Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. The last two passages have been pretty heavy, although they’ve been necessary to both expand upon and illustrate through analogy, Gurdjieff’s take on how the Multiverse works. In short, the whole thing is a perpetual-motion device designed to recycle energy back to The Source (whatever or whoever that might be) so that he/she/it doesn’t run out of puff and disappear. Humanity’s part in this, as a three brained being, is to absorb a critical part of that radiated energy from The Source (called the Okidanokh). Once absorbed, the Okidanokh separates out into its three component Forces – the Positive, Negative, and Reconciling Forces – which each sits in a different physical area – or centre – of the body. The idea is to get the three centres working together in perfect harmony in order to obtain Objective Reason, which is the ability to analyse everything around you using only the intellect. Why only the intellect? Well, because your physical senses aren’t equipped to fully understand what they see, hear, smell, taste, or touch – and they often lie to you. When you exercise Objective Reason, you somehow coat extra ‘bodies’ around yourself, one of which is generally known as the Astral body, and the other, which is even more refined, is generally known as the Soul. As far as we have been able to work out so far, these bodies have the ability to survive physical death. All of this – Objective Reason and the coating on of extra ‘bodies’ – somehow refines the emanations that you give back out to the Multiverse and find their way back to replenish The Source and keep the whole cosmic show on the road. But if you do not make the effort to better yourself and coat yourself with extra ‘bodies’ the implication (as we’ve read it so far) is that, when you die, that’s it for you as that particular being – you’ve reached the end of the road, because the Okidanokh that was in you simply recombines into what it started off as and goes zipping back out into the Multiverse looking for a less lazy host to do the job of energy refinement. That’s a pretty simple explanation of what is probably a much more complex concept, but it’ll do us for now.
In this next section, Beelzebub explains to his grandson, Hassein, why he had to descend to Earth a second time during his long exile in our solar system. I actually think that Gurdjieff uses the word descend deliberately here as he generally has Beelzebub depict Earth as a planet with some very serious problems, whose three-brained inhabitants (that’s us humans) are a fair way down the scale from the pretty advanced Beelzebub himself. Anyway, I really like this section as not only does it give us an amusingly narrated insight into the cataclysmic stupidity of humanity where it concerns our attitude to religion, but it also tells us more about how the process of death fits in with the grand cosmic scheme of things. It also contains what I think is one of the most powerful passages in the whole of the work, but you can read that when you get to it further down the page. So here goes:
Beelzebub begins by given Hassein a brief overview of the topographical changes to the layout of Earth since his first visit to that ill-begotten lump of rock. The continent of Atlantis, he says, had now sunk beneath the waves and the resultant seismic upheaval had caused new land masses to rise, to nearly all of which the surviving humans had spread and multiplied excessively (a point, says Beelzebub, he’ll enlarge upon at some later stage). The members of Beelzebub’s own tribe who were residing in exile on Earth also all managed to escape the catastrophe thanks to the disaster being prophesied a year in advance by their very own female seer, who advised everybody to migrate to a nearby continent that eventually became Africa. I think the prophetess bit is a bit tongue-in-cheek as Beelzebub goes on to hint that this female seer had ‘foreseen’ the catastrophe about to sink Atlantis by having developed her Objective Reason to a very high level. In other words, she spotted the signs, put two and two together, and advised all her fellow tribal comrades to bugger off before it was too late.
Beelzebub then explains why he ended up on Earth for a second time: A group of high officials from The Source arrived on Mars (Beelzebub’s home-in-exile), many of whom had been on the first delegation which had to sort out the first disaster to hit Earth when it was smacked into by a comet, and two fragments, the Moon and Anulios, split off. They explained that they’d been keeping an eye on the planet to make sure their readjustments were working, but unfortunately there’d been an unforeseen effect, because when the planet finally jolted back into its correct centre of gravity after losing the two sizable chunks, it had caused a massive seismic upheaval that had sunk the continent of Atlantis and changed the layout of seas and land masses across the planet. Despite the mayhem, though, the delegation was now satisfied that neither the planet Earth, nor its missing chunks – The Moon and Anulios – any longer had the potential to upset the wider cosmic balance; indeed, the Moon and Anulios were now ‘independent’ celestial bodies within the solar system. The leader of the delegation, the Angel Looisos, then gets down to the nub of his visit and makes his request to Beelzebub.
