Systems and law of 3,7??
Another comment from Daisy
It doesn’t help me at all that the “laws of 3 and 7″ are deducible from n-term system theory, since I don’t understand n-term system theory, and given how many times I have had people try and fail to explain it to me, now suspect the problem is with Systematics, not with me after all.
What pressing mysteries do the “systems” explain? What is the difference between a “system” and an “objective law”? What is a “system” and what is an “objective law” according to Bennett?
My suspicion is that all of Systematics is a promising insight which is ultimately empty; and that Bennett, with his famously strong will, not un-augmented by a certain amount of pride, never allowed the original idea to gracefully die off.
Daisy is quite right here: systematics is almost a parody of the type of mathematics abstraction you see in the literature of various fields of modern math.
That doesn’t make it wrong, but the false mystique doesn’t do beans for the law of seven or law of three. And the connection to music is equally obscure.
The orginal idea, mentioned in passing by Ouspensky, referred to the ordinal number mysticism whereby the counting integers took on a kind of cosmic significance.
Bennett is, ironically, to be commended for taking all these ideas that sounded so impressive in Ouspensky (quoting Gurdjieff) and working them out. With results that we can see: dubious at best.
Still, I am severely critical, but not totally rejecting of Bennett’s ideas.
But the whole thing lacks the solid foundation needed to proceed.
It is an old problem! The law of three is really the same old junk about dialectic, in which Hegel, then Marx became experts of confusion, and/or the non-dual muddle of Vedanticists.
In the final analysis, this thinking goes back a long way (witness the Samkhya), and it is possible we are confronted with decayed versions of an original that has been lost.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 