Adam Bobbette’s The Spirituality of Coal contemplates the influence of carbon-based industrialisation on the modern sense of self. The writer invokes the life story of John G. Bennett, a British scientist, industrial research director, and coal miner who, in the mid-twentieth century, developed a theory locating energy in the human self, that, if tapped into and released, might allow the mind to evolve, just as unleashing fossil fuel energy allowed society to progress. Highlighting how Bennett’s thinking evidences a relationship between fossil-fuel systems and the mind, Bobbette asks: how will our contemporary transition towards post-carbon societies reconfigure the self?

The notion that coal is the remains of ancient forests was agreed on by most geologists only as recently as the late nineteenth century. The idea that the fuel of industrialisation—and therefore, modern civilization—was literally fuelled by ancient dead organisms, and that the earth was ‘banded’ with ‘seams’ of its fossilised past suggested that progress was driven by the combustion of history itself. It also implied that geologists and industrialists had tremendous power in creating the grand narrative of historical progress. Somewhere in their collusions—between geologists, industrialists, and the sticky black matter of coal—they even transformed ideas that belonged to the spheres of religion and cosmology: They changed how people understood themselves in relation to their world and universe.

For most of us reading this, fossil fuel powered industrialisation created the world we inhabit. It only makes sense, then, that those very fossil fuels sedimented their way into our deepest recesses. They may even occupy the most unexpected regions. As ideas of energy transitions loom, and in many parts of the world, people are looking for escape routes from carbon culture, a small contribution to that effort might be to help trace just how deeply fossil fuels have reached into us. This is what this essay is about.

My hunch is that we have fossil fuel selves. And those selves may be difficult to recognise. I see these selves in our contemporary notions of ‘self-care,’ and of an ever-perfectible self that is at once a social construction and an internally self-produced actuality; in our language of energies and our implicit belief in progress. Scholars in the humanities are now overly familiar with critiques of extractivism and the way that carbon modernity transformed nature (and humans) into resources and commodities. I’m not interested in repeating these predictable claims. Instead, I’m compelled to hone in on the convergence between spiritual practices and coal, the zone where the self encountered the properties of fossil fuels. Instead of extractivism as a lens to understand modernity, this essay conjures the spirit of Weber. Whereas Weber sought to comprehend how Christian spiritual practices shaped capitalism, I am interested instead in how coal—and fossil fuels more generally—created a modern, spiritual, sense of self.

To think through these issues, I want the assistance of an unlikely character—John G. Bennett. A white British spiritual leader and coal miner, Bennett completed his most important work between the First World War and the 1970s. He is interesting because he was an intermediary between the worlds of coal extraction and science, industrial development, and European spiritual movements, right in the middle of a supposedly secularising society. Rather than a Europe becoming alienated and disenchanted with spirituality, the twentieth century Europe that Bennett inhabited was flourishing with spiritual practices. This explosion of new and reformed old religions also coincided with a historically unprecedented acceleration of fossil fuel usage. Bennett’s work brought these two realities together. His intellectual life was driven—even if unconsciously—around spiritualising coal and coalifying spirit.

Beginning in the 1930s, Bennett began to articulate a grand theory of energy. According to him, energy was the primary ontological stuff of the universe. Everything was energy, made up in gradations and different forms, from the lowest (stones and minerals) to the highest (spirit). In the four volumes of his Dramatic Universe, Bennett described, in often incomprehensible prose and wild conjecture, his energetic cosmology. His fascination with energy as the basis of all being and eternity was rooted in his work prospecting for coal during the First World War. While stationed in Istanbul as an intelligence officer, he also pursued commercial interests, opening coal mines in western Turkey near the Dardanelles, and later, in northern Greece, near the small town of Vevi. In 1938, he became director of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, a world-leading laboratory researching the industrial uses of coal. B.C.U.R.A, as the organisation was known, sought to apply modern science to the exploitation of coal for the British economy. The scientists and engineers who worked there explored how coal could be used more efficiently in domestic and industrial circumstances: they tried to invent new ways to cook with it, heat houses, draw gas from it, and transport it. One of the results of their work was the design of new enclosed fireplaces that became ubiquitous features of the post-war British living room.

