All This -- & Heaven Too?

Helena Edwards has lived a long life of adventure. Sometimes this has involved travel, usually alone and off the beaten track, in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Morocco, for example, dealing with unusual circumstances as the arose. At others the adventure has involved apparently everyday work, among extraordinary people, where the challenge was to the basic notion of what is real and what is not. We find Helena frozen in mid movement during a ''Stop Exercise'' at J.G. Bennett''s Coombe Springs, dangling from the end of a rope in the Swiss Alps, intuiting what sort of idiot she was in Gurdjieff''s flat in Paris, and teaching Gurdjieff''s Movements herself. We see her crossing central Turkey in blazing heat on a search, hearing difficult truths from the Indonesian teacher Pak Subuh, accepting the hospitality of a stranger at an oasis, entrained with a Soviet propagandist, and experiencing the Sufi way of teaching at first hand. All This - and Heaven Too? recalls some of the twentieth century''s more remarkable teachers. Much has been written about G I Gurdjieff, J G Bennett and Idries Shah. Few met all three, let alone worked closely with two of them. Helena Edwards provides valuable insights into their methods, and into Fourth Way and Sufi work in general. Helena has produced, with modesty, a self-portrait of someone who is herself a remarkable women.