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THE CRISIS IN HUMAN AFFAIRS

J.G. BENNETT

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION - 1954

In 1947, when this book was first written, I not seen Gurdjieff for twenty-four years. Throughout that period the study of his ideas, and endeavours to put into practical application his as I had learned them, had been my chief interest in life. I was deeply dissatisfied with the position I had reached; and, although more than ever convinced that the psycho-kinetic process is a reality and that transformation of being from mechanicalness to consciousness can be accomplished by man, I was less than ever confident that I myself had the means to accomplish it. In July 1948, I again met Gurdjieff in Paris. From my first renewed talks with him and with members of a group which had been working with him during and after the War years, I became convinced that he had made a vital step towards making more accessible to Western people the traditional methods of work that have for the most part been lost, even in the Asiatic countries in which they were first applied. I was also able to study in manuscript the written exposition of his ideas, comprising three series of books of which the first series was subsequently published as All and Everything.

In these writings I recognized the consolidation of the position I had studied in outline twenty-five years earlier, and found confirmation of certain conclusions I myself had reached concerning the manner in which the spiritual regeneration of mankind in the New Epoch is to be accomplished. From July, 1948, until Gurdiieff's death on 28th October, 1949, I worked with him as closely as my circumstances allowed. During that brief period of sixteen months Gurdjieff put into my hands means of work that showed me both the cause of my previous failure and the way by which I could now hope to succeed in accomplishing that seemingly impossible transformation of being about which I had written in this book. Since his death five more years have passed, and it is now possible to begin to assess the magnitude of his contribution to the inauguration of the New Epoch. For more than a hundred years new forces have been working in the life of man. Gurdjieff has perhaps been the first to give clear expression to these forces and to bring their mode of operation within the understanding of ordinary people of the Western world.

The transition from one epoch to the next is a process that must occupy several centuries, but its initiation can sometimes be assigned with confidence to a particular moment of time. To me it seems that the seven-year period from 1844 to 185I A.D. marked both the end of the Megalanthropic Epoch and the appearance of these new influences that will be decisive in the life of man.

During those seven years the whole world passed through a spiritual upheaval to which it would be hard to find a precedent. Gurdjieff ascribes such periods to the action of the law

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of Solioonensius, which produces a state of tension sometimes in restricted areas, sometimes throughout the whole world. This tension has the effect of driving men to turn away from their old conditions of life and to look for something new. It was during the period 1844-51 that the United States of America occupied Texas, waged war on Mexico and laid the foundations of her present greatness. In the Far East, China was passing through the Tai Ping revolution. In Europe, in 1849, the hopes raised at Vienna were shattered in that outburst of revolutionary fervour which came very near to destroying forever the established world order.

No outward connection can be traced between these events, nor can any common cause be suggested. Their coincidence must therefore be attributed either to mere chance or to a general unrest that could be the first stirring of a new spiritual awakening. The latter interpretation would not be convincing had we only the evidence of the visible political history of the world. When, however, we look more closely into the inner life of man, we see that many new movements, that at the time had little apparent significance or visible connection the one with the other, were initiated during the heptad of years 1844-5 I. We can recognize all over the world a strong urge to go beyond the divergencies of creeds and practices and to get away from the old ways of life.

In these years several prophets appeared on earth. In most cases their doctrines were an obvious syncretism and their new faiths little more than a combination of old creeds. In China, the Tai Ping movement was initiated by Hung Hsiu Ch'uan who, as a result of ecstatic visions, was led to combine the Christian and the Taoist revelations and proclaim a new religion. In Persia, Mirza Ali Muhammed of Shiraz proclaimed himself the Bab, or Gateway, and in the years 1844-50 founded the religion subsequently known as Bahaism. In India, the Brahmosamj was moving towards a Christian-Hindu syncretism, and in 1851 Ramakrishna Paramhansa experienced in Calcutta his first revelations.

