QUESTION [your inner] AUTHORITY

Suggestibility and the Slippery Slope Toward Our Collective National Trance

This summer, rather than simply waiting for the other shoe to drop as I watch my country slip deeper and deeper into its hypnotic trance, I am once again taking a deep dive into Keith Buzzell’s uncommonly brilliant essay “Suggestibility” from his book Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim. Once again I am finding real food here: not only tools for my own inner understanding but a glimmer of a path forward for all of us who still dare to believe in the conscious evolution of humanity.

Keith Buzzell is one of those still-underappreciated geniuses among the second generation of Gurdjieffian teachers. A student of Gurdjieff’s student Irmis Popov and an osteopathic physician by training, he maintained a small rural practice in western Maine for decades (until his death in 2018), while simultaneously running one of the brightest and best small Fourth way groups in the country, all the while creating an impressive canon of scholarly writing on the leading edge of Gurdjieffian metaphysics and contemporary science.

The essay in question is sandwiched between his chapter on “Primordial Principles” and his sweeping exposition of Gurdjieff’s “omnipresent Okidanokh” as a functional equivalent to the electromagnetic spectrum. Essentially a reflective interlude, it takes off from Gurdjieff’s arresting comment (in Beelzebub’s Tales, p.107) that of all the “abnormal being-particularities” we three brained human beings are afflicted with (the list includes egoism, self-love, vanity, pride, and conceit), “the most terrible for them is the one called suggestibility.”

Why, of all things, suggestibility? Buzzell bores into this question unflinchingly—and his answer, if you’re truly paying attention, will most likely send a chill up your spine.

Of course, we know all about suggestibility at a superficial level. We are children of the advertising era (and more recently of the SuperPAC era); we grew up on brand names, ratings, and spin. The scholar Rene Girard covers much this same territory from a different angle of approach in his widely influential mimetic theory. The bottom line is that we human beings are fundamentally copycats who prefer to join the bandwagon once it gets rolling than to think and discern on our own. (And, of course, one of Girard’s most devoted disciples was Peter Thiel, who pulled JD Vance, who pulled…..)

But why does this mimetic tendency exist in us? What makes us so suggestible? Here is where Buzzell leaves mimetic theory in the dust as he plunges to the neurological heart of the matter. The root cause of this “abnormal being-particularity,” he argues, is that we humans are simply not neurologically sensitive enough to directly perceive the more subtle energetic forces and cosmic units (like atoms, quarks, viruses, ions) that give shape to the phenomena which actually determine our perceivable world. So we are forced to rely on what Buzzell calls “resonant representations”— interior images or algorithms independently constructed by each of our three brains according to its respective perceptual modality (thinking, feeling, sensing) to create a picture of reality which we then take for reality itself. This is the biological root cause of our suggestibility and the reason for its devastating stranglehold on our behavior.

Up to a certain point, this capacity for image-making (imagination) serves us well; no doubt we humans clawed our way to the top of the evolutionary chain precisely through the exercise of this third brain, with its unparalleled powers of abstraction and projection. Our discovery of the atomic world is a good case in point. Not one of us has ever actually seen an atom, an electron, let alone a quark, with the naked eye. But based on the power and consistency of the models constructed through our imaging capacity, we have been able to harness those unseen nuclear forces to fundamentally change the nature of the world.

But the tragedy begins when we fail to recognize that our “self”—our cherished and idolized personhood, “soul,” interiority—is also a resonant representation, created through exactly the same imagining capacity but fundamentally believed in as a point of absolute inner authority. Just as we cannot directly perceive an atom, so we cannot directly perceive our own “self.” What we perceive instead is a self-constructed two-dimensional simulacrum, conjured up for us via the self-reflexive nature of our human consciousness. It feels like a point of absolute inner truth, but in reality it’s a solipsistic mirage, our inner watchdog chasing its own tale.

Buzzell comments:

In the second state of consciousness [i.e., our normal “waking consciousness] our Itoklanoz* is primarily responsible for our personal inner-world reality. The focus of our consciousness is on the outside world, however, and we are only dimly aware, if at all, of the processes that lead to our sensations, feelings, and thoughts. As a result, we are especially vulnerable to the presumptive reality of inner world images. The state of inner considering [Gurdjieff’s word for inner self-preoccupation] contains a multitude of examples of this presumptive reality.

And further:

The defensive and accusatory judgements of inner-world processing of data are all images that in the moment we are convinced are real. We do not see that they are products of fantasy and imagination in the arena of self-other relationships…

The survival of the sense of self is dependent on the creation of images that support the presumed uniqueness of the self. For example, I am superior to you or I am inferior to you; you are lying/exaggerating, you are less intelligent than I; you judge me, I judge myself…

Leading to the painful but inescapable Q.E.D.:

In this circumstance we live at the mercy of these created images, a self-contradictory fantasy of who we are in reality. Seen in this way, it is no wonder that Gurdjieff called it [i.e., suggestibility] the most terrible being-peculiarity of all.

If you feel like you’ve just been dropped down an elevator shaft, you have fully grasped his point. It’s a complete overthrow of virtually everything that our self-preoccupied, psychologically oriented, uber-articulate spiritual culture has taught us about what self-awareness means. I watch my own inner world suddenly set spinning: six-plus decades of rambling around in the hall-of-mirrors of self-discovery, self-realization, contemplative prayer, “finding my voice,” spiritual companioning, psychotherapy, Ignatian discernment, fifteen volumes of personal journals to record the paper trail in 8 ½” X 11” Canson artist sketchbooks…all for what? Suggestibility? Simply to worship the golden calf of my own self-created interiority?

As the old pith saying goes, “To be free of illusions, if it does not break our courage, is a liberating experience.”

Liberated or simply disoriented, this is the classic mi-fa passage. On this side, the mirage of permanence. On the other, the first taste of authentic freedom. And in this summer of our national discontent, I guess that’s where I’m headed. It’s the only place where freedom still remains.

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*Itoklanoz: a technical term in Gurdjieff pointing toward the autopilot nature of these undetected processes

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