Changing Ourselves to Change the Future
A public talk delivered by George Bennett
on November 15th, 2009
The title of this talk should be self-explanatory. It implies that any change or progress we may aspire to for ourselves, the human race or the planet as a whole, will have to start with us as individuals. But even if you immediately see some sense in this, it is not an obvious or widespread opinion. People of all political persuasions generally believe that if only governments pursue the right policies, human problems can be solved. And yet, just to take an example of this country, we have seen in the past few years two presidents of radically differing persuasions each struggling to enact the platforms they were elected on.
In any case the solutions being offered are, by and large, of the same kind as the ones that have come and gone before. Governments around the world are straining every sinew to return their countries to growth, but even if they succeed, where will this lead in the coming century, or even in our own lifetimes? It’s nearly forty years since the Club of Rome published the report entitled ‘Limits to Growth’, which underscored the self-evident fact that we live in a finite world, with finite resources. All attempts to ‘grow’ our way out of our difficulties would, therefore be doomed to failure in the long term.
We generally want other people to change; we are much less prepared to make any serious change in ourselves. We may think we want the government to pass laws that will bring events back under control but we are not prepared to entertain the sacrifices any effective legislation would entail. Take, for example, our attitude to gas prices. We can all see that it would be good to consume less gas; the planet would benefit and so would we. But when the gas price drops, as it did last fall, we all rejoice. I can see in myself the conflict between my understanding that we need to burn less fossil fuel, and my personal relief that the gas price had halved. The summer before, I was urgently looking at ways to buy a more fuel-efficient car; now the urgency has gone, and I am back to excusing myself for my useful little gas-guzzler. We can probably all recognize this kind of discrepancy between what we know to be necessary, and what we are prepared to do about it.
This simple, but by no means trivial, example is an indication that the real crisis in front of us is a crisis of people. For centuries we have become accustomed to the idea that what we are able to take for ourselves, we are entitled to take. I can afford more food than I need, so I buy as much as I want. I can afford to drive an inefficient car, so why shouldn’t I have one? We don’t see this as a matter of satisfying our own egoism, we see it as exercising a natural right.
How has this come about? To understand the answer, let us look back about 2500 years, to the emergence of the idea that has come to dominate the period since then. Before about 4-500BCE, the predominant understanding was that the life of individuals did not matter; that only the favored few - rulers, priests and mythological demigods - had any rights, or any aspirations to transformation or even fulfillment in this life. Ordinary people’s lives were of little account and they could even be massacred in large numbers if it suited the needs of the favored few.
Then came a few people such as the Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao Tzu and the Greek philosophers, who put forward the idea that all individuals have a value, and a right to exist. This notion gradually took hold and became the dominant idea of the two and half millennia since then. However, the idea that the individual has value has brought with it the assertion that the individual has rights and this has gradually metamorphosed into the supposition that we have the right to possess whatever we are able to take. We might even hope that all people in the world should enjoy the same right to take more than they need, but it is now becoming increasingly clear that this attitude, applied collectively on an overpopulated planet, is going to lead to disaster.
The Russian-Greek philosopher George Gurdjieff foresaw this crisis, in some form, as early as a century ago. Gurdjieff lived from 1877 until 1949 and from his early youth he occupied himself with the question of what is the purpose and significance of life on Earth and of human life particular. To find an answer to these questions he journeyed all over the Middle East, Central Asia, Tibet and Africa in search of sources of wisdom, and effective techniques for human transformation. From about 1915 he began to share what he had discovered with groups of people in St Petersburg and Moscow in Russia.
In psychological terms, Gurdjieff’s central message was that we people are asleep; that what we take to be conscious activity, directed by our own will, is in fact nothing but a series of reactions to external stimuli of all kinds. Those who are in positions of power are unable to do even what is obviously needed, because neither they nor the people they govern are anything more than machines that can behave only as they are conditioned to do. Because we are asleep we don’t see the reality of our situation, either personally or on a larger scale. And even if we do have a glimpse of reality, we are too much asleep to do anything useful about it.
