12.04.08

J.G. Bennett and Samkhya’s evolutionary psychology

Posted in Booknotes at 5:05 pm by nemo

Comment from James on More 0n The Thinker J.G. Bennett

James said,
December 1, 2008 at 10:19 pm ·
I took a look at the book at the library tonight and I have to say that the experience was like seeing a UFO.

Bennett’s book can generate that kind of feeling. We spend all our time in a limited set of ideas (e.g. the sterile science/religion debate), so it comes as a shock to consider how much we are missing. Things unimagined appear at a fast pace in Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe. After a while, however, the limitations of his thinking become clear.
The reason for my preoccupation lies in the way he got enough things right to make reading him useful, and in any case he at least made an effort to deal with issues never addressed either by religionists or scientists.

I must be wary of seeming to promote this book, because it could be like selling alcohol to Indians with its strain of metaphysical extravagance. Who’s to read this book? New Agers couldn’t handle it: they would if they bothered at all wreck it with metaphysical delusion.
But, perhaps, Bennett considered that the effort was worth the risk and would at least mention the unmentioned issues factored out of our mindspace. Our condition is desperate: we are one to four degrees or levels distant from our real selves, even if able to sudden snap into it, and four to six (who knows) from the deep source behind those selves and their hopeless struggles with ‘will’ in the samsaric realm. In that context we talk gibberish about ‘god’, think neuroscience proves man is a robot, and actually do exist as robots despite our real potential. Small wonder the organized desperation of the ancient buddhists. The idea of redemption arose in that context to consider that man needs help. But as with current Christianity the whole idea has been corrupted into a hopeless mess of bad theology. Of no help whatsoever. And the swarm of gurus is not far behind. In fact, Bennett’s work is a way to pull rank on all these spiritual authorities who are ignorant, because it shows a higher logic they obviously know nothing of. Bennett’s work can be helpful to those stuck in Christian conditioning, make them snap out of the complacency that Jesus is going to appear from heaven to save them, an irresponsible notion for any religion to promote.

The point of Samkhya, nonetheless, is that you can detect the depth of your self in your ordinary experience, and begin to move inward from there. The effort is up to the individual and requires understanding, and teachers who don’t lie and deceive with PR theologies.

If you read his spiritual psychology framework you can be struck by the attempt to really address the issues with the right level of complexity. Such a thing is non-existent in the Sahara desert of current reductionist scientism which can’t even handle Kant, what to say of the complexities of self-consciousness, the matrix of self in its manifold octaves or registers of depth. Bennett got one thing right: the complexities of self, will, and consciousness require a connection to all the issues of time and relativity. It is really complicated, and beyond our current understanding.

As noted, part of the reason for the interest in his formulation, if only to critique it, is its connection with the ancient evolutionary psychology of Samkhya which propelled a host of yogis to a clarity that enabled their realization. Such a thing is non-existent in modern society, hence my relaxation of standards with respect to Bennett’s attempt to climb the North Face.
Having momentarily reconsidered this work, which I had set aside years ago as a lost cause, I am still at a loss at how to rescue any portion of it for current consumption. A pity since the shock of seeing oneself being enclosed in a box by modern science (your sense of seeing a UFO) can be a healthy one.

Science is doing its job, pursuing the causal line of analysis in all directions. It is a set of research programs. But what does it add up to at this point? Not enough to renew culture or evaluate man’s historical evolution (a point the eonic effect makes clear). So we are cast out on our own resources. And that is a treacherous venture. Bennett can’t resolve that perilous passage, but if you can maintain a Kantian reserve, and consider his stupendous vision momentarily in the mind’s eye, and then move on, the result can be salutary.
The book has many liabilities, among them Bennett’s truly fascinating but somehow unacceptable ‘gnostic design’ argument with the idea of the ‘demiurge’, that would ironically give the ID people a run for their money, and another electric shock to biologists, whose account of the descent of man is even worse science fiction than Bennett’s. This, and other aspects of his book, are likely to cause so much confusion (I tend to disregard them in pursuit of the Samkhya strain) as to make reading his book counterproductive. Still the idea that hyper-conscious beings constructed from light waves can exists in a cosmic framework beyond selfhood and are entangled in the drama of evolution, is a thesis I can’t refute, or even call crackpot (in Bennett’s relativistic version), nor prove, even as it easily explains of host of obscurities about evolution. I have to part ways with Bennett here, and my assessment of this is that it is a bridge too far, and blurs at the edges. But the point remains that the evolution of man is not a Darwinian process, and involves questions, as Wallace realized, about the latent human potential of man that man cannot even contact easily in himself, let alone explain with natural selection.

In any case Bennett’s work represents a hope that man in secular society can arrive at an evolutionary psychology that will really assist his development, and free him at once from the delusions of scientism, the entrapment of Christianity, or the svengali exploitations of the guru swarm (who hate a man like Bennett because he tries to give the game away, and doesn’t reject the potential of modern socity).

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