Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
The last two episodes have described how Beelzebub, a higher three-brained being, had been sent to planet Earth by some sort of Cosmic Oversight Committee to try to dissuade its spiritually-challenged inhabitants (who are also three-brained but way behind in the psychic-spiritual evolution stakes) from ritual animal sacrifice, because the practice was so prevalent that the psychic energy released by so much wholesale slaughter of innocent creatures was beginning to warp the space around the unfortunate planet and spread into the solar system proper. Beelzebub had targeted three centres of human civilisation on Earth’s most densely populated continent, Asia: Tikliamish (roughly modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), Maralpleicie (the modern Gobi Desert), and Pearl Land (Modern India). By making use of selected local inhabitants and employing first a massive guilt trip (Tikliamish) and then a piece of cunning psychological subterfuge (Maralpleicie), Beelzebub had reduced the levels of animal sacrifice in those two regions to acceptable levels. Which just left Pearl Land – or modern day India – and Beelzebub’s first visit to that land is the subject of this chapter.
This is a relatively long chapter in the book itself, but that’s because it serves as both a culmination of Beelzebub’s mission to eradicate, or at least mitigate, animal sacrifice on Earth, and a kind of summing up of Beelzebub’s/Gurdjieff’s cosmology as it’s been explained so far. If we think of the ‘technical’ descriptions in the previous chapters The Arch-Absurd and The Arch-Preposterous as the ‘theory’ component of what Gurdjieff is attempting to teach us (up to this point anyway), then the visits to the three Asiatic centres described in the last two plus this chapter, comprise the ‘practical’ component; so I’ll work my way through Beelzebub’s first visit to Pearl Land/India and chuck in comments where I think it appropriate. Here we go, then . . .
Rather than scoot back to his home-in-exile on Mars as he had after his first success in Tikliamish, Beelzebub – still, as the chapter opens, in Maralpleicie – decided to team up with a caravan of traders who were intending to travel overland to Pearl Land; and he immediately takes a pop at human vanity; specifically the use of jewellery by all mankind to offset what he calls ‘the value of their inner insignificance’. The real issue is a lot deeper, of course, in that anything – jewellery included – that helps project a ‘false’ image or create a mask over our true selves is a form of deep-seated self-delusion that makes it easier to shirk from doing the hard yards on ourselves that are necessary for spiritual evolution. But Beelzebub doesn’t dwell too much on that at this point in the chapter as it’s actually a prelude for what comes a bit later, and he swiftly moves on.
At this point in the narrative, Beelzebub’s phraseology takes on a rather convoluted turn as he describes how he is assimilating outside impressions and filtering them through his Reason – a sure signal to us, the audience, that we need to sit up and pay attention, because we are going to be asked to make some links between what Gurdjieff has been talking about in previous chapters and what he is about to discuss in this chapter. And so it begins . . .
The first month of the caravan’s journey took it through ‘a region of various terra-firma projections of unusual forms’ containing ‘all kinds of intra-planetary minerals’. I guess that what Beelzebub is describing here are mountains – most probably the Himalayas – essentially parts of the planet’s innards thrust up from the surrounding crust by the two previous ‘shocks’ that Earth had undergone; namely, the breaking off of the two chunks – The Moon and Anulios – and the subsequent jolting back onto a regular axis which sunk Atlantis. This is a reminder to us that the planet itself is part of a finely-tuned cosmic machine, and when disturbances affect the Earth, the effects are visible – often on a massive scale. Just as our skin can erupt into protuberant boils that consist of matter found within the body, so the Earth’s crust can erupt into mountain ranges that consist of matter found within the planet. As above, so below; everything is a mirror of everything else . . . it’s just a matter of scale and perspective.
The caravan moved on from the high places inhospitable to what we call life and eventually came to areas where the soil was capable of supporting one- and two-brained beings; that is, flora and fauna – plants and animals. Beelzebub’s journey, then, is already taking on a pattern: he is moving through the ‘platforms’ – planets, suns, and the like – whose internal mineral balance is constantly shifting to keep the massive cosmic machine in a perfectly poised dance, and beginning to drill down to the one-, two-, and three-brained beings those ‘platforms’ support, and who are responsible for ultimately transmuting energy to prevent the universal Source from succumbing to entropy.
