Robert Anton Wilson

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson 

Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson in 1991
Born	Robert Edward Wilson January 18, 1932 Brooklyn, New York
Died	January 11, 2007 (aged 74) Capitola, California
Spouse(s)	Arlen Riley Wilson (m. 1958; died 1999)

Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, novelist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized by Discordianism as an Episkopos, Pope, and saint, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings and interviews.

Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."

Wilson was a major figure in the counterculture, comparable to one of his coauthors, Timothy Leary, as well as Terence McKenna and others.

Early life

Wilson at the National Theatre, London, for the 10-hour stage version of Illuminatus! in 1977

"Is", "is." "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

— Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, as spoken by Sigismundo Celine.

Born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, he spent his first years in Flatbush, and moved with his family to lower middle class Gerritsen Beach around the age of four or five, where they stayed until relocating to the steadfastly middle-class neighborhood of Bay Ridge when Wilson was thirteen. He suffered from polio as a child, and found generally effective treatment with the Kenny Method (created by Elizabeth Kenny) which the American Medical Association repudiated at that time. Polio's effects remained with Wilson throughout his life, usually manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane occasionally until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death.

Wilson attended Catholic grammar school, likely the school associated with Gerritsen Beach's Resurrection Church, and attended Brooklyn Technical High School (a selective public institution) to remove himself from the Catholic influence; at "Brooklyn Tech," Wilson was influenced by literary modernism (particularly Ezra Pound and James Joyce), the Western philosophical tradition, then-innovative historians such as Charles A. Beard, science fiction (including the works of Olaf Stapledon, Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon) and Alfred Korzybski's interdisciplinary theory of general semantics. He would later recall that the family was "living so well ... compared to the Depression" during this period "that I imagined we were lace-curtain Irish at last."

Following his graduation in 1950, Wilson was employed in a succession of jobs (including ambulance driver, engineering aide, salesman and medical orderly) and absorbed various philosophers and cultural practices (including bebop, psychoanalysis, Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Leon Trotsky and Ayn Rand, whom he later repudiated) while writing in his spare time. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from 1952 to 1957 and English education at New York University from 1957 to 1958 but failed to take a degree from either institution.

After smoking marijuana for nearly a decade, he first experimented with mescaline in Yellow Springs, Ohio on December 28, 1961. Wilson began to work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter in the late 1950s. He adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings, telling himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel and later finding that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity. 

He assumed co-editorship of the School for Living's Brookville, Ohio-based Balanced Living magazine in 1962 and briefly returned to New York as associate editor of Ralph Ginzburg's quarterly fact: before leaving for Playboy, where he served as an associate editor from 1965 to 1971. According to Wilson, Playboy "paid me a higher salary than any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or sell my soul in return. I enjoyed my years in the Bunny Empire. I only resigned when I reached 40 and felt I could not live with myself if I didn't make an effort to write full-time at last." Along with frequent collaborator Robert Shea, Wilson edited the magazine's Playboy Forum, a letters section consisting of responses to the Playboy Philosophy editorial column. During this period, he covered Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's Millbrook, New York-based Castalia Foundation at the instigation of Alan Watts in The Realist, cultivated important friendships with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and lectured at the Free University of New York on 'Anarchist and Synergetic Politics' in 1965.

He received a B.A., M.A. (1978) and Ph.D. (1981) in psychology from Paideia University, an unaccredited institution that has since closed. Wilson reworked his dissertation, and it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.

Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958. They had four children, including Christina Wilson Pearson and Patricia Luna Wilson. Luna was beaten to death in an apparent robbery in the store where she worked in 1976 at the age of 15, and became the first person to have her brain preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society. Arlen Riley Wilson died on May 22, 1999, following a series of strokes.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Richard Metzger: You have studied the Illuminati for years. Have you come to any conclusion about their aims?
Robert Anton Wilson: Usually when people ask me that question, I give them some kind of a put-on, but I can't think of a good and original put-on that I haven't done several times before.
So I'll tell you the truth, for once. After investigating the Illuminati and their critics for the last 30 years, I think the Illuminati was a short lived society of free thinkers and democratic reformers that formed a secret society within Freemasonry, using Freemasonry as a cover so they could plot to overthrow all the kings in Europe and the Pope. I'm very happy that they succeeded in overthrowing all the kings, I just wish that they had completed the job and gotten rid of the Royal family in England too, but they did pretty well on the continent. I'm sorry they haven't finished off the Pope yet, either, but I think they're still working on the project and I wish them luck.

Disinformation: The Interviews. By Richard Metzger.

Among Wilson's 35 books, and many other works, perhaps his best-known volumes remain the cult classic series The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Shea. Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," the three books—The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, soon offered as a single volume—philosophically and humorously examined, among many other themes, occult and magical symbolism and history, the counterculture of the 1960s, secret societies, data concerning author H.P. Lovecraft and author and occultist Aleister Crowley, and American paranoia about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. The book was intended to poke fun at the conspiratorial frame of mind.

Wilson and Shea derived much of the odder material from letters sent to Playboy magazine while they worked as the editors of its Forum. The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "guerrilla ontology", which he apparently referred to as "Operation Mindfuck" in Illuminatus! The trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws (named after Hagbard Celine, a character in Illuminatus!), concepts Wilson revisited several times in other writings.

Among the many subplots of Illuminatus! one addresses biological warfare and the overriding of the United States Bill of Rights, another gives a detailed account of the John F. Kennedy assassination (in which no fewer than five snipers, all working for different causes, prepare to shoot Kennedy), and the book's climax occurs at a rock concert where the audience collectively face the danger of becoming a mass human sacrifice.

