Bennett, Conscience, and Progressive Revelation

In response to the first comment, I don’t see how Bennett “denigrates” Gurdjieff here in any way, but clearly he is standing on his own and offering his own “experiment.”

My own comments spring from an almost life-long (I’m now 65) respect for the Fourth Way and for Bennett’s work, but also from a certain dissatisfaction with some of its premises in view of my equally long experience within the Baha’i world community. The two have been the two “wings” of my inner life and have always strengthened and corrected one another. We need both an individual and a group basis on which to move toward solving human problems and caring for the future. Bennett in essence gives only the individual basis. It is this gap in his overall treatment of the human situation that I wish to highlight here.

Bennett deals in this lecture with effective human individual self-change as the key to expressing any genuine and sincere care for the future, but he seems systematically to miss the connectedness of the individual to the other living systems in which the individual is embedded—which is ironic given the emphasis of The Dramatic Universe and of Gurdjieff on interdependence and “reciprocal maintenance.”

Rightly, he looks beyond the Western psychological tradition of individual psychoanalysis to traditions in Africa and Asia that have preserved deeper methods of self-change. He mentions or hints at specific techniques and teachers, including Gurdjieff, who have made efforts to bring these self-change techniques to the West.

Strangely, however, although he talks of specific techniques, he never mentions the technique of simply immersing oneself in the Word of God and working with others in accordance with it. Although he believes in God, and in the notion of revelation, he never here asks the obvious question of whether God has renewed His revealed Word for the globalized age that we are now living in and will continue increasingly to live in. His whole approach seems to take for granted that such a thing has not happened.

But the question of whether it has or has not happened is a vital question in its own right. The answer profoundly impacts the self-consistency of any so-called “spiritual approach” to solving the world’s problems.

The question needs to be posed straightforwardly and at least tentatively and conditionally answered to the best of our current ability with ascertainable historical evidence. What are the criteria we need to look for in sifting the evidence available?

If, for example, we account the transformative lives and missions of Jesus and/or Muhammad as “from God,” we can and surely need to ask whether this same human/Deity relationship has happened in connection with any other individual since those revelations. Who has made a claim to being the vessel of Revelation, and what has he or she produced in support of this claim?

If evidence points to a “yes” for renewed Revelation, as the Baha’i community would affirm, then we need to examine and heed what that revelation has to offer to us in terms of cooperatively and scientifically solving world problems.

If not, if the evidence points to no new Revelation, then we should feel free to experiment on our own, but, at the same time, we should feel the need to face and answer the next obvious question, namely, whether and why a “real God” would leave humanity without real renewed and detailed guidance at the most vital and crucial turning point in its history.

Can we seriously force ourselves to believe that the fragmentary account of the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament or the teachings given to a people of warring tribes in medieval Saudi Arabia are the exact same teachings that God would utter today were He to speak to us again as citizens of a global society?

To place limits on what a “real God” can do is morally extremely dangerous and in fact is one of the root causes of the “human egoism” that Bennett so often rails against here and in other places.

Let us just say, for the moment, that human egoism arises in some sense from our own self-attachment and from our denial of God and of His selfless, transcendental love for the Creation and humanity.

If this be true, then something must be quite obvious. Namely, if the historical record of the great effective religions of humanity is in fact a record of God’s own repeatedly renewed and rejuvenated attempts to guide us to Him and His ways of love, then for us to deny the validity any of His attempts, or to consign them all to the past, is profoundly wrong, short-sighted, and egoistic. It inverts God into the tribal deity we all instinctively reject.

Is it not equally obvious that if the “real God” has acted, reasonably enough, in the recent past to guide humanity through this “crisis” in its evolution and we are in fact ignoring this guidance, then we are in a profoundly wrong position, with our own egoism at the wheel of our ship?

Rather than asking and answering these basic questions as the way forward to solving human problems, Bennett here relies, in line with the Fourth Way tradition, on the ultimate technique of re-uncovering the “individual conscience” as the way forward.

But what guarantee is there that this raw, untrained individual organ of conscience, by itself and with all the cultural conditioning that surrounds it, is sufficient to produce a successful global society?

Bennett takes the “organ of conscience” as a given thing, unchanging, able to know without further ado “what is right.” He never seems to question whether the “conscience” of individuals inculcated by God’s Word as given in the past is adequate for the conscience needed and called for by God to create a global, sustainable social and ecological future in the world of today.

If it is the Word of God that tells us, ultimately, what is right, and if we and our organ of conscience are not in touch with that Word, how can we expect our conscience to function properly?

If that Word is given progressively in accord with humanity’s historically progressive capacity to embody it, how can we think that a conscience in tune with what was given in the past is the same conscience that God intends for us now?

Bennett takes the path of working from the atomic individual “up” to the social framework, not from the renewed Divine Will for humanity “downward” to the socially and economically embedded individual and group.

Ideally, in my opinion, the two techniques should point to and reciprocally reinforce one another, for if science and our current politics in the US tell us anything, it is that groups and individuals are interdependent in their behavior, and then when group dynamics get corrupted, we need to search for new overall patterns and methods of self-government at both the individual and the group levels. If this is true at the national level, then how much more true in the context of global self-government!

We need to break from the past, with all its corrupted dynamics. The Baha’i scriptures and the Baha’i global/local community supply a sacred context for such a break. They have their own patterns and methods of self-government. They offer a pattern of life including individual prayer and reflection in which we become able to lift our inner being up to its vision of perfection—what the Fourth Way calls the higher emotional center. They also offer a spiritualizing method of “objective mentation” and of decision-making. But they also offer all this in the context of a centrally coordinated global plan of action and network of groups for developing and strengthening the emotional and intellectual bonds of Earth Community.

Some additional comments.

First, Bennett uncharacteristically talks here in dualistic terms of a “spiritual reality” that is seemingly apart from the “material” reality accessible through our senses and “the mind.” This is not his usual approach based on Gurdjieff's relativistic material energy-ism.

Second, Bennett speaks of a large-scale “spiritual action” taking place in the world.. Yet he does not connect the dots and talk about what form this “action from the Other Side” might most centrally be taking, although Scriptures universally do this.

Third, Bennett also has a really rather disturbing and distorted view of “human rights.” He speaks here very denigratingly of the notion that human beings have a “right” to something. He wants to “do away” with this notion. It has "long since served its purpose."

His error consists in wrongly equating the notion of human rights with the notion of individuals asserting their own human egoism and “my right.” The real notion of human rights and human dignity, however, is one of service and justice to others.

Specifying human rights gives society a standard of justice and a platform on which each of us can stand up not just for ourselves but also for one another in global solidarity and fairness. On what basis can Bennett conceive of justice and fairness if not the framework of equal treatment of individuals in equal circumstances?

He rightly condemns the exaggerated notion that we “have a right” to do what we can physically do and get away with, e.g., British colonialism, but he wrongly equates this distortion of the notion of human rights with the essence of the human rights doctrine. This is not only short-sighted but dangerous in permitting, in theory, an authoritarian basis for dictating social function.

 John Dale, 2012-01-14, jtd359@yahoo.com

Bennet here speaks about some very important things, but it seems to me that he denigrates G. I. Gurdjieff, as if he were just an example of something, rather than the foremost proponent of it, and at the same time making of himself someone of an equal stature og function.