Bee analogies are marvellous for this type of thing (as they are for many other things – wonderful creature, your bee): The ‘Source’ is the Apiarist, the planets and suns are the physical hives, the three types of bee – worker, drone, queen – are your one-, two- and three-brained beings, and the honey is the ‘energy’ that is the result of the bees’ work transmuting ‘food’ from outside into something that goes back to sustaining the Apiarist/Source. It is a particularly apposite analogy as it carries the implication that the Source must ‘care for’ and continually nourish its system in order to receive the end result (the honey) which, in turn, nourishes it and keeps the whole cycle going. And, just like an apiary, the cosmic machine is very delicate and extremely susceptible to disturbance – every little ripple has a knock-on effect or reaction . . . and that, my friends, is felt at every level, because everything, everything has to readjust to re-establish the balance to keep the machine going. Maybe the concept I have just described there is the one that is sometimes called karma (simply, and mathematically put, a universal Law which demands that everything must balance out to zero) but I’m getting a bit side-tracked here, so let’s get back to Beelzebub’s journey to Pearl Land.
The caravan eventually descended down into Pearl Land and arrived at its chief city which Beelzebub names as Kaimon. Before continuing with what he did there, though, Beelzebub, as he had with the previous two places he visited, begins to tell his grandson, Hassein, a tale about how Pearl Land first became inhabited. But just before he does, there is another mention of a curious gesture – this time made by Hassein – accompanied by a fervent hope that his grandfather evolve to the degree of the sacred Anklad (of which, more later in the work). After acknowledging Hassein’s hopes for his grandfather’s ‘spiritual promotion’ – for want of a better phrase – with only a smile, Beelzebub continues:
Before Atlantis was plunged beneath the waves, he says, one of the more unsavoury consequences of the organ kundabuffer (see previous section The Moon and Mankind’s Problem – see, I warned you that this was a kind of ‘revision’ chapter), which was temporarily implanted in humanity to help redress the first big ‘shock’ to the Earth, was a predilection for bodily adornment in the form of trinkets, amongst which were pearls. Pearls, explains Beelzebub, are created in certain single-brained beings that dwell in the sea which, along with all other water on Earth, is described as the ‘blood of the planet’ and is an essential ingredient in ‘actualising’ the ‘Most Great common-cosmic Trogoautoegocrat’ (hardly surprising as water is essential to maintaining all life on Earth which, in turn, is essential for energy conversion to keep the great cosmic show on the road).
Just as the Atlanteans had hunted the Pirmiral – some kind of deer whose powdered horns were supposed to be a kind of panacea – to extinction on their own continent and had to send hunting groups to Asia to find more, so they did with the poor old oysters who surrounded their island. The pearl-foraging parties were forced to search further and further from Atlantis until one lot, blown off course by a storm, ended up in India where they found pearls galore.
I’ll just jump aside, at this point, to comment that humanity’s wanton and needless destruction of one- and two-brained creatures for no other purpose than to indulge fantastical notions (vanity, ritual animal sacrifice , and so on) that are born in their own psyches with absolutely zero application of Reason, is a very strong theme in this early part of Gurdjieff’s work. Beelzebub maintains that the repercussions of those human fantasies can have wider cosmic consequences in that, if they are not called to heel, they can upset the very balance of All and Everything; but we have to bear in mind that he is also talking on a personal and individual level. When we, as individual humans, let irrationality control our actions, then the waves of consequence ripple out all around us and can affect everyone and everything with which we come into contact.
Anyway, back to the narrative. The castaway pearl hunters from Atlantis, having checked out the new country’s interior, realised that it was a pretty neat place and decided not to bother returning home. A couple of them did go back from time to time to offload and trade their cargos of pearls but they always returned, each time with more and more settlers, so that when the planet’s second ‘shock’ sank Atlantis beneath the waves, this new ‘Land of Beneficence’, as they called it, attracted many survivors from the wrecked continent. The people multiplied hugely and chose the country’s two main river valleys as their main centres of settlement.
Beelzebub, as he had at Tikliamish and Maralpleicie, decided that his best bet to attack ritual animal sacrifice was through Pearl Land’s religion but, when he arrived, he encountered a complication; because, unlike the other two countries he’d visited, Pearl Land’s inhabitants adhered to several, totally distinct religious teachings, none having anything to do with any of the others. So Beelzebub set out to study them all. He ascertained that the one with the most devotees was one founded on the teachings of a ‘genuine emissary’ sent by the Source; an emissary who went by the name of Saint Buddha.
