This post was supposed to be at The Gurdjieff Con, but I pulled a fast one and put it here…
Modern biology can’t do justice to the human ‘organism’/being: the issue of the will is the lost chord of the human mystery. The monotheistic religions, or perhaps at least christianity did address the question but in what seems like a negative way now: the will of man was to be subjected to the will of god. The whole scheme was a misunderstanding and has produced a lot of confusion.
But the issue of ‘will’ remains. Bennett’s book is the only that seems have any understanding of the subject. The void is being filled with the truly atrocious bum steers of figures like Aleister Crowley for whom the ‘will’ is the path to witchcraft. \
Be lucky enough to have never taken up Crowelyanity.
The invocation of the will is closely related to issues of enlightenment, the latter as it were the ‘path of being’ while the path of ‘will’ is related, but somehow even deeper. Don’t use Crowley: treat the path of will like the path of being…meditation… You cannot quite separate the two.
The real subject we can see was related to the Samkhya and in Bennett triads and the factor of will are related, remarkable, if true. Still, the subject remains obscure. However a sense of will, however ‘primitive’ is part of our species makeup. The will as will power or ‘willing’ as egoic is a sort of veil for something deeper. The ‘will’ is almost never, perhaps never, experienced in ordinary consciousness, but we can sometimes intersect with its effects. Almost every man alive has produced a miracle at least once in his life, as if by accident: it ain’t a christ monopoly. Such moments shows the unconscious stirring of the will, perhaps. The christian view may be a degeneration of something deep: the ‘will’ might be a part of a larger something, like atman and brahman. But the ‘will’ has an aspect for every individual: like the signature of each unique person.
It can help to read Schopenhauer, who influenced Bennett: the will as ego is not the same as the Will (in Nature) as the ‘thing in itself’ beside the phenomenon, the egoic will which is a kind of feckless idiot. But Schopenhauer seems to violate his own caution: do we know the ‘will’ is as the ‘thing in itself’, as unknowable?
It is pretty hard to see how the idea of ‘evolution’ by natural selection can work here, to say the least:…but any other explanation will also suffer difficulties…
The title: note how we sometime say unconscious to mean conscious, and vice versa…
The will and being may be related, but aren’t the same: if you sit in meditation you sense ‘being’, but if you act in motion it seems like ‘will’.
But clearly the two are related: to sit doing nothing is a form of will by definition and maybe vice versa…
I have tried several times to elucidate some portion of Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe. I am always afraid that even dealing with the book will wreck my reputation…But…
Source: The once and future mysterious legacy of Samkhya… – The Gurdjieff Con
Darwiniana 