A
andi
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Basarab Nicolescu, a very intelligent man of science in the field of quantum physics discussing the teachings of Gurdjieff in relation to science, reality and lows.
This is a long read, so read patiently (it is a very informative extract well worth the attention).
[Book]-(Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teachings)
[link]google books extract:
_http://books.google.ca/books?id=3R9vGrR5IEUC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=basarab+nicolescu+gurdjieff+nature&source=bl&ots=6_E9Y-NK01&sig=qXyopG0RVgHBp9KlcUzKvMtsFAM&hl=en&ei=05sCTIanC4L-8Aba4eXhDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=basarab%20nicolescu%20gurdjieff%20nature&f=false
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edit: divided in 3 parts
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[Extract]:
Gurdjieff's
Philosophy of
Nature
Basarab Nicolescu
This is a long read, so read patiently (it is a very informative extract well worth the attention).
[Book]-(Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teachings)
[link]google books extract:
_http://books.google.ca/books?id=3R9vGrR5IEUC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=basarab+nicolescu+gurdjieff+nature&source=bl&ots=6_E9Y-NK01&sig=qXyopG0RVgHBp9KlcUzKvMtsFAM&hl=en&ei=05sCTIanC4L-8Aba4eXhDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=basarab%20nicolescu%20gurdjieff%20nature&f=false
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edit: divided in 3 parts
--------------
[Extract]:
Gurdjieff's
Philosophy of
Nature
Basarab Nicolescu
A particle-physicist’s bold,
rigorous exploration of the
relationship between Gurdjieff’s
cosmological mythos and leading
theories in physics and cosmology.
It is becoming very fashionable almost everywhere to find
parallels between modern science and this or that
teaching, this or that philosophical system, this or that
religion. The more or less hidden sociological root of such
a tendency is quite obvious: the contemporary allpowerful
"god" of technoscience is evoked as evidence of
the "seriousness" of another field of knowledge.
Even if the intentions of certain seekers (and I include here
those few who are drawn toward the relationship between
science and the Gurdjieff teaching) are not tied to this
sociological motivation, there is still a huge
misunderstanding. The methodology and perspective of a
teaching, a system of philosophy, or a religion are very
different from the methodology and aim of modern
science. To compare results or ideas judged to be similar
can only lead to the worst illusions, to analogies that are
soft and devoid of meaning, and, in the best of cases, to
resonances that are felt as "poetic."
Nevertheless, the search for a real relationship between
science and such fields of study would, in our opinion, be
worthwhile. Such a relationship could be established if the
teaching, the philosophical system, or the religion in
question derives from a philosophy of nature.1
The fact that Gurdjieff's teaching contains a philosophy of
nature is obvious, and the present study will attempt to
support that affirmation. The hypothesis of a
correspondence between man and nature is formulated
without ambiguity by Gurdjieff:
"It is impossible to study a system of the universe
without studying man. At the same time, it is
impossible to study man without studying the universe.
Man is an image of the world. He was created by the
same laws which created the whole of the world. By
knowing and understanding himself, he will know and
understand the whole world, all the laws that create
and govern the world. And at the same time, by
studying the world and the laws that govern the world,
he will learn and understand the laws which govern
him. . . . The study of the world and the study of man
must therefore run parallel, the one helping the other.''
The comparison between modern science and this type of
philosophy goes beyond an intellectual exercise. In the
first place, some great scientific discoveries have been
guided by ideas from a philosophy of nature. For
example, the role that German Naturphilosophie played in
the discovery of electromagnetism in 1820 by Oersted is
well known. Such cases are rare, but it is their existence,
not their number, that is highly significant. These cases
show that there is an intrinsic relationship, which is not
devoid of meaning, between nature and a "realistic"
philosophy of nature.
A second aspect seems still more important. The absence
of meaning, above all the absence of a value system
guiding technoscience, is perhaps the characteristic trait of
our epoch. It is just in this context that we are going to
examine Gurdjieff's philosophy of nature.
THE PRINCIPLE OF DISCONTINUITY AND
QUANTUM DISCONTINUITY
One of the most surprising aspects of Gurdjieff's
philosophy of nature is the central role which it gives to
discontinuity, with a direct critical reference, moreover, to
contemporary physics.
