The Eighth Dynamic and the Third Force

The Eighth Dynamic and the Third Force

[The forecast for Wednesday has already been posted.]

It may seem peculiar that I am spending so much time musing on the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky "System" in that Ouspensky himself rejected it at the end of his life. 

But those touched by that "System" and its method seem to be touched by it permanently. To spend a few months trying to "wake up" and "stop being mechanical" and "observe yourself" and "remember yourself" and on and on has strong effects. I believe I was fortunate to be trying to do that, when I studied the System mostly through Ouspensky's book The Fourth Way, not with a personal teacher or despot such as Gurdjieff but on my own. There have been many individuals and groups who have set up "Fourth Way" Schools or groups, but the ones I briefly investigated seemed tainted by the egoism of their leaders. There can be sadism-masochism when one or a few are trying to "train" the others to "stop being machines" and so on. It can be ugly. It's not for me. 

But it occurs to me that something in the air, in the atmosphere of the earth, in the 1930s and 1940s was favorable to Gurdjieff's "System" and that those who were attracted to him and to Ouspensky needed it for some reason. Perhaps it was William James's "moral equivalent of war" for the mostly well-off individuals who became Gurdjieff's clients (or slaves if you will). (He required a thousand rubles as a down payment.) They felt that their lives were too easy, perhaps, and that they were in fact "sleeping" spiritually. But rather than the discipline and training of the churches, at that time considered boring and unfashionable by their like, they gravitated to a strong accomplished masterful man who dominated them, and they liked it. It strikes me that that is what was going on in much more perverse and horrid because involuntary ways in Russia (bolshevism), in Germany, and almost everywhere during the Second World War and the years leading up to it. It was a "holocaust" not only for the Nazis' victims but for many others in usually a smaller way.  In a treatise I wrote on the decades of the twentieth century I called it the "formidable forties." 

And then, quite amazingly, after World War II, in 1947, Gurdjieff, his health failing, repudiated Gurjieff's "System." He had had enough, as the world had had enough of warfare. Gurfjieff had some strange theories about the war--that it was caused by the planets and their configurations. He was a fatalist when it came to humanity as a whole and his pseudo-scientific or scientistic "System" included a lot of stuff about the multiple "laws" which governed humanity until it could "wake up" and become less "mechanical." He did not blame anybody in particular for the wars, but the planets and the mechanical nature of all things for those who have not yet awakened (all but a tiny tiny minority). That is a fatalism which is foreign to me, and my brand of astrology has nothing to do with it. It is the ethical failures of human beings which are responsible for cruelty and war. If the planetary configurations seem to contribute to the problem, that is only because human beings are not mature enough to live through such configurations without going out of kilter and killing one another. That can change, and not by people following G's "System" but by following the reality of the example of Christ Jesus, for example.

The relations of Ouspensky to Christianity are interesting. He comes off sometimes as almost an esoteric Christian in the way he writes. But that would be a topic for a book rather than these few paragraphs. However, one of his chief disciples, Maurice Nicoll, was an esoteric Christian and his books, I have been given to understand, combine Fourth Way teachings with esoteric Christiantity. I really want to get my hands on them and see what they are all about.

Gary Lachman reports that Ouspensky often repeated the Lord's Prayer over and over, as part of his efforts to "wake up." 

Rodney Collin, a disciple of Ouspensky's who was very close to him in the final months of his life, driving with him all over England (while Ouspensky was drinking heavily I believe), is well worth reading. I am working with his book The Theory of Conscious Harmony. He wrote it after Ouspensky had passed from this world but it is filled with Fourth Way and Ouspenskiian teaching. Collin has his own voice, however. He reports that at one point Ouspensky said to him that after doing all one can--to become conscious, to be a real self with real will, to achieve all the aims of the System--one sometimes just has to--Collin reports Ousppensky as just throwing his hands up to heaven, imploring Someone or Something for help. 

That would go along with another teaching Collin reports, that there are three "forces." One is the mechanical force of cause-and-effect in which we are all entangled, which makes us nothing but unconscious machines (who imagine they are conscious). That is "second force." First force is the labor or effort to be conscious, to be something other than a machine. This would be a force only those working with the System would ever be able to use. But there is a Third Force which, as Collin descirbes it, seems to me to correspond with Divine Grace. It is a gift. It is something that helps one spiritually, something one did not earn by one's heroic efforts alone. 

And there, if you will, G*d enters the System. (Although, for anyone who understands the word it has to be said that the System is and always was something within G*d, if it exists at all. And Ouspensky said, "There is no System.")

Another founder of a pseudo-scientific system for training human beings toward higher consciousness, L. Ron Hubbard, identified G*d with "the eighth dynamic" (something greater than the other seven) and said, "Scientology does not invade the eighth dynamic." That was wise of him.

--HHH

Tuesday, March 21, 2017  10:00 PM