We have discussed these issues many time here, and the Gurdjieff work (note the phrase itself) is a classic ‘union busting’ reactionary spiritual movement’, like much sufism.

I hope that my Descent of Man Revisited can put the issue of evolutionary enlightenment in a better perspective. I am puzzled by Cohen’s (really bad) book on this subject, made worse by the authoritarian dogmatism of a guru whose books/views become ‘must believes’ in a cult. I speak defensively, and mean no quarrel with these people. But since my book will be banned in those circles I will launch a preemptive counterattack. Cohen’s fumbling inability to grasp the evolution issue is obvious from his book’s flawed premises.

I am tired of getting into fights with these pseudo-gurus, and Cohen is one of the worst.
Enlightenened men have not solved the problem of evolution, and to dish up this New Age crap
about evolutionary enlightenment, and then make it a kind of doctrinal paradigm
is one more nail in the New Age movement. Keep in mind that in antiquity men reached enlightenment without the idea of evolution. Now the idea is confusing the issue.
But perhaps it might help to adopt a version of the ‘evolutionary enlightenment’ thesis, one that will do less harm. That’s easy: how did the buddha phenomenon arise, and when? And what physiological features accompany that phenomenon (if any). Note that the momentum of culture by and large sweeps past the enlightenment potential: the mechanization of consciousness in low gear is chronic in man.

The question of how the buddha phenomenon arose in human evolution is raised in my book, but not answered.
These questions were better studied by J. G. Bennett (but not very well there either) than by Cohen, and Bennett at least mapped out the questions: we have the emergence of homo erectus, who was he? and the emergence of homo sapiens, which seems to have happened relatively quickly in its final stages, and this secondary transformations remains unclear next to its other branches, e.g. the Neanderthals. His account derails, so beware of it: it has no authority as such. But he puts the question in context, and the answer that isn’t an answer is obvious: the potential for the buddha phenomenon emerged as a latency during the ‘great explosion’, the rapid punctuated equilibrium phase of some group of early homo sapiens (building on the erectus/Neanderthal base)
The problem here is that our overall ignorance is so great that we can’t fit the pieces of the puzzle together, yet. But note that Bennett was at least studying the science, even as he exposed the problems of Darwinism. He ruins his account with all sort of egregious speculations, and hybrid-crafting with the gross darkness of the Gurdjieff movement. but his basic work was separate. It wasn’t so profound that we have to dwell on it, save that is has some useful insights. The awareness of the existence, spiritual entry however primitive, of homo erectus was a first in New Age writings, and Bennett’s take, which I will restate in my own version, is that consciousness is strong in homo erectus, however primitive (but it is also present in chimpanzees), but up-amps to the potential distinction of consciousness/self-consciuousness in homo sapiens (whatever that means). This distinction is the classic yogic one, and is completed by a third, and last, turiya, the fourth (sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, turiya), sometimes called enlightenment. This is why meditation becomes a preoccupation: man’s hold on self-consciousness, always spiraling back down into mere mechanical consciousness, is not certain, and he needs a culture or discipline of consciousness. This issue is made more complex by the second question, not always addressed by yogis, of the ‘will’ of man, such as it is, and its relationship to species issues. An obscure question, to say the least.
It is simply impossible to my knowledge to depict or explain this new stage, still marginal in homo sapiens, in Darwinian terms. So we are out in left field from the start.
Here the Cohen/New Age brand of ‘evolutionary enlightenment’ is misleading. Nature may be inducing the potential to enlightenment, but it is basically a question of a new kind of species, and this species has at best a marginal potential for enlightenment. So, perhaps, it is a comfusion of new agers (but less forgivable in Cohen) that we re moving toward a new man who will somehow be a superyogi. Taken lightly this notion might have some inspirational value, and an obvious meaning. But all in all it is false, for, as time passes, few reach or evolve to enlightenment, until they step out of that stream of cultural time, passing, and passing away. I don’t know, but I think this idea evolutionary enlightenment is naive. Nature has already bestowed this Christmas present on man, but he can barely use it. We aren’t going to evolve the solution to this problem. We have already evolved the potential to enlightenment. The question is to realize that potential. The idea that we are evolving toward enlightenment is a muddle of thought, and Cohen is putting a lot of guru prestige behind this, why is not clear. Very few real gurus have addressed the question of evolution. Not surprising, they knew they didn’t understand it. It wasn’t their function.
Still, I should be careful. We don’t know what kind of future man is going to appear, and what his consciousness will be like. So we should be wary of totally refusing New Age notions here.
To understand human evolution we must better understand man, but, more, we must have been present at the dawn of man to see how self-consciousness, language, ethical conscience (such as it is), will, creative potential, and the rest of it, so suddenly crystallized in a new species. It is a really hard question.
This is not a question we must abdicate to reductionist Darwinism. Neither should we abdicate it to guru hustler’s like Andrew Cohen.
Rajneesh, a genuine buddha (despite the many puzzling features of his behavior, e.g. his game with expensive cars, and the rest of the stuff the media picked up to discredit him), was careful to steer clear of the evolution question, because he knew that since he wasn’t there he couldn’t answer to the ‘how’. Nor did he mistake spiritual practive with evolution.