Indeed, with rare exceptions, continuity is a constant in
human thought. It is probably based on the evidence
provided by our sense organs: continuity of our own
body, continuity of the environment, continuity of
memory. It belongs to the visible domain, to the domain of
constant forms (or forms evolving in a constant way), to
the domain of objects. Death, natural cataclysms,
mutations were, until just recently, considered more as
manifestations of accident, chance, or impenetrable
mystery. Science needs a mathematical apparatus for its
development. Newton and Leibniz discovered such a tool
based on continuity: infinitesimal calculus. For centuries,
scientific thought has been nourished by the idea of
continuity.
Gurdjieff, however, clearly affirms the essential role of
discontinuity in nature:
It is necessary to regard the universe as consisting of
vibrations. These vibrations proceed in all kinds, aspects,
and densities of the matter which constitutes the
universe, from the finest to the coarsest . . . . So that one
of the fundamental propositions of our physics is the
continuity of vibrations, although this has never been
precisely formulated because it has never been
opposed. In certain of the newest theories this
proposition is beginning to be shaken.
In this instance the view of ancient knowledge is
opposed to that of contemporary science, because at the
base of the understanding of vibrations ancient
knowledge places the principle of the discontinuity of
vibrations.
The principle of the discontinuity of vibrations means
the definite and necessary characteristic of all vibrations
in nature, whether ascending or descending, to develop
not uniformly but with periodical accelerations and
retardations.
These considerations of Gurdjieff's were formulated in
about 1915, in front of a St. Petersburg group. The date is
important.
Gurdjieff himself was aware of these scientific discoveries,
or at least one of the numerous intellectuals among his
groups in Moscow and St. Petersburg—Ouspensky in all
likelihood—had informed him of the existence of these
discoveries. The allusion in these texts to "certain most
recent theories" may thus be explained. According to this
hypothesis, Gurdjieff, speaking of "contemporary science,"
would have been referring rather to what we would today
call "classical science." But beyond questions of
vocabulary, what seems important to us is that Gurdjieff
sees the epistemological and philosophical stake of science
in discontinuity.
In evoking this work developed in 1900, Max Planck
writes: "After a few weeks, which were certainly filled by
the most intense work of my life, I had a flash of light in
the darkness in which I was debating with myself, and
unexpected perspectives were opened." This "flash of
light in the darkness" revealed to him a concept—the
elementary quantum of action ("action" is a physical
quantity corresponding to energy multiplied by time)—
which was going to revolutionize all of physics and
profoundly change our vision of the world. This quantum
is expressed by a universal constant (the "Planck
constant") which has a well-determined value and occurs
by integer multiples.
The Planck quantum introduces a discrete, discontinuous
structure of energy. Planck was fully conscious that in
breaking down the old all-powerful concept of continuity,
the very foundation of classical realism was thus being
put in question: "This quantum represented.… something
absolutely new, unsuspected until then, and seemed
destined to revolutionize a theoretical physics based on
continuity, inherent in all causal relations since the
discovery of infinitesimal calculus by Leibniz and
Newton."
It is important to take into account that the "discontinuity"
we are speaking of (whether in regard to quantum theory
or in regard to the cosmology of Gurdjieff) is a pure and
firm discontinuity which has nothing in common with the
popular usage of this word (the fork of a road, for
example). To try to grasp the full strangeness of the idea
of discontinuity, let us imagine a bird jumping from one
branch to another without passing through any
intermediary point: it would be as if the bird were to
suddenly materialize on one branch, then on another.
Evidently, confronting such a possibility, our habitual
imagination is blocked. But mathematics can treat this sort
of situation rigorously.
Quantum discontinuity is an infinitely less rich concept
than discontinuity in the sense in which it is used in the
cosmology of Gurdjieff. There it is presented as the
fundamental aspect of one of the two laws regulating all
worlds (the law of seven). The "obligatory-gap-aspects-ofthe-
unbroken-flowing-of-the-whole" conditions the
interpenetration of the different worlds, one within
another. It is discontinuity which permits unity to exist in
diversity and diversity within unity. It is discontinuity
which permits evolution and involution. It is discontinuity
which permits the coexistence of global causality and local
causality. And, in the end, it is discontinuity which
assures the dignity of man and gives meaning to his life.
