Hazard

by J.G. Bennett

"If man is not a pawn in the hands of an omnipotent and omniscient chess player, then he may be something much more significant: a being upon whom rests real responsibility for taking his own part in the universal task."

This is a book about the risk of realization. It does not tell you how to succeed but encourages you to see that the chance of failure is what makes things real. Whether you are playing a game or trying to improve yourself, the risk involved is the sacrifice you make to be "in the game."

It is in conditions of hazard that you can become intelligent.

"A situation is dramatic when there is a need accompanied by the uncertainty as to whether it will be satisfied. The greater the need and the more impressive the scale on which it is experienced, the greater is the dramatic content.

When we contemplate the destiny of the galaxy, we find a dramatic situation upon so vast a scale that we can scarcely feel its significance.

It was through the intuition of relatedness understood in a deeper and more intricate way than how it appears in the dialectic of the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel or the German political philosopher and socialist Karl Marx-that Bennett set himself to reconcile the deeds and sufferings of mankind with affairs on a galactic scale.

If human life was dramatic, then the whole universe must be dramatic also, which meant that this universe had to be understood in a way that was not to be found in either traditional religion or contemporary science.

Concerning man and the universe, he wrote, "Man is neither an automaton nor an immortal soul but an interesting being with great possibilities. By his nature, he is little more than an animal, but by his own choice and his own efforts, he can become more than he could dare to hope for....

Everything that exists must submit to some measure of contingency and therefore must experience need because, throughout all existence, there is a real need, there is in the universe a real drama. Need and suffering, success and failure are words whose meanings differ according to the level of being to which they refer, but they always do have a meaning, whether for the human individual or for the Great Being who is our Common Father.”

Choice was not merely some human subjective feeling or interpretation of events but a real power and, as such, was part of reality everywhere.

What is this chaos? "It is instructive to regard the source of chaos as missing information, for chaos is what humans observe when they lack the information to perceive the underlying order...

For him there could be no absolute divide between the way in which a human being engages in the struggle for self-development and the way in which human beings came into existence upon the earth. Both concern a change of level and both are characterized by uncertainty.

"Intelligence is the power of adaptation to hazard."

For whatever reason—and the history of this is quite obscure—Bennett set himself to express this new vision of man and the cosmos in his own terms. Gurdjieff's language was "alchemical" and deliberately complex and contradictory in appearance. Bennett, in his own writings, was not re-expressing Gurdjieff's language but finding his own way to say the same thing.

In the tradition from which Bennett came, understanding is related to what one can do rather than to what one can know

Realization—of anything, such as a vision, a hope, a quest—is not only risky but feeds on hazard. It is through hazard that things become real. Such an idea can only be properly understood through one's own will.

Hazard and intelligence go hand in hand because it is through hazard that intelligence can be exercised. The greater the intelligence, the greater the risks involved. This means that God faces hazard at its most intense.

The simplest "ultimate equation" we can think of only states that man, the universe, and God are related, but, according to Bennett, this relation is hazard. We are not accidents of nature, neither are we puppets of a creator. So much should be obvious, along with the conclusion that we are free insofar as we act in the face of uncertainty. If the world were not uncertain, we could have no reality.

Hazard is the essential component of the "authentic existence" of the existentialists because it leads into the heart of choice.

In the teachings of Don Juan, the same idea is delineated quite precisely as "seizing the cubic centimeter of chance.”[28] The writings of Carlos Castaneda go a long way toward describing how alternative realities coexist and the hazards involved in passing from one reality to another. They are particularly valuable in emphasizing the intentional character of hazard. "Sorcery," in this context, is one of the names for the ability to utilize hazard and is therefore an art of intelligence.

"No one who has observed human affairs and human history can doubt that uncertainty and hazard are as real as order and completeness. No account of man and his world would be worth much that did not give full weight to the reality of uncertainty, and show the way beyond it.

I did not say man drives toward order but that he yearns for it.

As long as there are risks to be taken, dangers to be overcome, there is life.

If the word possibility means anything, it means something that may be or may not be.

To learn how to live in a world of hazard is not merely to have possibilities, it is rather to create possibilities.

Hope does not consist in the realization of potential but in the augmentation of potential. This is objective hope,

Hazard is not simple chance. For instance, we do not know whether heads or tails will come up when we toss a coin. This in itself has no significance. It is only when the toss of the coin is linked to some important event, such as who will kick off in a football match, that hazard enters.

Hazard is the combination of uncertainty with significance. If there is significance with no uncertainty, there is no hazard.

The dramatic situation is one in which the outcome of an event matters to the participants or to the onlookers but where ther...