This description may sound grim, and it was quite revolutionary when Gurdjieff first started sharing his ideas with others nearly a century ago. Since then, however such notions have become more mainstream, not least because the past century has seen a succession of disasters that no amount of good-willed people or organizations have been able to prevent.
And Gurdjieff’s message would, indeed, be grim if that was all there was to it. Instead, however, he held out the possibility that people can be transformed; that it is possible for us to be in contact with our own will, and even to become free of the external influences which normally affect and direct our behavior. To this end, Gurdjieff maintained that it is possible for us to be in contact with what he called Objective Conscience. By ‘objective’ he meant independent of an externally imposed morality or our tendency to be ruled and motivated by like and dislike, pride, fear of the opinion of others, and so on. This Objective Conscience is able to see what is needed at any moment, and can act as the spur towards right action. It is not difficult to see that if people were able to live according to such a conscience, the world would start to look very different.
In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Gurdjieff, with a number of his pupils, left Moscow and settled for a time in the Caucasus, before conditions there obliged him to move to the west, which he did. He traveled first to Constantinople and finally, settled at Fontainebleau, near Paris. Here he set up a teaching community, under the title of The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. This title was a reference to the fact that our education and training are almost exclusively concerned with our functional nature and are usually out of balance. We over-emphasize the development of the thinking brain, adopt a fairly crude attitude to the development of the body, and largely leave the emotions to fend for themselves. Gurdjieff strove to set up conditions in which all three centers – mental, emotional and physical – could develop in harmony.
But he was also concerned with other aspects of our nature apart from these functional centers. In order to have contact with our own will – what Gurdjieff called our real ‘I’ – it is necessary to develop ‘Being’. Such ‘being’ was described by one of Gurdjieff’s senior pupils – Madame Ouspensky, who came with him from Russia – as ‘what we are able to bear’. Our level of being affects how much our will is able to be in effective contact with our functions. The development of being depends on certain conditions and know-how. It requires persistence, first to see ourselves as we truly are, and then to be able do anything at all about our situation. Gurdjieff tried a variety of experiments to set up the appropriate conditions for this aspect of human transformation.
Owing to a near-fatal automobile accident in 1924, Gurdjieff was obliged to abandon his experimental institute and to resort to writing as a way of transmitting his teaching. His writing, which appeared as three ‘series’ under the overall title of ‘All & Everything’ is dominated by his magnum opus, the first series of his writings, entitled Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson – an Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man. This 1250-page book includes a staggering amount of information, disguised in an unconventional and almost impenetrable prose. It is hard work to read but the results are very rewarding and constantly surprising.
Apart from his writing, Gurdjieff continued to the end of his life to teach students in groups and, following the end of the Second World War, he was in contact with hundreds of people from all over the world, and particularly in this country. He developed a wide range of methods and practices for personal transformation. Over several decades his pupils worked with these methods and verified their effectiveness for themselves. One of the most prominent of these was the English scientist and philosopher JG Bennett.
Bennett first met Gurdjieff in Constantinople in 1920. Although he was only a young man of twenty-three, Bennett had an unduly influential position in the intelligence arm of the British army of occupation in Turkey, following the First World War, thanks to his fluency in Turkish. This fluency was of an inestimable advantage in his conversations with Gurdjieff, who was himself a fluent Turkish speaker.
Bennett had been convinced, following an ‘out-of-body’ experience when he was wounded and in a coma, in the First World War, that there is in people ‘something’ that can exist independently of the body. His contact with Gurdjieff further convinced him that Gurdjieff had an understanding of human transformation that was not only deep but also practical. When Bennett returned to Europe, he spent a few weeks with Gurdjieff at his institute at Fontainebleau in 1923.
Bennett left Fontainebleau but continued to study for many years with one of Gurdjieff’s most prominent students, PD Ouspensky. Bennett himself was not only an exceptional thinker but also a gifted linguist, and he studied a wide variety of spiritual traditions while adopting a successful career as a scientist and technologist in the field of coal research.
