08.05.09
Archive: Ouspensky on evolution
archive: March 13, 2006
After a post on Gurdjieff I got a question about Ouspensky and evolution. Below is a quote from A Secret History of Consciousness, by Gary Lachman.
Warning: be very careful of these people, their claims, and the innuendo they give out that since they are ‘esoteric’ they have all the answers. BULLSHIT.
Note that Gurdjieff was very cagey here, and said very little, probably because the reality behind claims for sufis, gurus, and adepts was known to him directly and he could see they were a crock. A bunch of occult crooks aren’t supermen in the style of Nietzsche. What on earth are these people doing falling for Nietzsche??? They arent’ smart enough to figure out Kant (not true of Ouspensky) who scares them for that reason. Note the point.
The guru Rajneesh achieved enlightenment in his teens. But had to take a University course to learn something so he could have something to teach! Not quite the style of an overman. To surpass man as man would be a big thing, far beyond mere Buddhahood.
These people would be more helpful if they simply were themselves, and stopped their shenanigans that have corrupted these traditions.
Don’t fall in the trap of being mesmerized by the propaganda of these people, all too often concocted by their disciples. The tactics are to make people think they must submit to others to gain the key to their ‘evolution’. It can be a pitiful con.
In fact, not even enlightened Buddhas have the key to evolution. They have changed ancient terminologies in many cases to New Age lingo, ‘self-evolution’, as a spiritual evolution. The confusion of terms is not helpful. We have no evidence that this is connected to the general evolution of man.
Ouspensky confuses the issue here. It is true that ‘conscious self-evolution’ has to be individual, but all that means is that man can live up to the potential nature gave him, and gave to men universally. To decline into a mechanical consciousness and the work to repair that is good psychological self-maintenance (we do it all the time) but can we call that evolution. This issue of self-consciousness is very important, but the confusion with evolution is puzzling.
Man’s latent potential is universal, it is an aspect of his species being (a term from Feuerbach, and Marx? since Ouspensky so dislikes socialists). Step down a peg. To say this arose from some race of early superapes who became man is baloney. Man emerged as a species with unique features. We simply don’t know how that happened. Please note that Enlightened men are nervous on this question. They ought to know all that, but they don’t.
In all fairness, New Agers correctly grasp that Darwin’s theory couldn’t possibly be right. Alfred Wallace snapped out of it too.
Ouspensky’s Nietzscheanism, and antidemocratic bias is tasteless, reactionary, and for it to be packaged as some esoteric truth is the height of impudence. Even a cursory glance at the structure/history of Buddhism shows the double process at work: individual attainment becomes connected to general being, as with the Bodhissatwas.
The idea some grotesque Nietzschean thug is going to become superman and exterminate the rest is unconsciously present in this votile mix of stupid thinking, and it is simply paranoid nonsense, not spirituality. The crime wave among sufis created by Nietzsche is a sign it has long since fallen into decline. Stay away from these idiots.
That a man like Gurdjieff lets Ouspensky say all this without comment, exploits it to attract mass followers, just shows he is the usual cunning sufi shark. They know a thing or two, and can create stupefaction in the gullible, but the idea they are supermen is such stupidity it is amazing. Occultists, so far from being supermen, are more like Faust, next stop Hell. The ordinary fellow who resists Faustian temptations looks less impressive, but, like Frodo the hobbit, has to carry the idea.
The future evolution of man is as yet unknown, and the same is obviously true of the emergence of anatomically modern man.
Lest anyone try to challenge spiritual democracy let us note that it is a fait accompli. Every case of homo sapiens has the same potential as every other, and this didn’t happen through the Nietzschean grotesquerie that Ouspensky and so many other intellectuals of that generation fell for as some kind of esoteric path.
The powers and attainments of yogis are real, but they are not evidence of supermen. Bullshit. That they should snobbishly think so just discredits them. Most of these gurus are a bunch of hidebound windbags corrupted by millennia of enforcing the laws of caste. They wouldn’t have a clue to the real evolution of man, or the evolutionary significance of democracy.
Ouspensky’s ideas on the “superman” and the “new race” are collected in his remarkable chapter “Superman” in A New Model of the Universe and in the final chapter of Tertium Organum, where he engages in an extended discussion of Bucke’s theories.
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Here there is talk of “cosmic consciousness” and other mystical
states. But with Ouspensky’s superman, a new perception on the evolution of consciousness enters the picture. Like Orage, Ouspensky was a Nietzschean; and, like Bergson, he has many doubts about the adequacy of the Darwinian version of evolution. His Nietzscheanism appears in his denial of Bucke’s democratic vision that cosmic consciousness is a natural, more or less automatic or inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process and that over time it will produce an entire humanity possessing the new consciousness in the way it now possesses self-consciousness. In contrast, Ouspensky argues that the appearance of the new consciousness is not part of the general “development” of humanity. It is limited to individuals-not, it must be made clear, by any outside authority, but by their own interests and values. Any evolution of consciousness must be achieved through our own efforts, chiefly through the development of a culture that encourages and nourishes the new consciousness: in contrast to what Ouspensky saw as the philistinism and barbarism then prevalent in Western civilization. Ouspensky had none of Bucke’s ebullient optimism about the immediate future, and, as his “Letters From Russia” show, he viewed socialism as a central evil, a levelling of all values to the
lowest common denominator, more or less sanctioning philistinism as the norm. By today’s standards, Ouspensky was definitely not politically correct.
The other criticism he makes of Bucke is that he leaves out the possibility that evolution may operate through several independent streams or strains simultaneously. For Ouspensky, evolution may make many detours, sudden starts and stops, and changes of direction. He argues that the paleontological record does not reveal a neat, orderly progression from “primitive” forms to us; rather it tells a story of abrupt jumps, leaps, and “sports.” It portrays the rapid appearance and disappearance of forms and cannot be understood as depicting a stately “ascent” from earlier organisms to twentieth-century humanity. For Ouspensky, evolution is not the single, orderly, unbroken process of development it is usually understood to be. It is rather a series of different, varying experiments carried out by what he calls the Great Laboratory. Each of these experiments aims at creating a being that can be self-evolving, no longer dependent on the submerged consciousness of the species or race ,for its direction, but capable of independent action and thought. So far, the only experiment that can be considered in any way successful in this direction is the human being. As with Bergson it is the human being that carries within itself the greatest potential for freedom and novelty. That potential, however, will not be actualized automatically.