25.09.08

The ‘will’ and the ‘Will’

Posted in Uncategorized at 2:43 pm by nemo

Updated, below.
comment/input from MBFM

Very interesting commentary on Gurdjieff’s ‘path of the will’. However, I am wary of endorsing this perspective, even as I recommend giving it consideration.

The author makes an important point: the ‘path of will’ is completely frustrating, sometimes you give up and something clicks.
Rajneesh often made this point, in various forms, and, indeed, specifically with respect to Gurdjieff.
I have been critical of Gurdjieff, but I can’t automatically reject the recognizably ‘fenced’ spiritual teachings that he absconded with from somewhere/somewho else. He, and Bennett, dropped open hints repeatedly along the way of the ‘different ways’, no doubt in the process making a pastiche of them, e.g. the silly partition of ways, fakir, monk, and yogi, and a fourth. This division is an artificial construct. But there is an obvious meaning here, and in fact there is a lot in Gurdjieff that is obviously borrowed, e.g. from Buddhism, or from any meditative tradition that expounds on the psychology of the meditator. For example the whole discourse on many ‘i’s’ before some phantom called the real ‘I’ is pretty ancient stuff, rewritten with a kind of flair that makes it seem original. It’s like the ’sufi’ tale of the horse, the driver, the passenger, etc.. Gurdjieff? Sufi? It’s last reported siting goes back to the Jains in the time of Mahavir, thence we can be sure further back.
It’s a truth rediscovered by anyone who tries to quite smoking, so…
The problem I have here is that abandoning the ‘will’ for the cooled out sensation of meditative release might make you feel good, but it won’t help you quit smoking. (a very artificial example, perhaps. Now they have chemicals that can help, think of a better example)
The formulation thus of issues of the will won’t go away. That doesn’t mean we have to buy into obsessive and deluded notions of our ‘will’. So what are we talking about?
Kant is good here: your ‘will’ is present already at the moment of ethical action, by definition of the terms. This issue in Kant is one of the most vexed, philosophically. Yet his point is clear: at the crunch, man has the higher embedded in the lower, his will. Otherwise he could not function in human society.
Then there is Schopenhauer on the will.
Wait for the moment when these difficult philosophers appeal to you at a moment of interest, and consider them.
Both these philosophers demonstrated the immense complexity of the question of will, and the difference between phenomenal and noumenal aspects of this question, with different perspectives in the same framework of transcendental idealism toward the reality of free will.
Of great importance is to grasp their distinction of noumenon and phenomenon, or, in Schopenhauer, representation and thing in itself.
As you pursue a spiritual path you begin to speculate about ’self’, but your experience reflects the phenomenon of self. You never experience the noumenal aspect of self. This is the whole point of the Upanishads, which, however, are not so clear as Schopenhauer. Some may not agree. Schopenhauer offered some hope, contra Kant, for detecting, so to speak, the ‘will’ behind the representation. Best to consider his depiction, not mine.

Update: The Indic stream shows a classic antinomy in action, almost Kantian in its strangeness: The upanishads have ‘atman’ as a referrent, while Buddhism negates this, anatta, or ‘no atman’. There is no real contradiction. But Buddhism can confuse beginners here, and I often wonder if the classic elegance of Buddhism wasn’t counterproductive. Perhaps there is a sense of passing beyond the ‘true self’ to something beyond that, level six.

The problem we have here is exactly the problem we have outlined with the two paths, that beyond time, that through time.
Enlightened beings have, perhaps, moved beyond ‘will’ (a dangerous statement, since the meaning of the term ‘will’ can change its meaning). At any rate they don’t linger for the attempt to realize a ‘real will’, although their enlightenment essentially does that in any case.
Gurdjieff pointed to something that mathematically ought to exist, but didn’t produce any method or clarification, in part because he didn’t really want that freedom in those he wished to control.

Another line of understanding might be Samkhya, to wrest the question from the Gurdjieff distortion of that ancient subject.
It is not trustworthy stuff at this point, the key having been lost. But it makes a rough sense, as metaphysics, with little scientific basis:
You have the different realms,

96 gunas close match raw physicality
48 gunas close match to ordinary consciousness, hypnotized
24 gunas close match to what is supposed to normal self-consciousnees
12 gunas the ‘real’ self…. the ‘will’, the individuality???
6 gunas Man rarely if ever reaches this level, a mathematical abstraction
3 gunas same here
beyond the 3 gunas lies… well, millennia of confusion talks gibberish about something they call ‘god’. As Jesus notes, ‘no man has seen god at any time’.
Thus the two top rungs (assuming any of this Samkhya has any validation!) are never reached by man.

Note and Update: The classic Samkhya was a non-theistic philosophy and any use of the ‘term’ god will provoke confusion in this schematic (which is pretty shaky as it is). The apex of this triangle should be taken for what it is, an apex of a triangle, and says nothing, in the same way that the t=0 point in the big bang says nothing. These subjects are also confused by the conceptions of involution vs evolution which have fallen into a pit of nonsense. We have no direct evidence of involution.

Update In discussing this I often have J.G.Bennett’s terminology in the back of my mind, and here mislabeled the level of twelve gunas Individuality and True Self. The Individuality corresponds to level twelve, and the True Self to level twenty-four, the level forty-eight being what he calls the Divided Self. The question is significant because the True is within the reach of self-development and can become in Bennett’s terminology the vehicle of the higher level.
I have a notion to rewrite this whole scheme in another terminology. The grafting of Samhya, Schopenhauer, and various other things makes his rendition highly difficult to grasp.

Man lives his life somewhere between the 96 and the 24. The deeper part, however, is already forever there, if he can find it.
The problem then is real, to find the true self, the ‘individuality’. Not so simple.

The thing that makes it insuperable, almost, is the way the ‘outer mind theatre’ must be the theatre for all of these levels. You never jump to a higher level. You may experience the manifestation of higher levels in your ordinary theatre of mind, and that is mixed at once ordinary mind.
A frightening situation to be in. That’s why Buddhists say, orient toward ‘enlightenment’ (what level is that?) and bail out, without delay. You have no chance to sort out this different levels with the means you have. But you can, whatever it means, snap out of the whole labyrinth.
Whatever the case, we see that it is at least meaningful to consider the ‘will’ in man as part of his deep unconscious, an aspect of his nature, and something far different from the chaotic psychological state he lives in normally, where something like ‘will power’ becomes the forlorn hope of projects of egoic intention, with whatever results.

You never hear of this in the Indic stream, because they renounce the samsaric and don’t bother with it. Gudjieff caught some hints, which he naturally tried to trace, even back to the Sumerians, of a more comprehensive way beside the Indic, the last remaining real source of last resort, and it makes theoretical sense, sad then that we hear of it from such a con man who sullied the whole idea.
Man’s frame in nature is thus complex. Not even the Buddhist path can fully depict it. Perhaps it remains a project of man’s future.

Permalink