No readers for DU??
Mr. Bennett on The Dramatic Universe (update 2018:I am glad to repair conflict with Bennett’s son. Bennett’s Du is a remarkable book: I first read the first volume in 1974/5/6? and reached a state of ‘enlightenment’ or superconsciousness that lasted a week: it is the factor of ‘understanding’ in Ouspensky’s sense, although that is misleading, we don’t associate higher consciousness with knowledge but that is not really right. However, I did not understand all the text, to say the least, so the way the text triggered a rise in consciousness is not clear, but a dose of ‘understanding’ is enough, it seems: e.g. reading about ‘will’ in ‘being function will’, one example out of dozens, can come as revelation after so many dull yoga texts. The reason for my entanglement with the text…criticizing the text is like drowning kittens, shudders…but it is necessary to be ruthless)
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. Many large public libraries all over the world have at least the first edition/first volume. that’s thousands of books…
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.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 