In the fourth volume of J.G. Bennett’s sprawling magnum opus The Dramatic Universe, he opens with a justification as to why the subject of History should be the culminating subject of the series.

Preliminarily, he first re-conceives the conventional way of viewing the present moment.  After all, a study of history, normally understood to be a departure into the past, can, from the point of view of in-the-moment, philosophically pragmatic teachings like Gurdjieff’s, which Bennett himself took great influence from, be seen as the opposite of useful.  This is in fact much the way in which Bennett’s works are viewed by many Gurdjieffians from other lineages, whether or not they have a firm grasp of what these works actually contain. Nevertheless, Bennett redefines the present moment to include all of history.

This is a subtle enough point to require explanation.  Conventionally, time is sensed through the flow of what seem to be sequential units. Looking at a persons relationship to this continual flow, we often define a persons’ presence of mind in terms of  their ability to be aware of a process that is happening in time.  For instance, when cooking, a failure to anticipate the correct time to remove food from the heat, which requires a futuring capacity, shows a lack of present moment awareness.  However, to be present in this case, means to visualize a process not just from the “present”, but with anticipations of the future.  Although this would seem to contradict the meaning of presence, almost every process a human can engage in requires a meaningful weaving of what Bennet calls “traces and memories”, future “expectations and hopes”, and also a range of phenomenon more conventionally regarded as “present moment” phenomena.  These include sensations, from emotional to tactile to taste, sight, smell and so on.  Normally, mental objects, such as pictures of the past and future, are seen somehow as occurring outside the present moment, as if these experience somehow occurred outside of the moment.

In this way we come to the sense that truly and in fact, without any doubt, a persons collected-ness, or what we refer to as presence, which is not a singular thing but has many aspects and levels, is a result of a meaningful coalescence of a range of attentions or awareness.  Some of these are mental, some emotional, and others physical or instinctive, but they must be formed into a cohesive and useful pattern to result in collectedness.  In this way, a chef’s anticipation of a meat’s cooked-ness or an excavators memory of where a gas pipeline lay in the dirt both show a thinking ahead or a remembering that plays an essential organizational role that determines a persons skill and presence.

Its not surprising it is exactly this that we find indicated in the Enneagram, whose linear points are placed along a line taking the shape of a circle.  The fact that these nine points are arranged around a circle is what creates the Mod 9 system that makes the hexagram figure possible.  However, the arrangement of the circle doesnt just “precede” the hexagram or cause, but in a strange way also, we can intuit the inter-weavings of the hexagram as pulling the line together into the shape of a circle by linking its nodes.  A circle, of course is inherently self-referential, and the hexagram is just one example of how to draw its points together.  Nonetheless, we can say that before placing a process on the enneagram, without drawing correlations between the seaparate points of a given process, we are likely to see events as unrelated and separate when in fact they are winding round in a circle.  This is the experience of a person going through the same habit patterns for years without noticing the way in which they are disrupting other aspects of their lives.  The important point is that what is done at point 2 bears decisively on points 4 and 8, which themselves cast their gazes back at points 1 and 5.  In this way, if a process is not engaged in with an understanding of this apparently non-temporal linkage, it tends to fall apart.  For instance, a failure to plan and organize necessary materials at points 1 and 2 can cause a complete failure and blockage of the process at point 4.  If, on the other hand, each point is experienced and understood in its proper relationship to previous as well as future steps of the process, the so called linear and sequential process ceases to be experienced as a series of divided steps, and more as a simultaneity, we move in the direction of a human being no longer bound by time in the ordinary way.  This last statement requires a great deal more elaboration than we can do here.

Although Bennett does not, in this section of DU, discuss this about the enneagram, it is clear that his study of the enneagram affected his view of process and time.  In volume IV, he comes to the conclusion that traces and memories, hopes and expectations, and in fact all mental phenomena are present moment experiences.  Where else could they occur?  We must come to the conclusion that human beings, as a more or less organized set of attentions, while their functions may be contacting present moment reality in a disjointed and disharmonious way, nonetheless, can never be anywhere or experience anything that is not the present moment.  This is a crucial point to understand.

The present moment fallacy, as we could certainly call it, divides into two broad distinctions which have center biases.  There is on the one hand the idea that only physical and instinctual sensations such as the fives senses count as present moment phenomena.  This of course, is itself an idea, partially a result of faulty thinking arisen through a imprecise vocabulary.  For example, the words “present moment” imply that there is actually something other than the present moment, and so in using these words, without considering their implications, a person unknowingly blocks a more total way of understanding.  Chained to the literal and limited assocations aroused by words, a misunderstanding arises that actualizes the very difficulties it sets out to remedy, causes limitations where linguistic limitation was scorned.  It is clear that meditation on objects of sensation, such as sounds, sight, etc. reveals inexhaustible aspects and levels right down to the very heart and nature of awareness itself, and there is a clear imbalance when a person lives completely in thought and the false feelings it can generate.  This however does not justify a reversal of lopsidedness in which a person, apparently limiting themselves to the body, fails to develop psychological and emotional tools for dealing with and understanding the truly complex human situations we are constantly facing and which demand careful consideration.