In Europe, there arose a true prophet of the new epoch, Sren Kierkegaard who laid the foundations of modern Existentialism and whose principal writings were published during this period. The great but abortive conception of universal Communism was launched with the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Spiritualism, a movement destined to exceed all these others in the number of its adherents and to provide a substitute for the old religions especially among the laboring classes of the West had in 1848, its first almost unnoticed beginnings in the spirit communications to the Fox family in Hydesville, New York state.

Many important scientific discoveries made in the middle of the I9th century have played a decisive part in changing the direction of human thought. One of the most important of these concerns the relationship between matter and energy. It was in 1849 that James Prescott Joule presented to the Royal Society the memoir that finally established the principle of Conservation that led to the realization that everything that exists is composed of energy in one or another form. One year later the remarkable intellectual movement of Evolutionism, that was to dominate both natural science and philosophy for the next hundred years and to disrupt

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Christianity, made its first great impact on the world with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.

The common factor in all these trends apparently so diverse in character is the search for a new kind of unity: not that of the philosophical absolute of the previous epoch, but rather that of an organic wholeness, later to be combined with the conception of universal relativity. The seven years of spiritual upheaval did not do much to change the course of visib1e history, but they were the outward signs of the entry into human life of a new spiritual force that is not yet fully made manifest.

The century from I850-1950 shows all the indications of a transitional period during which mankind was moving into a new epoch, understanding neither what was being left behind nor what lay ahead. The megalanthropic fallacy had ceased to be tenable either in thought or in practice, yet men continued to live as if human values and human interests alone required their consideration. We can see that, by the time of Gurdjieff's death in 1949, the consequences of the megalanthropic delusion had brought mankind to the verge of ruin: those who were best qualified to judge fully expected the outbreak of a third world war. The tensions that existed, not only between the great powers of the East and the West, but also on many subsidiary but nevertheless important fronts, were perhaps even sharper than those that were present in 19 14 or 1939, and the habit -of man always to find himself and his own party in the right was never more absurdly exemplified than in the attitude of the different great powers towards one another. But war did not break out and has not yet done so.

My own view, expressed in'the last chapter of this book, that a catastrophic end to the Iv1egalanthropic Epoch \vas inevitable, was modified by conversations with Gurdjieff and especially by one that took place about a fortnight before his death. He then said that by all logical reasoning a disastrous war between East and 'Yest appeared to be inevitable, but that a new force was at work of which people could not yet be aware. He added that since the future is always unpredictable nothing could be guaranteed, but that there were grounds for the hope that mankind would yet be spared the lesson of near extinction.

'Ye must recognize that incalculable dangers lie behind the forces now at the disposal of Governments, not only in the means of material destruction, but also and even more perhaps, in the weapons of mass suggestion, propaganda and state organization. There is no indication that the statesmen of any country will or can display the wisdom, the tolerance and the capacity for self-denial that the removal of these dangers requires. Nevertheless, events are moving in a way that is more favourable than we have any right to expect, and it may be that the transition to the new epoch will be accomplished without a great catastrophe that would destroy the major part of what man has achieved.

If this peaceful transition is to occur, it can do so only through a fundamental change in the attitude of man towards the fact of his own existence. In Chapter 2. I have discussed the fallacy of cosmological megalanthropism. It is necessary to go further and realize that man must not only know, but also be thoroughly convinced, that all existence is inter-dependent. Absolutism,

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individualism, isolationism, exclusivism are names that cover those tendencies by which in the past man has been set against man, class against class, nation against nation, creed against creed, "truth' against 'truth', In the final chapter I wrote that the master-idea of the new epoch had not appeared, but affirmed that it must express a radical departure from the old conception of man as the centre of the universe. Gurdjieff's doctrine of the reciprocal maintenance of everything that exists, which he calls the Trogoautoegocrat, is, if not itself the master-idea, at any rate one of the most significant conceptions that have been formulated since the new epoch began. I have given only partial expression to it in the present book, and hope to do so more adequately in The Dramatic Universe. To realize that everything that exists depends upon the support of other existences and, in. its turn, serves to maintain yet others, is to understand the reason for man's existence on the earth, and the nature of the task that he has to fulfil. It means a radical departure from the humanistic outlook of the past epoch, whether inclined towards atheism, in the sense of believing that man exists only to serve himself, or towards theism, in the sense of ascribing his creation to the inscrutable purposes of a God who does not really need him.

