Debriefing the Gurdjieff work
From Mr. Bennett:
Stigmatizing my father as a crook was a popular pastime in many quarters throughout his life and while I knew him it never bothered him, and neither does it concern us.
You are the worst possible judge of the matter. In any case, all these other people charging this are not talking about what I am talking about.
You cannot dismiss this so cavalierly. It is not an issue of family loyalty.
A corrupt teaching is not a funny joke.
Too many readers of Ouspensky/Gurdjieff suffer from suggestibility in their conversion to that system, ironic, since curing you of that was to have been the object of the exercise.
People therefore consider Gurdjieff some higher authority they should defer to. But they have got the whole thing wrong. Gurdjieff was a scumbag, a man without religion, and he threatened to do to religion what the reactionaries of neo-liberalism have now done to America, destroy it.
There is a strange resemblance of types.
DON’T BE FOOLED
Mr. Bennett on The Dramatic Universe
You have clarified the situation, thank you. I hope this is correct.
I think more people have read this book than you might think. It is, after all, resident in many major libraries. I have seen the stamped dates in the withdrawal count in several cases, over thirty years.
I am not sure what you mean by …nobody would read it would could understand it…
I read it in the seventies, when it made a considerable impression. I finished the whole text in a matter of days.
I have since felt the strangeness of that initial experience.
I have learned a few things from it that, as I can see, I won’t be able to explicate to anyone else.
The point here is that, had Bennett not rigged his work to match Gurdjieff’s system, it would have been a great breakthrough in the modern interpretation of Samkhya, to stand next to Shopenhauer. But sadly that opportunity got lost somewhere.
I think an opportunity has been lost here. The whole thing should have been beyond reproach, but instead the text suffers from careless errors of judgment in performing major tasks, e.g. the confusion over the Kantian categories. And much else.
But it is unusual in that it affirms the value of modernity, and its freedoms, at the end of the fourth volume. That alone made Bennett an object of enmity in sufistic circles. So, on those grounds, et al., despite my criticisms, I have often defended Bennett.
I have to throw up my hands here, I was embarking on a brief commentary, but I can see that would not work out as I had thought.
http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2009/07/12/the-dramatic-universe-page-one/comment-page-1/#comment-35082
Mr. Bennett clarifies his position on The Dramatic Universe.
Ben Bennett said,
17.07.09 at 5:54 pm ·
Dear John
I sent you those copies of DU as I was happy that you had read even enough of the book to write a review of it on Amazon.com. I am sorry if this has caused offence. As for any intentions of making money – you probably realize that this is absurd. We re-printed in 1997 1000 copies, for which we raised the entire cost by private subscription. (This was a facsimile of the original typesetting which unfortunately perpetuated some errors which technical readers discover from time to time.) I watched my father working on this book through most of my childhood, and I knew that his prediction had been fulfilled that nobody would read it who could undertand it. In 12 years we have sold about 400 copies, so nobody is getting rich or ever expects to do so. Stigmatizing my father as a crook was a popular pastime in many quarters throughout his life and while I knew him it never bothered him, and neither does it concern us. If you do succeed in posting DU online in violation of copyright, I don’t expect very much harm will come of it, or interest be taken.So good wishes to you and all you readers
Ben Bennett
Post on Bennett/Graves confronting Idries Shah
MBTF concludes by suggesting mercy for the victims of Gurdjieff/Sufis:
Show old men some mercy.
For one day we all shall be old, if permitted to live long enough.
I understand the sentiment, and have shown ambivalence here about how to consider J.G.Bennett. But in the final analysis Bennett flunked a morals test: he discovered the criminality of Gurdjieff and gave no warning. Unlike Ouspensky. He not only gave no warning but heaped praise on the system in the fashion of a convert.
The Dramatic Universe is corrupted by that compromise. I havetrying hard to see how some of its value could be rescued.
Finally I give up. It is a lost cause.
So no mercy can be shown there.
Sweet sounding charmers are frequent in life, sometimes even in mafias like the Gurdjieff/sufi mafia.
Idries Shah like any mafia honcho shows no mercy to the hangers on, and there is a crook’s justice in that. Mafia justice to their own has saved innumerable police departments time and funds.
Exercise: if your are a Gurdjieff student see if you can find the references to genocidal mass murder in Bennett’s books, and how it relates to Gurdjieff’s ‘system’.
Let Bennett have shown some mercy then
Bennett’s confusion over copyright
first: John Landon
!= nemo?
This new comment about copyright by Mr. Bennett misses the point completely.
Scholarly quotations objected to on copyright creates a tense environment for discussion, and here must result in boycotting The Dramtic Universe save as critical commentary.
