“Gurdjieff: Making a New World,” was one of the last books that J. G. Bennett wrote, published in 1973.

It’s a book that tells a new [or very ancient, although these are one in the same] mythology on the nature of existence and on the purpose of human life. Gurdjieff was the catalyst for introducing these ideas, and Bennett was a conduit for getting them more broadly distributed.

At the heart of this myth is the idea that people matter. We’re not here to drive the progress of technology [an ultimately ego-centered aim], or even to eradicate poverty, halt global warming, or fix any of the other problems that we’ve created for ourselves [that just puts us back where we started]. Instead, we’re part of a much bigger system based on the principle of reciprocal maintenance. The passage of time creates entropy, and leads to heat death: involution. But we have a counter force - evolution - a function which concentrates and improves the quality of energy. As humans we’re in the middle of the energetic food chain:

1) Heat
2) Simple
3) Crystal
4) Soil
5) Vegetable
6) Germ
7) Animal
8) Man
9) Demiurge
10) Cosmic Individuality
11) Trogoautoegocrat
12) Endlessness
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This book definitely gave me a different perspective on history. The first half of the book focuses heavily on Middle Eastern history, and takes a much longer look [100k years] than we see in popular academics. Gurdjieff and Bennett developed a strategic plan for the next millennia not the next five years, as is commonplace today. I find the breadth of their present moment refreshing. In the tech bubbles of today, sometimes I feel as though we feel shame for the past, like we’re always looking “forward.” But Bennett’s story paints a very different picture of history, quite counter to our story of technological progress.

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Also, all of the review of Middle-Eastern history got me researching the Middle East. I was eleven when 9/11 happened, so anything Middle Eastern was banished from my progressive education. Bennett suggests that Gurdjieff was in touch with some very ancient lineages handed down from generation to generation in the Middle East. Whatever globalization had left of them, the War on Terror has almost certainly destroyed.

To go on an aside, everything concerning Islamic fundamentalism, “terrorism,” Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda turns out to be rife with irony. For example, we funded Osama and Islamic fundamentalists in the ’80s in their fight again the USSR. And then the tides turned in the ’90s. Also, we knew 9/11 was coming, and didn’t care. Osama points out in a letter to the US, that we are the extremist terrorists, and by the simple metric of human deaths, he couldn’t be more right - 9/11 killed 3,000 people, and just in Iraq, we’ve killed hundreds of thousands so far - three magnitudes more deaths!

Another piece of irony is that al Qaeda’s goal, which has been public for years, is to bring down the US economy by 2020 through involvement in unwinnable wars. Well, we totally fell for it, and they’re succeeding…

Two last pieces:

1) Check out Sharia law - what a lot of Middle Eastern culture is based on.

2) Drones! Killing Pakistani tribespeople! ( )

J..G. Bennett could speak to G. in Turkish. ( )