Wow! That’s a bit of a bombshell, isn’t it? What’s all this about emissaries from ‘on high’ suddenly lobbed into the narrative like a stun-grenade? Well, Beelzebub, goes on to explain . . .
On Earth, he says, there are – and always have been – two basic types of religious teaching. The first consists of those born from humanity’s own disposition to fantastical and delusional imaginings; pure invention in other words. The second type, in contrast, is based on detailed instructions dispensed by genuine messengers from The Source with the purpose of dispelling the awkward psychological after-effects of the organ kundabuffer. That organ, if we recall, was deliberately – but temporarily – implanted in mankind to prevent it being able to correctly perceive Reality while the after effects of Earth’s first ‘shock’ were being sorted out.
Before I continue, I think that what we are getting into here comes under the heading of ‘finding a guru’. I’ve been using the word ‘shock’ in this passage to describe the cataclysmic events that radically affected the development of the planet Earth and its inhabitants, and my reason for that will become clear as we progress further into this passage, but, just for now, let’s bear in mind that, more often than not, some kind of ‘shock’ or ‘force’ or energy is required to kick start change. In a way, it’s another way of expressing the Law of Threes. Just as the emotional and physical ‘centres’ demand input from the intellectual ‘centre’ for the unified being to function rationally; just as cool and reasoned authority can bring an end to the physical violence and rampant emotion of a mob; so a guru can draw together and soothe the existential fear of erring disciples. There is, of course, a heck of a lot more to this, but what I think I’m getting at here is that this sudden injection into the narrative of dudes on a mission from above needs, for now anyway, to be given a little bit of context and interpreted as a metaphor for the Application of Pure Reason (capital letters intended). OK, let’s carry on . .
According to Beelzebub, Saint Buddha had to be sent to India by the Cosmic Hierarchy because people of influence there (I am assuming the normal suspects here; that is, what passed for priests and officials of the ruling classes) were putting about such totally ridiculous ideas that it messed with people’s psyches to the extent that the correct energy exchange necessary for maintaining the multiversal balance – that’s everything from the Okidanokh interchange within three-brained beings to the correct emanations needed to maintain the inter-planetary dance – was being severely hindered.
Saint Buddha, then, was ‘coated’ with the planetary body necessary for survival on Earth; that is, his/her/its astral body and/or spirit/soul was incarnated into human form. Beelzebub says this happened ‘several centuries’ before his own visit but we can’t read anything into that as the various ‘incarnations’ of the Buddha are said to go way back into remote prehistory. Beelzebub pauses here to make a very interesting distinction. He explains to Hassein that the derogatory term he often uses to describe some humans – hasnamusses – applies to those who have not yet managed to crystallise within themselves the ‘Divine Impulse of Objective Conscience’, which I read to mean that they have not yet developed the application of Objective Reason (with a capital O and R) to be their absolutely-without-fail first resort when reacting to, or dealing with, anything and everything with which they are faced. But what’s really interesting, here, is that Beelzebub says hasnamuss does not necessarily refer to only a human that has not yet managed to coat their first, planetary (or physical) body with the higher (astral or spirit/soul) bodies. He insinuates that the term can also refer to a human who has already managed to acquire one or both of those higher-being coatings. Now, isn’t that interesting? It would imply, to my way of thinking, that there’s a bit of a grading system going on here. Perhaps it is the constant tension of the energy state exchange that creates those higher-being bodies, but achieving that merely puts you on the first rung of the wider psychic-spiritual evolutionary ladder. Sure, by reuniting your Okidanokh into a form that feeds back to nourish The Source and keep the cosmic machine ticking over, you have done a good thing, and a by-product is a ‘you’ that will, in some form or state, survive physical death; but, you still have work to do on yourself in the form of perfecting your Objective Reason. I suppose it’s a bit like University. You get a BA – that’s good, it puts you in the race. You go on and get a Masters – that’s better. You go the whole hog and do a PhD – that’s better still. I can’t dwell overmuch on that concept here (that is, the concept that the higher-being bodies depend for their formation on an inner ‘friction’ between the three centres which is based more on the energy it takes to perform than any real moral quality) as Gurdjieff does enlarge on it a lot more as the work progresses; but it does kind of reinforce the idea that if you don’t bother working at all on yourself in life to create the energy required by the Cosmos for its upkeep, then that’s the end of it for you as an individual. But, if you do make the effort, you get to ‘continue’ somehow; and if you really, really make the effort, you get to up the role you play in the whole multiversal shebang. But we’ll come back to that again in later episodes.
