Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
This instalment picks up from the last at the point where Beelzebub has completed his rather lengthy digression to his grandson, Hassein, about the ‘debate’ raging on planet Earth around whether humans descended from apes or vice versa, and is about to relate what actually happened when he descended to our benighted sphere for the fourth time.
Just before I get into the remainder of the chapter proper, though, I think we need to bear in mind that we are now at that point in the wider work where Gurdjieff is beginning to fill in some detail for us readers. We now have a rudimentary grasp of what the Law of Threes is all about and we have also been told that the Law of Sevens is equally as important, although we haven’t yet been given too much of an explanation as to exactly how that Law operates. In addition, we now kind of get it that if a human being doesn’t do a sufficient amount of ‘work’ on itself during a lifetime, then that ‘individual’ will not ‘continue’ – and I use ‘continue’ as a term of convenience here because, so far, we’ve only been offered glimpses and hints about what might happen if we do perform sufficient work on ourselves. So, yes, this chapter is all about filling in more detail. In it, the wider issues with which humanity as a collective must cope, begin to be pared down to commentary on the individual, and we begin to get some advice on how to better ourselves and what work is involved in making that happen. So, with that in mind, let’s dive in . . .
Beelzebub explains to Hassein that he descended to Earth for the fourth time on his ship Occasion which he moored in the Red Sea just off the coast of Egypt which was then a region called Nilia. The destination was chosen because Nilia was where those of Beelzebub’s tribe who had wished to remain on Earth were domiciled and he intended to enlist their help to secure some apes for further study.
Beelzebub headed straight for the country’s capital of Thebes – modern day Luxor – where, upon arrival, he was told about the construction, in another part of the country, of a radical new type of cosmic observatory. Believing that the observatory might contain a design detail that could help Beelzebub overcome a problem he was having constructing his own observatory back on Mars, he decided to go and check it out for himself and set out down a tributary of the Nile to a region just before the river entered what Beelzebub calls a large Saliakooriapnian area and which, from later comments, we can identify as the Giza plateau on the outskirts of modern day Cairo.
The new observatory was not, from a description of it later in this passage, an actual pyramid (although there are some structural similarities). According to Beelzebub, the observatory was employed to both observe celestial bodies and – and this is important – to identify and study how those celestial bodies affect the Earth and what happens on it. In other words, we are talking here about the ‘true’ science of astrology. Beelzebub goes on to say that, once the human psyche had degenerated, the ‘true’ science of astrology became diluted into the practice of simply identifying and naming cosmic concentrations – otherwise known as astronomy – and explains to Hassein how that sad state of affairs came to pass. And I might also mention, at this point, that, on another level, we are talking about what we’ll call karma for now; that is the reciprocal effect of all interactions, on whatever level, and how whatever happens here affects there and vice versa. Everything affects everything else – both ways.
He begins by explaining what the function of a ‘true’ Astrologer was. In addition to observing celestial bodies and interpreting their reciprocal effect on the Earth, an Astrologer had certain social duties to perform. One such obligation was what we would call matchmaking; that is, the placing together of couples whose astrological charts were compatible and sympathetic (a system alive and well in some parts of our modern world even today). The ancient Astrologer’s remit, though, didn’t stop at joining star-crossed lovers: he also advised on when was the most favourable time to conceive a child and, as soon as that child was born, the Astrologer would cast its horoscope and use that horoscope as a reference point with which to guide the new human being through its entire life. In that respect, the Astrologer functioned as a kind of life-coach, offering not only advice to overcome life’s difficulties based upon any given individual’s horoscope, but also operating as a kind of guru on how to live a Responsible (with a capital R) existence according to the universal Laws that govern the operation of the Cosmos and their influence on every being in the Multiverse. I suppose it was a bit like saying ‘OK, your horoscope tells me that you are inclined to fly off the handle. In the coming weeks, certain celestial bodies will create conditions in which you and your fellow humans will become fractious and testy. The Law of Threes dictates that when too much active/positive/masculine energy is injected into a fragile situation the result is a disaster. Guard against those situations over the next two weeks! Avoid potential arguments!’
