Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. Having started to explain the relativity of time to his grandson, Hassein, Beelzebub changes tack slightly, and begins to demonstrate that humanity’s inability to intuit that what it perceives as time is nothing more than the ever-changing, leading edge of the particle-dance of energy exchange, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, this heavily disadvantaged species’ grasp on the true reality of All and Everything is ridiculously inadequate and seriously skewed.
This passage, which Gurdjieff has entitled The Arch-absurd, can sound, at first reading, counter-intuitive from a scientific perspective. In addition, Beelzebub’s terminology for certain natural phenomena can sound as if it comes straight from a nonsense rhyme like Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky; but I’ll attempt to spare you the worst of all that and see if I can sift through the layers and extract some meaning from what is, thematically, a pretty difficult chapter. So here goes with my personal take on the action:
Beelzebub begins by having a go at what humanity calls ‘sciences’. In Beelzebub’s opinion, human scientific advancement is nothing more than ‘wiseacring’ ( a lovely old-fashioned word, by the way, which, if you’ve never heard it before, means the outpouring of individuals who affect to be knowledgeable about something but are actually vacuous windbags). He gives the example of the way all modern humans believe that cosmic phenomena such as darkness, daylight, heat, cold, etc. derive directly from the Sun. This belief, says Beelzebub, is the purest fantasy as the Sun is actually ‘almost always’ freezing cold and ‘perhaps’ more ice-bound than the terrestrial North Pole. Hmmmm . . . all a bit radical, and patently inaccurate – even the most basic experimentation on a partly cloudy day will demonstrate that direct sunlight acts on the variability of temperature – so I guess we have to start reading this allegorically. And, sure enough, Beelzebub springboards off onto an explanation to Hassein about how planetary phenomena are created from a Primal Source.
This section, then, is, once more, all about the true perception of reality. It is Gurdjieff’s version of Plato’s famous Cave Allegory and its extension into the Sun Analogy. In Plato’s version, prisoners in a cave chained to face one way saw only shadows as they were cast and distorted against a wall by the light emitting from a fire positioned behind them. To those prisoners, the shadows were reality even though they were only often grossly distorted reflections of the real thing. Plato’s allegories get a tad involved to get into in too much detail here, so we’ll limit the discussion to the consideration that should one of those cave prisoners break free, he or she would exit the cave and see a different reality to what they saw projected on the cave wall within. But he or she would then meet a dead-end with the Sun because it is a light at which his or her senses would be unable to stare at for more than a few seconds, and to an understanding of the true nature of which – or even beyond which – his or her physical senses would be unable to take him or her. And it’s that last bit – about the Sun being a kind of barrier that mere human senses can’t intuit beyond – that Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is getting at here in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. If you want to stretch Plato’s analogy a bit, you could say that Gurdjieff (and I would think it highly likely that he had read Plato) interprets the cave prisoners as one- or two-brained beings, who were aware of only a two-dimensional ‘reflection’ of reality, and were probably quite happy with that state of affairs. But, once a cave-prisoner breaks free, we are dealing with the equivalent of a three-brained being. This being, now out of the cave, has the sensual apparatus to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste things as they appear in reality (that is, a step up from the two-dimensional, often distorted, reflection on the cave wall) but not necessarily their actual reality (that is, what things are in essence, what they truly mean). If you’ve been following The Kolbrin thread of this website, it’s the equivalent of the people who, when they clubbed a living sacrifice to death and threw him into the flood waters, thought that the subsequent receding of the water-level was due to their appeasement of their god rather than the actual reason, which was that the flood was a natural phenomenon and the waters had already reached their highest point. In other words, they read into what they saw what they wanted to believe, rather than the reality of the situation.
I hope I’ve made that clear enough. I guess what I think Gurdjieff is saying is that there is a barrier of some kind which prevents modern humans from seeing beyond the obvious, beyond what we’ve been told (that is, the ‘wiseacrings’ of mainstream science), and he depicts this barrier as the Sun because it has been used in the past as a good analogy. The idea, I suppose, is that the barrier can be overcome and we can see the Truth that lies behind everything if we do enough work on ourselves to become more psychically and spiritually advanced. In a way, the Sun performs the same function as the ‘Veil’ between planes of existence. To all intents and purposes, a human being who is developed enough to perceive and understand the particle-dance of change and what it portends on the various levels can see beyond the present and understand why the Universe does what it does. That is, in a way, breaking down the barrier and seeing true reality. It is piercing the Veil. And I guess, if you follow that line of thought through to its conclusion, it is also a way of seeing the future. But that last sentiment belongs in another discussion.
