Gurdjieff mentions objective reason 30 times in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. Here are a few of those references, along with some commentary.
Page 87: Why Men Are Not Men:
“And of course there began gradually to be crystallized in the three-brained beings there the corresponding data for the acquisition of objective Reason.
One way of describing the aim of our focus on the process of reasoning is to “gradually crystallize corresponding data for the acquisition of objective Reason.” Each act of reasoning we do, however small, should generate exactly that kind of data. More than that, it will improve the reasoning process itself.
In the online group today we each gave our own understanding of the reasoning process. One person started with a question, another with “first principles”, and another through feeling. However, one of our online participants said he often started with ‘curiosity’, and this curiosity was located in the emotional center.
I found this approach to be quite interesting, especially since I’m quite sure that I would never have come up with this idea myself. Curiosity also seems to have an odd if not unique characteristic of not being ‘goal oriented’. Most reasoning processes seem to come out of needing to solve a problem, deal with a situation, arrive at some known destination, or achieve some aim. Curiosity is largely an end in itself.
I was struck by something from our reading the other day where Bennett responds to a question about patterns, because it calls into question some of the things that I have been saying about when and where we can use this process of reasoning. Here is the exchange:
Student: How do you know when a pattern is emerging, whether it is right to let it happen or try and change it? I really get lost in this.
JG Bennett: You know according to your own state. If you are in a subjective state you cannot have reliable indications because your state will perhaps even make you see white as black and black as white.
Therefore, when it appears that something is revealing itself, it is really important to set about getting oneself as completely as possible into an objective state. If you really wish to be able to make an impartial judgment about whether something is right or not, you must be prepared to devote a certain amount of time to it. It may take you an hour. You have to put the whole thing out of your mind and concern yourself only with your own state. Supposing I had to do that, I would go and make my ablutions, sit down and do an exercise. I would certainly find that I would be tending to think about the particular thing, but I would go on until I realized that I am calmed down and no longer thinking about it. Then I would start the exercise or do a zikr.* When I know that I am free from subjective feelings, it usually happens that the whole thing shows itself quite clearly. I need not worry about self-will. One must not expect to be in the right place just because one wants to be; it does not come in that way. One has to be ready. People who work a great deal and regularly on themselves still need to prepare themselves to get into an objective state when they wish to make an impartial judgment.
Sometimes we might go several days without finding a suitable place to apply this method of reasoning. If that happens, it’s because we haven’t yet grasped what reasoning is really about.
We are constantly in front of the situation, “What should I do now, in this moment?” Generally we just let the world decide for us in terms of habit, external influences, and the law of accident. But it's possible, and indeed necessary for us to stop using this mechanical approach to life and become intentional about our lives. This intentionality would initiate a process of reasoning at every point in the day where we are about to start a new activity, even if that activity is as simple as walking to the car. That’s right, not only ‘can’ we reason about the seemingly simple activity of walking to our car, but we actually need to do that in order to transform our lives.
Our emotional nature enters into the reasoning process in three quite distinct but interrelated ways.
The first way is that emotions and our emotional nature have to be fully accounted for in any situation. Constructing a logical process full of “shoulds” which ignores the emotional reactions we all have is bound to fail. This is easy enough to say, but the variety and complexity of emotional influences we are all subject to, creates a profound challenge. Nevertheless, it’s a challenge that has to be met.
Sometimes reasoning does not have to be some big, earthshaking process to be profound. Case in point is something that happened earlier today.
I’ve been trying to learn how to speak Hebrew, and have felt some frustration because normal written Hebrew doesn’t include vowels. These “vowels” are not letters as in English, but rather they are (usually) small makings or “pointings” called nikud. Or rather they would be small markings if they were normally included, which they aren't. Of course, just to add to the confusion, sometimes these vowels actually do come in the form of a written letter. But without the nikud, it’s very difficult for someone learning the language to ‘guess’ whether they are seeing a vowel or a consonant.
One of the hardest things to understand about reasoning with oneself is how this process differs from simply thinking about things, applying logic, being ‘practical’, or any of the other things that we normally group under the heading of reasoning. The main difference is that it’s not our thoughts or our thinking that changes; it’s really our will that changes. One can go further by saying that reasoning gives us a power of decision, based on reality, which allows us to take effective action. One can go even further by saying that reasoning allows us to literally create a new reality for ourselves.
In working with this theme of reasoning I asked some of the online group participants to take up the challenge of doing two or three reasoning processes this week, and reporting on their experiences. What they were asked to do was this:
TASK FOR THE WEEK:
… “to individually go through a process of reasoning two or three times this week to gain some familiarity with this method, and then post our experiences on our individual blogs. There are roughly four simple steps to this task, and it might help us to blog them in this order:
Here's my situation.
Here's my reasoning process
Here's the outcome to my reasoning process
Here's what I learned, observed, discovered, thought about, had a question about, from all of this. “
I haven’t wanted to highlight this question, as it can be a little discouraging. But it came up today in one of our sessions, so we need to face the reality of what we have to work with. Fortunately for us, we’ve already covered a significant number of these approaches, and so the situation is not as daunting as it might at first appear.
So how many ways of Reasoning are there? The simple answer is “lots”. An even simpler answer is, just one… because there is only one reality, and the aim of our reasoning process is to contact that reality.
One of the participants in the online study group had this to say yesterday:
“JG raised a challenging point in today's (13 Jan) session regarding partial or faulty reasoning, that reasoning can be applied for our benefit or detriment and there are several factors that can influence these opposite outcomes. I hope [he] will write a post about his thoughts since some of the distinctions he made seem quite important for bringing 'discriminating wisdom' to the process of understanding our reasoning.