And it didn’t stop there. Because a single Astrologer might guide a whole area, and was aware of the horoscopes of each member of his flock and the changing state of the heavens and had a working knowledge of the Laws that make All and Everything tick, he could, as it were, head potentially inflammatory situations off at the pass. At the first sign of impending trouble, he might advise all sorts of sensible preventative precautions such as keeping persons of incompatible types separated from each other for the duration of the danger period. And I guess it doesn’t really matter whether or not you actually believe in the power of the spheres being able to affect your life because the point is that the people you are dealing with do, and what the Astrologer ends up doing is giving practical advice because he understands the Law of Threes – which manifests in very prosaic ways – and he uses astrology as his vehicle of communicating it and getting his message across. In a way, it’s just like the power of a parable. And it’s also like Gurdjieff using the analogy of what astrologers do to keep the balance to help us understand that everything we personally do or say has repercussions that can bounce back on us in a positive or negative fashion. Just like the Astrologer, we, too, must read the signs and speak and act accordingly. Like I said, this is also about karma.
But that’s how it used to be, moans Beelzebub to his grandson. Nowadays, he says, the true Astrologers have been supplanted by mere Astronomers, interested only in searching for and naming new suns and planets. Modern astronomers, he says, are limited by their tools and have no real understanding of what they are observing (although that does not prevent them from adopting a lofty intellectual arrogance – a widespread condition in many so-called ‘disciplines’, says Beelzebub) but, he says, they do no real harm, except to those their ignorance immediately affects.
As regards the new observatory itself, Beelzebub reveals that it was the brainchild of the learned society Akhaldan which had been formed on Atlantis before that continent sank beneath the waves; and at this point he feels it is important to instruct Hassein on the formation and history of the society itself. And this is where we, the readers, need to sit up and start paying attention, because it is directly relevant to what we, as individuals, must do in order to be able to start work on ourselves.
Just before Beelzebub starts on his explanation, though, he makes a very strange comment about how he himself came across the society’s history. According to Beelzebub, thoughts or ideas, once they have arisen, obtain a kind of materialised existence which then hang around in the atmosphere of the planet on which they were conceived. But not all thoughts and ideas; only those that arise from three-brained beings who have coated their higher-being bodies (which we’ll call astral and soul for the time being) and perfected their Reason (with a capital R) to the degree that he calls Martfotai (various ‘ranks’ of exalted being are referred to throughout the book, and your promotion up them, it would appear, is directly commensurate with how much work on yourself you are prepared to put in – a bit like the coloured belt system in karate). Beelzebub says that he put together the history of the learned society Akhaldan by accessing the ‘thought tapes’ directly relevant to it, which had been fixed in sequence by an eternal being, Asoochilon, who had incarnated into a normal three-brained being named Tetetos on Atlantis several centuries before the cataclysm. The important part of this passage – to my mind, anyway – comes at the end when Beelzebub reveals that these ‘thought tapes’ as he calls them last as long as the planet on which they arose and, importantly, are impervious to both internal planetary catastrophes and outside cosmic causes. What I think Gurdjieff – through Beelzebub – is describing here is the unshakeable veracity of the end result of the process of True Reason – Truth with a capital T. When your thinking has achieved such a clarity and quality that what you arrive at is an unalloyed Truth, then it is unassailable from outside; and that Truth, through its purity and immediately recognisable legitimacy, becomes a thing in itself, and acquires a ‘life’ independent of the individual in whom it arose.
Back to the narrative, and Beelzebub further explains that anybody sufficiently well developed or trained can ‘access’ these thought-tapes – and that got me to thinking about another of Gurdjieff’s teachings that Knowledge can be hidden in plain view – in the lines of a temple, for instance, or the words of a song or steps of a dance learned by rote – always there to be ‘read’ by those sufficiently advanced to do so. And isn’t that the same as an idea acquiring a life of its own, independent of its originator? I’d say so, but that’s a whole discussion on its own which we’ll regrettably have to leave for the time being and revisit later on in this series.
So, having ‘accessed’ the relevant thought-tapes, Beelzebub learned that the society Akhaldan was formed on Atlantis 735 years before it sank. This is where it starts to get extremely interesting because Gurdjieff is about to outline for us the process of individual self-betterment; of what it involves to begin to coat ourselves with the higher-being bodies.
The founder of the learned society Akhaldan, it turns out, was an individual named Belcultassi who started off as a normal three-brained human being and was now, at the time of Beelzebub’s narrating these historical events, a Saint ‘Eternal Being’ (which is Gurdjieff dangling a mighty carrot about humankind’s potential before he even has Beelzebub begin the story).
