak Subuh’s mouth, Bennett was projecting it, the trouble being that Mr. B (as he was called) was a very erudite, philosophical man, and Pak Subuh wasn’t really, so what one got out of it was a very erudite Pak Subuh.

FEITIS: What was your impression of Bennett?

ROLF: Oh, John Bennett was a marvellous man. I was very, very fond of Mr. B. I worked with him and through his group for a longtime. Bennett had been one of the three prominent leaders of the Gurfjieff movement in London. He had built a most magnificent building that was done by hand by the members of his group. II was called – well, when Pak Subuh came on the scene, it was called the “Jami” chanatra -a contraction of an Indian name which I can’t spell. It was built by that Gurdjieff group, which included architects, experts in carpentry. and so forth. This building was an eight-sided figure. It was built on the magnificent grounds of the house at Coombe Springs, which had originally been bought with money raised within the Gurdjieff group, and was the center for Bennett’s Gurdjieff teaching. There were two other Gurdjieff teachers in London, one of them being Ouspensky (by this time. though, I think Oucpensky was probably in the States), and the other Maurice Nicoll. These three men had different understandings and emphasized different aspects of Gurdjielfs work, but it’s all Gurdjieffs work. Gurdjieff had told his students that he was not the ultimate teacher, that one would come who was greater than he. From the East. And when Subuh appeared, John Bennett remembered this. So Bennetl in all good faith, transferred his allegiance from Gurdjieff to Pak Subuh, taking most of his Gurdjieff group with him – not all. As a result, Pak Subuh then came into something already established, all set up in England, at Coombe Springs. actually an early precursor of the “human potential’ movement. There was all kinds of housing available there, none of it elaborate, the kind of place. That you’d find as a school for human potential. And Pak Subuh and Ibu and their daughter and one or two other Indonesians that were with them, all moved down to Coombe Springs and were there the whole of one summer. latihan went on day after day, night after night. And from that group, Bennett picked many people that were in need of just the kind of physical help that Rolfing could give them. John Bennett understood what Rolfing was about, one of the very few in the early days who glimpsed what it was about and the value of its goals.

FEITIS: Was Bennett working at that time with Systematics, or did that come later?

ROLF: No, that developed later. That developed as he began to phase out of Subuh and arrive at the recognition that Subuh deliberately by passed intellectual understanding as well as intellectual achievement. There was, once upon a time in the history of the United States, a party whose slogan was that they knew nothing – the Know Nothing party. Subuh got more and more “know nothing” -you needed nothing except the latihan said the party line. And by and by, John Bennett and I, both of whom were really intellectuals basically, and not “know nothings,” got fed upon this. Because we knew it wasn’t so. And a little and a little, we walked away from the party line, and John Bennett developed Systematics, and spread the word of it through the magazine, also called Systematics. The magazine developed as the voice of his thinking. He asked me whether I would like to have an article in the first issue, so I sent one to him. Bennett was at that time in the Orient somewhere, and had left the publishing of systematics in the hands of a young American who chose this particular moment to have a schizophrenic breakdown. This young man got hold of my article and edited it in accordance with his ideas, When I came back (the dawn thing was published by this time), he had taken sentences and turned them completely around. I was ready to scream, as I have been many times before and many times since. There are still copies of that early edition around.

FEITIS: Was that the first time you used the idea about gravity?

ROLF: Could’ve been, I don’t remember. You see. I always had the idea of the blocks, because this is what I saw. And by the time you get those blocks sitting one on top of the other, you’ve got the concept of gravity it’s the only way you can handle the concept of those blocks. So that it wasn’t that I went from the concept of gravity to the concept of the body. It has always been, in Structural Integration , that I looked at the body and followed along with what the holy told me. This has been with respect to very small things and very large things. Only, you see, I didn’t put as much verbal emphasis on gravity in those days as we do now.

To be continued in a future issue.An Interview with Ida P. Rolf – Part II