#

Cap.

PP.

0.1

Foreword, by Colin Wilson

ix to xix

0.2

Introduction : Consciousness Explained?

xxi to xxxv

#

Cap.

PP.

1

Future of Humanity

3 to 15

2

William James & the Anaisthetic Revelation

16 to 19

3

Henri Bergson & the E'lan Vital

20 to 26

4

The Superman

27 to 30

5

A. R. Orage & the New Age

31 to 37

6

Ouspensky's 4th Dimension

38 to 52

0.1

Foreword, by Colin Wilson

ix to xix

George Gurjieff's All and Everything

is explained by P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous

which is explained by Kenneth Walker's Venture with Ideas.

p. xiii

"in T. E. Eliot's The Family Reunion the line : "partial observation of one's own automatism.""

"I remained aware of this mechanical element in the human personality that I called "the automatic pilot" -- the part of us that learns to drive a car or talk a foreign language. This I eventually came to call "the robot." {It is likewise the part of one's self that can learn to play music, to play a game (sport) of dexterity (skill), etc.} ...

You are now habitually more "robot" than "real you," and this ...

p. xiv

makes you pessimistic. it is a vicious circle ... . ...

In short, although the robot is the most valuable servant we possess, he is also responsible for most of the things that are wrong with our civilization. ... This explains why so much "modern thought" is tinged with gloom, from the psychology of Freud to the philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre, and their successors. ... Abraham Maslow complained that Freud had "sold human nature short" and landed us in a radical underestimation of our own powers."

p. xv

"George Pransky ... refers to ... the Psychology of Mind. In his book The Renaissance of Psychology, Pransky describes ... the sheer cheerfulness ... of the participants" at a session moderated by "Syd Banks ... .

{These participants had, of course, rejected the Christian doctrine of inhaerent human depravity. If they had not rejected that doctrine, they could not have been cheerful. Choice of the very term "Renaissance" would imply a deliberate rejection of Christianity in favor of prae-Christian (or anti-Christian) ideology.}

p. xvi

And Banks's insight had come upon him" when he had suddenly perceived "that all our mental states are things we happen to "think" are so."

"Gary Lachman has approached this problem from ... angles ... of the teachings of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner, ... Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Owen Barfield, Maslow, Schwaller de Lubicz, and Jean Gebser."

{Every single one of these authors is an outspoken rejecter of the Christian New Testament doctrine of inhaerent human depravity.}

"ferry called The Herald of Free Enterprise. Its captain made ... to leave port with the car doors open ... . A wave rolled into the ship, causing it to capsize with great loss of life."

{It is surely poe:tic justice that such a calamity should have overtaken a vehicle named "Free Enterprise" -- if "free-enterprise" be taken to mean "capitalism", a ruthlessly exploitative system with no safeguards for the protection of the working-class, and headed toward dragging humanity into one World-War after another.}

0.2

Introduction : Consciousness Explained?

xxi to xxxv

p. xxv

"In After Life : In Search for Cosmic Consciousness ..., science writer David Darling writes of some ... clearly remarkable cases of hydrocephalus ... . In the cases he recounts ..., the people ... had water instead of a brain. Nevertheless they functioned as perfectly normal, intelligent human beings. Darling speaks of two children born in the 1960s who "had fluid where their cerebrums should have been ... . Although neither child ... having a cerebral cortex, the mental development of each appeared perfectly normal." In another case, a man ... with a first-class honors degree in mathematics ... had no detectable brain. ... Although the paper reporting these cases received some attention at the time, it was subsequently forgotten, its findings just too contrary to the reigning scientific orthodoxy."

p. 277, n. 0.2:9

"Darling's account is based on a remarkable paper published in 1965 by John Lorber, a specialist in hydrocephalus, "Hydranencephaly with Normal Development," in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, December 1965, 7:628-633.

A popular account of Lorber's further work, "Is Your Brain Really Necessary[?]" by Roger Lewin, appeared in the December 12, 1980, issue of Science."

1

Future of Humanity

3 to 15

p. 14

"In 1846 the French poet and novelist The'ophile Gautier published an account of his experiences as a member of the celebrated Club des Haschischins, inaugurated in Paris by ... Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours. Modeled on ... the medieval {not only mediaeval, it is as yet extant in the Yasin and Hunza river valleys of Kas`mir} sect known as the Assassins ..., the club included among its members Charles Baudelaire, Ge'rard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, and Honore' de Balzac. ... Most of the people involved in the club produced accounts ..., Baudelaire's classic essay Artificial Paradise (1851-60) rising above the rest".

p. 15

"In 1857, a ... poet and essayist from Poughkeepsie, New York, named Fitz Hugh Ludlow published ... his ... The Hasheesh Eater ... . Ludlow ... added philosophical insights".