Illuminatus! popularized Discordianism and the use of the term "fnord". It incorporates experimental prose styles influenced by writers such as William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. Although Shea and Wilson never co-operated on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career. Most of his later fiction contains cross-over characters from "The Sex Magicians" (Wilson's first novel, written before the release of Illuminatus!, which includes many of his same characters) and The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction, voted by the Libertarian Futurist Society  for science fiction in 1986, has many international editions, and found adaptation for the stage when Ken Campbell produced it as a ten-hour drama. It also appeared as two card based games from Steve Jackson Games, one a trading-card game (Illuminati: New World Order). Eye N Apple Productions and Rip Off Press produced a comic book version of the trilogy.

Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati

Wilson wrote two more popular fiction series. The first, a trilogy later published as a single volume, was Schrödinger's Cat. The second, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, appeared as three books. In between publishing the two trilogies Wilson released a stand-alone novel, Masks of the Illuminati (1981), which fits into, due to the main character's ancestry, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles' timeline and, while published earlier, could qualify for the fourth volume in that series.

Schrödinger's Cat consists of three volumes: The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons. Wilson set the three books in differing alternative universes, and most of the characters remain almost the same but may have different names, careers and background stories. The books cover the fields of quantum mechanics and the varied philosophies and explanations that exist within the science. The single volume describes itself as a magical textbook and a type of initiation. The single-volume edition omits many entire pages and has many other omissions when compared with the original separate books.

The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, composed of The Earth Will Shake (1982), The Widow's Son (1985), and Nature's God (1991), follows the timelines of several characters through different generations, time periods, and countries. The books cover, among many other topics, the history, legacy, and rituals of the Illuminati and related groups.

Masks of the Illuminati, featuring historical characters in a fictionalized setting, contains a great deal of occult data. Intermixing Albert Einstein, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and others, the book focuses on Pan and other occult icons, ideas, and practices. The book includes homages, parodies and pastiches from both the lives and works of Crowley and Joyce.

Plays and screenplays

Wilson's play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell, was published as a book in 1987 and first performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, in San Francisco, and in Los Angeles. It features many factual and fictional characters, including Marilyn Monroe, Uncle Sam, and Wilhelm Reich himself. Wilson also wrote and published as books two screenplays, not yet produced: Reality Is What You Can Get Away With: an Illustrated Screenplay (1992) and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1997).

Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati has been adapted as a theatrical stage play by Daisy Eris Campbell, daughter of Ken Campbell the British theatre maverick who staged Illuminatus! at the Royal National Theatre in 1977. The play opened on November 23, 2014 in Liverpool before transferring to London and Brighton. Some of the costs were met through crowdfunding. Wilson's book is itself dedicated to "Ken Campbell and the Science-Fiction Theatre Of Liverpool, England."

The Cosmic Trigger series and other books

In his nonfiction and partly autobiographical Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and its two sequels, as well as in many other works, Wilson examined Freemasons, Discordianism, Sufism, the Illuminati, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Jack Parsons, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, Yoga, and many other esoteric or counterculture philosophies, personalities, and occurrences.

Wilson advocated Timothy Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he wrote about in many books including Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), which contain practical techniques intended to help the reader break free of one's reality tunnels. With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which they combined to form the word symbol SMI²LE.

Wilson's 1986 book, The New Inquisition, argues that whatever reality consists of it actually would seem much weirder than we commonly imagine. It cites, among other sources, Bell's theorem and Alain Aspect's experimental proof of Bell's to suggest that mainstream science has a strong materialist bias, and that in fact modern physics may have already disproved materialist metaphysics.

Wilson also supported the work and utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and examined the theories of Charles Fort. He and Loren Coleman became friends, as he did with media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and wrote extensive commentaries on the author and on two of Joyce's novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, in his 1988 book Coincidance: A Head Test.

Although Wilson often lampooned and criticized some New Age beliefs, bookstores specializing in New Age material often sell his books. Wilson, a well-known author in occult and Neo-Pagan circles, used Aleister Crowley as a main character in his 1981 novel Masks of the Illuminati, also included some elements of H. P. Lovecraft's work in his novels, and at times claimed to have perceived encounters with magical "entities" (when asked whether these entities seemed "real", he answered they seemed "real enough," although "not as real as the IRS" but "easier to get rid of", and later decided that his experiences may have emerged from "just my right brain hemisphere talking to my left"). He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting "energies" they unleash could lead people to "go totally nuts".

Wilson also criticized scientific types with overly rigid belief systems, equating them with religious fundamentalists in their fanaticism. In a 1988 interview, when asked about his newly published book The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, Wilson commented:

I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they're governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They're so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic ... I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity ... I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical ... The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational! ... They're never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They're only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They're actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college. ...

Probability reliance

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, Wilson described himself as "model-agnostic" which he said

consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes ... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.

Wilson claimed in Cosmic Trigger: Volume 1 "not to believe anything", since "belief is the death of intelligence". He described this approach as "Maybe Logic."

Wilson wrote about this and other topics in articles for the cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.

