Soul, psyche and homo sapiens, being function will…Gurdjieff’s anti-democracy and growling about ‘dirty dogs’
The critiques of Gurdjieff’s comsology are important but as we noted in the previous post, the issue can be tricky. Gurdjieff uncovered the significance of samkhya and much of his teaching is a pastiche of samkhya (which is inself a pastiche of some unknown source).
His speculations on cosmology are something different and here after yesterday’s account which was favorable I would more or less agree with the critics of his cosmology but with some caveats. The issue is clarified by Bennett: the triad of being function will installs will as a fundamental component of the universe and the triad(s) as in essence factors of the will. It is worthwhile (essential) to read Schopenhauer here: one has to wonder at how Bennett obtained his unique insight into will, the triad, etc…The echo of Schopenhauer is stunning. And irony of ironies Bennett downscales the will to a plan component in a realist context, in part because of Whitehead, or so I suspect. In Schopenhauer the will is an aspect of the noumenal, or the thing in itself. To borrow from Schopenhauer and not preserve that issue is a suspicious botch.
Bennett isn’t really spiritual at all, ok, and perhaps his approach at some point can bear fruit.
The point here lost to all parties, critics and fans, is that Gurdjieff’s cosmology makes much better sense using schopenhauer (who would gasp at the though) because the cosmic bodies as Bennett sensed (from gurdjieff) are a mystery. But once we see that the will is not psychological will power but the Will in nature we realize that the ‘will’ in this sense is very close conceptually to the idea of scientific law! especially at its lower end. Next, to be alive and show will are different things. Look at Bennett’s triad: life and consciousness are in the being aspect, while the will is independent of life. Next we get will guesses in Gurdjieff/Bennett, but the Bennett versions sends the suggestion that cosmic bodies are somewhere better scientific law and the Will in Nature. I will say, boob or not, but the hint is cosmic bodies stage life as entities of will, but are not alive. The endless mistakes and confusions here are thus easily clarified, but only is we could take any of it seriously. But the ‘will’ aspect of cosmic bodies actually makes sense. some variant of this is what drove Gurdjieff to his speculations, which in a way have undermined the usefulness of his teaching (if he has one) with ideas about food for the moon etc…
The material on Kundabuffer is especially frustrating, because it is not clear what this has to do with kundalini, and in any case the the whole thing tends to freeze students in place because they are dealing with incorrect or incomplete information. Gurdjieff was not nice. To have left thousands in path limbo with garbage in/out versions of his garbled system seems not to have bothered him. Keeping the disciple/peasants confused their whole life seems again to have left him indifferent: they would perish like dirty dogs in any case, reserve his real teaching in some super concealed fashion.
By this account further human beings are the object of indifferent contempt by cosmic (angelic) entities who would be destroyed psychologically by the kundabuffer implant. Nice guys, quite moral. mass murder is not beneath them. Gurdjieff was no democrat and the demos was the object of his contempt and they were condemned to soulless life and death as ‘dirty dogs’.
But the material on the ‘soul’ is provocative. Is it true that the multitude has no soul. Our books here uncover one aspect of what Gurdjieff was talking about with the idea of the ‘soul seed plexus’ implant which is a real technique of a very small minority of sufis, the very worst sufis. Ordinary good men are cashiered into oblivion while the potential demons among men are to get souls. Crazy, worse than crazy. But the problem here is also that as Bennett notes man as homo erectus then homo sapiens acquires a soul in just this passage (whose scientific history remains murky at best). Man as a species being has a soul in some sense. In some ways that simply refers to the complex nature of man as homo sapiens where speciation involved ‘mind, language, intelligence, self-consciousness, aesthetic intuitions and art craft, moral abstractions, and much else’. The soul is the larger container of this psyche/mind complex that appears in human speciation. So man does/does not have a soul. In some sense then man as man has some king of amateur club member ‘soul’ as his vehicle through a passage of lives on the way to realizing that potential in some fashion, as a ‘complete man’. It would seem obvious as very brim stone preacher has fulminated that average dagwood joes are in danger of falling into oblivion losing what soul they have and, will, the whole perish like a dirty dog bit. The relationship of this to the ‘soul’ factor hidden in sufism and probably known by Gurdjieff is unclear, but if gurdjieff thinks you are a dirty dog you should reverse charges,flip the bird toward afghanistan where the worst sufi villains abide (go see the movie The Man Who Would Be King, an unwititng silly parody of hidden sufis).
Those who preach sermons agains man fail to realize he has never been given correct information, and that a real spiritual psychology is undermined by the bigwigs of estoeric oulala.
I recommend a study of the eonic effect: a dimension of world history is totally lost on these spiritual types. Man has a path of sorts in the ordinary drama of history and its possibilities. Man cannot be condemned for not having a soul any than not having a mind or potential consciousness. I fail to grasp the malevolent demonic of Gurdjieff and his ilk, and he of course freely confessed to being a devil.
I suspect the answer is that man as man has a very simple soul structure as a superset of his mind and that this vehicle offers a line for reincarnations that sooner of later can wear out, or an opportunity thrown away.
In any case everything Gurdjieff said remains useless because the information is useless or incomplete.
We have posted this essay without endorsement, but even as a critic of Gurdjieff I find this critique (although useful) inadequate. We have addressed these issues already many times in various blog…
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 