Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Spring 2021  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 109:2, pg 2

Soon after I first suggested that we do an issue on Ecology, it became clear to me that I was not thinking of the term in its usual sense.

The environmental crisis is grave, and its size and degree would be hard to overstate. But there is comparatively little we at Quest can say about this subject. Very likely we have no more access to information about it than you do. The only thing left would be sermonizing, which is usually tiresome and counterproductive.

Instead I was thinking of ecology in a deeper sense—our interrelation with the world and the universe, not merely in biological terms, but in light of the unseen realms. Hence we have retitled this issue as “The Ecology of Spirit.”

In this issue’s Viewpoint, Barbara Hebert discusses ecology in this sense. If we grant that there is an astral realm—a realm of thoughts, forms, and images that is no less real than the physical one—we have to consider how we may be polluting it. Many people are generating extraordinary amounts of emotional toxic waste, and they are by no means limited to any one sector of the ideological continuum. As often happens, people employ the abuses of the other side to pardon their own.

The backdrop of the environmental crisis is the materialistic worldview—the belief that nothing exists except for what can be apprehended with the five familiar senses (augmented by certain apparatus); beyond that, there is nothing.

This worldview is cracking, to judge by the many news stories about quantum physicists suggesting that consciousness rather than matter is the ground of the universe. But materialism is still the default intellectual habit.

For the last two centuries, the materialistic worldview has been used to justify exploitation of nature. Over the last fifty years, as the ecological crisis has become more and more acute, some in the intellectual world have taken another tack: instead of regarding the earth and all therein as merely a set of “natural resources” to be used at our whim, some worry whether the human race is itself a cancer on nature and whether the planet would be better off without us.

What, then, are we supposed to do? Kill ourselves off as a matter of principle? The world was shocked by the mass suicides of cultists like the People’s Temple and Heaven’s Gate, which were recognized as instances of collective madness. Sacrificing the human race to save the earth comes across as still more insane.

 This issue contains an article of mine on G.I. Gurdjieff’s view of what might be called astral ecology . In his colossal work Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, he suggests that humans exist as means of generating certain forces that are necessary for the care and feeding of the cosmos. These forces are generated, says Gurdjieff, by the “conscious labors and intentional suffering” of people working toward self-perfection. If we do not strive for perfection in this way, these forces will be extracted from us regardless—through death on a mass scale. Gurdjieff suggests that war exists as a side-effect of the collective failure of humanity to perfect itself.

 These ideas may seem outlandish, but at least they provide some explanation for war, which has been a consistent feature of human history even though everybody professes to hate it.

For my part, I neither endorse nor reject Gurdjieff’s views (although they have some flavor of truth about them). But I think there is reason to believe in the traditional sacred ternary of the Chinese: heaven, earth, and man (or humanity if you prefer). We are the only beings that we know of who are capable of consciously uniting heaven and earth—that is, the visible and unseen realms. I believe that is very close to our function as a species on this planet.

Our failure to live up to this task has had the most grievous consequences. In the first place, it leads to a distorted valuation of the material realm as the whole of reality rather than a mere part of it. In the second place, at some level we realize that we have not been doing the job that we were put here to do, leading to the anomie, dissociation, depression, alienation, and anxiety that are practically universal in the present-day world. In the third place, our failure to fulfill our role in the subtle ecology of the planet may be doing more harm than all of the fluorocarbons and fossil fuels put together, in ways that we have not imagined.

In short—yes, the human race is responsible for cleaning up the environmental mess that it has made. But I don’t believe that’s enough. Doing no harm (or undoing the harm that one has done) is only a part of a complete ethical program. We must also embrace a positive role for ourselves, and it is not one that can be cooked up as a mere placeholder. It must be genuine.

 What, then, does it mean to unite heaven and earth? Are there techniques for it? Meditations? Rituals? Many of these no doubt serve such a purpose, but I don’t see it as my place to tell readers what they might be. Nonetheless, I do believe that if we take this cosmic union as an objective in our lives, the means will be given to us.

Richard Smoley

           

           

           

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Printed in the  Spring 2021  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Gurdjieff and Ecology: The Astral Ecosphere in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson" Quest 109:2, pg 34-39

By Richard Smoley 

The human connection with nature is one of the chief themes of esotericism. As soon as we grant that nature is alive, we are faced with the question of how we are to relate to it. Is it beneficent, inimical, or (as secular thought often suggests) merely indifferent?

Just as it became fashionable over the last generation to speak of a hermeneutics of suspicion, it may be possible to speak of an esotericism of suspicion. Rather than seeing the universe as the creation of a benevolent God, this position would regard it as fraught with ambiguous supernatural forces that do not necessarily have the best interests of humanity in mind.

Today we tend to associate this view with that of the Gnostics, but it is hardly a new one, nor is it limited to the Gnostics. In fact what used to be called “natural religion” contained a heavy dose of this perspective. We need only look back at the literature of classical antiquity, with its capricious and irritable gods who are all too willing to visit their wrath on humanity for the slightest offense, to appreciate this fact.

At first glance, the teachings of G I. Gurdjieff (1866?–1949), the enigmatic and paradoxical Greco-Armenian sage who was both one of the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth centuries and one of its most accomplished tricksters, would seem part of this esotericism of suspicion. This is particularly true for those who know him chiefly through In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of a Forgotten Teaching by Gurdjieff’s student P.D. Ouspensky (1878–1947). Although this book was published posthumously in 1949, it was written much earlier and paints a portrait of Gurdjieff and his work from 1915 to 1924, the years when Ouspensky worked with him. Ouspensky broke with Gurdjieff in January 1924, although he continued to visit him until 1930 (Webb, 379–84).

At one point in Ouspensky’s narrative, Gurdjieff tells a strange parable about a magician who is perplexed by a flock of disobedient sheep. “This magician was very mean,” says Gurdjieff. “He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence around the pasture where the sheep were grazing.” The sheep kept running away, “for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.”

The magician hit upon an expedient. He hypnotized the sheep into thinking “that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them.” (Personally I can no longer read the Twenty-third Psalm without having this parable come to mind.) “After this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.

“This tale is a very good illustration of man’s position,” Gurdjieff ominously adds (Ouspensky, 219). The ideas here are intimately bound up with one of his most famous teachings, that of the sleep of man: the idea that our allegedly waking life is in fact a low-grade hypnotic stupor. “A modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies,” Gurdjieff contends (Ouspensky, 66). This sleep is the result of kundalini, which, in his view, is not the coiled serpent power at the base of the spine, as many Eastern mystics teach, but “the power of imagination, the power of fantasy, which takes the place of a real function” (Ouspensky, 220; emphasis in quotes is in the original). This power of imagination, which Gurdjieff practically never understands in a positive sense, constitutes the sleep of man.

What, then, is this sleep for? What are we sheep going to be skinned for? The moon. The moon occupies a strange and crucial place in Gurdjieff’s cosmology. Contrary to contemporary science (and to some other esoteric systems, such as Theosophy: The Secret Doctrine, 1:155–57), he does not regard it as a dead shard of a planet. Instead, he claims, it is a “growing end of the branch” of the ray of creation, which proceeds in a lawful series of steps from the Absolute down through the galaxies and suns down through our own earth to reach its culmination, at least for the time being, in the moon.

Because the moon is a growing planet that may someday become like earth, it requires food. The energy passing down through the cosmos is gathered on its behalf in a “huge accumulator situated on the earth’s surface.” This accumulator is organic life on earth, of which we humans are a part. “Everything living on the earth,” says Gurdjieff, “people, animals, plants, is food for the moon. The moon could not exist without organic life on earth, any more than organic life on earth could exist without the moon.” Human awakening is “liberation from the moon” (Ouspensky, 85).

Here we can see the analogy with the parable of the magician and the sheep. Our “flesh and skins”—that is, certain cosmic vibrations emitted by organic life—are required in order to feed the moon. We are little more than livestock waiting in a planet-sized feedlot until we are sent to the slaughterhouse. We have been hypnotized into a waking sleep so that we will not realize our true situation. “One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position,” Gurdjieff says (Ouspensky, 219).