So, this Saint Buddha, having thought about it for a while, decided that his best approach to fixing the unfocused thinking of the people of Pearl Land was to see if he could ‘enlighten’ their Reason. Beelzebub explains that the Holy Envoy had already worked out that the humans he was sent to sort out were operating under a form of pseudo-reason that he calls ‘instincto-terebelnian’; but, again, we don’t have to worry about Gurdjieff’s weird terminology, because he simply means a reason that is based on reaction to external stimuli. In other words, Saint Buddha was sent to deal to a large population of knee-jerk over-reactors – people who responded to what life threw at them in a totally instinctive and subjective, rather than objective, way. The ancient Greek and Roman (but especially Greek) philosophers wrote screeds about this type of thing, but we haven’t time to go down that rabbit-hole here.
The serene Buddha dude gathered together some of the human leaders and began by laying down some Cosmic fundamentals, or, as Beelzebub prefers to call them, some ‘Objective Truths’. The first thunderbolt (at least, to them) he delivered was that every human is essentially a Mini-Me of The Source, but his or her potential is being held back, hence the Buddha’s mission. That idea is, of course, nothing new as it appears in many teachings: Man is made in God’s image, As Above so Below, Man is a microcosm of the cosmic macrocosm, and so on. Having delivered that message to his general audience, which he collectively describes as humans who simply carry the potential; that is, the blueprint to be useful to the overall cosmic plan, The Buddha then enlarged on his mission to a more select band of followers whom he describes as those who were already actualising their function in the multiverse (in other words, those who had already gone some way to uniting the Okidanokh within themselves and had begun the process of higher-being body coating). To this group of ‘initiates’, he explains why the organ kundabuffer had to be implanted in mankind (more revision of earlier chapters by Gurdjieff) and how its effect of skewing humanity’s perception of objective reality had become engrained, even after the organ had been removed.
The Buddha reveals that The Source, realising that humanity was still in trouble, had sent an earlier Holy Envoy, incarnated into human form, to help educate it out of its bad psycho-spiritual habits. Unfortunately, although said Holy Envoy met with limited success and managed to put a few humans back on the right track, the human lifespan had become considerably shortened and The Source’s messenger suffered the Sacred Rascooarno (aka death) before he could finish the job, and everything reverted back to the way it was within a couple of generations.
As with so many things in our lives – and with most teachings – humanity decided to pick away at that first Envoy’s words and – reading between Gurdjieff’s lines – the real message became lost when too many so-called ‘experts’ started tampering with the unalloyed Truth (with a capita T) and spinning it with their own ‘authoritative’ versions; more often than not to their own personal advantage.
So The Source tried again with another Holy Envoy. And another. And another. And another, and always with the same result, right up to the time of the mission of Saint Buddha himself. Buddha explained that he had been sent to try to stop the rot for good because the failure of humanity to play its rightful part in the cosmic scheme of things was beginning to seriously impact the balance of the Solar System. At this point, Beelzebub reminds us that humanity’s plight was not all of its own making (it stemmed from a ‘Higher Order’ cock-up and lack of foresight), although I, personally, suspect this is an allegorical clarion call to humanity to get off its collective backside and put in the effort to sort out our own messes. After all, we didn’t ask to be born, so just being here is not our fault, but we have been given the inner equipment to give ourselves a leg up out of whatever quagmires we find ourselves in – if we make the effort to use it.
Saint Buddha then went on to explain how humans should be leading their lives which, in a nutshell, entails that the Positive part (which, we recall, is centred in the head and, therefore must equate to our intellectual capacity for Reason) must consciously (very important word, that) direct how the unconscious parts (which must be the emotional and physical centres) function – which is just a fancy way of saying that we have to employ Objective Reason before we let our passions have their way; in other words, we have to train our heads to rule our hearts to prevent knee-jerk reactions to life.
