During our discussion in the online study group on Tuesday we talked about the fact that we each have a cosmology. This is sometimes called a world view or paradigm. Or put more simply, it’s our picture of how the world that we experience from moment to moment really works. Sometimes this cosmology is arrived at through years of study, contemplation, experience, etc. But often it’s just an unexamined collection of assumptions and conditioning. Upon further reflection we might identify three main sources for our cosmology as shown below:
It struck me today that there is an interesting parallel between reasoning and conscience. It’s true that conscience comes from a source in the unconditioned worlds, while reasoning rises out of the world of logic, facts and daily experience. However, they both end up having a quiet, non-coercive influence. We are free to ignore both reason and conscience, and we often do.
Sincerity - the quality of being free from pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy. from the Latin sincerus meaning clean, pure, sound.
Gurdjieff makes clear that any real process of reasoning with ourselves also requires the ability and willingness to be sincere with ourselves. At first glance this may seem like an odd combination, reasoning and sincerity. But everywhere we look; in politics, in religion, and strangely enough especially in science, there seems to be a near total absence of sincerity... with damaging to disastrous consequences.
One of the participants in the online group mentioned reasoning from first principles the other day. Reflecting on this today I began to see more deeply into the wisdom of this approach. Essentially this ties in with developing an objective cosmology. But whereas a focus on cosmology has more to do with understanding how the world is structured, the focus on first principles is more focused on the laws that govern how things happen.
For the last couple of days I’ve been researching the link between reasoning and conscience. Through a Wikipedia article I was led to a source that I’ve never used before, namely the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Contained in that document is the following:
“Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed.”
I just happened on this section from page 188 of Beelzebub’s Tales.
“Soon after we were on ‘good terms’ with each other, I discovered that in the Being of this priest Abdil—owing to very many external circumstances, among which were also heredity and the conditions under which he had been prepared for a responsible being—the function called ’conscience’ which ought to be present in every three centered being, had not yet been quite atrophied in him, so that after he had cognized with his Reason certain cosmic truths I had explained to him, he immediately acquired in his presence towards the beings around him, similar to him, almost that attitude which should be in all normal three-brained beings of the whole Universe, that is to say, he became, as it is also said there, ‘compassionate,’ and ‘sensitive’ towards the beings surrounding him. -- (emphasis added)
One of the participants in the online group posted an observation today that included a comment about the help he received from his wife and what a great partner she was. Reflecting on his post I suddenly saw that reasoning in the arena of creative action, like who our partner should be, is probably not wise, at least in the beginning. Even with our best insight and methods of evaluation it does seem to me that we would come up short trying to reason this through on the front end. Too much is hidden, even with our best efforts at seeing.
For the last three weeks we’ve looked at reasoning, Objective Reason, and the reasoning process from a number of different perspectives. We’ve had input from Gurdjieff, Wikipedia, Bennett … and yours truly, among others. But are we any closer to really getting a handle on reasoning?
At this point, we can make a few statements about reasoning that appear to have some validity...
As we said yesterday, Gurdjieff mentions objective Reason 30 times in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. Here are a few more of Beelzebub’s guiding words of wisdom.
Page 366: Organization by Ashiata Sheimash:
“I must remark by the way, that both of these two terrestrial genuine initiates of that time had already by then ’coated’ in their common presences their higher being-parts to the gradation called ‘completion’ and hence they had time during their further existence to perfect these higher parts of theirs to the required gradation of Sacred Objective Reason, and now their perfected higher being-parts have even ‘become worthy’ to have and already now have the place of their further existence on the holy planet Purgatory.