Descent of Man Revisited has to sail between the extremes of Darwinism, and the attempted cooptation of ‘evolution’ by New Age gurus. The fact remains, that even enlightened gurus can’t solve the evolution question. It is still a super riddle beyond easy knowledge, as the framework of the book will make clear.
Meanwhile, don’t surrender your autonomy to gurus who claim spiritual authority over the evolution question.
It is nonsense from the word go. The problem emerged in view with Blavatsky from some earlier source, in the nineteenth century, as the issue of Darwinism prompted some people to mistranslate some Sanskrit terms as ‘evolution’.
Please note that ancient yoga/buddhist treatises never used the term evolution in this way. We evolve, and become beings in samsara. Just as we have advanced brains, still in samsara, so we have an advanced consciousness, still in Samsara.
It is a distant cousin of the tale of Faust (which we should take warily as but partial): his advance in consciousness is problematical, and turns into its opposite, and there is a demon nearby. A tall tale and myth, but a sage reminder that man’s ‘evolution’ didn’t automatically evolve toward enlightenment, as his self-consciousness became the theatre of his ‘true will’, which is the begining and ending of ‘sin’, that demon nearby, chuckling.
The ‘will’ in man, thus, a virtual mysery that can ride on the white horse of self-consciousness, is thus entangled in the samsaric jungle. The path to enlightenment requires a lot of disentangling, and doesn’t happen with the ease of other natural functions. But that evolution produces a potential for enlightenment we can take into our consideration.
But just as the creation of a house built with a new technoloyg, e.g. electricity, is neutral about electricity: we can rewire it to do something else, so with man the potential to enlightenment was (I suspect, not sure) such a side effect, in the sense that the consciousness of a primitive evolving man can be rewired to a deeper understanding. And as Schopenahuer and Buddha understood, you can unravel the ‘will’ to cease to appear in samsara, negate the will, cultivating the potential self-consciousness in the process to overflow into the stage of englightenment. It is very tricky, and it is unwise to suggest that nature is evolving man automatically toward enlightenment. It seems not to be the case. It just throws electricity into the house, self-consciousness into man’s organismic stage.

But now I am in the game of claiming the term ‘evolution’ myself: not my intention. The empirical issue is that sometime during the early phase of man, and then in the Paleolithic, the potential of amplified human self-consciousness spontaneously began to produce ‘buddhas’, and this natural realization of human potential was characteristic of homo sapiens, but still not very common, or assured. I think that the Indic tradition preserved a version of this Paleolithic phase of the Buddha quest, and we can sense in the primitive profundity of primordial Shaivism (before it became tantra/yoga, or Jainism/Buddhism, or the Shiva cults now historical) a glimpse of those first ‘yogas’ of primitive men (not that modern men are less primitive).