In 1948, Bennett resumed contact with Gurdjieff and worked with him until Gurdjieff’s death in 1949. Meanwhile, from 1946 to 1966, he ran his own research institute, dedicated to making a synthesis between eastern spiritual traditions and western scientific thought. Bennett and his institute worked with Gurdjieff’s teaching in particular, and researched the effectiveness of the spiritual practices he had introduced. The key to these methods is that they are practical and can be developed in our ordinary lives. Our everyday experience is the source of information about ourselves and it is also the arena in which we can work on our own transformation.
In 1971, Bennett set up a school near Oxford, in England. At this school, in a series of ten-month courses, Bennett shared the results of his own researches with about a hundred students at a time. Bennett modeled his Academy, as he called it, on Gurdjieff’s institute at Fontainebleau, but brought to this model his own personal understanding.
Although both Gurdjieff and Bennett were concerned with personal transformation, this was only part of the picture. They were both convinced that we people are on this planet to serve a purpose. Gurdjieff described this as the ‘spiritualisation’ of the planet, Bennett put it in terms of serving the future of mankind and of the planet as a whole. What they both saw, and what Bennett stated explicitly, was that a change is coming in human nature in the next five hundred to a thousand years, and we have to start preparing for it now.
This requires a change of thinking. Just as the idea of individual human value began to emerge two and a half thousand years ago, and became the dominant idea of that epoch, we are now at the threshold of a new era in which cooperation will be the key. Bennett called it the ‘synergic’ epoch. People will have to learn to cooperate with each other and to cooperate with what he called ‘the Higher Powers’ or perhaps Nature herself. Instead of seeing the Earth as the servant of human purposes, we will have to learn how to cooperate with each other and, as individuals and a race, with the purposes of the Biosphere. We need to become the servant of Nature, and not treat Nature as the servant of humanity.
We are used to thinking of the human race as fully developed, as the end product of the evolutionary process. We rarely think of our race as a work in progress, with much still needed in the way of evolution. Partly that’s because, as a species, we are rather pleased with ourselves, and partly it’s a question of scale. We are not accustomed to taking the future seriously, not even the relatively short-term future of the next thousand years. At best we wonder whether we can avert disaster in the timeframe of one or two generations.
However, when we do start to think in a longer time-scale we can begin to see that a greater change is possible; that there is the possibility, as well as the need, for an evolution in humanity. Imagine a race of people who lived according to Conscience and who were able to see their individual interests as secondary to the needs of others, and those of the whole biosphere. The world would look very different and its potential for further evolution would be enormous.
Is this a practical proposition, or is it simply a fanciful theory? Both Gurdjieff and Bennett presented complex cosmologies that ascribed a purpose to life in general and to human life in particular. Gurdjieff’s All & Everything is a monumental attempt to put human experience in a terrestrial and cosmic perspective. Bennett’s own presentation, in his four-volume Dramatic Universe, is concerned to construct a descriptive framework that can encompass all aspects of human knowledge and experience, both scientific, in the world of fact, and spiritual, in the world of value. Both expositions emphasized that humanity has a role to play in the evolution of the world.
It was in this context that they were concerned with developing and verifying practical methods of human transformation. This begins with self-knowledge. Before we can begin to change we need to know, from persistent and careful self-observation, exactly who and what we are. At the same time, methods and practices are needed to help awaken Conscience in us, to free us from slavery to likes and dislikes, the impulses that derive from our own egoism, and the effect of external influences that come to us at random.
I myself attended the third of Bennett’s ten-month courses, in 1973-4. Since then, and in cooperation with other people around the world who have had contact with these ideas and practices, many of us have worked together in seminars, communities and groups. We have seen for ourselves that what we were taught, if worked on, can be effective. It is possible, little by little, to develop the inner strength to deal with difficulties impartially, and find a certain degree of detachment from random influences from outside ourselves. Above all, we have found that it is possible, by practice, to begin to awaken conscience and have this as a guiding principle in our lives.