Elsewhere in Ouspensky’s book Gurdjieff states that the project of evolution goes against this natural process of feeding the moon. (Gurdjieff means evolution not in the Darwinian sense but in the sense of human awakening and spiritual liberation.) “The evolution of humanity beyond a certain point, or, to speak correctly, above a certain percentage, would be fatal for the moon. The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity. . . . If all men were to become too intelligent they would not want to be eaten by the moon. . . . Nature does not need this evolution and does not want it.” Our only chance for success, according to Gurdjieff, is due to the fact that the cosmic feeding cycle is so enormous that a few individuals can slip by, just as “the presence or absence of one cell will change nothing in the life of the body” (Ouspensky, 57–58).

Such is Gurdjieff’s position as outlined by Ouspensky. Most sources indicate that Ouspensky’s book is a faithful record of Gurdjieff’s teaching and that Gurdjieff himself approved it soon after Ouspensky’s death in 1947. Gurdjieff’s own groups would occasionally read from In Search of the Miraculous in the last years of Gurdjieff’s life (Bennett, 205).

Nevertheless, Ouspensky’s account of Gurdjieff’s teaching differs in at least one major respect from that of Gurdjieff’s own as expressed in his magnum opus, All and Everything, First Series: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Written mostly during the 1920s, it contains a lengthy and fantastic account of human origins and history, all designed with one motive in mind: “to destroy mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world” (Gurdjieff, v).

In this book Beelzebub is not a devil but a senior member of the cosmic hierarchy, returning from a long exile for a certain unspecified infraction of divine law. The exile was to a remote and inhospitable location: our solar system. From this vantage point Beelzebub, whose lifespan enormously exceeds our own, has been able to observe, and occasionally visit, planet earth, with its singularly unfortunate “three-brained beings”—the human race, who view everything “topsy-turvy” (Gurdjieff, 88). The bulk of this 1200-page narrative consists of Beelzebub’s discussion of our hapless race with his grandson Hassein, who is accompanying him on the return voyage.

Beelzebub tells Hassein that the current plight of our race began with a cosmic accident. During the formation of our solar system, a comet known as Kondoor was due to pass through the orbit of the nascent earth. Unfortunately, “as a result of the erroneous calculations of a certain Sacred Individual concerned with the matters of World-creation and World-maintenance,” this comet collided with the earth, so that “two large fragments were broken off from the planet earth and flew into space” (Gurdjieff, 82). These are our moon and another, smaller moon, unknown to us but which Beelzebub calls “Anulios.” The two fragments did not fly far and were drawn into the orbit of our planet. To prevent further disturbances, the cosmic authorities deemed it necessary that these fragments should stay in the earth’s orbit and that the earth “should constantly send to its detached fragments, for their maintenance, the sacred vibration ‘askokin’” (Gurdjieff, 84).

 Here I should say something about Gurdjieff’s terminology in Beelzebub’s Tales. The book is peppered with curious and almost unpronounceable words like “askokin,” “Heptaparaparshinokh,” and “Ikriltazkakra.” These were Gurdjieff’s creations, coined as portmanteau words from roots taken from the dozen or so languages he knew. Sometimes the roots are easily discerned: “Heptaparaparshinokh”—the “Law of Sevenfoldness” (Gurdjieff, 470)—is derived partly from the Greek hepta, or seven. (Greek was Gurdjieff’s first language.) In other, perhaps most, cases, the origins of these terms are hard to determine, although I suspect that anyone who knew the same languages that Gurdjieff did would be able to decipher most of these words.

In any event, the moon and its unknown sister, Anulios, have been broken off, and the earth has to send vibrations of the mysterious askokin to maintain them. Here we can see a clear analogy to Gurdjieff’s idea, as expressed in Ouspensky, that organic life is “food for the moon.”

Later Beelzebub explains just how this askokin is produced—it is emitted by living beings during the process of their “Rascooarno”—what we usually call “death.” So the moon is fed by the vibrations emitted by the deaths of living creatures.

Suddenly the parable of the magicians and the sheep becomes much easier to understand. We are the “sheep,” and the “flesh” and “skins” required of us upon our slaughter are really these vibrations that are given off at our deaths. The “magicians” are the “Sacred Individuals” who are pasturing us for this purpose.

This is a humiliating and unpleasant state of affairs, and the Sacred Individuals who set up this process realized, as humanity was beginning to evolve out of “mechanical instinct” toward “the attainment of Objective Reason,” that these beings might “prematurely comprehend the real cause of their arising and existence and make a good deal of trouble”—for instance, by being “unwilling to continue their existence” and destroying themselves (Gurdjieff, 88).

The Sacred Individuals decided to respond by implanting a strange pseudo-organ at the base of our spinal column. It is what Gurdjieff in In Search of the Miraculous calls “kundalini,” although he stresses that this has no relation to current occult concepts of kundalini. In Beelzebub he calls it “kundabuffer”—an amalgamation of “kundalini” and “buffer.” And it does serve as a buffer against humanity’s realization of its true purpose. Its effect is that we unfortunate beings “should perceive reality topsy-turvy” (Gurdjieff, 88).

Later these Sacred Individuals decided that the danger of our premature realization of our function had passed and the organ kundabuffer could be removed, but by then it was too late: “Although this astonishing organ and its properties had been destroyed in them, nevertheless, owing to many causes, the consequences of its properties had begun to be crystallized in them” (Gurdjieff, 89). Through inertia, we still suffer the maleficent effects of this organ, even though the organ itself was removed in prehistoric times. This is why, according to Gurdjieff, we continue to perceive things “topsy-turvy.” It would not be hard to see the whole of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, which spans a range of human history from the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Tikliamish (the latter supposedly existed in what is now the Gobi Desert) to the Jazz Age, as an account of the effects of this vanished but still-operative kundabuffer. As we have seen, the entire objective of Beelzebub is, through literary means, to destroy the residual effects of this organ in the reader.

Up to this point, the theories about the moon presented by Ouspensky and in Beelzebub are similar or identical. But here the theory in these two books begin to diverge. At one point Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff as saying, “In living, in dying, in evolving, in degenerating, man equally serves the purposes of nature—or, rather, nature makes equal use, though perhaps for different purposes, of both the products of evolution and degeneration.” But, he adds, “The evolution of large masses of humanity is opposed to nature’s purposes” (Ouspensky, 57). Humans can make use of nature’s purposes—the emission of these mysterious vibrations—for their own evolution, but Gurdjieff does not explain how; moreover, he suggests that this making use of nature’s purposes is adventitious or even subversive. Elsewhere in the same book he says, “The way of the development of human possibilities is a way against nature, against God” (Ouspensky, 47).

Gurdjieff’s position in Beelzebub is the exact opposite. He still holds that the emission of the sacred askokin takes place upon the death of living creatures, but one small detail changes the whole picture. Gurdjieff mentions it toward the end of the book in a long chapter on the causes of war.

To understand this idea, we have to realize that Gurdjieff, unlike most other exponents of the esoteric wisdom, denies that immortality is the automatic birthright of every human being:

The “man-machine” with whom everything happens, who is now one, the next moment another, and the next moment a third, has no future of any kind; he is buried and that is all. Dust returns to dust. . . . In order to be able to speak of any kind of future life there must be a certain crystallization, a certain fusion of man’s inner qualities, a certain independence of external influences. If there is anything in a man able to resist external influences, then this very thing itself may also be able to resist the death of the physical body. (Ouspensky, 31)

In Ouspensky’s book, Gurdjieff equates this “crystallization” with what the Western occult tradition calls the astral body, although they are not identical (in ways that are too intricate to explore here). In Beelzebub he gives it his own name: the body Kesdjan. If a human being is, by dint of “conscious labors and intentional suffering,” able to crystallize this body, he will eventually be able to perfect himself up to the level of genuine immortality.