Again, a little aside here on a personal note. I remember my first reaction to reading about the Stoic philosophical school’s approach to life, and my first impression was far from favourable. The Stoics, you see, thought that the Universe was unfolding in a totally predetermined way and that humans had no say in their own destiny, and even that the Stoic version of a ‘God’ or ‘Source’ was entirely beyond the power of mankind to entreat. So the best response, they said, was to fortify your mind against all the things – good and bad – that that fatalistic and, ultimately, uncaring Universe was going to throw at you, so that you could take it all on the chin and get on with things. And I thought what a cop out! I felt that to adopt that kind of mentality would be to cheat oneself of the whole gamut of human emotions and become a kind of sterile-minded automaton, a robot that would never understand and learn from the roller-coaster fury of the human condition. But then I realised that that reaction of mine was exactly why the Stoics thought the way they did. My initial reaction had been a knee-jerk one. I didn’t employ my Reason and think the whole thing through. I then realised that what Gurdjieff (through Beelzebub) and the Stoics (although I’ve got other bones to pick with that lot) are saying is not that you should not have emotions/passions – because, bar the odd person with alexithymia (the inability to feel emotion) the need to emote is hard-wired into all of us – but that emotions and passions should be subservient to Objective Reason and that Objective Reason alone should be what dictates how we react to the people and world around us. I finally came to understand that it is OK – healthy, even – to have emotions, but the key was to employ my Reason to understand why I was experiencing those emotions before taking any kind of action (if any). And I know that all sounds like basic common sense but, believe you me, it’s a hell of a lot harder to put into practice than to just write down.
And just before I dive back into the text again, there’s also this to consider: The ‘friction’ – the ‘conflict’ almost – you feel within yourself when you are trying your absolute damnedest to rein in, for instance, the impulse to throttle someone who has unjustly upset you, is your Objective Reason attempting to control your passion. In other words, your Intellectual centre is attempting to gain control of your emotional and motor centres. In other other words, the three strands of your Okidanokh are attempting to act in concert – and it is precisely that kind of energy, that kind of friction, that provides the ‘food’ to begin the coating of your higher-being bodies. So you can kind of see, in that small example I’ve just given, what I think Gurdjieff was saying earlier in this passage; that is, that the energy required for the coating of higher-being bodies is, more-or-less, morally neutral; after all, there’s nothing much Universe-enhancing in barely restraining yourself from strangling some twat who probably thoroughly deserves it – it was the energy required to overcome the impulse that mattered. To my way of looking at this, using your Objective Reason to internally unite the three strands of the Okidanokh is the starting point, in that it creates the energy for the formation of the higher-being bodies. But it is how you then proactively and consciously function once those bodies are coated that determines your psycho-spiritual evolution and the role you will go on to play within the wider cosmic machine. Gurdjieff will explain more about this concept later in the work but it’s worth keeping in mind that his protagonist, Beelzebub, is very much an example of this spiritual ‘job promotion’ in action as Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson progresses. Bit of a longer aside than I’d anticipated there, but back to the narrative . . .
So Saint Buddha, by preaching the application of Reason over emotion, started to make some headway and many humans began to disentangle themselves from the after-effects of the organ kundabuffer. Nevertheless, once the Buddha died, the very next generation started to distort his teachings, and so it continued until, by the third or fourth generation after his lifetime, the precepts the Buddha had taught would have been unrecognisable even to the Saint himself.
Beelzebub explains to his grandson, Hassein, that, in the case of the Buddha, the main reason for the bastardisation of his teachings was a total misunderstanding of one of his central tenets – a misunderstanding that is still evident even today. According to Beelzebub, the Buddha had taught that one of the best ways for humanity to ‘train’ itself out of the consequences of the organ kundabuffer was through ‘intentional-suffering’, and one of the best situations in which to practise that concept was by forcing yourself to rein in your reactions during confrontations with people who were – in whatever way it manifested – being unpleasant towards you.
Unfortunately, that piece of superb advice (the essence of which I’ve kind of touched on in my aside above) was twisted by the succeeding generations, who felt that the internal ‘struggle’, the ‘endurance’ referred to by Saint Buddha could only be achieved in complete solitude. They thereby missed the entire point, because it is only by direct exposure to the unpleasantness of others that we can truly ‘experience’ the inner struggle to keep our cool, and it is the energy created by that inner struggle that kicks in what Gurdjieff calls the ‘psychic-chemical-results’ that result in fortifying the positive or affirming force within ourselves to counterbalance and overcome our negative inclinations. In short, exposing ourselves to the hostility of others without reacting is good practice for building our Objective Reason which, in turn, is a positive force for converting energy to that quality required by The Source to keep everything going; and it has the added benefit of building our own higher-being bodies so that we look like potential ‘management material’ to All and Everything.
