The Paradox of Man's Evolution

I remember Ken Keyes Jr. speaking about this issue when I workshopped the pathways for more than a month with him ‘back in the day.’ He was very emphatic about the pathways being an intellectual reformation. There effect when repeated consciously over time in association with ‘machine like’ behavior is to succeed in ‘aiming’  or ‘pointing’ one’s field of possibility in the direction where liberation may ultimately become real on the horizon. However, the pathways do NOT extinguish or stop or liberate one from being mechanical but are rather antidotes of the mind in the classic buddhist sense, I think.

The statement below is an example or proof of this as being nothing more than a mechanical production caused by incorporating the pathways as part of your associative memory. Before we get snagged on the semantics of liberation, let us understand liberation to be the cessation of ignorance. Ignorance is the gravity or the specific condition present which results in addiction. Addiction is a complex of mechanicalness such that a disease emerges from the knotted dysfunctionality and the corruption it presents to one’s energetic system. One can recover from addiction. There is no recovery or ‘program’ allowing a human being consciousness which is free from mechanical behavior, emotion, and thought.

I could continue this thought on liberation regarding the PROCESS in which it is attained, but I think I have already shown the defect in your idea of liberation, especially as you have it related to the idea of addiction. But, just for your consideration, may I say that Liberation or the freedom from Karma and Reincarnation cannot be programmed. There is no ‘genius’ level of thought or wisdom that one can program the mind with resulting in liberation. If this were true, then the Buddha’s teachings would be producing Liberated immortals 100% of the time, or at least that is what I infer would happen based on what Buddha said about his Dharma. Over and over, he says that the doctrine of his teaching was perfect and complete. However, at the very end what the aspirant practices takes place beyond doctrine and the mind. It is nevertheless a ‘space’ one must make the effort to produce, and yet nothing can be said regarding the exact essence and nature of that effort. So is the Buddha a fibber?

There is another angle to this situation representing the final penetration through veil of illusion and mechanical or non-liberated states of consciousness. This insight comes from The Fourth Way, more specifically Ouspensky rather than Gurdjieff, at least for me. The principle states the situation rather plainly regarding how higher consciousness is possible for man, and how it is produced. But throughout all my fourth way study it was a consistent idea that after a certain level of evolution by man, the ‘system’ is no longer of any value and cannot take the student any futher. This is often referred to as the beginning of the path. It is centered on how only through a man’s CONSCIOUS EFFORT is he able to generate higher consciousness, which presupposes that he already has higher consciousness which he doesn’t. This little paradox is so elegant in its representation of the reality it’s poetic.

There’s so much I am not saying which is crucial and given within the fourth way for example helping the student to pass the elephant through eye of the needle, but is far outside the scope of my response. Suffice it to say then, Liberation remains only an idea and in reality it is only by NOT following a pathway, ANY pathway, that one has the possibility of making their first step on the PATH of LIBERATION.