If the issue were plagiarism, misquotation, theft of text, etc, that would be one thing. But here the issue is simple commentary reference.
The comparison to World History and the Eonic Effect is absurd. The copyright is there, but the text was also online in all three editions, a great sacrifice of sales that resulted in greatly increased readership.
But then I am not advocating more readers for DU: it is a dangerously confusing text.
MBTF said,
16.07.09 at 11:51 am · Didnt Bennett get ripped off by letting Idries Shah the pseudo-Sufi con him into believing that he, Shah, had access to the true source of gurdjieff’s much vaunted system?
And after Bennett was assured that Combe Springs would be used as a study center, signed it over to Shah, Shah then evicted everyone, then sold the property and made a tidy profit?
Some die hard followers of Bennett insist that the old man did this willingly, perhaps because it was painful to face their leader had been hoodwinked in old age.
Robert Graves was persuaded to make a translation of the Rubayat of Omar Khayyam from a manuscript allegedly known as the ‘Fishan Khan MS’, property of one of Idries Shah’s ancestors. But Shah and his brother never did produce the original and Robert Graves, himself an old man and vulnerable, was left holding the bag.For more, read the two volume biography of Graves, written by his nephew Perceval.
Show old men some mercy.
For one day we all shall be old, if permitted to live long enough.
These depradations of Idries Shah are important to recall.
But my complaint is that it is ultimately futile to extricate the useful material from The Dramatic Universe, because it rigged with Gurdjieff’s very dangerous ideas, ideas that will lead to destruction of human life.
Bennett became aware of his dilemma, but unlike Ouspensky was unwilling or unable or too afraid to resist.
my complaint is that Gurdjieff thugs will claim this work of Bennett as their ‘property’ and/or make their intepretation seem to be ‘objective knowledge’ when in fact everything they do is a devious dishonest scheme.
One of my associates has scanned twenty pages of The Dramatic Universe and uploaded them onto another site. So, Mr. Bennett, we will defeat your copyright greed, and be able to proceed.
Twenty pages a day, it won’t be long.
Mr Bennett blew it completely. He sent me a free set of The Dramatic Universe, and now I see why: he is the copyright holder, and hopes to increase sales by sending copies to anyone who might comment favorably on the book.
I have news for Mr. Bennett: he blew his cover, and reminded me of the danger of treating Bennett’s book in such a way as to promote its hidden agendas.
I can see no way to proceed, and have to thank Mr. Bennett for warning me once again of all the vultures who want to use Gurdjieff and Bennett to exploit people.
To Mr. Bennett I would say: look impartially at you father: he was a gangster’s apprentice, and his great book is totally spoiled by its contact with Gurdjieff.
The fuss over copyright was revealing. I hadn’t the foggiest notion of putting the text on line, a thousand pages to scan??
But now I will see some way to do that and deprive the Bennett gang of the money they obviously want to make from sales of this book. I will do everything I can to prevent that.
The book should be abandoned to public domain. As soon as possible.
Bennett’s son tries censorship
I find it amusing and somewhat incredible anyone would try to prevent citation of Bennett’s work online, as a form of censorship.
We will certainly cite Bennett as much as possible and ignore this presumption of copyright.
But putting Bennett online was not our purpose, and the publicity given to that crook is a problem in itself.
So to Mr. Bennett, we should say, you are out of line. We mean to expose the whole Gurdjieff game, and Bennett won’t be spared in that.
Your father was a crook, and a crook’s disciple. And the use of his Dramatic Universe to bamboozle students of spirituality needs to be exposed completely.
http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2009/07/12/an-isom-series-ouspensky-should-have-stayed-in-india/comment-page-1/#comment-35058
Comment on ISOM series from James:
James said,
13.07.09 at 3:14 pm ·
Review of Blavatsky’s Baboon:
A most revealing passage from Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon describes P.D. Ouspensky, a Fourth Way or Gurdjieff School leader, who near the end of his life in 1947 was very depressed (confusion and depression have been common ailments of lifelong disciples of the Western guru tradition). He took to escaping from students in his car with his cats. Ouspensky would park his car at some destination, sit in the back seat staring out of a window while cuddling his pets. “Returning home from one journey, he spent the rest of the night in the car while a female pupil stood over him at the window, her arm raised as if in benediction. A cat would never be so stupid” (p. 337). This passage not only reveals the depths of delusion both guru and follower might reach, but it also reveals Washington’s insensitivity to the perhaps deluded but nevertheless struggling, dedicated victims of such gurus.http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/mine/blavatsky.htm
Right on, Ouspensky needs a critical look, off his rocker in many ways. But at the same time he is not as dangerous as the Gurdjieff line.