Gurdjieff says that in order to perfect this body Kesdjan, man must absorb the sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis; in order to do this, he has to perform a kind of extraction, because they are ordinarily found in combination with the sacred askokin. This sacred askokin, as we have seen, is the very substance needed to feed the moon. The ultimate gist is that the substance that the moon needs for its maintenance—the sacred askokin—is not only the substance that is emitted when living creatures die, it is the substance emitted when human beings work on perfecting themselves. Beelzebub says that when he realized this, “only then did I finally understand to which end both Great Nature herself and the Most High and Most Saintly individuals always patiently adapt themselves to everything” (Gurdjieff, 1106). Unlike the Gurdjieff of In Search of the Miraculous, who says that human evolution is “against nature, against God,” the Gurdjieff of Beelzebub says that human awakening creates a force that feeds the moon—which is exactly what we were put here for.

That is, we have a choice. We can and must satisfy the purpose for which we were created. The universe requires certain energies from us and will get them one way or another. If we want to cooperate and incidentally gain our own immortality, well and good. If not, the energy will be extracted by other means.

As a system of sacred ecology, this must seem extremely abstruse and irrelevant to current concerns, but it is not. Gurdjieff in Beelzebub stresses that nature has had to compensate for human beings’ failure to perfect themselves by extracting the sacred askokin in the other way—through physical death on a mass scale. “Great Nature . . . was constrained to adapt Herself to extract this sacred substance by other means, one of which is precisely that periodic terrifying process there of reciprocal destruction” (Gurdjieff, 1107). That is, war. For Gurdjieff, war is not the result of squabbling or territorial disputes or whatever high-blown slogans will lead men to the slaughter. It is the result of the demands of nature. As weird as this may sound, it has one advantage over conventional theories: it at least explains why war is so universally irresistible a temptation even though everyone claims to hate it.

Gurdjieff also suggests that this need for the sacred askokin is the cause of the population boom. Since there are few people giving out these vibrations consciously through self-perfection, nature requires more people to accomplish the task unconsciously by dying. Nature, as he puts it, has to “‘puff and blow’ in order to adapt Herself to remain within the common cosmic harmony” (Gurdjieff, 1107).

Conversely, at a point in human prehistory, when through the labors of a certain Sacred Individual known as Ashiata Shiemash, large numbers of humanity began to work on self-perfection, both the birth rate and the death rate dropped enormously. “The said decline in both their death rate and their birth rate proceeded because as they approximated to an existence normal for three-brained beings, they also began to radiate from themselves vibrations responding more closely to the requirements of Great Nature, thanks to which, Nature needed less of those vibrations which are in general obtained from the destruction of the existence of beings” (Gurdjieff, 388).

The need for these sacred vibrations and the inability of humans to provide them by self-liberation is the key to understanding Gurdjieff’s rebarbative book, and probably his thought as a whole. There is very little in Beelzebub that is not, in one way or another, related to these themes.

Hence the esotericism of suspicion that appears in the Gurdjieff of In Search of the Miraculous gives way to quite another vision, one that is more wide-ranging, more profound, and more reassuring (although Gurdjieff would not have wanted to reassure anybody about anything). Humans have a meaningful part to play in the cosmos, and the dislocations in the ecosystem caused by war and the population explosion—which are key factors in the ecological crisis by anyone’s account—arise because we are unaware of this role and are hence unable to carry it out.

Several considerations about this sacred ecology of Gurdjieff would be worth exploring further. For example, one could ask about the reason for these subtle but crucial differences in the accounts given by Ouspensky and by Gurdjieff himself. Did Ouspensky misunderstand, or did Gurdjieff’s own ideas change? There is a space of about ten years between Gurdjieff’s Petrograd lectures during World War I, which form the core of In Search of the Miraculous, and Gurdjieff’s composition of Beelzebub in the 1920s. I personally tend to incline toward the view that Gurdjieff modified his ideas over time, but that is a highly debatable point.

 Another issue has to do with the origins of Gurdjieff’s system—again a topic too large for a single article. An astonishing number of possible candidates have been proffered as sources—Sufism, the esoteric tradition of Eastern, even Ahmusta Kebzeh, an allegedly 26,000-year-old esoteric teaching indigenous to Abkhazia in the Caucasus (not far from Gurdjieff’s native Armenia: Yagan, 40–47)—but none of them has proved entirely convincing.

To my knowledge, no one yet has examined the connections between Theosophy and Gurdjieff’s teaching in detail. He was certainly aware of Theosophy:

There are two [esoteric] lines known in Europe, namely theosophy and so-called Western occultism. . . . Both lines bear in themselves grains of truth, but neither of them possesses full knowledge and therefore attempts to bring them to practical realization give only negative results. (Ouspensky, 286) 

Gurdjieff seems to dismiss Theosophy outright, but the picture is not quite so simple. In 1922, for example, he leased a property called the Prieuré in Fontainebleau, France, and set up his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Soon after, Maud Hoffman, to whom A.P. Sinnett had willed the Mahatma Letters, arrived and, with the help of A. Trevor Barker, prepared them for publication (Ginsburg). This fact could not have been unknown to Gurdjieff, who was intimately involved with every detail of Prieuré life. One must at least suspect that he regarded this task as of some importance.

Furthermore, some scholars of esotericism, such as Wouter Hanegraaff and Julie Chajes, have argued that the original Theosophical Society, formed in New York in 1875, changed radically after its founders went to India in 1878–79. (See my review of Chajes’ Recycled Lives in Quest, winter 2021.) The scholars contend that originally Blavatsky did not teach the immortality of the soul, citing an 1877 letter of hers to her aunt, Nadezhda de Fadeyev, which said:

Per se, the soul is not immortal. The soul outlives the man’s body only for as long as is necessary for it to get rid of everything earthly and fleshly; then, as it is gradually purified, its essence comes into progressively closer union with the Spirit, which alone is immortal . . . But if whilst still in the flesh . . . the man has lived only his earthly life, and the fleshly thoughts have strangled all trace of spiritual life within him, he will not be born again, he will not see God (John iii, 3). Like a still-born child, he will leave the womb of earthly life, his mother, and after the death of his flesh he will be born not into a better world, but into the region of eternal death, because his Soul has ruined itself for ever, having destroyed its connection with the Spirit. (Algeo, 304–05; cf. Chajes, 58)

These scholars may well be overstating the differences between “the first” and “the second” Theosophical Society; that is a matter too large for discussion here. But notice the resemblance of HPB’s ideas in the letter above to Gurdjieff’s concept of a soul that is only provisionally immortal, requiring a process of crystallization to form the body Kesdjan.

We do not know whether Gurdjieff got this idea from HPB, with whose writings he was undoubtedly familiar, but I am convinced that the connections between his thought and Theosophy are far more extensive than is currently believed. For our purposes here, however, I think we will have to content ourselves with his claim that his teaching “is completely self-supporting and independent of other lines and it has been completely unknown up to the present time” (Ouspensky, 286).

As the title of this article suggests, Gurdjieff may have something more to offer than a fantastic science-fiction construct. Ecological fears have been pressing on the collective mind more heavily each year. And yet the discourse has been conducted almost exclusively in negative terms. There is frequently the background assumption that the human presence on earth is a kind of blight. Should we simply “destroy ourselves” deliberately, as the Sacred Individuals in Beelzebub feared that our primordial ancestors would? Even the more positive perspectives have really argued for nothing more than leaving a light footprint—walking on the eggshells of nature. While this may be necessary, it is ultimately uninspiring. We are not going to find life’s ultimate meaning in clearing up our own garbage, however necessary that may be.

In the end, I suspect, human civilization is going to have to move toward a vision like Gurdjieff’s. The sacred askokin, the organ kundabuffer, and so on are unlikely to become household words anytime soon. Perhaps he even coined such bizarre usages to keep them from being turned into slogans. On the other hand, his suggestion that human beings have something positive to offer to the cosmic ecosystem may in the end be vindicated. It will probably not take the form of his ideas specifically, but we may find ourselves called back, say, to the ancient Chinese ternary of heaven, earth, and man—to the idea that we as human beings constitute a bridge between the visible and invisible worlds in a way that no other creature that we know of can do.