We can’t be sure that man will evolve toward ‘enlightenment’. It is a confusion of thought. You might compare the primitives in the movie Avatar with the supposedly more evolved ‘sky people’, men armed with a rapacious capitalist technolgy. It is clear that the potential toward enlightenment is very strong in primitive men, of a certain type, and can die out as man advances in civilization. So we must be wary of any and all concepts of ‘evolutionary enlightenment’. (Advanced civilization, I must add, could potentially do a better job here, but so far doesn’t) It is a mistaken terminology in any case, created by bad translations from sanskrit. (and these are futher confused by a frequent distinction with ‘involution’, an equally supect muddle, but that’s another discussion). So, you don’t reach enlightenment in ordinary history, culture, or the world of gurus. You get cagy and move in a parallel history that can move beyond history, and you become an orphan of civilization. Various buddhist stories said it well: you leverage the flow of the stream, as you move by indirection toward the opposite shore.

The design debate, design vs. natural selection, is destined
to be deadlocked. The strategy of reductionist scientism
has failed here. But so has creationism trying to use design
arguments as proofs of the existence of god. ‘God’ cannot
‘exist’ inside space-time, and is ‘outside’ of ‘existence’ in
a different mode, being, beyond knowledge. This makes
the whole debate nonsensical. And we cannot speak of
‘intelligent’ design in predicates for ‘god’. Monotheists have
lost the distinction between ‘supernatural’ and the ‘spiritual’
inside the realm of the material/natural, but it is present
in the Old Testament as ‘elohim’. That then would be an
empirical issue, a ‘phenomenology’ of ‘spirits’, the ‘heavenly
host’ of the Christians, perhaps. Outlandish, but logical. In
a sense the design argument should be a natural sideline to
scientific research, since teleological machines are a staple
of biochemistry, now confronting the epigenome. But this
has nothing to do with theism, necessarily. The ‘natural
teleology’ of Kant suggests that ‘design’ begins as a naturalistic
phenomenon, whatever the mysteries of unknowable divinity.
And there is a third possibility, as noted: a natural demiurge
(plural?) acting within space-time, science fiction perhaps, but
logical. The materiality of the ‘spiritual’ resolves the questions
of material soul, short of the supernatural, which is beyond
knowledge. The idea of a material soul (as opposed to an
enlightened being beyond soul) is unknown to Christians,
but is known in the Sufistic and Indic traditions. The problem
with design arguments is, ironically, the way in which religious
mythology has distorted the use of the term ‘god’, leaving it
dangerously ambiguous, and design arguments fairy tales.
The ancient prophets warned severely of the use of such terms
of pop theism, reserving reference to a ‘pointing to’, as in the
abstract referent IHVH. The strange record left by the Old
Testament has actually lost the thread of its deep discovery
of historical ‘evolution’, which can indeed impinge on design
questions. But this record conceals a revolutionary discovery,
which the creators of Israelitism did not yet understand.

http://descentofmanrevisited.com

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The debate over evolution has endured for over a century but the outcome remains uncertain, in a debate that has been muddled by the ideological agendas of all parties. Even as biological research explodes in new directions in a robust science of the organism, the question of evolution, and its theory, seems to be mired in a concealed metaphysical scientism. In fact, the question of evolution is not solved by a science taken as the successor to physics. The issues of theory are confounded by the fact/value dichotomy, and by the difficulty of truly observing evolution in action. And this is the reason that the field is confronted by religion proponents of Intelligent Design. The debate over design will not go away, whatever it status as science, because it points to a complexity of natural law that current science is blind to. Among other issues that of teleology lurks ominously over the domain of reductionist thinking, and this is an issue as old as Aristotle, and commented on systematically by the philosopher Kant.
We can propose that the deadlock over evolution can be resolved by looking at the suggestive evidence of world history, which shows a clear non-random process at work in the sense of ‘macroevolution’. We can use this to debrief our obsessive Darwinian fixations and to consider the hint this gives about the earlier evolution of man.

John Landon
South Fork Books
descentofmanrevisted.com
nemonemini@aol.com

Note: you can download the pdf review copy, or if you don’t wish to download a file you can request a hard copy with address given for a hard copy of the book

Descent of Man Revisited deals with the questions of world history and human emergence, as it explores issues of evolutionary theory, biological self-organization, and the history of biological thought, from the period of Lamarck and the predecessors of Darwin. The relationship of evolution to history remains a source of confusion, and the text explores this problem, along with the issues of non-random emergence visible in the archaeological record. This invites a close look at the data of the so-called Axial Age. Included is a new perspective on the rise of modernity, and the debates over secularism. The text contains a set of outlines of world history, attempting to examine the idea of ‘evolutionary chronicles’ as the early emergence of man passes through a transition from ‘evolution to history’. This idea requires considering the idea of the ‘evolution of freedom’. This creates a connection with issues of so-called Big History, and the classical philosophy of history. There are many additional topics discussed, from the evolution of ethics, and consciousness, to the riddle of evolutionary enlightenment, finally to the question of the ‘first and last man’, an idea from Olaf Stapleton, in a consideration of the future evolution of man, in the ‘conclusion’ or ‘self-evolutionary epilog’ of homo sapiens.

