05.12.08
Bennett turning tables on Gurdjieff
One of the ironies of reading Bennett, and its possible value for those critical of the guru phenomenon lies in the way it unwittingly undermines the Gurdjieff legacy even as it might seem to endorse it. I am referring only to The Dramatic Universe, which has very little of Gurdjieff, save the part transmitted and distorted from a version of Samkhya.
The point here is that these teachers and gurus have no hotline to God or the spiritual. Bennett, ingeniously, constructs the consequences of the tidbits left by Gurdjieff and shows clearly that the ‘spiritual’ domain we tend to imagine is quite imaginary: take an example: Bennett in his discussion of the relativity of the present moment (volume 4, our ‘present’ moment is sometimes ‘this instant’ or the more general contemporary ‘present age’, the ‘present’ moment of homo sapiens, etc…) lets out the idea that the present moment of the larger scale of intelligent life (thence his demiurgic sources) is many many millions of years, the scale of life itself (billions of years), which means that the relationship of these higher sources is analogous to the similar relationship we have to the cells in our bodies!
Such processes don’t even know we exist, and the sufi establishment, et al, certainly have no hotline to such ‘beings’.
Bennett is a clever ‘neither theist nor atheist’.
Such remarks in passing, as they add up, undermine conventional theology, and the authoritarianism of the very people trying to use all this as a source of authority.
Bennett was a bit clever, and behind his fronts he put forth something (easily refutable, because on the level, mostly) that one can use to ‘pull rank’ on gurus of all types with their preposterous claims of special knowledge, powers, and authority.
I fear that Bennett’s system won’t stand, but enough of it is reconstructable via the original samkhya to make it a candidate for a secularist’s self-defense kit against the flood of phonies besieging New Age consciousness.
All these god man pretenders and avatars have no more connection to a higher reality than anyone else.