Secret_History

Chapter 12: Out of Time 589
“It is precisely in unconscious involuntary manifestations that all evil lies. You do
not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will
come when you will understand.”
Again we note: Gurdjieff was speaking at the beginning of the First World War,
in the opening rounds of a century of unprecedented warfare. And now, almost a
hundred years later, humanity is on the edge of a precipice and no one knows what
feather will plunge us all into the abyss.
Wilhelm Reich wrote about the same problems that concerned Gurdjieff and
Ouspensky:
Why did man, through thousands of years, wherever he built scientific, philosophic,
or religious systems, go astray with such persistence and with such catastrophic
consequences? […]
Is human erring necessary? Is it rational? Is all error rationally explainable and
necessary? If we examine the sources of human error, we find that they fall into
several groups:
Gaps in the knowledge of nature form a wide sector of human erring. Medical errors
prior to the knowledge of anatomy and infectious diseases were necessary errors.
But we must ask if the mortal threat to the first investigators of animal anatomy was
a necessary error too.
The belief that the earth was fixed in space was a necessary error, rooted in the
ignorance of natural laws. But was it an equally necessary error to burn Giordano
Bruno at the stake and to incarcerate Galileo?[…]
We understand that human thinking can penetrate only to a given limit at a given
time. What we fail to understand is why the human intellect does not stop at this
point and say: “this is the present limit of my understanding. Let us wait until new
vistas open up.” This would be rational, comprehensible, purposeful thinking. [...]
What amazes us is the sudden turn from the rational beginning to the irrational
illusion. Irrationality and illusion are revealed by the intolerance and cruelty with
which they are expressed. We observe that human thought systems show tolerance
as long as they adhere to reality. The more the thought process is removed from
reality, the more intolerance and cruelty are needed to guarantee its continued
existence. 401
Who or what is responsible for this state of mankind is a major issue, most
particularly if we assume a benevolent God and a hierarchy of benevolent beings
guiding the destiny of mankind. Gurdjieff commented on this in the following way
(edited for clarity):
“We must remember that the ray of creation... is like a branch of a tree. ... Growth
depends on organic life on earth. ...If organic life is arrested in its development, in
401 Ether, God and Devil, Wilhelm Reich]