#gurdjeff

Order Never Sustains Itself For Free

In physics, the idea that systems tend to move toward disorder and that usable energy spreads out and becomes less available for work is called entopy. In a closed system, structure degrades over time unless energy is actively maintained.

If you look at a human being, there is an analogy. Your attention, energy, and stability do not naturally stay organized on their own. They drift. You get distracted, tired, pulled into loops, worn down by repetition. In that sense, there is a kind of “psychological entropy.” Without ongoing input and structure, things tend to become more chaotic, less directed.

But the important difference is that a human is not a closed system. You constantly take in energy, information, stimulation, relationships. You can reorganize, rest, learn, recover. So you are not simply decaying in a straight line the way a closed physical system would. You are more like an open system that can temporarily build order, lose it, and rebuild it again.

When Gurdjieff talks about blowing power he is not describing a universal physical law. He is pointing at something more specific. The way learned patterns and habits channel your available energy into familiar routes, often inefficient ones. Not because entropy demands it, but because repetition has carved those pathways deeply. The connection to entropy helps to see that maintaining any form of clarity or stability requires ongoing input and structure. Without that, things tend to scatter. There is a natural drift toward disorder in organisms, but there is also a constant capacity for reorganization. The problem is not that energy must be lost, but that it tends to follow the easiest, most familiar paths unless something interrupts or reshapes those paths. The "psychologial entropy" is like a background tendency that you are always negotiating with, but not something that fully determines you.

Closer To Ignorance

Various self-proclaimed spiritual teachers, citing Buddhism, Grudjief, and even Kant, propose performing various arbitrary tasks that are supposedly intended to interrupt the automatism of the practitioner and, horribly, place him outside the chain of cause and effect and thus bring you closer to God. This is completely impossible. No exercise, meditation, promise, or thought will ever take you beyond cause and effect.

Such proposals may not be intended to be harmful, but rather result from conceptual confusion about what philosophers meant by “cause and effect,” and they mix metaphysics with a practical exercises in a way that collapses under inspection. First we must separate two different claims.

One claim comes from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant did not say that events themselves might occur without causes. His argument was more precise. He argued that causality is a structural rule of human cognition. The mind organizes experience through categories such as cause, time, and substance. Because of this, everything that appears to us as an event must appear within causal structure.

Kant’s point was epistemological (relating to the theory of knowledge), we cannot know the thing-in-itself independently of these structures. But this does not mean that by performing a strange action of moving the chair back and forthwe somehow escape causality. That would be like saying you can escape gravity by jumping slightly differently.