Economic thought

Wilson favored a form of basic income guarantee; synthesizing several ideas under the acronym RICH. His ideas are set forth in the essay "The RICH Economy," found in The Illuminati Papers. In an article critical of capitalism, Wilson self-identified as a "libertarian socialist", saying that "I ask only one thing of skeptics: don't bring up Soviet Russia, please. That horrible example of State Capitalism has nothing to do with what I, and other libertarian socialists, would offer as an alternative to the present system." By the 1980s he was less enthusiastic about the socialist label, writing in Prometheus Rising that he "does not like" the spread of socialism. In his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now, he praises the georgist economist Silvio Gesell. In the essay Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective, Wilson speaks favorably of several "excluded middles" that "transcend the hackneyed debate between monopoly Capitalism and totalitarian Socialism"; he says his favorite is the mutualist anarchism of Benjamin Tucker and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but he also offers kind words for the ideas of Gesell, Henry George, C. H. Douglas, and Buckminster Fuller. Wilson also identified as an anarchist and described his belief system as "a blend of Tucker, Spooner, Fuller, Pound, Henry George, Rothbard, Douglas, Korzybski, Proudhon and Marx." Wilson spoke several times at conventions of the American Libertarian Party. He included Benjamin Tucker's Instead of a Book, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, and Gesell's The Natural Economic Order in a list of 20 book recommendations, "the bare minimum of what everybody really needs to chew and digest before they can converse intelligently about the 21st Century."

Other activities

Robert Anton Wilson and his wife Arlen Riley Wilson founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future in 1975.

From 1982 until his death, Wilson had a business relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, which hosted his first on-stage dialogue with his long-time friend Timothy Leary entitled The Inner Frontier. Wilson dedicated his book The New Inquisition to A.C.E.'s co-directors, Jeff Rosenbaum and Joseph Rothenberg.

Wilson also joined the Church of the SubGenius, who referred to him as Pope Bob. He contributed to their literature, including the book Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob", and shared a stage with their founder, Rev. Ivan Stang, on several occasions. Wilson also founded the Guns and Dope Party.

As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association, Wilson worked to inform the public about jury nullification, the right of jurors to nullify a law they deem unjust. He advocated for and wrote about E-Prime, a form of English lacking all forms of the verb "to be" (such as "is", "are", "was", "were" etc.).

A decades-long researcher into drugs and a strong opponent of what he called "the war on some drugs", Wilson participated as a Special Guest in the week-long 1999 Annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, and used and often promoted the use of medical marijuana. He participated in a protest organized by the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz in 2002.

Death

On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family. On October 2, Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble. Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the SubGenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff's appeal. As his webpage reported on October 10, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least six months. Obviously touched by the great outpouring of support, on October 5, 2006, Wilson left the following comment on his personal website, expressing his gratitude:

Dear Friends, my God, what can I say. I am dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and totally stunned by the charity and compassion that has poured in here the last three days.
To steal from Jack Benny, "I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don't deserve them either."
Because he was a kind man as well as a funny one, Benny was beloved. I find it hard to believe that I am equally beloved and especially that I deserve such love.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, know that my love is with you.
You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world.
Blessings,
Robert Anton Wilson

On January 6, 2007, Wilson wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he would likely only have between two days and two months left to live. He closed this message with "I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd." 

Wilson died peacefully five days later, on January 11 at 4:50 a.m. Pacific time, just a week short of his 75th birthday. After his cremation on January 18 (also his 75th birthday), his family held a memorial service on February 18 and then scattered most of his ashes at the same spot as his wife's—off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California.

A tribute show to Wilson, organized by Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris and performed in London as a part of the "Ether 07 Festival" held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on March 18, 2007, also included Ken Campbell, Bill Drummond and Alan Moore.

E-Prime

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime 

E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′) is a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms.

Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. A number of other scholars have criticized E-Prime's utility.

History

D. David Bourland Jr., who had studied under Alfred Korzybski, devised E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's general semantics in the late 1940s. Bourland published the concept in a 1965 essay entitled "A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime" (originally published in General Semantics Bulletin). The essay quickly generated controversy within the general semantics field,^{[citation needed]} partly because practitioners of general semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages.

Bourland collected and published three volumes of essays in support of his innovation. The first (1991), co-edited by Paul Dennithorne Johnston, bore the title: To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology. For the second, More E-Prime: To Be or Not II, published in 1994, he added a third editor, Jeremy Klein. Bourland and Johnston then edited a third book, E-Prime III: a third anthology, published in 1997.

Different functions of "to be"

In the English language, the verb 'to be' (also known as the copula) has several distinct functions:

• identity, of the form "noun copula definite-noun" [The cat is my only pet]; [The cat is Garfield]
• class membership, of the form "definite-noun copula noun" [Garfield is a cat]
• class inclusion, of the form "noun copula noun" [A cat is an animal]
• predication, of the form "noun copula adjective" [The cat is furry]
• auxiliary, of the form "noun copula verb" [The cat is sleeping]; [The cat is being bitten by the dog]. The examples illustrate two different uses of 'be' as an auxiliary. In the first, 'be' is part of the progressive aspect, used with "-ing" on the verb; in the second, it is part of the passive, as indicated by the perfect participle of a transitive verb.
• existence, of the form "there copula noun" [There is a cat]
• location, of the form "noun copula place-phrase" [The cat is on the mat]; [The cat is here]

Bourland sees specifically the "identity" and "predication" functions as pernicious, but advocates eliminating all forms for the sake of simplicity. In the case of the "existence" form (and less idiomatically, the "location" form), one might (for example) simply substitute the verb "exists". Other copula-substitutes in English include taste, feel, smell, sound, grow, remain, stay, and turn, among others a user of E-prime might use instead of to be.

Examples

Words not used in E-prime include: be, being, been, am, is, isn't, are, aren't, was, wasn't, were, and weren't.

Contractions formed from a pronoun and a form of to be are also not used, including: I'm, you're, we're, they're, he's, she's, it's, there's, here's, where's, how's, what's, who's, and that's. E-Prime also prohibits contractions of to be found in nonstandard dialects of English, such as "ain't".

Rationale

Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding or conflict.