Now, this Belcultassi was in the middle of a good old self-absorbed, existentialist crisis when it suddenly struck him that everything he did and thought made absolutely zero logical sense. This came as a profound shock to the fellow (and we need to note that ‘shocks’ whether originating internally or externally are important elements in the self-betterment process) and he resolved to work out what was wrong. To do that Belcultassi committed to a regimen (no details on the mechanics of that regimen yet from Gurdjieff, unfortunately, although it does sound like a combination of dietary control and mental effort) that would result in his being able to recognise and conquer the impulses and passions created within himself by both any kind of external influence and any innate tendency to conceits such as self-love, pride, and vanity.
Only once Belcultassi had arrived at what we might describe as a mental and psychic state of being able to process using pure Reason alone, was he ready to begin the next stage, which was to look back over his life up to that point and rationally and objectively identify how and why he had reacted to things the way he had. This next bit is important, because Gurdjieff has Belcultassi analyse which impulses and passions – either internally generated or the result of external influence – arose in him with respect to which of his three centres they affected and from which of them his reaction originated. The three centres are, of course, the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual, each the seat of one of the three strands of the sacred Okidanokh which must all be brought into harmonious concert for a three-brained being to function optimally and correctly. Belcultassi was forced to identify those occasions when he had reacted with his ‘I’ (which, at this stage we must interpret as the three centres working in some kind of unison even if it is not perfect concert) and those when he had reacted ‘automatically’ (that is, without any kind of rational thought). After being brutally honest with himself during the self-analysis, Belcultassi realised that something was going horribly wrong with the way he was processing information and subsequently acting upon it (that’s my way of putting it – you might equally say that Belcultassi came to the conclusion he had never acted logically and rationally in his life up to that point).
Needing to understand whether what he’d realised about the dysfunctional operation of his own psycho-spiritual state was more widespread, Belcultassi canvassed his mates and buddies and discovered that yes, it most certainly was – the vast majority of human beings are very, very messed up indeed. A few of those Belcultassi approached, though, those who had begun to suspect that they were essentially living on false terms with objective reality, became intrigued and began to make their own observations of how their fellow humans operated. These few enquiring minds formed the nucleus of the society Akhaldan and Belcultassi became its first leader. According to Beelzebub, the word Akhaldan encompassed the sentiment of ‘striving to become aware of the sense and aim of the Being of beings’.
The formative years of the society Akhaldan are also very interesting. The collective membership quickly agreed that there was something inherently cross-wired in humanity’s psycho-spiritual make-up which had to be corrected for True Reason to be able to operate properly, and they realised that to have the right tools to put that right, more knowledge was required. To that end, they split into seven (the number seven pops up a lot in this chapter) separate ‘disciplines’ each tasked with acquiring as much learning as possible about their designated subject. This, explains Beelzebub to Hassein, was the start of ‘genuine objective science’ on planet Earth.
The seven scientific disciplines were (1) the study of the planet Earth, its place in the cosmos, and how its component parts affect one another (2) the radiations of the planets in the solar system and their reciprocal action on each other (3) mathematics (4) the study of the human condition and human interaction verified by statistics (5) the study of chemistry and physics (6) the study of external circumstances and happenings whether consciously triggered or the result of happenstance, and under which conditions those circumstances and happenings were perceived incorrectly by beings (7) the study of the effect on humans of external cosmic actions not dependent on humans themselves.
Unfortunately for the learned society Akhaldan and tragically for the psycho-spiritual betterment that may have been the reward for wider humanity, just as the knowledge-gathering was building up a head of steam, certain members worked out that the destruction of Atlantis was imminent and the whole society dispersed over the globe. When the dust from the catastrophe – which had affected to a greater or lesser degree, the whole planet – finally settled, the surviving members of the society gathered and settled in the Nile Valley of what is modern day Egypt, and, shortly afterwards, the members of Beelzebub’s own tribe remaining on Earth and who had been residing near the source of the river, followed suit.
Beelzebub completes his potted history of the learned society Akhaldan by telling Hassein that, although the society never managed to fulfil its original goals, nevertheless the instinct for True Reason was genetically passed down through its subsequent generations; and even in wider humanity there remained what Beelzebub calls an ‘instinctive conviction’ that leans towards ‘completed personal Being’. I guess what he means by that is that all humans, to a greater or lesser degree, feel some sort of primal ‘urge’ to improve themselves.
