Two strains in Bennett
The previous posts show the significance of Bennett’s basic model in The Dramatic Universe, but unfortunately the overall corpus is a confusing mixture of (at least) two things: his outline of the dodecad, and the Gurdjieff ideas of the law of three and law of seven.
It took me a long time to realize that the two models are different, not really compatible and yet overlaid in most of his books, especially Deeper Man. The law of seven he was never able to explicate, noone else either.
That makes me reluctant to use any of his material. I just don’t want to see Gurdjieff thugs strong arm their way into a usage of Bennet by claiming that is Gurdjieff material, and attacking independent thinkers as outsiders. As we can see much of Bennett’s thinking springs from Whitehead, and from the independent spiritual experience he appears to have had in the late thirties, which led to a conflict with Ouspensky. I am not sure of this part of the history, but it is clear that much of The Dramatic Universe is original material that is not in any of Gurdjieff’s work. And dropped hints about ‘demiurgic powers’ and the birth of communism (and Bahai) in the new age ca. 1848 jolts him totally out of the Sufi/Gurdjieff stream. \
The material in DU is still not out of the woods, and the attempted use of his own variant of the law of three creates a hybrid, that is very insightful but perhpas logically unsound. Anyway, the way is clear to a better usage of Bennett outside of the Gurdjieff framework, whose usage, like Faust with Mephistopheles, is dangerous, and subject to ‘sufi copyright violation’, i.e. psychic murder.
Maybe just say goodbye to all of it, and reconstruct Bennett’s material outside of his systematics.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 