Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. This section is a long one, so please bear with me as it contains some good stuff. It follows on from the previous section entitled the Arch-absurd, in which Gurdjieff, through the explanation by Beelzebub to his grandson, Hassein, began to expand a little on his own take on cosmology. The Arch-preposterous kind of continues that theme and brings into play some other topics touched briefly upon earlier in the work, and it’s all done in a very entertaining way. Just before we begin, though, let’s have a quick summary of where the last passage left us (at least as far as I understand it):
Your average modern human being is so out of touch with the real nature of the Universe and everything in it, that he or she is totally oblivious to the true essence of everything around them. Gurdjieff used The Sun as an example. A human, he says, is incapable of understanding what The Sun is with the five usual senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In a kind of twist that could easily have come from Platonic-Socratic philosophy, he argues that only when we leave our five senses out of the equation and look at The Sun using only True Reason (Plato and Socrates explain it as using only thought or intelligence) do we stand a chance of perceiving its true nature. To get to that stage where True Reason is the only weapon in our arsenal involves doing a hell of a lot of spiritual and psychic hard work on ourselves. The three-brained Beelzebub, in contrast to the three-brained rabble on Earth, claims to be quite a long way down that path already.
In addition, Beelzebub gave us a bit more detail on how All and Everything fits together and what fuels it. You can refer back to the previous section for the detail, but essentially what happens is this: The Source, left to its own devices, would eventually dissipate (and, presumably, disappear down a black-hole or something) through slow energy leakage. His (or Her or It’s) solution to that problem is quite brilliant. The Source transmits an energy-wave which collapses into suns, planets, and their associated life-forms. When everything functions properly, the lower level life forms (one and two-brained beings), once formed, transmute part of the eternal energy wave into a cosmic fuel which keeps their local surrounding bit of space going; and the higher level life forms (three-brained beings) transmute a part of the eternal energy wave into a fuel that is in a fit state to return to The Source and replenish whatever energy it loses by emitting the eternal energy wave. It’s all a big circle, designed as an anti-entropy device to prevent The Source from decaying. Although this may make it sound that the purpose of human existence is to perform the function of a tiny cog in a massive machine, Beelzebub inferred that the more work we do on ourselves, the greater and more involved a part we will play in the greater cosmic scheme of things.
OK, on with the Arch -preposterous, and the narrative becomes, on the surface, quite absurd. Beelzebub explains to Hassein that, during his exile, he encountered a few ‘bosom-buddies’; that is, three-brained beings in Earth’s solar system with whom he had a close, what we might call, spiritual affinity. One such was the Chief, or King, of the inhabitants of Saturn – one Gornahoor Harharkh – who had the appearance of a giant raven. Gurdjieff notes that only Earth has multiple kings – one for each region or nation, he says – while all other planets in the solar system have only the one King who is top dog over all inhabitants – an allusion, I would say, to the disjointed ‘centres’ within any individual human living on the disadvantaged planet Earth. What follows, I believe, is Gurdjieff illustrating the way that the sacred Okidanokh (that part of the eternal energy wave that contains the three inter-twined Forces of Positive, Negative, and Reconciling) behaves, by using the analogy of some physical apparatus used in experiments by his mate, the raven. Just a quick reminder, here, that those three Forces, when entering a newly formed three-brained being (such as a human) split into three independent centres, and the whole point is to get those centres working in harmony in order to evolve and convert energy back into a form that The Source can continue recycling to keep the whole cosmic machine running.
Now, the raven, Gornahoor Harharkh, although at that time a normal three-brained being, was apparently quite the scientist, and had invented several interesting gizmos that were used on various other planets, including a telescope-like device with a magnifying factor of 7,000,285. Beelzebub explains that he, himself, had one of these devices set up in his own home-in-exile on Mars and through it was able to keep tabs on events on Earth and other planets of the Solar System. I sense this is somehow an allegorical reference to using degrees of perspective to analyse events; so what Gurdjieff is saying here is that, being more developed and analytical, Beelzebub could apply Reason (=distance) to the mayhem and chaos occurring on Earth. This all ties back to seeing things as they really are by distancing ourselves from the immediate reaction of our senses and having a good old think about what they are telling us, before deciding what to do.