After all of that, Beelzebub finally returns to the topic of the ingenious observatory of the Giza Plateau, but not before imparting another intriguing snippet of information to Hassein. Before humankind met with circumstances that stalled and reversed the development normal and proper to three-brained beings, he says, we were capable of seeing the stars and planets of the cosmos with the naked eye at any time of day or night. Moreover, those of us who had trained our vision to a higher degree, had the ability to see even those cosmic bodies in the immediate vicinity of the Holy Sun Absolute. But after humanity’s psycho-spiritual evolution was interrupted, our vision deteriorated to the capability of one- and two-brained beings and we became able to look upon the stars and planets only on dark nights. On top of that, the limitations of our visual organs mean that we only perceive what is close to us. Now, Gurdjieff does bang on in very convoluted terms about this deteriorated state of affairs, but, of course, what he’s getting at here is something much more profound than just physical visual impairment; and I’ll explain what I mean by that a little later on.
But back to the observatory now and Beelzebub explains that one of the reasons the descendants of the learned society Akhaldan had devised and constructed it was to compensate for humankind’s degraded eyesight and give us, once again, the ability to observe from afar those planets and stars of the cosmos that came within their hemisphere of observation at any time of the day or night. Beelzebub describes the observatory as consisting of five strategically placed pipes hollowed out through the ground all of which converged in a central cave deep inside the earth. By observing the heavens through these pipes, the astrologers could work out the position of the Earth relative to the stars and planets – in both their own and other solar systems – and keep records and make deductions accordingly. The key to the observatory’s success, apparently, was that the central observation chamber was buried deep underground (and there’s probably something allegorical going on here as well, in that members of humanity might only see the ‘true’ nature of things if they look from deep within themselves rather than relying on ‘surface level’ senses).
At this point, Beelzebub mentions other ‘constructions’ nearby that are obviously the Pyramids themselves. They were still under construction at the time, he says, but, intriguingly, mentions that not only was their purpose to be above-ground celestial observatories but they were also intended as instruments that could determine and then actively direct the surrounding atmosphere to achieve a desired climate. Fascinating! The pyramids, of course, are accredited with all sorts of mystical properties (not least of them the ability to resharpen blunted razor blades) and we know from modern sonar readings that chambers and shafts (some of which are angled to the very exterior of the sloping sides) honeycomb the constructions. Frustratingly for us, Beelzebub leaves his digression on the pyramids at that point but he does tell Hassein that he may enlarge on those fascinating edifices ‘sometime later’.
We are then given some more intriguing insights into the complex on the Giza Plateau. The entire area on which the Pyramids were being constructed was surrounded by a latticework fence made from a plant called Zalnakatar (which must mean something but, infuriatingly, that’s all we are told). Beelzebub next moves onto the Great Sphinx which guarded the main entrance to the complex, and which Beelzebub says was, essentially, the ‘symbol’ (or ‘totem’ I suppose you could call it) of the learned society Akhaldan; but, from what follows, it obviously looked slightly different to the Sphinx we see today. He explains its allegorical significance in that each part of the Sphinx reflected an animal in which a certain ‘quality’ was considered best perfected. So, the trunk of a bull signified tireless labour, the legs of a lion signified might and power, the wings of an eagle signified higher thought processes not bound to earthly concerns, and the breasts of a virgin that were used for the head (yes, bit of a shock that bit, isn’t it?) signified that Love was paramount and must be the basis of all we think and do. Moreover, the amber that affixed the ‘head’ to the bull-like torso signified that Love must be ‘strictly impartial’ and from that I am assuming that we are talking here about what I like to call ‘umbrella’ love; that is, Love with a capital L, a pure Love that is independent of any passion or emotion or selfishness.
Beelzebub explains that the Sphinx was used by the members of the learned society Akhaldan as a kind of meditation aid in that, by concentrating on any given part of the Sphinx, they could ‘shock’ themselves into a mental state conducive to working our why they were thinking and reacting in a totally illogical manner, and then ‘reworking’ themselves to a Rationality appropriate to a properly functioning three-brained being.
In a nutshell (and in my own words), it functioned like this: The trunk of a bull reminded the members that to ‘get their heads right’ would require intense and indefatigable work on themselves. The lion’s legs told them that those labours could only be performed if executed with all one’s might and power. The eagle’s wings informed the members that whilst labouring indefatigably upon themselves with all their might, they must also constantly meditate on ‘higher’ matters, things that do not directly affect our day-to-day lives, things like the Divine. And the breasts of a virgin are there to remind us all that, as I have alluded to above, Love trumps everything.