The Moon, he said, being now an independent object, had started to form an atmosphere in accordance with the overall cosmic plan, but the formation of that atmosphere was being impeded because of a peculiarity being exhibited by humanity back down on Earth. I’ll come to the ‘peculiarity’ in a moment, but Looisos said, that rather than having to resort to a drastic remedial measure, would Beelzebub consider going to Earth and finding some way of stopping the ‘peculiarity’ by appealing to humanity’s Reason. The problem, he said, was this:
Since the catastrophe that sank Atlantis, mankind had spread out again and multiplied. There were three major population centres that were of concern. We later learn that all three countries are in Asia. The first, Tikliamish, adjoined the Eastern coastline of the Caspian Sea, the second, Maralpleicie, was located in what is now the Gobi Desert, and the third, Pearl-Land, was modern day India. In all three places, humankind had developed a form of religion. Although each of the three religions was unlike the other two, all of them had developed the widespread use of sacrificial offerings. It’s worth quoting what the Angel Looisos thinks about this, as I don’t think I can put it any better myself:
“And this custom of theirs is based on the notion, which can be cognised only by their strange Reason alone, that if they destroy the existence of beings of other forms in honor of their gods and idols, then these imaginary gods and idols of theirs would find it very, very agreeable, and always and in everything unfailingly help and assist them in the actualization of all their fantastic and wild fancies.”
I love that speech. Anyway, Looisos went on to explain why this has become a problem for the surrounding areas of the solar system – and you have to remember, here, that, as we’ve discussed in previous passages, energy from The Source that’s converted by one- and two-brained beings goes into keeping the local area of the cosmos going, while energy from the Source that’s converted by three-brained beings is intended to be fed back to The Source to stop he/she/it from dissipating: In other words, one- and two-brained beings keep the structure sound and balanced so that three-brained beings can do their thing. Remember also that the whole cosmic machine is a finely tuned instrument that can be easily upset and imbalance can have dire repercussions. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that everything, ultimately, is dependent on everything else.
So, bearing that in mind, Looisos went on to tell Beelzebub that this – in essence – slaughter of lower-brained animals in sacrificial ceremonies, had caused a massive excess of the energy that is normally released at death and used to help ‘develop’ those two celestial bodies in relatively near space: The Moon and Anulios. The Angel said that, because of that excess, the Moon was not able to maintain the energy-juggling act required to help develop its own atmosphere the way it was supposed to, and the imbalance could have potential disastrous repercussions that would spread out from the local solar system into the wider universe. I suppose, in a way, that’s like anything: give a human too much food; give plants too much water; give wayward kids too much freedom . . . and there are consequences. And with such a delicately balanced machine as the multiverse . . . well, anything might happen.
Hinting to Beelzebub that finding a successful solution without having to resort to ‘drastic cosmic measures’ (not specified, but I certainly don’t like the sound of them) might help mitigate whatever had got Beelzebub exiled to our solar system, the Angel Looisos departed, leaving Beelzebub carrying the baby, as it were. There is probably a whole undercurrent about remorse and atonement and taking responsibility for your actions here, but it becomes a bit lost in the almost lighthearted tone of the narrative.
So Beelzebub accepted the challenge, eager to demonstrate that he was a willing (but, importantly, independent – he had, after all, used his Reason to agree to the task) particle in the immense cosmic machine.
His ship, Occasion, landed in what is the modern Caspian Sea, in the northwest of the relatively newly formed continent of Asia which had, at that time, become the major centre of human population and civilisation. According to Beelzebub, the Amu Darya river, which now empties out into the Aral Sea, then flowed directly into the Caspian, which made it easy for him to sail to the capital of that land of Tikliamish (the modern day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan general area) which was called Koorkalai. As a little aside, here, Beelzebub hints that, although Earth had already suffered two catastrophes (the comet impact that broke off two big chunks, and the jolting back into the correct centre of gravity that had, amongst other seismic upheavals sunk Atlantis), it would, in the future, suffer a third, one of the effects of which would be to cover this Tikliamish region with sand. It would also cover Maralpleicie (the Gobi Desert) with sand, and throw up the Himalayas as a barrier between Pearl-Land (India) and the rest of the continent. Threes, you see . . . it’s all about threes. Oh, and sevens, but we’ll come to them later in the work.
Anyway, at the time of Beelzebub’s second descent to Earth, Tikliamish was still a lush and fertile land. Gurdjieff keeps the tone light and amusing here, and explains that in all three centres – Tikliamish, Maralpleicie, and Pearl-Land – the people, rather than striving for the proper and expected goal of three-brained beings everywhere of perfecting their being to bring their three Okidanokh centres into harmony, had instead developed an obsession for ‘proving’ that their own country and civilisation was the pre-eminent ‘Centre-of-Culture’ for the entire planet. This competition inevitably escalated into conflict between the countries. This, of course, is an illustration, in macrocosm, of the disharmony between the three centres of an individual human being, with each vying for supremacy rather than working in concert with the others.