We are therefore very far from quantum discontinuity.
MATTER AND DEGREES OF MATERIALITY
Gurdjieff affirms unambiguously the materialistic
character of his teaching: "Everything in the Universe is
material: therefore the Great Knowledge is more materialistic
than materialism." And he adds: "Everything in this
universe can be weighed and measured. The Absolute is
as material, as weighable and measurable, as the moon, or
as man." Here is something to scandalize a good many
spiritualists and devotees of Tradition and something to
placate some scientists (let us forget for the moment the
word "Absolute").
This trenchant affirmation, however, reveals its full
meaning only at the moment Gurdjieff introduces the
distinction between "matter" and "degree of materiality."
Like every man of science, Gurdjieff is convinced that
"matter is everywhere the same.…" But he introduces the
notion of the degree of materiality, linked to energy: "It is
true that matter is the same, but materiality is different.
And different degrees of materiality depend directly upon
the qualities and properties of the energy manifested at a
given point."
For a physicist of the nineteenth century, the idea of
"degrees of materiality" would not have meant very much.
It takes on real substance with the discovery of the
quantum world, where laws are radically different from
those of the macrophysical world. It is the study of the
infinitely small which reveals a degree of materiality
different from that of the macrophysical world.
This is not the place to discuss quantum laws. But allow
us to cite briefly a relevant example.
Classical physics recognizes two kinds of objects that are
quite distinct: corpuscles** and waves. Classical
corpuscles are discrete entities, clearly localized in space
and characterized, from a dynamic point of view, by their
energy and their momentum. Corpuscles could easily be
visualized as billiard-balls traveling continuously in space
and time, and describing a very precise trajectory. As for
waves, they were conceived as occupying all of space, in a
continuum. A wave phenomenon can be described as a
superpositioning of periodic waves characterized by a
spatial period (wave-length) and by a temporal period. In
the same way, a wave can be characterized by its
"frequencies": a "frequency of vibration" (the inverse of the
period of oscillation) and a "wave number" (the inverse of
the wave-length). Waves can thus be readily visualized.
Quantum mechanics brought about the complete
overturning of this view. Quantum particles are
corpuscles and waves at the same time. Their dynamic
characteristics are connected by the formulas of Einstein-
Planck (1900–1905) and de Broglie (1924): the energy is
proportional to the temporal frequency (the Einstein-
Planck formula), and the momentum is proportional to
the wave number (the de Broglie formula). The factor of
proportionality, in both cases, is precisely Planck's
constant.
This representation of a quantum particle defies all
attempts to represent it by forms in space and time, for it
is obviously impossible to represent something mentally
that would be simultaneously corpuscle and wave. At the
same time, the energy is changing in a discontinuous way.
The concepts of continuity and discontinuity are reunited
by nature.
It must be well understood that the quantum particle is a
completely new entity that cannot be reduced to classical
representations; the quantum particle is not a simple
juxtaposition of corpuscle and wave.
We can understand the quantum particle as being a unity
of contradictories. It would be more correct to affirm that
this particle is neither a corpuscle nor a wave. The unity of
contradictories is more than the simple sum of its classical
parts, a summation which is contradictory (from the
classical point of view) and approximate (from the
quantum point of view).
When Gurdjieff affirms, "The world consists of vibrations
and matter, or of matter in a state of vibration, of vibrating
matter," and when we remember the role he gives to the
frequency of vibrations, to energy, to discontinuity, it is
tempting to think of the new quantum entities. Let us be
very clear: we are not affirming that quantum particles
can be identified with the "vibrations" Gurdjieff speaks
about (which would in any case be absurd), but that they
appear to be their materialization in the quantum world.
At the same time, it is indisputable that the discovery of
the quantum world gives rational, scientific sense to the
notion of "degree of materiality." Gurdjieff associates the
fineness of matter with the frequency of vibrations: "The
expression 'density of vibrations' corresponds to
'frequency of vibrations' and is used as the opposite of
'density of matter'.… Therefore the finest matter
corresponds to the greatest 'density of vibrations.'"