It’s also possible that some of Gurdjieff’s techniques and practices, many of which have to do with self-remembering and conscious sensation of the body, may become—as they deserve to be—part of the broader esoteric legacy of the West. Gurdjieff’s pupil Kenneth Walker writes:

The first step to self-remembering was to come back from our mind-wandering into our bodies and to become sensible of these bodies. We all know, of course, that we possess limbs, a head and a trunk, but in our ordinary state of waking-sleep we receive few or no sense-impressions from these, unless we happen to be in pain. In other words, we are not really aware of our bodies. But G[urdjieff] taught us special exercises first for relaxing our bodies to the fullest possible extent, and then for “sensing” the various areas in our bodies. . . . These exercises became of immense value to us and were particularly useful as a preparation for self-remembering. (quoted in Lindh)

On the surface, this passage appears to have little to do with ecological concerns. But if we look deeper, we may see that much of the compulsive consumerism that drives the wasteful aspects of contemporary society is fueled by this disconnection from the body. Indeed much of the time the mind and the ego are not only disconnected from the body but are unaware of the fact. They obscurely sense that something is missing, and they seek to fill the lack—but the means they often choose are buying, spending, and the compulsive chatter of communication that our technology has made infuriatingly easy. If the aspects of Gurdjieff’s teaching that emphasize this reintegration of mind, emotions, and body become more of a part of the mainstream, they may help us stop the activities that are proving most harmful to the earth.

Most of the esoteric traditions place humanity at the center of the cosmos, and while this view may seem naïvely anthropocentric, it reflects our own situation: as humans, we necessarily live in an anthropocentric universe. Gurdjieff departs from this vision in Beelzebub: his protagonist constantly stresses the abnormality and inferiority of humanity and its comparative insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things.

Nonetheless, he does grant humankind a vital role in sustaining the ecology of our solar system. This role has to do with conscious participation, and here Gurdjieff shows some affinity with Hermetic and alchemical traditions, for they too seek to sustain and foster living nature by interacting with the subtle forces  in animals and plants. Gurdjieff places this interaction not outside us, but within us. Through “conscious labor and intentional suffering” in the work of our own being, in our own sensations and feelings, we perpetuate the wholeness of the universe.

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Sources

Algeo, John, ed. The Letters of H.P. Blavatsky, volume 1, 1861–1879. Wheaton: Quest, 2003.

Bennett, J.G. Witness. Santa Fe, N.M.: Bennett Books, 1962.

Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. Wheaton: Quest 1993 [1888].

Chajes, Julie. Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

 Ginsburg, Seymour B. “A Teacher of Dancing: The Mahatma Letters and Gurdjieff.” Quest 103, no. 2 (spring 2015): 58–60.

Gurdjieff, G.I. All and Everything, First Series: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1950.

Lindh, Allan. “Considering Fragments.” Gurdjieff International Review website, accessed Dec. 31, 2020: https://www.gurdjieff.org/lindh1.htm.

Ouspensky, P.D. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of a Forgotten Teaching. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950.

Webb, James. The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers. Boston: Shambhala, 1987.

Yagan, Murat. “Sufism and the Source,” Gnosis 30 (winter 1994): 40–47.

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Richard Smoley’s video, audio, and book series The Truth about Magic was released in February 2021. A version of this article was presented as a paper to a conference of the Association for the Study of Esotericism, Charleston, South Carolina, June 2008.

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Printed in the  Spring 2021  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Ravindra, Ravi, "In the Beginning Is the Dance of Love" Quest 109:2, pg 24-32

By Ravi Ravindra

Our collective worldview, perhaps since the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687, has led us to regard questions concerning the origin, development, measure, and meaning of the cosmos as pertaining almost exclusively to the domain of science and in particular to that of physics. For us moderns, cosmology is a branch of physics, a subject that since the sixteenth century has concerned itself with understanding the cosmos ultimately in terms of dead matter in motion in reaction to external and purposeless forces.

Natural theology, however, has a long history. At the beginning of modern science, the astronomer Johannes Kepler regarded himself as a priest of God in the temple of Nature. Isaac Newton viewed all his scientific work as a hymn of glory in praise of God.

A long and hard struggle was necessary to establish natural science as an independent mode of inquiry, free of the tyranny of theology and the church, which had been coupled with temporal power. Now, especially since the making of the atomic bomb in 1945, it is science that is associated with power; and a similar struggle may be necessary to rescue genuine spiritual inquiry from the tyranny of scientific rationality. Since Newton’s time, scientists have felt increasingly uneasy about mentioning God, at least in their scientific publications.

Contemplation of the heavens has always brought human beings to wonder about the meaning and purpose of the cosmos and their own existence. The heavens have always seemed to be the abode of the sacred, inspiring reflection and awe. However, a subtle shift has taken place in our attitudes owing to the rise and development of modern science. Let us take a familiar example, from Psalm 8:3–4:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained,
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

We too have contemplated the heavens and other things in the light of the latest scientific knowledge, but our attitudes, and our questions, are different. Today’s scientist is more likely to ask:

When I consider the heavens, the work of our equations,
the black holes and the white dwarfs, which we have ordained
what is God, that we are mindful of him?

Ideas and activities flourish and change in the context of a worldview, although worldviews themselves are permeable and elastic. Science is the major component of the present paradigm, and our intellectual discussions now take place with a background of a shared scientific rationality.

I do not have any new data to bring for consideration of whether the origin and evolution of the universe provides evidence for design. Nor do I believe that, collectively or individually, we need additional data to come to a proper sense of design (or absence of design) in the cosmos. Instead I propose to raise some issues around this question, organizing my discussion under the subheadings “Origin,” “Evolution,” “Universe,” “Evidence,” and “Design.”

Origin

The question of the origin of the universe is intimately connected with the understanding of time. It is practically impossible for the present-day Western mind to avoid thinking of time in linear terms. This notion has entered deeply into the structure of scientific thinking. Even when we think of nonlinear time, as we sometimes do in contemporary physics, we look at the nonclassical properties of time: its conjugate variables, how it works in other dimensions and spaces, and so on. Nonetheless, in physics we are always dealing with some dimension of time, and never the sort of situation when “time shall be no longer” (Revelation 10:6).

Of course, when we extrapolate along the dimension of time, we might run into a singularity, as we do for example in the equations dealing with gravitational collapse or the cosmological solutions leading to the big bang theory. There our notions of time go awry, and we need some very ingenious methods to get around these difficulties.

Even so, from the point of view of physical cosmologists, the questions concerning the beginning of the universe have to do entirely with smaller and smaller amounts of time from the initial event, when all this began. However many theoretical or practical difficulties we might encounter, we are trying to follow the time coordinate back to zero. We have theories now dealing with the state of the universe at time spans of the order of 10^-23 seconds after the absolute zero of time. There are theoretical reasons for believing that this may be the closest we can get to the absolute beginning along the time coordinate. If so, according to our present notions of time, it makes no sense to talk about time any closer to that beginning and certainly not prior to it.

Physical cosmologists are not searching for the beginning spoken of in mystical or mythical literature. When the opening line of Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” we are tempted to think that according to the Bible, the heaven and the earth were the first manifestations. To do so, however, is a mistake, as we see from the verses immediately following: the heavens were not created until the second day, and the earth not until the third; and the heavens, also called the “firmament,” were created in order to divide the waters above from the waters below. These waters, one should notice, existed before the existence of the heaven and the earth, which were said to have been created in the beginning. Perhaps this text is presenting us with two different kinds of heavens and two different kinds of earth. I shall not engage in biblical exegesis; I merely wish to suggest that we have here a notion of a beginning that is different from the scientific notion.

In such passages, we may be encountering difficulties with language that are endemic to all religious literature. But there is no reason for us to imagine that the scriptures are meant to be at our service and that they must be clear to us while we remain as we are. I imagine that, at the least, scriptures summon us to realities that we do not ordinarily perceive. The spiritual traditions universally agree that, for us to perceive these hidden realities, something in us needs to change. We cannot remain as we are and come to the Mystery. That change is called by many names: a change in the level of being, a change in consciousness, a deepening of faith, a new birth, the opening of the third eye, the true gnosis, and so on.

When the doors of perception are cleansed, one fundamental change that is said to occur concerns time: not only does one’s sense of duration change but, more importantly, one’s relationship with the passage of time alters radically.