But the inhabitants of Pearl Land didn’t ‘get it’ and, either individually or in small communities (retreats and monasteries in other words), isolated themselves from the ‘training ground’ of normal human life in an attempt to ‘save their souls’; and this was seen as a perfectly acceptable facet of the religion based on the teachings of Saint Buddha which the majority of Pearl Land’s inhabitants were practising at the time of Beelzebub’s first visit to that country.
Beelzebub still had to work out exactly how he was going to slow down ritual animal sacrifice in Pearl Land and he eventually settled on taking advantage of another teaching of Saint Buddha that had resulted in a misunderstanding. But first, Beelzebub explains the ‘Cosmic Truth’ that the Buddha had revealed, and it is very interesting as Gurdjieff uses the Buddha’s explanation to precis and revise the mechanics of his own cosmology – as we’ve heard it so far – in a couple of short paragraphs. It’s a bit technical so I’ll do my best to simplify it to what I think Gurdjieff is saying:
All three-brained beings on all planets of the multiverse, humanity included, are essential parts of an inclusive and embracing Whole which is The Source itself. The Source radiates itself continuously and renews itself from three-brained beings seeded on planets in whom, through a proper realisation of the two fundamental cosmic laws – The Law of Sevens and The Law of Threes – Objective Divine Reason becomes concentrated and fixed.
There’s a bit more there about three-brained souls who have attained a level of spirituality through Divine Reason reuniting with The Whole, but I kind of boil the whole thing down to its being a description of the self-sustaining, perpetual-motion anti-entropy device I’ve discussed in previous chapters. Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub and Saint Buddha, then goes on to describe the process of the correct application of the Laws of Seven and Three to the coating of ourselves with higher-being bodies and their fine-tuning through the use of Objective Reason, as Holy Prana (from the Sanskrit word meaning breath and as embodied in Hinduism – and some yogic schools – as the concept of the holy or divine breath).
Now, in my opinion, Gurdjieff’s jumped the gun a bit there, because we’ve not really had much explanation, thus far, about the Law of Sevens, but we shouldn’t get too bogged down because, at this point, the good old inhabitants of Pearl Land managed once again to mess up the pure message behind the Buddha’s teaching. Within three generations, says Beelzebub, the followers of Buddha’s religion had forgotten all about the critical element of having to strive to coat themselves with the higher-being bodies, and instead just assumed that ‘Mr. Prana’ was with them from birth. In other words, they considered themselves a fully functional part of the holy, cosmic whole without having to do a second’s worth of work on themselves – something the Buddha had made perfectly clear was not the case. And it’s worth remembering, here, that Gurdjieff has previously implied that, if you don’t put the effort into reuniting (and, thereby, ‘re-energising’) the three strands of the Okidanokh which separate and reside in your three centres at birth, then those three strands, because you’ve not bothered to transmute them into something to replenish The Source, will, on your physical death, zip off back into the multiverse in their original ‘unre-energised’ state to seek out a less lazy host – and that’s that for you as an ‘individual’.
I recently came across the process of ‘fuel polishing’ which involves passing degraded diesel from a tank through a purification device, and Gurdjieff’s universe-as-an-energy-recycling-system is a bit like that. In that analogy, the machine containing the tank is the Universe, the diesel is the okidanokh, and humans (or any other three-brained beings) are the purification devices. If the purification devices are working as they’ve been designed, the diesel in the tank is kept healthy and the machine runs well. If the purification devices don’t do the job for which they’re designed, the diesel in the tank degrades and the whole machine grinds to a halt. So The Source does what any good mechanic would and, when one purification device won’t do its job, He/She/It replaces it with another that will.
