So, the spiritually and psychically advanced Beelzebub is aboard the spaceship Karnak and has started to explain to his interested grandson, Hassein, exactly why the inhabitants of the planet Earth are so spiritually backwards despite possessing the exact same potential for self-betterment as Beelzebub’s own race.
Beelzebub begins by stating that he has been a personal witness to both the material formation of the Earth itself and the arising of Mankind. The problems started, he says, before the planet had even finished cooling off after its ‘concentration’; that is, its solidifying. At this point in time, Beelzebub had already perpetrated his massive cock up and was setting up home in exile on the planet Mars. All at once, all of Mars was shaken and a terrible stench was smelt; the cause of both effects, it was soon found out, being the fact that the Earth, which was passing fairly close by Mars at the time, had experienced some kind of catastrophe and two fragments of it had broken off and flown out into space. It was later discovered that the ‘cosmic architects’ had stuffed up and allowed a comet called ‘Kondoor’, which had been designed for a very wide orbit (and which apparently still exists) to collide with Earth during its very first pass. The mistake was made because the solar system Oors was still at a formative stage and hadn’t yet settled down into a stable enough state that all its component parts (sun, planets, moons, comets, and so on) were in harmonious balance with each other – or, indeed, Oors itself with its neighbouring star systems.
Now, I have to digress from the narrative for a moment here to remind the reader that Gurdjieff is writing on several different levels, so what I think is going on at this point is another piece of allegory in which we are meant to take the planet Earth as a metaphor for a human being. At this stage, like the planet, the human being is still ‘unsolidified’; that is, not completely formed, and still developing. Even the description of it as ‘cooling down’ could be an allusion to one of the first steps we must take in our own personal evolution, which is to get our ‘hot’ passions under control and operate under the captaincy of ‘cool’ Reason. If you’ve been following any of the other threads on this website, such as Seneca or The Kolbrin, you’ve probably become aware that the ability to control emotion at will is considered a massive step forward in an individual’s personal journey to self-betterment by just about every religion or school of thought that has ever been. And it’s no wonder, because keeping a lid on anger, or hate, or lust, or envy, or greed, is a hugely beneficial survival trait. You can get yourself into a hell of a lot of trouble if you let your mouth or your actions run away with you. Trust me, I know all about it!
OK, with that in mind, let’s get back to Beelzebub’s narrative. The comet ‘Kondoor’ – and we have to remember that Gurdjieff uses comets to signify random acts of fate that can have the effect of derailing our senses – has smashed two fragments off the planet Earth. So, Earth is now, essentially, in three pieces (probably representing the three disunited ‘brains’ or ‘centres’ of a three-brained being). Part of the problem was that the Earth, at the time of the impact, hadn’t yet had the chance to develop a protective atmosphere (I think this means the ‘higher-body’ – or ‘soul’ – with which a human can, with due self-developmental effort, coat itself). In the wake of the disaster, an embassy of high cosmic officials (Arch-Engineer Archangels and the like) were sent to the system Oors to investigate and work out what to do. This Holy Commission firstly ascertained that the disaster would have no knock-on effect to the wider universe (and this, I believe, is Gurdjieff pointing out that we are our own little micro-blueprint of All and Everything – as above, so below – but we must put in the effort for self-betterment by ourselves. In short, it is up to each of us, individually, to sort out our own little micro-cosmos). The second ‘finding’ of the select committee was that the two broken off fragments of Earth were still caught in that planet’s orbit but, importantly, could not ‘re-unite’ with the Earth because they were now subject to the universal Law that Beelzebub calls ‘The Law of Catching Up’, and the situation would not change until some other major ‘influence’ either enforced the re-merger, or sent the fragments off on their own trajectory in space. This, to me, is a stark warning that a lot of effort, a lot of energy is required to unite our disparate centres into one harmonious whole. Gurdjieff may even be hinting that the ‘outside’ influence that is required to effect the reunification process can come in the form of a mentor or guru. Maybe.