Statements like “In the beginning was the Word” do not refer to ordinary time, on a coordinate axis, whose point of origin is the beginning. These statements carry weight and significance precisely because they were uttered and received in heightened states of awareness. Whenever these writings and symbols speak to anyone spiritually, it is because they carry a higher level of energy, and not primarily, or even at all, because of any logical clarity or agreement with our scientific notions of space and time.

This other kind of time—that of myth and mystical writing—is certainly not contradictory to our ordinary time. Nor is it, however, merely an extension of ordinary time in either direction of the coordinate: the beginning or the end. Just as the scriptural “beginning” is not the zero of the time coordinate, so mystical “eternity” is not an infinite extension of time. Thus what is everlasting is not necessarily eternal.

In a way, spiritual time appears to be orthogonal to scientific time: it lies in a dimension wholly independent of the domain of time, although it is able to intersect with time at any moment. Thus no manipulations of time or in time could lead to this orthogonal dimension of eternity, which speaks of mythic beginnings and endings.

Evolution

As long as there is time, there is change. That is how we understand and measure time; that is how we know that it exists and passes. It is only in this minimal physical sense, of state  A changing into state B, that we speak about the evolution of the universe in physical cosmology. But there is an ordinary use of the word evolution of which we need to be careful: ordinarily one thinks of evolution as containing within it an idea of change in a desirable direction, so that the end product is at a level higher than its antecedents.

But it is very difficult to say how we should understand the concept of “level.” There are some connected notions, like those of development, growth, and progress. Something or someone who is at a higher level may have more being, more consciousness, or more wisdom, or may be able to perform more complicated tasks than one at a lower level. The idea of hierarchy is built into the notion of levels and of evolution. Furthermore, we specify which we view as higher or lower, or whether a process is degenerative, progressive, or static.

But cosmologists talk about physical change without attaching any notion of a hierarchy of being. Physical laws merely describe change in time. There is no place in them for intention, purpose, or evolution insofar as these contain the emotionally laden sense of progress.

It is worth paying more attention to this point. In the history of natural philosophy, change and the dynamics of nature have been intimately connected with notions of ausality. For our purposes, we can distinguish three distinct notions of causality: metaphysical, physical, and biological.

The metaphysical notion of causality, which prevailed until the sixteenth century, assumes that the cause is greater than the effect. Thus in theology, the creator is naturally greater—at a higher level of being, intelligence, and power—than the creation. Applied to natural philosophy, this was, from the point of view of the subsequent developments in science, a stumbling block to a proper understanding of nature.               

During the sixteenth century, a new understanding of physical causality emerged, according to which the cause and the effect were at the same level. One no longer spoke of a cause being higher than (or in some senses containing) the effect, but rather of a change of one state of matter into another, without assuming a rise or lowering in its level of being, intelligence, or desirability.

The sixteenth-century shift from metaphysical to physical causality was a subtle one: from the domain of intentions, will, reasons, and purposes, and the forces and laws required to carry out these intentions in nature (or, in another language, angels and powers), to a field of forces and laws operating in nature without any purpose.

In the nineteenth century, a biological notion of causality emerged, according to which the cause is lower than the effect. That which is inferior, ontologically or in intelligence or in the subtlety of cellular organization, gives rise to what is superior: amoebas, in time, give rise to Einstein. Since what follows is more desirable than what precedes it (at least from the human point of view), this notion of causality is rightly called evolution.

This principle is the inverse of the metaphysical and the theological notions of causality: rather than proceeding from above, creation—including human beings—now proceeds from below. This idea naturally causes an immense amount of anxiety and unease, especially to those who are comforted by a belief in some ultimate cause, or God, who is personally concerned about their welfare.

Returning now to scientific cosmology: it is only in this century that the idea of a dynamic universe was precisely formulated. One of the solutions to the field equations of general relativity demanded that the universe as a whole be dynamic; otherwise the solution was unstable. This notion of the dynamism of the cosmos seems to have been such a revolutionary idea in the Judeo-Christian world that even a radical thinker like Einstein balked at it. He tinkered with his equations and introduced another factor into them, called the cosmical constant, which was helpful in obtaining a stationary solution to the field equations. Soon after, it was discovered that even with this new, somewhat arbitrarily introduced, constant, dynamic solutions of the equations still resulted. Einstein himself later remarked that the introduction of the cosmical constant in his field equations was “the greatest blunder” of his life.

Within a few years, Edwin Hubble discovered from observational data that the galaxies were receding from one another at the speed of light and that the universe was therefore expanding. This was the most significant observational confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Thus the fundamental equations on which modern physical cosmology is based have nothing to do with evolution, except in the minimal sense of physical change. As far as the notion of causality is concerned, modern cosmology is just like the rest of physics: it describes the change in matter-energy from one state to another. From our point of view, the emergence of the stars, galaxies, solar system, and ultimately ourselves is more desirable than their nonemergence, so we feel justified in describing this change as evolution.

In this process, we are combining two different notions of causality described earlier. We actually need one of these (physical causality) for our knowledge; the other (evolution) is an emotional overlay, for the obvious reason that we humans are at the end of the corresponding change. This fact saddles us with a philosophical problem because of our sentimentality about human beings while nevertheless insisting on a limited physico-biological view of man.

We do not need a limited view of cosmology, which cannot take into account the deepest, spiritual part of ourselves. Physical cosmology, which is a perfectly legitimate and indeed wonderful study in its domain, is concerned with change in the physical form of matter-energy. Here we do not speak—indeed we cannot speak—within the assumptions and procedures that govern the subject of spiritual evolution. Physical theories concerning the nature of the universe are not about the dimension of significance or purpose, nor do they pretend to be,.

At the same time, human beings have always had a sense of, and a need for, the sacred, which gives meaning and purpose both to ourselves and to the cosmos. Fundamentally bereft of the sacred, we are riddled with anxiety and adrift in the meaningless vastness of space-time.

Universe

What do we mean by universe? Presumably, all there is. Does a cat or a bee have the same universe as a human being? Does a tone-deaf or color-blind person have the same universe as a painter or one who is musically gifted? Does a person who is blind to symbols or to spirit, or who is insensitive to wonder, beauty, or spiritual presence, have the same universe as a scientist or a poet or a mystic?

What there is is a function of who sees: what we know, actually and potentially, about the universe depends on the procedures, methods, and interests that we bring to our observation of it. If we do not know how to find angels and are not interested in them, we will say that the angels do not exist. And it is true that they are not a part of our scientific universe. Nor are “the clouds which brood,” which were a part of Wordsworth’s universe, or the dancing colors inhabiting Blake’s universe, or the cherubim and the seraphim singing, “Holy, holy, holy.”

The physical cosmologist’s universe, vast and marvelous as it is, is not all there is. As Shakespeare put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Even when allowance has been made for error and illusion (which can, of course, blight the cosmologist as much as the poet or the mystic), it is difficult simply to dismiss these other fields.

Hardly anyone dismisses the arts out of hand, but many people find it much easier to dismiss the mystic and the theologian. There are understandable historical reasons for this dismissal; in any event, present-day intellectual circles do not regard these fields as relevant to deliberations concerning the cosmos. We relegate the universes that the artist, the musician, or the mystic regard as most precious to a murky and imaginary realm. We certainly do not regard those imaginary realms as real as the multiple universes, the shadow universe, the antiuniverse, or the other weird universes that make up the speculations of contemporary physical cosmologists. We assume that whatever musicians, artists, or mystics might be doing, they are certainly not producing knowledge. Knowledge is produced exclusively by scientists, we would say, and by nobody else.

Contemporary philosophers, with all their love for wisdom, generally agree. We might not now say, with the positivists, that “nonscience is nonsense,” but we would surely say that nonscience cannot lead to knowledge and truth. What we include in the universe is related to a traditional idea of levels of materiality.

Medieval philosophers held that both matter and the laws operating on different planets was  were different from those in ours. It was a considerable advance in astronomy to establish that fundamentally the same sort of matter prevailed throughout the universe, subject to the same laws everywhere.