Bennett’s theories of energy were also influenced by the intellectual milieu in Istanbul in the 1930s and Britain in the 1940s. During the First World War, he lived in Istanbul with his partner Winifred Beaumont, a Fabian socialist from London, where they came into contact with the cosmopolitan world of exiles and refugees from the war and Russian revolution. The couple became close with exiles Pyotr Ouspensky and George Gurdjieff, who fled the Bolshevik revolution and were living as bohemian ascetics and fledgling gurus in Istanbul. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff claimed to be descendants of ancient Sufi Islamic traditions and to have access to its secret societies. Gurdjieff, in particular, claimed to have spent formative years wandering as a monk in the foothills of the Gobi Desert around Kashgar and today’s Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (the former Russian empire), learning from local mystics. Such claims to have special access to esoterica were not unusual; they were, after all, central to other spiritual movements, including Theosophy and its offshoot, Anthroposophy, which was influential at the time. The matriarch of the Theosophy movement, Helena P. Blavatsky (which was popular in Istanbul but also a highly cosmopolitan movement), claimed in her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, from the 1890s, that her expansive narrative of human origins and cosmogony was based on ancient secret texts.⁠1 Access to the “sacred records of the east”, as Theosophists called them, was crucial to their strategy of looking to traditions beyond the West as a way to criticise what they saw as the alienation of modern Western, industrial, rational, warring civilisation.

What also influenced Bennett’s circle was the idea that industrial civilisation had evolved but “the mind” had not. They thought that their generation had lived through enormous transformations brought about by the exploitation of fossil fuels. And they were enduring the atrocities and unprecedented industrial mobilization of global war machines. But this hyper-speed fossil-fuelled intensification did not result in an evolution of consciousness. “Man is only a half developed being”, Bennett wrote. As Gurdjieff liked to frame it, “man is asleep”; the purpose of spiritual work was to “wake up”. Their target, ultimately, was consciousness, to raise it, open it, so that it would evolve to some yet unknown next stage, to create the next “man”.⁠2

If this sounds vague, that is because it was. We should not turn to Bennett, Beaumont, Gurdjieff, and Ouspensky for a coherent analysis of industrial society and psychic alienation. They fused theory (and a lot of it—Bennett wrote nearly twenty books in addition to his massive volumes of the Dramatic Universe) with much practice. Meditation, experimental choreographed dance, singing, fasting, agricultural labour, transpersonal therapy, mantras, and experimental architecture, were all trialled over nearly a half-century of work that influenced some of the most important intellectuals and celebrities of the second half of the twentieth century. One of the ways to approach their analysis of industrial society, I think, is not as a coherent theory, but in terms of how it created a space where the overlaps between carbon-based industrialisation and the self became visible. Bennett made these connections particularly stark. At the very moment that he was maximizing the industrial potential of coal for the advancement of the national economy, he was also speculating about the energetic potentials in “man” that could enable him to “wake up”. Unleashing the energy locked up in coal enabled society to advance; unlocking the energy locked up in the mind would enable humans to evolve, too.

The two visions, it seems to me, enabled each other. His view of coal as an energetic substance became a model for how to think of the spiritual self. The work that he undertook, as Theodore Roszak has shown, contributed to the popularization of therapy among those who would have been conventionally understood to be healthy. It is well known that psychoanalysis made therapy fashionable, but Bennett contributed to this from another angle: working on the self through group meditation, the human potentials movement, avant-garde improvisatory group dance, and New Age practices of self-care, were all experimented with, sometimes for the first time, at Bennett’s property in Coombe Springs, southwest of London. I’ll flesh this out in some more detail by turning to what might seem to be a tangential path toward Java, but it is, in fact, at the very centre of contemporary conceptions of self and energy.

Bennett resigned from the British Coal Utilisation Research Association in 1945 and bought the compound on which it operated at Coombe Springs. It was an old estate with a Victorian mansion that had housed the laboratories. Bennett transformed it into the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, which became a hub for transnational visitors interested in exciting spiritual practices and “awakening” themselves.