Arriving in Tikliamish’s capital, Koorkalai, Beelzebub wasted no time and started hanging out in the restaurants, clubs, dance halls, meeting places, and such like; the idea being that these were the places to watch and meet people and get a handle on what they were thinking and doing. Incidentally, as a little aside, Gurdjieff maintained that one of the best professions for self-development is to be a member of the waiting staff in a restaurant. He reckoned that, if you were any good at your job, the constant need to be aware of everything going on around you, and – importantly – to be able to ‘read’ people and developments as they played out; indeed, to learn to accurately predict where you would next be needed and with what, was excellent training for self-awareness and thinking about how your own little piece of the Universe was unfolding around you. But I digress.
After a while, Beelzebub met the acquaintance of one Abdil, a priest of the local religion who understood the mindset of his congregation. Beelzebub singled out Abdil because the local man retained some vestige of conscience which inferred he had the potential to develop compassion and sensitivity to all fellow earthly creatures. Before getting to how he put Abdil to use, Beelzebub, in a passage that tells you all you really need to know about the stupidity of many religious practices, explains a little more about the custom of sacrificial offerings, the numbers of which had, he says, at the time of his second descent, reached astonishing levels. Weak one- and two-brained beings were being slaughtered in the name of imaginary gods and fantastical saints in incalculable numbers. The illogicality and stupidity employed were staggering. If a man wanted something, he would promise his god a number of ‘offerings’. If the man got what he wanted, he slaughtered with utmost veneration; but if he didn’t get what he wanted, he would then increase the number of slaughtered animals in an attempt to win back the favour of the imaginary deity. Men even, says Beelzebub, divided the sacrificial victims into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ categories, believing, in their delusion, that their gods would find only the ‘clean’ animals agreeable. The sacrifices were made at home, in public, or at special religious sites dedicated to gods that humans themselves had invented, or saints they had themselves elevated to sainthood. He goes on in the same vein, pointing out that it always seems to be the strong who sacrifice the weak, even in the rare instances of human sacrifice when a father would offer up his son, a husband his wife, an elder son his younger sibling, and, more often than these, slaves; that is, captives from the periodic wars when humanity went on mutually destructive bents. Beelzebub explains to Hassein that ritual sacrifice was still a peculiarity of the planet Earth but, thankfully, nowhere near the scale it was during that second descent.
The next passage, in which Beelzebub lectures the priest Abdil on the dumb, illogical, unreasoning absurdity of practising animal sacrifice is amongst my favourite sections in the whole of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, and I just wish I could copy it out here for you verbatim. It is very powerful: by turns scathing, humorous, and deeply, deeply touching, and it leaves you feeling not a little scoured . . . and also profoundly ashamed of what unthinking humanity, with its ridiculous and oh so fallible reasoning, is capable of. The passage is, unfortunately, too long to reproduce in its entirety, so I’ll have to cherry-pick a bit and select the most important bits. All of what follows in the next paragraph is Gurdjieff’s voice through Beelzebub. I have added no comments of my own:
Beelzebub begins by pointing out that Abdil has faith and tells him that faith is a good and desirable thing. It is desirable, he says, because it intensifies an individual’s self-awareness that they are a particle in the great cosmic Everything. But killing a fellow being, and killing it in the very name of its CREATOR has no part in faith. Is that being’s life not just as important as yours to that CREATOR who created you both? To sacrifice a fellow being is to misuse your Reason. You sacrifice something because you can out-think it, because it is mentally weaker than you. What you are doing, in objective terms, is evil. In terms of the universal machine, you are killing off one of the essential cogs that keep the balance so that the conditions are kept stable for you, a three-brained being, to self-evolve and perfect your own purpose. On top of that you diminish yourself because, by killing, you are destroying the hopes of The Source that you will evolve and play a bigger part in running All and Everything. Why on Earth do you think, that by killing something, you are pleasing the CREATOR? Does it not, for one single second, enter your head that the being whose existence you destroyed was put here for a specific purpose? Think, humanity! Stop and think! Think, not in your normal day-dreamy illusory way, but properly . . . as befits a being who claims to have been made ‘in the likeness of God’. Did the CREATOR write on the foreheads of the creatures you massacre that he wanted them destroyed in his honour and glory? No, of course not! That could never, ever be! What you are doing, your animal sacrifice, is an invention of humanity’s only. To the CREATOR there is no difference between the life of man and any other being. The CREATOR foresaw, when the cosmic machine was devised, that necessarily different environments would demand necessarily different life-forms. A human cannot jump in the sea and live as a fish any more than a fish could sit in a cafe and drink green tea. Everything, absolutely everything, is designed as it is because that is the part it plays in the inconceivably huge machine of the multiverse. It sounds strange, but it is logical. Abdil’s two-brained donkey, for instance, performs a function on the Earth, a function it would be a lot harder to perform if it had more advanced cognitive faculties; in other words, its lower mental powers are fitting to its function. Three-brained humans are a problem in this respect. They are designed with the potential to achieve high Objective Reason yet waste the tools they are given to achieve that on low cunning. And yet donkey and human both are part of the overall plan for All and Everything. Everything, absolutely everything, every single one- two- and three-brained being is equally necessary for the harmony of the entire cosmic machine. For that reason alone, the CREATOR holds every single being equally dear. But now, humanity, a three-brained race, whose striving should be to Objective Reason, has taken it upon itself to use its intellectual superiority to lord it over unfortunate, less smart creatures and to have the bald-faced impertinence to extinguish their existence in the name of their God, actually believing they are doing something good. And the terribly sad thing is that, if humans could actually understand this evil crime they are committing against the very universe itself, they would, in their remorseless shame at the extent of the atrocity they’d perpetrated, hang their heads and never ever ever again take the life of another being, of whatever form, as a sacrificial offering. The CREATOR’s commandment is: ‘Love everything that breathes‘. The absurdity of mankind’s reasoning knows no bounds. Having opted to wantonly destroy slower-witted life-forms than himself, he has had the audacity to divide them into clean and unclean. In this respect man is a coward as well as a moron. A sheep is clean but a lion, for instance, is not. The reason for this is that a sheep is dull-witted and weak whereas a lion is clever and strong. Man is a coward! He would not dare to capture and sacrifice a lion.