Ouspensky was never strictly speaking a ‘guru’ but a public teacher empowered by Gurdjieff due to his exceptional ability to due just that (and also because of his reactionary views on politics and culture). Also, Ouspensky was the only person who had the integrity and the nerve to speak his mind on what he called Gurdjieff’s criminality, telling J.G.Bennett that Gurdjieff was a criminal. He broke with Gurdjieff but remained deluded that Gurdjieff’s material was somehow connected to ‘hidden schools’ in the Islamic or sufi worlds. Enough people have lost their shirt on that.
Ben Bennett’s comment on The DU page one…
To mr. Ben Bennett:
I have not idea what you think you will accomplish with these copyright tactics. You have guaranteed that our treatment of Bennett will have any last trace of ‘human affection’ stripped away, with the resulting negative portrayal, which is what should have been the case from the beginning.
Fair use quotes, in any case, are not illegal along the lines of commentary, and are in any case completely unnecessary to the discussion.
But they can assist clarification.
As with the last post, chicanery is the atmosphere of the Gurdjieff world. And Bennett fell into that. Anyone who thinks he can replace the Kantian categories with his own set is both a boob, a cheat, and a bamboozler.
So it would be a hundred times more intelligent to allow brief quotes from DU. Again, who cares, we have accomplished our mission here, and certainly don’t need to bother with a lot of citations.
tag: MBFM
comment on the GQ link:
http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2009/07/12/gq-link/comment-page-1/#comment-35056
mybrainisafleamarket said,
13.07.09 at 9:06 am
Thanks for extending the discussion and finding the link. I posted in haste
from a library terminal and was running out of time and couldnt find the URL for the GQ interview of Ramis.It goes to show how we can turn up data on the deleterious effects of Fourth Way in some unexpected venues.
I suspect Murray was already a very unhappy man and self selected into Fourth Way mind-fuck because it validated his pre-existing misery and gave him a seemingly noble pedigree for interpersonal sadism.
I have to tell you that the other day I was telling a young fellow about the Murray pattern of behavior and how he used Gurdjieff to rationalize this cruelty as a teaching method.
The young man was actually fascinated–to my horror, he LIKED the sound of this, found it appealing.
I was alarmed and told him, ‘Please, this is not a good way to treat people. If you are young and resilient this can seem thrilling.
But when you get old enough to understand how it feels to have a heart, and how you feel to have your heart broken, and how long it can take to recover from that, you can find that this is a terrible way to live and you’ve left damage that cannot be repaired. Please, this isnt a good way to live and its not going to teach anything worth while!’
I very much fear that people who have been horribly brutalized in life and crave revenge and a feeling of mastery to compensate for feeling powerless are the ones who find this sort of thing appealing–and find inspiration in the ghastly life stories of sadistic deceitful monsters who dare claim to be spiritual teachers.
(Groan)
On the first attempt we get a comment from Bennett’s son, complaining of the citations from Bennett’s book.
Now why would he object? Because we approach the issue critically.
Why on earth did Ben Bennett send me unsolicited the four volumes of Bennett’s DU if he feels this way??
I think we can ignore this request, on the grounds that we can better perform this critique without quoting from Bennett, and do so with a mean attitude toward the obvious tactics of attempted censorship.
Meanwhile the copyright issues are totally unclear. I think we should disregard them.
Otherwise he can get a lawyer and sue ‘nemo’
Later in his introduction Bennett hints at his strategy: he is going to replace the categories of Kant with new ones!! Hilarious bit of nonsense, the whole and entire foundation of his system is going to rest on that.
I fear that Bennett has failed to grasp the Kantian critique of metaphysics.
His tactic is a complex combination of mysticism and realism, and can’t seem to grasp what Kant was about. This is important since there is nothing out of date about those categories of Kant. There are plenty of critics of that system, but Bennett’s approach suggests we are going to be treated to some metaphysics of illusion.
…Let us look at the requirements that such a pnnclple would have to satisfy. In the first place, it must provide us with new categones of thought to take the place of the awkward and pitifully inadequate forms that we have inherited from Aristotle and the German transcendental philosophers. When these categories were formulated, natu~al SCIence had not made the prodigious advances of the last two centunes. I.n any event natural science must remain limited in its forms of expreSSiOn so long ~s it is concerned almost exclusively with predictab.ility. If science is to transcend its limitations, it must, first of all, recogmze them. ~h~n only will it be possible to step out of the narrow f~rms of thought wlthm which the scientific intuition is now confined. It IS necessary to be able to think and to speak in new forms about quantity as well as about
quality.