Man And His Nature

dramatic universe vol 3.htm 1 of 290 file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/My%20Documents/... 15/02/2008 21:52 dramatic universe vol 3.htm 2 of 290 file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/My%20Documents/... First Printed 1966 Copyright © 1966 J.G. Bennett Coombe Springs Press Edition 1976 Claymont Communications Edition 1985 ISBN 0-934254-09-5 Claymont Communications Box 112 Charles Town, W.Va. 25414 PREFACE This third volume of The Dramatic Universe is to appear at the same time as the fourth and last volume of a work which has been one of my main interests for more than a third of a century. It has been very hard to bring the work to a stop so that the results could be published. This is in part due to a temperamental inability to let well alone, but also and more significantly to a characteristic of the period in which we live. This characteristic is discussed in the last chapter of the work, where I refer to the explosion of progress that is coming in every field, and that has gone out of man's control. When this work was started thirty-five years ago, many notions that I had received from Gurdjieff and other traditional sources about the nature of man and the universe appeared to be unsupported speculations. The progress of science and of psychology in the intervening period has made many of these notions commonplaces of present-day thought. There are still, however, a great number that are far ahead of our time, but the human mind is catching up with its arrears of understanding man and his world, and I hope that this work may help to provide a framework for lines of thought that at present appear to be unconnected and yet which by their very nature ought to be built into a coherent structure. In former times philosophers, and to an even greater degree theologians, could write about God, man and the universe in a more or less stationary climate of thought as to the natural order. Man was the summit of creation, the earth was the centre of the universe. Man had a single indivisible soul, right and wrong were clearly defined unchangeable realities. For the philosophers God either existed or did not exist, but there was no middle path between faith and unbelief. We have passed through a period when all absolute notions have broken down and the world is now driving forward with a new dynamism of thought and action that makes the facts of today the myths of tomorrow, and also sometimes the myths of yesterday the accepted realities of the present. In the world of science this explosive situation is creating an almost insoluble problem of communication. One attempt to meet this is by the publication of progress reports in the different scientific disciplines. These have the advantage of being explicitly ephemeral and subject to revision the following year. If I could have done the same with the 15/02/2008 21:52 dramatic universe vol 3.htm 3 of 290 file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/My%20Documents/... Dramatic Universe—that is, the study of man, the world and God— my task would have been much easier. This present book has been written and re-written often enough to have made a whole series of progress reports on our researches into these themes. These researches during the last twenty years have been conducted at Coombe Springs at the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, which has provided a meeting point for people interested in all three sides of the problem, that is, the problem of man and his nature, the problem of the universe and the natural order and scientific progress, and the problem of the ultimate purpose of our existence which is the heart of theology. Thanks to many fortunate circumstances, we have had access to traditional sources which show that in the past men have understood