OK, just before we go back to Beelzebub’s explanation, which now begins to elucidate the laws surrounding what he calls ‘World-creation’ and ‘World-maintenance’, it’s worth quickly reminding ourselves about the fundamental process that determines how things come into being. Very simply put, the Primal Source emits energy waves that contain the ‘blue-print’ – DNA sequence, philosophical Form or Idea, call it whatever floats your boat – of everything. This energy wave then ‘collapses’ into larger bodies (planets, suns, what have you) and, after that, into the ‘life forms’ that exist upon them (trees, insects, birds, minerals, humans etc.). The one- and two-brained life forms that arise on a planet are responsible for transmuting cosmic substances (as yet unspecified) into ‘fuel’ to keep their local planet and solar system working according to the Divine Plan, and the three-brained beings (which includes humans) are responsible for transmuting cosmic substances (as yet unspecified) into ‘fuel’ to keep the whole Shebang; that is, the entire creational machine of the multiverses working according to the Divine Plan.
So, back to the narrative, and, at this point, it makes a rather strange statement which interprets – if I read it aright – as that all of this intricate substance mutation and exchange, the ‘Reciprocal-feeding of everything that exists’ as Beelzebub puts it, is designed so that the merciless ‘Heropass’ (that is; entropy) cannot affect the Sun Absolute; that is, the Primal Energy Source. What Gurdjieff is suggesting here is that Life, The Universe, And Everything (to borrow a phrase from the late but brilliant Douglas Adams) is one massive, self-sustaining, perpetual-motion device. In other words, all emanations from the Primal Source collapse into beings (planets, humans, cockroaches, whatever) that are actually machines programmed to convert energy into something that feeds back into the Primal Source so that it can keep the whole circuit going in such a way – and this is the really important bit – that its petrol tank, as it were, is always at the same level. The logical assumption is that if the Primal Source did not continually emit energy waves capable of collapsing into machines that made the correct energy to return to It, It would eventually deplete itself through natural entropy and, eventually, ‘die’ or cease to exist.
Now, am I going mad here, or is this exactly what Gurdjieff is saying; that is, All and Everything, the whole Shebang, is simply one inconceivably massive and intricate anti-entropy device? A bit like the fabled perpetual-motion car where the engine creates the energy which turns the wheels which create the energy to drive the engine which creates the energy that turns the wheels, and so on and on ad infinitum. After all, Gurdjieff did spend a lot of time earlier in the work (which I’ve already covered in previous sections) explaining about perpetual-motion spacecraft. Perhaps that was meant as a simpler allegory of this same concept. Is All and Everything simply a very clever way of converting energy from one form to another and back again to keep the whole from crumbling – a bit like keeping money in circulation so that an economy keeps going without having to print any more cash?
At this point there are absolutely massive metaphysical and spiritual implications in consideration of which I could disappear down labyrinthine rabbit-holes – not least considerations about the ‘purpose’ of existence; whether All and Everything has to be a ‘closed system’ for the self-perpetuating anti-entropy concept to work; whether there is, despite the ingenuity of the energy conversion and re-conversion concept, a slow dissipation and the Primal Source will eventually disappear into a black hole; whether the Primal Source cares or loves; whether there are many, many Primal Sources, each designed to maintain its own peculiar dimension; the list goes on – but this is not the place (yet) for them, so, let’s see what Beelzebub says to Hassein next:
The process that keeps All and Everything going, explains Beelzebub (and I’m going to use my interpretations of the terms used here rather than Gurdjieff’s trumped-up concoctions), works on the basis of two fundamental cosmic laws: The Law of Sevens and The Law of Threes. It is the action of these two Laws that, when certain conditions are met, ‘crystallize’ the standing energy wave that emanates from the Primal Source into cosmic formations. So, for example, a planet may be formed and its atmosphere becomes part of the substance exchange that keeps the wider process going. Beelzebub then goes on to explain more about The Law of Threes:
The Law of Threes manifests in everything, without exception, and throughout the multiverses. It has three elements (hence its name): The Holy-Affirming (The Positive), The Holy-Denying (The Negative), and The Holy-Reconciling (The Reconciling i.e. it neutralises or reconciles one or both the others). The Law can, in simple terms, be defined as: the result of three independent and dissimilar forces latent (and often undetectable by the senses) within any given entity or situation, whose characteristics act upon one another to produce a consequence which, in turn, becomes an element in something new. It’s important to understand that this Law manifests in absolutely everything; it is a crucial consideration in the study of Change and energy transfer.