There is a fair bit more that I haven’t included in the above paragraph, but what I have included should be enough to give you a feeling for how the conversation went. In short, Beelzebub gave Abdil a right old bollicking – very much like an adult giving a wayward child the what for.
The result of the lecture was that Abdil, whom, remember, Beelzebub had selected for the dressing down because he had the potential to listen and, more importantly, to actually understand what had been said, took himself away and thought for two days solid. He then, at a huge religious festival in his own temple, delivered an hours long sermon that lasted into the next day. The lecture taught against the making of sacrificial offerings, and it was of such appealing eloquence, and delivered with such honesty and passion that many in the congregation, having been brought to tears, were persuaded by his words. Fragments of the speech spread, some people began to change their habits, and Abdil, now a bit of a celebrity, went on a lecture tour around other temples throughout the whole country of Tikliamish. But, as usually happens in circumstances such as these, other people in power – in this case other priests – fearing a decline in their authority and prestige, plotted and conspired against Abdil, spreading slander and making attempts on his life. Despite their efforts, Abdil’s doctrine of love to all fellow creatures daily grew in popularity until, finally, the other priests put Abdil on trial. He was excommunicated, but that wasn’t the end of the matter. As Abdil was now an outcast, people who had followed him began to turn against him and he was eventually murdered. Abdil’s elderly (and last) retainer brought the news of the discovery of the hacked body To Beelzebub who, fearing further desecration of the body, gathered up the parts and took them back to Mars.
But Abdil left behind a legacy. Although animal sacrifice was still prevalent, enough of Abdil’s preachings were still circulating that the practice was becoming increasingly less common. And for Beelzebub himself, that was mission accomplished. And so it was that the energy imbalance in nearby space-time was made less of a critical issue and the first and only human burial on Mars took place. Just before this chapter on Beelzebub’s second descent to Earth ends, Beelzebub remarks that, awaiting him upon his return to Mars were several new arrivals from his home planet of Karatas, including, he says, Hassein’s grandmother who, at that time, had been selected to become Beelzebub’s partner for the continuation of his line. He refers to this being as his ‘passive’ half (an interesting concept that, the old male=active female=passive force, but it is explained in more detail later on in the work so I won’t comment on it any further at this stage).
There’s not a hell of a lot to add to this one. It’s kind of a hammering home of the Laws that govern the fine balance of the multiverse and how breaching those Laws can affect things. The three countries (remember everything comes in threes), each assuming it is the most important and doing its own thing, represent, of course, the three centres (or Forces) of the Okidanokh within a three-brained being. The conflict, or wars, between them, as each of the three strives for supremacy above the other two, is illustrative of the way a human-being is a battleground between the physical, the emotional, and the intellect. The total discordance which ensues, the utter nonsense that bastardised reasoning comes up with when the three centres are not working in concert, is epitomised by the sheer absurdity of something like animal sacrifice. So deluded does this failure to use Objective Reason make humanity, that it doesn’t even think it is doing anything wrong! On the contrary, in its insanity, it actually believes that animal sacrifice is a good and right thing to do. It is sheer lunacy. There is not one shred of logic in it. And that, my friends, is what happens when we don’t stop and use the faculties given to us by Nature/The Source/God call it what you will.
OK, the next installment covers Beelzebub’s third descent to the planet Earth and everything starts to get a whole lot weirder. Please join me there.
