09.26.08
Reinventing the sacred: Classical Samkhya
A post at The Gurdjieff Con on the ancient evolutionary psychology of Samkhya, The ‘will’ and the ‘Will’.
Scientists are often baffled by the opposition of fundamentalists. It is partly because they have allowed themselves to sandbank inside the worldview of scientism, which closes their perceptions off from contact from the cultural history of world civilization.
Science, as is so evident in the dogmatism of the Darwin paradigm, has become insular, and a kind of blindsidedness has left them unable to see why reductionism is doomed to fail. Into that void, alarmingly, rushes the least helpful of all substitutes, fundamentalist religion.
There is a clever way out of this, a strategy I am sure science won’t take, but one that could be an object of study by scientific individuals willing to give themselves a cold shower shock at the nearly incredible ‘engineered ignorance’ of modern scientific psychology. Science needs some courageous individuals to lead the way out of the ostrich world now dominant.
The classical Samkhya is useful because it attempted to create a neutral ‘pidgin spiritual talk’, so to speak, with a non-theistic, ‘materialistic’ so-called spiritual psychology. It bypassed the spiritual/material distinction, in fact, and spoke in terms of a set of triadic manifestations and their levels. This ancient Indic tradition is obscure now, and the key has been lost. But its invisible influence has been great, and, further, it has been ripped off repeatedly, and transmogrified into a theistic system, most outrageously.
The New Age writer J.G. Bennett rediscovered some of the secret entrance ways to the Samkhya mystery, and produced an outlandish, but significant, rendition, again without acknowledgement, and again transmorgrified with some theistic packaging.
Lo and behold you discover that Schopenhauer (and Kant behind him) was stumbling on the clue to the secret entranceway, and Bennett’s false crystallization of that philosopher’s notions of ‘will’ nonetheless show one good way of making the obscure Samkhya suddenly intuitive, in one possible interpretation.
The point here is that scientific culture is going to bleed to death if it can’t adjust to the legacy of greater religious/cultural history to produce some kind of real advance. It is just not going to happen that the New Atheists with Dawkins on a white horse are going to deliver us from religious tradition.
Samkhya is not a belief system, and is as metaphysical as anything else, but its map of the general framework of ‘spiritual’ psychologies can highlight where one-dimensional science is going wrong.