Kellogg and Bourland describe misuse of the verb to be as creating a "deity mode of speech", allowing "even the most ignorant to transform their opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".

Psychological effects

While teaching at the University of Florida, Alfred Korzybski counseled his students to

eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when ..." or "I tend to make myself depressed about ..."

Korzybski observed improvement "of one full letter grade" by "students who did not generalize by using that infinitive".

Albert Ellis advocated the use of E-Prime when discussing psychological distress to encourage framing these experiences as temporary (see also Solution focused brief therapy) and to encourage a sense of agency by specifying the subject of statements. According to Ellis, rational emotive behavior therapy "has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime". However, Ellis did not always use E-Prime because he believed it interferes with readability.

Examples

Standard English		E-Prime
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. — New American Standard Bible, Matthew 5:3		The poor in spirit receive blessings, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. — modified from the New American Standard Bible

Works written in E-Prime

• Laws of Form by G. Spencer-Brown, 1969 (except for one statement)
• Quantum Psychology, by Robert Anton Wilson (1990)
• Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by David Gerrold has a chapter about (and written in) E-Prime
• The New American Standard Bible in E-Prime, composed by Dr. David F. Maas
• Scoundrel Days: A Memoir, 2017 Brentley Frazer

Criticisms

Many authors have questioned E-Prime's effectiveness at improving readability and reducing prejudice (Lakoff, 1992; Murphy, 1992; Parkinson, 1992; Kenyon, 1992; French, 1992, 1993; Lohrey, 1993). These authors observed that a communication under the copula ban can remain extremely unclear and imply prejudice, while losing important speech patterns, such as identities and identification. Further, prejudices and judgments that are made are more difficult to notice or refute. James D. French, a computer programmer at the University of California, Berkeley, summarized ten arguments against E-Prime (in the context of general semantics) as follows:

1. The elimination of a whole class of sentences results in fewer alternatives and is likely to make writing less, rather than more, interesting. One can improve bad writing more by reducing use of the verb 'to be' than by eliminating it.
2. "Effective writing techniques" are not relevant to general semantics as a discipline, and therefore should not be promoted as general semantics practice.
3. The context often ameliorates the possible harmful effects from the use of the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication, so it is not necessary to eliminate all such sentences. For example, "George is a Judge" in response to a question of what he does for a living would not be a questionable statement.
4. To be statements do not only convey identity but also asymmetrical relations ("X is higher than Y"); negation ("A is not B"); location ("Berlin is in Germany"); auxiliary ("I am going to the store") etc., forms we would also have to sacrifice.
5. Eliminating to be from English has little effect on eliminating identity. For example, a statement of apparently equal identification, "The silly ban on copula continues," can be made without the copula assuming an identity rather than asserting it, consequently hampering our awareness of it.
6. Identity-in-the-language is not the same thing as the far more important identity-in-reaction (identification). General semantics cuts the link between the two through the practice of silence on the objective levels, adopting a self-reflexive attitude, e.g., "as I see it" "it seems to me" etc., and by the use of quotation marks—without using E-Prime.
7. The advocates of E-Prime have not proven that it is easier to eliminate the verb to be from the English language than it is to eliminate just the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication. It may well be easier to do the latter for many people.
8. One of the best languages for time-binding is mathematics, which relies heavily on the notion of equivalence and equality. For the purposes of time-binding, it may be better to keep to be in the language while only cutting the link between identity-in-the-language and identification-in-our-reactions.
9. E-Prime tends to make the expression of higher orders of abstraction more difficult, e.g. "She is a student" is rendered in E-Prime, e.g., as "She attends classes at the university".
10. E-Prime makes no distinction between statements that cross the principles of general semantics and statements that do not. It lacks consistency with the other tenets of general semantics and should not be included into the discipline.

According to an article (written in E-Prime and advocating a role for E-Prime in ESL and EFL programs) published by the Office of English Language Programs of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the State Department of the United States, "Requiring students to avoid the verb to be on every assignment would deter students from developing other fundamental skills of fluent writing."

Newspeak

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak 

The logotype for Ingsoc from the film Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), directed by Michael Radford.

Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalised such concepts into thoughtcrime as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy.

In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. Linguistically, the political contractions of Newspeak—Ingsoc (English Socialism), Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), etc.—derive from the syllabic abbreviations of Russian, which identify the government and social institutions of the Soviet Union, such as politburo (Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Comintern (Communist International), kolkhoz (collective farm), and Komsomol (Young Communists' League). The long-term political purpose of the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles—the working-class of Oceania—to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by A.D. 2050; during those 66 years, "the usage of Oldspeak (Standard English) shall remain interspersed among Newspeak conversations."

Newspeak is also a constructed language, of planned phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, like Basic English, which Orwell showed interest in while working at the BBC during the Second World War (1939–1945), but soon came to see the disadvantages of. In the essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946) he criticises standard English, with its dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which he would later satirise in the meaningless words of doublespeak, the product of unclear reasoning. Orwell's conclusion thematically reiterates linguistic decline: "I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this may argue that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development, by any direct tinkering with words or constructions."

Principles

The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate the expression of the shades of meaning inherent to ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak (Standard English) in order to reduce the language's function of communication, by way of simplistic concepts of simple construction—pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink—the last one of these which linguistically reinforces the State's totalitarian dominance of the people of Oceania. In Newspeak, English root words function as both nouns and verbs, which reduce the vocabulary available for the speaker to communicate meaning. For example, think is both a noun and a verb, thus, the word thought is not functionally required to communicate the concepts of thought in Newspeak and therefore is not in the Newspeak vocabulary. 