The Law of Threes dictates that the only cosmic crystallization made up from the energy that emanates from the three Holy sources of the Primal Source – what Beelzebub calls the Omnipresent-Okidanokh – must have the three forces (positive, negative, and reconciling) latent within itself. This Omnipresent-Okidanokh, then, is that element of The Divine, which forms part of the energy wave that has the potential to become all things. So, this three-in-one energy wave part goes zipping off in space-time and what it eventually ‘collapses’ into depends on its passage through the ‘gravity-centers’ that are subject to The Law of Sevens (of which more later). Beelzebub informs Hassein that the Omipresent Okidanokh (the three-in-one part of the energy wave) has many properties but, thankfully for us, at this stage in the work, he’s going to limit himself to just two of them.
Its first peculiarity, he says, is that when some new object is crystallized (that is, the energy wave ‘collapses’ into something we’d recognise, i.e it seeds, buds, is born, etc.) the Okidanokh, unlike the other elements that were part of the energy wave, does not enter the new object/being as is; rather, it splits into its three separate parts (positive/negative/reconciling). And now comes the important bit: what that means, is that the new person (and let’s drop the pretense here because Gurdjieff is, after all, preaching to humans) has the potential to activate their very own Law of Threes process and make the three separate parts of the Okidanokh within themselves work in harmony, in the same way that it emanates from, and therefore resembles, The Divine. In other words, humans have the potential to recreate, in themselves, a little bit of God (however you want to define that term).
Now this is powerful, powerful stuff! It fits in neatly with what I read into Gurdjieff’s earlier inferences about Creation (for want of a better term) being a gigantic and very clever anti-entropy device – that is, the various conversions of energy forms back and forth to keep everything going – but now we are being offered glimpses of the trade-off; of the what’s-in-it-for-us side of the transaction. Perhaps we are not, after all, just meaningless cogs in the machine; perhaps we are all part of a very aware and very loving Allness; we just have to realise some of the potential latent within ourselves to be able to tap into it. Or am I getting a bit carried away here? Better get back to the narrative, but just before I do, it’s worth noting the parallel with other philosophical and religious esoterica, especially with that belief of the so-called ‘heretical’ Cathars who maintained that the soul ‘died’ upon its descent to Earth and, only when humans ‘reunited’ with The Divine within themselves could they escape this planet and avoid another earthly incarnation.
Back to Beelzebub. So, every new human has the three distinct parts of this Primal Source potential separated within itself. Beelzebub assures Hassein that the three parts will sit there patiently waiting to be developed for as long as that human lives. Once the human dies, the three parts reunite and zip off back into the general energy wave. Now, Gurdjieff doesn’t state as much at this point but I am reading into this passage that if humans die without having worked on themselves, the reunited Okidanokh (let’s call it the divine potential for now) whizzes off into the general energy wave with little or no ‘flavour’ from the human it has just ‘occupied’. But the implication is that, if humans do work on themselves, the reunited Okidanokh behaves differently after physical death. Gurdjieff has a lot more to say about this later on in the book but, for now, I guess the inference is that what some might call a ‘soul’ starts off as simply a ‘neutral’ piece of the Primal Source that splits into three on entry into a new organism and it is up to us and the work we do on ourselves how ‘individual’ that three-in-one energy packet becomes and what happens to it next. I suppose that, to the Primal Source, what we do as individuals is entirely up to us. The Primal Source possibly doesn’t really care how many of those three-in-one energy packets get ‘individualised’ as long as enough energy gets converted back to the right type to keep the anti-entropy machine in working order. But I’m digressing again.