We can see that events are divided into three kinds. There are the trivial events that do not matter one way or another; there are the events that are important but where the probability of a certain outcome is so great that no tension is set up; and there are the dramatic, hazardous events. We would probably agree that it is events of the third kind that give life its interest.

This tendency of ours is something that merits attention. We should ask ourselves, why is it that most of us have a certain longing for security, for some guarantee as to the outcome of the events in which we are involved? What is it in our nature that makes us incapable of going to the point that is the most interesting and significant one? Maybe it is, in part, that we simply do not recognize that life in its fullness is life at that point; departure from that point toward either of the other conditions is a diminution. The strange thing is that we fully recognize the quality of the heroic; we admire, and even wish to participate in the lives of people who will expose themselves to maximum hazards. Few people are heroes, but most people are attracted by the heroic.

The doctrine of the omnipotence and the omniscience of God is certainly incompatible with the reality of hazard in Creation; if one is to believe in hazard, one has to cease to believe in the omnipotence and infallibility of the Creator.

There is, in reality, very little fundamental difference between the theist and the atheist, as so many people have so often pointed out. Both of them are people who live by faith in some unseen power; the atheist in the unseen power of the universal laws and the theist in the unseen power of an almighty creator.

I believe that what we really all care about is to be involved in a process that is exciting, interesting, and in which we have some part to play.

intelligence is really the power of adaptation to hazard.

So it is sufficient, I think, without going into any details, to say that what gives human life the character of enterprise, adventure, and even purpose is that there are crossroads at which there is an element of uncertainty.

The true making of opportunities is connected with sacrifice. If an opportunity does not arise out of sacrifice, then it is not really an opportunity, it is simply a result.

Hazard alone is not an opportunity any more than in the backgammon game I was talking about in the beginning. Just throwing dice by itself does not constitute a game. A game has to be played with an understanding of its principles and the ability to recognize the opportunities—that is, recognize the holes into which it is possible to move—and then to know how to take advantage of the uncertainties that surround it. These are the essential conditions for the attitude I am talking about, which consists in taking these uncertainties not as obstacles to the achievement of the aim nor as a weakening of one's powers to achieve it but, on the contrary, as the only means by which the way is opened.

There is in man an organ that is able to see these things, to be able to see when there is a real chance of doing something and when it is only apparent or fictitious. This is something that I believe is put in us and is sometimes called conscience.

This is the beginning of a kind of perception that everybody has the possibility of, and if they could only use it and trust it more, they would see that there are opportunities in life that they never noticed.

"It is probably true that without hazard there could be no experience of the presence of God—for faith is the work of the reconciling impulse in the core of man's three-fold nature that enables the impossible to become possible.

Hazard is the condition of faith and, when we apprehend it rightly, this makes it also the precursor of freedom.

I asked you to try for yourself the experiment of seeing whether you are able to conceive of any virtue, any desirable quality or admirable quality, that could manifest without hazard. The time has come to ask ourselves whether it is possible to conceive of love without hazard, of charity without risk. I think you will see that this is the key to the whole of the theological dilemma. To say that God is love and that he loves the world would be quite meaningless if the world were no more than a passive instrument in God's hands, bound entirely by the Divine Will in every action, in every event, large and small, because, obviously, there cannot be a distinction between large and small events before the omnipotence of a universal god. If we accept what seems to me absolutely unavoidable, that it is impossible to conceive of love without hazard, then one must also accept that God Himself must be subject to hazard, that the creation itself is not only hazardous in its own operations but also in that it was brought into existence at all.

If we think of God as the greatest of the heroes, as the noblest and the most heroic will that there is, then this noble heroic will must be subject to the greatest possible hazard.

If you will reflect upon it deeply, I think you will be bound to see that love and hazard are inseparable, and the greater the hazard, the greater can be the manifestation of love. Without the one, the other is impossible. Without hazard, there can be no love, but without love, hazard itself would collapse into meaningless chance.

A situation of hazard arises for us when it is uncertain whether a goal or purpose can be achieved.

All that is interesting and significant in the existing universe comes from our constant striving to realize value in fact and to endow fact with value.

In a more profound sense that goes beyond our existence itself, we look for the ultimate significance of our lives in the union of the conditioned with the unconditioned. For this, the conditioned must shed a part of its conditioning—that is, of its existence; the unconditioned must sacrifice a part of its freedom. I use the term "transformation" for this two-fold process. I call the interface between the two worlds the "world of realization" because transformation is more than change; it is the creation of a new reality.

The new reality has a character that comes from the mutual attraction of the unconditioned and the conditioned worlds. This character is Love, which has the unique property of being both unconditioned and conditioned. Love is an act of will that is possible only because there is an existing world that needs love, but since the u...

The dimension of hyparxis is the only one of the four determining conditions —space, time, eternity, and hyparxis —that allows acts of will.