As personal communication, Newspeak is to be spoken in staccato rhythm, using words "with the stress equally distributed between the first syllable and the last" and that are easy to pronounce, which generates speech that is monotonic, physically automatic, and intellectually unconscious, thereby diminishing the possibility of critical thought occurring to the speaker. English words of comparative and superlative meanings and irregular spellings were simplified into regular spellings; thus, better becomes gooder and best becomes goodest. The prefixes plus- and doubleplus- are used for emphasis (for example, plusgood meaning "very good" and doubleplusgood meaning "superlatively good"). Adjectives are formed by adding the suffix –ful to a root-word, e.g. goodthinkful means "Orthodox in thought."; while adverbs are formed by adding the suffix –wise, e.g. goodthinkwise means "In an orthodox manner".

Grammar

The grammar of Newspeak is greatly simplifed compared to English. It also has two "outstanding" characteristics: Almost completely interchangeable linguistic functions between the parts of speech and inflectional regularity in the construction of usages and of words. This means that any word could function as a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb, and the preterite and the past participle constructions of verbs are alike, and each ends in –ed. Hence, the Newspeak preterite of the English word steal is stealed, and that of the word think is thinked. Likewise, the past participles of swim, give, bring, speak, and take were, respectively swimmed, gived, bringed, speaked, and taked, with all irregular forms (such as swam, gave, and brought) being eliminated. The auxiliaries (including to be), pronouns, demonstratives, and relatives still inflect irregularly. They mostly follow their use in English, but the word whom and the shall and should tenses were dropped, whom being replaced by who and shall and should by will and would.

Prefixes

• "Un–" is used to indicate negation, as Newspeak has no non-political antonyms. For example, the English words warm and hot are replaced by uncold, dark is replaced by unlight, and the moral concept communicated with the word bad is expressed as ungood. When appended to a verb, the prefix "un–" communicates a negative imperative mood, thus, the Newspeak word unproceed means "do not proceed" in Standard English.
• "Plus–" is an intensifier that replaces very and more; thus, plusgood replaced very good and English words such as great.
• "Doubleplus–" is an intensifier that replaces extremely and superlatives; to that purpose, the Newspeak word doubleplusgood replaced words such as fantastic and excellent.
• "Ante–" is the prefix that replaces before; thus antefilling replaces the English phrase "before filling."
• "Post–" is the prefix that replaces after.

Suffixes

In spoken and written Newspeak, suffixes are also used in the elimination of irregular conjugations:

• "–ful" transforms any word into an adjective, e.g. the English words fast, quick, and rapid are replaced by speedful and slow is replaced by unspeedful.
• "–ed" forms the past tense of a verb, e.g. ran becomes runned and drank becomes drinked.
• "–er" forms the more comparison of an adjective, e.g. better becomes gooder.
• "–est" forms the most comparison of an adjective, e.g. best becomes goodest.
• "–s" and "–es" transform a noun into its plural form, e.g. men becomes mans and lives becomes lifes.
• "–wise" transforms any word into an adverb, replacing all English adverbs not ending in "–wise", e.g. quickly becomes speedwise and slowly becomes unspeedwise.

Therefore, the Oldspeak sentence "He ran extremely quickly" would become "He runned doubleplusspeedwise".

Vocabulary

As a controlled language, Newspeak limits the user's communications (thought, spoken, and written) with a vocabulary that diminishes the intellectual range allowed by Oldspeak (Standard English), which is realised by making root words function as both nouns and verbs; thus, the word crimethink denotes two things: (i) A thoughtcrime (noun), and (ii) the action "to commit thoughtcrime" (verb). The adjective is formed with the suffix "–ful" (crimethinkful), and the adverb is formed with the suffix "–wise" (crimethinkwise). 

Note: The novel says that the Ministry of Truth uses a jargon "not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words" for its internal memos. As many of the words in this list (e.g. "bb", "upsub") come from such memos, it is not certain whether those words are actually Newspeak.

• ante — The prefix that replaces before
• artsem — Artificial insemination
• bb — Big Brother
• bellyfeel — The blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea
• blackwhite — When used on an opponent, it means to believe that black is white, despite the facts; on a Party member, it means the ability to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one ever believed the contrary
• crimestop — To rid oneself of unorthodox thoughts that interfere with believing the tenets of Ingsoc's ideology
• crimethink — The criminal act of holding politically unorthodox thoughts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc, frequently referred to by the standard English “thoughtcrime”
• dayorder — Order of the day
• dep — Department
• doubleplusgood — The word that replaced Oldspeak words meaning "superlatively good", such as excellent, fabulous, and fantastic
• doubleplusungood — The word that replaced Oldspeak words meaning "superlatively bad", such as terrible and horrible
• doublethink — The act of simultaneously believing two, mutually contradictory ideas
• duckspeak — Automatic, vocal support of political orthodoxies
• facecrime — A facial expression which reveals that one has committed thoughtcrime
• Ficdep — The Ministry of Truth's Fiction Department
• free — The absence and the lack of something
• –ful — The suffix for forming an adjective
• good — A synonym for "orthodox" and orthodoxy
• goodthink — Political orthodoxy as defined by the Party
• goodsex — Sexual intercourse only for procreation, with zero physical pleasure on the woman's part, and strictly within marriage
• ingsoc — English Socialism
• joycamp — Labour camp
• malquoted — Inaccurate representations of the words of Big Brother and of the Party
• Miniluv — The Ministry of Love, where the secret police interrogate and torture the enemies of Oceania
• Minipax — The Ministry of Peace, who wage defensive war for Oceania
• Minitrue — The Ministry of Truth, who manufacture consent by way of propaganda and distorted historical records, while supplying the proles (proletariat) with culture and entertainment
• Miniplenty — The Ministry of Plenty, who keep the population in continual economic hardship (starvation and rationing)
• Oldspeak – Standard English
• oldthink — Ideas from the time before the Party's revolution
• ownlife — A person's anti-social tendency to enjoy solitude and individualism
• plusgood — The word that replaced Oldspeak words meaning "very good", such as great
• plusungood — The word that replaced Oldspeak words meaning "very bad"
• Pornosec — The pornography production section (Porno sector) of the Ministry of Truth's Fiction Department
• prolefeed — Popular culture for entertaining Oceania's working class
• Recdep — The Ministry of Truth's Records Department, where Winston Smith edits historical records so they conform to the Party's agenda
• rectify — The Ministry of Truth's euphemism for manipulating a historical record
• ref — To refer (to someone or something)
• sec — Sector
• sexcrime — A sexual immorality, such as fornication, adultery, oral sex, and homosexuality
• speakwrite — A machine that transcribes speech into text
• Teledep — The Ministry of Truth's Telecommunications Department
• telescreen — A two-way television set with which the Party spy upon Oceania's population
• thinkpol — The Thought Police
• unperson — An executed person whose existence is erased from public and private memory
• upsub — An upwards submission to higher authority
• –wise — The only suffix for forming an adverb