However, when we move from medieval natural philosophy—alchemy, astrology, mathematics, or cosmology—to the modern sciences, our general reaction to the backward-looking nature of the past and our excitement over new discoveries blind most of us to the predominantly symbolic and analogical nature of medieval thought.

There is an ancient analogy between each human being and the universe, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, which inwardly mirror each other’s essential principles. We might then realize that the various planets, the different materials on them, and the different laws operating there were all symbols of different levels of interiority within a human being, and that the quality of matter-energy at different levels of the mind is different from that of the body, and subject to different laws. Sometimes this idea was explicitly shown in various diagrams, but often it was merely assumed, much as we today assume that everyone in all reasonable gatherings naturally accepts the mode of scientific rationality. As Blake succinctly put it, “Reason and Newton are quite two things.” What goes on in our minds and our feelings, and not only what takes place in our bodies, also contributes to all there is.

Mental and psychic functions are not in principle outside the domain of scientific knowledge. They are not supernatural, as opposed to natural, and thus excluded from the investigations of natural philosophy. There is nothing supernatural about most of what gets labeled as miracles or extrasensory perception. Extrasensory perceptions, to be sure, are at present extrascientific perceptions, but there is nothing inherently beyond nature or beyond science in them. It may well be that a radically altered science will be required to understand what is now called extrasensory perception, just as a radically altered science was required to understand lightning in the sky or the light of the sun; this science might have seemed quite supernatural from the perspective of fourteenth-century scientists. It is important to distinguish, as St. Augustine did, between what we claim really is nature and what we know of nature. The limits of our knowledge are not necessarily the limits of nature.

Yet even with a radically altered science that could take account of extrasensory perceptions and other “miraculous” happenings, we cannot come to the end of all there is. “All there is” far exceeds the realm of nature, the domain of causality and materiality, however subtle our descriptions. To say that we do not yet know certain levels of nature is not to say that nature is all that there is to know or that can be.

In fact, practically without exception, all great spiritual teachers, such as the Buddha, the Christ, Patañjali, Krishna, and Moses, have warned against an excessive fascination with miraculous phenomena and occult powers, which are said to be diversions from the true spiritual path.

Two related, although somewhat parenthetical, remarks may be made here. The first concerns an important distinction, made in the scientific revolution starting in the sixteenth century, between the primary and the secondary qualities of matter. This distinction played a crucial role in the development of the physical sciences and also in the subsequent impoverishment of nature. The primary qualities were extension, mass,  length and velocity time; to this list was added charge in the nineteenth century, and spin, strangeness, charm, and others in the twentieth. The secondary qualities consisted of taste, color, smell, and the like; they were not considered to be objectively a part of nature, but were subjective and rather unreliable. Considered even more subjective and unreliable were tertiary qualities: feelings of beauty, purpose, or significance.

The secondary and tertiary qualities were gradually eliminated, not only as instruments of inquiry into nature, but also as fundamental constituents of nature. They could not, properly speaking, be studied as themselves constituting reality, but as something that needed to be explained and understood in terms of the primary qualities. Thus a deep-seated reductionism is built into the fundamental presuppositions of scientific inquiry. A division into res extensa (what can be measured) and res cogitans (what is aware) carried within it a certain instability attached to the realm of the mind. From a scientific point of view (as we see clearly in behavioral psychology), all psychic functions must be reducible to external motions.

On the other hand, we have the philosophical problem of mind-body dualism. In some theological circles, it is really understood as soul-body dualism, in which the soul is supernatural, removed from the realm of nature and scientific investigation altogether, and placed in the realm of faith, away from knowledge.

Any real knowledge of the psyche or the soul thus gets rather short shrift: the scientists deny the existence of anything that they cannot study by physical means, and the theologians deny the possibility of any knowledge of it. But in neither case can spiritual qualities have any independent existence in the cosmos that we can study.

The second remark derives from a comparative study of the history of ideas in the Western world and in India. In Greek philosophy and in the early Christian writers, as well as in the Indian tradition, there was a tripartite division of a human being into spirit, soul, and body, or, to use the Greek of St. Paul’s epistles, pneuma, psyche, and soma. Gradually this threefold division shrank into a twofold division: spirit and nature, or mind and matter, or soul and body. Descartes explicitly identifies spirit with soul, and both with the mind. In the Western world, since the time of Descartes, soul has in general been regarded more or less completely as spiritual rather than natural.           

A partial reduction of the threefold division into a twofold one took place in India as well. Nevertheless there, in general, the psyche has been regarded as in the realm of nature, and therefore subject to the laws of nature and amenable to scientific inquiry. Thus thoughts and feelings, and psychic phenomena, including those considered paranormal, are in the realm of prakriti, nature—that is to say, in the domain of materiality and causality. According to Indian thought, so-called miracles are not supernatural or spiritual, even though they are unusual and extraordinary. Spirit (purusha), however, is still beyond.

Evidence

We have already seen that our knowledge of the cosmos depends on the procedures, methods, and interests that we bring to knowing it. Niels Bohr was quite right in saying that “it is wrong to think  that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (in Moore, 406). Of course, even what we can say about nature depends on the mode of discourse that a community of scientists accepts as appropriate. In that discourse, certain kinds of data are acceptable as evidence, and certain other data are not acceptable. The angels that were so real to Blake are not acceptable; nor are Bach’s fugues. In fact, no interior experience is a part of scientific data.

Scientific knowledge is not a knowing-by-participation, but a knowing-by-distancing. It is not an I-thou knowing but an I-it one. Thus we see that scientific knowledge is indeed objective, but not in the mystical sense, in which the observing self is so completely emptied or “naughted” that the object reveals itself as it is, the thing in itself, in all its numinosity and particularity. Sages in all cultures have said that it is only in this state of consciousness, devoid of the self, that an object is known both in its oneness with all there is and in its distinct uniqueness. An entity—a tree, a person, a culture, or the whole cosmos—is then understood both in its interiority and its externality, including its generality and specificity.

Scientific “objectivity” comes from another route, even in the etymology of the word (from the Latin obicere, to throw in the way, to hinder): it is a sense of throwing ourselves over and against something, as in our word objection. One mode is love; the other, combat.

Mystics are constantly speaking about love. We are told that God is love, as in the New Testament; that love supports the whole cosmos, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy; or that love was the first creation and absolutely everything else came from it, as in the Rig Veda. But scientific methods wish to conquer nature as if she were an adversary. In fact, scientists almost never refer to nature as “she”; they always call her “it.”

Naturally, what is dead or was never alive can hardly have intentions, purposes, reasons, or feelings: it can have no interiority. Evidence that involves this sense of interiority, that is based on an I-thou relationship, is out of the scientific arena altogether.

What is at issue here is a different sort of knowing. The important thing is not to see different things, but to see things differently—not changed or expanded contents of the same consciousness, but a different quality of consciousness. Just as one can be in an I-thou relationship with even a cat or a tree, as Martin Buber used to say, one can also bring the I-it attitude to human beings, or even to God, if we seek only to use them as objects. Such, for example, was the attitude of Newton, perhaps the greatest of all scientists; as one of his biographers, Frank Manuel, has remarked, “For Newton, persons were usually objects, not subjects.”

Scientists have no monopoly on the I-it attitude, nor are they, as a class, devoid of the I-thou intercourse. But when they are doing science, they automatically exclude the I-thou attitude, along with any observations based on the interiority of the object, from the body of scientific evidence.

In the last four centuries, there has been a virtual explosion in the number of scientific instruments that have extended our ability to observe the very small and the very far away and to measure extremely small amounts of time. Because of this immense quantitative expansion of the field of our observation, we now see the cosmos with different eyes. There has been an extension, but not a cleansing, of our eyes in the sense that Blake or Goethe would have understood it. Nothing in the nature of science itself might lead us to invoke, with St. Francis, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.”

Any of us—scientists as well as nonscientists—can, of course, be deeply moved by a sense of our oneness with the cosmos. Furthermore, anyone can be struck by the wonder, the mystery, and the design of the cosmos as much today as in the days of Newton or Archimedes or Pythagoras, although unfortunately most of us are all too rarely struck in this way. These feelings and perceptions lie in dimensions different from the ones in which scientific observations are extended. No amount of quantitative expansion of data and theories can lead to the dimension of significance, any more than an endless extension of time can lead to eternity.