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01.03.12 at 2:33 pm

The issue of Gurdjieff and Samkhya has been raised by many, among them the text To Live Within by an Indian guru, who pointed out the obvious. The link to Samkhya lies in the ‘law of three’ and the idea of triads in a doubling series. The idea of 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, cosmic laws is pure Samkhya. But Samkhya may not be the ultimate source, and Gurdjieff’s thinking about the subject may have had another set of sources. It is not the deep science it is made out to be. Noone can properly explain the meaning of this ‘law of three’, or of triads. Everyone has failed, down to Hegel (with a slightly different tradition, not doubt related, or the same, the ‘dialectic’, etc…). So I remain open to the real version, but am losing hope.
Let me note that Schopenhauer, unaware of Samkhya produced a vision of real ‘samkhya’ in his transcendental idealism of the ‘will in nature’. If he had studied the tradition, he would have gotten it wrong!

I am hardly reactionary here, please. I am a western leftist critical of Gurdjieff’s reactionary anti-modernism, and fascist latencies.

I think that Gurdjieff has thrown a lot of things in a bad light, such as the Philokalia. Which is unfair. But everything Gurdjieff touched is now a toxic mess under a new monopoly. His vampire game has delayed beyond reason the emergence of exemplars in his own teaching. He cares nothing about this, and has ditched his own legacy, as he seeks reincarnation (as depicted in his Karnakrocket ship myth) in a new disguise for his next meal.
Study Da Free John here, also, he openly confesses to being a vampire using a transit ashram to restock his energies, discarding his disciples on death, as he moves on.

You cannot use these things safely anymore, because Gurdjieffianity tries to coopt them. You should read the introduction to Bennett’s Dramatic Universe, to see how Bennetf fell in the trap. He had a host of great ideas, and a different source, but his book is now a channel leading to Gurdjieff authority, as if Gurdjieff were in charge of it. That’s grotesque. Bennett’s work might have prospered better in general secular culture. But as Bennett quotes Gurdjieff telling him, you ‘trash’ (he didn’t quite say it) will be useful if it is advertising for ‘me’.
Benntte clearly distoted his vision with its hybrids with Gurdjieff.
What a shame.

So I would warn you, I wouldn’t ever again, touch the philokalia, after the Gurdjieff demons have touched it. It is all a lost garbage dump of ancient and mostly lost gnosticism.
It remains, of course, on one level an historical zone of great interest. But Gurdjieff completely spoiled even the slightest interest I might have in esoteric Orthodox Christian. I have better ways to spend my time.

With Gurdjieff et al. it will all be sufi fried chicken. Be forewarned. Criminals don’t deserve you false reverence.

I think that Bennett explained in his autobiography the source of his own work, in the later thirties or early forties, and this source is not Gurdjieff, hence his friction with Ouspensky.
Bennett seems to have contacted the ‘demiurgic powers’ he speaks of later. In any case, his work should stand by itself, without a Gurdjieff connection. But, of course, he used a lot from Ouspensky in his hybrid, so the damage is done.
His work should be rewritten in a new form, to be the independent work that it was.

I should note that Bennett was in contact with a source of radical spirituality, the force behind the rise of modernity, perhaps, and his correct insights into the rise of democracy and communism, and his ideas about 1848, are signatures of this unknown domain of radical spirits, anathema to the likes of Gurdjieff and vice versa. Bennett unwittingly exposed his liberal views, which have made him unmentionable in reactionary sufis circles.

IN a month with almost no new posts, the traffic increased! The visits to the archives persist.
I think what should be done is to put the material in book form, and/or ebook form.