A, B, and C vocabularies

The words of the A vocabulary describe the functional concepts of daily life (e.g. eating and drinking, working and cooking), mostly of Oldspeak words. The words of the B vocabulary are constructed to convey complex ideas; compound words (noun-verb) of political implication mean to impose upon and instill to the user the politically correct mental attitude required by the Party, e.g. the Newspeak word goodthink denotes "political orthodoxy", and is inflected according to the grammar of Standard English. The words of the C vocabulary are technical terms that supplement the linguistic functions of the A and B vocabularies. Distribution of the C vocabulary is limited, because the Party do not want the citizens of Oceania to know more than one way of life and techniques of production. Hence, the Oldspeak word science has no equivalent term in Newspeak, instead, there are specific technical words for speaking of technical fields.

Thought control

The intellectual purpose of Newspeak is to express Ingsoc's worldview, and to attempt to make impossible all unorthodox (i.e. anti-Ingsoc) political thought. As constructed, the Newspeak vocabulary communicates the exact expression of sense and meaning that a member of the Party could wish to express, whilst excluding secondary denotations and connotations, eliminating the ways of indirect thinking that allow a word to have second and third meanings. The linguistic simplification of Oldspeak into Newspeak was realised with neologisms, the elimination of ideologically undesirable words, and the elimination of the politically unorthodox meanings of words.

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but only to communicate a lack of something, e.g. "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free of weeds". The word could not denote free will, because intellectual freedom no longer exists in Oceania. The limitations of Newspeak's vocabulary enabled the Party to effectively control the population's minds, by allowing the user only a very narrow range of spoken and written thought; hence, words such as: crimethink (thought crime), doublethink (accepting contradictory beliefs), and Ingsoc (English Socialism) communicated only their surface meanings.

In the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the lexicologist character Syme discusses his editorial work on the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary:

By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like Freedom is Slavery when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Involution (esoterism)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involution_(esoterism) 

 

The term involution refers to different things depending on the writer. In some instances it refers to a process that occurs prior to evolution and gives rise to the cosmos, in others an aspect of evolution, and still others a process that follows the completion of evolution in the human form.

According to esoteric cosmology

In theosophy, anthroposophy and Rosicrucianism, involution and evolution are part of a complex sequence of cosmic cycles, called Round. When the universe attains a stage of sufficient density, the individual spirit is able to descend and participate in the evolution. Involution thus refers to the incarnation of spirit in an already established matter, the necessary prerequisite of evolution:

As an example, the so-called descent of the Monad into matter means an involution or involving or infolding of spiritual potencies into material vehicles which coincidentally and contemporaneously, through the compelling urge of the infolding energies, unfold their own latent capacities, unwrap them, roll them forth; and this is the evolution of matter. — Gottfried de Purucker 

That period of time devoted to the attainment of self-consciousness and the building of the vehicles through which the spirit in man manifests, is called involution. Its purpose is to slowly carry life lower and deeper into denser and denser matter for the building of forms, till the nadir of materiality is reached. From that point, life begins to ascend into higher Worlds. This succeeding period of existence, during which the individual human being develops self-consciousness into divine omniscience, is called "spiritual evolution".

In the cosmology of Surat Shabda Yoga, involution and evolution apply to both the macrocosm, the whole of creation, and the microcosm, the constitution of an individual soul.

The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, a Rosicrucian text written by Max Heindel, advances the concept of epigenesis as the key related to the evolution (after an involutionary period) of human beings.

According to Sri Aurobindo

Introduction

For Sri Aurobindo, involution is the process by which the Omnipresent Reality, i.e. the Absolute, Brahman extends Itself to create a universe of separate forms from out of Its own Force/Energy. 

Sat, Chit-Tapas, and Delight/Ananda are the three aspects of Satchitananda, and they are part of involution. Spirit or consciousness manifests as these three, and then as the intermediate link of Supermind, which is transitional between the higher and lower (matter, life, and mind) nature.

The reason for involution is Delight—the Delight of Being (the Spirit or Absolute) moving to Delight of Becoming (temporal existence, the cosmos). Being throws itself forward into a multiplicity of forms, becoming lost in the inconscience of matter, and then through evolution it partakes in the Delight of rediscovering the Spirit which had been hidden in the interim.