At this point, Beelzebub gives us another little hint about the Law of Threes (and maybe Sevens) when he informs Hassein that amber is one of only seven planetary ‘formations’ in which the three strands of the Okidanokh are present in exactly equal measures, which somehow gives them the ability to ‘impede’ the independent flow of the three localised strands. Beelzebub then does one of those little actions (in this instance making a short pause) that obviously mean we have to take especial note of this seeming aside, before moving on with his narrative. So what’s he going on about here, then? Well, on one level, I think it’s meant to illustrate what he’s already explained about the amber band separating Love (the Virgin’s breasts) from the rest of the Sphinx; that is, that Love must be a totally separate consideration; that we must learn to treat Love as a concept totally independent of all other passions and endeavours. But I’m guessing that he’s also hinting that once we, as three-brained beings, like amber, have equalised or balanced our three internal centres (the three strands of the Okidanokh) into concert, we ‘impede’ ourselves from those situations where one or more of the three strands is not in equal concert with the other two and the resultant mayhem that imbalance causes in our lives. Something like that, anyway. One other thing, though, is that Beelzebub’s little gesture here may also be designed to remind us readers that he has already mentioned the peculiar properties of amber earlier in the work. It was mentioned in the post entitled Perpetual Motion and Being-Duty as functioning as a separator band in the spaceship propulsion system where, again, the imagery was – I believe – used as a metaphor for the functioning of a three-brained being. Maybe worth a re-read, that chapter.
We then get another little digression in which Beelzebub talks about a subsequent trip that he made to Earth, and to Egypt in particular, in which he sat in reflection at the foot of one of the Pyramids which, we all know, have stood the test of time. During his reflection, he talks about further ‘catastrophes’ that befell the planet Earth, in particular the ‘fifth’ in which Egypt and many other regions became covered with sand (which could be an allusion to a climatic shift or a metaphor for the obscuring and loss of knowledge – but we can leave that point until later in the book). But this is an important reflection by Beelzebub, because it leads him onto one particularly disturbing trait of humanity’s deranged psyche, one that he terms its periodic ‘urgent need to destroy everything outside of themselves’ – in other words, our predilection for war. Gurdjieff will go on to explain more about this aberrant behaviour later in the book, but it is brought up here to illustrate how we, as a species, tend to destroy everything when the rage comes upon us, and that, very often, knowledge and things that could be of universal benefit to us all, are wrecked beyond recovery by mindless violence and hate. And that is as true of international conflict as it is of one-on-one disputes. Even the repeated forced dispersal of the members of the learned society Akhaldan due to violent planetary upheaval seems to me to be a metaphor for this sad human trait.
So Gurdjieff winds up this very long chapter with Beelzebub going off on a little jaunt to some countries of southern Africa and capturing the apes he needed for his research. Beelzebub then telepathically summoned his ship Occasion which duly picked everyone up and returned to Mars and, from there, shortly afterwards to Saturn where Beelzebub became the godfather to his friend, the raven-like Gornahoor Harharkh’s, new son Raoorkh.
Now, although Gurdjieff reveals that Beelzebub has some kind of telepathic ability in an almost throwaway manner here, I need to make a couple of comments. Firstly, it is a hint that a fully developed three-brained being does indeed have such a capability – something to look forward to if we make the effort, then – but there are hints and suggestions elsewhere in Gurdjieff’s teachings that telepathy can be developed by sufficiently advanced and trained humans. And it’s not just in Gurdjieff himself where you’ll find this. In P. D. Ouspensky’s (one of Gurdjieff’s more famous pupils) In Search of the Miraculous, he recounts one experience where he claims to have heard Gurdjieff’s words coming from within his (Ouspensky’s) own chest – something that freaked Ouspensky out somewhat. Admittedly, the incident occurred after a pretty extreme bout of fasting and self-discipline, but it is food for thought . . .
So, that’s the end of this very long chapter, but not the end of this post. Before I let you go, then, I want to comment on a couple of things that cropped up here:
The first, I suppose, is the message from Gurdjieff that ridding ourselves of all our wrong-headedness and knee-jerk reactions is not for the fainthearted. It’s a lot of hard yakka. It’s essentially coming to the realisation that your entire life has been a series of your responding to external influences that manage to push your buttons and pull your strings into non-sensical and illogical reactions. It’s hard. It’s bloody hard. To be that honest with yourself that you can tear down all your internal self-protection and hubris and start all over again – but doing it properly this time – is brutal! Some ancient philosophers, including Romans of the Stoic school like Seneca, used to put aside a bit of time each evening to go over the events of the day and evaluate how they had reacted to them and how those reactions had influenced the turn of events – either for good or for bad – and then amend their future behaviour accordingly. But what Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is advocating, is that to the power of ten! Your ancient Roman (or even Greek) philosopher would probably be coming from the angle of a pre-defined value set (however warped it may in reality have been) whereas what Gurdjieff is asking you to do is far more invasive. It is savage introspection! It is a searing searchlight directed internally, designed to make us totally honest with ourselves, realise just how much we are the puppets of outside influence and then make the literally superhuman effort to start all over from the beginning and build ourselves up again from scratch. Only when you realise you know nothing can you truly begin to learn, type of thing.