Anyway, although a major knock-on effect was not of immediate concern, the potential problem still existed that these bits of the Earth could fly off at some stage in the future and cause grief elsewhere in the solar system or beyond. The suggested ‘solution’, at that time, was that the Earth had to ‘maintain’ its new satellites by means of a sacred ‘vibration’ which could only be generated by the arising of life forms that existed independently of the planet itself, a category that includes humanity. This rather radical solution was sanctioned from ON HIGH and, over time, one-, two-, and three-brained beings arose so that the required ‘nutritional’ vibration could be generated and the Earth could ‘sustain’ its fragments, the larger of which was called Loonderperzo (later to be known as ‘The Moon’), and the smaller Anulios, which, although it still exists, was gradually forgotten and has become, to all intents and purposes, invisible to mankind.
But there was a problem with all of this. It is the purpose and destiny of any three-brained entity to achieve Objective Reason. The sacred powers began to fear that the three-brained beings of the planet Earth would, upon achieving Objective Reason, realise that their arising had only come about in order to remedy a sacred cock-up, and, as a consequence, become a bit put out by the whole thing, and so start causing trouble elsewhere. Moreover, feeling themselves slaves to a situation that they were in no way responsible for creating, they would actively seek their own destruction. In my opinion, Gurdjieff is laying it on a bit thick here, as any being capable of Objective Reason would fully understand why the ‘remedy’ had to take place in the first place. But, hey ho! maybe Gurdjieff means that the sacred powers didn’t want to be found out as ‘fallible’. This is all allegorical anyway, and I’d guess that what Gurdjieff is alluding to around this part of his work is that random acts are capable of unbalancing an individual and it is down to us to find either a way of reuniting our three centres or, at the very least, of establishing our own equilibrium so that no further damage occurs to ourselves or those around us.
But back to Beelzebub’s narrative: Fearing that humanity would ‘find them out’, the sacred powers decided upon a further remedial measure; and this one was to have dire and lasting consequences for mankind’s ability to realise its full psychic and spiritual potential. A special ‘organ’ was created specifically for the three-brained inhabitants of the planet Earth. It was implanted at the base of the spinal column and it was called the kundabuffer. Its purpose was to distort the perception of ‘reality’ so that impressions gathered by the senses would engender emotions such as pleasure and enjoyment. What Gurdjieff is doing here, of course, is alluding to that state of an individual before any self-development has taken place; that is, unless we achieve a state of ‘mindfulness’ and see All and Everything with a cool and calm detachment and understand why it is occurring at that very point in space-time, we are prone to distorted perceptions caused by our emotions.
So, humanity had an organ implanted, the kundabuffer, which, as its name implies, prevented individuals from perceiving true Reality. But it had also an unexpected side-effect in that, unlike any other three-brained beings anywhere else across the multiverse, those who inhabited the planet Earth commenced periodic bouts of mutual destruction; wars in other words. At this stage in the narrative, Beelzebub makes the assumption that this unique proclivity for war is also a consequence of the organ kundabuffer , explaining it away as a mechanism to prevent over-population caused by the over-fecundity of mankind. The over-fecundity itself is explained as necessary to produce a sufficiently high level of vibration to sustain Earth’s fragments.
Beelzebub concludes this section with a little aside about the setting up of a marvelous telescope at his home-in-exile on Mars through which he can observe the goings-on on Earth at a great distance; and he mentions the spiritually excellently developed three-brained creatures of the planet Saturn who resemble large ravens. Beelzebub’s remote observations of humanity’s problems and struggles can, I think, be likened to that first developing aspect of our spiritual self-betterment which perceives and criticises the behaviour of our ‘lower’ selves but is powerless, as yet, to do anything about it. We have to remember that Beelzebub, himself, at this dramatic date in his narrative, has also recently been guilty of blotting his own copy-book big time, so maybe this whole episode is illustrative of the first stirrings of the wish for spiritual self-betterment?
In the next section, Beelzebub goes into more detail about mankind’s inability to accept that it has work to do on itself; why we are fed an awful lot of academic drivel promulgated by vacuous buffoons; and why we persist in perceiving fantastical notions as reality. See you there.