But what Beelzebub next tells Hassein, his grandson, is absolutely fascinating, because, with it, Gurdjieff, for the first time in the work and totally out of the blue, begins to hint at an almost intermediate stage in human psycho-spiritual development – a state somewhere between not having any higher-being coating and one in which the higher-being bodies are fully perfected. According to Beelzebub, Saint Buddha had expressly told his disciples that, once you begin the process of crystallising your higher-being bodies – whether you are ware of having done so or not – it is imperative that you employ your Reason to complete the process because, if you do not, ‘this most holy coating will, changing various exterior coatings, suffer and languish eternally’. Beelzebub follows this up with another dire warning, this time from another Holy Envoy who was sent to Earth from The Source, one Saint Kirmininasha, who said: ‘Blessed is he that hath a soul; blessed also is he that hath none; but grief and sorrow are to him that hath in himself its conception’.
Crikey! What are we meant to make of that? On the face of it, Gurdjieff is saying that there’s some kind of level of individual existence that transcends the death of the physical body but cannot realise its full potential of ‘reuniting’ with The Source. There’s even a hint in the ‘changing various exterior coatings’ statement of the possibility of existence through several reincarnations, or even wandering the Earth like an old ghost. All very esoteric and mysterious, yes, but we must always keep in mind that Gurdjieff writes on several different levels and there is also a much more psychologically prosaic way of reading this passage as it could equally be interpreted as Gurdjieff warning us that, once you start on the path to self-evolution, it’s better to finish the job on yourself than to get stuck at some intermediate stage where you’re neither one thing nor the other and your life is made a misery by the confusion of incomplete understanding and the guilt of not fulfilling what you started. Those who never bother, or don’t even contemplate, psycho-spiritual evolution live in ignorance of it; those who achieve it live enriched lives; but those who start and get stuck on the path often beat themselves up for what could have been. Of course, both above interpretations of this very strange passage could be correct – or it could mean something else entirely. But whatever Gurdjieff really does intend it to mean, he doesn’t enlarge on at this point and we move on to how Beelzebub solved the problem of animal sacrifice in Pearl Land.
Having decided to play on a facet of the already established religion (just as he did in Maralpleicie) Beelzebub started to put it about that this ‘Holy Prana’ that everybody already assumed was theirs by right of being born, was present not only in humans but in every creature born on planet Earth, whether it be found in the sea, on land, or in the air. Although Beelzebub knew that was not the true doctrine of Saint Buddha (who had said that ‘Holy Prana’ was the result of hard self-work in three-brained beings) he assured those he chose to seed the message that it was, and sent them on their way to spread the word. The effect was immediate and the practice of ritual animal sacrifice came grinding to a halt as the inhabitants of Pearl Land began to regard all creatures as equal to themselves.
But, just like in Maralpleicie, and humans being humans, the message was embellished and distorted and people started taking their new ‘understanding’ to comical extremes. Some walked on stilts to avoid crushing insects; others wouldn’t drink fresh water because they might inadvertently swallow the small creatures living in it; still others wore face masks to avoid accidentally inhaling insects. Societies grew up to protect animals both domesticated and wild, and rules were put in place to forbid the consumption of any kind of animal flesh. And, yes, for Beelzebub, it was mission complete because he had massively reduced animal sacrifice, but for Saint Buddha and all those Holy Envoys who preceded him it was same old-same old as humanity continued to distort the true message behind their words. According to Beelzebub, all we humans did with the Objective Truth of our existence was twist it out of all shape into so-called teachings such as Occultism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Psychoanalysis, all of which serve only to muddle our already muddled psyches.
Gurdjieff winds up this chapter with another strange little passage. In it Beelzebub tells Hassein that the only thing to have survived from the teachings of Saint Buddha was ‘half a word’. That word concerns the location in the human body at which the organ kundabuffer had been caused to grow, which was, apparently, at the base of the spine. Now, we have to remember that the spinal column is referred to by Beelzebub as one of the ‘brains’ of a three-brained being and he has mentioned that it is the seat of the Holy Denying, or Negative stream of the Okidanokh. According to Beelzebub, although the organ no longer functions as such, it is still present in humans as an obsolete bodily formation. He then goes on to explain how humans have mangled the semantics of the original name of the organ and arrived contemporarily at kundalina which is, of course, the yogic kundalini force believed to coil around the base of the spine. Now, Beelzebub does say that the modern use of the word figures prominently in what he calls ‘Indian Philosophy’ but he dismisses any ‘secrets’ or sciences that purport to explain it as quite fanciful.