So, is it worth all that effort? Well, only you can answer that. The short answer, in my opinion, is yes, of course it’s worth it, if only to make life a lot easier by beginning to think for ourselves and refusing to be playthings in the great game of chance and luck that passes for life. Gurdjieff, of course, is dangling what you may consider to be bigger and better carrots in front of you: A possible continued existence after physical death. A greater role in helping the multiverse run as planned. Even telepathy! Blimey, that’s not bad is it?
The other thing I wanted to comment on – and connected to the first – is the way that this chapter emphasises our human inability to see things as they truly are (and that includes ourselves, hence the concentration on getting ourselves ‘right’). The appearance here of Beelzebub’s Teskooano and the terrestrial observatories are representative of the concept of remote and objective observation from a rational standpoint. And Gurdjieff delves deeper into that discussion when he says that humanity’s ‘sight’ has deteriorated to the extent that we are only able to see the stars at night. It’s all about our inability to see what’s really there – our inability to pierce the veil. This chapter, then, with its emphasis on eyesight, is all about the inability to perceive Reality objectively, A lot of authors have had a crack at portraying this through metaphor – perhaps most famously Plato with his ‘Cave Allegory’, an attempt to illustrate the difference between what we believe to be true – that is, how our senses interpret the available evidence – and exactly what is true from the standpoint of objective reality. But you don’t need to read the works of Plato to come across the idea that personal perspective is deceiving. The late and wonderful Terry Pratchett sums it up beautifully on page 246 of The Last Continent:
The Bursar thought, or received the thought: that’s because perspective is a lie. If I know a pond is round then why should I draw it oval? I will draw it round because round is true. Why should my brush lie to you just because my eyes lie to me?
I suppose that a basic way of looking at it is that we are never – not even once – in possession of all the information in any given situation, so there is no way we can perceive the bigger picture unless – and this is the important bit – we accept on a permanent and ongoing basis that there is more to everything we perceive and experience than our standard five senses can communicate to us. Simply put, we must think beyond the perspective of the moment.
This concept can get as deep as you want it to, and space and time restraints prevent me from addressing the whole thing right now (even if I could do it justice) but, in my opinion, Gurdjieff, in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, is equipping us with a toolkit – explaining the Laws of Threes and Sevens for instance – by applying which we can begin to perceive the true reality of what is happening around us. If we fully comprehend the way that the Laws within which the Multiverse MUST operate actually function – its graceful mathematics, or karmic balancing out if you like – then we have a chance at understanding outside the here-and-now and then Rationally (with a capital R) deciding on a course of action (or not, as the case may be).
And don’t get put off by the term mathematics here – that’s just a handy way of putting it – because the underlying principles of the immutable laws within which the multiverse operates manifest on all levels and in all things – from the flight of a spinning cricket ball whose trajectory has been premeditated by an artful bowler to an angry outburst from your boss in the office because he/she is still smarting from something that happened at their home that morning. ‘It’s all mathematics’ simply means that when you add one particular circumstance to another particular circumstance then you will get a particular result. The trick is all about being in the now so that you can identify those particular circumstances as they unfold and add or combine with one another. That way, when you get good at it, you can pretty much predict the outcome. And if you get really good at it, you can pretty much dictate what happens next to your own advantage . . . but, of course, none of us would do that now, would we? No, of course not, because it’s all about helping others and creating a win-win outcome for all involved. So, if you can accept that all things happen for a reason (one that you, personally, are almost never aware of at the time) and that the All and Everything cannot help but unfold according to strict rules, then that is a start, and you may begin to view the world in a different way and actively begin to think before you react to anything.
OK, that was a bit of a long haul, but it was a long chapter. The next chapter covers Beelzebub’s fifth trip to Earth and it’s a bit shorter than this last one, so I’ll probably be able to knock it over in one go. I hope to see you all there.