Evolution is thus the movement forward by which the created universe evolves from its initial state of inconscience (i.e. as matter), evolves animated life forms and mental beings (i.e. humans), and continues to evolve spiritual properties, and in that process rediscovers its Source. Such an Evolution of animated forms is only possible because at each stage of development, the developing entity contains within itself the conception of what it may become. Thus, the evolution of animated life out of matter supposes a previous involution of that animated capacity. This is akin to a seed that already has the essence of the tree that will emerge from it.

Each plane emerges from an earlier plane through the evolutionary process, which takes place in chronological time. But in a parallel construction, each of these new planes can be understood as being a descendant of its corresponding higher order plane from the Infinite. Thus, when mentality emerged in the universe, the universal plane of Mind was implanted to a degree in those beings harboring that mentality.

The evolution is the development of all entities in the cosmos, including humans, in order to attain their fulfillment, including the discovery of spiritual Delight, which was, and always is, the experience of the Source Creator. The evolution is the progressive development from the original inconscience of matter into life (movement, sensation, desire, etc. and living physical beings), and from thence to mind (in conscious animals and most especially humans—the self-conscious thinking animal), and from thence to spiritualized mind, culminating in The Supermind or Truth Consciousness (as supramental individuals, and finally the supramental, i.e. a divine life on earth).

Sat

We cannot speak of Sat without Chit Ananda or Being, Consciousness and Bliss. They represent a totality. Sat is the vital state of that which is was and always will be. In a sense it is a beginnining but because it is pregnant with possibility it is inexorably tied to Ananda or the recognition of Being and then the subsequent realization of bliss which is divine inner knowing. Each flows out of the other and then back again. It could be said that Sat only exists through Ananda or Consciousness however, these levels of differentiation cannot grasp the true nature of either of these three qualities since they are interdependent. 

"Sat—being, existence; substance; "pure existence, eternal, infinite, indefinable, not affected by the succession of Time, not involved in the extension of Space, beyond form, quantity, quality", the first term of saccidananda and the principle that is the basis of satyaloka; "the spiritual substance of being" which is cast "into all manner of forms and movements"; existence as "the stuff of its own becoming", which on every plane is "shaped into the substance with which Force has to deal" and "has formed itself here, fundamentally, as Matter; it has been objectivised, made sensible and concrete to its own self-experiencing conscious-force in the form of self-dividing material substance" short for sat brahman."

Chit-tapas

Chit-Tapas or Consciousness-Force, in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy refers to the pure energy of Consciousness by which creation ultimately comes about; the infinite divine self-awareness which is also the infinite all-effective Will. It is also one of the seven planes of existence, according to the Vedic cosmology and the seven lokas of Hindu thought.

In chapter 10 of The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo writes at length on the nature of Consciousness-Force as a principle of the Divine. As he understands it (following the Tantric dichotomy of Shiva and Shakti), Chit or Consciousness is not an inert and passive principle; but contains the potential spiritual Energy, Tapas, which in Creation becomes the dynamic and creative principle or Force, called Shakti. Chit-Tapas or Chit-Shakti is therefore the universal Consciousness-Force, the divine Energy; the Mother.

Delight

Delight is Sri Aurobindo's term for ananda, and plays a large part in his cosmology and spiritual teaching. Delight is the reason for creation, by which The Absolute extends its Delight of Being into multiplicity, losing itself in the inconscience and then through Delight rediscovering Itself through individuals realising their Divine nature and proceeding to spiritual realisation.

In other words, the universe was created so that the Delight of the Infinite Spirit can manifest in all the forms of creation. When we discover our higher nature, the soul and spirit, we experience the delight for which we were came into being and of which we are a part.

In chapters 11 and 12 of The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo writes at length on the nature of Delight as a principle of the Divine, and its role in creation.

Meher Baba

Meher Baba uses the term "involution" to mean the inner path of a spiritual aspirant toward Self-realization. He divides involution into seven stages he calls "planes," and describes different experiences and powers had on each, until the Goal of full enlightenment is achieved at the seventh plane.

Other Indian interpretations

Baba Hari Dass

For Baba Hari Dass (a Maunisadhu monk who practices continual silence), evolution and involution are key concepts on universal level that have also individualized expressions in mental processes. In Samkhya and Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in yoga practice, those two states are conditions of mind (chitta), with the mind's outward-evolution expressions (pravritti) and the inward-involution expressions (nirvritti). Nirvritti is the involution stage where "Yoga is the control of thought waves in the mind" (Sutra 2, Samadhi Pada). Outward expressions of mental activity, vritti, draw the mind to the afflicting experiences, and in effect produce afflicting impressions of klishta-vritti, or vyutthana samskaras (outgoing mind). Involution, or deep introspection in yoga, leads to the opposite results and attenuates afflicting impressions to the finest degree possible with the end result of aklishta-vritti (non-painful thought waves). Thus, when the mind is liberated from painful impressions, one-pointed mind (ekagra samskara) is achieved, which can be said to be the goal of yoga. One-pointed mind is the foundation of samprajnata and asamprajnata samdhi, or "super-consciousness".

Integral thought

In integral thought, involution is the process by which the Divine manifests the cosmos. The process by which the creation rises to higher states and states of consciousness is the evolution. Involution prepares the universe for the Big Bang; evolution continues from that point forward. The term involution comes from the idea that the divine involves itself in creation. After the creation, the Divine (i.e. the Absolute, Brahman, God) is both the One (the Creator) and the Many (that which was created). 