Indeed, what conceivable relation is there between a chair
and a neutrino (a particle with no mass and no electrical
charge which penetrates our macrophysical matter
without impediment)? It is clear that it is a question of two
different worlds—of two different levels of reality,
governed by different laws—and that the degree of
fineness of matter is very different when passing from one
level to another.
The existence of different degrees of matter allows us to
see that there are different kinds of matter, defined exactly
in terms of their degree of materiality. Gurdjieff is not the
only contemporary thinker who has conceived of the
existence of several kinds of matter. Stephane Lupasco
(1900–1988), whose philosophy takes quantum mechanics
as its point of departure, deduced, as a consequence of his
logic of energetic antagonism, three types of matterenergy.
With regard to the number of types of matter, Gurdjieff
made two apparently contradictory affirmations. In the
collection of his talks recalled by his students, Views From
the Real World, he says, "Unity consists of three matters,"
whereas in In Search of the Miraculous, he affirms that there
are twelve categories of matter." In fact, there is no
contradiction. When Gurdjieff, like Lupasco, speaks of
three types of matter, he is referring explicitly to the law
of three, which gives structure to all the phenomena of
reality. In this sense, there is no question of a coincidence
between the numbers advanced by Gurdjieff and Lupasco;
to the degree that Lupasco's conclusion is based on a
ternary logic—the included middle—the correspondence
with the law of three is obvious. Finally, considering the
idea of materiality in relation to the structure of the
universe, Gurdjieff, in his cosmology, deduced that there
must necessarily be twelve categories of matter. This will
give scientists work for several centuries.
The existence of two matters—macrophysical matter and
microphysical matter—even if it is not unanimously
accepted (or recognized as such) does not unleash fierce
opposition either. On the other hand, to speak of
"biological matter" or "psychic matter" is enough to bring
to a boil a scientific world still dominated by
reductionism. Likewise, not everyone is ready as yet to
accept the affirmation of Lupasco (who, as we will see, is
close to the ideas of Gurdjieff) that every system includes
an aspect that is, at one and the same time, macrophysical,
biological, and psychic.
For Gurdjieff, there is nothing completely inert in nature;
everything is in movement: "The speed of vibrations of a
matter shows the degree of intelligence of the given
matter. You must remember that there is nothing dead or
inanimate in nature. Everything in its own way is alive,
everything in its own way is intelligent and conscious."
Though this assertion is, at first sight, astonishing, it is in
accord with what we observe at the scale of the infinitely
small. "Inert matter" is an expression of classical science
which has been completely emptied of meaning today.
Microphysical matter is everything but "inert matter." At
the level of the infinitely small, there is a boiling activity,
an infinite number of processes, a perpetual
transformation between energy and matter, a continuous
creation of particles and anti-particles. The stupefying
quantity of information and the increasing density of
energy that one finds in the quantum world show that it is
practically impossible to trace a boundary between the
living and the non-living. It is quite conceivable that a
quantum particle possesses its own subjectivity, its own
intelligence, in complex relations of perpetual combat and
of continual creation and annihilation taking place with all
the other particles.
Gurdjieff often comes back to the problem of the
intelligence of matter: "In addition to its cosmic properties,
every substance also possesses psychic properties, that is,
a certain degree of intelligence." This explains why
certain substances can contribute to the evolution of man,
an evolution which is, after all, at the very heart of the
Gurdjieff teaching.
For Gurdjieff, there is no separation among matters: "The
finer matters permeate the coarser ones." An example of
this is microphysical matter, which penetrates
macrophysical matter. Protons, neutrons, electrons, the
quantum vacuum are in us, even if our behavior is far
from being identical to that of the quantum world.
Gurdjieff goes even further in affirming that all the
matters of the universe are found in man: "We have in us
the matter of all other worlds. Man is, in the full sense of
the term, a 'miniature universe'; in him are all the matters
of which the universe consists;" We can interpret this as
meaning that what is being described is the Gurdjieffian
version of the mystery of the Eucharist.