Anyway, the Saturnine raven scientist agreed to show Beelzebub the appliance he’d invented, in which could be identified the results of experiments conducted to reveal the peculiarities of the Okidanokh. The crux, here, is that Gornahoor had managed to extract the three strands of the Okidanokh – which starts off from The Source as a three-in-one strand of the bigger eternal energy wave and then separates out into its three constituent centres when it ‘collapses’ into a ‘being’ – from various beings, recombine them, and then separate them out again to better understand the properties of each of the Positive, Negative, and Reconciling forces. It’s a bit like extracting the juice from three separate citrus fruits, combining them together to make a new drink, and then using a distillation process to re-extract one juice at a time so that, by comparing the remaining drink to the original, you can identify what qualities or peculiarities are now missing, and thereby gauge what the extracted juice had brought to the collective party, as it were. And the point of all this (and I’ll cut to the chase here) is to demonstrate that, when a human being is not functioning cohesively with all three centres operating in harmony, he or she is not actually aware that they are not performing to their full spiritual and psychic potential. The spiritually malfunctioning human can, however, be made aware of their deficiencies either by a Reasoning outside influence; that is, a guru or somebody similar, or by a sequence of events that forces their attention to the problem. In this passage, Gornahoor’s Okidanokh extraction-combination-separation device is meant to symbolise both the application of Reason and the mechanical sequence of events that will reveal the workings of the three centres.
Beelzebub describes the ‘chamber’ in which the results of the device’s workings could be observed as being like a ‘huge electric lamp’ in the form of a hermetically sealed room with glass-like walls which, although transparent to the eye, were impervious to any kind of energy transmission. Inside the chamber were what looked like a table with two chairs with an electric lamp hanging above the table while below it were three identical things each resembling the Momonodooar (which we are later told resembles a socket with an arc-lamp in it). In addition, several instruments unknown to Beelzebub lay on and around the table. Everything, it appears, was made of a special material invented by the genius scientist raven (the raven’s occult and spiritual symbolism as a bird of insight probably has something to do with the scientist’s appearance but I am not sure exactly what at this stage). In the same workshop as this chamber, Beelzebub also noted a couple of large devices that he compares to dynamos and a large vacuum-inducing pump. So, we can surmise that whatever is going to happen with the manipulation of the three Okidanokh forces in this laboratory is going to demand a whole lot of energy. It all comes down to energy, doesn’t it? Worth remembering the words of the late, great Terry Pratchett in this respect, to the effect that one of the strangest qualities of energy is that everything in the universe eventually ends up as everything else. Damn, but that man was good!
Gornahoor begins to explain the mechanism to Beelzebub. The vacuum pump, he says, in concert with the largest dynamo, sucks in the three forces of the Okidanokh from either the atmosphere or some other ‘being’ (and it’s worth remembering that planets, atmospheres, trees, etc. are also classed as ‘beings’ that have ‘collapsed’ from the eternal energy wave) in which they are present, and it sucks in each one separately. The dynamo somehow re-blends the three forces into one and concentrates the now fully formed Okidanokh in what Beelzebub describes as a ‘generator’. It then flows into another dynamo where it is broken down again into its three separate parts and stored in accumulators from which Gornahoor can extract the individual forces to conduct his experiments. In terms of our citrus juice analogy, at this point we have taken our three different juices and poured them all into a single jug then poured the mixture through a filter which has re-separated them back into their original juice containers. Now, if you’re thinking there’s an unnecessary first step here (the initial separation of the Okidanokh into three just to reform it again), all I think Gurdjieff is doing is illustrating the whole process from The Source emitting the energy wave to its collapsing into a ‘being’ of some description, at which point Gornahoor’s experiment kicks in. Gurdjieff may even be hinting at the way the energy is ‘recycled’ through various stages until it finds a ‘host’ capable of turning it into the good stuff that The Source needs to keep the whole cosmic show on the road. You could even – and I am taking a bit of a punt here – take a step back and hazard that Gurdjieff is suggesting that only a sufficiently advanced being – a guru in other words – is capable of examining the three centres of a spiritually mangled human being, working out what the problem is, and putting the whole thing back together again the way it’s meant to be.
And now it gets interesting, because Gornahoor begins to demonstrate what happens when the Okidanokh attempts to re-blend with one of its three forces missing. It’s essential, at this point, to list what happens in exact order (and I’ll chuck in comments where I think they’re relevant):
1. The vacuum pump creates an absolute vacuum in the ‘chamber’ with hermetically sealed glass-like walls we mentioned above.
2. The process of ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’ is kick started in the separate forces of the Okidanokh within the vacuum (it is not made clear if the vacuum state is the catalyst to kick start the process or simply analogous to a newly formed human being into which the Okidanokh strands are poured).