One such visitor was Raymond van Sommers, a petroleum engineer from working-class Melbourne of Dutch-Anglo ancestry. He had been prospecting in Papua New Guinea in the late 1940s for the Australasian Petroleum Company when he began to read Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. He learned about Bennett’s work at Coombe Springs, left his job, and arrived in England in 1955. As he put it, “Ouspensky’s ideas not only momentarily awakened me but also posed the fundamental question of the very purpose of my existence and of human existence in general.”⁠3 Part of his work at Coombe Springs was to apply his engineering skills to building the estate, including an octagonal dome, the Djamichunatra, used for choreographed sacred dances and meditation. Frank Lloyd Wright visited the Djamichunatra in 1957 and was impressed by its structure and purpose.⁠4 In the same year, Bennett introduced Sommers to a new guest at Coombe Springs, a Javanese man named Subuh. Bennett had become interested in Subuh’s movement called Subud and its meditation practice called latihan (literally practice in Indonesian) and invited him to Coombe Springs. Bennett became Subuh’s introduction to Europe and quickly introduced British and European celebrities and intellectuals to his ideas and the latihan, which were held daily in the Djamichunatra.

The latihan was often described as a form of “opening”, and people who had conducted it described themselves as “opened.” It looked like other forms of mystical meditation and sometimes resulted in possession. It would take place in a dark, quiet room. People would lie down and wait for “contact”. Sometimes this would result in crying, screaming, convulsing, or not. It was often in a group, and it was the regular, central practice of Subud. The British film star Eva Bartok claimed to have been cured of her illness by it. I have counted at least two references to suicides after a latihan. Sommers felt that Subud and the latihan could help him find a meaningful life in which he was “awake” to himself. As he put it,

“Every latihan I wondered at my good fortune. In the Djami, and later in the large wooden hut, at various times I ran or shook, I wept or laughed, I shouted or sang, I felt my breathing change and stop, I prayed and felt deep silence. Outside I was occasionally touched by blissful joy. I remember sitting in the sun in the rose garden marvelling at everything around me, too beautiful to be expressed in words. The overall effect was inner peace and certainty about the latihan.”⁠5

So he followed Subuh back to Indonesia in 1960 and remained with him for nearly three decades. At the outset, in Jakarta, Sommers threw himself into expanding the Subud organisation and designed the house for Subuh and the Subud International Centre at Cilandak, south Jakarta. They also established an engineering and architecture firm to create revenue for the organisation. At this stage, Subud and the daily practice of the latihan were the spiritual infrastructure of an expansive corporate enterprise. By the late 1960s, their engineering and architecture firm International Design Consultants was constructing factories in Jakarta and using their international connections to attract foreign investments. They designed the Jakarta International School and later engineered the S. Widjojo Building, a modernist tower block in Jakarta. In 1970, the firm designed a large pavilion for the Fourth Subud World Congress, where more than two thousand attendees arrived from nearly fifty countries. The congress was opened by the president and savage autocrat, Suharto, who gave a rosy picture of a humanity united in love and progress. He also took pains to insist that Subud was not a cult. In 1982, the Subud firm completed the urban design plan for central Sydney’s derelict industrial Darling Harbour. The original plan included a massive Subud temple and space for the latihan, later axed by the New South Wales government. However, the rest of their design was implemented.

While the organization expanded its international reach, Sommers and others in the circle close to Subuh insisted on the fundamentally rewarding nature of their work. The latihan enabled them to undertake an industrial enterprise that, in all respects, looked like any other corporation. The difference was that they were fuelled by the latihan. Every day they would leave the drawing boards, re-unite, and lay together in the dark to be “opened”. It was a new spirit of capitalism that pre-figured contemporary corporate culture’s fascination with ‘wellness’. The centre of gravity for the latihan was the interior self, which in turn connected to the infinite. “Practicing” the latihan was a kind of ritual recharge, re-filling the labour depleted self with the plenitude of universal energy.

