27.08.09

James, Bennett, and Pali Buddhism

Posted in Dramatic Universe at 1:39 pm by nemo

I was amused, and pleased in fact, that in trying to discuss Bennett’s thinking in The Dramatic Universe, James appears to have ‘counterattacked’ with some material on Pali Buddhism. An apt rejoinder, and welcome here.
I can tip my hat to James, and recommend Pali Buddhism myself (although I don’t endorse anything at this point anymore), and proceed to an abbreviated look at Bennett.

So we can also continue with a brief look at Bennett, taken critically. It might help to jump to vol 4 and critique his views on evolution, which are quite exotic.
The question of Bennett’s system is a controversial one, and since this is The Gurdjieff Con blog, it is appropriate to include a critique of Bennett’s systematics, which was our declared intent from the beginning.
Bennett is not a con man, but a kind of superintelligent geek who was spotted by some hidden sufis and dosed with a kind of ‘speed’ that made his mind race at a hundred miles per hour for a thousand pages of what is finally, well, junky. But a few fragments stand out as questions, and ideas of possible value. A total rejection of his work would not be credible, and it is by acknowledging some value in his effort that a critique comes into being.

But Bennett, as MBFM pointed out, was really a victim of the Gurdjieff Con, and an immensely intelligent whiz kid who nearly succeeded in rewriting the ancient Samkhya for modern times. In the process the project got melded, and quite ruined, by its assoication with Gurdjieff. Contact with Gurdjieff turned his brain into mush, and it is hard to sort out the whole thing.

The result in his masterwork is a combination of pure crap with brilliant insights. The result is also, ironically, a way to challenge Gurdjieff on his own ground, since it is not clear from what Gurdjieff said just what he meant, or whether he was telling the truth or telling lies.
Thus Bennett unwittingly upstaged him, and you can defend yourself quite handily using Bennett against Gurdjieff.
Gurdjieff and most sufis are too stupide to produce a spiritual psychology of any value, and Bennett’s work, despite is incorrect foundations and almost drunken rationality on speed, voids most previous efforts.

Except, most amusingly, the realm of Pali Buddhism!

There is something depressing about this failed project: we could have had a clarification of a Samkhya spirituality for modern man: instead we got a Gurdjieff cannibal racket grafted onto a fourth way myth, reprocessed by Bennett as a scholarly book that starts to turn into science fiction.

Anyway, a look at his ‘being function will’ matrix of human psychology, and some of his evolutionary discussions in vol 4 can round out our discussion here and provide critics of Gurdjieff with some solid ground and an amusing way to pull rank on these mystifiers.

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