As we can see, the materialism of the Gurdjieff teaching is
very complex, and we have only touched on the most
superficial fringe of it—its relation to modern science. But
make no mistake about it: Gurdjieff's "matters" have
multiple aspects, most of which totally escape the
methodology of modern science since they concern,
rather, the inner alchemy of man.
THE LAW OF THREE AND THE NECESSITY FOR A
NEW LOGIC
Since the dawn of time, binary thought, that of "yes" and
"no," has dominated man's activity. Aristotelian logic has
reigned for centuries and continues to this day. Certain
traditional teachings (and in particular, Christian
theology) had the potential for a new logic, but the
potential stayed in the hands of a small number of
initiates. Gurdjieff's teaching on the law of three is related
to this new logic, which also manifests itself in quantum
physics.
According to Gurdjieff, the law of three is "the
fundamental law that creates all phenomena in all the
diversity of unity of all universes."
This is the "Law of Three" or the law of the three
principles or the three forces. It consists of the fact that
every phenomenon.… is the result of the combination
or the meeting of three different and opposing forces.
Contemporary thought realizes the existence of two
forces and the necessity of these two forces for the
production of a phenomenon.… No question has ever
been raised as to the third, or if it has been raised it has
scarcely been heard.… The first force may be called
active or positive; the second, passive or negative; the
third, neutralizing. But these are merely names, for in
reality all three forces are equally active and appear as
active, passive, and neutralizing, only at their meeting
points, that is to say, only in relation to one another at a
given moment.
Before discussing the special character of the third
principle, let us, for a moment, emphasize the character of
the opposition (or as Lupasco calls it, the "antagonistic
contradiction") between the three principles, to which
Gurdjieff constantly returns. In Beelzebub's Tales to His
Grandson, he describes the law of three as "a law which
always flows into a consequence and becomes the cause of
subsequent consequences, and always functions by three
independent and quite opposite characteristic
manifestations, latent within it, in properties neither seen
nor sensed." This other aspect is worth mentioning: the
latent character, invisible and ungraspable, of the three
principles. Manifestation can only take place by means of
the interaction between the law of three and the law of
seven.
The opposition between the three principles is a veritable
"contradiction," in the philosophical sense of the term:
something which, far from self-destructing, builds itself
through antagonistic struggle.
It is relatively easy to imagine a contradiction between
two terms, but practically impossible (except by a formal
mathematical construction) to conceive of a contradiction
between three terms. Two of three terms lose, by the
inclusion of a third term, their own identity. In this sense,
we can understand the expression "included middle."
Paradoxically, in the logic of the "included middle,"
notions of "true" and "false," far from losing their value,
are considerably expanded, embracing a number of
phenomena which are much more important than those of
binary logic.
An example taken from quantum physics will illustrate
the preceding points simply.
In an experiment made, quite obviously, in the world of
macrophysics, a quantum particle manifests either as
wave or as corpuscle, that is to say as one of two
contradictory and antagonistic entities. If we want to use
the usual word "complementarity," it is more the
expression "antagonistic complementarity" which
governs, because the properties of waves and corpuscles
are mutually exclusive. Now, at its proper level of reality
in the quantum world, the quantum particle appears as a
third term, neither wave nor corpuscle, but which, at the
macrophysical level, is capable of manifesting as a wave
or a corpuscle. In this sense, it is a reconciling force
between the wave and the corpuscle. But, at the same
time, being neither wave nor corpuscle and manifesting at
another level of reality, it is clearly in contradiction with
the wave or the corpuscle.
It should be noted that Ouspensky—one of the most
famous disciples of Gurdjieff—in his book Tertium
Organum, published in 1912 in Russia, was the first
modern thinker to have affirmed the importance of the
principle of the included middle as the fundamental logic
of the new science. Deeply enamored at the same time by
both science and tradition, Ouspensky wrote other books
inspired by science, of which The Fourth Dimension, which
appeared in 1909 in St. Petersburg, had, among others, a
considerable influence upon Russian futurism, and
Malevitch.