"In 1874 Benjamin Paul Blood, a NewYork ... calculating prodigy privately published a highly eccentric account of his experiences under the gas nitrous oxide. In "The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy," ... laughing gas revealed to him "the Open Secret ... the primordial ... surprise of Life."

The philosophical implications of breathing nitrous oxide were first discovered by Sir Humphrey Davis in 1799".

2

William James and the Anaisthetic Revelation

16 to 19

p. 17

"Blood's anesthetic revelation ... is rife with contradictory statements that ... act as a kind of propositional ladder, reaching to a higher, encompassing, all-inclusive reconciliation."

"In his essay "On Some Hegelisms," James remarks ... of how

p. 18

under the effects of the gas James experienced the reconciliation of opposites that Blood described as the essence of the anesthetic revelation. ...

"The keynote of the experience," he wrote, "is the tremendously ... intense psychedelic illumination. ..."" (Melechi, p. 20)

"The experience convinced James that the conscious person is continuous with a wider, fuller "self" of which one is usually unaware, but which is made present in ... mystical illumination ...; moreover, that "wider self" is itself conterminous with ... the universe at large."

3

Henri Bergson and the E'lan Vital

20 to 26

p. 21

"Bergson came to the conclusion that consciousness uses the brain and is not ...

p. 22

produced by it. ... The brain's function then, for Bergson, was to act as a kind of "reducing valve," limiting the amount of "reality" entering consciousness. ...

[p. 279, n. 3:2 "Years later, Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, called upon Bergson's notion of the brain as a "reducing valve" to account for the effects of mescaline on {viz., by expanding it} consciousness."

As he wrote in 1911, "The brain is the organ of attention to life ...,

shutting out from consciousness all that is of no practical interest to us." (M-E, pp. 47, 77)

{Among such concerns as are shut-out as "of no practical interest to us" are abilities to see the worlds whence we come before this life, and to those whither we go after this life; so that we are kept in a state of continuous terror for lack of such knowledge. On account of our not seeing the ultimate retribution for our every act, many persons become heedless and obnoxious, so that there is resultant continuous social disorder.}

p. 23

Yet one drawback to the brain's highly efficient ability to focus on necessities is that it "falsifies" reality".

"awareness is subject to the highly efficient editing procedures of the brain, which limits the amount of input coming to it".

p. 22

"Bergson developed his radical ideas about the role of consciousness ... into a complete evolutionary theory, presented in Creative Evolution (1907)".

p. 22

"The intellect, then, then was a strictly practical device, and its use was solely limited to dealing with the necessities of staying alive. ... The difference this kind of consciousness and a cosmic consciousness, open to the influx of the whole, is evident. ...

p. 23

Through drawing back from our habitual gesture of "dealing" with the world, we can ... discover

a kind of consciousness in which subject and object -- we and the world -- are "one.""

{[according to the Madhyamaka] "asking whether the subject (grahaka) ... and the object (grahya) ... are different from each other. He answers, "No."" (JTT, p. 32)} {[according to the Vijn~ana-vada] "When the subject-object duality is transcended, one dwells in ... the Absolute." (CSIPh, p. 120)}

"The whole past ..., Bergson believed "still exists, ... is still present to consciousness in such a manner that, to have the revelation of it, consciousness has but ... a withdraw a veil." [M-E, pp. 56-77]

Such insights are the foundation for Marcel Proust's immense novel Remebrance of Things Past, perhaps the most determined effort to put Bergson's ideas into practice. The novel begins with the narrator "regaining" the past through ... the memories of his childhood".

{This would indicate that Bergson's suggestion is of no metaphysical significance whatsoever, if all he meant was the merest of ordinary memories of the self-same lifetime. (Not until the akas`ik records of other lifetimes are reached is there anything of metaphysical significance achieved.)}

4

The Superman

27 to 30

p. 29

"philosophy argued for a "higher morality" and a more severe self-discipline than that professed by the hypocritical Christians".

p. 281, n. 4:1

"Nietzsche's attack on Christianity was prompted by the self-serving, hypocritical variety [of "Christianity"] prominent in Europe at the time (and today)".

{The only "self" served such "Christianity" is the greed-maddened egotism of the superrich atheistical ploutokrateia. The hypocrisy would consist of the fact that such ploutokrats -- if they have any religion at all -- are fanatic Mammon-worshippers.}

p. 28

"Nietzsche's conception of the superman was of an individual of such ... zest for life that he would be able to affirm life as it is, joyfully, even in the face of its apparent absurdity and cruelty.