The second general distinction has a center bias in the emotions.  These are the people who associate any kind of mental strain or organized, intentional thinking with “mentalizing.”  Human situations and relationships are quite complex and often a decision to practical action cannot come without looking into it from many angles over a period of time.  Real investigation and verification requires patience and a genuine not-knowing.  I say genuine, but genuine not knowing is like an empty cup that allows room for new knowing, that holds knowledge without ceasing to allow new aspects and relationships in.  In the emotionally centered bias, the present moment fallacy instinctively senses any mental difficulty or attempt at analysis as a wrong effort, and such effort evokes fear and disdain by association.  Again, in this situation, a negative feeling, sensation, or association has become erroneously linked to a particular kind of effort.  To use a physical allegory, it would be easy to assume, going out for a jog for the first time in years, that because it hurts to run it is the wrong thing to do, but this just isnt sufficient information to conclude that.  So in this case, again, we have a descent into a blindness that, by virture of its limited point of view, cannot see it own blindness.  It fails to go through the full elaboration of an experience and therefore cannot possibly collect the necessary data for making the very real distinction between discursive thought and mature discrimination.  It anathematizes the very effort that is needed to cure its dysfunction.  One would need to maintain a sustained effort at jogging daily for a couple weeks to learn that it is in fact a worthwhile effort, and that the initial strain and difficulty are symptoms of a degenerated function that needs exercise. Likewise, in this case, expansion of the moment through the minds awareness of process does not develop easily or automatically.

These two misconceptions Ive outlined are not distinguished in Bennett’s book, but bear upon a number of intrinsic biases that should be dealt with as early on as possible.  Suffice to say, that Bennett points out that mental objects are immediate present moment experiences. In his words:

“We are accustomed to think of our experience as consisting of a series or succession of moments, one of which is present while the others are either ‘past’ or ‘future’.  there is no justification for this way of looking at our experience except that it is convenient to separate in the present moment three kinds of elements that can be called ‘traces and memories’, ‘immediate mental objects’ and ‘expectations and hopes’.  All three are contained in the present and we can, if we find it convenient, label them as past, present and future; but there is an objection to treating experience in this way, inasmuch as the memories and expectations are also ‘immediate mental objects’.” (Bennet, DU Volume IV p 13)

It is in this way that Bennett invites us to view the present, as nested and relative rather than as a series of distinct units in a linear process.  A moment of a certain duration and extension, although we may apply a quantitative number to it as a unit, nonetheless is experienced in ratio to other durations.  In this way an hour can feel like a minute, a lifetime like a second, or a few moments may seem eternal and timeless.  It is the qualitative experience of a period in time that determines the significance we ascribe to it, not that calculated quantity we materialistically apply to it.

Another way of speaking about this is to show that moments in time are infinitely divisible, and that people thinking they limit themselves to the present moment by avoiding the human capacities for forethought or hindsight fail to realize they may limit themselves to infinitely smaller units of time.  Human beings, with the functional machinery we possess, may sense a sound as a moment in time.  We may think that when we hear a word coming from someones mouth, the the whole word was spoken instantaneously.  However, as any linguistic therapist would tell us, there are parts to every word that happen in time.  The word therapist itself, experienced in time, has parts.  Thera comes before pist, and if we say that only this moment exists, one cannot say at the moment pist is being uttered, that thera is any longer there.  Likewise, pist itself can be broken into each of its consonants, and each of these has a beginning, middle and end as well.  So are we to say that therapist as a word doesnt exist at all and has no meaning? This is true in an absolute sense, but in the human world, it seems too convenient to disregard one scale of time, such as that which historians operate with, and then not to ackowledge that the most basic functions of language used for practical activity are inherently empty.Oones notion of ones profession, ones families and relationships, are all, essentially, built on erroneously linked-together elements that could be linked-together in numerous other ways.  Because time is infinitely divisible, we must acknowledge that we do in fact link past and future elements together to create the world, as in the case of the word therapist, tin order o come to a concrete and what we call “present moment” experience.  We also judge the sanity of ourselves and others by their very ability to combine memories, anticipations and present moment phenomena meaningfully.

Thus Bennett describes the present moment as differing in duration and extent.  For human beings, it is easy to think that being present in the moment only means being present to a breath, but a breath, as a scale of experience, is as large in relation to its parts, as the whole of human history is to the lives of individual men and women.  For bennett, then, the study of history is the study of the present moment, and the life of our species may be relatively seen as the duration of a moment.

This is a pivotal understanding, because in setting up a war with the natural flow of mental phenomena, which inevitably exist and function even in anti-intellectual persons who like everyone else live with perceptions of themselves, their lives, and other people, we block a whole series of perceptions natural and necessary to our evolution as individuals at even very practical levels, such as in cooking, building, and other activities preconceived to be more “useful”.

In another article I am going to take a look at the present moment fallacy a little more in depth and show where it came from, as in Gurdjieff’s system, particularly in his books, he most certainly is not anti-intellectual in the sense of promoting a lack of thinking or mental effort or any kind of mental passivity.  On the contrary, he tasks the mind on a number of levels simultaneously, something which modern academic studies rarely do.  This is the reason academic culture has failed in general to produce awakening and to go beyond language, mind and time, the inevitable outcome of direct investigation into the heart of human experience in this moment.