Before getting onto the second peculiarity of the Omnipresent-Okidanokh about which Beelzebub had promised to tell Hassein in this passage, he explains about the concept – or law – of remorse. Apparently, once the Okidanokh has entered a new human and split into its three separate and distinct parts, those parts, because they originated in the Primal Source, are susceptible to the vibes of things that resonate with that holiness (or whatever other word you want to use for good vibes). Whenever that happens, each of the three parts feels a kind of remorse and ‘criticises’, or, I suppose you could say, ‘puts a guilt trip on’, the other two. Beelzebub then begins a seeming digression and informs Hassein that human scientists are unable to distinguish between ’emanation’ and ‘radiation’. He also, at this point, reminds Hassein to take on board the ‘mechanics’ of the Law of Remorse, which includes, to my understanding, this important additional piece of information: All beings are ‘made up’ of the crystallization of the Energy Wave. A part of the Energy Wave that crystallizes into a being contains the three-in-one thread which Beelzebub calls the Okidanokh. The rest of the Energy Wave (the whole of which, incidentally, Beelzebub calls Etherokrilno but we’ll stick with Energy Wave for now) performs the function of holding the rest of the being together; so, I am assuming, it crystallizes into blood, muscles, nerve strands etc. During the process of Remorse, all of these connecting bits and pieces become reduced in effectiveness, and only fully regain and perform the function for which they were designed when the three separated parts of the Okidanokh recombine and work together as one. I guess that this is just another way of saying that when the three ‘brains’ of a three-brained being are not working in harmony, then all the other functions of the being – physical, emotional, whatever – fail to perform at their full potential. And it’s absolutely correct, of course. Simply put; the more distraught you become, the more likely you are to stuff up.
The three strands of the three-in-one Okidanokh correspond, of course, to the three brains of a three-brained being, and Beelzebub goes on to enlarge on that so that Hassein can better understand how one- two- and three-brained beings differ from one another in terms of their function in the wider cosmic machine. He explains that each ‘brain’ is the potential conduit in a being for its corresponding original function – or ‘power’ – in the Primal Source from which it originally arose. It’s a bit like having three separate ingredients for a cake sitting inside you waiting for something – or even someone – to come along and ‘unite’ them into a beautiful finished product. Beelzebub also mentions here that the three strands of the Okidanokh can be somehow ‘fed’, each by its own type of ‘being-food’ (a concept Gurdjieff enlarges on later in the work).
Now, back to the second peculiarity of the Okidanokh that Beelzebub had promised to reveal to Hassein earlier in this passage; namely, that the separation of the three strands of the three-in-one Okidanokh into distinct ‘brains’ does not occur because beings are exposed to large or holy cosmic concentrations, rather it is reliant on two other factors. The first is whether or not the individual is prepared to put in some work on itself; so this is something within that being’s own control. The second is the wider requirement of Great Nature to maintain the correct balance of vibrations necessary to keep the cosmic machine balanced and running smoothly in every localisation in the multiverses. This, of course, individual beings have absolutely no say in, and the implication is that Nature Herself may need to actively step in and ‘interfere’ with a species’ development so that the overall equilibrium in a particular part of the multiverse can be maintained.
So, when a being is crystallized, the Energy Wave collapses into the bits that make that being ‘work’, and the three-in-one Okidanokh part of the collapsed Energy Wave separates into its three distinct parts (or ‘centres’, or ‘brains’, as Gurdjieff calls them). Each of the brains needs to be fed. This ‘being-food’ comes in three types, each of which is also made from the Energy Wave and, therefore, contains the three-in-one Okidanokh. Once the ‘food’ enters the being, the Okidanokh part, as usual, separates out into its three strands and each strand knows which brain it has to ‘feed’ because it senses the ‘kindred vibration’ calling to it from that particular brain. So, these three brains are also performing their part in the energy exchange scenario we looked at above. The machine is, ultimately, designed to transform energy emanating from the Primal Source through a filtering process (the ‘brains’ in beings) which keeps All and Everything going and negates the impact of entropy on the Primal Source. Brilliant! This is a truly logical and intricate machine. Gurdjieff has concocted, to nick a phrase from the brilliant Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a miracle of rare device! It’s even plausible. But what’s in it for us? Aha! Gurdjieff’s got that covered too.