None of this is easy, but it is possible. Take a simple example. Suppose we set ourselves the task for one single day of replacing habitual negative comments with positive ones. We quickly see that it’s much easier to say we’ll do this, than actually to put the plan into effect. We have to start by noticing the occasions of negativity when they arise. Most of the time the best that happens is that we notice these moments only when it is already too late to do anything about them. The trick is to see it in the moment. Only then do we have the possibility of doing something. That’s where the change of attitude comes in. We have to be prepared, to have in front of us a determination that when we see the opportunity, we will be positive, or act positively, and not add to the negativity we find around us.
I have chosen the example of working with our own negativity because, if we look at ourselves impartially, we can see that our moods and emotional states vary from moment to moment, as we react to events, people or situations that please or displease us. And yet there has never been a greater need for emotional maturity, an emotional stability that usually eludes us, in the face of the growing forces of negativity that surround us.
Our educational system is at its worst when it comes to preparing people in terms of their emotional nature. Children are rarely taught to accept each other. They are, at best, shown how to avoid reacting to each other. Moreover, we teach our children, and accept as adults, that it is perfectly normal to be governed by what we like and dislike, and to pursue the former and avoid the latter. But if we are going to face conditions in the future that, to put it mildly, we don’t like, how are we to manage if we have no experience with accepting the petty dislikes in our everyday lives here and now?
We need to be able to rely on our emotions not to fly in all directions under pressure. The way we are currently ‘educated’ is little help in replacing such fragility with a reliable emotional nature. And by this I don’t mean a buttoned-down, stiff-upper-lip approach to life; a risk-free, joyless existence. On the contrary, I mean an understanding that there are feelings we can consider as objective, not dependent on outside stimuli, and that these are incomparably more reliable, and often more joyful, than the reactions we habitually accept in their place.
It’s not enough to wish for change, to wish to serve the future. We have to be able to change, and for that we need know-how and practice. For more than a decade after JG Bennett died in 1974 practical courses along the lines he established were offered at Claymont, a community in West Virginia. But for the past dozen or so years no such course has been available. That is why a group of us, from around the world, decided to set up an experimental three-month course to see if anything useful could be shared in that time. The first of these was in Royalston, in central Massachusetts, in the fall of 2006, and we are making further experiments along these lines, starting next summer, with a six-week intensive in June and July.
We have found that what is impossible for an individual may become possible for a group working together. Conditions can be arranged in which people can try these practices and see for themselves whether they are effective. Experiment and verification are necessary; it’s no good trying to effect an internal change by blindly following external instructions. What can be useful, however, is to be shown methods that we can verify, and accept or reject, according to our own experience with them. Part of the solution to our problems is technical and these techniques and practices have to be learned.
And what has this to do with the future? How can the work of individual people, even working in groups to help each other, serve the future of humanity and the planet as a whole? It’s because only change within ourselves will have a lasting effect on the way we develop as individuals and as a race. Only by an inner transformation is it possible for us to come under the influence of our own conscience, and not the so-called ‘conscience’ that is just a conditioned response to local social rules. It is possible to envision a new era of cooperation between people but with a higher purpose of serving the development of humanity and our planet in the future.
But for that world to grow, we have to sow the seeds now. Just as the idea of individual human value began as a small idea, so too will the master idea of the ‘synergic epoch’ – cooperation between people, and cooperation with a higher purpose than our own. We have to take seriously the idea that we have a responsibility to the future, and look for ways in which we can serve it by the way we live our own lives in the present.
Indeed, we have to expand our idea of what we mean by ‘present’. If we keep something of the future in our present attention we can contribute to creating that future. It’s partly a matter of know-how and partly a matter of intention. Are we concerned with serving the future in a positive way, as best we can, or are we going to batten down the hatches and hope for the best? If we are interested in changing the future, we can be effective only by changing ourselves. And if we do wish to serve the future there is, as they say, no time like the present. We need to develop the necessary tools for our own transformation, and we need to start doing it now.