3. Gornahoor acts as an external Agent of Reason and excludes the Reconciling Force from the ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’ process.
4. With only the Positive and Negative Forces ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’, the harmonious Law of Threes (a basic and founding Law of cosmic build and balance) is breached and the result is the ‘process-of-the-reciprocal-destruction-of-two-opposite-forces’ which manifests as ‘artificial light’ or, to you and me, electricity. Gornahoor asserts that the clash of the two Forces within the vacuum can generate 3,040,000 volts.
5. Gornahoor demonstrates the release of electricity (or ‘rays’ as he calls it) by allowing it out of the sealed chamber and temporarily blinding Beelzebub and the other onlookers by feeding it into the wider lighting system.
6. Gornahoor allows the third Force of the Okidanokh – the Reconciling Force – to join the ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’ process within the vacuumed chamber with the result that, although the voltage still sits at 3,040,000, electricity is no longer generated by the clash. The Law of Threes has restored the process to harmony. This proves, says Gornahoor, that when The Law of Threes is in full working order, the normal senses cannot discern the blending of the three Forces of the Okidanokh; but when The Law of Threes is not conformed to, then the resultant ‘unlawful’ clash of forces can be witnessed, because something is wrong.
Well, what are we to make of all this? A lot, probably, but for now let’s just settle for the observation that the Reconciling Force operates as some sort of regulatory amperage (at least in Gurdjieff’s analogy above) and observe that, as far as human behaviour is concerned, people who operate on two opposing Forces or centres clashing (angry, distraught, aggressive, insane and so on) are far easier to recognise than the serene dudes cruising along and blissing out with all of their three centres purring along in harmony.
Gornahoor the scientist’s next move was to invite Beelzebub to get into some sort of protective suit and enter with him into the vacuum chamber in order to be able to witness first-hand some peculiarities of the Active Force of the Okidanokh. Again, we have to read this next bit very carefully, and it’s well worth doing so because there are, in my opinion, parts in which Gurdjieff begins to get to the heart of how the human psycho-spiritual apparatus works:
1. The suits are like diving suits or space suits, although Gurdjieff, writing when he did, wouldn’t have known what the latter are – , with reinforced plates and helmets that had a breathing tube attached to the outside of the chamber. It is interesting to note that Beelzebub, here, describes air as the ‘second being-food’, a description that will become more important later in the work. There was also a communication tube connecting the suits of Beelzebub and Gornahoor.
2. Beelzebub remarks that Gornahoor was, at that time, a not fully perfected three-brained being, with the inference that, had he been, he would have been able to manifest in a vacuum with no protective equipment or other aids. Interesting comment, that, I thought; are we talking the ability to manifest in some kind of disembodied astral form here, or are we looking at an analogy for the suggestion that Pure Reason – that is, highly-honed thought process – is a function independent of (and therefore, unaffected by) external conditions?
3. Fascinatingly, the helmets were also fitted with a device that allowed their wearers to visibly perceive everything – both normally visible and normally invisible to the eye – within that chamber (at least that, I think, is the inference if the chamber is taken metaphorically – another allusion to we humans needing assistance if we are to interpret everything around us accurately: in a sense, I suppose, to be able to perceive the reality behind the reality. The allusion to humans requiring the assistance of, for instance, a guru, is strengthened by Beelzebub explaining that the device which helped them see everything was somehow ‘fed’ by magnetic currents from outside which aided the perception of normal three-brained beings).
4. Beelzebub and Gornahoor seal themselves off inside the chamber. In so doing, I believe that Gurdjieff is ‘taking us inside’ the psycho-spiritual workings of the human mind. In other words, he is taking us inside that part of us that is our ‘self’: all alone, and separated from the rest of the world.
5. Gornahoor activates the vacuum pump to rid the chamber of any residue from the previous experiment and, once again, the emphasis is that this action was intentionally performed by a being exercising Reason (so possibly analogous to The Source starting from a clean slate).
6. Beelzebub explains to his grandson, Hassein, that although Beelzebub was, even at that time, a sufficiently advanced three-brained being, and able to move without too much difficulty between planets with different atmospheres, being exposed to a complete vacuum left even his ‘being’ reeling. The effect, he says, was as if each of his three centres – his ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’, and ‘moving’ centres – were, commensurate with the increasing vacuum, slowly dying, and losing their ability to function.
