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A new concept of GodSummaryTranscript
The difference between a teaching that tells you how you should be, how you should behave and how you should believe, and how things happen, because, from the 15th and 16th centuries on, the contradiction between these two appears and grows and grows and grows. So, by the end of the 19th century, we have this very paradoxical situation, where there is almost a concretization of belief systems in the Western world at the same time that there is this gigantic expansion of scientific enterprise.
Keith Buzzell [hereafter KB]: One aspect that isn’t found in the most of what I could bring up to discuss about the Great Traditions is, first of all, very, little discussion, from any kind of objective or scientific perspective, of how things happen. This has been a major thrust for the last 300 years. Most especially since the middle of the 19th century, where how things happen, the process of how things happen, became increasingly potent instruments that came out of scientific investigation.
George I. Gurdjieff clearly understood that if we are going to have a new concept of God, that new concept had to include how do things happen? How does the world govern itself? How do all these things carry on? These are very, very straightforward questions. They are not prophetic teachings in the sense that, “Thou shalt obey this and do this,” and so forth–not like that at all. There is a totally different concept that Gurdjieff is intent on bringing forth. That’s what I understand as the new concept of God. It is a concept that is, from some perspectives, totally at odds with all prior concepts. Yet, at the same time, it is a magnificent reconciliation of exactly those things that come from and were emphasized in the Great Traditions, that were pointing always, always to the reality of our inner world and to the necessity of us coming more and more to live in that inner world or from that inner world–what Gurdjieff referred to as the world of the true consciousness, the world of relationship and the world of being open to all living things and in appropriate relationship to them. This is very much a Buddhist thought.
So, they had to incorporate that and take the how things happen into consideration with how we should be. I think that this is one of the great paradoxes that we see recurring throughout history–the difference between a teaching that tells you how you should be, how you should behave and how you should believe, and how things happen, because, from the 15th and 16th centuries on, the contradiction between these two appears and grows and grows and grows. So, by the end of the 19th century, we have this very paradoxical situation, where there is almost a concretization of belief systems in the Western world at the same time that there is this gigantic expansion of scientific enterprise. With the discoveries of Maxwell and Darwin and the late 19th century physicists; the discovery of radioactivity, x-rays and, finally, the quantum mechanical perspective that emerges in the very early part of this century, they introduce incontrovertible clashes with established perspectives from a spiritual point of view. Gurdjieff confronts this, in a kind of semi-humorous but very serious fashion, when he talks about the old Jew with a comb in his pocket as being the anthropomorphized vision of God that many of the Great Traditions carry into the present time–that God, for these people, is like an old Jew with a comb in his pocket. In other words, it is this very limited, restrictive, anthropomorphized vision of a great being, who is directing you or who does things in the Universe with no concern, within that conception, of how things happen. And Gurdjieff was clearly aware, he was very widely read in all of the scientific literature of the late 19th and early 20th century, and the indications for the future are very clear – science and spirituality must be brought into reconciliation.
If there is going to be a reconciliation and a reintroduction of truly spiritual themes into the life of Man, so that transformation becomes a real possibility, then you have to take all of this into account; you cannot not do that.
So, that’s why I feel, as I mentioned, in the early days that get so well reflected in P.D. Ouspensky in Search. (In Search of the Miraculous) He talks about digestion in a very straightforward way and a very meaningful way, meaningful in the scientific sense. You can follow it along and say, oh yeah, you’ve got to have enzymes to do this, and they’ve got to do this in the stomach and then the small intestine. Then things have to get into the bloodstream, and then you have to breathe.”
All of this was a ‘how to,’ but blended into an aim that says the human body, with its three brains, has three foods, essentially. Because each of them is of a more refined character when it enters the body, those three foods have the possibility of carrying that refined-ness, if you will, to a very high level.
Here, Gurdjieff is beginning to move, and you can see in his discussions of this that he is beginning to build a bridge over into the world of the spirit, the inner world of true emotion, of conscience and reason, and so forth. He is opening a route in that direction by speaking about the three foods. Then he says very, very directly that the process in the digestion of these three foods–the lawful processes that join them all together–are exactly the same, in principle. They all move in a certain step-wise progression, with certain kinds of changes that are characteristic in all three octaves. So, if you know the laws–and this is another principle of Gurdjieff–if you know the laws in one world, and you know them well, then you can apply those principles to other worlds and learn a great deal. This is part of the reconciliation. He speaks about, for instance, that Okidanokh, or the great energies, empowers the creation and maintenance and interaction of everything in the Universe, almost everything, and is a part of the creation of most of the phenomena that occur. These are all automatic energy expressions. They are immutable by physical law. These are laws of physics. Nobody gets out of that box; we’re all stuck in the box of physical relationships and so forth and so on.
Given that, Gurdjieff comes along and puts forward what, on the surface, seems like a very contradictory thing. He says, in order to perfect oneself spiritually, or to “build a higher body,” as he puts it; in order to do that, you have to utilize the higher energies; you have to take them and make them work for you. So, he is directly joining the “how to,” the process of mechanical, automatic law, with all the energies that are involved in that. And, he says we must make proper use all of these energies in order to build these higher bodies.
So, suddenly, there is this world of process, of automatic, lawful, physical process, and he’s got it linked to the highest potential attainments of Man. And both of these are all God. This is all a new concept of God. So, from an anthropomorphized old Jew with a comb in his pocket, we suddenly see that, in Gurdjieff’s perspective, his Whim, that God disappears as any kind of anthropomorphized singularity and begins to take on a completely different measure.
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A new concept of GodSummaryTranscript
The difference between a teaching that tells you how you should be, how you should behave and how you should believe, and how things happen, because, from the 15th and 16th centuries on, the contradiction between these two appears and grows and grows and grows. So, by the end of the 19th century, we have this very paradoxical situation, where there is almost a concretization of belief systems in the Western world at the same time that there is this gigantic expansion of scientific enterprise.