When we come to see that we men exist on the earth to serve a very definite but at the same time a very limited purpose in the transformation of energy by which the universal economy is maintained, we shall be led to a complete change in our attitude towards the data of natural science, the speculations of philosophy, and towards all former religious beliefs and political theories. This change will come about, not by the action of one supremely gifted individual nor by collective violence of any kind, but through the sharing of experience on the part of thousands of people in every country, and of every race, who are able to respond to the forces of the new epoch. The children of the new epoch are those who can accept the principle that our own particular 'truth' is not the only truth, and that our 'way' is not the only way; and who, moreover, realize that no one man can 'do' anything alone, but that we need in our enterprises the help of our fellows and also the guidance of a consciousness able to penetrate more deeply into the needs of the universe than we ourselves can.

The ability to perceive the relationship of our own personal existence to the greater needs of the world to which we belong is called by Gurdjieff the 'Sacred Impulse of Divine Conscience', and I have no doubt that a right understanding of the role of Conscience in human life will be the master-idea that will regenerate the spiritual existence of mankind.

Passivity that is, lack of initiative both in thought and in action is a malaise characteristic of our present time. The great majority of people in all parts of the world have become much too dependent upon authority, rely too much upon external agencies to stimulate them into action and upon outward activities to occupy their interest and attention. We are passing through a period of passivity, disguised by the desperate busyness with which people engage in outward affairs but that conceals, nevertheless, an apathy that goes deeply into the roots of our present life. Such apathy and the bewilderment that accompanies it are the inevitable consequences of the forms of thought by which man has lived for thousands of years. People do not know how to think nor where to look for succour, and so they are carried along, unresistingly, by the stream of events.

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To understand that we have a task to perform on the earth, and to see for ourselves something of the consequences of neglecting this task, is to have recognized the new direction that human striving must take. But we must admit that such a realization strikes at the very root of the conceptions by which we have lived in the past and still live today. In the coming years the forces of the new epoch will make an increasing impact upon every human discipline and every phase of life: upon science, philosophy, art and religion, upon the manner on which man will order his everyday life. To a discerning eye these influences are already making themselves apparent in the growth of relativism as a guiding conception in natural science; in the desperate search of the artist for liberation from absolute forms; in the perception that religion must take account of the nature of man as it finds him; in the understanding that there are no final or perfect social structures or modes of life by which man can hope to live in security. Closely connected with relativism is the understanding that there can be no final or absolute authority, no centre of force from which the directive of human life can radiate. We are accustomed to centrifugal authority; that is, an oligarchical structure in which the many are dominated by the few. We can scarcely picture to ourselves a mode of life in which the initiative comes from the many thus enabling the few to act only as guides or counselors. I have referred briefly to this in Chapter 12 as the eternal rle of schools. Since that chapter was written I have had the opportunity to study more closely the form of organization that Gurdjieff was bringing into existence to enable men and women to work together for the attainment of the aim and the fulfilment of the task of their existence. I have seen from this the immense significance of group work in the life of man, and of the possibility of creating in common a force that is directed towards a centre rather than of submitting to the operation of a force directed outwards from a centre.

Although it is only in Gurdjieff's teaching and practice that I have seen the principles of group and school work convincingly exemplified, we must recognize that the tendency towards group activity is making itself felt in all departments of human life. We are beginning to think in new ways; we shall before long begin to behave in new ways. To give form to these new impulses, new ideas must enter, and I am convinced that the recognition of the universal significance of energy and of its conservation through all its changes in space and time, will lead also to the acceptance of the doctrine of reciprocal maintenance and with it of the true meaning of the existence of man upon earth. This, in its turn, will compel people to seek he1p and guidance in the process of transformation by which they can discover their own Conscience and with that discovery begin once again to accomplish, as befits men worthy of the name, the task for which they were created.

LONDON.

JUNE I954.

THE CRISIS IN HUMAN AFFAIRSJ.G. BENNETTPREFACE TO THIRD EDITION - 1954