10.01.10
Note on the Bennett scanned material
tag: DUvol4
Bennett, DU Volume IV post: This quotation may not make sense out of context, and I am a little nervous about trying to explain Bennett, since he is all too likely to become a kind of cult figure. Taken critically he can be useful, but you need to recast his ideas outside the Gurdjieff system. In fact they have no real connection to that system, and his thinking stands as is. But unfortunately the link to the work ideas is there and has perverted the wholel thing with Gurdjieff’s concealed brand of spiritual fascism. So I can’t recommend Bennett. but he had a few interesting notions, and can be a source of some value.
His model of the mind is a metaphysical non-Kantian speculation, and his most interesing psychology starts to bear fruit in the fourth volume: basically the idea is that mind is creating a six-dimensional construct, of space, time, eternity, and hyparxis, and this makes the ‘present moment’ a complex of great sublety. A brilliant notion, or set of notions, but where’s the proof. Take it broadly and his point is of interest.
It was probably a mistake to scan this passage, since it is a distraction step one from the business at hand, Bennett’s New Age Evolutionism, and its connection to the question of consciousness.
I am considering simply writing a short book reconstructing my own version of what I would consider Bennett meant, and beyond that, what I mean.
I tend to dawdle over Bennett when I should be done with him because his books raise the possibility of doing right what he did in a fashion that is too hard, and too confusing for most: providing an open source (open source!!, I chose the right phrase) for a useful spiritual psychology, not filled with deliberate lies and distortions, or sold incomplete with the esoteric secrets at a markup.
We can quarrel with Bennett all we please but he did a funny thing: he put the whole question of spiritual psychology out in the open. Most gurus are nervous here because they don’t understand him! And promote their own mystifications that serve to create power over people struggling to find even the first principles for self-understanding, and almost never finding them.
Ouspensky’s work, sadly, comes close to providing this kind of open psychology, but a closer look shows that he was crippled by Gurdjieff’s lies, tall tales, and esoteric come ons. Most of Ouspensky is useless for that reason, resulting in lifetimes of wasted effort. Gurdjieff didn’t care about such things, glad to keep people entangled ad infinitum, and making sure they thought about development, but never developed.
A good example of the confusion added in is the enneagram, the purest crap, but his whole system is cast in terms of this lore, and the result is a whole new round of mystification just at the point of clarification. It is not clear if Gurdjieff fell for this nonsense. If so his system, already suspect, becomes trash. There is at least the possibility that he lied and that some other notions of his are of value.
Anyway don’t worry over the scanned material. I will move on rapidly, toward the end of the fourth volume, with a flashback to volume two, with its material on the various selves.
In any case, understand that NOONE can resolve these issues, not even if they are enlightened. Once you know that this material is downgraded form Esoteric BLAH to ordinary philosopy of consciousness, it becomes useful, taken critically. Bennett’s psychology could be done right and might save people immense amount of time as they get thrown between everything from psychoanalysis (an older generation) to gosh knows what, trying to figure themselves out, in vain.
In fact, Schopenhauer (and then Kant, if you can get past his langauge) is the clearest restatement of the whole set of questions, amazing the more so since he was unaware of the details of Indian spiritual practice. Bennett is very endebted to Schopenhauer, but becomes too metaphysical about the ‘will’. We can see the clarity of Schopenhauer frittered away all over again, and it is important to consider that people in the New Age world are confused and can’t do things at the level of Schopenhauer.
In any case, Schopenhauer is the joker in the deck, and perhaps because of the unwitting character of his effort he succeeds where others get stuck in the degenerated endless rehash of Hindu spiritual jargon.
Sufis claim to have the ultimate here, but they claim a lot of things, and NEVER deliver, so, given a look at Ouspensky and granting is limits and that sufis just might have something better, still, I would say, they are lying, and are in any case NEVER trustworthy. So, you can use a bit of Schopenhauer to get your bearings, and then just maybe the whole of Bennett’s beautiful swan dive, minus the Gurdjieff crap, and a question mark about the Samkhya, will stand out as a transparent depiction (which Bennett confused himself into misunderstanding all over again) of the nature of mind, soul, self, and time.
Then flush out the chaff, and go back to Schopenhauer, a little savvier.
More on this some other time.
The point here is our suspicion that the idea of evolution, certainly Darwinian, breaks down, or turns into something else: we can’t even describe ‘consciousness’, what to say explain how it evolved.
Nor can anyone say at what point all this happened. But Bennett, with data of generation ago, was already close to the picture we now have, and that suggests the real beginnings of man around homo erectus, and then a hint, in what would be my retelling of Bennnett’s idea a generation later, in the so-called Great Explosion sometime after -200K BCE of the rapid emergence of human self-consciousness (not just consciousness, please note) at that point. Bennett flips the terminology here: he calls ‘self-consciousness’ ( a yogic term, present in Gurdjieff as self-remembering consciousness) consciousness in his sense, redefining what we usuallly mean by consciousness as ‘sensitivity’ or sensitive energy, or the peak of life-energy. The point is that for Bennett consciousness is a ‘cosmic energy’, at the lowest grade of that cosmic stage.
The point is that mind/self-consciousness etc are more than simple consciousness. Understanding this MIGHT (beware of speculation) hellp to sort out the levels of homo erectus or the neanderthals and homo sapiens who confuses biologists because he is the same as what came before and yet different, in the same way that self-consciousness is the same as consciousness, yet different, like music at a higher octave.
Anyway, it might help to restate Bennett’s thinking (and then critiicize it) in terms of an additional generation of research.
In the meantime, it is important to understand that noone in the sufi/yogic realm is in a position to pontificate about consciousness or its evolution. They are supposed to enlightened and omniscient, but they are not.
I am critical of science on evolution, but at least they get out there and dig for bones, and do research. The thumb twiddlers of sufism and hinduism will mostly confuse you.
Anyway, don’t despair, as a homo sapient you already know all this, supposedly. So it is a matter of nothing more than becoming unconfused, unfortunately not a simple task.