Design

It is hard to imagine a scientist who does not see order in the universe, a harmony of the various forces that permit the continued existence of the world, and a pattern involving regularity of phenomena and a generality of laws. The more we know about the universe, the more elegantly and wonderfully well-ordered it appears. Most scientists share with Einstein a “deep conviction of the rationality of the universe,” and his feeling that no genuine scientist could really work without a profound “faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is comprehensible to reason” (Einstein, My Later Years, 26). Einstein himself called this a “cosmic religious feeling,” which he regarded as the “strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” Even though other scientists may be embarrassed by the word religious, they are by no means strangers to the feeling that Einstein is describing.

What puts scientists on guard is not the idea or the feeling of “design” in the universe, but a suspicion that lurking behind the slightest concession in using the word is a theologian who will jump with glee and immediately saddle them with the notion of a Designer and all that goes with it. Scientists are not uneasy about design as such, but about the designs that they smell hiding behind the slightest admission of it! It is no use telling them that the theologians have been on the defensive now for nearly three hundred years and are so eager to gain any approval from their scientific colleagues that they become overenthusiastic if they sniff any possibility of truce.

All of science is a celebration of pattern, regularity, lawfulness, harmony, order, beauty; in other words, all the marks of design. But it does not have much to do with a Designer who is over and above the design, occasionally interfering in the universe in contravention of natural laws. Already in the seventeenth century, Leibniz reminded Newton that his God was like a retired engineer: having created perfect laws and having set the universe initially in motion, he was no longer needed and could be on a permanent sabbatical. The very perfection of scientific laws and their comprehensibility make the continued presence of this sort of God less necessary.

To infer the Designer from the design is largely a theological and linguistic habit. It is based on a notion of design that is more technological in character than scientific or artistic. In art there is always a definite element of play, improvisation, and surprise. No creative work is like painting by numbers; the artist does not know beforehand what the finished product will be like. And any scientist who already knows what he is going to find at the end of his work does not need a research grant, because he hardly needs to carry out the research.

I am not discounting the intuitive conviction that a scientist can have so that he knows the outcome prior to engaging in a detailed calculation or experiment. But every good scientist, even an Einstein or a Newton, has many intuitive convictions that do not lead anywhere. In the actual working out of the ideas and their encounter with what is lies the real delight, excitement, and even terror of creativity. Without them, scientific and artistic activity would be very dull. And any God who might create the universe without delight, without playfulness, without wonder, and without freedom or fresh possibilities would be a very dull God indeed. He would be a God of grim specialists, not of the dilettantes who delight in what they do and study. Such a God could be a good technician carrying out a technical design, a good bureaucrat keeping everyone in his place, or a thorough accountant keeping track of everyone’s actions for later dispensation of necessary judgments; he might even make a good president of a large corporation or a modern university. But he certainly would not make a good scientist, artist, or mystic. Such a God could not be the God of love or wisdom, and it would be very difficult to take delight in him.

Etymologically, design is related to roots meaning sign from. Sign from whom? Historically, in Christian theology, the signs are generally from a personal God. However, there are profound and fundamental incompatibilities between scientific knowledge and the idea of a personal God, even though many great scientists, for example Newton, were deeply committed to a personal God. Here is a brief excerpt from a manuscript of Newton, now in the Jewish National and University Library (Yehuda Ms. 15.3, fol. 46r):

We must believe that there is one God or supreme Monarch that we may fear and obey him and keep his laws and give him honor and glory. We must believe that he is the father of whom are all things, and that he loves his people as his children that they may mutually love him and obey him as their father. We must believe that he is παντοκράτωρ [pantokrator], Lord of all things with an irresistible and boundless power and dominion that we may not hope to escape if we rebel and set up other Gods or transgress the laws of his monarchy, and that we may expect great rewards if we do his will. . . . to us there is but one God the father of whom are all things and we in him and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things and we by him: that is, but one God and one Lord in our worship.

Since Newton’s time—and partly owing to the very science he took a major hand in creating—scientists are much less comfortable about accepting such a faith in a personal God, and certainly in expressing it. There is a feeling of a fundamental incompatibility between science and such a faith. Most scientists these days are likely to agree with Einstein in his description of what he called his religious feeling as

one of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men. (Einstein, Ideas, 11)

Many people who knew Einstein personally insisted that he was the most religious person they had ever met, but he was not religious in any denominational sense. As he said many times and in many ways, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God” (quoted in New York Times obituary).

Here we see a very good illustration of the fact that being struck by the beauty, harmony, order, and design in the universe does not necessarily mean accepting a personal or a sectarian God. It is worth quoting Einstein at some length on this point, from a remarkable address on “Science and Religion” at a symposium in 1941:

The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God. It is the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space. For these rules, or laws of nature, absolutely general validity is required—not proven. It is mainly a program, and the faith in the possibility of its accomplishment in principle is only founded on partial successes. The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is give up

that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labours they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task. (Einstein, My Later Years, 28–29)

In my judgment (which in this regard is different from Einstein’s), the major cause of the incompatibility between science and theology or church religion, which should certainly not be confused with spirituality, is not so much the concept of a personal God as the restricted view of knowledge that prevails in scientific  circles, as remarked earlier, and theologians’ limited notion of the Spirit or Divinity. To have understood (rightly) that Divinity is at least at the level of the human person does not mean that it is only personal. The personal aspects of Being, such as intelligence, intention, will, purpose, and love, which are all marks of interiority, do not have to lead to a concept of a personal God made in the external image of man, with definite form and being separated from others. Uniqueness of any level of being, seen separated from the oneness of all Being, leads to a limitation of vision, to partiality, and to exclusivism.

As the scriptures tell us, human beings are made in the image of God, which I take to mean that a human being is potentially able, in the deepest part of self, to be one with the Divine. This is what the sages have always said everywhere, whether the expression is aham brahmasmi (“I am Brahman,” Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10) or “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). However, if we forget the summons for an inward expansion to God, we are bound to reduce God in an outward contraction to human beings.

Concluding Remarks

I have suggested that there is more to the universe and to knowledge than is encountered in physical cosmology; that there are dimensions of the existence and development of being other than in time; and that one can be very spiritual with a personal God or without one. These are practically truisms. My observations have nothing to do with being Eastern or Western. Of course, one is conditioned by one’s cultural background. However, the more deeply one delves into oneself, the more one discovers one’s common humanity with others, and one’s commonality with all there is, without thereby losing one’s uniqueness. In this necessary realization of our oneness as well as uniqueness, we may, each one of us, have to travel paths we do not ordinarily travel, in lands we do not usually inhabit, and experience modes of being not habitually ours.

Different modalities and levels of being, and the corresponding levels of thought and feeling, exist in every human being and even more so in every culture. Some contingent historical factors can overwhelm or underscore a particular modality at any given time. The tremendous impact of science and technology in the West in the last two centuries has made some modes of being now appear to be non-Western. Yet we are now in a particularly exciting situation of a global neighborhood demanding a larger vision of ourselves. A special kind of insensitivity is now required for us to remain culturally parochial, refusing to become heirs of the great wisdom of mankind: as much of Plato as of the Buddha, of Einstein as of Patañjali, of Spinoza no less than of Confucius.

A major conceptual revolution was created in the Western world when the works of Aristotle were discovered by the Latin West through the Arabic philosophers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. That revolution went on for several centuries, leaving no area of thought and culture untouched. It appeared for a time that the major synthesis brought about by Thomas Aquinas between Aristotle and Christian thought was a culmination of this revolution. But no: it rolled on until and including the major scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was finally brought to a close by Newton.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, we have been in the middle of another major encounter of different cultures and different streams of thought, of the West with the East. Moreover, since the Second World War, for the first time in history major cultures are juxtaposed as neighbors without being in the position of either the victor or the vanquished. Who knows where the resulting cultural revolution will end?