Because, Beelzebub goes on to explain to Hassein, the separation at being-crystallization of the three-in-one Okidanokh into its separate parts creates an energy-transmutation apparatus which can be used by Great Nature to maintain cosmic balance, that very same apparatus can be used by us – that’s you and me – to transform the incoming being food (=energy) into something that benefits us as individuals. The fly in the ointment, though, is that we have to exert the effort to wrest control of the energy transformation device to our own ends and personal benefit. It all depends, says Beelzebub, on the quality of the way the incoming energy blends with the brain to which it is attracted. In order to raise the standard of that quality, it is imperative – Beelzebub says it’s actually a commandment of the Primal Source – that we maintain a guard against any perception (that’s his word – I think he means thought process) that may ‘soil the purity of your brains’. By making the effort to active our objective Reason, humans have the potential to develop each of our three brains independently so that they work in perfect harmony with each other. If we can achieve this, the consequence is that we become mirrors of the Primal Source in that we contain within ourselves the three ‘forces’ that exist in the Primal Source which combine into the Okidanokh. We become, in this particular reflection of the Divine, like mini-gods. Moreover, another consequence of perfecting the three individual brains is that we ‘coat’ our being with a ‘higher’ (or more refined) body which (Gurdjieff infers elsewhere) has the power to escape the physical bonds of the Earth and even survive physical death.
That all sounds great, but then Beelzebub brings the mood crashing down by informing Hassein that the humans of planet Earth, although possessing the potential to become angels (in a manner of speaking), are totally oblivious to the possibility’s existence. Beelzebub then gives his grandson a breakdown of how the three brains (that is, the three forces of the Okidanokh) in humans correspond to bodily organs and functions. The Positive force, he says, resides in the head. The Negative force lies along the spinal column. The Reconciling force is scattered throughout the nerve nodes but in particular the solar plexus (and if this is beginning to sound like yogic chakras and the ‘power-centres’ of various other esoteric traditions, well, of course it does – there are echoes of truths in all teachings). Now, Beelzebub has mentioned before that it is an existential duty of three-brained beings everywhere to perform what he calls being-Partkdolg-duty which is essentially the perfecting of Objective Reason. This is really nothing more than the ability to accurately and dispassionately acknowledge the changes that the leading edge of the particle-dance of All and Everything is making in your localisation, and take informed action (if any is required). This is a concept well-recognised in many ancient traditions and can even be boiled down to pithy little sayings like Look before you leap! or Stop and think! (and, incidentally, those little sayings are often really, really pregnant with meaning. They come with a full load of thinking behind them and only seem simple because they’ve been designed to by-pass your intellectual centre and hit you right in the emotion, where you instinctively understand them to be ‘true’ without any accompanying explanation required – I’m a great fan of them).
Back to the narrative. Beelzebub tells Hassein that the only one of the three brains that humanity uses to transubstantiate energy for its own use is the Negative force. The incoming energy that gets ‘attracted’ to the Positive and Reconciling forces is all converted and sent back out to help maintain the balance of the cosmic machine. The incoming energy that gets ‘attracted’ to the Negative force is used primarily for the upkeep of the physical body and so the entire organism, having not managed to ‘coat’ itself with any higher-level body, perishes utterly at biological death.
At this point, Beelzebub feels he can’t go any deeper into the subject in hand until he’s explained more to Hassein about the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance. But before he does that, even, he will tell Hassein about the experiments that Beelzebub himself conducted on the science of creation whilst on Saturn. But that is a topic for the next posting.
So, to sum up: Wow! Blimey! Crikey! And things of that nature generally. That was a seriously heavy passage. In it, I gave you my take on what I think Gurdjieff is saying in this part of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. His cosmogony is slowly taking shape. The presentation of Creation as a vast, intricate, entropy-negating device, filled with energy transubstantiating mechanisms – that’s you, me, and all other ‘beings’, including planets and suns – is a bit of a mind-blower, although you have to remember that’s my interpretation of the text and you may get something completely different out of it. Gurdjieff also seems to be constant in his insistence that we, as individuals, don’t have to be satisfied with being mindless cogs in the universal machine, but are presented with the option of pulling our finger out and making ourselves more useful pieces of equipment. There are also all sorts of other echoes going on in this passage, not least the three-in-one Okidanokh, of which the Christian Trinity is an obvious echo, but we’d better leave it there for now. I hope to see you in the next posting which is entitled the Arch-Preposterous.