And as if that wasn’t strange enough, Beelzebub leaves us with a bemusing puzzle. He says that the way modern scientists define the significance of the location of the now defunct organ kundabuffer in the marrow in the lower spinal column is a ‘profound secret’ which ‘entered’ the favourite mole on the right side of the famous Scheherazade’s navel. I’ve absolutely no idea what that’s all about (if anything) so make of it what you will.
So, I think that, for us at this juncture, we only need to take away from that little aside that the yogic energy kundalini is considered a female energy which ‘equates’ with its negative assignation in Gurdjieff’s terminology involving the Law of Threes (remember he introduced his wife-to-be as the ‘negative’ aspect to his own ‘positive’ one), and that Beelzebub explains the organ’s location as ‘that part of the spinal marrow’. There are a lot of similarities – even parallels – between Gurdjieff’s Laws of Three and Seven and many other teachings and philosophies, but they are too many to get into just yet.
This chapter on Beelzebub’s first visit to India finally ends – phew! – with him deciding to head back to his spaceship, but, rather than going by the most direct route, Beelzebub decides to travel through that locality that would later be called Tibet.
Well, that was a massive revision chapter (with a few new concepts thrown in) and we’re beginning to see some themes running together. For one thing, it’s amazing how everything seems to boil down to the change of energy states to keep everything going. Modern quantum physics, with its collapsing probability waves, and its quarks and strings, all vibrating away at different frequencies to ‘create’ the basic building blocks of everything (which collide and change identity and charge), tells much the same story as Gurdjieff with his permanent standing wave of energy that ‘collapses’ into every type of ‘thing’ (suns, planets, one-, two-, and three-brained beings) and then separates and mutates and recombines into something else. There is an awful lot of so-called ‘esoteric’ knowledge floating around this world which, it seems to me, modern science is only just catching up with . . . but enough of that for now.
As far as self-help aspects of this chapter are concerned, well, like Gurdjieff’s subject matter, it’s pretty much a revision session. One message that comes through strongly is that changes to existing energy levels – or an injection of new energy – are often needed to kick-start reactions that will jolt us out of a rut or bad habits. In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson that energy comes in the form of Beelzebub himself and his ‘ruses’ to jolt people out of a pre-set mental attitude and start a chain reaction to achieve change; although it could equally come, in our lives, from a friend, a relative, even a book. The energy arrives in our lives in some form or other but then it’s up to us what we do with it. After all, the term guru simply means a teacher in Sanskrit; it’d be a mistake to always assume that your guru is going to be a person – experience, after all, is often seen as one of the best teachers of the lot.
There is one other thing that cropped up in this chapter worth mentioning as regards self-help, and that’s when Beelzebub talked about subjecting yourself to the hostility of others in order to master the art of inner control which generates fuel to build your higher-being bodies. Now, I’m not advocating that we all go around deliberately winding people up just so that we can perfect our self-control and hasten our personal spiritual evolution, but there’s a wider point here. Keeping your cool in an inflammatory situation is, in my opinion, an essential survival trait and one that’s worth cultivating; but there are other ways of generating that ‘friction’ which forces your inner centres to sort out a working relationship; and they can be found in all sorts of situations. I remember reading an account of Gurdjieff’s when he related the anecdote about a mountain bandit (or it may have been a hunter) waiting to ambush his quarry. The man developed an itch on the side of his nose but was aware that even the slightest movement would betray his position and warn his prey. The more he was aware of the itch, the more acute his desire to scratch it became. That inner struggle, the man’s Reason overriding his emotional and physical impulse to raise his hand and scratch his nose – a movement he knew would disadvantage him – was enough to generate fuel for his higher-being bodies. He wasn’t aware that’s what was happening, he just wanted to ambush his prey without being spotted, but it was happening whether he wanted it to or not. Now, that’s a pretty extreme example but there are more prosaic ways: resisting the temptation to scoff the bottom layer of the chocolate box, for instance, or forcing yourself to do that exam revision you’ve been putting off for days and days, or keeping your mouth shut when you really want to grandstand and show off how much you know even though it’ll make you look like Hermione Granger – the possibilities are everywhere. So the self-help lesson is: use your noddle and think before you give in to what your emotions or physical urges want you to do. Your passions and your body can be very persuasive and demanding but you can overrule them if you try hard enough. And that’s a big enough win even if you don’t believe in all that higher-being stuff; but if you do, well then, it’s a double-whammy.
That really is enough for now. I hope to see you next time when Beelzebub pays his first visit to Tibet.