7. Beelzebub’s state of perception narrowed down from deriving conclusions from everything happening around him as well as inside him, to just deriving conclusions only from what was happening within himself: so, a narrowing of perception, then. With this narrowing – or focusing – of perception, Beelzebub had the sensation that those parts of his planetary body that housed the ‘second’ and ‘third’ centres (that’s the Negative Force in the spinal column and the Reconciling Force in the nerve nodes/solar plexus respectively) were gradually dissolving, and – and this is the crucial bit – their functions gradually ‘migrated’ to the ‘first’ centre (that’s the Positive Force located in the head) and were unified into that centre’s function. As the functions of all three centres became unified in the one, thinking centre, Beelzebub felt his state of perception and true understanding expanding and improving to encompass everything both outside and inside of himself. Now this is a very important description, because it analogises the human ‘journey’ to the perfection of Reason (with a capital R) where the only true form of discernment is when emotion and action are passed through the filter of rational thought. Beelzebub is describing the attainment of that state of existence in the realm of intellect that Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato called ataraxia and Roman philosophers like Seneca called constantia, but that we, for want of a better term, right now will call Objective Reason. Where Gurdjieff got the concept from – his reading of ancient Greek and Roman texts, Eastern religions and philosophies, his ‘Meetings with Remarkable Men’ – I can’t really tell, but it’s a concept that’s as old as human civilisation itself.
8. Gornahoor, who has been tweaking his device by pulling levers and flicking switches, makes a mistake (eh?) and inadvertently makes ‘parts of his body more dense than was necessary’. That, coupled with the fact he was taking in air through the tube attached from outside, gave him a ‘shock’ which lifted him off his feet and left him floundering. Now, the mechanics of this are possibly testament to the incomplete contemporary knowledge (the 1920’s) of what happens to somebody who is, in effect, trussed up in a space suit in a vacuum, but I feel that Gurdjieff is making a contrast between the almost sublime state Beelzebub has managed to achieve through the harmonising of his three centres, and the almost comical bumbling around of Gornahoor when the balance of his ‘internal machine’ is upset.
9. Beelzebub goes silent and then makes a very strange gesture (not described in the text) with his left hand, before continuing to talk, but in a tone that was ‘not proper to his own voice’. Now, I mentioned in an earlier installment how Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson is peppered with Beelzebub making strange gestures with different parts of his body that are never explained in the text but which must, I’d imagine, have some meaning. To me, they are almost like the gestures that the ancient Roman orators used to make when declaiming – and they, too, meant something – but I’m not going to go down the track of attempting an explanation here as this section is long enough as it is and we’ve still a while to go to get through it all. After making the gesture, Beelzebub confesses to Hassein that he has physical safety concerns for his participation in Gornahoor’s experiment.
10. Gornahoor gets his space suit and planetary body under control with much difficulty and only after a ‘special and complicated’ maneuver. Again, I suspect this is a metaphor for the effort and skill required to get a malfunctioning human back on psycho-spiritual track.
11. Gornahoor explains that the three identical Momonodooars (sockets with electric arc-lamps) situated under the table in the chamber are connected to the three external containers in which the three Forces of the Okidanokh are stored. Through them he can draw as much or as little of the three Forces (Positive, Negative, or Reconciling) as he wishes and thereby control the force with which they recombine. First, says, Gornahoor, he will reproduce the same experiment they witnessed just now from outside the chamber, and allow only the Positive and Negative forces to recombine. This, we remember, is a contravention of The Law of Threes, and this time we are going to witness what happens from inside the chamber; that is from within the pyscho-spiritual self.
12. After double-checking that the whole chamber is hermetically sealed against any energy leak or ray-emission, Gornahoor introduces equal amounts of the Postive and Negative Forces. The voltmeter rises again to precisely 3,040,000 volts, but, to Beelzebub’s consternation, there are no changes to how or what he is able to perceive in the room.