{This sort of condescension (resignation to the divine plan) is most readily and naturally available when there is a sense that the deities have arranged events so as to produce continuously the best possible consequences.}

And affirm it ... eternally, as his doctrine of the "eternal recurrence of all things" implies."

p. 281, n. 4:2

"eternal recurrence cannot be experienced as either eternal or recurrent since, if everything recurs recurs again exactly as it happens now -- and has recurred such throughout eternity -- there would be no difference between "this" recurrence and either an "earlier" or "later" one. ... Each recurrence would appear to us as the "same time," and hence seemingly occurring only once."

{This would most effectively apply to the system of the universe[s] as a whole, thereby making the effective total time-duration quite finite, if it must of necessity be viewed from within that system (there being nowhere outside it for an independent standpoint from which to measure time).} {{This has been a favorite paradox of mine for some years : I supposed that I was its inventor, but I am pleased to find here that it was already known to metaphysics.}}

p. 282, n. 4:2

"For a thoughtful study of the similarities between Nietzsche's recurrence and Rilke's doctrine of "once only" announced in the Duino Elegies, see the brilliant essay "Rilke and Nietzsche" by Erich Heller in The Importance of Nietzsche."

p. 29

"As scholars like James Webb and Joscelyn Godwin make clear, a current of occult interest ran through the enlightenment, the Romantic revolution, and other cultural and political movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries."

p. 282, n. 4:4

"James Webb's brilliant ... histories of occultism The Occult Establishment (1976) and The Occult Underground (1988), also

Joscelyn Godwin's The Theosophical Enlightenment (1994)."

5

A. R. Orage and the New Age

31 to 37

"Ouspensky had worked with Gurdjieff in Russia and Turkey from 1915 to 1918 .... . In 1921 he arrived in London ... . ... Orage published Ouspensky's "Letters from Russia" in The New Age ... . ... Devoted to ... philosophical, mystical ... writing, the pages of The New Age introduced the work of the writer Katherine Mansfield".

p. 34

"In a series of lectures given in 1904 ... in Manchester and Leeds, Orage brought the Nietzschean inspiration ... under the title "Consciousness : Animal, Human and Superhuman." ... the lectures were published in book from in 1907".

p. 36

"Orage argues that animal consciousness ... receives impressions and retains images, but there is no consciousness of this, no awareness ... . ... It can pick up sensory impressions, even retain and store them, but it has no memory of them."

{Absurd! Of course animals have both consciousness of sensory impressions, and memory of those sensory impressions. Machines may sense objects without being conscious, but animals are just as conscious as are humans.}

"Orage's ... Nietzchean ethos of self-creation was soon to lead him away from the more earnest and idealistic Theosophical campfires."

{Such an absurdity as claiming that animals are not conscious is an indication of poor judgement, dishonesty, or both. Orage's liking for the writings of Nietzsche is another indication of poor judgement, dishonesty, or both. ["Nietzche did not believe in a "spiritual reality,"" (p. 27) but was instead a deluded materialist.]}

6

Ouspensky's 4th Dimension

38 to 52

p. 39

"Ouspensky experienced with unsettling vividness "memories" of places he had not seen ... . ...

p. 40

The other obsession that haunted Ouspensky was his conviction that the everyday world was a fraud."

p. 43

"The basic theme of Tertium Organum is the need to pass beyond the artificial limits to knowledge erected by the inadequate logic of positivist science. To this day that scince asserts that there is no greater significance or deeper meaning to life than that provided by its material explanation -- which in effect means that there is no meaning or significance to it at all -- and it was against this numbing assessment that Ouspensky brought his considerable talent and incisive intellect to bear. To recognize ... that behind this world lies another world, totally different from our own, a world, as Ouspensky called it, of the "miraculous" -- such was the aim of Tertium Organum. The book's title means the "third organ of thought," beyond Aristotle's and Francis Bacon's ... .

p. 44

... Ouspensky came to understand that this world was a gigantic hieroglyph, a symbol for a higher, more intensely meaningful world that lay beyond it".

"Ouspensky ... looked with wonder at his ash tray. Suddenly he saw this humble object as the center of a vast radiating web of meanings and relations."

{This episode is closely similar to the spiritual illumination of Jacob Boehme "by ... a pewter dish. Boehme received an illumination of knowledge and wrote : "... my spirit directly saw through all things, and knew God in and by all ... ."" ("IJB")}

p. 47

"The world of space and time is not, then, an illusion".

{The material universe is an illusion (maya) is various ways : like an optical illusion (and unlike divine substances), material objects cease from existing after some time; material objects (unlike divine objects) are not self-created nor self-caused; etc. Furthermore, to suppose that material things have any purpose or meaning in and of themselves (rather than in relation to the divine) would indeed be a delusion.}

"Ouspensky ... as his "Letters from Russia" show, ... viewed socialism as a central evil".

{As is well-known, the party of Lenin was installed during the Great War by machinations of the German goverment of Lutheran capitalism. In being warned against the party of Lenin, we are warned against the evils of Protestant capitalism.}