Earlier I gave as an example of the third term the quantum
particle in its own world: the quantum world. But do we
really see this particle? Have we a direct access to the
quantum world? Our ways of measuring are always
macrophysical and we do not really see the quantum
particle. In our accelerators we will reconstruct it, for
example, by its traces. Our own macrophysical
constitution prevents us from traveling freely in the
quantum world and from going to "see" what happens
there.
To understand this third term would require a conceptual
revolution. A relatively recent development in particle
physics throws an unexpected light on the third force. The
unification of all the physical interactions seems to require
a space-time whose number of dimensions goes far
beyond the number of dimensions of our own space-time
(three dimensions of space and one dimension of time). It
doesn't matter that this unification could happen only at
fabulous levels of energy, never achievable in our
accelerators. What matters is that such a large number of
dimensions could be reunited by the coherence of physical
laws. Is the manifestation of the third force this large
space-time? Would this third force be the source of
discontinuity, of nonseparability and of nonlocality?
In relation to this large space-time, we, poor beings living
in four dimensions, are a bit like the two-dimensional
beings of Edward A. Abbott's conceptual universe,
Flatland, in relation to the miraculous beings coming
from a world of three dimensions. But we can understand
this third force precisely if we, as Gurdjieff said, go
beyond the limitations of "the fundamental categories of
our perception of the world of phenomena," that is to say,
if we go beyond our sensation of space and time.
Gurdjieff's insistence, in his philosophy of nature, on the
scientific notions of "dimensions" and "space" and "time"
seems to us neither accidental nor a simple coquettishness
of language. In particular, to distinguish the different
cosmoses by the different number of their dimensions of
space-time is extremely significant.
The "Okidanokh" is a marvelous Gurdjieffian symbol of
the ternary dynamics and of its manifestation. It is
conceived as the "Omnipresent-Active-Element," as the
"'Unique-Active-Element' the particularities of which are
the chief cause of everything existing in the Universe". It
"obtains its prime arising.… from the three Holy sources
of the sacred Theomertmalogos, that is, from the
emanation of the Most Holy Sun Absolute.… [It is] the
fundamental cause of most of the cosmic phenomena."
Directly linked to the three principles of the law of three, it
is thus normal that "no results of any kind normally
obtained from the processes occurring through this
Omnipresent World-substance can ever be perceived by
beings or sensed by them." But how to reconcile the
ungraspable character of the three principles of the law of
three with the fact that the Okidanokh is, all the same, a
substance capable of penetrating all cosmic formations?
Indeed, "immediately on entering as a whole into any
cosmic unit, there immediately occurs in it what is called
'Djartklom,' that is to say, it is dispersed into the three
fundamental sources from which it obtained its prime
arising." The three principles are thus universally
present. But what is it that confers on the Okidanokh the
character of substance? It is certainly not the three
principles. So Gurdjieff invents a symbol of etherokrilno,
"that prime-source substance with which the whole
Universe is filled, and.… is the basis for the arising and
maintenance of everything existing". It is exactly this
fourth element of Okidanokh which confers on it the
character of substance "the proportion of the pure—that is,
absolutely unblended—Etherokrilno, which unfailingly
enters into all cosmic formations and there serves, as it
were, for connecting all the active elements of these
formations; and afterwards when its three fundamental
parts reblend then the said proportion of Etherokrilno is
re-established."
The symbol of Okidanokh, let it be said in passing, creates
an interesting relationship between the "three" and the
"four": the "three" represents the latent invisible and
ungraspable characteristic of the three principles, whereas
the "four" represents the manifestation of the three
principles on the plane of matter-energy.
A phonetic resemblance can make us think of a possible
relation between "etherokrilno" and "ether," especially as
Gurdjieff speaks of "the prime-source substance with
which the whole Universe is filled." But there is no such
true relationship. Ether is a sort of reference absolute,
unmovable, a universal system of reference. Etherokrilno,
in its relation with Okidanokh, is linked to movement, to
transformation, to energetic transmission.
We can imagine Okidanokh as a field filling all the
cosmoses and whose vibrations will transmute the law of
three in material manifestations. If the "natural" man
seems sensitive to duality, the universe, as far as it is
concerned, certainly needs the three.