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THE FOURTHWAY MANHO E-JOURNAL Volume 84 October 31, 2019 |
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LOUIS PAUWELS By Professor Dr. Tan Man-Ho (An excerpt from the original work, Real World Views, Book 4 by Professor Dr. Tan Man-Ho entitled "A Critique of Material Reflection, On the Modern Innovation to Old Materialism, The Emergence of Tri-Octave Materialism and Some Remarkable Individuals," September 1975 ~ December 1975 Discourses, Chapter 7, Section A : "Louis Pauwels," pp. 182 ~ 187)
A.
LOUIS PAUWELS
1
The
Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man is one of those rare
institutes that prepare obyvatels or ordinary men into remarkable
individuals. It appears very repulsive to those from the non-esoteric
circle, yet still accessible to them. For the mechanical man
who has just begun the study of himself would have to experience with his
inner eyes the various ghosts,
and put them in his control. If you dream of ghost now you must say,
get lost.
And it will disappear, will it? If it does not disappear, then it is
essential to meditate. Surely, this will make gods and ghosts as your
servants – which will sway and transform at your mercy. That is to
say, they become your toys. Instead of them dictating your life, you
dictate their lives. This is what took place, according to Louis Pauwels: We gathered together
in small groups of five, ten or twenty people, under a “master,” formerly
Gurdjieff himself. We were taught to become conscious. The first
stage of the work consisted in understanding that up to the present we had
lived in complete unconsciousness, that in no circumstances or in any
respect – physical, emotional, intellectual – had we ever been free, but
always identified
with our impulses, moods and associations. This side of the Teaching can be
compared to psychoanalysis or Marxism. As psychoanalysis teaches us
that such and such a noble sentiment is merely the sublimation of sexual
inhibition, and Marxism, that religious belief is merely the result of
economic constraints, so we were told that our normal behavior.
Whether “spiritual” or “external,” was entirely due to mechanisms over which
we had no control whatever. This control, the key to true freedom, was
what we were going to be taught. But if we are totally
conditioned, how can we hope to escape? The Teaching said: Stop,
identifying yourself. Instead of being one with your automatic life,
detach yourself from it. Learn to control it by watching yourself
live. Say you are walking in the street: try, if only for five
minutes, to keep yourself from being absorbed by what is going on around
you, or by associations of ideas, and concentrate entirely on yourself.
Say you are with other people: detach yourself for a moment from the
game of conversation and watch them. Notice how completely they follow
their own trains of thought, and how their ideas, far from being the fruits
of a free choice, are only mechanical expressions springing from their own
particular education, instincts or interests. These exercises in
attention were referred to in the Teaching as “self-remembering.”
(Louis Pauwels, Gurdjieff, p.328) Pauwels spoke of the Forest Philosophers group led by Gurdjieff, namely, P.D. Ouspensky, G. E, Bechhofer's, Denis Surat, Dr. Young, Georgette Leblanc, Maeterlinck, Margaret Anderson, D.H. Lawrence, Middleton Murray, A. R. Orage, Katherine Mansfield, Paul Sérant, Aldous Huxley, Pierre Minet, Luc Dietrich, Irène Reweliotty, Irène-Carole, René Dazeville, Dorothy Caruso, Rene Barjavel and Pierre Schaeffer.
2
The conscious life once bestowed in birth,
begins its perpetual flow, the very flow which we saw it to be the
activities of all men in society, or rather that perpetual activity which is
responsible for what we called society. The mechanical men move under
the attraction, mechanically, of themselves neither knowing their activities
and rather just perform something. To move away from this something
makes them trapped into some other things. They neither see nor know
the reason for their movements as such, and that their movements control
them. These mechanical activities in society have ended in social
repulsion. By repulsion is meant the moving away of consciousness
along this line of flow of conscious life and to stand in and external
relation to it, that this in turn is not possible since the other mechanical
men must use force to destroy the other beings. This reciprocal
control of men by men, which appears to be maintenance and regulatory but in
the end is reciprocal destruction, i.e. the reciprocal destruction of
classes, of various order and this is precisely the situation of what is
called the world today. The master and his little slaves in the end find
themselves in reciprocal destruction. And why? Because the
persistent greediness of the master, the brutal enslavement of this life
that the mechanical men will soon be caught in a position to use the weapon
to fell the masters. That the center of gravity of conscious flow of life
begins to shift its materialization, and that human beings begin to move in
a different manner. They form new nuclei and create many centers of
gravity. The mechanical men are beings being controlled by
social forces, that the rate of service production in the masters’ command
affects the mechanicalness. The one line flow of conscious life is
mechanized sill further. This dangerous dilemma of our society where
leaders are undoubtedly in favor of the skillful mechanical men, whom one
sees it as making a mechanical vegetable out of man’s life. This
fearful thing to continue the same job throughout your whole life makes you
really a mechanical being. You are a moving part of the gigantic
exploiting machine that has enslaved you. The higher beings control
you. You are only a mechanical part. But now that you do not want to be a mechanical
being, that you want to leave a machine and you land yourself in another
exploiting machine. And to stay in one is wrong and to stay in another
is also wrong. Now that you manage to see the whole exploiting
machine, you want to destroy it but you must also see those who may be able
to help you to destroy it.