One thing, however, is certain: this revolution is bound to result in a recognition, in addition to the experimental science of nature, of an experiential science of the spirit freed from all sectarian theology. This science of the spirit is not the same thing as an extension of our present science to include occult phenomena and extrasensory perceptions. Nor should one be seduced by superficial parallels between certain expressions and paradoxes of contemporary science and ancient Oriental thought.

In his day, Kepler was convinced that the sun was the Father; the circumference of the solar system, the Son; and the intervening space, the Holy Ghost. A latter-day scientist, brought up on different symbols and metaphors, might see in the patterns appearing in the cloud chamber the dance of Shiva, or be moved to find in the complementarity of quantum phenomena yin and yang encircled together, or discover the resolution of the various paradoxes of contemporary physics in the ineffable Tao. These parallels or interpretations are as true or false now as they were then. They add nothing, either to true science or to true spirituality.

There is a deep-seated need in human beings to seek an integration of all their faculties and a unity of their knowledge and feeling. We are fragmented and thirst for wholeness. This thirst, however, cannot be quenched by mere mental conclusions and arguments about the parallels between physics and Buddhism or the existence and nature of the design in the cosmos. We need a radically transformed attitude in the deepest sense, which would permit us to receive true wisdom and intelligence from above ourselves, and to use our science and technology with compassion and love. Without this attitude, we cannot reconcile Blake and Newton, and their heirs. And the lament will continue:

O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long & cold repose.
For Bacon & Newton sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations
I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.

(William Blake, Jerusalem 15.9–20)

Sources

Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

“Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76; World Mourns Loss of Great Scientist.” The New York Times, April 19, 1955: https://www.nytimes.com/1955/04/19/archives/dr-albert-einstein-dies-in-sleep-at-76-world-mourns-loss-of-great.html

Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown, 1954.

——. Out of My Later Years. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.

Moore, Ruth. Niels Bohr. New York: Knopf, 1966.

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Ravi Ravindra is emeritus professor of physics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of a number of books, including The Pilgrim Soul: A Path to the Sacred Transcending World Religions; The Gospel of John in the Light of Indian Mysticism; and most recently The Bhagavad Gita: A Guide to Navigating the Battle of Life. He was interviewed in the winter 2018 issue of Quest.

A version of this article was originally presented as a paper in a symposium sponsored by the Royal Society of Canada and held at McGill University, Montreal, May 30–June 1, 1985. It was published in Origin and Evolution of the Universe: Evidence for Design?, edited by J.M. Robson (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1987), 259–79. The article is also included in Ravi Ravindra, Science and the Sacred: Eternal Wisdom in a Changing World (Wheaton: Quest Books, 2002).

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Printed in the  Spring 2021  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Watts, Alan, "The Cosmic Dance" Quest 109:2, pg 22-23

By Alan Watts 

Alan Watts is one of the world’s most popular interpreters of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Originally published in 1963, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity is Watts’s forgotten book on world mythology—myths of light and darkness, good and evil, and the mystical unity that sees the transcendent whole behind apparent opposites.

Fans of the mythologist Joseph Campbell will immediately notice his influence throughout this book. Campbell and Watts were in fact friends during its writing, and Campbell shared notes and feedback on several chapters. One might even say that The Two Hands of God is Watts’s own introduction to the mythology of the world’s religions, using the nondual lens for which he was so well known in his Zen teachings and study.

As there is no woven cloth without the simultaneous interpenetration of warp and woof, there is no world without both the exhalation and inhalation of the Supreme Self. Though the image of breathing, as distinct from weaving, makes the two successive rather than simultaneous, nevertheless the one always implies the other. Successive in time, they are simultaneous in meaning, that is, sub specie aeternitatis, from the standpoint of eternity. Beginning and end, birth and death, manifestation and withdrawal always imply each other. In Western—that is, Judaic and Christian—imagery there has generally been a tendency to overlook this mutuality and to see each life and the creation itself as unique—as a beginning, and then an end which does not imply another beginning. Our world is linear, and the course of time is very strictly a one-way street. Nature is a clockwork mechanism which does not wind itself up in the process of running down. In Western religion and physics alike, we tend to think of all energy as expenditure and evaporation. There is no hope for a renewal of life beyond the end unless the supernatural Creator, by an act of special grace, winds things up again.

But the Indian view of time is cyclic. If birth implies death, death implies rebirth, and likewise the destruction of the world implies its recreation. The Western images are thus essentially tragic. Nature is a fall and its goal is death. There is no necessity for anything to happen beyond the end: only divine grace, operating outside the sphere of necessity, can redeem and restore the world. But the Indian imagery makes the world-drama a comedy—a sport or lila—in which all endings are the implicit promise of beginnings. Yet comedy must always depend on surprise. The burst of laughter is our expression of relief upon discovering that some threatened doom was an illusion—that “death was but the good King’s jest.”

Consider a very simple but typical comedy enacted many years ago in a London music hall. The curtain rises upon an elaborately furnished bedroom. The sleeper is at once awakened by a shrill alarm clock. Reaching under his pillow, he produces a hammer and smashes it in the face. Sitting up in bed, he glowers at his early-Monday-morning surroundings, and, hammer still in hand, slowly crawls out from the covers. Thereupon he proceeds, item by Victorian item, to smash everything in the bedroom—the bedside table, the flowered pitcher and basin on the wash stand, the knickknacks on the mantel, the chocolate-colored chamber pot patterned with green leaves, the glass on the pictures, the windows, and the bed itself—leaving only a bulbous and pretentious floor lamp with a huge glass shade. Creeping stealthily across the wreckage he eyes this last and perfect object of his rage, very obviously designed to disintegrate with a spectacular explosion. Instead of smashing it with his hammer, he grasps it with both hands and flings it high into the air—and, falling to the floor, it bounces: made of rubber.

This is the vulgar archetype of the cosmic punch line, the totally unexpected anticlimax which, in Hindu mythology, follows the terrifying tandava—the dance in which ten-armed Shiva, wreathed in fire, destroys the universe at the end of each cycle. But Shiva is simply the opposite face of Brahma, the Creator, so that as he turns to leave the stage with the world in ruin, the scene changes with his turning, and all things are seen to have been remade under the cover of their destruction.

The polarity of Brahma and Shiva thus finds its expression in what at times seems to be the extreme ambivalence of Hindu culture—extreme in its asceticism as in its sensuality. On the one hand, there is the goal of Yoga, the meditation-discipline: to concentrate thought so as to penetrate and burn away the illusion of the world. Yoga is thus man’s participation in the inhalation or withdrawal of the world breath, in the dissolution of maya, and in return to the undifferentiated unity of the Godhead. Shiva, the destructive aspect of Godhead, is therefore the archetypal yogi, the naked ascetic daubed with ashes sitting hour after hour with his consciousness in total stillness. On the other hand, there is that exuberant delight in form and flesh which is so exquisitely celebrated in Hindu dancing, music, and sculpture, in the marvelously refined eroticism of the Kamasutra, the scripture of love, as well as in the vision of the perfectly governed society laid out in the Arthashastra, the scripture of politics. One might almost say that India had set herself the problem of exploring these two attitudes to their extremes and then of finding the synthesis between them.

This problem, stated in mythological terms, is the recurrent theme of a type of popular Hindu literature known as the Puranas. Certainly much later than the Upanishads, these are texts of uncertain date, forming a repository of myth and legend accumulated over many centuries. Notable in the Puranas is the relationship of the gods to their feminine counterparts or shaktis, the feminine symbols of maya, the world-illusion, whereby the male god is alternatingly seduced and disenchanted. Originally the Godhead is hermaphroditic, beyond the opposites, but at the moment of creation the feminine shakti leaps forth spontaneously, as Eve was created from the body of Adam while he slept.

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Alan Watts (1915–73) was a British-born American philosopher, writer, speaker, and counterculture hero, best known as an interpreter of Asian philosophies for a Western audience. He wrote more than twenty-five books and numerous articles applying the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy to our everyday lives.

Excerpted from the book The Two Hands of God. Copyright © 2020 by Joan Watts and Anne Watts, © 1963 by Alan Watts. Reprinted with permission of New World Library.

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