Subuh even established a bank, Bank Susila Bakti, so that they could fund their expansion; its offices were in the S. Widjojo Building in Jakarta. The bank was later incorporated into Bank Syariah Mandiri, one of the country’s largest. Today, one can withdraw money from one of the countless BSM ATMs scattered around Jakarta.

The project that most flagrantly brought together the spiritual aspirations of Subud with its roots in the carbon economy was the design of a utopian mining town in Sulawesi in 1972. Sommers developed the project for International Nickel, or INCO, one of the world’s largest nickel mining companies, based in Canada. INCO entered into an agreement with the Suharto regime to create the world’s second-largest open-pit nickel mine on the shores of Lake Matano. The nickel would then be exported and processed in Japan before entering the world market, largely to make steel for industrial equipment; in other words, it was used to build more factories. Subud’s contribution was to design, from scratch, a town for a population of 1000 workers, including 600 houses, schools, hospital, supermarket, clubs, roads, and utilities. They imagined that within ten years, the population would grow to 8000. They drew on the principles used in the design of Chilean mining towns where social life was organized around schools. In Sommers’ mind, this was an opportunity to use the town as an expression of humanistic principles of community and intergenerational contact.⁠6

Sommers’ accounting of this time emphasised the significance of the latihan as they developed the design. The members of the design team were all part of Subud, they were overseen by Subuh, and they practised the latihan daily as a way to bolster the spiritual significance of their work on the mining camp. The labour, though, had become onerous as they rushed to meet the deadline; the group was burning the midnight oil. In the end, upon delivery of the master plan, Sommers reported that,

“The surprising result was that I passed through the fatigue and—feeling totally at one with my own nature—I was able to complete the extensive report and documentation on time. This was such a powerful spiritual experience that when it was complete I felt that I should present a copy to [Subuh]. I knew that he would understand.”⁠7

Labour, for Sommers, had become unalienated. That was the concrete result of the latihan; awakening meant realising one’s capacity as a producer, to shape a town that would extract ores that would build factories, that would be powered by carbon, that would produce the industrial building blocks for more factories. It was, in fact, the perfect reconciliation with industrial society: Subud was, in this sense, mystical industrialism.

Sommers’ vision of his unalienated work was a stark example of just how far Bennett’s attempt to reconcile coal and the self could go. Sommers wasn’t schooled in the coalfields of the Mediterranean or the industrial labs of B.C.U.R.A; instead, he brought it together with a broader field of the carbon culture. Certainly, Sommers was not the first, but in his experience, we can see with stark clarity just how wrapped up spiritual practices of the self are with carbon modernity. The latihan, after all, gave meaning to his work designing a mining town.

It is perhaps no surprise that for Bennett, Sommers and Subuh, working on oneself was an endless project. The human psyche, for them, held progressive potential: tapping it, working it, perfecting it, was part of what it meant to be a modern human, to be ‘awake’. The experiments at Coombe Springs shaped the Self-Help and New Age movements, in particular their concern with the perfectibility brought about by working on oneself. Labour was not only something we did in and onto the world; it was what we did to ourselves. For Subud members, the latihan enabled their work to perfect the world—and themselves. For Bennett, energy defined the cosmos, from coal to the soul; human evolution through self-work, or simply “the work”, as he called it, was only a more complex version of burning coal; our insides, too, are waiting to be tapped like a seam.

Living through what seems to be the late stage of carbon culture, and at the threshold of new energetic realities, allows us (perhaps) to begin to envision what kinds of new selves and spiritualities can emerge with new energetic infrastructures. When the energetic infrastructure of a society transforms, how then does it reconfigure what it means to be a self? Casting a glance backwards to the wrapped-up nature of fossil fuels and self-help might better equip us to imagine what a post-carbon spiritual practice might look like.

Adam Bobbette is a lecturer in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His work ranges across political geography and the history and geography of the earth and environmental sciences. He is currently working on a project about geological violence. It examines the twentieth century history of fossil fuel prospecting and its relationship to spirituality and concepts of self.