3
When consciousness travels in its own
physical body, the process can be called to sliding within the body.
This slider being enters into the words, the pictures, the pains, the
pleasure, the dreams, the organs and the systems. It
continues to find itself caught and even died in various parts of the body. When body harmony is finally attained, the
consciousness will center itself in the external world, forgetting itself
while moving and centering at outside objects. So long as the inner
body does not give trouble, consciousness would forget to return to survey
its own body. This “self-reminder” comes naturally in a mechanical man
when something or other is irritating the inner body forcing conscious focus
to return to it. Labor shifts the center of gravity of consciousness
to the object, and the body forgets itself. Serious exploitation in
the factory creates a dilemma in work demand and a latent urge to be one’s
own. His dilemma cannot be easily resolved. When the focus
returns to its own self, it is reluctant to move away from it again. Such motion of consciousness is immature, it is
developmental and the physical body works badly, the person thinks poorly.
When consciousness after much experience in this “journey” of experience
finds the body becoming harmonious with nature and with itself, the whole
organism would soon function better. In the present world situation, where “danger” is
everywhere, consciousness has a very hard time. Life is hard indeed. Personal salvation in religion is a typical case of
self-centered positioning of consciousness. Experimental mysticism
(not mere mysticism) is the scientific conscious self-study. It is
scientific yoga. 4
The Marxist method of self-criticism,
involves therefore, a mass shifting of conscious center of gravity into the
material self, including especially the psyche self, a study of all the
“dust” which may be collected unconsciously by the self in the course of the
historical sleep. This happy getting rid of dust particles by
consciousness is a good experiment and quite pleasurable. This method
and practice make man a real man. By this merciless destruction of
one’s existing backward self, one is on the threshold of the new superman. On Ouspensky’s
Experimental Mysticism, let me stress that somewhere at the end of 1970
through 1974, I have been experiencing such mysticism; my
Material Reflection
precisely reflects this state of my consciousness. For the nonce, I
have had such experience. Such method has great capacity to oust wrong
ideas. 5
In the sacred books, we have some truths, something coming from higher
thought. The genesis may be interpreted as an attempt to trace the
life issuing force from the Absolute to our world.
God created the world in seven “days”.
Each day is a time period equal to infinity. I must warn you, there is
a lot of “rubbish” in these “sacred books”. When we study a system of knowledge for truths and
accuracy, we must be objective, not “feel” a liking for it and accept
without verification. 6
A good
obyvatel must
not stick to dead ideas, must not be a bookworm, must not arrest his
thought. In fact to act in this manner such an
obyvatel is
not at all an obyvatel.
By sticking to dead ideas he to violates the principle of perpetual motion
of thoughts – but of course we must not be “fancy seekers” i.e. is to make
“fancy seeking” our principle, and to behave in this manner all the time is
to stick to a dead system of idea once more. We must constantly be on
guard of our mind and our practical activities. We must “put” them
outside our bodies and study them carefully. We must watch our
activities, our thinking and feelings all the time. They become devils
very fast. 7
The contradiction between the
true (or
standard) language and the colloquial language resembles that between the
uncommon and the common, the minority and the majority, the inflexible and
the flexible, and the ideal and the realistic. He who thinks he can
stay on in the true language is fundamentally an ideal being who has
alienated himself from the common people to void the dirt. The
“satirical” property of the colloquial has been the target for
“penalization” in the so-called contemporary educational institutes. Louis Pauwels wrote the book “Monsieur Gurdjieff”
and published in France in 1954. Together with Jacques Bergier, he wrote
“The Morning of the Magicians” published in the United States of America by
Stein and Day, 1964, “The Eternal Man” and another “Der Planet der
unmoglichhen Moglichkeiten” or “Impossible Possibilities” both by Avon
Books.
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