The integral philosopher Ken Wilber refers to involution in his online chapter of Kosmic Karma, employing concepts from Plotinus, Advaita Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sri Aurobindo. According to Wilber, the cosmic evolution described in his previous works is preceded by an involution of Spirit into Matter. This involution follows the reverse stages to the sequence of evolution—e.g. Spirit to soul to mind to life to matter. Once the stage of insentient, lifeless matter is attained, then "something like the Big Bang occurs", whereupon matter and manifest world come into concrete existence, from which stage evolution follows.

Gurdjieff and modern science

Involution and evolution are important themes in the cosmology of G. I. Gurdjieff (1866? – 1949), addressed in detail in his book Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson.

In a popular presentation of Gurdjieff's teaching by P. D. Ouspensky and others, different terminologies are often preferred: "ascending and descending octaves" (evolutionary and involutionary processes), "the Ray of Creation" (the full scale of involutionary processes), "emanation" (the initiation of involutionary processes at the prime source), etc.

Like Aurobindo and others, Gurdjieff uses the word involution in reference to a top-down flow in the universe contributing to the creation and maintenance of cosmoses. Gurdjieff's main emphasis, however, was the mystery of how the descending flow of involution could change into the ascending flow of evolution. Exactly in this mystery, Gurdjieff looked for the significance of all living creatures, particularly man.

This search of Gurdjieff coincides with the scientists' search since the late 19th century for any principle in the universe that may go against the domination of the Second Law of Thermodynamics formulated by Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius. The law predicts the doom of the universe by affirming the irreversible increase of entropy (loss of creative potentials) in a closed system due to the inherent tendency of matters toward dispersion and equalization. Larger the system, more escapable it is from the sorrowful fate predicted by this Law. 

Therefore, as far as the normal logics go, there appears to be no way to avoid the increase of entropy in this scientifically defined process of involution, which began to have a more realistic character as a theory when the big bang theory began to be affirmed by more scientists based on observed evidence. Thus, the esoteric theory of involution or the theory of everything arising from one began to be accepted by official science.

In this context, the role of time in the Second Law of Thermodynamics is curious alone because the irreversible increase of entropy in the universe, as a principle that can be verified through daily observations, as something equivalent of the irreversibility of time, is enough proof of the big bang theory. That is to say, since the increase of entropy in time is continuous and irreversible, one would arrive at the prime oneness if one could travel backward in time.

While a novel by Dan Brown depicts a Catholic priest who holds a romantic view about the big bang theory, taking it as evidence of everything arising from one. Gurdjieff's interpretation of the same fact was exactly the opposite. The finding of "everything arose from one" is not a blessed one if one is intelligent enough to think of what awaits in the future as a result of this: everything is moving away from one and in the process of dispersion into nothingness.

According to Gurdjieff, the prime force that emanates from the prime source continues to lose "vivifyingness" and become more "dense" in the process of involution as it contributes to creations of various kinds. By admitting this, Gurdjieff seems to affirm the domination of the Second Law of Dynamics not only in the physical domain but also in the spiritual domain. Gurdjieff, however, speaks also of evolution as a reverse flow back to the source. Gurdjieff seems to assert that all created beings have a seed of this urge to return to the source. Gurdjieff calls it "remorse", an urge to go back to the source and reblend into one. 

According to Gurdjieff, the processes of involution and evolution are governed by the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. The Law of Three concerns the dynamic interactions among the forces of Affirming, Denying and Reconciling. Some similarities to this theory may be found in Indian philosophies and their interpretation by Aurobindo. The Law of Seven concerns certain irregularities in the development of processes or in the unfolding of events comparable with irregularities in musical octaves. Similarities to this insight are found in modern science such as irregularities or nonlinear ties in the development of various phenomena such as state transitions. According to Gurdjieff, it is thanks to such irregularities that the universe may escape the sorrowful fate logically expected from the domination of merciless Heropass (a word Gurdjieff created to mean the Action of Time or the law of irreversible increase if entropy in time).

Gurdjieff warns against the mechanical association of "good" and "bad" with the concepts of involution and evolution. Since involution is a flow from above, an inspiration, people tend to worship this flow as something sacred. However, as the negative connotation of the word "involution" suggests, mechanical obedience to this top-down flow, often in the name of religion, is nothing but degeneration. In this sense, Gurdjieff raised controversy by saying that his way was "against God". The top-down flow of involution fulfills its purpose only when it provokes in beings a reverse flow of evolution back to the prime source.

Gurdjieff, with his students, did real-life experiments around the question of how the top-down flow of involution could change into the bottom-up flow of evolution. The same search was shared later by some scientists, particularly those at the [Santa Fe Institute], who also were intrigued by irregularities in the development of certain phenomena that appeared to come from complex interactions among different processes and laws. Their studies suggest that interactions among different processes and laws, particularly with the involvement of consciousness, may lead to the emergence of unexpected something that might defy the seemingly unavoidable detrimental action of time according to the second law of thermodynamics.

Gurdjieff experimented with collective living in a commune-like format and also with intricately designed group dances called the Movements. They provided a rare environment in which one may actually witness the miracle of an upward flow emerging from the work of consciousness into a dynamic situation involving interactions among different qualities of forces.

With the advent of computers, scientists began to use a particular kind of simulation programs called "automatons" to represent how the complex interactions among individuals, the behaviors of each of whom are governed by relatively simple set of rules, may result in the "emergence" of unexpected patterns at the group level, where "emergence" is a new concept signifying the true creativity for man as opposed to the traditional concept of creation by God. It is interesting to notice that many of the Movements created by Gurdjieff are programmed just like these "automaton" simulation codes. The only, and quite a great, difference seems to be that Gurdjieff employed real living human beings, instead of virtual creatures in computers, for his experiment.