13. The next part is a tad confusing, but let’s have a go at it anyway: When Beelzebub asks why he can’t discern any result from the clash of the Positive and Negative Forces that is generating 3,040,000 volts, Gornahoor responds by first of all turning off the only device using electricity left in the sealed chamber – a small lamp – but, although the chamber goes dark, the voltmeter still reads the same. Gornahoor attempts to explain: the impervious walls of the chamber, he says, are designed to allow through only ‘certain vibrations arising from nearby concentrations’ which are discernible by the sight of normal three-brained beings (I think the emphasis on normal; that is, not advanced three-brained beings – i.e humans – is what is important here). A cosmic Law states, apparently, that rays (I am assuming Gurdjieff is referring specifically to rays that can, at some level, be picked up by the human sense organs) can only somehow interact with human sense organs when ‘the result of manifestation is proportionate to the force of striving received from the shock’. This rather complex concept means, I think, simply that the greatest distance any rays emitted from two forces coming together can travel is proportionate to the amount of energy released by the clash. So, because the clash of the Postive and Negative Forces of the Okidanokh generates a lot of energy, the effects can be perceived at some distance. OK, I’m going to jump the gun a bit here and suggest that what that implies, in terms of a human individual’s behaviour, is that when the Postive and Negative centres clash without the harmonising influence of the Reconciling centre, the potential for spiritual damage can spread out to affect everything around them.
14. Gornahoor then presses a button to allow the hermetically sealed chamber access to the exterior room, which immediately floods everything – inside and out – with the same blinding light Beelzebub had seen before when standing outside the chamber. This is due, he says, to the energy generated by the clash of the two Okidanokh Forces which had now been released from the sealed chamber, being ‘reflected’ back from outside ‘to the place of its arising’ – and if that’s not an analogy for a human being who doesn’t harmonise their three centres (and instead wastes the opportunity of a life of spiritual progression) ‘dissipating’ out into the wider energy pool to be returned to The Source for recycling, then I don’t know what is. At least, that’s my take on that last bit: essentially, that if you only ever engage two of your three available centres, it’s all a bit of a waste of time.
15. Gornahoor now demonstrates how the process of Okidanokh Force separation and recombination forms the interiors of planets; that is their mineral make-up. This experiment, he says, will explain how the stresses and energy releases of the Force clashes involved in the creation of these ‘mineraloids, gases, metalloids, metals, and so on’ ultimately result in the delicate and fragile ‘totality-of-vibrations’ which keeps any given planet, sun, asteroid, or comet spinning on its axis and travelling through space in a harmonious dance with everything else. I really like this concept. It’s quite humbling to think of everything in the multiverses spinning and whizzing around everything else in a beautifully poised, stately and controlled, yet incredibly powerful waltz. Imagine the massive forces involved, the almost unimaginable energy and power tugging and pulling in a cats-cradle of gravitational give-and-take, and yet all somehow, in some way, under control and just whizzing about as if a toy in the hands of a child. Bloody magnificent! It’s actually really beautiful. It’s no wonder that people like Pythagoras said that the dance of the celestial bodies around one another generated a structured tone (like a scale); a concept we now refer to as The Music of the Spheres.
16. Gornahoor has a piece of ‘red copper’ delivered into the chamber and places it on a mat within another (this time spherical – to represent a planet perhaps?) hermetically sealed container. He explains that copper is an example of a metal created during planetary formation at a particular density to play its part in maintaining the harmonious movement of the planet. Gornahoor will proceed to demonstrate how artificially messing with its constituent Forces of the Okidanokh will transmute the Copper, but, first of all, he explains that minerals (and, we are meant to infer, other planetary deposits) are formed from a single Force of the Okidanokh (in the case of Red Copper it’s the Active Force). The idea is that the minerals (and other things) of which a planet’s interior is composed and their relative percentages of the whole interior mass, absorb a Force of the Okidanokh which then blends with it in an inseparable bond. But – and this is the important bit – because the Okidanokh Forces are always striving to re-blend, the tension and energy this creates within a planet is responsible for how it spins and the speed and mass with which it enters the interplanetary dance. It’s actually a very elegant explanation, although I suspect that Gurdjieff was wide awake to its scientific flaws and only meant the whole explanation to be taken allegorically.
17. Gornahoor goes on to explain further about how anything in which one or more strands of the Okidanokh end up radiates a kind of ‘energy’ that reflects what the strand or strands of the Okidanokh are up to inside them. The radiations come into contact with one another and, under normally functioning conditions, the resultant interaction accounts for the gradually changing density within planets, which is the conscious adjustment each celestial body is continually making to keep the whole, delicate, planetary dance in balance. I guess we can, again, adopt the as-above-so-below approach to all of this and compare the continually self-adjusting planets to humans, with their ever shifting moods and attitudes, continually moving and readjusting to one another, both in mind-set and location, to keep society going in a balanced way. And, going back to Gurdjieff’s depiction of a solar system’s planets continually readjusting their internal densities to compensate for each other in order to keep the whole system balanced, we can extrapolate that outwards and imply the same for galaxies making tiny adjustments here and there to keep the galactic dance from descending into chaos; and even whole universes or whole dimensions. Keeping your inner balance to equipoise the whole is the name of the game here.
18. Getting back to the piece of red copper, Gornahoor advises Beelzebub that its density in terms of the yardstick measurement he calls the sacred element Theomertmalogos is 444; that is, it is 444 times less ‘vivifying’ (by which I think he means closer to the pure, unseparated Okidanokh energy). Gornahoor then sets up a microscope for Beelzebub to witness what happens to the red copper when he introduces the Okidanokh into the sealed sphere in which the metal is contained. The three Forces (Positive, Negative, and Reconciling) are introduced in equal amounts and,because everything remains in balance within and without the metal, nothing changes, the three Forces of the Okidanokh recombine and it disappears back off through a pipe into one of the outside containers.
19. Gornahoor then repeats the experiment but with a greater degree of the Negative Force strand of the Okidanokh, and this time, through the microscope, Beelzebub witnesses the atoms of the red copper mutate into something else, which he analogises to Hassein as like watching a large riot in an enclosed public square in which all the participants slaughter each other with any means at their disposal. And, of course, this analogy is another example of the as-above-so-below concept: unless human society is stable and in harmony it will self-destruct.
20. Gornahoor changes the amount of each separate Okidanokh Force in turn, eventually demonstrating to Beelzebub that the original red copper can be transmuted into any other metal in existence – even gold, which, by the way, has a ‘vivifying’ factor of 1439 (there are supposed to be a lot of occult properties in gold but we haven’t time for that fascinating digression here) – and thereby proves a fundamental universal Truism (with a capital ‘T’): that everything around us is in potentia everything else. We would say that what we are witnessing Gornahoor doing here is effecting molecular change to transform one substance into another, but Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is overlaying this with something more fundamental. Molecular change, he is saying, is the process of change, but the actual agent of change is the Okidanokh and any variation from an harmonious and equal balance between its three Forces is a catalyst for change.
On that note, Gurdjieff breaks off from his narration about the encounter between the raven, Gornahoor, and Beelzebub in the ultra-science lab on Saturn, and returns to the direct conversation between Beelzebub and his grandson, Hassein. After briefly mentioning again that he had, at some stage, committed a massive cock up that had caused his exile, Beelzebub promises Hassein that the boy, himself, will have the opportunity to examine the apparatus used in the experiment with Gornahoor because Beelzebub had been allowed to take it back to his home planet Karatas after his recall from banishment. And that, ladies and gentlemen and others, is the end of that chapter. Phew!
Wow! There was a whole lot in there. I suppose the whole thing imparts a message and also a warning. The message comes in the fairly simple shape of an analogy that when human beings get their three centres (the three Forces of the Okidanokh) out of kilter, life becomes more difficult. But Gurdjieff also chucks in the lifeline that you can help to get yourself back on track with the help of a guru.
But on another level, a warning level, this passage is an indictment against humanity for messing about with forces that it shouldn’t. The Law of Threes dictates the only ‘safe’ environment in which the three forces of the Okidanokh (which, remember, through the plan of The Source, constitute All and Everything) can operate and convert energy to the form The Source needs to keep everything from collapsing. Abusing that Law is ‘unnatural’ and it’s implied that each abuse, each ‘unlawful’ combination of the three forces, somehow upsets the cosmic balance and too much abuse will prove harmful if not fatally destructive.
So Gurdjieff is broadcasting a fundamental message here: don’t mess with the natural order! There’s a delicate balance in the cosmos that has to be observed for the whole purpose of the grand machine to play out. Any deviation from the Laws that make the whole thing work has consequences.
From a purely personal self-help perspective, we can take from this passage what it tells us about perception. Lots of things in life are intangible. Emotions, for instance, are not always visible on a face and can often not be identified by somebody’s actions. So, sometimes, everything has to be taken into account, all the ‘clues’ whether visible (an expression, an action) or invisible (information from other sources or what you yourself have experienced either in the now or in the past) must be put together in the inner sanctum of your rational thoughts in order for you to arrive at the true picture. And the same goes for when you witness consequences. It’s necessary to put together all the preceding contributory factors to really get why something has happened. Our normal five senses aren’t up to the job – you have to use the inside of your noddle as well
Right, I’m sorry that one was so long, so thanks for sticking it out – I hope it didn’t bore you. The next installment covers Beelzebub’s second descent to the planet Earth and the narrative becomes a whole lot easier for a while, so I hope to see you there.
